Recent English Poetry – 1 167one were watching the “aerial walk” of a Hathayogin who had
just conquered the force of gravitation, but only to the extent of
a few inches, so that one is always expecting the moment which
will bring him down with a bump to mother earth. It is some-
thing like a skimming just above the ground of prose, sometimes
a dragging of the feet with a frequent touch and upkicking of
the dust, for inevitably the poetic diction and imaginative power
of style fall to the same level. Much of Whitman’s work is in this
manner; he carries it off by the largeness and sea-like roll of
the total impression, but others have not the same success, —
even the French craftsmen are weighed down, — and in them
the whole has a draggled and painful effect of an amphibious
waddling incertitude. But there is a nobler level at which he
often keeps which does not get out of sight of the prose plain
or lift up above all its gravitation, but still has a certain poetic
power, greatness and nobility of movement. But it is still below
what an equal force would have given in the master measures of
poetry.
But the possibilities of an instrument have to be judged
by its greatest effects, and there are poems, lines, passages in
which Whitman strikes out a harmony which has no kinship to
nor any memory of the prose gravitation, but is as far above
it as anything done in the great metrical cadences. And here,
and not only in Whitman, but in all writers in this form who
rise to that height, we find that consciously or unconsciously
they arrive at the same secret principle, and that is the essential
principle of Greek choric and dithyrambic poetry turned to the
law of a language which has not the strong resource of quantity.
Arnold deliberately attempted such an adaptation but, in spite
of beautiful passages, with scant success; still when he writes
such a line as
The too vast orb of her fate,it is this choric movement that he reproduces. Whitman’s first
poem inSea-Driftand a number of others are written partly or
throughout in this manner. When he gives us the dactylic and
spondaic harmony of his lines,