teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence, should express perfectly the writer’s perception, feeling, image, or thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats’s, we exclaim, ‘That is the thing itself’; so that, to quote Arnold, the words are ‘symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized,’ or, in our technical language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is, in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the aspect of form. 19 6 No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he takes 20 the word ‘meaning’ in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to poetry. People say, for instance, ‘steed’ and ‘horse’ have the same meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that is poetry. 20 ‘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?
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