And then he cries to the waves to tell him what they have been
whispering all the time.
Whereto answering, the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper'd me through the night and very plainly before day-break,
Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.
This theme, it will be remembered, is worked out more fully in
the Lincoln poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," with
the "Song of Death," too long, alas, to quote here--it would be
delightful even to inscribe the words--which seems to me for
splendour of language, sweetness of rhythm, and stateliness of
cadence--to say nothing of the magnificence of the thought--to be
incontestably among the very greatest poems of the world.
If Whitman could always have written so! Then he need hardly have
said that the strongest and sweetest songs remained to be sung; but
this, and many other gems of poetry, lie in radiant fragments among
the turbid and weltering rush of his strange verse; and thus one
sees that if there is indeed a law of art, it lies close to the
instinct of suppression and omission. One may think anything; one
may say most things; but if one means to sway the human heart by
that one particular gift of words, ordered and melodiously
intertwined, one must heed what experience tells the aspirant--that
no fervour of thought, or exuberance of utterance, can make up for
the harmony of the firmly touched lyre, and the music of the
unuttered word.
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