This Hermit good lives in that wood
Which slopes down to the sea.
How loudly his sweet voice he rears!
He loves to talk with marineres
That come from a far countree.
He kneels at morn, and noon, and eve,—
He hath a cushion plump:
It is the moss that wholly hides
The rotted old oak-stump.
The skiff-boat neared: I heard them talk:
‘Why, this is strange, I trow!
Where are those lights, so many and fair,
That signal made but now?’
‘Strange, by my faith!’ the Hermit said—
‘And they answered not our cheer!
The planks looked warped! and see those sails,
How thin they are and sere!
I never saw aught like to them,
Unless perchance it were
Brown skeletons of leaves that lag
My forest-brook along;
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf’s young.’
‘Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look’—
(The Pilot made reply)
‘I am a-feared’—‘Push on, push on!’
Said the Hermit cheerily.
The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;
The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.
Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread;
It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.
Stunned by that loud and dreadful sound,
Which sky and ocean smote,
Like one that hath been seven days drowned
My body lay afloat;
But swift as dreams, myself I found
Within the Pilot’s boat.
Upon the whirl, where sank the ship,
The boat spun round and round;
And all was still, save that the hill
Was telling of the sound.
I moved my lips—the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.
I took the oars: the Pilot’s boy,
Who now doth crazy go,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
‘Ha! ha!’ quoth he, ‘full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.’
And now all in my own countree,
I stood on the firm land!
The Hermit stepped forth from the boat,
And scarcely he could stand.
‘O shrieve me, shrieve me, holy man!’
The Hermit crossed his brow.
‘Say quick,’ quoth he, ‘I bid thee say—
What manner of man art thou?’
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me;
To him my tale I teach.
What loud uproar bursts from that door!
The wedding-guests are there:
But in the garden-bower the bride
And bride-maids singing are:
And hark the little vesper-bell
Which biddeth me to prayer!
O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God Himself
Scarce seemed there to be.
O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
’Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company—
To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,
While each to his great Father bends,
Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!
Farewell, farewell! but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door.
He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn;
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow-morn.
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
1775–1864
ROSE AYLMER
AH, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.
EPITAPH
I STROVE with none, for none were worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art,
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
CHILD OF A DAY
CHILD of a day, thou knowest not
The tears that overflow thine urn,
The gushing eyes that read thy lot,
Nor, if thou knewest, could’st return!
And why the wish! the pure and blest
Watch, like thy mother, o’er thy sleep;
O peaceful night! O envied rest!
Thou wilt not ever see her weep.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
1767–1844
HOHENLINDEN
ON Linden, when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow;
And dark as winter was the flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.
But Linden saw another sight,
When the drum beat at dead of night
Commanding fires of death to light
The darkness of her scenery.
By torch and trumpet fast arrayed
Each horseman drew his battle-blade,
And furious every charger neighed
To join the dreadful revelry.
Then shook the hills with thunder riven;
Then rushed the steed, to battle driven;
And louder than the bolts of Heaven
Far flashed the red artillery.
But redder yet that light shall glow
On Linden’s hills of stained snow;
And bloodier yet the torrent flow
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.
’Tis morn; but scarce yon level sun
Can pierce the war-clouds, rolling dun,
Where furious Frank and fiery Hun
Shout in their sulphurous canopy.
The combat deepens. On, ye Brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave!
Wave, Munich! all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy chivalry!
Few, few shall part, where many meet!
The snow shall be their winding-sheet,
And every turf beneath their feet
Shall be a soldier’s sepulchre.
EARL MARCH
EARL MARCH looked on his dying child,
And, smit with grief to view her—
The youth, he cried, whom I exiled
Shall be restored to woo her.
She’s at the window many an hour
His coming to discover:
And he looked up to Ellen’s bower
And she looked on her lover—
But ah! so pale, he knew her not,
Though her smile on him was dwelling!
And am I then forgot—forgot?
It broke the heart of Ellen.
In vain he weeps, in vain he sighs,
Her cheek is cold as ashes;
Nor love’s own kiss shall wake those eyes
To lift their silken lashes.
