Heroic poetry

“ The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. ”

“ The type of poetry commonly known as heroic is one which makes its appearance in various nations and in various periods of history. No one can fail to observe that certain similar features are to be found in poems of this type which are widely separated from one another both in date and place of origin. ”

“ As gold the fiery flame;
And may the years that bind our hearts
In love that cannot die,
Still draw us hourly nearer God,
And nearer to the sky.
[Pg 92]
THE POET'S LESSON. "He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life a heroic poem."—Milton. ”

“ One fell amid the clash of arms, while gods and godlike men wrought deeds that poets wrought in song. Against the darkness of the former night the heroic action fills the golden dawn, and they who fought and fell are still the foremost heroes of the world. ”

“ They have placed on the brow of others a crown which belonged to themselves, and all the heroic literature of the world was made by the sacrifice of the nameless kings of men who have given a sceptre to others they never wielded while living, and who bestowed the powers, of beauty and pity on women who perhaps had never uplifted a heart in their day, and who now sway us from the grave with a grace only imagined in the dreaming soul of the poet. ”

“ Only the heart-quick praise, the praise of deed,
Is faithful praise for the heroic breed.
How shall we honor them, our Deathless Dead?
How keep their mighty memories alive?
In him who feels their passion, they survive!
Flatter their souls with deed, and all is said!
In the heroic soul their souls create
Is raised remembrance past the reach of fate.
The will to serve and bear,
The will to love and dare,
And take for God unprofitable risk—
These things, these things will utter praise and pæan
Louder than lyric thunders Æschylean;
These things will build our dead unwasting obelisk. ”

“ He would often rise from the reading of a beautiful poem, or the story of some heroic human effort, with eyes filled and voice completely overcome, and then, as a means of gaining relief and at the same time of giving expression to his feelings, would pen in a single sentence or two the thought that was most in his mind at the time. ”

“ That which is distinguished by the Name of Epic, or Heroic, is beyond comparison the Noblest, and most Excellent. An Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform. ”

“ It will celebrate the triumph of the pride of life riding to victory roughshod over friend and foe, and the flame-clad glory of the martyr who lives in obloquy and dies in agony for an idea or a dream. Poetry is a statement of the world and of the Universe as the world can know it. ”

“ But I think among what we call "heroic" lives—lives the story of which touches us with something higher than pity, and deeper than love—there never was any of his race who left behind a history more truly heroic than he. ”

“ But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist) , is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. ”

“ Those who have attempted to interpret him as the sentimental hero of minor moods, the tone-poet in whom the weakness of despair predominates, have missed the leaping flames, the vivid intensity and the heroic manliness permeated with genuine love of beauty that animated him. ”

“ Tragedy may be hard at hand, with all the human train of sorrows and passions and sins; but the glory of beauty, the loveliness of love, the exultation of noble duty and lofty labour in a stress of arduous joy, these are the influences that pervade the world and permeate the air of the poems which deal with the Christian cycle of heroic legend, whose crowning image is the ideal figure of the Cid. ”

“ Nay, though all the laws of heroic poem, all the laws of tragedy were exactly observed, yet still this tour entrejeant—this poetic energy, if I may so call it, would be required to give life to all the rest; which shines through the roughest, most unpolished, and antiquated language, and may haply be wanting in the most polite and reformed. ”

“ Wild, holy, tameless strains, how have you run down through ages in which large poems, systems, and religions have perished, firing the souls of poets, kissing the lips of children, smoothing the pillows of the dying, stirring the warrior to heroic rage, perfuming the chambers of solitary saints, and clasping into one the hearts and voices of thousands of assembled worshippers ”

“ I would rather have him yet a while in the company of the poets; in the indulgence of glorious hopes and beautiful dreams, forming to himself some type of the Heroic, which he will keep before his eyes as a standard when he goes into the world as man. ”

“ 'he who would write heroic poems, should make his whole life a heroic poem.'
So thought our Milton; ”

“ And so will the heroic spirit ever go on trying until it becomes raised to the desire of divine beauty itself, without similitude, figure, symbol, or kind, if it be possible, and what is more one knows that he will reach that height. ”

“ We see his whole nature revolt at baseness, ingratitude, cowardice, ferocity, all kinds of moral deformity; just as much as it was attracted and delighted by patriotism, courage, devotion, sacrifice, love carried to heroism, grace, and beauty. We perceive, in the poet's soul, a freshness and a moral vigor, that shine all the more brightly, contrasted with the misanthropical melancholy of the hero of his legend. ”

“ Let any one set his heart to do what is right and nothing else, and it will not be long ere his brow is stamped with all that goes to make up the heroic expression, with noble indignation, noble self-restraint, great hopes, great sorrows, perhaps even with the print of the martyr's crown of thorns. ”

“ Heroes are we, with wearied hearts and sore,
Whose flower is faded and whose locks are hoar,
Yet haste, light skiffs, where myrtle thickets smile
Love's panthers sleep 'mid roses, as of yore:
"It may be we shall touch the happy isle!"
ENVOY.
Sad eyes! the blue sea laughs, as heretofore.
Ah, singing birds your happy music pour!
Ah, poets, leave the sordid earth awhile;
Flit to these ancient gods we still adore:
"It may be we shall touch the happy isle!"
BALLADE OF LIFE.
"'Dead and gone,'—a sorry burden of the Ballad of Life." ”

