in the mind. All these dear niceties are blanked in mist, recede to their proper insignificance. Come, Sleep; O Sleep! The certain knot of peace, The bating-place of wit. Thou shalt in me, Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. But while you're about it, Sleep, we differ from Sir Philip in this: tonight we can even get along without Stella's image. We've chosen our epitaph for the evening-what the students at Leyden write on the walls of the examination-room when they suspect they've flunked-Hic Sudavit, Sed Frustra! Appendix [Being a brief and rigorous anthology of comments on kindred matters. I have asked the publisher to include several blank pages after these, so that you may fill in favourite excerpts from your own reading.] The work is done, and from the fingers fall The bloodwarm tools that brought the labour thro: The tasking eye that overrunneth all And thou, my perfect work, thou'rt of to-day; To-morrow a poor and alien thing wilt be, True only should the swift life stand at stay: Therefore farewell, nor look to bide with me. Go find thy friends, if there be one to love thee: Casting thee forth, my child, I rise above thee. -Robert Bridges (The Growth of Love). "Well, Francis," we said to himself, sitting in a back room in Fulton Street, "do you ever write any prose?" "Oh, no," he said; "poetry is what comes to you, but in prose you've got to know what you're doing." -Interview with Francis Carlin. Poetry is the voice of the solitary man. The poet is always a solitary; and yet he speaks to others-he would win their attention. Thus it follows that every poem is a social act done by a solitary man. And being an alien from the strange land of the solitary, he cannot be expected to admonish or to sermonize, or uplift, as it is called; and so take part in the cabals and intrigues in other lands of which he knows nothing, being himself a stranger from a strange land, the land of the solitary. People listen to him as they would to any other traveller come from distant countries and all he asks for is courtesy even as he himself is courteous. Inferior poets are those who forget their dignity-and, indeed, their only chance of being permitted to live-and to make friends try to enter into the lives of the people whom they would propitiate, and so become teachers and moralists and preachers. And soon for penalty of their rashness and folly they forget their own land of the solitary, and its speech perishes from their lips. The traveller's tales are of all the most precious, because he comes from a land-the poet's solitude-which no other feet have trodden and which no other feet will tread. * -J. B. Yeats. The simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness. Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. -Keats, letter to John Taylor. * We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author. -Keats, letter to Reynolds. Poetry must work out its own salvation in a man: It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness In Endymion, I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. -Keats, letter to James Hessey. Some think me middling, others silly, others foolish. I am content to be thought all this because I have in my own breast so great a resource. -Keats, letter to George and Georgiana. * Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. -Carl Sandburg. People do not ask painters to go to places and paint pictures for nothing, but they are forever trying to graft entertainment off of poets. -Don Marquis. * |