ers vividly after his
reading, those which have become a part of himself. If the student
makes his choice frankly and sincerely, he has, in making it, begun
his study. Then let him frame for himself or get from his leader, if
he has one, a list of the questions which each poem is to answer for
him. If the work be really poetry, its study ought to give a help
toward the solution of the first great problems: "What is poetry?" and
"What is its revelation to the life of our senses, our hearts, and our
souls?" We have a right to ask of each poem three questions: "How does
it charm our senses?"; "How does it make the meaning of things clearer
for us?"; "How does it bring to us a renewal of life?" The first
question is better fitted for private study than for class
investigation, the senses being delicate organs and shy in company.
Let the minute matters of form and structure be gone over at home. Let
the student work out the metre, the typical line, and the variations
by which the poet gets his effects, the metaphors, the alliterations,
the consonant and vowel harmonies. It will aid if this work be made as
definite and as exact as an investigation in a scientific laboratory.
But all this should be the student's home work. In the class the large
divisions of the poem should be sympathetically shown, so that each
student will comprehend the poem as a whole as the poet must have
conceived it. Then as some one reads aloud the lines the music of the
rhythms will come by assimilation rather than by analysis. Poetry
parallels the real with the ideal to make a harmony before undreamed
of. So in the lines sound re-echoes sound, and a subtle music but half
perceived sings itself out of the moving notes.

What burden this music bears is the second question. Poetry differs
from prose in that it lifts the thought so that its highest relations
and suggestions are made known. We have a right therefore to parallel
the prose sight with the poetic visions and to find in what the one
transcends the other. If we are studying the "Idylls of the King," for
instance, we may fitly ask what was the story as the poet took it, and
into what has he transformed it for us. This study of the thought of
the poem is an excellent subject for class work. The questions should
be made definite and so grouped that sections of the class can choose
one or another phase of the problem; the conferences should be so
directed that a few clearly worked-out and thoroughl