Poems

“ I would say, in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines,—to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader, for most part! ”

“ I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems of my soul and of immortality. ”

“ For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. ”

“ Yet the Poem contains many delicate touches of passion, and indeed the passion is every where true to nature; a great number of the stanzas present beautiful images, and are expresssd with unusual felicity of language; and the versification, though the metre is itself unfit for long poems, is harmonious and artfully varied, exhibiting the utmost powers of that metre, and every variety of which it is capable. ”

“ I have attempted to symbol the course of a Poet's mind from a state wherein thought is disordered, barren and uncultivated, to that which is ordered and swayed by the true Spirit of Poetry, and holds its perfect creed. ”

“ But with remembered skill
The hand interprets still,
Though speech with broken lyre is faithless to the will,
Those poor, pale fingers weave with majestic art,
One last, lone thrilling word to echo through the heart. ”

“ And herein is the legitimation of criticism, in the mind's faith, that the poems are a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which they ought to be made to tally. A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant: a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. ”

“ The title has carried with it its own standard, and the poems have been kept on a plane above jocularity or mere prettiness of versification; rather have they tried to teach the doctrines of courage, of nature-love, of pure and noble melody. ”

“ How much the eyes are windows to the soul
⁠Your poet eyes have taught me,—
Those shadowed orbs that seem the goal
⁠Of all that fairest dreams have brought me,—
And, in their depths revealing you,
Win from my heart a tender homage, too. ”

“ Set deeds in the world's face, and cry "Do thus!"
The Poet's life is action spiritualized,
Words sublimate by earnestness and truth
To the reality and force of deed—
Falling upon the great world's soul like spells
That take the reason captive, and subdue
Its motions to the gentle sway of love.
His thoughts are like the moonlight that enshrines
All earth and heaven with beauty and soft grace,
Pouring rich floods of radiance divine
O'er life's reality of grief and pain,
Making e'en sorrow luminous and sweet,
And freighting sighs with gentlest melody. ”

“ Consequently if we take a survey of the various channels through which the genius of poetry has been accustomed to diffuse itself, it will be found, that, during this half century, every province had its cultivators; that poems epic and dramatic, historic and didactic, lyric and romantic, that satires, pastorals, and sonnets, songs, madrigals, and epigrams, together with a multitude of translations, brightened and embellished its progress. ”

“ The fifty poems of Men and Women, with a few exceptions, fall into three principal groups—those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts—painting, poetry, music—and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, A Grammarian's Funeral ”

“ The shadowy plumage of historic song,
The new-born poet left the beaten course,
To track the passions to their living source.
Then rose the Drama;—and the world admired
Her varied page with deeper thought inspired
Bound to no clime, for Passion's throb is one
In Greenland's twilight or in India's sun;
Born for no age, for all the thoughts that roll
In the dark vortex of the stormy soul,
Unchained in song, no freezing years can tame;
God gave them birth, and man is still the same. ”

“ One simile, that solitary shines In the dry desert of a thousand lines, Or lengthened thought that gleams through many a page, Has sanctified whole poems for an age. ”

“ So in this little book will be found some poems in the old conventional forms and some others in free rhythms, in which the author has tried in a humble way, to mingle elements of thought, emotion and beauty. ”

“ Poems and Sonnets, Crown Svo, cloth extra, Ss, 'Many of these poems are leavened with the leaven of genuine poctical sentiment, and expressed with grace and beauty of language. A tender melancholy, as well as it penetrating pathos, gives character to much of their sentiment, and lends it an invesistible iwterest to all who can feel."—Stamdard. ”

“ In the deep heart of man a poet dwells
Who all the day of life his summer story tells;
Scatters on every eye dust of his spells,
Scent, form and color; to the flowers and shells
Wins the believing child with wondrous tales ”

“ The rough-hewn words to simplest thoughts confined
Were cut and polished in their nicer mind;
Caught on their edge, imagination's ray
Splits into rainbows, shooting far away;—
From sense to soul, from soul to sense, it flies,
And through all nature links analogies;
He who reads right will rarely look upon
A better poet than his lexicon!
There is a race which cold, ungenial skies
Breed from decay, as fungous growths arise ”

“ Our inquiry concerns the poet's inspiration, his production of beauty in sound and sense, his imagination, passion, insight, thought, motive. Impersonal work may be never so correct, and yet tame and ineffective. Such are many of the formal dramas and pseudo-classical idyls with which modern literature teems. Go to, say their authors, let us choose subjects and make poems. ”

“ The deep, the true, the honour'd of my song,—
If but one worldly soil has been effaced,
That song has not been utterly in vain.
All true deep feeling purifies the heart.
Am I not better by my love for you? ”

“ And I'm not a poet: but never despair!
I'll madly live the poems I shall never write. ”

“ FRAGMENTARY THOUGHTS FROM MARGARET FULLER'S JOURNAL.
Poesy.—The expression of the sublime and beautiful, whether in measured words or in the fine arts. The human mind, apprehending the harmony of the universe, and making new combinations by its laws.
Poetry.—The sublime and beautiful expressed in measured language. It is closely allied with the fine arts. It should sing to the ear, paint to the eye, and exhibit the symmetry of architecture. If perfect, it will satisfy the intellectual and moral faculties no less than the heart and the senses. ”

