On the Folly of Learning Noble Verse
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB
THESE remarks are not intended for the young. To them I say, as wise older folk said to me long ago, “ Store your mind with poetry now while your memory is fresh and strong; pack it with stanzas, quatrains, lines; poetry will be a refuge in time of trouble; it will comfort you when you are lame and blind and decrepit; you cannot learn too much.”
That may all be true. The trouble comes before you are lame and blind and decrepit: when you are able to walk vigorously forth upon the face of nature, and would be able to rejoice your eyes upon it all, were you not haunted by a spectral pack of noble verses that bay aloud upon the trail of beauty and drive her in swift flight.
More specifically, my complaint is this: When I find myself standing upon the borderland of loveliness, of wide green meadows, quick with spring, before my own eye and ear can respond to color and melody,— presto! come half-remembered lines of some dead poet and snatch away my own delight, changing my impressions to his.
Bare winter suddenly was changed to spring,
And gentle odors led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring.
So aptly does this fit mood and situation that one follows the melodious verse, only to be led to an alien scene, forgetful of cherry-blossom, dandelion, and the tender red of oak-leaves near at hand, searching for the poet’s oxlips, bluebells, and lush eglantine. Lush eglantine, forsooth! I cannot listen properly to our own bobolink, so persistently does Shelley’s skylark fly in my way with
The verse is good, but my bobolink is better, yet I may not hear him for the thick-oncoming similes. Even so, my west wind is not mine but the poet’s, and, though I say to him, “You had your west wind in your day and gloried in it; please give me back my own,” he makes no answer. So falls ever the veil of others’ impressions, shadow by shadow, blur by blur, between me and the charm of the moment.
They have different ways, these thieving poets, of robbing you of your own. Byron’s verse clutches you by the shoulder, vehement, insistent, with all the author’s desire to draw attention to itself. The glory of the old world you may not make yours; does he not loom high upon Alpine peaks, demanding to be showman ? Has he not made a corner in ruins, refusing to let you in, save on his own terms ? You enter the Coliseum: his hand is at your throat; you approach Santa Croce: he buttonholes you at the door. Many an hour have I waited for his watchdog to bay beyond the Tiber, but he never has. Why need he, when the poet bays so loud within your weary ears ?
has haunted me, not only upon the spot, but in many others, absurdly changing to a Bridge of Size. It can easily monopolize Brooklyn Bridge as you gaze New Yorkwards: —
As from the stroke of an enchanter’s wand.
Through Europe you drag the ball and chain of his verse, and you need not think you may escape. O Byron, Byron, very bandit of poets, making me stand and deliver, if you were going to take my all, could you not give me in exchange something that rings true and is true ? Trying to make music of your line, —
has spoiled the Coliseum for me. How did it happen, sir, that you saw mouldering towers and arches among the pure Greek level lines of the Acropolis ? Where, if I may change from comma to question-mark the punctuation of a famous verse of yours, —
carol more ?
Such music must he a special privilege reserved for English lords. There are moments, however, when you give more than you take: —
Land of lost gods and godlike men art thou!
and, —
The orphans of the heart must turn to thee
Lone mother of dead empires, —
and lend melody to many a wandering footstep in Greece and Italy.
In different fashion Wordsworth steals upon you, quietly picking your mind of your own perceptions, and making the scene before yon seem not itself but a pale reflection of some other known long ago. Who can discover hepatica and windflower because of his
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze,
in immortal beauty ? His
One after one,
have led me many a time far afield from my proper destination.
Yet, blessed be he who takes away small coin to give you of great hidden treasure. Wordsworth’s
are good for the soul to climb; his
loftier music than one would hear without him.
Like harmony in music,
partly through the influence of verse like his.
A bit of reflection of this kind had almost reconciled me to my own memory, when I suddenly realized that it is a terrible thing to be at the mercy, not only of your own, but of your friends’. It was an almost perfect moment, out among trailing branches of young leaves dropping sunshine on the grass, when my friend, still my friend, but with a difference, quoted, —
I have not yet forgiven, and, alas, I cannot forget, I who had been trying hard not to remember Sir Launfal. Rarer than any day in June is the friend who can keep from recalling to you that most persistent of poems, which has set all summer days forever jingling to one tune. Ah, what escape is there from this lidlesseyed demon, memory! Hers are manypointed weapons, and, like arrow-pricks, they come thick and fast. The prey of a forgotten anapest, at the mercy of a darting iamb, —for me there is no protection from the insidious thrusts of noble verse. How am I ever to escape from Shelley’s abominable
By anemone and vi’let
Like mosaic paven ?
Do Wordsworth’s verses, —
There’s something in a huge balloon,—
bring any real consolation in years of decrepitude ? I wonder if the immortals are not sorry, in the calm of heaven, to think that, in their hand-organ moments, they added to the discordant noises of earth ? Nothing but death, I am assured, can free me from that hoard of verse, which, in the guileless enthusiasm of youth, for good and bad alike, I stored away against a time of need. My heart grows hot in protest, but suddenly I realize that there is no earthly use in saying these things. Nobody commits poetry to memory any longer in these days. What a pity ! What an unspeakable pity!