CHARLES LAMB
1775–1835
HESTER.
WHEN maidens such as Hester die,
Their place ye may not well supply,
Though ye among a thousand try
With vain endeavour.
A month or more hath she been dead,
Yet cannot I by force be led
To think upon the wormy bed
And her together.
A springy motion in her gait,
A rising step, did indicate
Of pride and joy no common rate
That flushed her spirit:
I know not by what name beside
I shall it call: if ’twas not pride,
It was a joy to that allied
She did inherit.
Her parents held the Quaker rule,
Which doth the human feeling cool;
But she was trained in Nature’s school,
Nature had blest her.
A waking eye, a prying mind,
A heart that stirs, is hard to bind;
A hawk’s keen sight ye cannot blind,
Ye could not Hester.
My sprightly neighbour! gone before
To that unknown and silent shore,
Shall we not meet, as heretofore,
Some summer morning—
When from thy cheerful eyes a ray
Hath struck a bliss upon the day,
A bliss that would not go away,
A sweet fore-warning?
ALLAN CUNNINGHAM
1784–1842
A WET SHEET AND A FLOWING SEA
A WET sheet and a flowing sea,
A wind that follows fast
And fills the white and rustling sail
And bends the gallant mast;
And bends the gallant mast, my boys,
While like the eagle free
Away the good ship flies, and leaves
Old England on the lee.
O for a soft and gentle wind!
I heard a fair one cry;
But give to me the snoring breeze
And white waves heaving high;
And white waves heaving high, my lads,
The good ship tight and free—
The world of waters is our home,
And merry men are we.
There’s tempest in yon horned moon,
And lightning in yon cloud;
But hark the music, mariners!
The wind is piping loud;
The wind is piping loud, my boys,
The lightning flashes free—
While the hollow oak our palace is,
Our heritage the sea.
GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON
1788–1823
THE ISLES OF GREECE
THE Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse;
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest.’
The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For, standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not think myself a slave.
A king sate on the rocky brow
Which looks o’er sea-born Salamis;
And ships, by thousands, lay below,
And men in nations;—all were his!
He counted them at break of day—
And when the sun set where were they?
And where are they? and where art thou,
My country? On thy voiceless shore
The heroic lay is tuneless now—
The heroic bosom beats no more!
And must thy lyre, so long divine,
Degenerate into hands like mine?
’Tis something, in the dearth of fame,
Though linked among a fettered race
To feel at least a patriot’s shame,
Even as I sing, suffuse my face;
For what is left the poet here?
For Greeks a blush—for Greece a tear.
Must _we_ but weep o’er days more blest?
Must _we_ but blush?—Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylæ!
What, silent still? and silent all?
Ah! no;—the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent’s fall,
And answer, ‘Let one living head,
But one, arise,—we come, we come!’
’Tis but the living who are dumb.
In vain—in vain: strike other chords;
Fill high the cup with Samian wine!
Leave battles to the Turkish hordes,
And shed the blood of Scio’s vine!
Hark! rising to the ignoble call—
How answers each bold bacchanal!
You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet,
Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?
You have the letters Cadmus gave—
Think ye he meant them for a slave?
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
We will not think of themes like these!
It made Anacreon’s song divine:
He served—but served Polycrates—
A tyrant; but our masters then
Were still, at least, our countrymen.
The tyrant of the Chersonese
Was freedom’s best and bravest friend;
_That_ tyrant was Miltiades!
Oh! that the present hour would lend
Another despot of the kind!
Such chains as his were sure to bind.
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
On Suli’s rock, and Parga’s shore,
Exists the remnant of a line
Such as the Doric mothers bore;
And there, perhaps, some seed is sown,
The Heracleidan blood might own.
Trust not for freedom to the Franks—
They have a king who buys and sells;
In native swords, and native ranks,
The only hope of courage dwells;
But Turkish force, and Latin fraud,
Would break your shield, however broad.
Fill high the bowl with Samian wine!
