Strahlt von dem bunten Blitz von feuchtem Diamant,
can vie in vividness of impression with a flowerpiece by a Huysum, must either never have analyzed his own sensations, or must wilfully ignore them. It might be very pleasant to hear the lines read if we had the flowers in our hand; but, taken by themselves, they say little or nothing. I hear in every word the laborious poet, but the thing itself I am unable to see.
Once more, then, I do not deny that language has the power of describing a corporeal whole according to its parts. It certainly has, because its signs, although consecutive, are nevertheless arbitrary. But I deny that this power exists in language as the instrument of poetry. For illusion, which is the special aim of poetry, is not produced by these verbal descriptions of objects, nor can it ever be so produced. The coexistence of the body comes into collision with the sequence of the words, and although while the former is getting resolved into the latter, the dismemberment of the whole into its parts is a help to us, yet the reunion of these parts into a whole is made extremely difficult, and not infrequently impossible.
Where the writer does not aim at illusion, but is simply addressing the understanding of his readers with the desire of awakening distinct and, as far as possible, complete ideas, then these descriptions of corporeal objects, inadmissible as they are in poetry, are perfectly appropriate. Not only the prose writer, but the didactic poet (for in as far as he is didactic he is no poet) may use them with good effect. Thus Virgil, in his Georgics, describes a cow fit for breeding:—
Optima torvæ
Forma bovis, cui turpe caput, cui plurima cervix,
Et crurum tenus a mento palearia pendent.
Tum longo nullus lateri modus: omnia magna:
Pes etiam, et camuris hirtæ sub cornibus aures.
Nec mihi displiceat maculis insignis et albo,