THE TOYS My little Son, who looked from thought ful eyes And moved and spoke in.quiet grown-up wise, Having my law the seventh time disobeyed, I struck him, and dismissed With hard words and unkissed, His Mother, who was patient, being dead. Then, fearing lest his grief should hin der sleep, I visited his bed, But found him slumbering deep, With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet From his late sobbing wet. And I, with moan, Kissing away his tears, left others of my own; For, on a table drawn beside his head, He had put, within his reach, A box of counters and a red-veined stone, A piece of glass abraded by the beach, And six or seven shells, A bottle with bluebells, And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art, To comfort his sad heart. To God, I wept, and said: Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath, Not vexing Thee in death, And thou rememberest of what toys We made our joys, How weakly understood Thy great commanded good, Then, fatherly not less Than I whom Thou has molded from the clay, Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say, "I will be sorry for their childishness." -Coventry Patmore. TH CHAPTER III THE "OLD" POETRY, SO-CALLED HE term "old" poetry is here used, purely as a convenience, because of the recent popular division of poetry into the supposedly "old" and "new" varieties. But to speak of "old" poetry in reality is as absurd as it would be to speak, in the same sense, of "old" sky or "old" sea or "old" sunshine or any other general and universal characteristic or quality of creation. For the poetry now known as "old" is as ageless, deathless, perpetual, and eternal as any of the powers of nature noted. It began with the earliest dawns and stirrings of humanity; it will persist, endure, as long as the human. race. Even Miss Amy Lowell, avowed and accredited apostle of the "new" school of poetry, in "Tendencies in Modern American Poetry" admits that "Good poetry, if not strikingly great poetry, marked the epoch of Whittier, Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes." "The fundamentals of poetry," as William Stanley Braithwaite aptly says, "are in the folk chants of antiquity and the communal chant of primitive peoples in the world today. Poetry has advanced from the oral communal chant to a highly developed organism in which formal diction and forms of fixed patterns are more or less standardized." And it has advanced, in the English poetic history which, at least until quite recently, includes American poetic history, by a progression distinctly orderly if not always regular or measured. From the earliest known English poems such as "Sumer is icumen in," up through the ballads, chants, and story-songs of the wandering minstrels, up through Chaucer, Hogg, Percy, the medieval, Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian poets to the variously flowering and flourishing poets of the twentieth century, the stream of English-couched poetry has steadily flowed and risen. A similar course and progression has marked the poetry tide of other lands and races. And poetry, in all known ages and stages of the world's progress, has followed, reflected, sometimes foretold and forestalled the changing course of humanity's life, experience, and thought. When the world has been gay with romanticism, quick with chivalry, overcharged with sentiment, stirred by martial spirit, filled with religious enthusiasm, disturbed by social growing pains, poetry, faithful handmaid of life, has ever been true to the growing aims and ideals of her mistress. "For poetry," well says Louis Untermeyer, himself a rare and forceful poet, "is something more than a graceful, literary escape from life" (although, it may be interpolated, many a tired human heart and soul has found "surcease from care" in the poems of Longfellow or other gentle singers, fresh courage and stimulus and a bracing "way out" through the help of more daring bards, poetry, like religion, ministering, always, to deepest human need). "It is a spirited encounter with it." "A spirited sharing in life's encounter' |