human
Can you write a poem for me in the style of Various?
assistant
Sure, here's a poem in the style of Various:
  characterizes any purely personal expression of the creative
irregularly rhythmical or even unrhythmical,[10:A] just as the
exigencies of the emotion require, is the natural language of the
A very important phase of the subject will take in the connection
literature that he has never recognized as such. He will also be
classifications of the different kinds of poetry, such as epic,
Although I feel that the artificial verse forms hamper instead of
With theories of poetry being a product of the unconscious, as
Ecstasy, imagination, and the unconscious are all convertible and
conception, when ecstatically stated; I can think of no higher
literature of ecstasy than the imaginative utterance of great
intellectual conceptions or impassioned expression of the love of
On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both
But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism that is
The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact
understood generally as referring to any condition where man is
critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when
ecstatical, are therefore poetry.
personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It
All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed;
like the Corybantian revellers in their dances, who are not in
their right mind when they are composing their beautiful
strains, yet who, when falling under the power of music and
metre are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who
draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the
influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in possession of
their mind. And the soul of the lyric poets does the same, as
they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs
from the honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens
and dells of the Muses; they are like bees, winging their way
from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a
light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him
until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the
mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this
state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.
The expressions referring to being out of the mind and senses
must not be taken literally.
A remark of Socrates in the _Phaedrus_ should be well pondered by
admitted."
dialogues are full of poetry.
For my heart leaps within me fore than that of any Corybantian
reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I
observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I
have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought
that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my
soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought
of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me
to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure
the life which I am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit);
and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him
and fly as from the voice of the siren my fate would be like
that of others--he would transfix me, and I should grow old
sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not
to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and
busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I
hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only
person who ever made me ashamed, which you might think not to
be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same.
For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to
do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of
popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and
fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have
confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead,
and yet I know that I should be more sorry than glad, if he
were to die; so that I am at my wit's end.
The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his _Greek
A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of
The ecstasy of the wild and mad kind was seen only in the
early days of Hebrew prophecy, when wine and dance and music
and other external means were used for bringing about this
state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious
temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound
contemplation, was certainly the characteristic of the later
prophets. . . . Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the
other prophetic streams flow.
oppressed, the widow, the fatherless.
knowledge is that it may be and usually is superseded by later
De Quincey was no art-for-art's-sake man, and he recognized the
concentrated belong to the literature of ecstasy or poetry.
"Hebrew poetry is
Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
'Ecstasy affords
The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"
Aristotle was the first critic who placed little stress on the
For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of
Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one
hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic,
elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the
word "make" or "poet" to the name of the metre, and speak of
elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, _as if it
were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that
entitles them all indiscriminately to the name_.[42:A] Even
when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out
in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author;
and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the
metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the
other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even
if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all
metres, as Chaeremon did in his _Centaur_, which is a medley
composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under
the general term poet.
transferred into the prose of another tongue.
The first question the reader will now ask is: "Well, what then
between.
professed poets."
Emerson also said he heard the Germans considered the author of
_Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _Decameron_.
Heine spoke of _Don Quixote_ as a poem. Fredrick Schlegel called
One is from a work that is rich with poetry and written by one of
unpoetical in the first part:
Upon the forest side in Grasmere Vale
There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name.
An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
And in his Shepherd calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
And in the orchestra, spoke every eloquence, sang every joy,
wept every misery, that the human voice had ever expressed.
The melodies emerged from the symphonic depths, developing,
interrupting, superposing, mingling, melting into one another,
dissolving, disappearing to again appear. A more and more
restless poignant anxiety passed over all the instruments and
expressed a continual and ever vain effort to attain the
inaccessible. In the impetuosity of the chromatic progressions
there was the mad pursuit of a happiness that eluded every
grasp, although it shone ever so near, etc.
literature, for poetry is a quality of all the arts including
Golden lie the meadows; golden run the streams; red gold is on
the pine-stems. The sun is coming down to earth, and walks the
fields and the waters.
The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters
shout to him golden shouts. He comes and his heralds run
before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and the planes and
the beeches lucid green, and the pine stems redder gold;
leaving the brightest footprints upon thickly-weeded barks,
where the foxglove's last upper-bells incline, and the bramble
shoots wander amid moist rich herbage, etc.