“ The heroic inspiration is entirely wanting, if we fail to bear in mind that the characters do and suffer with superlative courage and fortitude, only because they willed to do and suffer, in all things, the will of the gods. ”

“ How could they excite in a poet those deep and genuine emotions of which true poetry is the expression, and which in other ages have been awakened only by great national triumphs and reverses, or by circumstances of absorbing personal interest, the crash of empires or of creeds, the throes of political and religious and moral convulsions in nations or in individuals, the fervours of religion, the raptures and the torments of love? ”

“ It was heroic!”
“Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius.” ”

“ With whom are we to sympathise? says the reader, who not unnaturally imagines that a hero should be heroic. Oh, thou, my reader, whose sympathies are in truth the great and only aim of my work, when you have called the dearest of your friends round you to your hospitable table, how many heroes are there sitting at the board? ”

“ Milton said: "He who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life an heroic poem." We are responsible for our thoughts, and unless we could command them, mental and moral excellence would be impossible. ”

“ And besides, what virtue is there in a tragedy which is not contained in an epic poem, where pride is humbled, virtue rewarded, and vice punished, and those more amply treated than the narrowness of the drama can admit? The shining quality of an epic hero, his magnanimity, his constancy, his patience, his piety, or whatever characteristical virtue his poet gives him, raises first our admiration; we are naturally prone to imitate what we admire, and frequent acts produce a habit. ”

“ Herein he proves that his love is truly heroic; because he proposes to himself as the chief aim, not corporeal beauty, but rather the grace of the spirit, and the inclination of the affections in which, rather than in the beauty of the body, that love that has in it the divine, is eternal. ”

“ The cheerfulness with which martyrs embraced pain and death did not proceed from want of feeling, but from the heroism of the highest love: they must previously, in struggles painful beyond expression, have obtained the victory over every earthly tie; and by the exhibition of these struggles, of these sufferings of our mortal nature, while the seraph soars on its flight to heaven, the poet may awaken in us the most fervent emotion. ”

“ How infinitely more subtle, varied, interesting, and psychologically true! The hero, too, is powerfully sketched, though throughout the section specially devoted to him one is conscious of the gigantic rather than the heroic. ”

“ It is, indeed, wonderful—but the power is that of sympathy and genius. The dramatic poet, whose heart breathes love to all living things, and whose overflowing tenderness diffuses itself over the beauty even of unliving nature, may yet paint with his creative hand the steeled heart of him who sits on a throne of blood—the lust of crime in a mind polluted with wickedness—the remorse of acts which could never pass in thought through his imagination as his own. ”

“ I will remark again, however, as a fact not unimportant to be understood, [255] that the different sphere constitutes the grand origin of such distinction; that the Hero can be Poet, Prophet, King, Priest or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into. I confess, I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men. The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. ”

“ Amid all the stern or disagreeable aspects of this prose tragedy, there are elements from which poetry may work its richest, fairest, and tenderest wreathings of sentiment, with the human heart to prompt and to respond to its melancholy images of devastated scenes and tortured affections. ”

“ Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch in us the vein of the poetic. We love to think of them, we long to try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also. ”

“ But that which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. ”

“ Borne down on the rush of Time's fitful blast.
Like the cloven tongues of fire.
[Pg 93] Wouldst thou fashion the song, O! Poet-heart,
For a mission high and free?
The drama of Life, in its every part,
Must a living poem be.
Wouldst thou speed the knight to the battle-field,
In a proven suit of mail?
On the world's highway, with Faith's broad shield,
The peril go forth to hail.
For the noble soul, there is noble strife,
And the sons of earth attain,
Through the wild turmoil and storm of Life,
To discipline, through pain. ”

“ Every masterful life calls across the world a cry of liberty to pent-up dreams, to the ache of faith in all of us, “Here thou art my brother—this is thy heart that I have lived.” A hero is immortalised because his life is every man’s larger self. So through the day-span of our years—a tale that is never told—we wander on, the infinite heart of each of us prisoned in blood and flesh and the cry of us everywhere, throughout all being, “Give me room!” ”

“ The tone of poetry, even when employed on the most tragic subjects, might waken in the hearer’s heart a chord of joy; for in such natural sorrow there was a healthful life, an energy which told of healing yet to come and the endless riches of love and hope. ”

“ But watchful Hero rais'd the torch on high,
The kind fore-runner of approaching joy:
He saw the promis'd star, how bright it shone!
And by its flame learn'd to improve his own.
But when the billows louder roar'd, he stood,
And, trembling, view'd the melancholy flood:
Then with these words his drooping spirits chears,
Resumes his courage, and expels his fears.
Love, like the sea, a boundless fury claims;
There rowling waters, here are rowling flames;
What means my throbbing breast? securely move
Thro' coldest waters, when all-fir'd with love.
Venus is kind ”

“ No gale around its coolness flings,
Yet sadly sigh the gloomy trees;
And hark! how the harp's unvisited strings
Sound sweet, as if swept by a whispering breeze!
'Tis done! the sun he has set in blood!
He will never set more to the brave;
Let us pour to the hero the dirge of death,
For to-morrow he hies to the grave.
THANATOS.
Oh! who would cherish life,
And cling unto this heavy clog of clay,
Love this rude world of strife,
Where glooms and tempests cloud the fairest day ”