Biographia Literaria
This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;
As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.
He to a Fellow-lodger’s care
Had left it, to be watched and fed,
Till he came back again; and there
I found it when my Son was dead;
And now, God help me for my little wit!
I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.”
If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the
rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an
equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes
at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask
whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the
woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet’s
imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over
all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which
“The simplest, and the most familiar things
Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,”) [67]
I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall
in these verses from the preceding stanza?
“The ancient spirit is not dead;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair:
She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.”
It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those
stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover
in all Mr. Wordsworth’s writings, of an actual adoption, or true
imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed
from provincialisms.
Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned,
which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and
defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with
poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined
with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have
nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium
of affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from
technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added metre.
Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion:
which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an
excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has
its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes
of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent
which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of a poet, the very act of
poetic composition itself is, and is allowed to imply and to produce,
an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a
correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as
marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The
vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as
much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer,
as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their
subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of
their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may
be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr.
Wordsworth’s reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this
reply, as already anticipated in his preface.
Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same
argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of
the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and
thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organized whole
must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and
the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the
composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation,
as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same
throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a
base radically the same.
Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries
and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the
foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would
not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an
essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical
composition.
In Mr. Wordsworth’s criticism of Gray’s Sonnet, the reader’s sympathy
with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted
rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or
compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the
lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,
differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those
which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the
five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of them differ from prose
even more widely, than the lines which either precede or follow, in the
position of the words.
“A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire.”
But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no
man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be
equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not
prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not
passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first
line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of
men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the
consideration, that the particular word “smiling” is hackneyed, and,
as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with
the common and material attribute of “shining.” And, doubtless, this
adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where
no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would
be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man’s conversation. Should the
sportsman exclaim, “Come boys! the rosy morning calls you up:” he will
be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this,
when he says, “A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds.” This
then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide
in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of
any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Aeschylus to
Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in thought I mean), every instance of
this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him;
or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission;
he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons
grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise, I should not
hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all
authority, as dead to it.
The second line,
“And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--”
has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line,
not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because
it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the
effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the thing;
in short, because it differs from the language of good sense! That the
“Phoebus” is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault,
dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced from
the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded mythology, is an
objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the torch of ancient learning
was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams, that our eldest poets, cut
off by Christianity from all accredited machinery, and deprived of all
acknowledged guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature,
were naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous
personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in nature, which had
given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay,
even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize
with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser,
what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in a modern poet?
I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of Mr.
Wordsworth’s theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say, that the
style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from prose,
and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and that the
stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN?
“By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering arre
And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phoebus’ fiery carre
In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did fill.”
“At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl’d his glist’ring beams through gloomy ayre:
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day.”
On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader’s
attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only
because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of
having in my mind such verses, as
“I put my hat upon my head
And walk’d into the Strand;
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand.”
To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these
lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are empty
of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to prove that
“an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is not a
man.” But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language correct and
dignified, the subject interesting and treated with feeling; and yet
the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be justly blamable as
prosaic, and solely because the words and the order of the words would
find their appropriate place in prose, but are not suitable to metrical
composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an instructive, and even
interesting work; but take the following stanzas, (and from the hundred
instances which abound I might probably have selected others far more
striking):
“And to the end we may with better ease
Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew
What were the times foregoing near to these,
That these we may with better profit know.
Tell how the world fell into this disease;
And how so great distemperature did grow;
So shall we see with what degrees it came;
How things at full do soon wax out of frame.”
“Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu’ror reign’d
With intermix’d and variable fate,
When England to her greatest height attain’d
Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
After it had with much ado sustain’d
The violence of princes, with debate
For titles and the often mutinies
Of nobles for their ancient liberties.”