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

discovered in the plot, conception, or general execution of the
poem. The opening stanza will afford us a tolerable example.

Tis the middle watch of a summer's night-
The earth is dark but the heavens are bright
Naught is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Cronest,
She mellows the shades of his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below,
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bow and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark-
Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.

There is Ideality in these lines- but except in the case of the
[second and the fourteenth lines]- it is Ideality not of a high order.
We have, it is true, a collection of natural objects, each
individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature,
capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic
Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the
beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to
behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let
us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will
produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make
up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as
moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains, &c., shall be capable of exciting
it,- it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line
"the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple
mention of the "dark earth" "and the bright heaven," we have,
directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky
compensating for the darkness of the earth- and thus, indirectly, of
the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of the
present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word
but between the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven"- this
introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by
the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression
"glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral
sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.
In one or two shorter passages of the Culprit Fay the poet will
recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish
it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them
without farther comment.

The winds are whist, and the owl is still,