One strong verse that can hold itself upright (as the French critic
Rivarol said of Dante) with the bare help of the substantive and verb, is
worth acres of this dead cord-wood piled stick on stick, a boundless
continuity of dryness. I would rather have written that half-stanza of
Longfellow's, in the "Wreck of the Hesperus," of the "billow that swept
her crew like icicles from her deck," than all Gawain Douglas's tedious
enumeration of meteorological phenomena put together. A real landscape is
never tiresome; it never presents itself to us as a disjointed succession
of isolated particulars; we take it in with one sweep of the eye,--its
light, its shadow, its melting gradations of distance: we do not say it
is this, it is that, and the other; and we may be sure that if a
description in poetry is tiresome there is a grievous mistake somewhere.
All the pictorial adjectives in the dictionary will not bring it a
hair's-breadth nearer to truth and nature. The fact is that what we see
is in the mind to a greater degree than we are commonly aware. As
Coleridge says,--
"O lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live!"
I have made the unfortunate Dunbar the text for a diatribe on the subject
of descriptive poetry, because I find that this old ghost is not laid
yet, but comes back like a vampire to suck the life out of a true
enjoyment of poetry,--and the medicine by which vampires were cured was
to unbury them, drive a stake through them, and get them under ground
again with all despatch.
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