“A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.  Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

“What was meant by the invective against him who had no music in his soul?

“To sum up this long rigmarole, I have, dear B——­, what you, no doubt, perceive, for the metaphysical poets as poets, the most sovereign contempt.  That they have followers proves nothing: 

  “’No Indian prince has to his palace
  More followers than a thief to the gallows.’”

* * * * *

SONNET—­TO SCIENCE.

  SCIENCE! true daughter of Old Time thou art! 
    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes. 
  Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
    Vulture, whose wings are dull realities
  How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
    Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
  To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
    Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing! 
  Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? 
    And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
  To seek a shelter in some happier star? 
    Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
  The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
  The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

1829.

* * * * *

Private reasons—­some of which have reference to the sin of plagiarism, and others to the date of Tennyson’s first poems [1]—­have induced me, after some hesitation, to republish these, the crude compositions of my earliest boyhood.  They are printed ’verbatim’—­without alteration from the original edition—­the date of which is too remote to be judiciously acknowledged.—­E.  A. P. (1845).

[Footnote 1:  This refers to the accusation brought against Edgar Poe that he was a copyist of Tennyson.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

AL AARAAF. [1]

PART I.

  O! nothing earthly save the ray
  (Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty’s eye,
  As in those gardens where the day
  Springs from the gems of Circassy—­
  O! nothing earthly save the thrill
  Of melody in woodland rill—­
  Or (music of the passion-hearted)
  Joy’s voice so peacefully departed
  That like the murmur in the shell,
  Its echo dwelleth and will dwell—­
  O! nothing of the dross of ours—­
  Yet all the beauty—­all the flowers
  That list our Love, and deck our bowers—­
  Adorn yon world afar, afar—­
  The wandering star.