IDEALLY speaking, there is no especially poetic range of subjects, and no especially poetic group of words with which to treat them. Indeed, the more traditionally poetical the subject and the words, the more difficult it is to do anything with them. The nymph, the swain, the faun, and the vernal groves are not any more or less legitimate themes of poetry than Motor Bicycle Trials, Girl Guides, or the Prohibition Question, the only difference being a practical one; the second category may be found unsuitable for the imaginative digestion because these words are still somehow uncooked; in the former case they are unsuitable because overcooked, rechauffé, tasteless. The cooking process is merely that of constant use. When a word or a phrase is universally adopted and can be used in conversation without any apologetic accentuation, or in a literary review without italics, inverted commas or capital letters, then it is ready for use in poetry.
As a convenient general rule, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has pointed out in his admirable pamphlet “Poetry and Contemporary Speech,” the poet will always be best advised to choose as the main basis of his diction the ordinary spoken language of his day; the reason being that words grow richer by daily use and take on subtle associations which the artificially bred words of literary or technical application cannot acquire with such readiness; the former have therefore greater poetic possibilities in juxtaposition.
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An objection will be raised to the term “universal” as applied to the audience for poetry; it is a limited universality when one comes to consider it. Most wise poets intend their work only for those who speak the same language as themselves, who have a “mental age” not below normal, and who, if they don’t perhaps understand all the allusions in a poem, will know at any rate where to go to look them up in a work of reference.
XIV
THE DAFFODILS
ART of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the London Mercury.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more the subject of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was the cause of the late European War.
Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously (though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.
These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,
“Oh then my heart with horror fills
And shudders with the daffodils.”
For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in their Poetry Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”