Thus far the text-books have been pleasant companions, even when unable to give as much aid to the student as he could wish; but the fact will come to him at length that there is something more in poetry than the hand-books permit him to consider. These books deal with the forms, and most of them with the forms only. They analyze the methods, work out the metre, show how the parts are woven together, explain how the chords produce the harmonies. But just in proportion as the student becomes learned in these rhythms, and can distinguish minute or subtle variations of metrical structure, does he realize that this study teaches not its own use and that there is something beyond which must be won by his own observation. He finds in his search for rhythmical perfection that there are poems which make little appeal to his senses, whose lines do not sing themselves through his day-dreams, which yet affect his imagination even more powerfully than the musical strains thrilled his senses. He finds that there is much more in poetry than its rhymes and jingles, that there is a rhythm greater than that of the senses. In its more complex forms poetry is rhythm of thought, leading the mind to find relations which prose may describe, but which poetry alone can recreate. There is such a thing as a prose thought and such a thing as a poetic thought. The one gives with exactness the fact as it exists, clearly, honestly, directly, and for all completed and tangible things is the natural medium of expression. The other parallels the actual with a suggestion of an ideal rhythmically consonant with the motive underlying the fact. Justice, for example, deals in prose fashion with a crime and awards the punishment which the law allows; poetic justice suggests such recompense as would come of itself in a community perfectly organized. The prose of life is honest living, a worthy endeavor to do the best one can in the world as it is; the poetry of life is the feeling for, and the striving after, the bringing of this life into harmony with a nobler living. So we rightly give the name of poetry to such verse as Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," Johnson's "London," Gray's "Elegy," Wordsworth's "Excursion," Milton's "Paradise Lost," Chaucer's "Knight's Tale," Browning's "King and the Book," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," which do not much stir our senses. They parallel the real with the ideal, suggesting the eternal rhythms of infinite mind as the poetry of the senses suggests the eternal rhythms of omnipotent nature.
This poetry of the Intellect is the second great division of the poetic realm. Beyond it lies still another; for there are spiritual harmonies which the mind alone cannot compass, and which the senses alone cannot interpret. The hand-books know little of spiritual harmonies, and do not go beyond their academic classifications of lyric and epic, and their catalogues of pentameters, hexameters, or alexandrines. But the student can for himself push his observation beyond, and come to the poetry of the higher imagination, where he can be forgetful of the mere form and disdainful of the merely logical relations, where his spirit can as it were see face to face the truth beyond the seeming. This is the poetry of the spirit, and ought to come as a revelation to the searcher. He may first find it in some pure lyric such as Shelley's "Skylark," or in some mystical fantasy such as Moore's "Lallah Rookh" or Coleridge's "Christabel," or in some story of human abnegation such as Tennyson's "Enoch Arden," or some wail of a soul in pain, as in Shelley's "Adonais," or in some outburst of exultant grief such as Whitman's "Captain, My Captain," or in some revelation of the unseen potencies close about us, as in Browning's "Saul," or in some vision of the mystery of this our earthly struggle such as "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," or in some answer of the spirit to a never stilled question such as Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." When he thus finds it he has come to poetry in its highest use. In his "Alexander's Feast" Dryden hints at two great functions of poetry in the lines:
"He raised a mortal to the skies,
She drew an angel down."
The office of poetry is to parallel the actual with the ideal, to cast upon an earthly landscape something of a heavenly glow, to interpret earthly things in terms of the spirit. The poetry of the Senses lifts a mortal to the skies, thinking the thought of one higher than itself as the poet muses, singing the songs of an angelic choir in harmony with the rhythm of the verse. The poetry of the Spirit brings the message of the angels down to men and makes the harmonies they speak the music of this earthly life.
