CHAPTER V.

_THE BEST POETRY AND HOW TO READ IT._

The reading and enjoyment of poetry may be said to be a fine art. Certainly no one is likely to have a taste for poetry who does not cultivate it. Yet nothing is so characteristic of the person of culture, and nothing is so likely to produce true culture, as the reading and study of the best poetry.

It is probably a fact that of all the volumes of poetry in the world, not one in a hundred is read. It would be almost impossible to read through from beginning to end the complete works of any well known poet, and nothing could be more foolish than to attempt to do so. Yet the average owner of a volume of poetry cannot think of anything else to do with it except let it alone, and generally chooses the latter alternative.

A poem is not like a story. One reads a story, enjoys it, and lays it aside. Few would care to read even the best novel more than once, or at most two or three times at widely separated intervals. A poem, on the other hand, cannot be understood or truly enjoyed even by the most cultivated until it has been read several times. In fact one reads a poem for quite a different purpose from that which leads one to read a story. A poem is more like a piece of music: one reads it when one wishes to be put into the mood which the poem or the music is intended to produce. The favourite mood produces happiness, and when we wish that kind of happiness we turn to the work of art which is able to produce it in us.

Now, evidently it is not every poet whose moods are like our own. It is true that we may wish to cultivate moods not natural to us; but there is a distinct limit even to these. It follows, therefore, that there are not many poets we will wish to study, or even to read more than once; and there are but few poems even of the poets we like which will have that perfect effect on us which will make us wish to repeat it often.

If one were asked to suggest the surest way to acquire a liking for poetry and a knowledge of it, the following would probably be the method suggested:

First, find one good poem that one could really like and read more than once with pleasure. There are few of us who could not name such a poem at once; but many of us go no farther.

Having chosen the first poem, one has thereby made choice of the first poet, a poet whose moods are in accord with one’s own and whom one is likely to be able to learn to like. Unless we can start with a liking, and proceed to another liking, we are not likely to go very far.

While one likes a poet rather than poems, when one’s taste is fully trained, the most successful readers of poetry know a poet by relatively few poems. One cannot read many poems many times, and as we cannot appreciate any poetry fully that we do not read many times, we must make a selection. Indeed we shall find that there are but few poems of any poet that produce in us the desired mood. For us, all the other poems are more or less failures, at least more or less imperfect. So the first principle in the successful reading of poetry is to select most rigidly.

While the special student of poetry may read the entire work of a poet, weigh each poem, and select judiciously those which he will reread and finally make a part of his inner circle of friends, the general reader must depend upon the selection of some one else to some extent, or at least he will read first those recommended to him, afterward dipping casually into others in the hope that he will find one he will wish to study more carefully. Such a selection, and one of the best ever made, is Matthew Arnold’s selection from the poems of Wordsworth. But even Matthew Arnold does not tell you what poem of Wordsworth’s to begin with. Another admirable selection of the “best poems” is Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury.” Yet even in that most lovers of poetry will miss many that have been excluded because they are not lyric, or because they are too long, or for some other reason which is not an essential one with the reader. Other selecters of poems have not been so fortunate, and when one can have a tolerably complete edition of a poet in his library, he will wish to make his own selection with the aid of such adviser as he may choose.

One of the easiest poets to begin with is Longfellow. We have already read the Psalm of Life. Let us read it again, and yet again.

Longfellow very aptly describes himself as a poet in that beautiful song of his “The Day is Done.”

Come, read to me some poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall sooth that restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music, Their mighty thoughts suggest Life’s endless toil and endeavour: And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet, Whose songs gushed from his heart, As rain from the clouds of summer, Or tears from the eyelids start.

Who, through long days of labour, And nights devoid of ease, Still heard in his soul the music Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet The restless pulse of care, And come like the benediction That follows after prayer.

And there is no better way to enjoy poetry than to read it aloud:

Then read from the treasured volume The poem of thy choice, And lend to the rhyme of the poet The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music, And the cares that infest the day Shall fold their tents like the Arabs, And as silently steal away.

Turning over the leaves of your volume of Longfellow, mark these few poems to read first, and if you find one that you like, read it again. Perhaps you will be quite familiar with some, if not most in this list; but if there are some that you do not know, but that attract you on reading once, study those till you have learned to love them; in so doing you will have made a real beginning toward the culture that comes from a systematic study of poetry: “A Psalm of Life,” “The Reaper and the Flowers,” “Footsteps of Angels,” “Flowers,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “The Skeleton in Armour,” “The Village Blacksmith,” “The Rainy Day,” “God’s Acre,” “To the River Charles,” “Maidenhood,” “Excelsior,” “The Belfry at Bruges,” “The Arsenal at Springfield,” “The Norman Baron,” “The Bridge,” “Curfew,” “The Building of the Ship,” “The Builders,” “Pegasus in Pound,” “Beware,” “The Day is Done,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” “The Arrow and the Song,” “My Lost Youth,” “Paul Revere’s Ride” (Tales of a Wayside Inn), “The Birds of Killingworth,” “The Bell of Atri,” “The Children’s Hour,” “Hanging of the Crane,” and “Keramos.” These are not all the good poems, and some of these are not even the best; but they are a good list to choose from. Besides these you will perhaps like to read “Hiawatha” first, then “The Courtship of Miles Standish,” and finally “Evangeline”; but these longer poems are tales rather than poems, and one does not care to return to them as to the shorter gems.

