INTERPRETATION OF THE PRINTED PAGE

CHAPTER I

GROUPING

Read aloud these lines with no other object than just to utter the words:

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:-
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner
Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes.
A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel—
That blue blade that the king's son bears,—but this
Blunt thing!" he snapt and flung it from his
hand,

And lowering crept away and left the field.

Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead,
And weaponless, and saw the broken sword,
Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,

And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout
Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down,

And saved a great cause that heroic day.

-SILL: Opportunity.

Now read the first six lines silently, trying to get the author's meaning:

This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream:-
There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged

A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. Have you not noticed in this careful reading a tendency to break up the lines into groups of words? Read the poem again to yourself, very carefully, and note that the more determined you are to get the meaning the slower will you read and the more groups will you make. We might rearrange it something like this:

This I beheld,

or dreamed it in a dream:—
There spread a cloud of dust

along a plain;

And underneath the cloud,

or in it,

raged A furious battle,

and men yelled,

and swords Shocked upon swords and shields.

A prince's banner Wavered,

then staggered backward,

hemmed by foes.

A craven hung along the battle's edge,

And thought,

"Had I a sword of keener steel

That blue blade that the king's son bears,

but this Blunt thing-!"

he snapt

and flung it from his hand,

And lowering

crept away

and left the field.

Then came the king's son,

wounded,

sore bestead,

And weaponless,

and saw the broken sword,

Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand,
And ran and snatched it,

and with battle-shout Lifted afresh
he hewed his enemy down,

And saved a great cause
that heroic day.

This deliberate study of the grouping has compelled you to read slowly and carefully; and that is the sole purpose of the lesson. It is easy to recognize words and then to pronounce them, but if one is to get the meaning he must do hard thinking. The author of this poem saw an entire picture, saw a good deal of it in one glance-just as you can close your eyes and recall some picture of home, or sea, or landscape, or farm-but when he wanted us to see what he had seen he had to describe it group by group. We must then get these groups one by one and build them up again into complete pictures. For instance, in the lines:

There spread a cloud of dust along a plain;
And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged
A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords
Shocked upon swords and shields,

we see a cloud of dust spreading along a plain, and in the midst of the cloud a battle raging wherein swords

If we

and shields shock, and men yell and scream. were looking at a battlefield we should take in at a glance all that the author here describes; but when we read the words, so accustomed are we to read carelessly and without conscious determination to get the meaning, most of us get but a small fraction of the story.

In this first example I have purposely chosen a simple poem. There are no hard words, and the construction is easy. If there were many strange words, and sentences long and involved, there would be several kinds of difficulties to overcome besides that of grouping. But we are taking one step at a time.

Some of the grouping difficulties in Opportunity are clearly due to the poetic form; but in prose, because it looks easier than verse, there is more temptation than in poetry to run words together without regard for the meaning. Read silently and hurriedly this passage from Silas Marner:

The disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the very first by the loss of his long-stored gold: the coins he earned afterwards seemed as irrelevant as stones brought to complete a house suddenly buried by an earthquake; the sense of bereavement was too heavy upon him for the old thrill of satisfaction to rise again at the touch of the newly-earned coin. And now something had come to replace his hoard which gave a growing purpose to the earnings, drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money.

Now in order that no part of the picture may possibly escape us let us group the lines as follows:

The disposition to hoard
had been utterly crushed
at the very first

by the loss of his long-stored gold:
the coins he earned afterwards
seemed as irrelevant

as stones brought to complete a house
suddenly buried by an earthquake;
the sense of bereavement

was too heavy upon him

for the old thrill of satisfaction

to rise again

at the touch of the newly-earned coin.
And now

something had come

to replace his hoard

which gave a growing purpose

to the earnings,

drawing his hope and joy

continually onward

beyond the money.

Of course, the grouping is overdone, but nevertheless it serves to illustrate the principle we are studying. A slow reader might be justified in such detailed study, but after he becomes familiar with the text I think he will find that a grouping about like the following will give the best interpretation:

The disposition to hoard had been utterly crushed at the very first by the loss of his long-stored gold; the coins he earned afterwards seemed as irrelas stones brought to complete a house suddenly buried by an earthquake; the sense of bereavement was too heavy upon him for the old

evant

thrill of satisfaction to rise again at the touch of the