When Lady Macbeth, sleep-walking, complains that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand,” these perfumes are not merely typically sweet smells to drown the reek of blood. They represent also her ambitions for the luxury of a Queen, and the conflict of luxurious ambition against fate and damnation is as one-sided as before. Or take Webster’s most famous line in his Duchess of Malfi: Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young, spoken by Ferdinand over the Duchess’ body; and that word “dazzle” does duty for two emotions at once, sun-dazzled awe at loveliness, tear-dazzled grief for early death. The effect of these distractions of mind is so often an appeal to our pity, even for the murderers or for the man who has had his fill of “vaine pleasure for 24 yeares” that to rouse this pity has been taken, wrongly, I think, as the chief end of poetry. Poetry is not always tragedy; and there is no pity stirred by Captain Tobias Hume’s love song “Faine would I change this note, To which false love has charmed me,” or in Andrew Marvell’s Mower’s address to the glow-worms: Ye country comets that portend No war nor prince’s funeral, Shining unto no higher end Than to presage the grass’s fall. There is no pity either for Hume’s lover who suddenly discovers that he has been making a sad song about nothing, or for Marvell’s glow-worms and their rusticity and slightness of aim. In the first case Love stands up in its glory against the feeble whining of minor poets; in the second, thoughts of terror and majesty, the heavens themselves blazing forth the death of princes, conflict ineffectually with security and peace, the evening glow-worm prophesying fair weather for mowing next morning, and meanwhile lighting rustic lovers to their tryst. V THE PATTERN UNDERNEATH The power of surprise which marks all true poetry, seems to result from a foreknowledge of certain unwitting processes of the reader’s mind, for which the poet more or less deliberately provides. The underlying associations of each word in a poem form close combinations of emotion unexpressed by the bare verbal pattern. In this way the poet may be compared with a father piecing together a picture-block puzzle for his children. He surprises them at last by turning over the completed picture, and showing them that by the act of assembling the scattered parts of “Red Riding Hood with the Basket of Food” he has all the while been building up unnoticed underneath another scene of the tragedy--“The Wolf eating the Grandmother.” The analogy can be more closely pressed; careless arrangement of the less important pieces or wilfully decorative borrowing from another picture altogether may look very well in the upper scene, but what confusion below!