A Study of Poetry Part 16

"_Milk-Woman_. What song was it, I pray? Was it 'Come, shepherds, deck your heads'? or, 'As at noon Dulcina rested'? or, 'Phillida flouts me'?

or, 'Chevy Chase'? or, 'Johnny Armstrong'? or, 'Troy Town'?"

ISAAC WALTON, _The Complete Angler_

We have already considered, at the beginning of the previous chapter, the general relations.h.i.+p of the three chief types of poetry. Lyric, epic and drama, i.e. song, story and play, have obviously different functions to perform. They may indeed deal with a common fund of material. A given event, say the settlement of Virginia, or the episode of Pocahontas, provides situations and emotions which may take either lyric or narrative or dramatic shape. The mental habits and technical experience of the poet, or the prevalent literary fas.h.i.+ons of his day, may determine which general type of poetry he will employ. There were born lyrists, like Greene in the Elizabethan period, who wrote plays because the public demanded drama, and there have been natural dramatists who were compelled, in a period when the theatre fell into disrepute, to give their material a narrative form.

But we must also take into account the dominant mood or quality of certain poetic minds. Many pa.s.sages in narrative and dramatic verse, for instance, while fulfilling their primary function of telling a story or throwing characters into action, are colored by what we have called the lyric quality, by that pa.s.sionate, personal feeling whose natural mode of expression is in song. In Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_, for instance, or Victor Hugo's _Hernani_, there are superb pieces of lyric declamation, in which we feel that Marlowe and Hugo themselves--not the imaginary Tamburlaine and Hernani--are chanting the desires of their own hearts. Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustum," after finis.h.i.+ng its tragic story of the son slain by the unwitting father, closes with a lyric description of the majestic Oxus stream flowing on to the Aral sea. Objective as it all seems, this close is intensely personal, permeated with the same tender stoicism which colors Arnold's "Dover Beach" and "A Summer Night." The device of using a Nature picture at the end of a narrative, to heighten, by harmony or contrast, the mood induced by the story itself, was freely utilized by Tennyson in his _English Idylls_, such as "Audley Court," "Edwin Morris," "Love and Duty," and "The Golden Year." It adds the last touch of poignancy to Robert Frost's "Death of the Hired Man." These descriptive pa.s.sages, though lacking the song form, are as purely lyrical in their function as the songs in _The Princess _or the songs in _The Winter's Tale_.

_1. The Blending of Types_

While the scope of the present volume, as explained in the Preface, precludes any specific study of drama and epic, the reader must bear in mind that the three main types of poetry are not separated, in actual practice, by immovably hard and fast lines. Pigeonhole cla.s.sifications of drama, epic and lyric types are highly convenient to the student for purposes of a.n.a.lysis. But the moment one reads a ballad like "Edward, Edward" (_Oxford_, No. 373) or "Helen of Kirconnell" (_Oxford_, No. 387) the pigeon-hole distinctions must be subordinated to the actual fact that these ballads are a blend of drama, story and song. The "form" is lyrical, the stuff is narrative, the mode of presentation is often that of purely dramatic dialogue.

Take a contemporary ill.u.s.tration of this blending of types. Mr. Vachel Lindsay has told us the origins of his striking poem "The Congo." He was already in a "national-theme mood," he says, when he listened to a sermon about missionaries on the Congo River. The word "Congo" began to haunt him. "It echoed with the war-drums and cannibal yells of Africa." Then, for a list of colors for his palette, he had boyish memories of Stanley's _Darkest Africa_, and of the dances of the Dahomey Amazons at the World's Fair in Chicago. He had seen the anti-negro riots in Springfield, Illinois. He had gone through a score of negro-saloons--"barrel-houses"-- on Eleventh Avenue, New York, and had "acc.u.mulated a jungle impression that remains with me yet." Above all, there was Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_. "I wanted to reiterate the word Congo--and the several refrains in a way that would echo stories like that. I wanted to suggest the terror, the reeking swamp-fever, the forest splendor, the black-lacquered loveliness, and above all the eternal fatality of Africa, that Conrad has written down with so sure a hand. I do not mean to say, now that I have done, that I recorded all these things in rhyme. But every time I rewrote 'The Congo' I reached toward them. I suppose I rewrote it fifty times in these two months, sometimes three times in one day."

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.