The highest type of poetry lends itself perfectly to earnest and profound study. In class work it is usually better to study poets as well as poems, and to study thoroughly a few works of a great master. Poetry is essentially a synthetic art; it unites the wandering desires of our hearts and spirits to make one single and enduring impression. Poetry speaks also the mood, the aspiration, and the deepest intent of its author; so that the great poet is the one who brings us most directly to understand its art. For most student classes it is best to take a single poet for interpretation, and to study in succession a small number—say six to ten—of his works, making one, or at least two or three, the subject of the conferences for each week. The choice of author will be dependent on many considerations and cannot here be positively advised, but one will not go astray in choosing Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, or Whittier, or three of them, for a season's work. Intelligent direction is of great assistance in making the study definite and progressive. Choose first of all the poems which seem to have influenced men, for to move men is the final test of poetry. If there is no class, and no leader, let the student make his choice by a preliminary examination. Let him read rapidly, and for the single impression, the poems of Wordsworth whose titles seem most familiar to him as he scans them over; such as "Tintern Abbey," "Yarrow Unvisited," "Solitary Reaper," "Lucy," "We are Seven," "The Intimations of Immortality," "She was a Phantom of Delight," and a few of the lyrical ballads; then let him read Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," "Maud," "The Idylls of the King," and a few of the shorter poems; let him read Browning's "Saul," "Abt Vogler," "The Grammarian's Funeral," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "Pippa Passes," one or two dramas, and a few of the brief poems in the volume "Men and Women." Then let him make his own list for study, taking those poems which have most stirred him, those which he remembers vividly after his reading, those which have become a part of himself. If the student makes his choice frankly and sincerely, he has, in making it, begun his study. Then let him frame for himself or get from his leader, if he has one, a list of the questions which each poem is to answer for him. If the work be really poetry, its study ought to give a help toward the solution of the first great problems: "What is poetry?" and "What is its revelation to the life of our senses, our hearts, and our souls?" We have a right to ask of each poem three questions: "How does it charm our senses?"; "How does it make the meaning of things clearer for us?"; "How does it bring to us a renewal of life?" The first question is better fitted for private study than for class investigation, the senses being delicate organs and shy in company. Let the minute matters of form and structure be gone over at home. Let the student work out the metre, the typical line, and the variations by which the poet gets his effects, the metaphors, the alliterations, the consonant and vowel harmonies. It will aid if this work be made as definite and as exact as an investigation in a scientific laboratory. But all this should be the student's home work. In the class the large divisions of the poem should be sympathetically shown, so that each student will comprehend the poem as a whole as the poet must have conceived it. Then as some one reads aloud the lines the music of the rhythms will come by assimilation rather than by analysis. Poetry parallels the real with the ideal to make a harmony before undreamed of. So in the lines sound re-echoes sound, and a subtle music but half perceived sings itself out of the moving notes.
What burden this music bears is the second question. Poetry differs from prose in that it lifts the thought so that its highest relations and suggestions are made known. We have a right therefore to parallel the prose sight with the poetic visions and to find in what the one transcends the other. If we are studying the "Idylls of the King," for instance, we may fitly ask what was the story as the poet took it, and into what has he transformed it for us. This study of the thought of the poem is an excellent subject for class work. The questions should be made definite and so grouped that sections of the class can choose one or another phase of the problem; the conferences should be so directed that a few clearly worked-out and thoroughly unified poetic thoughts will be left in the mind of each student.
In all things practice may fitly supplement precept. In a reading circle of which one of the editors of this series was a member the poems of Tennyson were studied by a method closely resembling that advocated in this article. As a suggestion the topics and questions for one of the poems are here given. One of the members acted as leader. A brief essay reciting the history of the poem was read. The entire poem was read aloud by one of the members of the class. Then the topics given below were discussed as presented in turn by groups of students who had given especial attention to one of the topics. In the discussions the entire class joined, and at the close a very brief summing up by the leader gathered up the threads of thought.
Topic: "Locksley Hall" and "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After."
Required Readings: "Locksley Hall"; "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After";
"Lady Clara Vere de Vere"; "Sir Galahad."
Suggested Readings: In connection with the earlier poem, "Ulysses" and "The Two Voices"; in connection with the later poem, "Maud," "Memoir of Tennyson," by Lord Hallam Tennyson.