gestions to those who wish to learn to understand and enjoy poetry? One reason why many persons find poetry difficult or unpleasant reading is that they regard a poem as merely a collection of words upon the printed page. Poetry is meant not for the eye but for the ear; it is living human speech and not cold print. Above all things, he who would learn to love great poetry should avoid reading it as he reads his newspaper or the latest popular novel, skipping every other word and half the lines. Poetry is music; and, like other forms of music, it gains in meaning when interpreted by the human voice. When so situated that he cannot read aloud, the man who loves poetry will make sure that, as he reads, he hears distinctly every syllable. To understand and enjoy poetry, one must read and re-read it as a man reads and re-reads a letter from one he loves.

If after a sympathetic and careful re-reading, you find that such a poem as Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" does not stir you profoundly, perhaps the reason is that you have not yet had the experience of life necessary to give you an understanding of this great poem. The imagination of youth partially supplies the place of experience; but much of what is greatest in poetry is comparatively meaningless to those who have never known love, sorrow, married life, children. It is unfortunate that most of us read the masterpieces of English poetry only in our immature years in school and college, for the great poets write mainly for the mature and the experienced. It is said that George Edward Woodberry, poet, scholar, and critic, was once delivering at Columbia University an enthusiastic lecture on the

Italian poet Ariosto when he was interrupted by one of his students, the now well-known novelist Upton Sinclair, who said: "Professor Woodberry, I don't care anything about Ariosto. What shall I do about it?" Mr. Woodberry paused a moment and said, "Young man, grow!" The great poets should be our life companions. The more we read them, the better we shall understand them. If we do not continue to read them after we leave school, we shall probably have to confess late in life, like Darwin, that we have lost the power to enjoy them.

CHAPTER II

THE SONG

And ever, against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse.

Milton: "L'Allegro"

THE song is a poem which is sung. It belongs equally to poetry and music, two arts which deal with sounds. In music the term often includes not only the lyric but also the ballad, which in poetry is classed separately and will be discussed in a later chapter. The song is the simplest and yet perhaps the most enduring form of either music or poetry. It is the oldest form of music and, the ballad alone excepted, also of poetry; and yet none of the later and more complex forms of either art has so wide an appeal as the song. The Greeks believed song to be the invention of the gods, and a Hebrew poet tells us that at the creation "the morning stars sang together" for joy. Nothing else in the whole range of art has such power to move the heart as this blending of melody and verse. Only Milton's "fit audience. . . though few" find pleasure in Paradise Lost, and Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" is "caviar to the general"; but "Annie Laurie" and "Auld Lang Syne" stir the hearts of millions.

Beautiful melodies and great poems are abundant, but the perfect blend of the two is one of the rarest things in the world of art. There are many stirring airs like "Dixie,” which are yet to find appropriate words; and there are many lyrics like "Crossing the Bar" which, though repeatedly set to music, still lack an ideal musical setting. The musician and the poet are generally too ignorant of one another's fields to achieve the ideal union of great poetry and beautiful music. Great songs are as rare as they are beautiful.

Just what each art contributes to this wedding of poetry and music is best discovered by examining them separately. The poem which is not sung-Shelley's "To a Skylark" for instance-often fails to arouse any emotion in the inexperienced reader. The poem does not sing itself to him, as the poet meant that it should. Music without words, on the other hand, is apt to arouse an emotion which is vague and undefined, not linked to any definite idea or image. When we hear even so simple an air as Dvorak's beautiful "Humoresque," most of us long for words to tell us what the composer is trying to express. But when we listen to "My Old Kentucky Home" or "Lead, Kindly Light," we are satisfied because the words give us the idea while the music arouses in us the appropriate emotional response.

The lyric, then, gives us the idea or theme and calls up appropriate pictures in language which is rich in suggestion, pictorial power, and sensuous beauty. The melody gives the poem greater expressiveness; and it does this by intensifying the emotion and adding a color and a richness which words alone cannot impart. Although

Rouget de Lisle wrote both words and air for the "Marseillaise" and Wagner wrote the librettos as well as the music of his operas, usually air and lyric are written by different persons. Ordinarily a musician like Schubert composes a melody for a poem like Shakespeare's "Hark, Hark, the Lark," or a poet like Mrs. Howe writes words for a well-known melody, as she did in "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." In every case, however, the poem and the air must blend to produce a harmonious whole.

There are more perfect melodies and far greater poems than the air and words of Stephen Collins Foster's "Old Folks at Home"; but in few other songs does one find so perfect a harmony between the two. The explanation is that Foster wrote both words and music for his songs. If the reader will read "Old Folks at Home" as a poem, he will find that it is not poetry of a high order; in fact, without the music the words seem colorless and conventional. When sung to the melody, however, they seem suddenly to have become alive, full of unsuspected color and feeling.