Nor is there any clear separation of types when we strive to look back to the primitive origins of these various forms of poetry. In the opinion of many scholars, the origins are to be traced to a common source in the dance. "Dances, as overwhelming evidence, ethnological and sociological, can prove, were the original stuff upon which dramatic, lyric and epic impulses wove a pattern that is traced in later narrative ballads mainly as incremental repet.i.tion. Separation of its elements, and evolution to higher forms, made the dance an independent art, with song, and then music, ancillary to the figures and the steps; song itself pa.s.sed to lyric triumphs quite apart from choral voice and choral act; epic went its artistic way with nothing but rhythm as memorial of the dance, and the story instead of dramatic situation; drama retained the situation, the action, even the chorus and the dance, but submitted them to the shaping and informing power of individual genius."

[Footnote: Gummere, _The Popular Ballad_, p. 106.]

In another striking pa.s.sage, Professor Gummere asks us to visualize "a throng of people without skill to read or write, without ability to project themselves into the future, or to compare themselves with the past, or even to range their experience with the experience of other communities, gathered in festal mood, and by loud song, perfect rhythm and energetic dance, expressing their feelings over an event of quite local origin, present appeal and common interest. Here, in point of evolution, is the human basis of poetry, the foundation courses of the pyramid."

_2. Lyrical Element in Drama_

We cannot here attempt to trace, even in outline, the course of this historic evolution of genres. But in contemporary types of both dramatic and narrative poetry, there may still be discovered the influence of lyric form and mood. We have already noted how the dramatist, for all of his supposed objectivity, cannot refrain from coloring certain persons and situations with the hues of his own fancy. Ibsen, for instance, injects his irony, his love for symbolism, his theories for the reconstruction of society, into the very blood and bone of his characters and into the structure of his plots. So it is with Shaw, with Synge, with Hauptmann, with Brieux. Even if their plays are written in prose, these men are still "makers," and the prose play may be as highly subjective in mood, as definitely individual in phrasing, as full of atmosphere, as if it were composed in verse.

But the lyric possibilities of the drama are more easily realized if we turn from the prose play to the play in verse, and particularly to those Elizabethan dramas which are not only poetical in essence, but which utilize actual songs for their dramatic value. No less than thirty-six of Shakspere's plays contain stage-directions for music, and his marvelous command of song-words is universally recognized. The English stage had made use of songs, in fact, ever since the liturgical drama of the Middle Ages. But Shakspere's unrivalled knowledge of _stage-craft_, as well as his own instinct for harmonizing lyrical with theatrical effects, enabled him to surpa.s.s all of his contemporaries in the art of using songs to bring actors on and off the stage, to antic.i.p.ate following action, to characterize personages, to heighten climaxes, and to express motions beyond the reach of spoken words.

[Footnote: These points are fully discussed in J. Robert Moore's Harvard dissertation (unpublished) on The Songs in the English Drama.]

The popularity of such song-forms as the "madrigal," which was sung without musical accompaniment, made it easy for the public stage to cater to the prevalent taste. The "children of the Chapel" or "of Paul's," who served as actors in the early Elizabethan dramas, were trained choristers, and songs were a part of their stock in trade. Songs for sheer entertainment, common enough upon the stage when Shakspere began to write, turned in his hands into exquisite instruments of character revelation and of dramatic pa.s.sion, until they became, on the lips of an Ophelia or a Desdemona, the most touching and poignant moments of the drama. "Music within" is a frequent stage direction in the later Elizabethan plays, and if one remembers the dramatic effectiveness of the Easter music, off-stage, in Goethe's _Faust_, or the horn in _Hernani_, one can understand how Wagner came to believe that a blending of music with poetry and action, as exhibited in his "music-dramas," was demanded by the ideal requirements of dramatic art. Wagner's theory and practice need not be rehea.r.s.ed here. It is sufficient for our purpose to recall the indisputable fact that in some of the greatest plays ever written, lyric forms have contributed richly and directly to the total dramatic effect.

