Roses, if I live and do well,
I may bring her, one of these days,
To fix you fast with as fine a spell,
Fit you each with his Spanish phrase;
But do not detain me now; for she lingers
There, like sunshine over the ground,
And ever I see her soft white fingers
Searching after the bud she found.
Flower, you Spaniard, look that you grow not,
Stay as you are and be loved forever!
Bud, if I kiss you 'tis that you blow not:
Mind, the shut pink mouth opens never!
For while it pouts, her fingers wrestle,
Twinkling the audacious leaves between,
Till round they turn and down they nestle—
Is not the dear mark still to be seen?
Where I find her not, beauties vanish;
Whither I follow her, beauties flee;
Is there no method to tell her in Spanish
June's twice June since she breathed it with me?
Come, bud, show me the least of her traces,
Treasure my lady's lightest footfall!
—Ah, you may flout and turn up your faces—
Roses, you are not so fair after all!
—Browning.
That "the poet is born, not made," is more and more an undisputed fact in every literary age. But many a birthright of poetic power has been saved from sale for a mess of pottage by a wisely ordered meeting of the young bard, while his gift was still latent, with the masters of lyric expression.
Such an introduction is the object of this study, so far as it can embrace in its aim the ends of both forms of expression,—interpretation and composition. There is no thought of inducing even an aspirant to the poetical purple, much less a Shelley or a Keats or an Alice Brown, through this brief dwelling with their immortal songs; but if this intensive interpretative study of the highest lyric expression does not result in a new sense of word values, a new sensitiveness to the music of the English language, out of which the songs of America must be made, then the study will have failed in its purpose toward you. If from this suggestive analysis of Shelley's "Skylark" you receive no impulse to use words with a new delight in the fitting of sound to sense, a new reverence for their harmonious arrangement to suggest and sustain an atmosphere; if, in short, your vocabulary is not enriched and your choice of words clarified through this study, then your new acquaintance with lyric expression will have been in vain. And, finally, if some one of you at least is not impelled by these excursions into the world of song to use his enriched vocabulary in an attempt to create a bit of lyric description in prose or verse, then the author of this study, and the teacher under whose direction it is made, must admit a failure to reach with the pupil the ultimate aim of such interpretative effort.
Let us make the test. As a final problem of this study I shall ask you to let your emotion find expression—lyric expression—in a bit of prose description. Don't be afraid! Use your vocabulary! Take as a subject: the bit of earth and sky you have secretly worshiped; the bird song or flight which has charmed your day; the memory of some illumined moment; the effect of any one of these lyrics upon you. Don't be afraid! And remember it is to be literature of feeling rather than thought; description, not exposition.