Our virgins dance beneath the shade—
I see their glorious black eyes shine;
But gazing on each glowing maid,
My own the burning tear-drop laves,
To think such breasts must suckle slaves.
Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
A land of slaves shall ne’er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
1792–1822
HELLAS
THE world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains
From waves serener far;
A new Peneus rolls his fountains
Against the morning star.
Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep
Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main,
Fraught with a later prize;
Another Orpheus sings again,
And loves, and weeps, and dies.
A new Ulysses leaves once more
Calypso for his native shore.
O write no more the tale of Troy,
If earth Death’s scroll must be!
Nor mix with Laian rage the joy
Which dawns upon the free:
Although a subtler Sphinx renew
Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendour of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright may live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give.
* * * * *
O cease! must hate and death return?
Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last!
WILD WITH WEEPING
MY head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,—or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought); to wonder that a chief
Among men’s spirits should be cold and blind.
TO THE NIGHT
SWIFTLY walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear
Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight!
Wrap thy form in a mantle grey
Star-inwrought;
Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day,
Kiss her until she be wearied out:
Then wander o’er city and sea and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand—
Come, long-sought!
When I arose and saw the dawn,
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest
Lingering like an unloved guest,
I sighed for thee.
Thy brother Death came, and cried
Wouldst thou me?
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noon-tide bee,
Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?—And I replied
No, not thee!
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon—
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night—
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!
TO A SKYLARK
HAIL to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert!
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire,
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun
O’er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight:
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight;
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see, we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is over-flowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody;—
Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not;
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine, would be all
But an empty vaunt—
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.
Waking or asleep
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!
TO THE MOON
ART thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
THE QUESTION
I DREAMED that as I wandered by the way
Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring,
And gentle odours led my steps astray,
Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring
Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay
Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling
Its green arms round the bosom of the stream,
But kissed it and then fled, as Thou mightest in dream.
There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxlips; tender blue-bells, at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets
Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.
And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine,
Green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured May,
And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine
Was the bright dew yet drained not by the day;
And wild roses, and ivy serpentine
With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray;
And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold,
Fairer than any wakened eyes behold.
And nearer to the river’s trembling edge
There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white,
And starry river-buds among the sedge,
And floating water-lilies, broad and bright,
Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge
With moonlight beams of their own watery light;
And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green
As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.
Methought that of these visionary flowers
I made a nosegay, bound in such a way
That the same hues, which in their natural bowers
Were mingled or opposed, the like array
Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours
Within my hand,—and then, elate and gay,
I hastened to the spot whence I had come
That I might there present it—O! to Whom?
THE WANING MOON
AND like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapt in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky east,
A white and shapeless mass.
ODE TO THE WEST WIND
O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver: Hear, oh hear!
Thou on whose stream, ’mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height—
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
Thou who didst waken from his summer-dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than Thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision,—I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
RARELY, RARELY COMEST THOU
RARELY, rarely comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
’Tis since thou art fled away.
How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.
As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.
Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure,
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure.
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves drest,
And the starry night,
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.
I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms—
Everything almost
Which is Nature’s, and may be
Untainted by man’s misery.
I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise and good;
Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.
I love Love—though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! O come,
Make once more my heart thy home!
THE INVITATION, TO JANE
BEST and brightest, come away!
Fairer far than this fair Day,
Which, like thee to those in sorrow,
Comes to bid a sweet good-morrow
To the rough Year just awake
In its cradle on the brake.
The brightest hour of unborn Spring,
Through the winter wandering,
Found, it seems, the halcyon Morn
To hoar February born;
Bending from Heaven, in azure mirth,
It kissed the forehead of the Earth,
And smiled upon the silent sea,
And bade the frozen streams be free,
And waked to music all their fountains,
And breathed upon the frozen mountains,
And like a prophetess of May
Strewed flowers upon the barren way,
Making the wintry world appear
Like one on whom thou smilest, dear.
Away, away, from men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs—
To the silent wilderness
Where the soul need not repress
Its music, lest it should not find
An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:—
‘I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields;—
Reflection, you may come to-morrow,
Sit by the fireside with sorrow.—
You with the unpaid bill, Despair,—
You tiresome verse-reciter, Care,—
I will pay you in the grave,—
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation, too, be off!
