belonging to the most curiously discordant strata of thought were jumbled together. The following sentences will illustrate this: "His first business, on making an income, was to extricate his family from the difficulties in which it had been lately enwrapped, and to restore happiness and sunshine to those sweet and well-beloved faces on which he had not seen the soft and fascinating beams of a simper for many a grim-visaged year." "It was all along the case, and it is so up to this time with the Lieutenant Governors, to give seats to non-professional men (who are or were as if cocks of the roost, or in other words, Natives of high social status) in the Council." "He then came in his chamber to take his wonted tiffin, and felt a slight headache, which gradually aggravated and became so uncontrollable that he felt like a toad under a harrow."1 It is one of the privileges of humor or of satire to lower the key intentionally, in some word or passage, thus by the connotation furnished by a different association infusing a passing shade of emotion - ridicule or contempt — into the idea conveyed. This is one of the refinements of literature, pleasing according to the good taste with which it is employed. 66 EXAMPLE. - In the following sentence the writer's contempt is conveyed simply by choosing words out of a more rudimentary and sordid sphere of ideas than that in which the account would naturally move: George III., who took a deep personal interest in the war, which, consciously or unconsciously, he felt to be the test of his schemes and the trial of his power, set his agents running over Europe to buy soldiers from anybody who had men to sell."2 This matter has already been discussed to some extent under the Key of Words; see above, p. 104. 1 Life of Onookool Chunder Mookerjee. 2 HENRY CABOT LODGE, in Scribner's Magazine, April, 1898, p. 387. CHAPTER VI. POETIC DICTION AND ITS INTERACTIONS WITH PROSE. In our discussion of prose diction we have had in mind merely a form of expression. Its antithesis, then, as confined correspondingly to form of expression, is not poetry, but verse. Poetry is more than an antithesis to prose; it includes not only form but material, mood, and thought. To this comprehensive term poetry it is hard to get an exact antithesis; the nearest, perhaps, is matter-of-fact, that is, practical knowledge or instruction, as distinguished from thought idealized by fancy and subjective feeling. Between prose and poetry, then, there is a tract of common ground, left over after verse has taken up as much of the antithesis as it can. On this tract there is tendency to incursion from both sides: prose occupying it in greater or less degree as its occasion becomes more like that of poetry; poetry occupying it in the peculiarities of word and phrase by which both it and prose are vitalized. The result is, that while in the two kinds of discourse the bulk of usage remains identical, any access of poetic feeling in either shows itself in those ways of expression which we name distinctively poetic diction.1 1 "Prose is distinct from Poetry as the offspring is distinct from the mother. Their nature is one, but their functions apart. Both Poetry and Prose are children of 'Music.' Both retain the virtue of their origin, and share in the family patrimony. By the detachment of Prose, Poetry has gained increased elevation through limitation to her highest and truest province. Poetry has retained, not all the Music, but only its mightiest department, the Music of the heart. The mind also has its Music, and that branch has fallen to the lot of Prose. So the music of Prose is that which chimes with Reason, the music of Poetry that which harmonizes with hope and fear, with love and aversion, with aspiration and awe. Yet Poetry and Poetic diction is in part dictated by, or rather blends artistically with, the exactions of poetic metre, which latter subject will be discussed in the next chapter. Its principle, however, is more fundamental than this: it goes down to the mood, the feeling, that underlies expression, and that makes diction and metre alike its medium of utterance. What Poetic Diction is. The motive of poetic diction is reducible to a single principle: spiritual exaltation. As poetry is the language of emotion and imagination, its verbal peculiarities answer to the spontaneous endeavor to make utterance more effective, in impressiveness or picturesqueness. In a word, poetic diction is heightened language, the result in words of the inspiration that controls the poet's mind. Or to express it according to the more scientific conception required by a text-book of rhetoric, it is language so employed and ordered as to connote fervid feeling and imaginative beauty.1 This elevated diction interacts with the diction of prose; that is to say, when prose has an emotional or imaginative occasion it takes on very much the same peculiarities of expression, but with a difference, due to its different predominance of motive. In prose the motive is practical and didactic, with spiritual exaltation as the helper.2 In poetry the motive is fervid and ideal, with matter-of-fact as the helper. Naturally, then, in poetry itself the poetic diction is freer and bolder, has more the abandon of existing for its own sake; while in any kind of prose, however poetic, the diction Prose are not estranged, they are still akin, and neither is quite shut out from the heritage of the other. Poetry abhors unreason, and Prose cherishes right feeling." EARLE, English Prose, p. 330. 