LIGHT VERSE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1186, 22 July 1911, Page 9

LIGHT VERSE.

, The London ■'"Times'" makes the 'appearance of a cotiplo of not very good • anthologies of }ight verse tho occasion for an excellent and suggestive article on this* fascinating topic. There .is much in it that one can disagree with, however, • : There is a. distinction to be drawn between light and humorous verse (says the writer), though the sainb poem. may be ", both, and though, the terms are very loosely used. The best light verse is ; ■ poetry at. play,, and only a, poet can writo ij;. ..-,-, ■ ' - Wnat I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows • - The Difference there" is betwixt Nature • and Art: ' ' J court others in Verse; but I love Thee in Prose: • .'- And They havo my Whimsies;, but Thou hast my Heart. .

This is the light verso of- a prosaic ane and of a worldly poet, yet it seems to be , always on the point of trembling info poetry, and there is no incongruity in the seriousness of the last word. . Just as in the light music.of Mozart there is'always a way open towards passion, so'it is-with the light verse of the masters; and in both it is beauty of form that provides the opening. Good light verse has the beauty of poetry, and always remembers poetry with respect. -The versifier may laugh at himscif, but he does not laugh at his art; and for that reason Me does not laugh at all that his art implies. In his mood of the moment ho may/'regard .himself and another as butterflies hovering for a day over the flowers of an enchanted garden; but his object, like Watteau's, ft to give aa immortal rendering of that transient delight; and to connect it with eternity by an expression of his .-own sense of its transience. For if wo know that the moment is short, we know that the ages are long; and.if wo call ourselves triHes, 'we imply that there is a reality which is not trifling. ■' But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before ' us lie Deserts of vast eternity. % ■'. . You cannot make poetry, or anything else out of an entire disbelief; and when a. poet,feems to smile at himself and his passion in light verse, he smiles really at the incongruity betweeu his own little momentary self and the great eternal tliat has entered into it. Light verse is always the creature of a mood, and has the instability of moods. In it tho poet does not laugh at high sustained flights, but confesses himself ■unequal -to them. He confesses himself to be less than what'ho wishes'to say; ' therefore he will only hint at it, smiling at his own impotence of expression.What is this? Ma foi, the fact is That my hand is out of practice, And my poor old hddle-crncked is, ■'And a man—l let the truth out— Who's had almost every tooth out, Cannot sing fls onco ho sung, When he Was young as you are young, When lie was young and lutes wero And lovo°lamps in tho casement luing. To see the difference between light and humorous verse we have only to, contrast M'irvell's -"Coy .Mistress, from Which wo ' have- quoted the most famous lines, with his satires—for instance, with this paseaao'from "The Character of Holland'; Cllad then,-as miners Hint hiiro found ' 'the ore They with mad labour fished the land to shore, . . . \m] dived as desperately for each piece Of earth, as if .'t had been of anismall loads of clay, Less than"what building swallows bear Or than those pills which sordid beetles Transfusing into them their dunghill soul.

Marvcll was n poet,- and never quite nt his ease in utterly prosaic verse. Hut the

point to be noted is that ho trios to mako the verso here utterly prosaic,.as he tries to mako it humorous, i'nr whereas light verso is poetry at play, liumonms verse is usually prose at play, and can bo made bv men who are not poets at all and could not write a lino with tlio music, of poetry in it. Good humorous verse, though it takes the form of poetry, keeps tho peculiar virtues of prose. Take for instance the famous lines from "Hudibras," in which the i'uritnns arc said to , Compound for sins thoy arc inclined to, 1 By damning those they have no mind •'. to: . Still so perverse and opposite ' As if t'hey worshipped God for Spite.

These aro to be admired for their intellectual, not for their emotional, qualities. They are verse only because liutler was not serious enough to write prose, lie laughs at Ilmlibras and expresses and advertise his laughter in this form. For there is an incongruity between the form proper to the expression of emotion and the purely prosaic virtue of the matter, which makes us laugh independently of the matter itself, and it is this incongruity which sometimes causes verso to bo unintentionally humorous, as in an unsuccessful Xewdignto poem upon the Pilgrim Fathers, in 'which this couplet occurs—

So, ever guided by the hand of God, They sailed along until they reached Cape Cod.

Hero wo have prose .masquerading its verse without knowing it,, hut in Swift and Butler it masquerades intentionally and profits by the greater brevity which the form of verso imposes upon it, and by .tho fact that tho form advertises its humorous intention; for We assume that a writer means to be humorous when he puts prosaic matter into a poetic form. Unfortunately this assumption, so easily induced, has led many writers lo think that, humorous verse is easily made. Mr. and Mrs. Melville's anthology contains many pieces which have i(o----'thing to recommend them except the incongruity between matter and form. Here, for instance, aro the first two lines :of "A Vision' of Siren Soup," by Shirley Brooks:— , ■

The alderman woke from his nightmare, ' , howling a terrible cry; Punched his wife's face with his elbow;, at morning sho had a black eye.