To-day is for itself enough;
Hope in pity mock not Woe
With smiles, nor follow where I go;
Long having lived on thy sweet food,
At length I find one moment’s good
After long pain—with all your love,
This you never told me of.’
Radiant sister of the Day,
Awake! arise! and come away!
To the wild woods and the plains,
And the pools where winter rains
Image all their roof of leaves,
Where the pine its garland weaves
Of sapless green and ivy dun
Round stems that never kiss the sun;
Where the lawns and pastures be,
And the sand-hills of the sea;—
Where the melting hoar-frost wets
The daisy-star that never sets,
The wind-flowers, and violets,
Which yet join not scent to hue,
Crown the pale year weak and new;
When the night is left behind
In the deep east, dun and blind,
And the blue noon is over us,
And the multitudinous
Billows murmur at our feet,
Where the earth and ocean meet,
And all things seem only one
In the universal sun.
THE RECOLLECTION
NOW the last day of many days
All beautiful and bright as thou,
The loveliest and the last, is dead:
Rise, Memory, and write its praise!
Up—to thy wonted work! come, trace
The epitaph of glory fled,
For now the earth has changed its face,
A frown is on the heaven’s brow.
We wandered to the Pine Forest
That skirts the Ocean’s foam;
The lightest wind was in its nest,
The tempest in its home.
The whispering waves were half asleep,
The clouds were gone to play,
And on the bosom of the deep
The smile of heaven lay;
It seemed as if the hour were one
Sent from beyond the skies
Which scattered from above the sun
A light of Paradise!
We paused amid the pines that stood
The giants of the waste,
Tortured by storms to shapes as rude
As serpents interlaced,—
And soothed by every azure breath
That under heaven is blown,
To harmonies and hues beneath,
As tender as its own:
Now all the tree-tops lay asleep
Like green waves on the sea,
As still as in the silent deep
The ocean-woods may be.
How calm it was!—The silence there
By such a chain was bound,
That even the busy woodpecker
Made stiller with her sound
The inviolable quietness;
The breath of peace we drew
With its soft motion made not less
The calm that round us grew.
There seemed, from the remotest seat
Of the white mountain waste
To the soft flower beneath our feet,
A magic circle traced,—
A spirit interfused around,
A thrilling silent life;
To momentary peace it bound
Our mortal nature’s strife;—
And still I felt the centre of
The magic circle there
Was one fair form that filled with love
The lifeless atmosphere.
We paused beside the pools that lie
Under the forest bough;
Each seemed as ’twere a little sky
Gulfed in a world below;
A firmament of purple light
Which in the dark earth lay,
More boundless than the depth of night
And purer than the day—
In which the lovely forests grew
As in the upper air,
More perfect both in shape and hue
Than any spreading there.
There lay the glade and neighbouring lawn,
And through the dark green wood
The white sun twinkling like the dawn
Out of a speckled cloud.
Sweet views, which in our world above
Can never well be seen,
Were imaged in the water’s love
Of that fair forest green:
And all was interfused beneath
With an Elysian glow,
An atmosphere without a breath,
A softer day below.
Like one beloved, the scene had lent
To the dark water’s breast
Its every leaf and lineament
With more than truth exprest;
Until an envious wind crept by,
Like an unwelcome thought
Which from the mind’s too faithful eye
Blots one dear image out.
—Though thou art ever fair and kind,
The forests ever green,
Less oft is peace in Shelley’s mind
Than calm in waters seen!
ODE TO HEAVEN
_Chorus of Spirits_
FIRST SPIRIT
PALACE roof of cloudless nights!
Paradise of golden lights!
Deep, immeasurable, vast,
Which art now and which wert then
Of the present and the past,
Of the eternal where and when,
Presence-chamber, temple, home,
Ever canopying dome
Of acts and ages yet to come!
