Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, POETRY, by JAMES GATES PERCIVAL


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

POETRY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The world is full of poetry -- the air
Last Line: Those feelings, which have died, to live no more.
Subject(s): Poetry & Poets


(I consider Poetry in a two-fold view, as a spirit, and a manifestation.
Perhaps the poetic spirit has never been more justly defined, than by Byron in
his Prophecy of Dante, a creation "From overfeeling good or ill, an aim
At an external life beyond our fate."
This spirit may be manifested by language, metrical or prose, by
declamation, by musical sounds, by expression, by gesture, by motion, and by
imitating forms, colours, and shades; so that literature, oratory, music,
physiognomy, acting, and the arts of painting and sculpture, may all have their
poetry; but that peculiar spirit, which alone gives the great life and charm to
all the efforts of genius, is as distinct from the measure and rhyme of poetical
composition, as from the scientific principles of drawing and perspective.)

THE world is full of Poetry -- the air
Is living with its spirit; and the waves
Dance to the music of its melodies,
And sparkle in its brightness. Earth is veiled.
And mantled with its beauty; and the walls,
That close the universe, with crystal, in,
Are eloquent with voices, that proclaim
The unseen glories of immensity,
In harmonies, too perfect, and too high,
For aught but beings of celestial mould,
And speak to man in one eternal hymn,
Unfading beauty, and unyielding power.

The year leads round the seasons, in a choir
For ever charming, and for ever new,
Blending the grand, the beautiful, the gay,
The mournful, and the tender, in one strain,
Which steals into the heart, like sounds, that rise
Far off, in moonlight evenings, on the shore
Of the wide ocean resting after storms;
Or tones, that wind around the vaulted roof,
And pointed arches, and retiring aisles
Of some old, lonely minister, where the hand,
Skilful, and moved, with passionate love of art,
Plays o'er the higher keys, and bears aloft
The peal of bursting thunder, and then calls,
By mellow touches, from the softer tubes,
Voices of melting tenderness, that blend
With pure and gentle musings, till the soul,
Commingling with the moody, is borne,
Rapt, and dissolved in ecstasy, to Heaven.

'T is not the chime and flow of words, that move
In measured file, and metrical array;
'T is not the union of returning sounds,
Nor all the pleasing artifice of rhyme,
And quantity, and accent, that can give
This all-pervading spirit to the car,
Or blend it with the movings of the soul.
'T is a mysterious feeling, which combines
Man with the world around him, in a chain
Woven of flowers, and dipped in sweetness, till
He taste the high communion of his thoughts,
With all existences, in earth and heaven,
That meet him in the charm of grace and power.
'T is not the noisy babbler, who displays,
In studied phrase, and ornate epithet,
And rounded period, poor and vapid thoughts,
Which peep from out the cumbrous ornaments,
That overload their littleness. Its words
Are few, but deep and solemn; and they break
Fresh from the fount of feeling, and are full
Of all that passion, which, on Carmel, fired
The holy prophet, when his lips were coals,
His language winged with terror, as when bolts
Leap from the brooding tempest, armed with wrath,
Commissioned to affright us, and destroy.

Passion, when deep, is still -- the glaring eye
That reads its enemy with glance of fire,
The lip, that curls and writhes in bitterness,
The brow contracted, till its wrinkles hide
The keen, fixed orbs, that burn and flash below,
The hand firm clenched and quivering, and the foot
Planted in attitude to spring, and dart
Its vengeance, are the language it employs.
So the poetic feeling needs no words
To give it utterance; but it swells, and glows,
And revels in the ecstasies of soul,
And sits at banquet with celestial forms,
The beings of its own creation, fair,
And lovely, as ever haunted wood and wave,
When earth was peopled, in its solitudes,
With nymph and naiad -- mighty, as the gods,
Whose palace was Olympus, and the clouds,
That hung, in gold and flame, around its brow;
Who bore, upon their features, all that grand
And awful dignity of front, which bows
The eye that gazes on the marble Jove,
Who hurls, in wrath, his thunder, and the god,
The image of a beauty, so divine,
So masculine, so artless, that we seem
To share in his intensity of joy,
When, sure as fate, the bounding arrow sped,
And darted to the scaly monster's heart.

This spirit is the breath of Nature, blown
Over the sleeping forms of clay, who else
Doze on through life in blank stupidity,
Till by its blast, as by a touch of fire,
They rouse to lofty purpose, and send out,
In deeds of energy, the rage within.
Its seat is deeper in the savage breast,
Than in the man of cities; in the child,
Than in maturer bosoms. Art may prune
Its rank and wild luxuriance, and may train
Its strong out-breakings, and its vehement gusts
To soft refinement, and amenity;
But all its energy has vanished, all
Its, maddening, and commanding spirit gone,
And all its tender touches, and its tones
Of soul-dissolving pathos, lost and hid
Among the measured notes, that move as dead
And heartless, as the puppets in a show.

Well I remember, in my boyish days,
How deep the feeling, when my eye looked forth
On Nature, in her loveliness, and storms.
How my heart gladdened, as the light of spring
Came from the sun, with zephyrs, and with showers,
Waking the earth to beauty, and the woods
To music, and the atmosphere to blow,
Sweetly and calmy, with its breath of balm.
O! how I gazed upon the dazzling blue
Of summer's Heaven of glory, and the waves,
That rolled, in bending gold, o'er hill and plain;
And on the tempest, when it issued forth,
In folds of blackness, from the northern sky,
And stood above the mountains, silent, dark,
Frowning, and terrible; then sent abroad
The lightning, as its herald, and the peal,
That rolled in deep, deep volleys, round the hills,
The warning of its coming, and the sound,
That ushered in its elemental war.
And, O! I stood, in breathless longing fixed,
Trembling, and yet not fearful, as the clouds
Heaved their dark billows on the roaring winds,
That sent, from mountain top, and bending wood,
A long hoarse murmur, like the rush of waves,
That burst, in foam and fury, on the shore.

Nor less the swelling of my heart, when high
Rose the blue arch of autumn, cloudless, pure
As nature, at her dawning, when she sprang
Fresh from the hand that wrought her; where the eye
Caught not a speck upon the soft serene,
To stain its deep cerulean, but the cloud,
That floated, like a lonely spirit, there,
White, as the snow of Zemla, or the foam,
That on the mid-sea tosses, cinctured round,
In easy undulations, with a belt
Woven of bright Apollo's golden hair.
Nor, when that arch, in winter's clearest night,
Mantled in ebon darkness, strowed with stars
Its canopy, that seemed to swell, and swell
The higher, as I gazed upon it, till,
Sphere after sphere, evolving, on the height
Of Heaven, the everlasting throne shone through,
In glory's full effulgence, and a wave,
Intensely bright, rolled, like a fountain, forth
Beneath its sapphire pedestal, and streamed
Down the long galaxy, a flood of snow,
Bathing the heavens in light, the spring, that gushed,
In overflowing richness, from the breast
Of all-maternal nature. These I saw,
And felt to madness; but my full heart gave
No utterance to the ineffable within.
Words were too weak; they were unknown; but still
The feeling was most poignant: it has gone;
And all the deepest flow of sounds, that ever
Poured, in a torrent fullness, from the tongue
Rich with the wealth of ancient bards, and stored
With all the patriarchs of British song
Hallowed and rendered glorious, cannot tell
Those feelings, which have died, to live no more.






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