1 A poet's sense of the office of poetic diction is indicated in this couplet from Tennyson's poem, The Wreck : "The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr'd, 2 See this illustrated above, p. 111. must always be subdued enough to allow the practical motive to show through. I. POETIC TRAITS IN POETRY AND IN PROSE. In recounting these traits, we follow the stages of divergence from the language of common life, beginning with the characteristics least removed from didactic prose. I. Tendency to Brevity or Concentration. In poetry and prose alike, poetry only slightly predominating, the first impulse of heightened feeling is to hasten to the point of the idea, with as little impediment as possible. In order to this, the central attack is made upon the symbolic words,' with the object of making these as light, as rapid, as little lengthy,2 as they will bear, so that more distinction may be left for the words of capital significance. Thus in the end this first impulse has to do with movement; the vigor of its feeling infuses vigor into. the sequence of words. 1. Omission of Symbolics. When articles, relatives, and conjunctions can be spared they are freely omitted. Such words, from their subordinate office, are necessarily unemphatic, and if used with scrupulous fulness tend to drag the movement. - 1 For the symbolic element of the language, see above, p. 117.- This means of condensation is defined and illustrated below, p. 295. 2 Here a distinction must be made. Lengthiness in expression is not synonymous with length; nor does poetry shun long words or long constructions in themselves. Take, for instance, this line from Shakespeare, "The multitudinous seas incarnadine," and you feel no lack of poetic thrust in the long rolling words; they help both metre and picture. Take, on the other hand, the word "indubitably," and you feel that its very movement is prosaic; it would be hard to fit into a really poetic passage. The relation it denotes is not important enough to require so many syllables for expression; it uses up vocal force for nothing. EXAMPLES.1 I. Omission of article: "When day was gone"; "Some injury done to sickle, flail, or scythe"; "Not fearing toil nor length of weary days.". -2. Omission of relative: "Even if I could speak of things thou canst not know of"; "Exceeding was the love he bare to him.". 3. Omission of conjunction: "But soon as Luke could stand." The omission of the relative is less frequent in Wordsworth than in some others; nor does he make any omitted or condensed construction violent. Compare with him some passages from Browning, with whom the omission of the relative is so constant as to be a mannerism: "You have the sunrise now, joins truth to truth, Shoots life and substance into death and void," where the subject-relative is omitted; "Whence need to bravely disbelieve report Through increased faith in thing reports belie,” where the omission of articles and object-relative gives a decided impression of forced concentration. This shows itself most 2. Abbreviation and Condensation. strikingly, perhaps, in the termination -ly of the adverb, which is so frequent in poetry as to be almost the rule. But in many other words also, poetry chooses shorter forms both by discarding terminations and by squeezing out interior syllables. Such abbreviation, being so generally necessitated by metrical exigencies, sounds affected and trifling in prose. EXAMPLES. 1. From Michael: "The hills which he so oft had climbed "; "When Michael, telling o'er his years"; " Ere yet the boy had put on boy's attire"; "Though naught was left undone"; "'T were better to be dumb than to talk thus." 2. From the general poetic vocabulary: scarce for scarcely; list for listen; marge for margin; vale for valley; mount for mountain; e'er and ne'er for ever and never; aye for ever in the sense of always; save for except. The relation of such words to prose is defined above, p. 110. 1 In order more clearly to ascertain the natural stages of poetic diction I have studied Wordsworth's poem Michael, a poem standing in style and subject at only a moderate remove from prose; and it is by citations from this work that the first two main traits above given are exemplified. |