Glorious shapes have life in thee,
Earth, and all earth’s company;
Living globes which ever throng
Thy deep chasms and wildernesses;
And green worlds that glide along;
And swift stars with flashing tresses;
And icy moons most cold and bright,
And mighty suns beyond the night,
Atoms of intensest light.
Even thy name is as a God,
Heaven! for thou art the abode
Of that power which is the glass
Wherein man his nature sees.
Generations as they pass
Worship thee with bended knees.
Their unremaining gods and they
Like a river roll away:
Thou remainest such alway.
SECOND SPIRIT
Thou art but the mind’s first chamber,
Round which its young fancies clamber,
Like weak insects in a cave,
Lighted up by stalactites;
By the portal of the grave,
Where a world of new delights
Will make thy best glories seem
But a dim and noonday gleam
From the shadow of a dream!
THIRD SPIRIT
Peace! the abyss is wreathed with scorn
At your presumption, atom-born!
What is heaven, and what are ye
Who its brief expanse inherit?
What are suns and spheres which flee
With the instinct of that spirit
Of which ye are but a part?
Drops which Nature’s mighty heart
Drives through thinnest veins. Depart!
What is heaven? a globe of dew,
Filling in the morning new
Some eyed flower whose young leaves waken
On an unimagined world:
Constellated suns unshaken,
Orbits measureless are furled
In that frail and fading sphere,
With ten millions gathered there,
To tremble, gleam, and disappear.
LIFE OF LIFE
LIFE of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Thro’ the vest which seeks to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Thro’ the clouds ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee,
But thy voice sounds low and tender
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost for ever!
Lamp of Earth! where’er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
AUTUMN
_A Dirge_
THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and grey;
Let your light sisters play—
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION NEAR NAPLES
THE sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon’s transparent might:
The breath of the moist earth is light
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight—
The winds’, the birds’, the ocean-floods’—
The city’s voice itself is soft like Solitude’s.
I see the deep’s untrampled floor
With green and purple sea-weeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore
Like light dissolved in star-showers thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone;
The lightning of the noon-tide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion—
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content, surpassing wealth,
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure;
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.
Yet now despair itself is mild
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,—
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
DIRGE FOR THE YEAR
ORPHAN hours, the year is dead,
Come and sigh, come and weep!
Merry hours, smile instead,
For the year is but asleep.
See, it smiles as it is sleeping,
Mocking your untimely weeping.
As an earthquake rocks a corse
In its coffin in the clay,
So White Winter, that rough nurse,
Rocks the death-cold year to-day;
Solemn hours! wail aloud
For your mother in her shroud.
As the wild air stirs and sways
The tree-swung cradle of a child,
So the breath of these rude days
Rocks the year:—be calm and mild;
Trembling hours, she will arise
With new love within her eyes.
January grey is here,
Like a sexton by her grave;
February bears the bier,
March with grief doth howl and rave.
And April weeps—but O, ye hours,
Follow with May’s fairest flowers.
A WIDOW BIRD
A WIDOW bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
There was no leaf upon the forest bare,
No flower upon the ground,
And little motion in the air
Except the mill-wheel’s sound.
THE TWO SPIRITS
_First Spirit_
O THOU, who plumed with strong desire
Wouldst float above the earth, beware!
A shadow tracks the flight of fire—
Night is coming!
Bright are the regions of the air,
And among the winds and beams
It were delight to wander there—
Night is coming!
_Second Spirit_
The deathless stars are bright above;
If I would cross the shade of night,
Within my heart is the lamp of love,
And that is day!
And the moon will smile with gentle light
On my golden plumes where’er they move;
The meteors will linger round my flight,
And make night day.
_First Spirit_
But if the whirlwinds of darkness waken
Hail, and lightning, and stormy rain;
See, the bounds of the air are shaken—
Night is coming!
The red swift clouds of the hurricane
Yon declining sun have overtaken;
The clash of the hail sweeps over the plain—
Night is coming!
_Second Spirit_
I see the light, and I hear the sound;
I’ll sail on the flood of the tempests dark,
With the calm within and the light around
Which makes night day:
And then, when the gloom is deep and stark,
Look from thy dull earth, slumber-bound;
My moon-like flight thou then may’st mark
On high, far away.