If the sphere of poetry has thus been widened to include many
_Macbeth_, where Lady Macbeth is walking in her sleep. The entire
One may ask various questions of the critic who clings to the old
Really, every great literary man is a poet, for he is constantly
philosophical humorist from the ranks of Apollo's servants?
I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim
before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time,
sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating
along, talking and singing and laughing. . . . I'd see him
standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I
could go on sleeping; . . . and would always call me honey,
and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and
how good he always was.
Our definition allows us to include the author of the few lines
proportion even when writing in prose.
Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all that stood by
him; and he cried, "Cause every man to go out from me." And
there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known
to his brethren, etc.
All lovers of poetry cannot help being indebted to Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, who showed he knew what constitutes poetry when he
Now, aside from the fact that not all of the earliest emotional
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
Here is Quiller-Couch's prose rendering:
Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from
its summit might disclose some sign of human habitation--a
herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps. But he could see
nothing of the sort.
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.
And suppose we lost the battle? We have not lost everything.
We still have our unconquerable will, our plans for revenge,
our eternal hatred, and courage never to give in or surrender,
and above all never to be defeated.
Shakespeare drew his plays. Is there not poetry in the critical
included in a definition of poetry, but whether it is a humane,
You can find poetry in various scenes of the great body of prose
I give two examples. The first is from Swinburne's book on Blake:
To him the veil of outer things seemed always to tremble with
some breath behind it; seemed at times to be rent in sunder
with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and
air seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and
palpitate under the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and
weeds, stars and stones, spoke with articulate lips and gazed
with living eyes. Hands were stretched towards him from beyond
the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to
guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest
allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were
literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about
his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play
of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.
Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth consoled or
menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of
every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the
rank raiment of weeds, in the drifting down of thistles,
strange faces frowned and white hair fluttered; tempters and
allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of the dead,
crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the
fields and hills over which he gazed.
The second is from James Thomson's essay on Shelley:
The only true or inspired poetry is always from within, not
from without. The experience contained in it has been
spiritually transmuted from lead into gold. It is severely
logical, the most trivial of its adornments being subservient
to, and suggested by, the dominant idea; any departure from
whose dictates would be the "falsifying of a revelation." It
is unadulterated with worldly wisdom, deference to prevailing
opinions, mere talent or cleverness. Its anguish is untainted
by the gall of bitterness, its joy is never selfish, its
grossness is never obscene. It perceives always the profound
identity underlying all surface differences. It is a living
organism, not a dead aggregate, and its music is the
expression of the law of its growth; so that it could no more
be set to a different melody than could a rose-tree be
consummated with lilies or violets. It is most philosophic
when most enthusiastic, the clearest light of its wisdom being
shed from the keenest fire of its love. It is a synthesis not
arithmetical, but algebraical; that is to say, its particular
subjects are universal symbols, its predicates, universal
laws: hence it is infinitely suggestive. It is ever-fresh
wonder at the infinite mystery, ever-young faith in the
eternal soul. Whatever be its mood, we feel that it is not
self-possessed but God-possessed; whether the God came down
serene and stately as Jove, when, a swan, he wooed Leda; or
with overwhelming might insupportably burning, as when he
consumed Semele.
different emotions is really unaesthetic in a uniform pattern.
"As to the accents of words," says Bacon, in his _Advancement of
This passage is the first attack in English on metre.
dialogues, and criticisms to complement his list.
Tragedy often presents lyric poems greater than any other work of
Our great poets do not owe their greatness to the use of the
The following letter is poetry:
I pour out my thoughts to you, dearest, dearest, as if it were
right rather to think of doing myself that good and relief,
than of you who have to read all. But you spoil me into an
excess of liberty by your tenderness. Best in the world!
Oh--you help me to live--I am better and lighter since I have
drawn near to you even on this paper--already I am better and
lighter. And now I am going to dream of you . . . to meet you
on some mystical landing place . . . in order to be quite well
to-morrow. Oh--we are so selfish on this earth, that nothing
grieves us very long, let it be ever so grievous, unless we
are touched in _ourselves_ . . . in the apple of our eye . . .
in the quick of our heart . . . in _what_ you are and _where_
you are . . . my own dearest beloved! So you need not be
afraid for _me_. We all look to our own, as I to _you_; the
thunderbolts may strike the tops of the cedars, and, except in
the first part, none of us be moved. True it is of me--not of
you perhaps, certainly you are better than I in all things.
