The Future Poetry

Recent English Poetry – 3 185

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes in the imminent deadly breach,

where with quite as simple a thing to say and a perfect force
of directness in saying it, it is yet a vastly different kind of
directness. The one speaks from the poetic intellect and satisfies
by a just and pleasing expression, in the other the words get, one
might say, into the entrails of vision and do not stop short at
the clear measure of the thing seen, but evoke their very quality
and give us immediately the inmost vital fibre and thrill of the
life they describe and interpret. It is not merely a difference of
the measure of the genius, but of its source. This language of
Shakespeare’s is a unique and wonderful thing; it has everywhere
the royalty of the sovereign intuitive mind looking into and
not merely at life and in this most myriad-minded of poets it
takes like life itself many tones, but that intuitive readiness to
get through, seize the lurking word and bring it out from the
heart of the thing itself is almost always its secret. From that, he
might have said, could he have given a better account of his own
working, and not by any mere mirroring of things in Nature,

It was my hint to speak, such was the process.

We are most readily struck in Shakespeare by the lines and
passages in which the word thus seized and brought out is fol-
lowed swiftly on the heels by another and another of its kind,
many crowding together or even fused and run into each other
in a single phrase of many suggestions, — for this manner is
peculiarly his own and others can only occasionally come near
to it. Such passages recur to the mind as those in the soliloquy
on sleep or the well-known lines inMacbeth,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart.