If that is not poetry I will eat my hat.
I suppose what the man meant was that a catalogue could not be poetry. You might just as well say that the name of a man could not be poetry, or the listed names of many famous men.
The marvel is that this essence, Poetry, whatever it is, survives, like the human soul surviving death. It survives a complete breach in continuity. The way in which the language was pronounced may be lost; the shades of meaning may be lost; sometimes even the plain meaning of a word or two in a passage of true Poetry may be lost. And yet the poetic essence survives. It survives in full strength—again like the human soul—and if there were a resurrection for languages, as there is for human beings, then the poetic soul meeting the poetic body would be quite at its ease, not enfeebled by so long a separation.
Thus when I hear it argued (with every probability behind it) that French poetry, on account of its extreme subtlety, will not—some centuries hence—survive that most lasting of our languages, I traverse. For men sometimes say that English poetry and Spanish poetry will survive the end of our civilisation, because they are dependent on lilt or stress. But how shall the glory of French verse remain which wholly reposes upon such tiny modulations of the tongue? The answer is that Greek undoubtedly reposed upon these same necessities; yet I take it that Greek poetry has survived.
Moreover, if you look at it, the English effects are a great deal more than lilt or stress, though lilt or stress is never absent from them. Some of the most desperately successful efforts in the English lyric are as slight in their nuance as the French. It is rare, no doubt; but you can find cases. For instance:
"Ah me, whilst thee the shores and sounding seas wash far away."
Here is in English what a French line is: a line with hardly any primary emphasis, a level line wholly dependent for its enormous effect upon the vowel sounds and the slightest modulations. And now for the miracle.
Imagine a time, a few generations hence, when the British th shall be blunted into d by Colonials of every blood and colour, when the short o of "wash" has turned to the popular "worsh" and when the long o in "shore" had come to be pronounced like our oo, when the s of the plural has in every position come to be pronounced like z, when the final d in "and" has become silent, and also the final g in "ing," and the characteristic a of the cultivated has become the popular "oi." "Whoilst dee de zhoores an zoundin zeas worsh far awoi." How could the line survive such changes? But it will survive; though I am damned if I understand how!
There is something very consoling for poor mortals in all this. We are here, in this world, all out of scale. We are hurried, we are grotesquely subject to change, though by our every appetite we protest against change, and hunger and thirst for victory over change. We are fast-rooted things, mocked by ceaseless fading; we are immemorial lovers carried on by a river of progressive forgetfulness; we are deathless within, and yet a death goes on about us (ah! and within us) all the time.
And there is in the midst of such a trial no temporal symbol of our real, our ultimate, security except Poetry. The intellect may convince us (if it is strong enough) of our immortality. Faith will always accept the sensible doctrine of our not time-bound fate, and of the concurrent doctrine of Resurrection. But you do not find any stuff around you to confirm you—except Poetry. Religion assures: but nothing man-made supports the vision of heaven, save the completed line. That endures. That is outside time.