_3. The Dramatic Monologue_

There is still another _genre_ of poetry, however, where the inter-relations of drama, of narrative, and of lyric mood are peculiarly interesting. It is the dramatic monologue. The range of expressiveness allowed by this type of poetry was adequately shown by Browning and Tennyson, and recent poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost and Amy Lowell have employed it with consummate skill. The dramatic monologue is a dynamic revelation of a soul in action, not a mere static bit of character study. It chooses some representative and specific occasion,--let us say a man's death-bed view of his career, as in "The Bishop orders his Tomb" or the first "Northern Farmer." It is something more than a soliloquy overheard. There is a listener, who, though without a speaking part, plays a very real role in the dialogue. For the dramatic monologue is in essence a dialogue of which we hear only the chief speaker's part, as in "My Last d.u.c.h.ess," or in E. A. Robinson's "Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford." It is as if we were watching and listening to a man telephoning. Though we see and hear but one person, we are aware that the talk is shaped to a certain extent by the personality at the other end of the line. In Tennyson's "Rizpah," for example, the characteristics of the well-meaning, Bible-quoting parish visitor determine some of the finest lines in the old mother's response. In Browning's "Andrea del Sarto" the painter's wife, Lucrezia, says never a word, but she has a more intense physical presence in that poem than many of the _dramatis personae_ of famous plays. Tennyson's "Ulysses" and "Sir Galahad" and "The Voyage of Maeldune" are splendid soliloquies and nothing more. The first "Locksley Hall" is likewise a soliloquy, but in the second "Locksley Hall" and "To-Morrow," where sc.r.a.ps of talk from the unseen interlocutor are caught up and repeated by the speaker in pa.s.sionate reb.u.t.tal, we have true drama of the "confrontation" type. We see a whole soul in action.

Now this intense, dynamic fas.h.i.+on of revealing character through narrative talk--and it is commonly a whole life-story which is condensed within the few lines of a dramatic monologue--touches lyricism at two points. The first is the fact that many dramatic monologues use distinctively lyric measures. The six-stress anapestic line which Tennyson preferred for his later dramatic monologues like "Rizpah" is really a ballad measure, and is seen as such to its best advantage in "The Revenge." But in his monologues of the pure soliloquy type, like "St. Agnes" and "Sir Galahad," the metre is brilliantly lyrical, and the lyric a.s.sociations of the verse are carried over into the mood of the poem. And the other fact to be remembered is that the poignant self-a.n.a.lysis and self-betrayal of the dramatic monologue, its "egoism" and its ultimate and appalling sincerities, are a part of the very nature of the lyric impulse. These revealers of their souls may use the speaking, rather than the singing voice, but their tones have the deep, rich lyric intimacy.

4. _Lyric and Narrative_

In narrative poetry, no less than in drama, we must note the intrusion of the lyric mood, as well as the influence of lyric forms. Theoretically, narrative or "epic" poetry is based upon an objective experience.

Something has happened, and the poet tells us about it. He has heard or read, or possibly taken part in, an event, and the event, rather than the poet's thought or feeling about it, is the core of the poem. But as soon as he begins to tell his tale, we find that he is apt to "set it out" with vivid description. He is obliged to paint a picture as well as to spin a yarn, and not even Homer and Virgil--"objective" as they are supposed to be---can draw a picture without betraying something of their att.i.tude and feeling towards their material. Like the messenger in Greek drama, their voices are shaken by what they have seen or heard. In the popular epic like the Nibelungen story, there is more objectivity than in the epic of art like _Jerusalem Delivered_ or _Paradise Lost_. We do not know who put together in their present form such traditional tales as the _Lay of the Nibelungs_ and _Beowulf_, and the personal element in the narrative is only obscurely felt, whereas _Jerusalem Delivered_ is a constant revelation of Ta.s.so, and the personality of Milton colors every line in _Paradise Lost_. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain, simple and n.o.ble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as the impression made by the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_. Those general traits of epic poetry which have been discussed ever since the Renaissance, like "breadth," and "unity" and the sustained "grand" style, turn ultimately upon the natural qualities of great story-tellers. They are not mere rhetorical abstractions.

The narrative poet sees man as accomplis.h.i.+ng a deed, as a factor in an event. His primary business is to report action, not to philosophize or to dissect character or to paint landscape. Yet so sensitive is he to the environing circ.u.mstances of action, and so bent upon displaying the varieties of human motive and conduct, that he cannot help reflecting in his verse his own mental att.i.tude toward the situations which he depicts.

