significant form. Perhaps on this point I may in Oxford appeal to
authority, that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the latter at any
rate an authority whom the formalist will not despise. What is the gist
of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one
virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence,
should express perfectly the writer's perception, feeling, image, or
thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we
exclaim, 'That is the thing itself'; so that, to quote Arnold, the words
are 'symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized,' or, in our technical
language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is,
in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own
words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A
translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh
dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one
chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the
aspect of form.

No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were
it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he
takes the word 'meaning' in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to
poetry. People say, for instance, 'steed' and 'horse' have the same
meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that _is_
poetry.

'Bring forth the horse!' The horse was brought:
In truth he was a noble steed!

says Byron in _Mazeppa_. If the two words mean the same here, transpose
them:

'Bring forth the steed!' The steed was brought:
In truth he was a noble horse!

and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me take a line certainly
very free from 'poetic diction':

To be or not to be, that is the question.

You may say that this means the same as 'What is just now occupying my
attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or
putting an end to myself.' And for practical purposes--the purpose, for
example, of a coroner--it does. But as the second version altogether
misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or
logical purpose be said to have the same sense? Hamlet was well able to
'unpack his heart with words,' but he will not unpack it with our
paraphrases.

[Sidenote: VERSIFICATION]

These considerations apply equally to ve