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Updated: June 18, 2025
Had he held a pencil he would have painted the Virgin of Foligno; as a sculptor, he would have chiselled the Psyche of Canova; had he known the language in which sounds are written, he would have noted the aerial lament of the sea breeze sighing among the fibres of Italian pines, or the breathing of a sleeping girl who dreams of one she will not name; had he been a poet, he would have written the stanzas of Tasso's "Erminia," the moonlight talk of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," or Byron's portrait of Haidee.
Why he elected not to go on with it, I don't know. Possibly, because his own impulse was spent before Whitman's; possibly, because he did not wish to impose the darker melancholy of the latter stanzas upon the clear ecstasy of that last call. It lost something, of course, from the inadequacy of the piano transcription, for it was conceived and written orchestrally.
We select, as our special example, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the best known of our American poets. The great poet, whoever he may be, is always reverential. His stanzas are crowned with a sacred seriousness. He gives to life a "grand, true, harmonic interpretation." Longfellow was born on the 27th of February, 1807, at Portland, Maine.
"What do you think," he enquired, "of the sonnet?" "Monsignor, it is perfectly written, and, what is more, it is a charming composition. Allow me to return it to you with my thanks." "She has much talent. I wish to shew you ten stanzas of her composition, my dear abbe, but you must promise to be very discreet about it." "Your eminence may rely on me."
seems to be correctly described as "Oratio Gallfridi Chaucer"; and in "Chaucers A. B. C., Called La Priere de Notre Dame," a translation by him from a French original, we have a long address to the Blessed Virgin in twenty-three stanzas, each of which begins with one of the letters of the alphabet arranged in proper succession.
It is a grand, calm, dignified stream, keeping to its course as a respectable matron, and gliding down in placid loveliness, without weir or leap, fall or rapids, or break of any kind a fine, broad, almost unrippled sheet of water, with an even, steady, and grandly monotonous flow, like that of the stanzas of Tasso.
Each corse lay flat, lifeless and flat, And, by the holy rood! A man all light, a seraph-man, On every corse there stood." Coleridge's marginal gloss to these last stanzas is "The angelic spirits leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light." Once more from Christabel: "The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone, She nothing sees no sight but one!
Byron wrote also, in 1818, an "Ode on Venice," a regret for its decay, in spirit not unlike the succeeding Childe Harold stanzas which I do not here quote. Here too he planned Marino Faliero, talking it over with his guest, "Monk" Lewis. Another Venetian play of Byron's was The Two Foscari, and both prove that he attacked the old chronicles to some purpose and with all his brilliant thoroughness.
Even in such regular strophes as those of Keats's "Grecian Urn," who remembers that the rhyme scheme of the first stanza is unlike that of the following stanzas? Or that the second stanza of the "Ode to a Nightingale" runs on four sounds instead of five?
There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according to our modern notions of poetry; but they are like enough to the long, plaintive notes of the nightingale to say all that the poet has to say, again and again through all his stanzas.
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