Page:The Raven (1884).pdf/14

Rh truth the counterpart of his own nature. I suppose that an artist's love for one "in the form" never can wholly rival his devotion to some ideal. The woman near him must exercise her spells, be all by turns and nothing long, charm him with infinite variety, or be content to forego a share of his allegiance. He must be lured by the Unattainable. and this is ever just beyond him in his passion for creative art.

Poe, like Hawthorne, came in with the decline the Romantic school, and none delighted more than he to laugh at its calamity. Yet his heart was with the romancers and their Oriental or Gothic effects. His invention, so rich in the prose tales, seemed to desert him when he wrote verse; and his judgment told him that long romantic poems depend more upon incident than inspiration,—and that, to utter the poetry of romance, lyrics would suffice. Hence his theory, clearly fitted to his own limitations, that "a long poem is a flat contradiction in terms." The components of The Raven are few and simple: a man, a bird, and the phantasmal memory of a woman. But the piece affords a fine display of romantic material. What have we? The midnight; the shadowy chamber with its tomes of forgotten lore; the student,—a modern Hieronymus, the raven's tap on the casement; the wintry night and dying fire; the silken wind-swept hanging; the dreams and vague mistrust of the echoing darkness; the black, uncanny bird upon the pallid bust, the accessories of violet velvet and the gloating lamp. All this stage effect of situation, light. color, sound, is purely romantic, and even melodramatic. but of a poetic quality that melodrama rarely exhibits, and thoroughly reflective of the poets "eternal passion, eternal pain."

The rhythmical structure of The Raven was sure to make an impression. Rhyme, alliteration. the burden, the stanzaic form, were devised with singular adroitness. Doubtless the poet was struck with the aptness of Miss Harretts musical trochaics in "eights," and especially by the arrangement adopted near the close of "Lady Geraldine."

His artistic introduction of a third rhyme in both the second and fourth lines, and the addition of a fifth line and a final refrain, made the stanza of The Raven. The persistent alliteration seems to come without effort and often the rhymes within lines are seductive; while the refrain or burden dominates the whisk work. Here also he had profited by Miss Barrett's study of ballads and romaunts in her own and other tongues. A "refrain" is the lure wherewith a poet or a musician holds the wandering car,—the recurrent longing of Nature for the initial strain. I have always admired the beautiful refrains the English songstress,—"The Nightingales, the Nightingales;" "Margret Margret," "My Heart and I," "Toll slowly," "The River floweth on," "Pan. Pan is dead," etc. She also employed what I term the Repetend, in the use of which Poe has excelled all poets since Coleridge thus revived it:

Poe created the fifth line of his stanza for the magic of the repetend. He relied upon it to the uttermost in a few later poems,—"Lenore." "Annabel Lee," "Ulalume." and "For Annie." It gained a wild and melancholy music, I have thought, from the "sweet influences, of the Afric burdens and repetends that were sung to him in childhood, attuning with their native melody the voice of our Southern poet.

"The Philosophy of Composition," his analysis of The Raven, is a technical dissection of its method and structure. Neither his avowal of cold-blooded artifice, nor his subsequent avowal to friends that an exposure of this artifice was only another of his intellectual hoaxes, need be wholly credited. If he had designed the complete work in advance, he scarcely would have made so harsh a prelude of rattle-pan rhymes to the delicious melody of the second stanza,—not even upon his theory of the fantastic. Of course an artist, having perfected a work, sees, like the first Artist, that it is good, and sees why it is good. A subsequent analysis, coupled with a disavowal of any sacred fire, readily enough may be made. My belief is that the first conception and rough draft of this poem came as inspiration always comes; that its author then saw how it might be perfected, giving it the final touches described in his chapter on Composition, and that the latter, therefore, is neither wholly false nor wholly true. The harm of such analysis is that it tempts a novice to fancy that artificial processes can supersede imagination. The impulse of genius is to guard the secrets of its creative hour. Glimpses obtained of the toil, the baffled experiments. which precede a triumph, as in the sketch-work of Hawthorne recently brought to light, afford priceless instruction and encouragement to the sincere artist. But one