God only makes the live shape at a jet.
Interpretative reading goes on in the same way. After a reader's long
familiarity with a poem, and when he thinks he has realized all its
possibilities of vocal effectiveness, some new vocal movement on a
single word, it may be, is suggested, which is a decided contribution to
the effect before reached. The play of Hamlet abounds in little
speeches, and single words, even, whose possibilities of expressiveness
can hardly be exhausted. Every great poet writes, at times, more
significantly than he knows.
In the creation of every great work of genius, a large degree of
unconscious might enters; and this unconscious might the reader with the
requisite degree of spiritual susceptibility may respond to. This is an
activity of the highest order on the part of a reader. Melody, harmony,
and every mode of form, are, to some extent, the product of an
unconscious might. Deep feeling attracts to itself such elements of
language as serve best to conduct it. Assonance, especially, is a
manifestation of it. Paradise Lost abounds with the assonance which the
dominant feeling of the poet induced.
When Hamlet is subjecting his friends to a searching examination in
regard to the appearance of the ghost of his father, he asks 'His beard
was grisly?' and then adds, 'no.' (The word is followed by a period, in
the Folio.) What a varied expressiveness this little word 'no' admits
of! When Macbeth says to his wife, when they are considering the murder
of the king, 'If we should fail?' she replies 'We fail?' Though the
interrogative is used in the Folio, the period would, perhaps, be the
better pointing. However that be, the reading of 'we fail' involves much
consideration; and so does the reading of thousands of single words in
Shakespeare's Plays.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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