Longfellow is a “humbler poet,” as he himself has expressed it, but he is none the less a poet; and in all literature you will not find a simpler poet, nor one easier to read and like.

Next to Longfellow, perhaps the most generally liked modern poet is Tennyson. Tennyson was not a great thinker, like Browning; he was rather the interpreter of the thinker poets, for the reader who could not read Wordsworth and the rest for himself. Tennyson set out in early life to master poetic technique, and he could write more different styles than any other great modern poet. Besides, his poems often have a swing (quite unlike the sweet melody of Longfellow’s) which fascinates many. And he was peculiarly and distinctly the poet of moods. “Break, Break, Break” is little more than a haunting melody in words; and the same may be said of most of the songs in “The Princess,” beautiful as they are.

It will take much more time to learn to like Tennyson than it required for Longfellow, for Tennyson is so various, and we must come at him in so many different ways.

Perhaps we might begin with such mere pretty rhythms as “Airy, Fairy Lilian” and “Claribel”; how much better than these shall we find “The Lady of Shallott,” “Break, Break, Break,” and all the songs in “The Princess.” “The Princess” itself is rather a tedious poem, certainly one which we would not care to read twice in succession; but the songs scattered through it are as nearly perfect as that sort of poetry well could be. “The May Queen” is a pretty and fascinating simple story that may touch us more deeply than we would own; and a poem of a different kind which might appeal particularly to our mood is “Locksley Hall,” following it with “Locksley Hall Twenty Years After,” which we may not like so well. Some will like to puzzle over the philosophy of “The Two Voices,” others the pretty story of “The Miller’s Daughter” or “The Talking Oak,” or the poetic “Ulysses” and “Lotus-Eaters,” while others will wish to pass on to “Maud” with its varied rhythms. In “Maud” there is one often quoted passage which may be all that one will care to reread--the passage beginning, “Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, has flown.” Nothing could be more perfectly and exquisitely rhythmical. And yet of all Tennyson’s poem, it is probably the shortest that we shall like best, such as “The Flower in the Crannied Wall” and “Crossing the Bar,” or such a stirring war poem as “Charge of the Light Brigade.”

Nearly all of Tennyson’s poems that he has retained in his complete works are well written and worth reading once; but if you ever come to like the higher poets you will find his best thinking expressed there better, and will turn to Tennyson more and more for the swinging music of his shorter songs, with their mood-making rhythms and haunting images.

And now let us turn to one of the great poets--to Browning. Most of us will be entirely unable to read the greater part of his poetry at all, and whether it is good or bad we must leave it to the critics to say. It will be best to buy him in a volume of selections, such as that he made himself from his own poems and published in two volumes. We may make our selection from that, though in other collections we may find other poems we shall like quite as much as any of these.

First of all, let us say that it will probably take many days to learn to like even a few of Browning’s poems; but once we have learned to like them they will be dearer to us than all the other poets. We measure his greatness by the intensity of the liking we have for what we do like.

Perhaps we have read “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix” and found nothing very wonderful in it. If we ever come to love Browning, it will be because he was himself a lover, and we shall admire him because he was a fighter against the discouragements and littlenesses of the world.

Let us begin with his love poems--such a simple poem as “A Woman’s Last Word.” We shall not understand all of it; but no matter--we shall like it none the less on that account, and we shall like it the better the more we read it. Then let us read “Love Among the Ruins.” We shall not understand all of that, either, but some we shall understand, and there will be new things to discover each time we reread, which should be many times. Possibly we shall never get tired of reading it over. And then we may read at pleasure such poems as “The Last Ride Together,” “Any Wife to Any Husband,” “In a Year,” “Misconceptions,” “Two in the Campagna,” and “Evelyn Hope.” There will be others which in time we shall be drawn to read, such as “In a Gondola” and “The Statue and the Bust”; but the important thing is to learn to love, and to like to read and reread, two or three.

And now let us turn to that other side of Browning, his philosophy as a fighter and a struggler in the world. Begin with “Rabbi Ben Ezra.” In a week, or a month, or a year, we may not have mastered it--indeed probably we shall never master it. So much the better; then we shall go on reading it and rereading it, and getting help and inspiration from it. There will be certain stanzas that will seem meant for us, and these we will mark, and in the margin we will make notes none will understand but ourselves.

Once master this one poem, and enough is accomplished--or at least the rest will take care of itself. We shall then read “Saul,” and the haunting “Abt Vogler,” “Andrea del Sarto,” “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” “Prospice” and “A Grammarian’s Funeral.”

There are other poems--yes, a good many others; but if you once come to love two or three, so that you like to turn to them, and find comfort in reading them, you will find the others for yourself, and if you do not find them, you will probably get all the more good out of the old ones.

We have perhaps said enough as to the manner of studying poetry, illustrating by the three poets we have considered. The reader will now be able to take up the following for himself, upon the hints given with each.

