MUSIC AND POETRY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 301, 20 December 1930, Page 16 (Supplement)

MUSIC AND POETRY.

A SCHOLARS STUDY.

The humble-minded reviewer must bow in admiration and reverence before the enthusiasm and the learning that have gone to the making of Katharine M. Wilson's "Sound and Meaning in English Poetry" (Jonathan Cape). Music and poetry are closely akin, and in primitive societies they naturally go together, but in civilised communities there are music lovers who do not care for poetry, and lovers of poetry who only know of music that there are two tunes—one is "God Save the King," and the other isn't. Moreover, many poetry lovers do not bother to analyse closely the musical element in verse, as, for example, Stevenson did with the famous barge speech in "Antony and Cleopatra." The face of poetry, so to speak, is good enough for them, and they feel that to dissect is to destroy. What more, they ask, does a botanist learn of the beauty of a flower by pulling it to pieces? They remember, perhaps, the dull dissection of Shakespeare and Tennyson at school, the missing of the real beauties of the verse in the tracking down of odd words.

Miss Wilson would cheerfully grant all this, but she would say that there is a profitable task in the study of sound in verse. "Look at ■ me," she would say. "I have studied the subject deeply, but my love for poetry is no less than it was, and I think I can communicate some of that love to you." She certainly can. Here is a book so learned, so subtle and complete in its analysis, that even English honours students may find some of it hard going, yet it glows .with the enthusiasm of a lover who knows that no study can fully explain, just as a man knows that no words can describe fully the woman he loves and account for his feelings. "We cannot explain what poetry means, certainly not what the best poetry means, and not because it is too indefinite, but because it is too definite to put into other words; it means precisely what it says, and will hot paraphrase or translate." Perhaps the most important thing Miss Wilson says in the book is her insistence on the'wedding of sound and sense. Homer has been read i a the original to boys of twelve who knew no Greek, but they divined the substance of the passage. "When we begin to notice that poetry has no m'eaning, this usually means that the sounds are not properly related, they have not the.relation of sense. If the mere music of poetry is strong enough, it will weave, if not meaning, then an atmosphere of meaning. The music of poetry is not a compound of two things, sound and. meaning, but one thing, meaningful sound." Or, as she says in some remarks about Swinburne, the supreme example in English poetry of a poet whose music is more potent than his intellectual content, "nothing makes music so easily as meaning." She cannot admire Swinburne, and thinks his admirers "arc either carried on by the rhythm, wound up by it into a pleasant fever, or soothed by the silky or furry feel of the words." This- reviewer would .be sorry to lose Swinburne, but criticism like this is salutary. The supreme music of tho poets—m "Lycidas," for example—is less deliberate and more subtle than Swinburne's, and the meaning ha 3 the clear-cut definition—and value—of steel. Only one fault is found here with this remarkable book. The reviewer, having spent some time in searching for a reference, begs Miss Wilson to give her next an index.