"I am afraid I cannot accept that answer! The truth is, you are keeping something back from me. You desire to prevent competition in your trade, and to keep its great emoluments for your limited guild. But I will find means to learn, in spite of you all!"
He shook his head, and still more his hair, and smiled in the shape of a capital V. He said it could not be done.
I went home and consulted one of my many thousand books, and then another, and discovered the rules of Poetry, and read descriptions of Poetry in encyclopædias and critics' books, and also much poetry direct in Anthologies, hoping to find out how it was done. But to this day I have never discovered the way.
There is a story of Taine taking some of Renan's work to the window, looking closely at it through a large reading-glass, and saying: "One cannot see how it is constructed!" So I with poetry. I can see how verse is done, but I cannot see how poetry is done. How is a startling of the soul produced by the collocation of few, simple words? What essence is it in their sound and their order which opens the blinding doors of vision?
Chevauche Karle tout li port durant.
There, in one revelation, are the Passes of the Pyrenees! There are the solemn, menacing heights, the ceaseless waterfalls. There, in that line, are the gods of the unconquered hills. Yet it means in English exactly, word for word, "Charles rides up all the pass," and "Charles rides up all the pass" is not poetry.
I remember a leathery idiot giving, as an example to show that Homer was over-rated, the Catalogue of The Ships, and saying: "At any rate, you won't call that poetry!"—which showed he did not know what poetry was.
τω δ'ἁμα τεσσαρἁκοντα μἑλαιναι υἡεϛ ἑποντο
"And forty dark ships followed him."