Some say there is a precipice
Where one vast pine is frozen to ruin
O’er piles of snow and chasms of ice
’Mid Alpine mountains;
And that the languid storm pursuing
That winged shape, for ever flies
Round those hoar branches, aye renewing
Its aëry fountains.
Some say, when nights are dry and clear,
And the death-dews sleep on the morass,
Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller,
Which make night day;
And a silver shape, like his early love, doth pass
Up-borne by her wild and glittering hair,
And when he awakes on the fragrant grass,
He finds night day.
JOHN KEATS
1795–1821
LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI
‘O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.
‘I see a lily on thy brow
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.’
‘I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
‘I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
‘I set her on my pacing steed
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.
‘She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild and manna-dew,
And sure, in language strange, she said,
“I love thee true.”
‘She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore:
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
‘And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill’s side.
‘I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried—“La belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
‘I saw their starved lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here
On the cold hill’s side.
‘And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.’
ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN’S HOMER
MUCH have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen:
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold;
—Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked on each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
TO SLEEP
O SOFT embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embowered from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes,
Or wait the amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength, for darkness burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.
THE GENTLE SOUTH
AFTER dark vapours have oppressed our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved from its pains,
Takes as a long-lost sight the feel of May,
The eyelids with the passing coolness play,
Like rose-leaves with the drip of summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us—as of leaves
Budding; fruit ripening in stillness; autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves;
Sweet Sappho’s cheek; a sleeping infant’s breath;
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs;
A woodland rivulet; a poet’s death.
LAST SONNET
BRIGHT Star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade into the forest dim:
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Clustered around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
I cannot tell what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;
And mid-May’s eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the Fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
THOU still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
ODE TO AUTUMN
SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o’erbrimmed their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
ODE TO PSYCHE
O GODDESS! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that my secrets should be sung
Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see
The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?
I wandered in a forest thoughtlessly,
And on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures couched side by side
In deepest grass, beneath the whispering roof
Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
A brooklet scarce espied:
’Mid hushed, cool-rooted flowers fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass,
Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
Their lips touched not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
The winged boy I knew;
But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?
His Psyche true!
O latest-born and loveliest vision far
Of all Olympus’ faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe’s sapphire-regioned star,
Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky:
Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,
Nor altar heaped with flowers;
Nor Virgin-choir to make delicious moan
Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.
O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retired
From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see and sing, by my own eyes inspired.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours!
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthed prophet dreaming.
Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind;
Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees
Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and shells, and stars without a name.
With all the gardener Fancy e’er could feign,
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!
ODE TO MELANCHOLY
NO, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine:
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of a salt sand-wave;
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips.
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grapes against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
HARTLEY COLERIDGE
1796–1849
SHE IS NOT FAIR
SHE is not fair to outward view
As many maidens be;
Her loveliness I never knew
Until she smiled on me.
O then I saw her eye was bright,
A well of love, a spring of light.
But now her looks are coy and cold,
To mine they ne’er reply,
And yet I cease not to behold
The love-light in her eye:
Her very frowns are fairer far
Than smiles of other maidens are.
NOTES
EPITHALAMION.—Page 3.
WRITTEN by Spenser on his marriage in Ireland, in 1594, with Elizabeth
Boyle of Kilcoran, who survived him, married one Roger Seckerstone, and
was again a widow. Dr. Grosart seems to have finally decided the
identity of the heroine of this great poem. It is worth while to
explain, once for all, that I do not use the accented _e_ for the longer
pronunciation of the past participle. The accent is not an English sign,
and, to my mind, disfigures the verse; neither do I think it necessary to
cut off the _e_ with an apostrophe when the participle is shortened. The
reader knows at a glance how the word is to be numbered; besides, he may
have his preferences where choice is allowed. In reading such a line as
Tennyson’s
‘Dear as remembered kisses after death,’
one man likes the familiar sound of the word ‘remembered’ as we all speak
it now; another takes pleasure in the four light syllables filling the
line so full. Tennyson uses the apostrophe as a rule, but neither he nor
any other author is quite consistent.
