Classic Poem

A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the
forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck,
and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of
centipedes running down the spine,—then a gasp and a great jump of the
heart,—then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head,—then
a long sigh,—and the poem is written.

It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,—I
replied.

No,—said he,—far from it. I said written, but I did not say copied.
Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the
copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an
instant in the poet’s soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the
meshes of a few sweet words,—words that have loved each other from the
cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it
will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not
is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet
turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a
hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel
ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their
regular sequences of association. No wonder the ancients made the
poetical impulse wholly external. ????? ae?de ?e?.
Goddess,—Muse,—divine afflatus,—something outside always. I never
wrote any verses worth reading. I can’t. I am too stupid. If I ever
copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.

[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,—telling
them what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I
thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]

The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything
better than Pope’s “Essay on Man”? Had I ever perused McFingal? He was
fond of poetry when he was a boy,—his mother taught him to say many
little pieces,—he remembered one beautiful hymn;—and the old gentleman
began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,—

“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens,”—

He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up
beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked
round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum,—the Sleeping
Beauty, I think they called it. The old man’s sudden breaking out in
this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if
changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat
scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable,
red-handed, broad-and-high-shouldered type; one of those imported female
servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person,
their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk,—the
waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall.
Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a
plate heaped with something upon the table, when I saw the coarse arm
stretched by my shoulder arrested,—motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta
caryatid; she couldn’t set the plate down while the old gentleman was
speaking!

He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on his
cheek. Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his
forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand
trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still!

By and by we got talking again.—Does a poet love the verses written
through him, do you think, Sir?—said the divinity-student.

So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal heat
about them, I know he loves them,—I answered. When they have had time
to cool, he is more indifferent.

A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes,—said the young fellow whom
they call John.

The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized
female in black bombazine.—Buckwheat is skerce and high,—she remarked.
[Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady,—pays nothing,—so she
must stand by the guns and be ready to repel boarders.]

I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things I
wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again.—I don’t
think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly appreciated, given to
you as they are in the green state.

—You don’t know what I mean by the green state? Well, then, I will
tell you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept
a long while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long
kept and used. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and immortal
example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name
three,—meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a
poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the
cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or
flavor,—born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as pallida
Mors herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually
the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up
from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting
pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing,
umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old
brown autumnal hue, you see,—as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in
the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant
reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a
single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys
that hang around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the
daughters of the house of Farina!

[Don’t think I use a meerschaum myself, for I do not, though I have
owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the
Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded
knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check.
On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted
tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved
with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure
in Raphael’s “Triumph of Galatea.” It came to me in an ancient shagreen
case,—how old it is I do not know,—but it must have been made since Sir
Walter Raleigh’s time. If you are curious, you shall see it any day.
Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking
contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a
ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that
fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous
incombustibles, the cigar, so called, of the shops,—which to “draw”
asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the
leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even
if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your
life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of
a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have
seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under
such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly
bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]

Violins, too,—the sweet old Amati!—the divine Stradivarius! Played on by
ancient maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying
fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who
made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and
scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from
his dying hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for
a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more
and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing
bow of their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident
artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns
with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it
learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it;
then again to the gentle dilettante who calmed it down with easy
melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old
maestros. And so given into our hands, its pores all full of music;
stained, like the meerschaum, through and through, with the concentrated
hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which have kindled and faded on
its strings.

Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum, or a
violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—the more porous it
is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of
absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—its
tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be
gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from
ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem
into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought
and image our being can penetrate.

Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the
maker’s hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than
fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to
each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly
acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument
becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had
grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is
juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a
hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.

Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each
word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than
in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened
them, and they don’t understand it at first. But let the poem be
repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often
enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute
solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world’s
crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe,
too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in
that of a violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its
hundredth birthday,—(Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—the sap is
pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet whom Neæra
cheated.—

“Nox erat, et cœlo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen læsura deorum
In verba jurabas mea.”

Don’t you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases? Now
I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a
certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the
“Pactolian,” in which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get
so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus,
yet you may be sure, that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines
hold their sap, you can’t fairly judge of my performances, and that, if
made of the true stuff, they will ring better after a while.

[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently a person turned
towards me—I do not choose to designate the individual—and said that he
rather expected my pieces had given pretty good “sahtisfahction.”—I had,
up to this moment, considered this complimentary phrase as sacred to the
use of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by
a small pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But as a
reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a little below
that blood-heat standard which a man’s breath ought to have, whether
silent, or vocal and articulate. I waited for a favorable opportunity,
however, before making the remarks which follow.]

—There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that fix a
man’s position for you before you have done shaking hands with him.
Allow me to expand a little. There are several things, very slight in
themselves, yet implying other things not so unimportant. Thus, your
French servant has dévalisé your premises and got caught. Excusez,
says the sergent-de-ville, as he politely relieves him of his upper
garments and displays his bust in the full daylight. Good shoulders
enough,—a little marked,—traces of smallpox, perhaps,—but white. . . . .
Crac! from the sergent-de-ville’s broad palm on the white shoulder!
Now look! Vogue la galère! Out comes the big red V—mark of the hot
iron;—he had blistered it out pretty nearly,—hadn’t he?—the old rascal
VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles! [Don’t! What if he has
got something like this?—nobody supposes I invented such a story.]

My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I
told you I had owned,—for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand
here, I am one that has been driven in his “kerridge,”—not using that
term, as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel
go-cart which has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled
vehicle with a pole,—my man John, I say, was a retired soldier. He
retired unostentatiously, as many of Her Majesty’s modest servants have
done before and since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he
recognizes one of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really
been in the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful
country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, “Strap!” If he
has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the reprimand for its
ill adjustment. The old word of command flashes through his muscles, and
his hand goes up in an instant to the place where the strap used to be.

[I was all the time preparing for my grand coup, you understand; but I
saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued,—always in
illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]

Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of. There was a
legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the English
coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape of Saxons,
who would not let them go,—on the contrary, insisted on their staying,
and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or an
Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in his title-page, and, having
divested them of the one essential and perfectly fitting garment,
indispensable in the mildest climates, nailed the same on the church-door
as we do the banns of marriage, in terrorem.

[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I looked
at our landlady, I saw that “the water stood in her eyes,” as it did in
Christiana’s when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and I
fancied, but wasn’t quite sure that the schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy
did in the same conversation, as you remember.]

That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story,—said the young fellow whom they
call John. I abstained from making Hamlet’s remark to Horatio, and
continued.

Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an old
Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things thought
the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the
front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it woul