"From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended!
Yea, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes
Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,
And beatings haunt the desolated heart
Which should have learnt repose, thou hast descended
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
O child of many winds! As suddenly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet!
Like genius, or like joy which riseth up ...
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desert of our life.
This is the season, this the day, the hour;
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine.
Too long desired, too long delaying, come!
How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel the pale air:
'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The Aeolian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?"
And here we find some details of underwater life which are modern. Two
fauns are conversing: one inquires where live certain delicate spirits
whom they hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are here in
an atmosphere very much like that of _The Midsummer-Night's Dream_. I
scarcely know anything more compact of pellucid beauty: it seems quite
worthy of Shakspeare.
"SECOND FAUN.
'Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say,
The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride in them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again."
Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which is as strong as
the other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia is
describing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust of
the earth are revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed,
modern, vivid, powerful.
"... The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancell'd cycles: anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turn'd to marble; quivers, helms, and spears;
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblems
Of dread destruction, ruin within ruin!
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jamm'd in the hard, black deep; and over these
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the torturous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse till the blue globe
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God,
Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried
Be not! And like my words they were no more."
Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied with the
Prometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in a
characteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happens
very felicitously to introduce the only other set of antique
considerations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let this
opportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me of
acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically
terms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake to
suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct
enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as
containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life....
... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a
systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements
of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition
flatter themselves that I should take Aeschylus rather than Plato as my
model."
In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between the
lines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the time
which every writer must share to a greater or less extent with his
fellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examine
Bayard Taylor's poem, _Prince Deukalion_, we find a man not only
possessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what was
implicit in Shelley--and a great deal more--here becomes explicit and
formulated.
As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, as
opposed to the drama of Aeschylus, strikes us at the outset in the
number of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Aeschylus as
he read down this truly prodigious array of _dramatos prosopa_:
Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gaea, Goddess of the Earth; Eros; Prometheus;
Epimetheus; Pandora; Prince Deukalion; Pyrrha; Agathon; Medusa;
Calchas; Buddha; Spirits of Dawn; Nymphs; Chorus of Ghosts; Charon;
Angels; Spirits; The Nine Muses; Urania; Spirit of the Wind; Spirit of
the Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; the
Poet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediaeval Chorus; Mediaeval
Anti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materials
Mr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time,
painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized each
epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In the
first act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the whole
antique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in the
persons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his wife-to-be, whose figures,
however, are as yet merely etched upon a mist of prophecy.
In Act II, we have the reign and fall of the mediaeval faith, all of
which is mysteriously beheld by these same shadowy personalities,
Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present is
similarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, or
developed personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the
world, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the ideal
woman, now for the first time united in deed as well as in
inspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it.
Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personality
and modernness as compared with the Aeschylean play, that few
quotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt even
such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, Act
I, of _Prince Deukalion_, Scene I being given in the stage direction
as
"_A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base of
the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple on
a rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels;
the flock scattered over the plain_,"--a shepherd awakes and
wonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which have
occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is a
symbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voices
from various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst other
utterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs--as
representative of the Greek nature--myths--which is quite to our
present purpose.