Martin Luther. German Student Life. Poetry

Seitenzahl:

88

Gewicht:

141 g

Erschienen bei:

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Kurzbeschreibung

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. POETRY. VX7HAT is poetry? " Pale Melancholy sat retired." Thank you, William Collins. That is poetry. Any other line of your exquisite Passion-ode might have done as well, but this will serve our purpose in the meantime. "Pale Melancholy sat retired." You give it to Dr. Syntax and the metrical measure, and Dr. Syntax and the metrical measure try it by their rules of syntax and prosody, and pronounce it quite correct. But there is obviously something here with which Dr. Syntax and the metrical measure have nothing to do and cannot touch, a sad, beautiful, saintly thing, called Poetry. You might give it to a sculptor like Canova, and he would put it into marble for you, realizing the fable of the Niobe that wept with grief till she was turned into stone. The marble would melt away among his fingers as he transfused the sorrow into it, and when the statue was finished it might be placed away on some monumental tomb, and in sepulchral crypt, in marble paleness and in darkest shadow, " Pale Melancholy sits retired," and it is still poetry?poetry in marble. You might give it to a painter like Cor- reggio, and he would put it upon canvas for you, drawing a lovely face and figure, like that of his famous " Magdalene of the Desert," subordinating the earthly beauty to the diviner beauty of sadness, and he would find you a peculiar tint of paleness, not the glistening paleness of the lily, nor the heavenly paleness of the Madonna, nor the ghastly paleness of the dead, but that peculiar tint of paleness that haunts him from the faces of the woe-begone, and thathe puts upon his " Penseroso"; and the whole toned down in a light darkened still further by curtains of shadow; then again in a picture, " with eyes upraised as one inspired," " Pale Melancholy sits r...

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Mehr von:  William Bruce Robertson, Cambridge Scholars Publishing