Roland der Ries
Im Rathhaus zu Bremen
Steht er im Standbild
Standhaft und wacht.
Kingsley has attempted something like it in his “Longbeard’s Saga,” but with much greater freedom, not to say licence:—
Scaring the wolf cub,
Scaring the horn-owl,
Shaking the snow-wreaths
Down from the pine boughs.
But to return to our modern poetry and to the poets whom I have known, and of whom I have something to tell, does it not show the power of tradition if we see them everywhere forcing their feet into the same small slippers of rhyme? And who would deny that they have achieved, and still are achieving, wonderful feats?—tours de force, it is true, but so cleverly performed that one hardly sees a trace of the force employed. No doubt much is lost in this process of beating, and hammering, and welding words together (a poet is called a Reimeschmied, a smith of rhymes, in German); much has to be thrown away because it will not rhyme at all (silver has been very badly treated in English poetry, because it rhymes with nothing, at present not even with gold), but what remains is often very beautiful, and, as Tennyson said, it sticks to the memory. One wishes one could add that the difficulty of rhyme serves to reduce the number of unnecessary poets that spring up every year. But rhyme does not strangle these numerous children of the Muses, and it is left to our ill-paid critics to perform every day, or every week, this murder of the innocents.