"By the rivers of Babylon There we sat down, yea, we wept, When we remembered Zion. Upon the willows in the midst thereof We hanged up our harps. For there they that led us captive required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song In a strange land?"
How many of our readers would be able to locate the above piece of poetry? The thought probably is familiar but does not the form in which it is here printed set it in a new light?
Some, noting the absence of rhymes and the uneven length of the lines, may question our right to call this selection a poem. If it was meant as a poem, others will say, the author must have been a Whitmanite before Whitman. That, however, would not be as improbable as it might seem at first.
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HAS anyone ever accused Milton of being a Whitmanite? He could not have been, of course, strictly speaking. His puritanic spirit stands at the opposite pole of chaste restraint from that of Whitman. We should not suspect him of displaying any kinship with the poet of the "barbaric yawp," even by anticipation. Nevertheless, Milton did have notions as to poetic form that might be described as Whitmanesque, if one did not shrink from the implication of honor in that terminology. But with the specimen above quoted from an older source before us, it would perhaps be more appropriate
to designate Milton's Whitmanism as Biblicalism.
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MILTON objected to rhyme because he thought it an undignified contrivance of modern times. The ancients didn't have it and wrote pretty good poetry. Rhyme, he says, interferes with the true and natural expression of thought. But, though discarding rhyme, he held to a regular meter in his Paradise Lost. In Samson Agonistes he goes farther and takes liberties with his rhythm like this:
The blind Samson speaks: "O first-created beam, and thou great Word, 'Let there be light, and light was over all.' Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree? The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night, Hid in the vacant interlunar cave. Since light so necessary is to life, And almost life itself, if it be true That light is in the soul, She all in every part, why was the sight To such a tender ball as the eye confined, So obvious and so easy to be quenched, And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused, That she might look at will through every pore?"
Again, seeing Samson's wife Dalila, approaching, the Chorus breaks out in more irregular fashion: But who is this? What thing of sea or land— Female of sex it seems— That, so bedecked, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing, Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for the isles