(3) She pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.
Poetry is co-extensive with Nature, but cannot exceed her limits. She has her mystical number, which is three. Her suns rise; they reach their zenith; they have their setting: it is their morning, their noon, and their night. The earth has its three dimensions; the elements and all the things it consists of can assume but three forms, the solid, the liquid, the gaseous. Her productions have their three stages, and, running through these, they begin again. Man, in common with all that is organic, is born, he lives, he dies; the plant yearly has its growth, its flowering, its seed-time. This is the trinity of Nature; and poetry, which is her vocal manifestation, has its three parallels.
This truth, instances of which the reader himself may multiply at will, serves to illuminate the poetic argument which is to follow. An idea in imaginative poetry, which is the greatest and the only truly great, has three parallels as already exemplified; it cannot have more, and to be of the highest quality it cannot have less. There are as many sources of these parallels as there are objects in the three natural kingdoms, that most marvellous of the threefold series, the conjoint animal, vegetable, and mineral, in which all things subsist; in which every object is an ante-type of the poetic evolution just defined.
It is not necessary that these parallels should be separated by intervening details of any length, whence it is that short passages, or short poems like the sonnet, when woven with a due regard to their effectiveness, become poetic gems. Such are the first four lines of Shakespeare’s thirty-third sonnet; such are Coleridge’s lines on “Time Real and Imaginary,” and those on “Work without Hope.” All these I will now cite, numbering the parallels in their gradual ascent from the subject to its evolution, and thence into its transcendental expression in the ideal.
Sonnet XXXIII. (Shakespeare).
(1) Full many a glorious morning have I seen