Best in the world you are--no one is like you. Can you read
what I have written? Do not love me less! Do you think that I
cannot feel you love me, through all this distance? If you
loved me less, I should know, without a word or sign. Because
It is remarkable how past usages in literature influence us. The
superfluous ornaments removed and the necessary parts turned into
bringing the term prose poetry into contempt.
Mirabeau. He also says it is impossible to refuse to see poetic
definition about rhythm or metre, and indeed Mill regarded as the
Michelet, or Newman, gives its musical value to every syllable."
But as Pater says--impassioned prose has become the special and
Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his
The Hawthorne passage is as follows:
Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).--. . . . Here
I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in
days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,--many that
have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the
same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for
thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it;
and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever
I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of
this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth
was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed;
and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been
despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently
for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did
not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at
all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And sometimes it
seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life
enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at
least, as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the
possibility of being. By and by, the world found me out in my
lonely chamber, and called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud
roar of acclamation, but rather with a still, small voice,--and
forth I went, but found nothing in the world that I thought
preferable to my old solitude till now. . . . And now I begin
to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this
lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the
viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape
into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been
covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become
callous by rude encounters with the multitude. . . . But
living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still
kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. . . .
I used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings,
and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!
. . . Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with
real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the
thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched.
That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are
beings of reality and inheritors of eternity. . . .
And the Emerson poem in prose is given herewith:
O poet! a new nobility is conferred in groves and pastures,
and not in castles or by the sword-blade any longer. The
conditions are hard, but equal. Thou shalt leave the world,
and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the
times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but
shalt take all from the muse. For the time of towns is tolled
from the world by funereal chimes, but in nature the universal
hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants,
and by growth of joy on joy. God wills also that thou abdicate
a manifold and duplex life, and that thou be content that
others speak for thee. Others shall be thy gentlemen, and
shall represent all courtesy and worldly life for thee; others
shall do the great and resounding actions also. Thou shalt lie
close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the
Capitol or the Exchange. The world is full of renunciations
and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a
fool and a churl for a long season. This is the screen and
sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and
thou shalt be known only to thine own, and they shall console
thee with tenderest love. And thou shalt not be able to
rehearse the names of thy friends in thy verse, for an old
shame before the holy ideal. And this is the reward; that the
ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual
world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not
troublesome to thy invulnerable essence. Thou shalt have the
sole land for thy park and manor, the sea for thy bath and
navigation, without tax and without envy; the woods and the
rivers thou shalt own, and thou shalt possess that wherein
others are only tenants and boarders. Thou true land-lord!
sea-lord! air-lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or
birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever
the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever
are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets
into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and
love,--there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and
though thou shouldst walk the world over, thou shalt not be
able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.
sympathetic introduction by William Dean Howells.
Prose discourse--I mean artistic prose--is, I may say, an
imitation of poetic discourse; for poetry as an art first came
upon the scene and was first to win approval. Then came
Cadmus, Pherecydes, Hecataeus and their followers, with prose
writing in which they imitated the poetic art, abandoning the
use of metre, but in other respects preserving the qualities
of poetry. Then subsequent writers took away, each in his
turn, something of these qualities, and brought prose down to
its present form, as from a sublime height. In the same way we
might say that comedy took its structure from tragedy, but
that it also has been degraded from the sublime height of
tragedy to its present "prose-like" style, as it is called.
The epic of _Gilgash_, the chief poem of the Babylonians, and the
Let us now examine the form of the poetry of the Bible.
W. Robertson Smith in an able article, "The Poetry of the Old
syllables in them almost at the will of the poet.
The earliest surviving Arabic poetry, the seven poems of the
MacDonnels' _Sanskrit Literature_ (P. 83):
Arise! the breath, the life again has reached us:
Darkness has gone away and light is coming.
She leaves a pathway for the sun to travel:
We have arrived where men prolong existence.
The _Rigvedas_ are fixed by some scholars at 1500 B.C.
Ancient her beauty
As the heart of man,
Yet ever waxing fairer,
Forever remaining young.
Mortals wither in time
As leaves in the frost of autumn;
But time only brightens the glow
And the bloom of her endless youth.
All men have loved her
But none shall touch with his lips
Even the hem of her garment.
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it
were the present . . .
Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities,
Along ancient trade-routes, across the world's waste spaces, its
caravans shall move;
And the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the ocean with
their lonely prows,
We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have
changed the course of time.
