On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

Thus far I have spoken only of the feeling or emotion which generates Poetry. Little or nothing has been said of that other side—the expression of the feeling in words. The mathematician of whom I have spoken was not, for all his joy, a poet. Why? Because though he had the material of poetry within him in the intense joy, he had not the power of putting it forth, of making it audible. He kept all the delight to himself, and could not by utterance impart it to others. He was at best but a dumb poet—a poet “in posse,” not a poet “in esse,” as the Schoolmen speak. And the question arises, Is not a dumb Poet a contradiction in terms? is it not of the very essence of a poet that he should be vocal? Is it not in this, his power of voicing his emotion, rather than in his power of feeling it, that he is distinguished from common men? Here we come on a great controversy on which I shall not venture to dogmatize. Wordsworth, we all remember, held that

“Many are the poets that are sown

By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts,

The vision and the faculty divine;

Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”

But Goethe and many others with him hold that without the power of poetic expression there can be no poet; that as well might you speak of a child being born which was a mind without a body, as of poetry existing in the soul which does not embody itself in language; that, if we are to divide Poetry into essence and expression, the garment of musical words is indeed the more essential of the two—or rather, that Poetry is non-existent till it has clothed itself in words; that in the true poet the emotion and the expression of it come into being at once, and are one. To this side Coleridge, I believe, would lean, for we find him saying—“The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination, and ... may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned.”

On the whole, then, without deciding whether the essence of the poetic nature lies in the capacity of feeling the emotion, and brooding over the shaping thought, or in the power of projecting it in words, this may be said:—Even if the potential poet may be silent, the actual poet must add the power of embodying his emotion in melodious words. And this from no conventional artifice of literature; but because, before the existence of any literature, the natural expression of strong emotion is a chant, a song. There is an essential kinship between the waves of excited feeling within the breast, the heaving of the soul under the power of emotion, and a corresponding rhythmical cadence in the words which utter it. Song or chant and emotion are as intrinsically allied as word and thought. The poet is the man whose emotions, intenser than those of other men, naturally find a vent for themselves in some form of harmonious words, whether this be the form of metre or of balanced and musical prose. The rhythmical vibrations of his soul long to project themselves into some sonorous medium. And for poetry to lie as it does dead in our printed books, to be read merely by the eye, or, if uttered aloud, to be read as one would a newspaper, is as unnatural, as emptying to it of its meaning, as it is for the lovely wild-flower to be seen dried and colorless within the leaves of a herbarium. Not of lyrical poetry only, though of it preëminently, but of all high poetry, may it be said, that it is only then fitly uttered when it is chanted, not read, and so it is with a chant that most poets have recited their own poetry. As Wordsworth tells us, “Though the accompaniment of a musical instrument be dispensed with, the true poet does not therefore abandon his privilege distinct from that of the mere proseman;

“He murmurs near the running brooks,

A music sweeter than their own.”

It is a sad divorce that has long been made between poetry and song. We shall never know the full power of Poetry till she has wandered back to her original home, and found there her long-severed sister, Music. Only then, if they could find each other again, and come forth to the world in blended might, should we know the full compass of that marvelous creation which we call Poetry.