The truth is--and here is the second and chief objection to the
claim that we are discussing--that the poetic mood, which is what is
expressed by the rhythm and form of verse and may very well be called the
emotion of poetry, is not at all the same thing as what are commonly called
the emotions--as happiness, despair, love, hate and the rest. Its colour
will vary between one poet and another, but in one poet it will be
relatively fixed in quality, while these other emotions are but material
upon which, in common with many other things, it may work. And being a
relatively fixed condition, it is, for its part, in no need of changing
metrical devices for its expression, and to maintain that the "emotions,"
subjects of its activity, should have in their alternation a corresponding
alternation of metrical device is no more reasonable than to maintain that
other subjects of its activity should be so treated; it is to forget, for
example, that when Shakespeare wrote:
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages:
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust,
it was his subject-matter that changed from line to line and not the poetic
emotion governing it, and to say that he ought to have made the metrical
and rhythmic form of the first line in itself suggest heat: of the second,
rough weather: of the third, work: of the fourth, wages: and of the fifth
and sixth the death of golden lads and girls and of chimney-sweepers
respectively, all things manifestly very different from each other, and
things which, if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do
this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely
related equivalents that they have here.
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