When Julia Bryant, the daughter of William Cullen Bryant, was a child, a neighbor of the poet made her first call, and was shown into the parlor. She found the small Julia seated on the floor with an illustrated volume of Milton in her lap. She knew, of course, that the pictures and not the text engaged the child’s attention, but by way of beginning an acquaintance, she asked: “Reading poetry already, little girl”? Julia looked up and regarded her gravely. Then with an air of politely correcting ignorance, she explained: “People don’t _read_ poetry. Papas write poetry, and mamas sing poetry, and little girls learn to say poetry, but nobody reads poetry. That isn’t what it’s for.” If the several members of all families were as happily accounted for as those in Bryant’s household, the Muses would not live so remote from this world. That mothers sing poetry and little girls say it is enough to keep it everlastingly alive. The trouble is that few households are blessed with papas who write poetry; and there are none too many papas who read it. If we have not learned to read poetry, let us begin now. Suppose we read and commit to memory the following stanza, and then talk a little about it. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I heard this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown: Perhaps the self-same song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn; The same that oft-times hath Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. This is from Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” It is one of the most musical, most magical stanzas in all English poetry; that much anyone can tell you who has read the poets. But to tell you in what consists its glory is beyond any critic who is not a poet; nothing of analysis can add to the effect it is making in your ears, in your brain, now that you have committed it to memory. One of the best of English critics--and he was a poet, too--Matthew Arnold, in his essay, “The Study of Poetry,” made but a dull and wordy discourse when he tried to tell what the qualities of poetry are. Only by reading the rest of the poem, and then the rest of Keats, and then other poets, can you increase for yourself the delight of those wonderful lines. If they do not tempt you to the great excursion into the poets, you have not read them over, you have not repeated them aloud often enough. Only for the sake of dwelling upon these lines, and because we have agreed to talk about poetry, and not because our comment can reveal the secret, let us go back and study the stanza.