If you like Longfellow, read some of the best poems of the other New England poets--Whittier’s “Barefoot Boy,” “Barbara Frietchie,” “Maud Muller,” “Skipper Ireson’s Ride,” and “Snow-Bound”; Holmes’s “The Chambered Nautilus,” “The One Hoss Shay,” “The Last Leaf,” and “Old Ironsides”; Lowell’s “Vision of Sir Launfal,” and “The First Snow-Fall”; and Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” “To a Water Fowl,” and “The Death of the Flowers.”

Some may trace a likeness between the three great poems of Poe, “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells,” and Tennyson; but Poe will be found unique in his weird mood and rhythmic use of words.

From the lyric poems of Tennyson, turn to Shelley’s “The Skylark” (one of the most beautiful poems in our language), and his “The Cloud,” and “Ode to the West Wind”; and after picking up such little gems as “Love’s Philosophy,” we may learn to like “Alastor” and “The Sensitive Plant.”

Once Byron was almost worshiped, while today we hardly do him justice. He is the poet of the “dark mood,” and we shall probably find this mood in its greatest purity in his dramatic poems “Manfred” and “Cain,” of each of which he is himself the hero. Rather than read entire such long poems as “Childe Harold,” “The Giaour,” “The Corsair,” and “Don Juan,” it will be better to read the striking passages--at least at first. We must judge from our taste for Byron how much we shall read of him.

No one should fail to read Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” If we would read further, we may perhaps choose first “St Agnes’ Eve,” “Ode to Autumn” and “Endymion.” It takes a fine poetic taste to appreciate Keats, for he is a poet “all of beauty,” rich, fragrant, sensuous beauty, such beauty as we shall find nowhere else; but his thoughts and emotions of love and conquest over life are not very great.

Next to Browning, perhaps the greatest poet of the nineteenth century is Wordsworth. He is the very opposite of Browning standing to Nature as Browning does to humanity. We shall find his creed stated in a poem which is one of the greatest in the English language, called simply “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”; and much the same thought we shall find expressed in more lyric form in his famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Unquestionably the best of Wordsworth is to be found in Matthew Arnold’s selections in the “Golden Treasury” series, and this is better to possess than the bulky complete works, much of which we shall find exceedingly dull and almost fatal to our liking for any poetry whatever. But there are also many beautiful simple poems of Wordsworth’s which we should easily learn to like, among them, “We Are Seven,” “Lucy Gray,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (Daffodils), and many of his sonnets, such as that to “Milton,” “On Westminster Bridge,” “To the River Duddon--Afterthought,” “The World Is too Much With Us,” etc.

Of the older poets, Burns stands by himself, one of the most popular of all poets who wrote in the English language. Best of all his poems are his simple love songs, such as “My Luve is Like the Red, Red Rose,” “Jean,” “Highland Mary,” and “To Mary in Heaven.” Who can forget “Bannockburn,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonnie Doon,” and “John Anderson my Jo?” “The Man’s the Gowd for a’ That,” and that beautiful little poem, “To a Mouse,” are unique, because they show us the simple heart of a man in all its struggling simplicity. Some, too, will like to read and reread “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In the reading of Burns one can hardly go wrong; yet after all there is much even in Burns that we might well spare, and many and many a line of his poetry has no such charm as the poems we have mentioned; yet the reader who has learned to like these will, on reading any other poem, know and discover the difference almost at the first line.

If one wishes to find in poetry comfort for a weary mood, one will not look for it in such poets as Pope and Dryden, with their clever lines. Pope has more quotable lines than almost any other poet except Shakspere; and his “Essay on Man” is interesting, and perhaps we may even find some charm in “The Rape of the Lock”; but on the whole one will miss little by reading him in a book of quotations.

Milton is different. He is the one noble and lofty poet of the English language. We shall not find any modern philosophy in him; but what is finer in its imagery and rhythm than his “Hymn to the Nativity”! And such lyrical poems as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” will be found to possess an easy and surprising charm. “Paradise Lost” we should never read more than a page or two at a time, for it is too great, too lofty for the common mind to bear it long; but who would miss the pleasure of reading this single page or two once a month or once a year?

There are certain single poems which no student of poetry will fail to read and reread as he does the poems of the great poets whom we study as men as well as the author of certain poems. One of these is Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” another is Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and his “Christabel”; Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs” and the “Song of the Shirt”; Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore”; Cowper’s “Alexander Selkirk”; Campbell’s “Hohenlinden”; and such bits as Ben Jonson’s “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and Goldsmith’s “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly.”

There are other poems by less known poets, which only the individual reader will find and make his own. For myself, I know no poems I like better to read than Matthew Arnold’s “Tristram and Iseult,” “Switzerland,” and “Dover Beach”; while many admire poems by Emerson and George Eliot and Dickens in the same way, though we are not accustomed to think of these writers as among the great poets. Though Edward FitzGerald’s “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” is a translation, it is one of the most popular poems in the English language, and considered also one of the greatest.

Note: Many of the poems here mentioned may be found in “A Selection from the Great English Poets,” edited by Sherwin Cody.