and
And passage and departure all thy theme
Whose life doth still a splendid dying seem,
And thou, at height of thy magnificence,
A figment and a dream....
the one of which is nebulous and the other shaped. And the language has many pairs or groups of words, not necessarily synonymous but of a like character, that fall respectively into the “gorgeous” or “magnificent” class, as, for instance, valorous, heroic; and transparent, crystalline; and regrettable or deplorable as against lamentable or grievous; and vicious, malignant; and vague, dim; and conceited, vain; and expensive, costly, and so on. It is hardly safe to say of any word that it can never be used seriously in poetry, but of those given as belonging to the “gorgeous” group—there are hundreds like them—it can at least be said that poetry would almost always lose more than she would gain by them.
Arnold’s gift of bringing a certain spare prose quality with profit into his poetry is not, therefore, to be observed in his use of such words as “magnificent” and the rest, which are naturally enough poetic, and not dangerous so long as they are kept clearly distinguished from the specifically prose “gorgeous” group. Nor, again, as we have seen, is it to be found in his control of such simplicities as “the sun is bright,” since these also are—or can be in right usage—essentially poetic. Also it is a distinct thing from that other simplicity that relies at moments of almost overwhelming emotion upon an expression stripped of every syllable that can go and yet, throbbing with momentum, having nothing in it of understatement; the kind of expression of which Shakespeare was the supreme master—
Soft you. A word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t.
No more of that....