It was in poetry that he made his first essays, as we have seen, and
this is not to be wondered at in one who had early read the old poetic
treasures of our literature, and in the close companion of so deeply
poetic a man as Coleridge. He was, indeed, himself essentially a poet,
though his work in verse falls far below that which he achieved in
prose. The perusal of a slim volume of the sonnets of William Lisle
Bowles was the small occasion from which sprang the great event of
Lamb's and Coleridge's commencing to write poetry. To the sonnet form
Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most felicitously, for two or
three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which makes them
remain in the mind. This one, with its familiar close, may stand as
representative of the days when Bowles was still the god of his
poetic idolatry:
The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,
And 'gins to sprinkle on the earth below
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,
I turn my back on thy detested walls,
Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind,
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;
Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.
I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,
That minded me of many a pleasure gone,
Of merrier days, of love and Islington;
Kindling afresh the flames of past desire.
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.
In his blank verse--and couplets--of the same period, the time when he
was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt
disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in
this form "On His Recovery from an Indisposition"). These, however,
were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less
conscious imitation, and Lamb was not long in finding his feet and
indicating his peculiar individuality. He had learned much from the
free expressions of the old dramatic poets, and in such pieces as "The
Old Familiar Faces"--a poignant cry from a suffering soul--or in his
unconventional sonnet, "The Gipsy's Malison," written more than
thirty years later, we have some of the most markedly individual of
his poems. He was not a poet, he declared--running counter to the
judgement of some of his later critics--but essentially a prosaic
writer. All that he wrote in verse, apart from the plays, would come
within the compass of a small volume, and perhaps half of that would
be occupied with album verses, slight _vers d'occasion_, such as are
more often the products of prose-writers' leisure than of a poet who
sings because he must. He felt his way to prose through poetry as so
many lesser writers have done, and on the way uttered perhaps a dozen
pieces, which for one reason or another will ever make a lasting
appeal to readers. The sense of tragedy in "The Old Familiar
Faces"--more remarkable in that it was tragedy realized and expressed
at the age of three-and-twenty--the weird imagination of "The Gipsy's
Malison," the sweet portraiture of "Hester," the fancy of "A Farewell
to Tobacco," and the "Ode to the Treadmill," will ensure that portion
of his work to which they belong, sharing the immortality of the
essays of Elia.