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There is, it seems, in philosophy, a charming concept which is called ‘the specious present’. It means that present which is commonly regarded as the present, being neither the immediate infinitely passing now nor the eternal now; it is the present as at any particular time considered in relation to the past and the future; and it may in consequence be five minutes, or a year, or any longer period, any period so long as it is conceived as opposed to the complementary concepts of a past and a future. There are therefore three presents—the true present, the specious present, the eternal present.

It is not for these elementary studies to plunge into philosophy; they do but borrow a likeness. In man, considered as a subject for poetry, there are three selves—his immediate self, his specious self, and his eternal self. Good poetry can be made out of all these.

Poetry which makes itself out of man’s immediate self is normally—let us be rash and say at once—lyric: either in actual lyrics or lyrical moments. It is that poetry which succeeds in turning one poignant emotion into another poignant emotion, without introducing any modifying or transmuting elements, except of course itself.

I would I were where Helen lies

On fair Kirconnell Lea.

Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!

O dark, dark, dark! amid the blaze of noon.

The tendency of such movements is towards themselves alone. The poetry is of course complex, however simple, for the reason suggested above: if you take an emotion and express it in a vehement pattern of associative words, you have a different though perhaps allied emotion. ‘I would I were where Helen lies’ is not the same thing as grief for Helen: it even in a sense contradicts it, for who would want to be where Helen lies while we can enjoy her death so marvellously? Who would wish Milton to see while we can enjoy his blindness so greatly? Or if one does, who does not recognize that he is introducing a non-poetic judgement, and refusing poetry for the sake of sympathy or pity or something equally outside itself? But though the poetic result may be necessarily complex even in its simplest form, yet its subject has been simple, and its effort has been towards a simplicity of its own. It is an effort to catch the sharpest poignancy of some experience, a sharpness which even in life we so often hardly realize. It takes that, it multiplies it by itself, it presents us with another immediate delight. It attempts to take the most immediate self of man and turn it into the most direct poetry.

But, as the immediate present can never be understood, because in being understood it is bound to become the specious present, so the immediate self can hardly ever be used. Poetry takes more frequently as its subject the specious self: the Ode to a Nightingale is a great example. There a whole present awareness, intense, but enlarged from the direct moment and emotion, is turned into an enlarged poetic experience. ‘Away, away! for I will fly to thee’ images a different kind of present and of self from ‘I would I were where Helen lies’. It is this kind of poetry which is most common; it is also this kind of poetry which is apt to become, in the worst sense, specious poetry. But that fact does not spoil the real poetry, any more than our frequent misunderstanding and misuse of the specious present alters the fact of the specious present. It is this kind of self which offers poetry its most frequent opportunities. The Ancient Mariner, the Vanity of Human Wishes, the Unknown Eros, the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, Comus are, considered as whole poems, examples. They may all of them, sometimes or often, change into an effort at the simplicity of the immediate self. But as a general rule the humanity which they transmute contains space and time within it, and that space and time are of the nature of the verse.

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide

Visit’st the bottom of the monstrous world.

I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost

Who died before the god of love was born.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.

If music be the food of love, play on;

Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,

The appetite may sicken and so die.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blest.

For soul is form and doth the body make.

And so on, and so on. This is the specious self as the subject of poetry.

And the eternal present? or, in the present parallel, the eternal self? Or (may we say?) eternal poetry? That certainly is a different and more difficult thing, since we have not yet discovered any way of writing poetry in time which shall include all the experiences of time—‘the perfect and simultaneous possession of everlasting life’. But the greatest poetic experiences are of a nature which include the lesser. They do not explain them philosophically; they relate them poetically. They are in general of two kinds: (i) the complete and complex experience of a great poem—such as Paradise Lost, (ii) the lines which, generally but not always, in such poems carry in themselves the sense of much experience known and determined. The nearest we can get to eternity is either all moments or one moment. But then the one moment must, in that aspect, be felt as entirely self-contained; it must definitely not ‘look before and after’. Such lines nevertheless may be assisted in their effect by their place in a poem. The last lines of Paradise Regained—

He unobserved

Home to his mother’s house private returned

—have their amazing effect partly by their place. They do not look before, but all that has gone before leads up to and contrasts with that actual fact; in a sense, all Paradise Regained does but define that moment. This is the conclusion of the whole matter, but it also contains the whole matter, as, for example, ‘who this is we must learn’ does not. We have learnt; we know who the ‘He’ is, and what ‘unobserved’ and ‘private’ imply, and why ‘his mother’s house’ and how ‘returned’. All great poetry in a sense is final.

My desolation doth begin to make

A better life,

is as complete as

I’ll be your wife if you will marry me;

If not I’ll die your maid, to be your fellow

You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant

Whether you will or no.

Both of these moments are perfect; both yet look forward to some other moment. It is their nature to do so; to be complete with the awareness of something else. But the second gathers up that future and defines it and brings it back into itself, so that we feel that that defined future does but help now to define the moment. The kind of betterness which it foresees over the past is explained. This is Miranda absolutely aware of herself and what she will be.

Warring in heaven against heaven’s matchless king—

is another example. A complete and obstinate futility is perfectly expressed; all the future is defined in ‘matchless’, all the insanity in ‘in heaven against heaven’s ... king’. It is Satan absolutely aware of his own act, and all the rest of the celestial war does but expand and explain it. Such lines certainly are not to be called eternal. But they are of a greater nature than the lines which go to and fro in the specious self, for they define that whole self. They define it according to the way in which the poet chooses to know it: that is, they refer to no other faculty than our own recognition of them. Like life, they will only be known on their own terms, whereas most prose pretends that it can be known on terms of mutual accommodation, And even prose which tries to abandon that pretence is governed by the lack of the arbitrary pattern, the ostentatiously recurrent base.