Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/143

Rh which poetry demands is that a poem must not only be enthralling by beauty and intensity, but, if it be of any length, by its interest.

Rossetti rightly queried whether a long poem ought not to be as absorbing as a novel. It ought. A novel need only fail of being a poem by that degree of beauty which formal rhythms have over informal. Most novels do fail in many other ways, but many long poems fail just where good novels succeed. It is in vital interest that Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet and Othello are so superior to Paradise Lost, though that poem perhaps maintains a higher level of beauty than they do.

Can the interest proper to great poems be distinguished from that aroused by imaginative prose? By intensity? Hardly: rather by quality, by perfection. Poetry transports us into its newly created world more delicately, with a finer respect for the bloom of the soul. The superiority is of mood rather than of power. The mind is carried among objects and events with a motion that more nearly satisfies innate desire: even so Zephyros conveyed Psyche from the piled logs on the rocky peak to a lawn in the gardens of Love's house. In like manner dancing contents the body better than walking or running or drilling. In the flight of some birds and in the swimming of certain fish we recognise an ideal smoothness and continuity, but dancing adds to this a conscious ecstasy; skill triumphs over known difficulties, elation lifts the body, which no longer merely serves, but becomes the disinterested vehicle of the soul, its partner and friend. Thus the movement of poetry weds the mind's desire.

Wordsworth found fault with The Ancient Mariner because the chief character remains passive, is acted on but does little. Now perhaps he appealed to a traditional error in thus accounting for the small effect produced by the Lyrical Ballads when first issued. We are, I think, as a matter of fact, as much interested by what happens Rh