“ Not my sweet lute, that wrought me wrong;
It was not song that taught me love,
But it was love that taught me song.
If song be past, and hope undone,
And pulse, and head, and heart, are flame;
It is thy work, thou faithless one! ”

“ But, as I wish to guard against the possibility of misleading by this classification, it is proper first to remind the Reader, that certain poems are placed according to the powers of mind, in the Author's conception, predominant in the production of them; predominant, which implies the exertion of other faculties in less degree. Where there is more imagination than fancy in a poem it is placed under the head of imagination, and vice versa. ”

“ Ye are better than all the ballads That ever were sung or said; For ye are living poems, And all the rest are dead. ”

“ Canst thou copy in verse one chime Of the wood-bell's peal and cry, Write in a book the morning's prime, Or match with words that tender sky? Wonderful verse of the gods, Of one import, of varied tone; They chant the bliss of their abodes To man imprisoned in his own. Ever the words of the gods resound; But the porches of man's ear Seldom in this low life's round Are unsealed that he may hear. ”

“ You must have also the untaught strain
That sheds beauty on the rose.
There is a melody born of melody,
Which melts the world into a sea:
Toil could never compass it;
Art its height could never hit ”

“ Then Nature shaped a poet's heart—a lyre From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows Drew trembling music, wakening sweet desire. ”

“ If such be the force of Imagination in active life, how absolute must be its dominion in poetry! And absolute it is, if we are to believe Wordsworth, who defines poetry to be 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion.' This definition coincides well with modern notions on the nature of the art. ”

“ Further, it is the language of men who speak of what they do not understand; who talk of Poetry as of a matter of amusement and idle pleasure; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry. ”

“ Undying recollections; Nature there
Was with thee; she, who loved us both, she still
Was with thee; and even so didst thou become
A silent Poet; from the solitude
Of the vast sea didst bring a watchful heart
Still couchant, an inevitable ear,
And an eye practised like a blind man's touch. ”

“ Several of my Friends are anxious for the success of these Poems from a belief, that if the views, with which they were composed, were indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the multiplicity and in the quality of its moral relations: and on this account they have advised me to prefix a systematic defence of the theory, upon which the poems were written. ”

“ This separated the genuine language of Poetry still further from common life, so that whoever read or heard the poems of these earliest Poets felt himself moved in a way in which he had not been accustomed to be moved in real life, and by causes manifestly different from those which acted upon him in real life. ”

“ There beams a world of poetry and song.
Spellbound, entranced, inspired he stands.
Then from his smiling, parted lips
His soul breathes forth a poem.
The words come ready-formed,
In pretty, well-turned phrases ”

“ The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way ”

“ Expression, child of soul! I fondly trace
Thy strong enchantments, when the poet's lyre,
The painter's pencil catch thy sacred fire,
And beauty wakes for thee her touching grace—
But from this frighted glance thy form avert
When horrors check thy tear, thy struggling sigh,
When frenzy rolls in thy impassion'd eye,
Or guilt sits heavy on thy lab'ring heart—
Nor ever let my shudd'ring fancy bear
The wasting groan, or view the pallid look
Of him [A] the Muses lov'd—when hope forsook
His spirit, vainly to the Muses dear! ”

“ And yet I pine;—this beautiful completeness
⁠Is incomplete, to my desiring heart;
'Tis Beauty's form, without her soul of sweetness—
⁠The pure, but chiseled loveliness of art.
There is no longer pleasure in emotion.
⁠I envy those dead souls no touch can thrill,
Who "painted ships upon a painted ocean,"—
⁠Seem to be moved, yet are forever still. ”

“ Which seems to radiate from the poet's lyre
Is to the world a mystery and a charm,
An AEgis wielded on a mortal's arm,
While Reason turns her dazzled eye away,
And bows her sceptre to her subject's sway;
And thus the poet, clothed with godlike state,
Usurped his Maker's title—to create;
He, whose thoughts differing not in shape, but dress,
What others feel more fitly can express,
Sits like the maniac on his fancied throne,
Peeps through the bars, and calls the world his own. ”

“ I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.
For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand. ”

“ But the beauties of poetry must be felt before their causes are investigated. There is a poetical sensibility, which in the progress of the mind becomes as distinct a power as a musical ear or a picturesque eye. ”

“ In music he repeats the pang Whence the fair flock of Nature sprang. O mortal! thy ears are stones; These echoes are laden with tones Which only the pure can hear; Thou canst not catch what they recite Of Fate and Will, of Want and Right, Of man to come, of human life, Of Death and Fortune, Growth and Strife.' Once again the pine-tree sung:— 'Speak not thy speech my boughs among: Put off thy years, wash in the breeze; My hours are peaceful centuries. Talk no more with feeble tongue; No more the fool of space and time, Come weave with mine a nobler rhyme. ”

“ Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word, popular, applied to new works in Poetry, as if there were no test of excellence in this first of the fine arts but that all Men should run after its productions, as if urged by an appetite, or constrained by a spell!—The qualities of writing best fitted for eager reception are either such as startle the world into attention by their audacity and extravagance ”