Accordingly there is nothing more common than verse bewailing the singer's inarticulateness. [Footnote: See Tennyson, _In Memoriam_, "For words, like nature, half reveal"; Oliver Wendell Holmes, _To my Readers_; Mrs. Browning, _The Soul's Expression_; Jean Ingelow, _A Lily and a Lute_; Coventry Patmore, _Dead Language_; Swinburne, _The Lute and the Lyre, Plus Intra_; Francis Thompson, _Daphne_; Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; Richard Gilder, _Art and Life_; Alice Meynell, _Singers to Come_; Edward Dowden, _Unuttered_; Max Ehrmann, _Tell Me_; Alfred Noyes, _The Sculptor_; William Rose Benet, _Thwarted Utterance_; Robert Silliman Hillyer, _Even as Love Grows More_; Daniel Henderson, _Lover and Lyre_; Dorothea Lawrence Mann, _To Imagination_; John Hall Wheelock, _Rossetti_; Sara Teasdale, _The Net_; Lawrence Binyon, _If I Could Sing the Song of Her_.] Frequently these confessions of the impossibility of expression are coupled with the bitterest tirades against a stupid audience, which refuses to take the poet's genius on trust, and which remains utterly unmoved by his avowals that he has much to say to it that lies too deep for utterance. Such an outlet for the poet's very natural petulance is likely to seem absurd enough to us. It is surely not the fault of his hearers, we are inclined to tell him gently, that he suffers an impediment in his speech. Yet, after all, we may be mistaken. It is significant that the singers who are most aware of their inarticulateness are not the romanticists, who, supposedly, took no thought for a possible audience; but they are the later poets, who are obsessed with the idea that they have a message. Emily Dickinson, herself as untroubled as any singer about her public, yet puts the problem for us. She avers, I found the phrase to every thought I ever had, but one; And that defies me,--as a hand Did try to chalk the sun. To races nurtured in the dark;-- How would your own begin? Can blaze be done in cochineal, Or noon in mazarin? "To races nurtured in the dark." There lies a prolific source to the poet's difficulties. His task is not merely to ensure the permanence of his own resplendent vision, but to interpret it to men who take their darkness for light. As Emerson expresses it in his translation of Zoroaster, the poet's task is "inscribing things unapparent in the apparent fabrication of the world." [Footnote: _Essay on Imagination_.]