We shall listen to prophecies of forgotten seers.
Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly,
Who saw in their vision peaks so lofty
That never have they been reached
By the sons and daughters of men.
Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might
And the love and the beauty of women.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus was one of the few ancient critics who
Dionysius erred however in not emphasizing the importance of the
Something of that mental state exists in us to-day. We bedeck and
characteristics that we call Asiatic. We are familiar with the
Great Poets have always been those who believed that poetry
was by nature the worthiest vessel of the highest arguments of
which the soul of man is capable. Yet a poetic theory such as
this seems bound to include great prose, and not merely the
prose which can most easily be assimilated to the conditions
of poetry, such as Plato's _Republic_, or Milton's
_Areopagitica_, but the prose of the great novelists. Surely
the colloquial prose of Tchekov's _Cherry Orchard_ has as good
claim to be called poetry as _The Essay on Man_, _Tess of the
_Phedre_. Where are we to call a halt in the inevitable
progress by which the kinds of literary art merge into one? If
we insist that rhythm is essential to poetry, we are in danger
of confusing the accident with the essence, and of fastening
upon what will have to be in the last analysis a merely formal
difference. The difference in such must be substantial and
essential _aspects of Literature_.[122:A]
Poetry was supposed to appeal to the imagination, prose to the
Our definition of poetry throws much light on the subject of the
When a prose writer is purely didactic without any emotional or
Verses of trivial facts and ideas set forth with artifice are not
insufficiently fed, and frequently sees his children in unhappy
Yet poets who may find numerous and important subjects for the
Conventional morality only becomes poetry when colored by the
imagination or illustrated by an unusually pleasing ecstatic
The connection between art and ethics is closer than some critics
The moral ideas of an author have much to do with the literary
We also see that parts of Dante, Pope, and Shelley may be placed
ecstatically but unrhythmically expressed is poetry.
tatters, or telling a story, or uttering a complaint, in order to
Aristotle and many others were also absorbed as to the difference
everything but the names.
Whistler's _Ten o'Clock Lecture_.
In many respects the theory awakens sympathy in all lovers of
society's, and thus has a higher moral purport in view. Ibsen's
psychologist, and his work is by no means devoid of intellectual
portrayed. He levels literature to a primitive degree.
Croce's conclusions lead to strange anomalies. His view that
It does not follow, however, that because an author has certain
What sad figures the versifiers of unimportant conceits make when
We want the progressive poet, and not the eternal harper on the
commonplace.
distribution of wealth, will be the subject of our poetry.
An English clergyman, F. W. Robertson, in his two lectures on the
The Poetry of the coming age must come from the Working
Classes. In the upper ranks, Poetry, so far at least as it
represents their life, has long been worn out, sickly and
sentimental. Its manhood is effete. Feudal aristocracy with
its associations, the castle and the tournament, has passed
away. Its last healthy tones came from the harp of Scott.
Byron sang its funeral dirge. But tenderness, and heroism, and
endurance still want their voice, and it must come from the
classes whose observation is at first hand, and who speak
fresh from nature's heart. What has poetry to do with our
Working Classes? Men of work! We want our poetry from
you--from men who will dare to live a brave and true  life;----
literature and poetry of democracy.
hackneyed ethical maxim which every child knows and hears usually
Every one has conceived the function of poetry as being something
Let us take a hypothetical case. A man a few centuries ago was
sensitiveness.
It is probably vain to try to define different types of poetic or
religion and morality, were it only a criticism." In spite of the
anything new; nevertheless, he is a poet of a high order.
intellectual passages in _Wilhelm Meister_ that are superior as
literature to emotional scenes in _Faust_ as literature.
universal longing for a world more perfect, nearer to the heart's
A poet may be great even though he uses the old machinery of the
aesthetic level of poets who lived many centuries ago.
Some of our so-called modern free verse poets like Amy Lowell are
distinguish every literature, but these do not usually make one
In the make of the great masters the idea of political liberty
is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of heroes
wherever man and woman exist--but never takes any adherence or
welcome from the rest more than from poets. They are the voice
and exposition of liberty. They out of the ages are worthy the
grand idea--to them it is confided, and they must sustain it.
Nothing has precedence of it, and nothing can warp or degrade
Aristotle's best known contribution to literary criticism is his
Professor J. E. Spingarn's book, _Literary Criticism in the
Moreover, Milton, who had traveled in Italy, must have read these
Aristotle is the founder then of psychoanalytic interpretation of
unconscious.
