Chapter V
. But we have tried in the present chapter to trace the functioning of the poetic imagination in those stages of its activity which precede the definite shaping of poems with the pen. If we say, with Professor Fairchild, [Footnote: _Making of Poetry_, p. 34.] that "the central processes or kinds of activity involved in the making of poetry are three: personalizing, combining and versifying," it is obvious that we have been dealing with the first two. If we prefer to use the famous terms employed by Ruskin in _Modern Painters_, we have been considering the penetrative, associative and contemplative types of imagination. But these Ruskinian names, however brilliantly and suggestively employed by the master, are dangerous tools for the beginner in the study of poetry.
If the beginner desires to review, at this point, the chief matters brought to his attention in the present chapter, he may make a real test of their validity by opening his senses to the imagery of a few lines of poetry. Remember that poets are endeavoring to convey the "sense" of things rather than the knowledge of things. Disregard for the moment the precise words employed in the following lines, and concentrate the attention upon the images, as if the image were not made of words at all, but were mere naked sense-stimulus.
In this line the poet is trying to make us _see_ something ("visual" image):
"The bride hath paced into the hall, _Red as a rose_ is she."
Can you see her?
In these lines the poet is trying to make us _hear_ something ("auditory" image):
"A _noise like of a hidden brook_ In the leafy month of June That to the _sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune_."
Do you hear the tune? Do you hear it as clearly as you can hear
"_The tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens_"?
In these lines the poet is trying to make us feel certain bodily sensations ("tactile" image):
"I closed my lids and kept them close, _And the balls like pulses beat_; For the sky and the sea and the sea and the sky, _Lay like a load on my weary eye_, And the dead were at my feet."
Do your eyes feel that pressure?
You are sitting quite motionless in your chair as you read these lines ("motor" image):
"I _sprang_ to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; I _galloped_, Dirck _galloped_, we _galloped_ all three!"
Are you instantly on horseback? If you are, the poet has put you there by conveying from his mind to yours, through the use of verbal imagery and rhythm, his "sense" of riding, which has now become _your_ sense of riding.
If the reader can meet this test of realizing simple images through his own body-and-mind reaction to their stimulus, the door of poetry is open to him. He can enter into its limitless enjoyments. If he wishes to analyse more closely the nature of the pleasure which poetry affords, he may select any lines he happens to like, and ask himself how the various functions of the imagination are illustrated by them. Suppose the lines are Coleridge's description of the bridal procession, already quoted in part:
"The bride hath paced into the hall, Red as a rose is she; Nodding their heads before her goes The merry minstrelsy."
Here surely is imagination penetrative; the selection of some one characteristic trait of the object; that trait (the "redness" or the "nodding") re-presented to us, and emphasized by conferring, modifying or abstracting whatever elements the poet wishes to stress or to suppress. The result is a combination of imagery which forms an idealized picture, presenting the shows of things as the mind would like to see them and thus satisfying our sense of beauty. For there is no question that the mind takes a supreme satisfaction in such an idealization of reality as Coleridge's picture of the swift tropical sunset,
"At one stride comes the dark,"
or Emerson's picture of the slow New England sunrise,
"O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire."
Little has been said about beauty in this chapter, but no one doubts that a sense of beauty guides the "shaping spirit of imagination" in that dim region through which the poet feels his way before he comes to the conscious choice of expressive words and to the ordering of those words into beautiful rhythmical designs.
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