Recent English Poetry – 1 169great than the epic voice from the other side of the ocean, his
poetry has a more harmonious, limpid and meditative fullness.
But the lesser abundance of force and drive makes us feel more
the limitations of his form. The thought is not only great, but
poetically great and satisfying, the expression as form of thought
is noble and admirable, but we miss the subtler rhythmic uplift
of the poetic enthusiasm which is given to minds of much less
power by the inspiring cadence and the ordered measures of the
poetic spirit,chandas. His flow is ordinarily of the middle kind
with occasional choric turns and movements, but the latter do
not carry with them the full force of the intenser poetic cadence.
To cite one passage, —
There in the region of equality in the world of Freedom
no longer limited, standing on a lofty peak in heaven above
the clouds,
From below hidden. Yet to all who pass into that region
most clearly visible
He the Eternal appeared.Whitman would have broken that up into five lines and got by
it a more distinct and forcible effect, — for the breath of poetry
best rises and falls in brief and intense lengths; so printed, it
would be at once apparent that we have a varied choric move-
ment, a little stumbling into half-prose just before the end, but
otherwise admirable, with two sudden turns of great poetic
force, where the movement is precisely that of the Greek chorus.
But the total effect is the sense of what one might almost call a
noble and chanting superprose rhythm.
This appears more clearly in another passage where Car-
penter’s movement is more at its normal level. He begins with
a strain which is only just distinguishable from the prose strain,
but suddenly rises from it to the beginning of a choric elevation,
As one shuts a door after a long confinement in the house
— so out of your own plans and purposes escaping, —then comes the full choric rise,