THE CLIMAX OF POE'S POETRY[13]
[From The Mind and Art of Poe's Poetry (New York, 1899)]
Accustomed as we are, from infancy up, to so much "rhyme without reason," in our nursery jingles and melodies, we associate some of Poe's poetry, remotely, at first blush, with the negroes singing "in the cotton and the corn." So much sound makes us suspicious of the sense, but a little closer ear appreciates delicate and telling onomatopoetic effects. Liquids and vowels join hands in sweetest fellowship to unite "the hidden soul of harmony."
As if, at last, to give the world assurance that he had been trifling with rhythm and rhyme, he wrote The Bells.
The secret of the charm resides in the humanizing of the tones of the bells. It is not personification, but the speaking in person to our souls. To appreciate this more full, observe how Ruskin humanizes the sky for us. "Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential."
Poe made so much of music in his doctrine of poetry, yet he never humanized the notes of a musical instrument....
He took the common bells,—the more praise for his artistic judgment,—and rang them through all the diapason of human sentiment.
If we have imagined a closer correspondence between expression and conception, in the previously considered poems, than really exists, there can be no doubt on that point, even to the mind of the wayfaring man, in reading The Bells.
If it be thought that the poet could harp on only one theme, let the variety of topic in The Bells protest.
Again, Poe's doctrine of "rhythm and rhyme" finds its amplest verification in The Bells. Reason and not "ecstatic intuition," led him to conclude that English versification is exceedingly simple; that "one-tenth of it, possibly, may be called ethereal; nine-tenths, however, appertain to the mathematics; and the whole is included within the limits of the commonest common-sense."