What Have We Here?

Now, reader, have you yet seen clearly and for certain that you are reading nonsense? That is the essential point. For poetry is sense, very strong sense, expressed with beauty. And not to recognize nonsense is surely to make insufficient distinction between it and poetry.

I implore you, reader, not to think that I am so rude as to be trying to deride you, even if you have not instantly placed those five lines in their proper category, which is with waste paper. It is no fault of yours. There have been so many writing lately along the edges of poetry, or in a sort of no-man’s-land between Parnassus and Bedlam, that they have already overstrained your generosity by expecting your intellect to go a little further than theirs has been able to, and to make that sense for them which they so nearly make themselves. If they were clerks in the employment of your banker and sent you accounts that as nearly made sense as their poems do, what a row you would make. Or if, instead of the excellent author who does it at present, they were to write Bradshaw, and play about with those letters that mean ‘Saturdays only’ and chronicle trains for the railway lines as vague as the lines of their poetry, again what an uproar there would be.

But they use delicate words, and words hallowed by the great poets of the past, and — and can we be quite sure that they don’t really quite mean anything? They have demanded too much of their reader’s generous coöperation, knowing that the readers of poetry are hard-working people who rightly believe that they owe it to a poet to get at his meaning. That is a debt that the reader of poetry really does owe, whether the veils round the meaning be the sometimes obscure language of Browning, or the flowery beauty of Swinburne, or the Greek of Homer, or the dialect of Burns, or any other obstruction whatever. But here the duty of a reader ends: it is not his duty to find a meaning that is not quite there.

Let us believe and accept that poetry is sense; that before ever it is clothed with beauty there is first of all a statement profound or joyful, and well worth passing on from one mind to others; let us accept it as being the duty of the poet to make his meaning as clear as ever he can, and the duty of the reader to find that meaning out, where the exigencies of rhyme may sometimes have slightly dimmed it. In the fields of many arts we are wandering too far down the labyrinths of dark and intricate thought, and so are getting further and further away from the richest field of all for the labor of all artists, and that is simplicity. Let us try and get back to it.