To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a
hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the
critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their
judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit
code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious
measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to
recognize the law of _The Unknown Eros_. It is to look, not only for
such precision, but for its rare companions—liberty, flight, height,
courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for
spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the
lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to
come, _The Unknown Eros_ will hardly then have many readers, and will no
doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by
reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness
is its own quality, conferred by no world’s neglect; not an effect of
conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative
to nothing.
The reader undertakes at least to know and to watch that solitude. It
was assuredly a sense of the gravity of this enterprise that inspired
the phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies’; a star is lonely, and its
student, whatever his conditions, lonely as he watches. Pausing upon
that significant phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not Keats’s,
evidently; and it proves at last to be a word of Patmore’s own; and the
lonely watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In a now cancelled
passage of Coventry Patmore’s ode, _Tired Memory_, occurs the ‘lonely’
astronomer. Who can complain that there are not many prepared for such a
vigil? Moreover, _The Unknown Eros_, although we may attempt images of
sidereal distance to express its profound flight, has the more dreadful
solitude of an experience, and goes far in an inverse flight, through
the essentially single human heart—intimately into time and space,
remotely into the heart of hearts.
Of many words of praise, the word ‘classic’ is chosen here because it
suggests no exclusions of schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for
poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of poetry of another.
None the less is it the most sharp and severe of all words of criticism,
or it shall here have that character, if the reader will agree to
understand as ‘classic’ all poetry that is _one_—thought and word. The
fusion of thought and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an
impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close coldness of fancy
made perfect; for since we hear that metals pass into one another, _in
vacuo_, by pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible; but even
if, with Thomas à Kempis, we contemplate the metal that is one with fire
and is changed into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that a
greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by a more vital union; mind
and body, where tidal thought and feeling are quick with the blood and
various with the breath of life, give a juster, as well as a simpler and
a human, image of a vital poem. Besides, the fire of life is made
sensible to us by warmth and not by flame, and there are in literature a
far greater number of humanly warm poems that are classic and vital,
than of poems that are classic and vital with apparent and uncovered
flame. Some of these last, indeed, there are, but few. The image of warm
life is the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry proved classic and
alive when a reader, struck to the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes
looking on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour, her height,
her light, her age, knows her indeed, and confesses her at last by
another sign: ‘Oh, she’s warm!’
In _The Unknown Eros_ the poet’s intention, single, separate, strikes
unique strokes against which the reader’s human heart is all unarmed by
custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so comes home, dividing
soul and spirit. There is not a violence in the world that does not seem
a dissipation and an essential weakness when reproached by such a
majestic energy, able to curb its hand.
Not without profoundly conscious art did Coventry Patmore achieve the
ultimate, the mortal, pathos of such an ode as _Eurydice_. He was ready
to tell the secret which no others could use as he used it, however it
might be guessed; and the secret of _Eurydice_ was: ‘After exceeding
ill, a little good.’ The slenderness of the good and the poignancy of
the ill are mingled, in this ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear
as no other poet has ever endured. _Eurydice_ is the dream of the
mourner, who night by night follows some dreary clue through labyrinths
without hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote, neglected
life that the dead do live in these intolerable dreams. But Coventry
Patmore does not always capture terror for such purposes of eternal
sadness; he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent ode of
reunion, _The Day after To-morrow_:
O, heaving sea,
That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,
And separatest not dear heart from heart,
Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart
O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,
Love in each moment years and years of rest.
· · · · ·
O Life, too liberal, when to take her hand
Is more of hope than heart can understand.
· · · · ·
One day’s controlled hope, and one again,
And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,
O Life, Death, Terror, Love!
_Ultima dolcezza_ was once exquisitely said of the skylark; _ultima
amarezza_ should be the words for the lines:
Thou whom ev’n more than Heaven lov’d I have,
And yet have not been true, even to thee;
and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the grief that kisses and
says a conscious ‘farewell, farewell’, is in _Departure_, and in this
passage of too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly implied
by a negative:
When the one darling of our widowhead,
The nurseling Grief, is dead,
And no dews blur our eyes
To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies.
Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death. The ode entitled
_Proem_ foretells with a singular peace of grief the day when England,
‘a dim heroic nation, long since dead’, shall be benignly remembered no
otherwise than by ‘the bird-voice and the blast of her omniloquent
tongue’—by the poets of her then dead language.
As to the ‘natural description’ for which the reader is apt to look—it
might not unfairly be said that Patmore never described. He claimed the
truths of science, to which in youth he had devoted his attention, to
serve his poem with images; and thus he used them in his speech, as when
the perception he gained of Divine truths by the act of contemplation
and the holding his spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to
the photographic picture of stars invisible even to the camera but made
visible by a long accumulation of continuous imperceptible impressions.
And nature, evasive to the mere describer, yielded imagery to him with
an indescribable freshness. There is an instance in the ode, _Wind and
Wave_, with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and waves that
Traverse wildly, like delighted hands,
The fair and fleckless sands
· · · · ·
And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the deafening beach.