Like sunny eve in some forgotten place;
love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman,
As when a south wind sombres a March grove.
In _Amelia_ we receive the candid, simple shock of the line in which
every meeting with her beauty is likened to a first beholding of the
ocean. In this ode, also, stands the ‘little bright, surf-breathing
town’, and the westering sun fills with shade ‘the dimples of our
homeward hills’. Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is with a
sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden insight. The blackbird at
dawn, a lonely thrush at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ‘sad
with promise of a different sun’, brought him in full the message of the
wild suggestion that never left poet’s heart at rest. When he wrote the
_Odes_, and used thus a free metre because he knew himself to be set at
liberty by his very knowledge and love of law, that heart beat in the
sensitive line, and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as a spirit
blowing whither it will.
The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated
question. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows
that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that
is to be judged. This true lover may well have outlived the desire to
give to others a convincing or converting reason for his own certainties
as to the most poetic things in poetry, but he still desires to know
whose mind’s ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time goes on. To
the treasure of these most beautiful things, to which the dramatic and
the epic poets have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets stanzas
or lines, it is a wonder to find how much Coventry Patmore has added.
The slender volume of his odes furnishes them out of all measure. Even
those readers who will not hold the author of that small volume to have
answered all the conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great, will
confess this extraordinary disproportion. The mental apprehension of
poetry can be put to the proof by Patmore’s odes—and indeed by not a few
passages of the contemned _Angel in the House_—much oftener than by
honoured classical poems from which we gather those testing lines by
precious threes and twos. _The Unknown Eros_ yields them to us in
overwhelming beauty and in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of
imagery—so enkindling, so exalting that we say of imagery that it is
poetry itself, until we find the poetry of the yonder side, for some
again are of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is beyond
imagery. One of the testing lines of our literature has this latter
character—Chaucer’s, chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man:
Now with his love, now in the coldë grave.
From Coventry Patmore’s odes we gather them with both hands, exalted,
subdued, and greatly moved by our riches.
Why _The Unknown Eros_ should have found so few readers it might be hard
to say. We should have expected something different from the literary
liberty and literary variety of England. Ignorance of Patmore’s odes
might have been looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind in
the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is not easily to be explained
in readers of various minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Crashaw,
Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare the lyrist. Probably a doubt as
to the whole meaning of many among the odes has discouraged even
Patmore’s willing readers. The beauty was there, but it was to them an
uncertain magnificence, a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call of
an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the heart-piercing utterance of an
obscure grief—obscure as waters are obscure because they are profound,
not because they are turbid. Some of our esteemed poets have left us
meanings troubled by the lowest of difficulties—the grammatical. Their
waters have matter in mechanical suspension rather than in chemical
solution. It is often impossible to decide to what nouns some of the
pronouns in _Sordello_ refer. But Patmore’s pure diction, uttered in the
composure that gives high dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no
such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of the odes of _The Unknown
Eros_ are difficult. Some, we say, and are again puzzled at finding them
so few. _The Day after To-morrow_ is not readily understood to refer to
reunion after death; the Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience
alien to the history, to the aspirations, and even the desires, of the
greater number of deeply spiritual men; the matter of the mystical ode
called _The Unknown Eros_ itself is all but hidden; _Deliciae Sapientiae
de Amore_ darkly sings the triumph of virginity and its sacrifice at
once; few or no readers will guess the _Arbor Vitae_ of a very fine ode
to be the Catholic Church, and the ‘nests of the hoarse bird, who talks
and understands not his own word’ to be (a most unjust image) the
clusters of her clergy; and a few other necessities for explanation
there may be. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt, to all
initiate in the world of poetry, as to the full significance—the
furthest significance, to every inner alley and retreat of meaning, to
every ultimate pang of sensitiveness—expressed in that terrible record
of a mourner’s dreams, _Eurydice_; in _Departure_; in _If I were dead_;
in _Saint Valentine’s Day_; or in the ode on the decline of England,
already named, which contains the memorable description of her
literature. Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one generally
known, even with the relative generalness possible among the little
minority that cares for poetry? That one is, needless to say, _The
Toys_, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one containing less
essential poetry than any other page of the odes.
