The poetry found in books is experience, directly or indirectly, through the agency of verbal expression, transferred to the printed page. The great writers of poems are those who have undergone spiritual experiences of greater intensity than those which come within the range of us lesser mortals. In their poems we partake of their life, of their ecstasy in the presence of beauty, of the richness of their imaginings, of the depth of their spiritual natures.
You and I, when we hear the wood thrush sing, are moved with the music of the notes, and are possibly carried away into the bosky woods where the richly patterned bird in his evening song pours his heart to Heaven; but when Keats hears the melody of the nightingale, his nature so acutely attuned to the harmony, the message of peace and solitude, is swept away in such an ecstasy of heartfelt longing for that same peace, that same solitude, that his own heart pours forth his song, in words no less musical, in cadences no less rich than the notes of the feathered songster. His experience is preserved for us in "The Ode to a Nightingale" and we may read and derive the same fascination that he felt.
Matthew Arnold somewhere tells us that all great poetry has one or both of two attributes: "Natural Magic" and "Moral Profundity." Whatever these two phrases may mean upon first sight, after examining their true import it will be appreciated that the greatest English critic did not consider poetry a thing for the closet, or sentimental matter only to be read by the melancholy lovelorn to his sentimental maid. The effect of the natural magic of a summer's night, of the sea breaking upon the wind-swept coast, of the sea gull's flight, is apparent and valued by everyone. What are most holidays other than periods during which we absorb appearances and sensations, that enter our personalities and remain part of ourselves during the succeeding year of work? "Natural Magic" is that which acts upon us as a holiday influence, compounded perhaps of beauty, mystery, fear or sentiment, which for the moment or for eternity gives our minds entrance into a realm of new and pleasurable things. Read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and you will find the essence of natural magic. You enter a realm, indeed, of magic and witchery, for
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Do those lines charm you? They charm most of us and the cadence of the words, the confused picture of Xanadu, have become our own,—riches with which we would not care to part.
Every time I read them the blunt edge of life is worn off, living regains its sharpness, I have to an extent experienced an ecstasy, taken a holiday.
It is hard to define the exhilaration of a canter across the meadows upon a crisp October day, or the impulse that surges through you as you look to the ocean breathing the sea breeze, or the sense of religious comradeship that grips you when in the midst of a crowd, great with a single purpose,—but this is all of the true stuff of Natural Magic. Your sensations are not of the minute, but of all time, as they have vivified your soul and become part and parcel of your personality.
It is so with the poets who sing you a song or breathe a sentiment that is not oral, not didactic, not purposeful, but of the stuff that thrills the spirit of man,—their charm is impossible to define, it must be felt, and for having felt it, your spirit is of a color different from what it was before. As Corot's landscapes painted in the forest of Fontainebleau are said to express the emotion of the painter when in the presence of nature, so does the lyric poet of magical gift express his feelings, lay bare his soul with its emotions and vacillations. The sadness and sensuous mystery of Edgar Allan Poe, the marvellous ability of Tennyson to fit the most exquisite words to the most subtle incantations of beauty, the thrill of romance in Shakespearean England as depicted by our contemporary, Alfred Noyes, the appetite for sensuous delights of Keats, the tuneful, heartfelt songs of the Cavalier poets—these are of natural magic, of delight to the human soul, of the spirit of art.
When Shakespeare wrote,
Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip's bell I lie,