Advantages

COMMENT

ADVANTAGES

N these days, when there seems to be a blight upon

civilization's orchard of industry and riches are falling

to the ground like rotten apples, when each man's fortune,

erect and healthy in the morning, may be stricken with a

pestilence before night, the poet has a certain advantage

over his neighbors. The dollar that danced away from him

during the boom is scarcely more elusive now under the

slump. The meagre meal that seemed pitiful when all the

world was feasting is almost a feast now that so many are

in the bread-line. And the philosophy of enchanting dis-

enchantment, that looked like a tinsel array of paradoxes

when the sun rode high, may shine in the dark with bright

gleams of essential truth. While the rich and great are

mortally hurt in their sense of security and their pride,

while they have little to think of but contrast and defla-

tion, the poet has the same stock of insubstantial treasure

which comforted him through years when others were

piling up more visible treasure in stocks and lands.

His blessed-be-little-or-nothing state of mind is not a

monopoly of his own; indeed, he has inherited it from the

saints and sages of all ages. The poet may not be a suffi-

ciently complete saint or sage to accept the philosophy

whole-heartedly, like Francis of Assisi or Diogenes; indeed,

his soul-or stomach-may rebel against some of its im-

plications when he sees brokers and bankers, however

vociferous with complaints, still holding on to luxurious

apartments and automobiles, and movie stars heroically

fighting the Depression at fifty thousand a picture. But

at least, if he is a poet worthy of the muse, he has eyes

wide open to the beauty of the world and of his share of

life in it, ears attuned to the music of its rhythms and the

magic of its words, and a mind keenly edged for cutting

under its shams and surfaces to the roots of its miraculous

growth and the rocky basis of its faith. Moreover, he is

aware of space and distances. He is not chained to the

earth, but travels with the planets through their vast

orbits around the sun, and he feels the enormous march of

the stars through incredible immensities of time.

It is something to be born with an imagination into this

world over-populated with groundlings. It is something

to have the power of utterance in a world where so many

voices stutter small nothings or are silent. It is something

to sing when others are scolding, to cry out when people

are sordid or complacent, to lift up some kind of a light

against fog or darkness. All these advantages are the

poet's heritage, even if now and then the gloom over-

shadows him and he forgets to live up to the full glory of

his destiny.

Others may have a share of it. The poet, or even his

fellows of the same genus in the other arts, may not be the

only ones to discover the magnificence of life; but in so far

as the man on the street discovers and lives in it, he also

is to that extent a poet, even though his less indulgent fate

did not accord him the gift of lyric utterance. H.M.