Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/71

60 That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand:

Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has here compelled the true and feeling poet to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad-form?

It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking; the question is about the use of the ballad-form for this. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer’s is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate; and that Homer’s translator must not adopt it, because it even leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it,—is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself,—as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To go again for an illustration to