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Evelyn's voice filled with the beauty of the melody, and she sang the phrase which closes the stanza a phrase which dances like a puff of wind in an evening bough so tenderly, so lovingly, that acute tears trembled under the eyelids. And all her soul was in her voice when she sang the phrase of passionate faith which the lonely, disheartened woman sings, looking up from the desert rock.
A poem, a genuine poem, assumes its form by an inward necessity. "Paradise Lost," conceived in Milton's brain, could not utter itself in any other mode than the unrhymed harmonies that have given to our language a new music. It could not have been written in the Spenserian stanza. What would the "Fairy Queen" be in blank verse?
Invaluable, to a "man of genius" mounted on his hobby! One's "stanza" can be polished at this rate. In return for these Russian sons of Anak, Friedrich Wilhelm grudged not to send German smiths, millwrights, drill-sergeants, cannoneers, engineers; having plenty of them.
Sometimes these two perfections of "form" and "significance" are miraculously wedded, stanza after stanza, and we have our "Ode to a Nightingale," or "Ode to Autumn" as the result. Yet more often lovers of poetry must content themselves, not with such "dictates of nature" as these poems, but with approximations.
I must have one; you cannot say Nay; O mother, a Hoop!" Another stanza shows the practical usefulness of the hoop: "Pray, hear me, dear mother, what I have been taught: Nine men and nine women o'erset in a boat; The men were all drowned, but the women did float, And by help of their hoops they all safely got out."
Often the most valuable lessons come from failures. Robert Browning, the poet, speaks again and again of the noble uses of failure. Let me quote one stanza from one of his greatest poems, "Rabbi Ben Ezra": "Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go! Be our joys three-parts pain!
In the next stanza, the poet's oft-expressed belief in the wholesome, antiseptic power of pessimism is reiterated, together with a hint, that when we have once and for all put God in His grave, some better way of bearing life's burden will be found, because the new way will be based upon hard fact.
Literature does not end with knowledge of forms, with inventories of books and authors, with finding the key of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down to the staccato of the nineteenth, or all the rest of the technicalities of scholarship. Do not think I contemn these.
The story begins directly, and many necessary facts are revealed in the first stanza, in a manner so simple that for the moment we forget that this apparent simplicity is artistic excellence. The Nun's Priest's Tale is a model of attack. A poure wydwe, somdel stope in age, Was whilom dwellynge in a narwe cottage, Beside a grove, stondynge in a dale.
This time the interrupter roared out a stanza or two of a wretched song: "Will no one tell me where they're gone, My bursting heart with grief is torn, I wish I never had been born, I've lost, I've lost my vife." A hundred or more voices roared with laughter. The devil of blasphemy was growing bolder.
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