Yet with difficulty; for there is an antagonism among the elements:
when the music is insistent, the thought is obscured; when the images
are elaborate, their meaning is lost to sight; when the thought is
subtle or profound, it rejects the image and is careless of sound.
Swinburne's poetry is full of philosophy, but is so sensuous and musical
that we miss its thoughts; Browning is too subtle a thinker to be a
musician. The complexity of poetry is the source of its strength,
lending it something of the inwardness of music and the plasticity of
the pictorial arts; but is also the source of its weakness. Seldom
does it achieve the technical purity and perfection of music and
painting and sculpture. Music has a clear and simple medium, painting
and sculpture work with colors and forms which almost are what they
represent; but word-sounds are not what they mean, and what they mean
is not precisely the same as the images which they evoke; too often
the correspondence is factitious and artificial, rarely is there fusion.
Yet, as I have tried to show, when meaning is made central, sound may
fit it closely, and when the meaning is emotional, the music of sound
may echo its cry, and the image, instead of rebelling, may serve.
Emotional thought is the essence of poetry and the link between its
music and its pictures.
Of the different modes of poetry, the lyric has rightly seemed the
most typical. Being an expression of a single, simple mood, its
subject-matter is most closely akin to the musical expressiveness of
the rhythm and euphony of the medium.
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