belfry sits,' and once
when I read out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he
said, 'What is the meaning of "we come like water and like wind we go"?'
Or go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson's 'Beauty like sorrow
dwelleth everywhere,' and find out how utterly its enchantment depends on
an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has from the
unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or take with
you these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing to stumble
over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with Helen.

'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.'

I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to
turn the pages of, but one need not go east of the sun or west of the moon
in so simple a matter.

On the other hand, when Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of
tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the
baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his
work by chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made them
gather conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though they copy,
as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and the well-born.
The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike their own, just as
little boys in the street mock at strangely-dressed people and at old men
who talk to themselves.

There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries,
which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind from the
true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten tradition. Both
are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who have not
understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic, that clear
rhetoric of the 'popular poetry,' glimmer with thoughts and images whose
'ancestors were stout and wise,' 'anigh to Paradise' 'ere yet men knew the
gift of corn.' It may be that we know as little of their descent as men
knew of 'the man born to be a king' when they found him in that cradle
marked with the red lion crest, and yet we know somewhere in the heart
that they have been sung in temples, in ladies' chambers, and our nerves
quiver with a recognition they were shaped to by a thousand emotions. If
men did not remember or half remember impossible things,