These books deal with the
forms, and most of them with the forms only. They analyze the methods,
work out the metre, show how the parts are woven together, explain how
the chords produce the harmonies. But just in proportion as the
student becomes learned in these rhythms, and can distinguish minute
or subtle variations of metrical structure, does he realize that this
study teaches not its own use and that there is something beyond which
must be won by his own observation. He finds in his search for
rhythmical perfection that there are poems which make little appeal to
his senses, whose lines do not sing themselves through his day-dreams,
which yet affect his imagination even more powerfully than the musical
strains thrilled his senses. He finds that there is much more in
poetry than its rhymes and jingles, that there is a rhythm greater
than that of the senses. In its more complex forms poetry is rhythm of
thought, leading the mind to find relations which prose may describe,
but which poetry alone can recreate. There is such a thing as a prose
thought and such a thing as a poetic thought. The one gives with
exactness the fact as it exists, clearly, honestly, directly, and for
all completed and tangible things is the natural medium of expression.
The other parallels the actual with a suggestion of an ideal
rhythmically consonant with the motive underlying the fact. Justice,
for example, deals in prose fashion with a crime and awards the
punishment which the law allows; poetic justice suggests such
recompense as would come of itself in a community perfectly organized.
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