“Dance, yellows, and whites and reds.”
The poet’s strictures upon classicism are entirely consonant with his philosophy, placing as he does the paramount importance on living realities, “Do and nowise dream,” he exclaims:
“Earth’s young significance is all to learn;
The dead Greek love lies buried in its urn
Where who seeks fire finds ashes.”
The “Parleying” with Charles Avison is more a poem of moods than any of the others. The poet’s profound appreciation of music is reflected in his claiming it as the highest artistic expression possible to man. Sadness comes to him, however, at the thought of the ephemeralness of its forms, a fact that is borne in on him because of the inadequateness of Avison’s old march styled “grand.” He finally emerges triumphantly from this mood of sadness through the realization that music is the most perfect symbol of the evolution of spirit, of which the central truth—
“The inmost care where truth abides in fulness”—
as Paracelsus expresses it, remains always permanent, while the form is ever changing, but though ever changing it is of absolute value to the time when the spirit found expression in it. Furthermore, in any form once possessing beauty, by throwing one’s self into its historical atmosphere the beauty may be regained.
The poem has, of course, a still larger significance in relation to all forms of truth and beauty of which every age has had its living, immortal examples, the “broken arcs” which finally will make the perfect round, each arc perfect in itself, and thus the poet’s final pæan is joyous, “Never dream that what once lived shall ever die.”
The prologue of this series of poems prefigures the thought in a striking dialogue between Apollo and the Fates wherein the Fates symbolize the natural forces of life, behind which is Zeus or divine power; Apollo’s light symbolizes the glamour which hope and aspiration throw over the events of human existence, without actually giving any assurance of its worth, and the wine of Bacchus symbolizes feeling, by means of which a perception of the absolute is gained. Man’s reason, guided by the divine, accepts this revelation through feeling not as actual knowledge of the absolute which transcends all intellectual attempts to grasp it, but as a promise sufficiently assuring to take him through the ills and uncertainties of life with faith in the ultimate triumph of beauty and good.
The epilogue, a dialogue between John Fust and his friends, brings home the thought once more in another form, emphasizing the fact that there can be no new realm of actual, palpable knowledge opened up to man beyond that which his intellect is able to perceive. Once having gained this knowledge of the failure of intellectual knowledge to solve what Whitman calls the “strangling problems” of life, man’s part is to follow onward through ignorance.
“Dare and deserve!
As still to its asymptote speedeth the curve,
So approximates Man—Thee, who reachable not,
Hast formed him to yearningly
Follow thy whole
Sole and single omniscience!”