Tone poem

“ Here again, the structure is not mechanical or arbitrary: each verse is measured to the turn of the thought; and the formal unity of the whole poem corresponds to the unity of mood or idea that the poem is framed to express.
THE WORD-ELEMENT IN POETRY
The poet's medium, or means of expression, is words. The painter works with color, the sculptor with form, the musician with tone. Color and form and tone are pleasurable in themselves, as sensations; they become beautiful and significant by force of what they may be made to express. So words in themselves also have a sensuous value. ”

“ Lyrical has been here held essentially to imply that each Poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation. In accordance with this, narrative, descriptive, and didactic poems,—unless accompanied by rapidity of movement, brevity, and the colouring of human passion,—have been excluded. Humourous poetry, except in the very unfrequent instances where a truly poetical tone pervades the whole, with what is strictly personal, occasional, and religious, has been considered foreign to the idea of the book. ”

“ The rhythm, rhyme, melody, harmony are all an embodiment in sound, as distinguished from word, of what can be so embodied—the feeling of the poem, which goes before, and prepares the way for the following thought—tunes the heart into a receptive harmony. ”

“ A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting poetry, repeating every verse ever conned for love of thought or sound. This is singing of a kind. Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may be sweeter. The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by song. And the inner meaning and sense of a poem becomes one’s own on the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the hidden yearnings of one’s own being. ”

“ Meanwhile the poet’s rich, resonant voice filled the studio with an agreeable and rambling monotone:
“Verse is a vehicle for expression; expression is a vehicle for verse; sound, in itself, is so subtly saturated with meaning that it requires nothing of added logic for its vindication. Sound, therefore, is sense, modified by the mysterious portent of tone. Thank you for understanding, thank you for a thought—very, very precious, a thought beautiful.” ”

“ As the order of the universe is shot through with a living pulse, so emotion, too, if sustained, tends to express itself in rhythm. The emotional stimulus of the perception of beauty, or the excitement attending insight into the deeper truth of life, quickens the heart-throb; this heightened activity overflows to expression in words which reproduce the measured beat of the impetus out of which they spring. And so a poem comes to birth. In its most primitive forms, some scholars tell us, poetry is but the voice accompaniment to the rhythms of bodily movement in work and play. ”

“ Such are the verses 'In Memory of Barry Cornwall,' 'Inferiæ,' 'A Ballad of François Villon,' 'Song,' 'Choriambics,' 'At Parting,' and the 'Dedication.' But even in these the old complaint has to be made of want of artistic self-restraint, want of the sense of perfect parts in a perfect whole. There is scarcely a poem in the book from which some lovely or splendid snatch of song cannot be taken, but the nucleus inspiration is so often lost in a side-play of colour, scent, and sound. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Some graceful or touching anecdote or situation catches her attention, and its poetry is developed in a strain of mourning melody, and a vein of gentle moralizing. I always wish, in reading my favourite poets, to know what first suggested my favourite poems. Few things would be more interesting than to know under what circumstances they were composed,—how much of individual sentiment there was in each, or how, on some incident seemingly even opposed, they had contrived to ingraft their own associations. What a history of the heart would such annals reveal! Every poem is in itself an impulse. ”

“ Who but a mighty poet, one seeing with ‘the vision and the faculty divine’—what, but a transfusing, all-conquering imagination—would have dared the attempt to compose another poem on the same subject, or to carry this to a greater hight of sublimity, by melting it down anew, so to speak, and pouring it out into a vaster, more glorious mold? ”

“ The good poem is that in which all these effects are properly used to convey the underlying emotions of its author, and that which welds all these emotions into a work of art by the use of dominant motif, subordinate themes proportionate treatment, repetition, variation,—what in music is called development, reversal of roles, and return In short, the good poem fixes a free emotion, or a free range of emotions, into an inevitable and artistic whole. ”

“ And at the same time, when we have said all this, we read the poem and we can forgive all or nearly all—the spirit is so high, the passion is so fierce and glowing, the poetry that bursts out, stanza after stanza, contrives to involve even these dolorous mistakes in such a glamour, that we can only admire the genius that could contend against such visionary errors. ”

“ Poetic form rouses the whole being to sympathetic action by its rhythm; it delights the ear by its melodious tone; the logic of its coherent harmonic structure satisfies the mind; its word-images stimulate the imagination by their power of evocation. So poetry adds to fact its intellectual worth and all the emotional value inhering in it. ”

“ It is not often that we get so veracious an account of the making of a poem, so clear a conception of the blending of sound-motives, color-motives, story-stuff, drama-stuff, personal emotion, into a single whole. ”

“ He chooses an appropriate stanza for his poem, discovers an unguessed power in some common measure, makes the words hurry or deliberately holds them back, varying the tempo with the spirit of the words, gives the pattern an unusual twist when the idea is unusual, startles or soothes by the sound as well as by the intellectual content of his lines—and accomplishes all these metrical nuances, not with the whip-snapping of the ring-master, but with the consummate art that conceals art. ”