I have fully stated in my _The Erotic Motive in Literature_ the
The first English poet who claimed to allow his unconscious self
unconscious. Thomson considers Wilkinson's belief in the divine
unconsciously incited the poet to utter his inner thought.
earliest poets. When they use patterns they are already becoming
There is nothing more amusing than to read the innumerable and
impression upon him.
One cannot accept Schopenhauer's views that the aim of art is to
Our views of poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view finds
Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective
We today may accept the definition of poetry given in the _Four
Discourses_[204:A] (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for though he also
Poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary
propositions, and adopts the deductions, with the result that
he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing
small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in
the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the
faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his
suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation
or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of
great things in the order of the world.
beneficial ecstasy?
Ibn Khaldun said:
Poetry is, of all the forms of discourses, that which the
Arabs regarded as the noblest; they also made it the
depository of their knowledge and their history, the testimony
which would attest their virtues and faults, the store-house
in which were found the greater part of their scientific views
and their maxims of wisdom. The poetic faculty was as much
deeply rooted in them as in all the other faculties they
possessed.
The Arabs, as we gather from _The Arabian Nights_, were a people
Ah for the throes of a heart sorely wounded!
Ah for the eyes that have smit me with madness!
Gently she moved in the calmness of beauty,
Moved as the bough to the light breeze of morning.
Dazzled my eyes as they gazed, till before me
All was a mist and confusion of figures.
Ne'er had I sought her, and ne'er had she sought me;
Fated the love, and the hour, and the meeting.
There I beheld her as she and her damsels
Paced 'twixt the temple and outer enclosure;
Damsels the fairest, the loveliest, the gentlest,
Passing like slow-wending heifers at evening;
Ever surrounding with courtly observance
Her whom they honor, the peerless of women.
Then to a handmaid, the youngest, she whispered,
"Omar is near: let us mar his devotions.
Cross on his path that he needs may observe us;
Give him a signal, my sister, demurely."
"Signals I gave, but he marked not or heeded,"
Answered the damsel, and hasted to meet me.
Ah for that night by the vale of the sand-hills!
Ah for the dawn when in silence we parted!
He who the morn may awake to her kisses
Drinks from the cup of the blessed in heaven.
Ah! where have they made my dwelling? Far, how far, from her, the
Since they drove me lone and parted to the sad sea-shore of Aden.
lover,
Nought is left but sad remembrance, and a share of aching sorrow.
love?
I may forget all else, but never shall I forget her as she stood,
anguish;
Then she turned her to Thoreyya, to her sister, sadly weeping;
Coursed the tears down cheek and bosom, till her passion found an
"Tell him, sister, tell him; yet be not as one that chides or
murmurs,
Why so long thy distant tarrying on the unlovely shores of Yemen?
thee?
Tell me what the price they paid thee, that from Mecca bought thy
I give three other examples of Arabic love poetry by different
Admire that passionate lover! he recalls to mind the well
protected park and sighs aloud; he hears the call of love and
stops bewildered. The nightingales awaken the trouble of his
heart, and his pains, now redoubled, drive all prudence from
his mind. An ardent passion excites his complaints; sadness
moves him to tears; his old affections awake, but these were
never dormant. His friends say that his fortitude has failed;
but the very mountain of Yalamlan would groan, or sink
oppressed, under such a weight of love. Think not that
compulsion will lead him to forget her; willingly he accepted
the burden of love; how then could he cast it off against his
will?
--O Otba, faultless in thy charms! be indulgent, be kind, for
thy lover's sickness has reached its height. By thee the
willow of the hill was taught to wave its branches with grace,
when thy form, robed in beauty, first appeared before it. Thou
hast lent thy tender glances to the gazelles of the desert,
and therefore the fairest object to be seen is the eye of the
antelope. Sick with the pains of love, bereft of sleep and
confounded, I should never have outlived my nights, unless
revived by the appearance of thy favor, deceitful as it was.
These four shall witness the sincerity of my attachment:
tears, melancholy, a mind deranged, and care, my constant
visitor; could Yazbul feel this last; it would become like
as--Suha. Some reproach me for loving thee, but I am not to be
reclaimed; others bid me forbear, but I heed them not. They
tell thee that I desire thee for thy beauty; how very strange!
and where is the beauty which is not an object of desire? For
thee I am the most loving of lovers; none, I know, are like me
(_in sincerity_) or like thee in beauty.
