ation.

Taine says that "the _creative_ power is the poet's greatest gift, and
communicates an extraordinary significance to his words"; and further,
that "he had the prodigious faculty of seeing in a twinkling of an eye
a complete character."[2]

The poet does not bring those characters to us by description, but he
causes them to speak in words so true and apposite to the character he
conceives that we seem to know the individuals from what they say and
not from what the poet wrote or said. But the poet goes much farther,
and in all his works presents surroundings and accessories, impalpable
but certain, which fit the characters and their moods and actions. The
picture of morning in _Venus and Adonis_ is apposite to the rich,
sensuous and brilliant colorings of the queen of love; the reference
in _Romeo and Juliet_ to the song of the nightingale "on yond'
pomegranate tree" is but an incident to the soft, warm and
love-inviting night; Rosalind moves and talks to the quickstep of the
forest; in _Macbeth_ the incantation of the witches is but the outward
expression of an overmastering fate, whose presence is felt throughout
the play. Let us then, in studying the Sonnets, consider that they are
from the same great master as the dramas. And we shall be thus
prepared, where the meaning seems plain and obvious, to believe that
the writer meant what he said, and to reject any interpretation which
implies that when he came to speak of himself he said what he did not
mean, or filled the picture with descriptions, situations or emotions,
incongruous or inappropriate. And if in so reading they seem clear and
connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted.
We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that
they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius of the poet,
cribbed and confined by the fashion of the time, forgot to soar, and
limped and waddled in the footsteps of the inconspicuous sonneteers
of the Elizabethan era.

I would illustrate my meaning. Sonnet CXXVI. is sometimes said to be
an invocation to Cupid.[3] That seems to me to destroy all its grace
and beauty. The first two lines of the Sonnet,

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour--

are quite appropriate, if addressed to the god of love. But the lines
succeeding are quite the reverse. In effect they say that you have not
grown old because Nature, idealized as