“LET ME NOT MUCH COMPLAIN.”
Let me not much complain of life, in age;
Life is not faulty, life is well enough,
For those who love their daily round of doing,
And take things rounded, never in the rough,
Turning from day to day the same old page,
And their old knowledge ever more renewing.
I have known many such; through life they went
With moderate use of moderate heritage,
Giving and spending, saving as they spent,
These are wise men, though never counted sage;
They looked for little, easy men to please;
But I, more deeply drunk of life’s full cup,
Feel, as my lips come nearer to the lees,
I dived for pearls, and brought but pebbles up.
—Thomas William Parsons, in the _Century_.
By title the above lines commend themselves as “well enough” wisdom, yet
will I “much complain” of them.
Here are fourteen lines.
At glance the eye anticipates a sonnet, following one of the fixed orders
of sonnet rhymes. The end of the third line yielding no recurrent sound,
the ear is disappointed and infers blank verse, while expectation is
frustrated by the fourth line rhyming with the second.
Did we read aright? Perhaps the first and third lines do conform to the
Shakspearean order now suggested! Go back. “Age,”—“doing,” no! and we
reach “page” at the end of line fifth with the suspicion that we have
stumbled on a nondescript.
Well, give it another chance, and begin again!
This time we ask: what is it in the third and fourth lines that gives the
ear a sensation as if something was struck with a hammer?
Yes, “round” and its iterate “rounded.”
Such sforzando does not occur in a good sonnet unless there is an idea to
be emphasized, to which the mind is pointed by the ear.
But we conclude that this is not a sonnet, and apatheticly scan didactic
platitudes through eleven lines till sobriety is startled by the all too
frank confession of the twelfth.
We read it twice, to see if it is not a lapse of grammar, or a squeeze of
“have drank” to meet the exigencies of rhythm, and come up from the dive
of the last line thirsty to know just what image Mr. Parsons had in his
mind.
Was his conception analogous to that of the reporter’s who described
the pretty actress as “standing on the brink of the rushing torrent of
Niagara and drinking it all in with shining eyes”?
Was “life’s full cup” so immense that Mr. Parsons dove therein for
pearls? A pretty large cup to drink to the lees, that? Is there, as a
rule, any reasonable expectation of discovering pearls or pebbles, or,
for that matter, lees, in a wine cup? Was the condition so awkwardly
characterized in the twelfth line—but no! there is simply an unconsidered
mixing of metaphors in this short poem, that starts with the book of
life, and in the last three lines introduces the cup of life, and the
sea of life. The last line, by the way, is mixed upon itself. Pearls
and pebbles are not found mingled, and at the bottom of the sea,
notwithstanding Robert Browning’s Divers in _Pan and Luna_.
Who dive for pearls do not so on pebbly bottoms. No doubt, by unluck,
they often bring up valueless shells.
The orders of rhythms and rhymes in a sonnet are supposed to be known to
all poetasters—or one can consult the Century Dictionary.
These forms should be kept in sacred reserve. Therein the poet may mold
some holy sentiment or feeling—not with wandering thought: rising through
the personal to the universal, or perhaps veiling the universal in the
personal. If one reproduces such trite didactic thought, why not bestow
enough labor to shape a pure form?
By so doing the platitudes even might be polished and made to shine like
new, with new metaphor.
I have not been able to resist the temptation of trying a prentice hand
on the metaphors in Mr. Parsons’s lines. Perhaps with more spleen against
the “well enough,” more enthusiasm for the intoxication not of the wine,
and more sympathy for the luckless diver.