The next poem represents one of the many outbursts of Antar:
O bird of the tamarisk! thou hast rendered my sorrows more
poignant, thou hast redoubled my griefs. O bird of the
tamarisk! if thou invokest an absent friend for whom thou art
mourning, even then, O bird, is thy affliction like the
distress I also feel? Augment my sorrows and my lamentations;
aid me to weep till thou seest wonders from the discharge of
my eyelids. Weep, too, from the excesses that I endure. Fear
not--only guard the trees from the breath of my burning sighs.
Quit me not till I die of love, the victim of passion of
absence, and separation. Fly, perhaps in the Hijaz thou mayest
see some one riding from Aalij to Nomani, wandering with a
damsel, she traversing wilds, and drowned in tears, anxious
for her native land. May God inspire thee, O dove! when thou
truly sees her loaded camels. Announce my death. Say, thou
hast left him stretched on the earth, and that his tears are
exhausted, but that he weeps in blood. Should the breeze ask
thee whence thou art, say, he is deprived of his heart and
stupefied; he is in a strange land, weeping for our departure,
for the God of heaven has struck him with affliction on
account of his beloved; he is lying down like a tender bird,
that vultures and eagles have bereft of its young, that
grieves in unceasing plaints whilst its offspring are
scattered over the plain and the desert!
This poem by an unknown author is tenderness unexcelled:
And whether, at dawn still there, mine eyelids a burthen bore of
tears falling one by one, as pearls from a broken string.
underestimated rather than exaggerated.
Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or
The Arabic note of ecstasy is found even in the poems of Goethe,
The Arabian love poems and elegies are proofs that poetry was
satisfaction with Aryan poetry, have not even translated or paid
To-day my longing thoughts recall thee here;
The landscape glitters, and the sky is clear.
So feebly breathes the gentle zephyr's gale,
In pity of my grief it seems to fail.
The silvery fountains laugh, as from a girl's
Fair throat a broken necklace sheds its pearls.
Oh, 'tis a day like those of our sweet prime,
When, stealing pleasure from indulgent Time,
We played midst flowers of eye-bewitching hue,
That bent their heads beneath the drops of dew.
Alas, they see me now bereaved of sleep;
They share my passion and with me they weep.
Here in her sunny haunt the rose blooms bright,
Adding new lustre to Aurora's light;
And waked by morning beams, yet languid still,
The rival lotus doth his perfume spill.
All stirs in me the memory of that fire
Which in my tortured breast will ne'er expire.
Had death come ere we parted, it had been
The best of all days in the world, I ween;
And this poor heart, where thou art every thing,
Would not be fluttering now on passion's wing.
Ah, might the zephyr waft me tenderly,
Worn out with anguish as I am, to thee!
O treasure mine, if lover e'er possessed
A treasure! O thou dearest, queenliest!
Once, once, we paid the debt of love complete
And ran an equal race with eager feet.
How true, how blameless was the love I bore,
Thou hast forgotten; but I still adore!
contemporaries.
To name even the most important of grammarians, anthologists,
philologists, critics of Arabia, is to call a long list. Even
century), one of the sections of which deal with poetry.
Ibn Khaldun, the historian, and a contemporary of Chaucer in the
thirteenth century, devoted a number of chapters to poetry in the
One of the conditions imposed in the use of this art (of
ornament) is that the embellishments appear in the piece quite
naturally, without the author's labor in searching for them
and without his being anxious about the effect that they
should produce. If they present themselves naturally, there is
nothing to object to them, for not being purposely introduced,
they save the subject the fault of lapsing into barbarism; but
when one imposes upon himself the task of painfully seeking
these embellishments, he is led to neglect the principles
which rule the combination of words, which are the foundation
of the discourse; this injures the principles of clearness of
expression and causes the distinctness and precision which
ought to characterize the discourse, to disappear; nothing
then remains but the embellishments. . . . Another condition
which should be observed in regard to the science of ornaments
is to make a rare use of it; that the poet apply it to two or
three verses of a poem; that will suffice to give elegance
and luster to the entire piece. The too frequent use of
embellishments is a fault, as Ibn Rashiq and others have
said. . . . All that we pointed out shows that the artificial
discourse (or style), when one writes it laboriously and as a
task, is inferior in merit to the natural discourse, for one
neglects thereby too many fundamental principles of the art of
speaking well. I leave it to good taste to judge thereof.
