A Talk about poetry

Celestial palms and ever-blooming flowers."

A scene whose chief use was to form a suitable background for man. As for man, he is portrayed in the conventional trappings of society with all the point and wit of superficiality. Thus is his true value lost sight of, and sinks into significance:

"Go, wondrous creature! Mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Go, teach eternal wisdom how to rule—
Then drop into thyself, and be a fool."

The evening light drew sharp antitheses of light and shade. Now and again the limelight would be thrown on some one characteristic, bringing it into undue and unpleasing, is unnatural-the appeal is transitory. The theatre cannot be enjoyed for more than a limited length of time.

But the night passes, and in those hours before sunrise, when the world appears in shades of black and white, another poet wrote. James Thomson described Nature in a series of excellent photographs:—

"The retreating horn Calls men to ghostly halls of grey renown."—

Or again—

"A wood of blackening pines, aye waving to and fro, sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood";

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But he has accumulated so many of these (they flash by like scenery from a railway carriage) that no one can sustain the shock of reading all. Thomson was one of the forerunners of romanticism. His duty it was to educate the popular taste away from the perfect freehand drawing of the heroic couplet to the often imperfect model drawing of blank verse—thence to prepare the way for lyric paintings of the great masters. He treated nature not as alive, but as a series of exquisite pictures.

But now the sun rises, and in those early morning hours, around all Nature is an air of mystery, of beauty, of wonder; for life has come to the inanimate. We begin to release that nature is not composed of painted canvas. No—nor yet of a series of moving pictures, but "the earth we pace again appears to be an unsubstantial fairy place." The same life throbs through all; the cuckoo is no bird, but an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery! One spirit sweeps through the dull, dense world, bursting in its beauty and its might from trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. The unknown surrounds our birth, and we must die if we would be with that which we do seek. Shelley sees through the maize of the material to the spiritual reality beyond:

"He can watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom,
Nor heed nor see what things they be
But from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality."

He uses the X-rays on nature, and the material world fades into a shadow of eternal beauty, love, courage, deathlessness of infinity:

"The one remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly."

And Francis Thompson takes up the tale. He begins with this same idea of our interdependence on the spiritual:

"Life's a veil the real has:
All the shadows of our scene
Are but shows of things that pass
On the other side the screen";

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But gradually does he begin to restrict the meaning, and he writes thus to the Dead Astronomer:

"Starry amorist, starward gone,
Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon;
Passed through thy golden garden's bars'
Thou see'st the Gardener of the Stars!"

Once more are we to be left with a personal deity?—or has the poet journeyed so far that he can look on tradition merely, as figure of speech—a personification?

I fed Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fed Him, down the arches of the years;
I fed Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running water."

Having reached its zenith, is the sun falling once more towards evening? Certain it is that the sky is flecked with the colour rather than with magic of words:

"Mark yonder, how the long laburnum drips
Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame."

—E. R. D