buying her presents-sensible things like now, with hot milk, and hot waterfurs and a warm cloak and a weddingring and an engagement-ring.

The Practical Use of Poetry

By BRIAN HOOKER

Author of "Mona," etc.

TWEE hear much nowadays of an awakened interest in poetry; W and yet this interest, wide-spread and genuine though it be, is in its nature almost entirely luxurious and sentimental. You hear it in the intonation of the voice with which people refer to Such-a-one the poet, a tone of apologetic reverence, of slightly amused admiration, as toward some inferior creature of supernatural powers. It implies a vaguely obvious idea. of poetry as an esthetic pleasure wholly remote from actual life, a sort of emotional massage delicately substituting dreams for deeds. Now, this idea seems curiously at variance with the universal and express tradition of mankind. One need hardly cite the platitude about a nation's laws and songs, or recall how race after dominant race has taken its poets in their degree as seriously as its priests or conquerors or men of learning, and has by comparison treated its commercial and scientific leaders with most iniquitous levity.

Either we here forget some considerable truth, or else humanity has long made a disproportionate pother about nothing; for we make the Muse a futile pleasure, who was always a helpmate and at times a goddess. To say now, even among cultivated folk, that poetry is of no less practical value than science is to provoke the indulgent smile. Yet it is quite literally true. We may remember with a start how much longer civilization could manage to exist and to progress without the one than without the other and so go on, not too unshakably incredulous, to consider as a plain, concrete matter of fact what use this thing called poetry may be.

Since it is well to realize at once whereof we speak, let us momentarily suspend our superstitious dread of definitions. We should all say offhand that poetry is the language of imagination and emotion, traditionally, at least, set forth in measured form; but it is

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needful to observe a little more precisely what this means. We can hear without emotion of a child slain in war so long as we merely understand the fact without imagining; but the moment we imagine such a thing, we begin to feel.

He turned her ower with his spear,

(O, gin her face was wan!)
He said: "Ye are the first that e'er
I wished alive again."

He turned her ower with his spear,

(O, gin her skin was white!)

"I might have spared that bonny face
To have been some man's delight."

This is imaginative, and therefore emotional. So much is merely to say that it is artistic; for all art addresses the imagination, and thereby the emotions. But this art does something more. It is not hard to see that the feeling of this scene is the essential thing: the poet wishes to convey not so much the vision of the event as the pathos of it, and to that end his imaginative detail is but the means. So with the old song:

Her brow is like the snowdrift,

Her neck is like the swan,

And her face it is the fairest

That e'er the sun shone on-
That e'er the sun shone on.

It is not so much that Annie Laurie looked like this, but that a lover felt like speaking so of her. So again with Cleopatra's terrible sentence about the asp:

Peace, peace!

Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,

That sucks the nurse asleep?

The poetry is not in the metaphor, but in the tragic sense of the whole situation which this image conjures up. And so just as truly with the point and purpose of an entire poem as with its expression in detail. To what end is all the imagination in "Mandalay,"

An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the
tinkly temple-bells,

but to express that homesickness for a strange land which is the real subject of the poem? So in Tennyson's "Tears, Idle Tears," where image after image is called up only to define and illustrate

the strange, sweet sorrow of days that are no more. So in "Lycidas" or Gray's "Elegy" or the odes of Keats, so even in the great epics or poetic plays. The purpose is more than merely to expound or to illustrate an idea; rather to express a certain emotional sense thereof, a certain accurate spiritual scent and taste and color such as we all have in dreams. Herein poetry comes of all arts most near to music; only with this difference, that music tells us abstractly how we feel, whereas poetry tells us how we feel about concrete things. That is of course the reason for the rhythmic and sonorous form of verse, not for esthetic ornament alone, but to create and enforce that emotional atmosphere which is the very essence of the idea. Poetry deals, as it were, with the feel of actual life, and so employs language not so much to make us understand or even imagine as to make us realize.

Now this art, instead of being somehow visionary and remote, is in sober truth the most accurately real of all, for it presents things. as they do actually happen to ourselves. The precise difference between other people's experience and our own is this very matter of emotion. Of your friend's cakes and ale you may have some imaginative sense, but you have the sensation of your own. If your brother bangs his head against the bookshelf, you doubtless understand and sympathize; but if it is your head which encounters the obstacle, then you feel. I can perhaps watch your game of tennis with excitement and admiration; to you who play it is in some sort a triumph or a defeat. What you know of another person's life is not his life at all, but only a pale and untrue representation of it inferred from circumstances and implied in his words and deeds; whereas the actual truth is that his life to him is like your own to you, an iridescent flux of feeling, a changeful tissue of pain and pleasure and struggle and desire, love, hate, fear, sorrow, laughter, shame, and prayer. We talk of the plain prose of life, but it is only the lives of others which are prose. Our own are always poetry, though they may be the poetry of "Mariana" or the "Reves Tale," of "Lucile" or "Caliban upon Setebos" or "The Song of the Shirt." And the reason why we do not commonly so think of them is simply that our casual conception of the poetic implies a beauty or passion or romance extraordinary and extreme; so that we no more realize the normal emotion of our daily lives than we notice the normal temperature of our own bodies. If the external temperature rises to ninety-eight degrees, we notice it with considerable emphasis; and that is precisely how we regard our own experience recognized in some poem.

There is in this idea absolutely nothing of sophistry or romance, nothing in the remotest degree figurative or fanciful or far-fetched. It is a plain, literal matter of fact, as obvious, and perhaps as unfamiliar, as the sunrise. To every one his own life is inherently and