POETS AND LITERALISTS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19162, 19 November 1927, Page 13

POETS AND LITERALISTS.

(WHITTES JOB THB FBBSS.)

[By Cyrano.]

There is a story of a senior wrangler who, having read a famous poem, asked what it proved. There are no longer senior wranglers, but the body of literalists to which they belonged are still with us, bent on plucking the heart out of the poet's mysteries. A member of that bodv is the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, which recently issued a report solemnly declaring that having made a survey of Gloucester Harbour, Mass., including the vicinity of the Reef of Norman's Woe, it could locate no remains ?Ji vvr , cck of tho Hesperus, and, further, that there never was such a wreck save in the poet's mind. No one outside the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey ever worried himself about the proved reality of the Hesperus story. No one ever wanted to know how many tons the schooner registered, where she was bound from and to, what the captain's name was, or whether she carried coals, cod, or cheap tin trays. Generation after generation has enjoyed "The Wreck of the Hesperus"—which contains some really fine lines, such as "Last night the moon had a golden ring; to-night no moon we see"—without troubling its head, about facts as recordable in Customs entries, Government charts, and newspaper reports. Now, however, State Department assures us that the story is fiction, and perhaps expects us to lament the shattering of another idol.

Literary America has taken the exposure with a seriousness that is almost as funny as the action of the Coast Survey. We must not blame it, however, for tho Hesperus is really a valuable possession. It is explained that Longfellow had some basis of fact for his poem. One night in 1839 a number of vessels were wrecked on a reef called Norman's Woe, and it was reported at the time *that a woman's body, lashed to a piece of wreckage, had been washed ashore. Longfellow noted tho wrecks in his diary, wrote down the name "Hesperus" as that of one of the lost vessels, and added: "1 must write a ballad on this." No schooner Hesperus was wrecked on Norman's Woe, but there was a iship of that name that got into difficulties somewhere else and suffered minor injuries. Naturally the name Hesperus appealed to Longfellow; the name and its associations have been moving poets all through history. Also any poet worth his salt would catch at a name like "Norman's Woe.". It is what is colloquially called "a gift." He imagined the rest, and did it well. The real woman who perished was 55 years of age. Longfellow changed! her into tho skipper's daughter, and who will blame him?

An American newspaper asks: "If a poet cannot invent a wreck without being manhandled by unpoetic mapmakers, what under Heaven can he do? Good or bad, the ballad is neither better nor worse because it is about a ship that never- was." Another newspaper says the "siege of Troy and the carrying of the message from Ghent to Aix are equally fictitious." The siege of Troy, it might have added, is now regarded in some quarters as a trade war—an illustration of the Marxian doctrine of the interpretation of history—but it still has power to thrill the worldl. The literalist, however, will not be completely extinguished. He will continue to try to explain the witches of "Macbeth" in terms # of reality, or to correct by astronomical calculations the error of the poet who introduced a moon into the burial of Sir John Moore, or to point out that when Tennyson wrote, "Every moment dies a man, every moment one is born," the poet was absurd, because such a balancing of the death_ and birth rates would result in a stationary population. (It may be remembered that a mathematically minded Englishman seriously suggested that the second line should read "Every moment one and a sixteenth is born.") The literalist, however, is fairly harmless. Despite his activities man will continue to exercise his imagination, and to count the imagined! thing often higher than what can be measured with a theodolite and computed on a weighbridge.