ONE-POEM MEN
One swallow may not make a summer, but one poem makes a poet. Immortality may be—and often has been—won with a single song. Nothing is known of Louisa Crawford except that she wrote “Kathleen Mavourneen;” William Douglas would have been forgotten many decades since save for “Annie Laurie;” William Shenstone’s name is kept alive only by his careless lines written at an inn at Henley. These are not, it will be observed, in any sense great poems; but they have one quality in common, that vein of pensive sentiment which, as W. P. Trent puts it, “finds an echo in the universal human heart”—an echo which Time seems powerless to diminish.
Not infrequently, out of a lifetime of metrical composition, out of thousands of lines produced with fearful labor, only a dozen or so survive. (To survive, be it understood, is to keep on living; and no poem can be said to live unless it is read and loved and quoted.) Blanco White’s sonnet, “To Night,” was considered by Coleridge the finest in the language,—and it represents the sum of White’s poetic achievement. Francis William Bourdillon has covered many reams of paper during the course of a long
3
