When rowers were in a boat the swinging oars became
rhythmic, and the oarsman's chant naturally followed. When the savage
overcame his enemy, he danced his war dance, and sang his war song
around his campfire at night, tone and words and gestures all fitting
into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the chants and
songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the moan of
lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the
mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was
but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion
through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little
meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple human desire
and grief.
It became poetry when it put a thrill of exultation in work, of
delight in victory, or of grief at loss by death, into some rhythmic
form tangible to the senses. There grew up thereafter a body of
rhythmic forms--lines, stanzas, accents, rhythms, verbal harmonies.
These forms are the outward dress of poetry, and may rightly be the
first subject of the student's study. We properly give the name of
poetry to verses such as Southey's "Lodore," Poe's "Bells," or
Lanier's "Song of the Chattahoochee," which do little more than sing
to our ears the harmonies of sound, the ultimate rhythms of nature.
Yet it is not merely the brook or the bell or the river, that we hear
in the poem, but the echoing of that large harmony of nature of which
the sound of the brook or the bell is only the single strain.
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