He may surround these situations, as we have seen, with all the beauties and pomps and terrors of the visible world. In relating "G.o.d's ways to man" he instinctively justifies or condemns. He cannot even tell a story exactly as it was told to him: he must alter it, be it ever so slightly, to make it fit his general conceptions of human nature and human fate. He gives credence to one witness and not to another. His imagination plays around the n.o.ble and base elements in his story until their original proportions are altered to suit his mind and purpose. Study the Tristram story, as told by Gottfried of Stra.s.sburg, by Malory, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne and Wagner, and you will see how each teller betrays his own personality through these instinctive processes of transformation of his material. It is like the Roman murder story told so many times over in Browning's _Ring and the Book_: the main facts are conceded by each witness, and yet the inferences from the facts range from Heaven to h.e.l.l.

Browning is of course an extreme instance of this irruption of the poet's personality upon the stuff of his story. He cannot help lyricising and dramatizing his narrative material, any more than he can help making all his characters talk "Browningese." But Byron's tales in verse show the same subjective tendency. He was so little of a dramatist that all of his heroes, like Poe's, are images of himself. No matter what the raw material of his narrative poems may be, they become uniformly "Byronic" as he writes them down. And all this is "lyricism," however disguised. William Morris, almost alone among modern English poets, seemed to stand gravely aloof from the tales he told, as his master Chaucer stood smilingly aloof.

Yet the "tone" of Chaucer is perceived somehow upon every page, in spite of his objectivity.

The whole history of medieval verse Romances, indeed, ill.u.s.trates this lyrical tendency to rehandle inherited material. Tales of love, of enchantment, of adventure, could not be held down to prosaic fact. Whether they dealt with "matter of France," or "matter of Brittany," whether a brief "lai" or a complicated cycle of stories like those about Charlemagne or King Arthur, whether a merry "fabliau" or a beast-tale like "Reynard the Fox," all the Romances allow to the author a margin of mystery, an opportunity to weave his own web of brightly colored fancies. A specific event or legend was there, of course, as a nucleus for the story, but the sense of wonder, of strangeness in things, of individual delight in brocading new patterns upon old material, dominated over the sense of fact. "Time," said Sh.e.l.ley, "which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augments that of poetry, and forever develops new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.... A story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

And in modern narrative verse, surely, the line between "epic" quality and "lyric" quality is difficult to draw. Choose almost at random a half-dozen story-telling poems from the _Oxford Book of English Verse_, say "The Ancient Mariner," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "La Belle Dame sans Merci," "Porphyria's Lover," "The Forsaken Merman," "He Fell among Thieves." Each of these poems narrates an event, but what purely lyric quality is there which cannot be found in "La Belle Dame sans Merci" and "The Ancient Mariner"? And does not each of the other poems release and excite the lyric mood?

We must admit, furthermore, that narrative measures and lyric measures are frequently identical, and help to carry over into a story a singing quality. Ballad measures are an obvious example. Walter Scott's facile couplets were equally effective for story and for song. Many minor species of narrative poetry, like verse satire and allegory, are often composed in traditional lyric patterns. Even blank verse, admirably suited as it is for story-telling purposes, yields in its varieties of cadence many a bar of music long a.s.sociated with lyric emotion. Certainly the blank verse of Wordsworth's "Michael" is far different in its musical values from the blank verse, say, of Tennyson's _Princess_--perhaps truly as different as the metre of _Sigurd the Volsung_ is from that of _The Rape of the Lock_.

The perfect matching of metrical form to the nature of the narrative material, whether that material be traditional or firsthand, simple or complex, rude or delicate, demands the finest artistic instinct. Yet it appears certain that many narrative measures affect us fully as much through their intimate a.s.sociation with the moods of song as through their specific adaptiveness to the purposes of narrative.

_5. The Ballad_

The supreme ill.u.s.tration of this blending of story and song is the ballad.

The word "ballad," like "ode" and "sonnet," is very ancient and has been used in various senses. We think of it to-day as a song that tells a story, usually of popular origin. Derived etymologically from _ballare_, to dance, it means first of all, a "dance-song," and is the same word as "ballet." Solomon's "Song of Songs" is called in the Bishops' Bible of 1568 "The Ballet of Ballets of King Solomon." But in Chaucer's time a "ballad" meant primarily a French form of lyric verse,--not a narrative lyric specifically. In the Elizabethan period the word was used loosely for "song." Only after the revival of interest in English and Scottish popular ballads in the eighteenth century has the word come gradually to imply a special type of story-telling song, with no traces of individual authors.h.i.+p, and handed down by oral tradition. Scholars differ as to the precise part taken by the singing, dancing crowd in the composition and perpetuation of these traditional ballads. Professor Child, the greatest authority upon English and Scottish balladry, and Professors Gummere, Kittredge and W. M. Hart have emphasized the element of "communal" composition, and ill.u.s.trated it by many types of song-improvisation among savage races, by sailors' "chanties," and negro "work-songs." It is easy to understand how a singing, dancing crowd carries a refrain, and improvises, through some quick-tongued individual, a new phrase, line or stanza of immediate popular effect; and it is also easy to perceive, by a study of extant versions of various ballads, such as Child printed in glorious abundance, to see how phrases, lines and stanzas get altered as they are pa.s.sed from lip to lip of unlettered people during the course of centuries. But the actual historical relations.h.i.+p of communal dance-songs to such narrative lyrics as were collected by Bishop Percy, Ritson and Child is still under debate.

