CHAPTER XXXII

POETRY AND BEAUTY

Let us gather in this chapter a few of the most beautiful lines in poetry.

The youngest of the great English poets is John Keats. When he was little more than a boy, early in the nineteenth century, he wrote poetry. One of his poems is called "Ode to a Nightingale". Keats had been listening to the voice of the bird, which sings at night a song considered more beautiful than that of any other bird, and he began to imagine how often the nightingale had sung to people who lived long ago, and how often in far away, beautiful lands. As he thought, he could see these other lands, where people lived in faery palaces, with open windows looking on the sea. Keats' words, which we can read to-day, keep the song of the bird, and the picture of the countries where it sang, in perfect beauty.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

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Wordsworth, whose poetry at times may seem dull and uninspired, again and again has the power to write lines which have a beauty that is inexplicable.

The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; . . . . . Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; . . . . . Hence, in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

These lines are taken from Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality". In another poem he describes a great mountain, Mont Blanc, which is snow-capped, so high that the sun when it rises shines on the mountain's summit long before the sun's rays reach the country below. One line of seven words tells us how at night the mountain peak seems to be in the company of the moving stars:--

"Visited all night by troops of stars."

Shakespeare has many of these magic lines, but one which seems to have come from nowhere, and for which Shakespeare offers no explanation is:

"Child Rowland to the dark tower came."

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We ask ourselves who Child Rowland was, and where was the dark tower. Then, perhaps, we begin to weave a story about Child Rowland and the tower, for poetry often stirs in us something which makes us think and feel more intensely, and awakens in us the desire to create beauty ourselves.

It was Thomas Nash, a poet living at the same time as Shakespeare, who wrote in his poem "In Time of Pestilence", lines which many other poets agree are among the most enthralling and beautiful ever written,--

Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye;

George Meredith, the novelist, who also was a poet, in his "Love in the Valley" has magical lines.

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.

Robert Louis Stevenson told the Irish poet, Mr. Yeats, that when he first read "Love in the Valley" he went about the country where he was shouting the lines for joy in them.

And so we finally understand that this power of creating strange beauty which stirs and thrills us all may come to any poet, sometimes to great poets, sometimes to poets not so great. Shakespeare and Nash had it, Keats and Wordsworth, Meredith who belongs almost to our own times, and a young poet of a later time even than {228} Meredith, James Elroy Flecker, in whose play _Hassan_, are many beautiful songs. The last song is "The Golden Road to Samarkand".

We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go Always a little further: it may be Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave There lives a prophet who can understand Why men are born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand. . . . . . . . . We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Coleridge, the Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was Charles Lamb's friend, wrote a story, a ballad, following the fashion of the old ballads, which he called "The Ancient Mariner". You probably know this poem already. But if you do not, find time to read it; or, possibly, someone may read parts of it to you. "The Ancient Mariner" is a story of the sea, of wanderings, of shipwreck, of strange sights, of learning that we must love every thing, not only men and women, but birds and beasts, and then of the glad returning to the place which was the sailor's home:

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as emerald. . . . . . . . . The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out: At one stride comes the dark; With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea, Off shot the spectre-bark.

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The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-- . . . . . . . . O dream of joy! is this indeed The lighthouse top I see? Is this the hill? is this the kirk? Is this mine own countree?

No matter how familiar such lines may become, we should never forget to realize their beauty.

Ben Jonson, who lived in the seventeenth century, wrote, with other poems, a lyric, wise as well as beautiful, in which we may find life-long companionship.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May, Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures, life may perfect be.

No one can change these lines and express the same idea as perfectly as Jonson has given it to us. For great poetry has some magic power by which it conveys to us truth and beauty which we are not able to discover for ourselves.

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