"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

The rainbow of the moony main.

It was a strange and lovely sight
To see the puny goblin there,
He seemed an angel form of light
With azure wing and sunny hair,
Throned on a cloud of purple fair
Circled with blue and edged with white
And sitting at the fall of even
Beneath the bow of summer heaven.

The [lines of the last verse], if considered without their
context, have a certain air of dignity, elegance, and chastity of
thought. If however we apply the context, we are immediately
overwhelmed with the grotesque. It is impossible to read without
laughing, such expressions as "It was a strange and lovely sight"- "He
seemed an angel form of light"- "And sitting at the fall of even,
beneath the bow of summer heaven" to a Fairy- a goblin- an Ouphe- half
an inch high, dressed in an acorn helmet and butterfly-cloak, and
sitting on the water in a muscleshell, with a "brown-backed
sturgeon" turning somersets over his head.
In a world where evil is a mere consequence of good, and good a mere
consequence of evil- in short where all of which we have any
conception is good or bad only by comparison- we have never yet been
fully able to appreciate the validity of that decision which would
debar the critic from enforcing upon his readers the merits or
demerits of a work with another. It seems to us that an adage has
had more to do with this popular feeling than any just reason
founded upon common sense. Thinking thus, we shall have no scruple
in illustrating our opinion in regard to what is not Ideality or the
Poetic Power, by an example of what is.*

* As examples of entire poems of the purest ideality, we would
cite the Prometheus Vinctus of Aeschylus, the Inferno of Dante,
Cervantes' Destruction of Numantia, the Comus of Milton, Pope's Rape
of the Lock, Burns' Tam O'Shanter, the Auncient Mariner, the
Christabel, and the Kubla Khan of Coleridge, and most especially the
Sensitive Plant of Shelley, and the Nightingale of Keats. We have seen
American poems evincing the faculty in the highest degree.

We have already given the description of the Sylphid Queen in the
Culprit Fay. In the Queen Mab of Shelley a Fairy is thus introduced-

Those who had looked upon the sight
Passing all human glory,
Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene,
Heard not the night wind's rush,
Heard not an earthly sound,
Saw but the fairy pageant,