Nicholson's _Studies in Islamic Poetry_, recently published.
substance, then oratory is poetry. A plea for adherence to the
I must admit that a beautiful poem has always given me a pure
gratification; whilst the reading of the best discourse,
whether of a Roman orator or of a modern parliamentary speaker
or of a preacher, has always been mingled with an unpleasant
feeling of disapprobation, of a treacherous art, which means
to move me in important matters like machines to a judgment
that must lose all weight for them on quiet reflection.
Readiness and accuracy in speaking (which taken together
constitute rhetoric) belong to beautiful art; but the art of
the orator, the art of availing one's self of the weaknesses
of men for one's own design (whether these be well meant or
even actually good, does not matter) is worthy of no respect.
delineation of it:
It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of the faun
lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle
wariness of half tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped
like the long-bow, was once a big round satyr's laugh, that
flung up the brows like a fortress lifted by gunpowder. The
laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of the
smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental
richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one
of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full field and
having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without any
fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not attract
it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and
wherever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected,
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic,
fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them self-deceived or
hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into
vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
shortsightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at
variance with their professions, and violate the unwritten but
perceptible laws binding them in consideration one to another;
whenever they offend sound reason, fair justice; are false in
humility or mined with conceit, individually or in the
bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast
an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery
laughter. That is the Comic Spirit.
coarseness and insult, and abounding in ideas. Satire is not mere
It is not because the satires (of Pope) were true pictures or
caricatures of any living person in particular, but because
they were true pictures of general types of human weakness
which have always existed, which exist to-day and which will
exist to-morrow. (_Life and Literature_, p. 286.)
For many centuries also, that alone was considered imaginative
portions. Yet who can doubt that the greatness of Milton is more
apparent when he talks of his blindness than when he gives us the
affectation.
The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old
oaks which the late hurricane has scattered upon me. I am
stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie
prostrate on the earth. . . . I am alone. I have none to meet
my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive
myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse
wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world. . . .
I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded
me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as
posterity are in the place of ancestors.
What does it avail me that at banquets my health is pledged in
the choicest wines and drunk from golden goblets, when I,
myself, severed from all that makes life pleasant may only
wet my lips with an insipid emotion? What does it avail me
that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my marble bust with
laurel wreaths, if meanwhile the shriveled fingers of an aged
nurse press a blister of Spanish flies behind the ears of my
actual body. What does it avail me that all the roses of
Shiraz so tenderly glow and bloom for me? Alas! Shiraz is two
thousand miles away from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the
dreary solitude of my sick-room, I have nothing to smell,
unless it be the perfume of warmed napkins.
Call her to mind--think of her--what goodness there was in
her: it showed in every line of her face! . . . O! couldn't
you see what was best for you, but you must bring a curse upon
me, and agony and death upon her, by doing that cruel deed!
. . . Eustacia, didn't any tender thought of your own mother
lead you to think of being gentle to mine at such a time of
weariness? Did not one grain of pity _enter_ your heart as she
turned away?
If you are awakened by the beauty and profundity of the following
And meantime those old savage sympathies with savage nature
that spring from the deepest sources of our being . . . would
seem destined to sublime at last into forms of cosmical
emotion expanding and responding to infinitude.
Have you never thought about those immemorial feelings? Have
you never, when looking at some great burning, found yourself
exulting without remorse in the triumph and glory of
fire?--never unconsciously coveted the crumbling, splitting,
iron-wrenching, granite-cracking force of its imponderable
touch?--never delighted in the furious and terrible splendor
of its phantasmagories,--the ravening and bickering of its
dragons,--the monstrosity of its archings,--the ghostly
soaring and flapping of its spires? Have you never, with a
hill-wind pealing in your ears, longed to ride that wind like
a ghost,--to scream around the peaks with it,--to sweep the
face of the world with it? Or, watching the lifting, the
gathering, the muttering rush and thunder-burst of breakers,
have you felt no impulse kindered to the giant motion,--no
longing to leap with that wild tossing, and to join in that
mighty shout?
appreciated by people who seek poetry.
unwarranted asceticism in poetry calculated to raise its tone.
And then there is the ecstasy that revolves around a profound
discoveries. For reason must go hand in hand with ecstasy.