[Footnote: See Louise Pound, "The Ballad and the Dance," _Pub. Mod. Lang.

a.s.s._, vol. 34, No. 3 (September, 1919), and Andrew Lang's article on "Ballads" in Chambers' _Cyclopedia of Eng. Lit._, ed. of 1902.]

"All poetry," said Professor Gummere in reply to a critic of his theory of communal composition of ballads, "springs from the same poetic impulse, and is due to individuals; but the conditions under which it is made, whether originally composed in a singing, dancing throng and submitted to oral tradition, or set down on paper by the solitary and deliberate poet, have given birth to that distinction of 'popular' and 'artistic,' or whatever the terms may be, which has obtained in some form with nearly all writers on poetry since Aristotle." Avoiding questions that are still in controversy, let us look at some of the indubitable characteristics of the "popular" ballads as they are shown in Child's collection.

[Footnote: Now reprinted in a single volume of the "Cambridge Poets"

(Houghton Mifflin Company), edited with an introduction by G. L.

Kittredge.]

They are impersonal. There is no trace whatever of individual authors.h.i.+p.

"This song was made by Billy Gashade," a.s.serts the author of the immensely popular American ballad of "Jesse James." But we do not know what "Billy Gashade" it was who first made rhymes about Robin Hood or Johnny Armstrong, or just how much help he had from the crowd in composing them.

In any case, the method of such ballads is purely objective. They do not moralize or sentimentalize. There is little description, aside from the use of set, conventional phrases. They do not "motivate" the story carefully, or move logically from event to event. Rather do they "flash the story at you" by fragments, and then leave you in the dark. They leap over apparently essential points of exposition and plot structure; they omit to a.s.sign dialogue to a specific person, leaving you to guess who is talking. Over certain bits of action or situation they linger as if they hated to leave that part of the story. They make shameless use of "commonplaces," that is, stock phrases, lines or stanzas which are conveniently held by the memory and which may appear in dozens of different ballads. They are not afraid of repet.i.tion,--indeed the theory of choral collaboration implies a constant use of repet.i.tion and refrain, as in a sailor's "chanty." One of their chief ways of building a situation or advancing a narrative is through "incremental repet.i.tion," as Gummere termed it, i.e. the successive additions of some new bits of fact as the bits already familiar are repeated.

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me!

A silken sark I will give to thee.'

"'A silken sark I can get me here, But I'll not dance with the Prince this year.'

"'Christine, Christine, tread a measure for me, Silver-clasped shoes I will give to thee!'

"'Silver-clasped shoes,'" etc.

American cowboy ballads show the same device:

"I started up the trail October twenty-third, I started up the trail _with the 2-U herd_."

Strikingly as the ballads differ from consciously "artistic" narrative in their broken movement and allusive method, the contrast is even more different if we consider the naive quality of their refrains. Sometimes the refrain is only a sort of musical accompaniment:

"There was an old farmer in Suss.e.x did dwell, (_Chorus of Whistlers_) There was an old farmer in Suss.e.x did dwell And he had a bad wife, as many knew well.

(_Chorus of Whistlers_)"

Or,

"The auld Deil cam to the man at the pleugh, _Rumchy ae de aidie_."

Sometimes the words of the choral refrain have a vaguely suggestive meaning:

"There were three ladies lived in a bower, _Eh vow bonnie_ And they went out to pull a flower, _On the bonnie banks of Fordie_."

Sometimes the place-name, ill.u.s.trated in the last line quoted, is definite:

"There was twa sisters in a bower, _Edinburgh, Edinburgh_, There was twa sisters in a bower, _Stirling for aye_ There was twa sisters in a bower, There came a knight to be their wooer, _Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay_."