Just mark that schooner westward far at sea—
’Tis but an hour ago
When she was lying hoggish at the quay,
And men ran to and fro,
And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed and swore,
And ever and anon, with crapulous glee,
Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore.
* * * * *
And now, behold! a shadow of repose
Upon a line of gray,
She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose—
She sleeps, and dreams away,
Soft blended in a unity of rest
All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes,
’Neath the broad benediction of the West.
Shelley finds the suggestion of distance in beautiful music:
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
Wordsworth hears it in the song of the Highland Girl:
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
These quotations are enough to show what a width of view is given to modern Romantic poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen in a wide setting of the mountains and the sea than close at hand in the street. But the romantic effect of distance may delude and conceal as well as glorify and liberate. The weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that he must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it. He rejects the authority, and many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of society. He looks out from his window on the
men fighting in the plain, and sees them transfigured under the rays of the setting sun. He enjoys the battle, but not as the fighters enjoy it. He nurses himself in all the luxury of philosophic sensation. He does not help to bury the child, or to navigate the schooner, or to discover the Fortunate Islands. The business of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not action. But the epic poet holds his reader fast by strong moral bonds of sympathy with the actors in the poem. “I should have liked to do that” is what the reader says to himself. He is asked to think and feel as a man, not as a god.
The weakness of revived Romance found the most searching of its critics in Tennyson, who was fascinated, when he was shaping his own poetic career, by the picture and the past, yet could not feel satisfied with the purely aesthetic attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he returns to the question, Is poetry an escape from life? Must it lull the soul in a selfish security? The struggle that went on in his mind has left its mark on The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Voyage, The Vision of
Sin, The Lotos-Eaters, and others of his poems. The Lady of Shalott lives secluded in her bower, where she weaves a magic web with gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall on her if she looks out on the world and down to the city of Camelot. She sees the outer world only in a mirror, and
In her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights