Our poetry, though it has been a deliberate bringing back of the Latin
joy and the Latin love of beauty, has had to put off the old marching
rhythms, that once delighted more than expedient hearts, in separating
itself from a life where servile hands have become powerful. It has
ceased to have any burden for marching shoulders, since it learned
ecstasy from Smart in his mad cell, and from Blake, who made joyous
little songs out of almost unintelligible visions, and from Keats, who
sang of a beauty so wholly preoccupied with itself that its
contemplation is a kind of lingering trance. The poet, if he would not
carry burdens that are not his and obey the orders of servile lips, must
sit apart in contemplative indolence playing with fragile things.
If one chooses at hazard a Spenserian stanza out of Shelley and compares
it with any stanza by Spenser, one sees the change, though it would be
still more clear if one had chosen a lyrical passage. I will take a
stanza out of _Laon and Cythna_, for that is story-telling and runs
nearer to Spenser than the meditative _Adonais_:
'The meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth's obscure and fading sleep.
The rhythm is varied and troubled, and the lines, which are in Spenser
like bars of gold thrown ringing one upon another, are broken
capriciously. Nor is the meaning the less an inspiration of indolent
muses, for it wanders hither and thither at the beckoning of fancy. It
is now busy with a meteor and now with throbbing blood that is fire, and
with a mist that is a swoon and a sleep that is life. It is bound
together by the vaguest suggestion, while Spenser's verse is always
rushing on to some preordained thought. 'A popular poet' can still
indeed write poetry of the will, just as factory girls wear the fashion
of hat or dress the moneyed classes wore a year ago, but 'popular
poetry' does not belong to the living imagination of the world. Old
writers gave men four temperaments, and they gave the sanguineous
temperament to men of active life, and it is precisely the sanguineous
temperament that is fading out of poetry and most obviously out of what
is most subtle and living in poetry--its pulse and breath, its rhythm.
Because poetry belongs to that element in every race which is most
strong, and therefore most individual, the poet is not stirred to
imaginative activity by a life which is surrendering its freedom to ever
new elaboration, organisation, mechanism. He has no longer a poetical
will, and must be content to write out of those parts of himself which
are too delicate and fiery for any deadening exercise. Every generation
has more and more loosened the rhythm, more and more broken up and
disorganised, for the sake of subtlety of detail, those great rhythms
which move, as it were, in masses of sound. Poetry has become more
spiritual, for the soul is of all things the most delicately organised,
but it has lost in weight and measure and in its power of telling long
stories and of dealing with great and complicated events. _Laon and
Cythna_, though I think it rises sometimes into loftier air than the
_Faerie Queene_; and _Endymion_, though its shepherds and wandering
divinities have a stranger and more intense beauty than Spenser's, have
need of too watchful and minute attention for such lengthy poems. In
William Morris, indeed, one finds a music smooth and unexacting like
that of the old story-tellers, but not their energetic pleasure, their
rhythmical wills. One too often misses in his _Earthly Paradise_ the
minute ecstasy of modern song without finding that old happy-go-lucky
tune that had kept the story marching.
Spenser's contemporaries, writing lyrics or plays full of lyrical
moments, write a verse more delicately organised than his and crowd more
meaning into a phrase than he, but they could not have kept one's
attention through so long a poem. A friend who has a fine ear told me
the other day that she had read all Spenser with delight and yet could
remember only four lines. When she repeated them they were from the poem
by Matthew Roydon, which is bound up with Spenser because it is a
commendation of Sir Philip Sidney:
'A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel books.'
Yet if one were to put even these lines beside a fine modern song one
would notice that they had a stronger and rougher energy, a
featherweight more, if eye and ear were fine enough to notice it, of the
active will, of the happiness that comes out of life itself.