Classic Poem

The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis
of Shakespeare's VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE.


In the application of these principles to purposes of practical
criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less
imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem
are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power,
as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition
by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the
inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I
could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work
of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our
myriad-minded Shakespeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the
LUCRECE; works which give at once strong promises of the strength,
and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I
abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic
genius in general.

1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is the
perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject;
and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without
passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the
thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody
predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to
a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an
easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in
the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music in his soul
can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery,--(even taken from nature,
much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works
of natural history),--affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting
personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their
combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,--may all by incessant
effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading,
who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic
reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary
end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical
delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and
this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect,
and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or
feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is
in these that "poeta nascitur non fit."

2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from
the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least
I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the
author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a
particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the
statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his
goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with
ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly
acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the VENUS
AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is
throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately
conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every
outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its
subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view;
himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only
by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic
fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had
so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have
conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which
impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting
him--by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and,
because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque
in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever
realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a
substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and
running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works
he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem
at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those
characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing,
but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity
of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow,
the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and
above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression,
the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he
is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject
cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was
poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and
as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and
deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles
of concupiscence; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse
itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the
reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful,
now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or
by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty
or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced
from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is
forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our
nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by
mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the
surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and
billows.

3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of
original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant
passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion;
or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or
succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life
is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,

Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.

In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable,
nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place,
part of a descriptive poem:

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally
in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The
same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of
that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare
even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other
poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to
the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they
burst upon us at once in life and in power,--

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."

"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come--

* * * * * *
* * * * * *

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent."

As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic
genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the
circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind.
For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory
will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the
"great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem em copia
fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the
instance of love in his 98th Sonnet.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play!"

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark

Gonimon men poiaetou------
------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi,

will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter,
the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of
simultaneousness:--

With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;--

* * * * * *

Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.

4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but
little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which
the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were
possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric
power;--is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great
poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry
is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems the creative
power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in
its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other.
At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its
shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that,
at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive
to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon
finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and
flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did
not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of
Lucretia seems to favour and even demand their intensest workings. And
yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos,
nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful
imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by
the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with
the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties;
and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge
and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often
domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say?
even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of
genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not
possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood
minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself
to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous
power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own
class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten
summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival.
While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of
human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood;
the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of
his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in
the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever
remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my
country!--Truly indeed--

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.