The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of “vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken, wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song “Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms:
Ye country comets that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall.
There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst.
V
THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH
THE power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides. The underlying associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern.
In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of assembling the scattered parts of “Red Riding Hood with the Basket of Food” he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another scene of the tragedy—“The Wolf eating the Grandmother.”
The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what confusion below!
The possibilities of this pattern underneath have been recognized and exploited for centuries in Far Eastern systems of poetry. I once even heard an English Orientalist declare that Chinese was the only language in which true poetry could be written, because of the undercurrents of allusion contained in every word of the Chinese language. It never occurred to him that the same thing might be unrecognizedly true also of English words.
VI
“INSPIRATION”
PEOPLE are always enquiring how exactly poets get their “inspiration,” perhaps in the hope that it may happen to themselves one day and that if they know the signs in advance, something profitable may come of it.