It must be owned that some of the accessory persons and conditions of
the story of _The Angel in the House_ are unwelcome to poetry as we have
learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we are either content, or
very weakly, very ineffectually, ill content, to live in a social world
that we confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry Patmore, as we
understand his attitude, refused to be content with such a world, and
refused, moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the world was unfit
for his poem, he would reject the world—and he at least knew how to
reject and did not play at rejection. He did not believe that there was
such unfitness, because love and immortality were there, as elsewhere,
with humanity. The modern age chose to be ashamed of the manner in which
it chose to live, to be associated, to prosper, to order its affairs; no
other age had condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry Patmore
was not modern in this matter. He thought the daily civilized ways of a
Cathedral town, granted that they were delicate and gay, and not dull,
no more unfit for ‘realistic’ art than other contemporary ways, neither
delicate nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably since, the
writing of _The Angel in the House_. Coventry Patmore wrote of
conventions in the manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents
older than his critics stopped to remember. If so much of explanation is
to be offered in answer to still current criticisms, how does it befall
that any reader should pause upon the mere intervals in poetry so
profound and penetrating as, in a hundred passages, shakes the metre
with a hand of control?
Among such passages are these records of beauty:
Her eyes incredulously bright,
And all her happy beauty blown
Beneath the beams of my delight.
So much simplicity of mind
In such a pomp of loveliness!
Eyes that softly lodge the light.
And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so close as these:
His only Love, and she is wed!
His fondness comes about his heart
As milk comes when the babe is dead.
And again:
Alone, alone with sky and sea
And her, the third simplicity.
Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with meaning:
Far round each blade of harvest bare
Its little load of bread;
Each furlong of that journey fair
With separate sweetness sped.
Again:
Blest in her place, blissful is she;
And I, departing, seem to be
Like the strange waif that comes to run
A few days flaming near the sun,
And carries back, through boundless night,
Its lessening memory of light.
It is possible that this early poem is contemned because the reader
takes the ‘Angel’ to be the woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a
kind of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the ‘Angel’ to be Love.
Patmore’s masculine mind probably referred the name rather to such an
angel as he who in the Old Testament took up a prophet by the hair of
his head and carried him across country. Together with Love, Patmore’s
subject was the Child in the House, before ever Pater had so varied
Patmore’s title. Together with the revelation of youthful love he has
coupled all the sweet revelations made to a child:
This and the Child’s unheeded Dream
Was all the light of all his day.
We find that there are two master-emotions in modern poetry—in that
Romance literature which has been the complementary life of Europe now
for many centuries; one dates from Dante’s day, and one chiefly from the
day of Henry Vaughan (Wordsworth’s virtually immediate precursor). Love,
and the love of Nature, mystically passionate, are what they are with
us, not because all men, but because two boys, conceived them. It needs
the childish dream to raise these emotions into the regions of mystery,
sweetness, tenderness, and terror which they have gained because Dante
was a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in love with
Nature. Other lovers have loved in childhood, or else they have profited
by Dante’s childhood; other poets have conceived the passion for Nature
in their childhood, or have profited by the childhood of Wordsworth, of
Vaughan, and of Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more
delirious and the more innocent these remote experiences, the more has
the lover’s love the quality of Romance, and the poet’s imaginative
verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men could never have done for
mankind what these boys have done; literature owes her two ideal adult
passions to the dreams of childhood.
Coventry Patmore’s ardour and mystery acknowledged that dear and
ignorant origin. He did more than remember that incomparable antiquity;
with him childhood hardly needed remembering, for it remained, the
companion of his complete intellect, the rapture of his profoundly
experienced heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly sorrows.
The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather
forest or field than garden, the ‘landscape garden’ of a false taste;
nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with
an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned,
rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and definite, but later
set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having
an enclosed wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and
excess. Comparable to such a garden is Coventry Patmore’s mind, obedient
to an ancient law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of visiting
winds and a splendid sun of genius.
No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or attributed to it a
greater dignity than the value and the dignity that consecrated it in
Patmore’s heart. As he very literally and actually held the members of
the body to be divine, so may it be said that he saw in poetry also the
incarnate word; the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the phrase
were not accidental but essential. Hence his extraordinary mastery of
style. And as to his sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and
domination we have but to compare it with the sense of one who spared no
words in praise of poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work and
mission—Matthew Arnold.[3] Failing the religious sanction, failing the
fundamental law with its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its
place, whether as temporary regent or regent without a term. It would,
he said, console and soothe mankind. As though a race in need of the
spur and the curb, the example, the threat, and the canon, were
sufficiently to be served by those unmanly ministrations! As though to
be soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill-humour were the
chief necessities of men, a race worthy of the dignities of
chastisement! In raising poetry to what he thought this eminence,
assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never was poetry more
conscious than Patmore’s. Nor, perhaps, if we seek among the homages of
the poets to their art shall we find graver or profounder veneration
than Patmore’s, hardly even excepting Wordsworth’s, explicit and
implicit.
Footnote 3:
He thought the value of the religions to be their ‘unconscious
poetry’. ‘It is part of the man’s unconscious poetry,’ says Harold
Skimpole—he is alluding to the family butcher (unpaid)—‘that he always
calls it “his little bill”.’
He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So must we learn to do, and
to value her for him.