in poetry that _is_
poetry.

"Bring forth the horse!" The horse was brought:
In truth he was a noble steed!

says Byron in _Mazeppa_. If the two words mean the same here, transpose
them:

"Bring forth the steed!" The steed was brought:
In truth he was a noble horse!

and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me take a line certainly
very free from "poetic diction:"

To be or not to be, that is the question.

You may say that this means the same as "What is just now occupying my
attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or
putting an end to myself." And for practical purposes--the purpose, for
example, of a coroner--it does. But as the second version altogether
misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or
logical purpose be said to have the same sense? Hamlet was well able to
"unpack his heart with words," but he will not unpack it with our
paraphrases.

These considerations apply equally to versification. If I take the
famous line which describes how the souls of the dead stood waiting by
the river, imploring a passage from Charon:

Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore,

and if I translate it, "and were stretching forth their hands in longing
for the further bank," the charm of the original has fled. Why has it
fled? Partly (but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
for five words, and those the words of Virgil, twelve words, and those
my own. In some measure because I have turned into rhythmless prose a
line of verse which, as mere sound, has unusual beauty. But much more
because in doing so I have also changed the _meaning_ of Virgil's line.
What that meaning is _I_ cannot say: Virgil has said it. But I can see
this much, that the translation conveys a far less vivid picture of the
outstretched hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a far less
poignant sense of the distance of the shore and the longing of the
souls. And it does so partly because this picture and this sense are
conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the
long-drawn sound of "tendebantque," through the time occupied by the
five syllables and therefore by the idea of "ulterioris," and through
the identity of the long sound "or" in the penultimate syllables of
"ulterioris amore"--all this, and much more, apprehended not in this
analytical fashion, nor as _added_ to