Classic Poem

The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the principles
from which the judgment, that they are defects, is deduced--Their
proportion to the beauties--For the greatest part characteristic of his
theory only.


If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles. And
still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of the
truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too exclusive
attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting him to carry
those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken theory have at
all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects be pointed
out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown, how far the
influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by starts; whether the
number and importance of the poems and passages thus infected be great
or trifling compared with the sound portion; and lastly, whether they
are inwoven into the texture of his works, or are loose and separable.
The result of such a trial would evince beyond a doubt, what it is high
time to announce decisively and aloud, that the supposed characteristics
of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether admired or reprobated; whether they
are simplicity or simpleness; faithful adherence to essential nature, or
wilful selections from human nature of its meanest forms and under the
least attractive associations; are as little the real characteristics of
his poetry at large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.

In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an experiment;
and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet even in these
poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural tendency of
the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated conceptions. The
poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part written in language,
as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two volumes. Yet take the
following stanza and compare it with the preceding stanzas of the same
poem.

"There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak,
In symphony austere;
Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast."

Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the former
half.

"Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the Traveller thus had died,
The Dog had watched about the spot,
Or by his Master's side:
How nourish'd here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate!"

Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's
genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's
bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the art,
generally acknowledged.

I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's
works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And though,
to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to understand
previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have already expressed
myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of the ill effects that
might arise from my pursuing a contrary arrangement. I will therefore
commence with what I deem the prominent defects of his poems hitherto
published.

The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear
to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under
this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines
or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all events striking and
original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished. He
sinks too often and too abruptly to that style, which I should place
in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species;
first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is only
proper in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both. There have
been works, such as Cowley's Essay on Cromwell, in which prose and verse
are intermixed (not as in the Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS
of Barclay, by the insertion of poems supposed to have been spoken or
composed on occasions previously related in prose, but) the poet passing
from one to the other, as the nature of the thoughts or his own feelings
dictated. Yet this mode of composition does not satisfy a cultivated
taste. There is something unpleasant in the being thus obliged to
alternate states of feeling so dissimilar, and this too in a species of
writing, the pleasure from which is in part derived from the preparation
and previous expectation of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness
is felt which hangs upon the introduction of songs in our modern comic
operas; and to prevent which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose
exquisite taste there can be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be
entertained as to his poetic genius) uniformly placed the aria at the
end of the scene, at the same time that he almost always raises and
impassions the style of the recitative immediately preceding. Even in
real life, the difference is great and evident between words used as the
arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse,
with the image and superscription worn out by currency; and those which
convey pictures either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and
particularize some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward
state of the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of
his peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works of
literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the business
of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires unusual
splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral tints,
that what in a different style would be the commanding colours, are
here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in order to
produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in a poem,
the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to disappoint
them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings are
alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.

I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:

"And one, the rarest, was a shell,
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep."

"Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred."

Or page 172, vol. I.

"'Tis gone forgotten, let me do
My best. There was a smile or two--
I can remember them, I see
The smiles worth all the world to me.
Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I cannot keep thee in my arms;
For they confound me: as it is,
I have forgot those smiles of his!"

Or page 269, vol. I.

"Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
And though little troubled with sloth
Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both!
Hearing thee or else some other,
As merry a brother
I on the earth will go plodding on
By myself cheerfully till the day is done."

The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of the
two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So vol. II.
page 30.

"Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
I watch'd him, he continuing motionless
To the Pool's further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view."

Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza but
two.

"And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish flood
Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth altogether, if it move at all."

Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both with
the first and the third.

"My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said,
My question eagerly did I renew,
'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

"He with a smile did then his words repeat;
And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
`Once I could meet with them on every side;
'But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.'

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently."

Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author. There
is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it would
not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat that this
defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the two volumes
of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would amount in the
whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the number of pages.
In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom excited by
the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the sudden
superiority of some other passage forming the context.

The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may
be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where
the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this actidentality
I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which Aristotle
pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos, the most
intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art; adding, as the
reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The following passage
from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well expresses this truth.
"When I considered the actions which I meant to describe; (those
inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather to choose those
of a former age, than the present; and in a century so far removed, as
might preserve me from their improper examinations, who know not the
requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they lose, (and even the
pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable), who take away the
liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of an historian.
For why should a poet doubt in story to mend the intrigues of fortune
by more delightful conveyances of probable fictions, because austere
historians have entered into bond to truth? An obligation, which were
in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is the bondage of false martyrs,
who lie in chains for a mistaken opinion. But by this I would imply,
that truth, narrative and past, is the idol of historians, (who worship
a dead thing), and truth operative, and by effects continually alive,
is the mistress of poets, who hath not her existence in matter, but in
reason."

For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines in
THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a striking
instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be some strong
motive--(as, for instance, that the description was necessary to the
intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me to describe in
a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to the eye with
incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes of his pencil,
or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such descriptions too
often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is determined to understand
his author, a feeling of labour, not very dissimilar to that, with
which he would construct a diagram, line by line, for a long geometrical
proposition. It seems to be like taking the pieces of a dissected map
out of its box. We first look at one part, and then at another, then
join and dove-tail them; and when the successive acts of attention have
been completed, there is a retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as
a whole. The poet should paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and
I know no happier case to exemplify the distinction between these two
faculties. Master-pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound
in the writings of Milton, for example:

"The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd,
"But such as at this day, to Indians known,
"In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
"Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
"The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
"About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
"High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
"There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
"Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
"At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade."

This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a magical
penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the exponents of
sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost said to reverse
the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the Egyptian statue.
Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in the world of
imagination.

The second division respects an appa