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same, in the midst of that brightness and warmth, aware of

"the earthly chill of dusk." He imagines the line of the shadow of the setting sun-of all the cumulative successive setting suns of history-moving across the world, across Persia, and Baghdad , . , he feels "Lebanon fade out and Crete," "And Spain go under and the shore I Of Africa the gilded sand,"

and . . . "now the long light on the sea" vanishes, too. And he concludes:

And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift, how secretly,

The shadow of the night comes on . . . .

The word "time" is not used in the poem, nor is there any mention of a lover. Nevertheless, the title reminds us of Marvell's lyric with its theme of "Had we but world enough and time," and thus the combination of the poem itself and its title invokes the same conflict, between love ( or life ) and time, that was the subject of the other poems we have considered here.

One final piece of advice about reading lyric poems. In general, readers of such works feel that they must know more about the authors and their times than they really have to. We put much faith in commentaries, criticism, biographies-but this may be only because we doubt our own ability to read.

Almost everyone can read any poem, if he will go to work on it. Anything you discover about an author's life or times is valid and may be helpful. But a vast knowledge of the context of a poem is no guarantee that the poem itself will be understood. To be understood it must be read-over and over. Reading any great lyric poem is a lifetime job-not, of course, in the sense that it should go on and on throughout a lifetime, but rather that as a great poem, it deserves many return visits. And during vacations from a given poem, we may learn more about it than we realize.

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H OW TO READ H I STORY

"History," like "poetry," is a word of many meanings. In order for this chapter to be useful to you, we must come to terms with you about the word-that is, explain how we will be using it.

First of all, there is the difference between history as fact and history as a written record of the facts. We are obviously, here, employing the term in the latter sense, since in our sense of "read" you cannot read facts. But there are many kinds of written record that are called historical A collection of documents pertaining to a certain event or period could be called a history of it. A transcription of an oral interview with a participant, or a collection of such transcriptions, could similarly be called a history of the event in which he or they participated.

A work having quite a diferent intention, such as a personal diary or collection of letters, could be construed as being a history of the time. The word could be applied, and indeed has been applied, to almost every kind of writing that originated in a time period, or in the context of an event, in which the reader was interested.

The sense in which we use the word "history" in what follows is both narrower and broader than any of those. It is narrower because we want to restrict ourselves to essentially narrative accounts, presented in a more or less formal manner, 234

How to Read History 235

of a period or event or series of events in the past. This is a traditional use of the term, and we do not apologize for it.

Again, as with our definition of lyric poetry, we think you will agree with us that this is the ordinary meaning of the term, and we want to stick to the ordinary here.

But our meaning is also broader than many of the definitions of the term that are current today. We think, although not all historians agree with us, that the essence of history is narration, that the last five letters of the word-"story"-help us to understand the basic meaning. Even a collection of documents, as a coUection, tells a story. That story may not be explicitthat is, the historian may try not to arrange the documents in any "meaningful" order. But it is implicit in them, whether they are ordered or not. Otherwise, we think,