The rest is no better, and it , has" only oiio object—namely, to advertise the fact that it is meant to bo humorous. It reminds one of the comedian who paints his nose red to show that he is funny and then has nothing funny to say. Anyone can see now that it is not good, for its style is quite out of fashion/ but much of our modern humorous verse will seem no better when it also goes out of fashion; for it is still not commonly understood that verso is not worth , writing at all unless it has the virtues either of poetry, or of prose. The incongruity between matter and form: is not enough to justify'its existence. We have many' writers who say nothing in ' their. verses except that they arc not poets and do not wish to' be. They. use verse as a means of laughing at poetry, not ■ at themselves. They parody emotions wnen they are not'parodying styles, and. they, (Iα so merely to raise a laugh and without" ijny reserve-of admiratjon. All parody is; a parasitic form of art, and it is often a troublesome parasite. Mr. .Leonard i(i his notes quotes Swinburne's outburst against Calverley, "A jester, graduate or undergraduate, may bp fit enough to hop, skip, and tumble before University; audiences, without "capacity to claim an enduring or-, even a passing, station among even.the humblest of English humourists.' . This may seem to bo too harsh-; biit Swinburne was provoked by tho fact .that. Calverley taught his imitators' a fatally easy way of raising a laugh and that he himself had often no object except to raise one as easily as ho could. . Calverley's defect is poverty of subject matter. He wrote for a small class, not for the world; and ho wrote about things that are amusing only to that class. His parodies, unliko Swinburne's, are criticisms of the manner of , the poet parodied, not of his mind. They strike us as more amusing than!, just They arc, v were, mere prac-i tical jokes, brilliantly executed, whereas! Swinburne's parody oi' Mrs. Browning-is, a reductio ad absurdum, and we feel that Mrs..Browning herselt'might have written it in an unguarded moment. Parody, is; caricature; and'Jike the besticaHcatiu'es,'the best parodies have, an essential,'not merely an accidental, likeness, to the original.- They are concerned with.its very nature, not with- its mannerisms. Here, for instance, is a verso from-Swinburne's parody of Mrs. Browning in which the ■Woodlouso justifies itself to the Poet:— And I sacrifice, a Levite—and I palpitate, : ; a poet; ' Can I close dead ears against the rush and

resonance of things? " Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic; ■ : Earth's worst spawn, you said, and cursed «■ .me? look! approve me! I have wings. That hqs even some of the merits of the victim, and could only have been written by one who had read her with delight. There is only one of Swinburne's parodies, which is an attack upon the:writer parodied, and that is u long, dull failure. ■ But parody at best is a trivial kind of humorous poetry.' It only ceases ,to be trivinl when it is. practiced accidentally, as by Aristophanes, and with Foiae larger purpose. The parodist. has his material provided for him, and if it is a wellfnown poem he is sure to make someone laugh. But in other kinds of humorous .poetry the writer has to provide his own material; and he must bo judged by tho quality of that as well as of his execution. Hood, for all his ingenuity, is' becoming obsolete because his material is usnally poori He .makes verbal jokes round a subject-matter that is not essentially humorous. But fhe "Ingoldsby Legends"-■ are still good to read because their subjectmatter is humorous, and the "Bab Ballads" aro 'likely to last for the same reason. There are sound prosaic merits in both. Like Barham, Sir William Gilbert, of whom it is fad to speak suddenly in tho past, tense, had' usually a good story to tell. Like Barham, too, he had an original mastery of comic verse, and could laugh in it as tho poets sing in poetry.'' Of the two Barham wa? superior in energy and Gilbert in idea. It was Barham's peculiar gift to combine.a- headlong volubility of speech with a i mechanical perfection of versification so as to make us laugh at their incongruity. This was not a mere trick, for his high spirits were real, not affected for literary purposes, and he seems to write in verse rather than in prose for the same reason that a child dances whon'it might walk. Gilbert also had high spirits, but ho had more satiric power 'than Barham. He thought more, and combined -ideas withhigh spirits as ho combined extravagance with demurenoss. Ho could make prosaic sentences dance in verse as if they wcro solemn people mesmerised. Neither he nor Barham assumes a humorous manner; their fun seems to grow naturally out of their attitude towards life; they aro like .good actors whose art is being rather than acting. And that is tho secret of all hu'morous verse. You must be humorous before you' can writo it. No desire to ridicule things, no verbal dexterity, no trick of style, will give success. Unfortunately, the man who is not humorous by nature is the last to suspect his own deficiency.