“ The brief lyric, above all other kinds of poetry, should be finished in form and expression. The imperfections of diction that might go unchallenged in a longer poem are inexcusable in a lyric. Delicacy of thought and intensity of feeling constitute its breath of life, and should mold for themselves a beauteous form. What is commonplace, harsh, or unmusical in expression should be avoided, unless such diction is wedded to the thought. Concrete and suggestive words are to be used rather than abstract and vague expressions. There is always a distinct gain when the poem evokes pleasing pictures. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Of this he said, in his “Essay on Lyric Poetry,” prefixed to the poem—“For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which laid me under great difficulties. But difficulties overcome give grace and pleasure. Nor can I account for the pleasure of rhyme in general (of which the moderns are too fond) but from this truth.” Yet the moderns surely deserve not much censure for their fondness of what, by their own confession, affords pleasure, and abounds in harmony. ”

“ Free as thine shall be my song;
As thy music, short, or long.
Poets, wild as thee, were born,
Pleasing best when unconfined,
When to please is least designed,
Soothing but their cares to rest;
Cares do still their thoughts molest,
And still th' unhappy poet's breast,
Like thine, when best he sings, is placed against a thorn.
She begins, let all be still!
Muse, thy promise now fulfil!
Sweet, oh! sweet, still sweeter yet!
Can thy words such accents fit?
Canst thou syllables refine,
Melt a sense that shall retain
Still some spirit of the brain,
Till with sounds like these it join? ”

“ The smiles and manifold expressions that chase one another across her lovely features, like the subtly-interwoven melodies in a symphonic poem, are the visible signs of thoughts and emotions which he has never experienced, and therefore cannot understand. ”

“ Rhyme, that exquisite echo which in the Muse’s hollow hill creates and answers its own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man’s utterance to the speech of gods ”

“ Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crystal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that allows almost the pure architecture of thought to become visible to the mental eye. Substance is much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, instead of a few drops of soap and water. ”

“ His scornful lips upon the instant sing,
⁠And all his pulses leap with ecstasies.
'Tis love the poet wants; he cannot live
Without caressing and without caress,
⁠Which all to charity his fellows give;
But I will wrap his soul in tenderness,
⁠And straightway from his lips will burst a song
⁠All loving hearts shall echo and prolong.
POET.
O Earth, and Sky, and Flowers, and Streams agushing,
⁠God made ye beautiful to make us blest:
O bright-winged Songsters through the blue air rushing ”

“ Lyric poetry is the fitting of rhythmic, melodious, colored words to the emotion within, to the point where the very form itself becomes the meaning, and the essence and mystery of the song are in the singing. Beauty is harmony materialized; it is emotion ordered and made visible, audible, tangible. If in the arts of form we seek further a standard of truth, their truth is not found in their relation to any external verity, but is determined by their correspondence with inner experience. ”

“ The tone of the romance is monotonous, and we dare not affirm that this song, receiving the honors of written notation, could satisfy the dilettante and the melodrama. But its charm, or, if you will, its enchanting grace, consists in the modulations of the voice in singing, as it were to cast out certain notes, to blend them, to balance them, so to say, very softly, in raising or lowering the tone, in swelling it or allowing it to die. It is thus that the romance, composed of a number of notes strongly bound, presents the great difficulties of expression, and the purity of execution. ”

“ Lyric poetry proves abortive, and likewise the epic poem.3227 Nothing sprouts on these distant fields, remote and sublime, where speech unites with music and painting. Never do we hear the involuntary scream of intense torment, the lonely confession of a distraught soul,3228 pouring out his heart to relieve himself. ”

“ Passion-Tone.In dealing with this element of dramatic effect a convenient technical term is Tone. The deep insight of metaphorical word-coining has given universal sanction to the expression of emotional differences by analogies of music: our emotional nature is exalted with mirth and depressed 251with sorrow, we speak of a chord of sympathy, a strain of triumph, a note of despair; we are in a serious mood, or pitch our appeal in a higher key. ”

“ The colour of the picture and the music of the poem belong to the manner of the artist, and appeal first to our affections, but the pleasure, or even exaltation of soul, we derive from them is due not to any virtue in themselves so much as to their own spiritual significance and suggestiveness. ”

“ In the larger fields of epic and drama, the poet turns more directly to ourselves: he bids us approach, he confers with us, he interprets for our hearing some great truth of humanity, or some wise and searching judgment of life. But the lyric poet stands apart, careless of our presence, oblivious of our attention, pouring out his heart in a transport of purely personal joy or sorrow, singing because he must, and not because there are any to listen. ”

“ They evince refinement of thought and sentiment, richness and warmth of fancy, and singular delicacy and strength in the use of language. Perhaps the finest characteristic of their diction is the feeling they display of the harmony of sound and color, in the expression of thought and emotion. The music of the verse corresponds to the imagery which flushes through it, and thus the figures which the poet’s prolific fancy conjures up, are all endowed with life and motion—or rather seem to make the harmony in which they move. ”

“ They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows, and the honey-flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden [Pg 121] with the sweetness of melody; and arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth. For a Poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged, and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him. ”