COMMENT ON THE POEM.
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he secret of a poem, no less than a jest's prosperity, lies in the ear ofhim that hears it. Yield to its spell, accept the poet's mood: this, afterall, is what the sages answer when you ask them of its value. Even thoughthe poet himself, in his other mood, tell you that his art is but sleightof hand, his food enchanter's food, and offer to show you the trick ofit,--believe him not. Wait for his prophetic hour; then give yourself tohis passion, his joy or pain. "We are in Love's hand to-day!" singsGautier, in Swinburne's buoyant paraphrase,--and from morn to sunset we arewafted on the violent sea: there is but one love, one May, one flowerystrand. Love is eternal, all else unreal and put aside. The vision has anend, the scene changes; but we have gained something, the memory of acharm. As many poets, so many charms. There is the charm of Evanescence,that which lends to supreme beauty and grace an aureole of Pathos. Sharewith Landor his one "night of memories and of sighs" for Rose Aylmer, andyou have this to the full. And now take the hand of a new-world minstrel, strayed from some properhabitat to that rude and dissonant America which, as Baudelaire saw, "wasfor Poe only a vast prison through which he ran, hither and thither, withthe feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a purer world," andwhere "his interior life, spiritual as a poet, spiritual even as adrunkard, was but one perpetual effort to escape the influence of thisantipathetical atmosphere." Clasp the sensitive hand of a troubled singerdreeing thus his weird, and share with him the clime in which hefound,--never throughout the day, always in the night,--if not the Atlantiswhence he had wandered, at least a place of refuge from the bounds in whichby day he was immured. To one land only he has power to lead you, and for one night only can youshare his dream. A tract of neither Earth nor Heaven: "No-man's-land," outof Space, out of Time. Here are the perturbed ones, through whose eyes,like those of the Cenci, the soul finds windows though the mind is dazed;here spirits, groping for the path which leads to Eternity, are halted anddelayed. It is the limbo of "planetary souls," wherein are all moonlightuncertainties, all lost loves and illusions. Here some are fixed in trance,the only respite attainable; others "move fantasticallyTo a discordant melody:" while everywhere are "Sheeted Memories of the Past--Shrouded forms that start and sighAs they pass the wanderer by." Such is the land, and for one night we enter it,--a night of astral phasesand recurrent chimes. Its monodies are twelve poems, whose music strives tochange yet ever is the same. One by one they sound, like the chiming of thebrazen and ebony clock, in "The Masque of the Red Death," which made thewaltzers pause with "disconcert and tremulousness and meditation," as oftenas the hour came round. Of all these mystical cadences, the plaint of _The Raven_, vibratingthrough the portal, chiefly has impressed the outer world. What things goto the making of a poem,--and how true in this, as in most else, that racewhich named its bards "the makers"? A work is called out of the void. Wherethere was nothing, it remains,--a new creation, part of the treasure ofmankind. And a few exceptional lyrics, more than others that are equallycreative, compel us to think anew how bravely the poet's pen turns thingsunknown "to shapes, and gives to airy nothingA local habitation, and a name." Each seems without a prototype, yet all fascinate us with elements wrestedfrom the shadow of the Supernatural. Now the highest imagination isconcerned about the soul of things; it may or may not inspire the Fantasythat peoples with images the interlunar vague. Still, one of these lyrics,in its smaller way, affects us with a sense of uniqueness, as surely as thesublimer works of a supernatural cast,--Marlowe's "Faustus," the "Faust" ofGoethe, "Manfred," or even those ethereal masterpieces, "The Tempest" and"A Midsummer Night's Dream." More than one, while otherwise unique, hassome burden or refrain which haunts the memory,--once heard, neverforgotten, like the tone of a rarely used but distinctive organ-stop.Notable among them is Buerger's "Lenore," that ghostly and resonant ballad,the lure and foil of the translators. Few will deny that Coleridge'swondrous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" stands at their very head. "LeJuif-Errant" would have claims, had Beranger been a greater poet; and, butfor their remoteness from popular sympathy, "The Lady of Shalott" and "TheBlessed Damozel" might be added to the list. It was given to Edgar AllanPoe to produce two lyrics, "The Bells" and _The Raven_, each of which,although perhaps of less beauty than those of Tennyson and Rossetti, is aunique. "Ulalume," while equally strange and imaginative, has not theuniversal quality that is a portion of our test. _The Raven_ in sheer poetical constituents falls below such pieces as "TheHaunted Palace," "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," and "Israfel." Thewhole of it would be exchanged, I suspect, by readers of a fastidious cast,for such passages as these: "Around, by lifting winds forgot,Resignedly beneath the skyThe melancholy waters lie. No rays from the holy heaven come downOn the long night-time of that town;But light from out the lurid seaStreams up the turrets silently-- * * *
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