ROSALYND’S MADRIGAL.—Page 21.
It may please the reader to think that this frolic, rich, and delicate
singer was Shakespeare’s very Rosalind. From Dr. Thomas Lodge’s novel,
_Euphues’ Golden Legacy_, was taken much of the story, with some of the
characters, and some few of the passages, of _As You Like It_.
ROSALINE.—Page 22.
This splendid poem (from the same romance), written on the poet’s voyage
to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, has the fire and freshness
of the south and the sea; all its colours are clear. The reader’s ear
will at once teach him to read the sigh ‘heigh ho’ so as to give the
first syllable the time of two (long and short).
FAREWELL TO ARMS.—Page 25.
George Peele’s four fine stanzas (which must be mentioned as dedicated to
Queen Elizabeth, but are better without that dedication) exist in another
form, in the first person, and with some archaisms smoothed. But the
third person seems to be far more touching, the old man himself having
done with verse.
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD.—Page 28.
The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.
TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY.—Page 44.
The author of this exquisite song is by no means certain. The second
stanza is not with the first in Shakespeare, but it is in Beaumont and
Fletcher.
KIND ARE HER ANSWERS.—Page 46.
These verses are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and
poet, Campion, than even the following, _Laura_, which he himself sweetly
commended as ‘voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit.’ In _Kind
are her Answers_ the long syllables and the trochaic movement of the
short lines meet the contrary movement of the rest, with an exquisite
effect of flux and reflux. The ‘dancers’ whose time they sang must have
danced (with Perdita) like ‘a wave of the sea.’
DIRGE.—Page 44.
I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less
beautiful stanza.
FOLLOW.—Page 49.
Campion’s ‘airs,’ for which he wrote his words, laid rules too urgent
upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The airs demanded
so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave to be away, and they
depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital
spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating
pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not
attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true
poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this
line, ‘touching in its majesty’—
‘Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!’
Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging stanza
containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are speechless, with
these two final lines—
‘If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!’
Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.
‘Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me’
is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in
this—
‘Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!’
And a single joy in this—
‘Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!’
Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion the
author of _Cherry Ripe_—
‘A thousand cherubim fly in her looks.’
And yet ‘a thousand cherubim’ is a line of a poem full of the dullest
kind of reasoning—curious matter for music—and of the intricate knotting
of what is a very simple thread of thought. It was therefore no easy
matter to choose something of Campion’s for a collection of the finest
work. For an historical book of representative poetry the question would
be easy enough, for there Campion should appear by his glorious lyric,
_Cherry Ripe_, by one or two poems of profounder imagination (however
imperfect), and by a madrigal written for the music (however the stanzas
may flag in their quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics
for the sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity of
the inspiration, and the poet’s absolute disregard of the moment of its
flight and departure.
A few splendid lines may be reason enough for extracting a short poem,
but must not be made to bear too great a burden.
WHEN THOU MUST HOME.—Page 50.
Of the quality of this imaginative lyric there is no doubt. It is fine
throughout, as we confess even after the greatness of the opening:—
‘When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest—’
It is as solemn and fantastic at the close as at this dark and splendid
opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem
must bind Campion to that period without question; and as he lived
thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his _Book
of Airs_ with Rosseter two years before her death, it is by no violence
that we give him the name that covers our earlier poets of the great age.
_When thou must Home_ is of the day of Marlowe. It has the qualities of
great poetry, and especially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and
it has a quality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult,
large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous.
THE FUNERAL.—Page 56.
Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation that I
admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral; but the earlier
lines of the last are fine.
CHARIS’ TRIUMPH.—Page 58.
The freshest of Ben Jonson’s lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is
freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic
initiative, and his overhearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a
stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his
honesty that he did not adopt the country-phrases in vogue; but when he
takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had
the temerity to find fault, for a blunder of meaning, with the passage of
a most famous lyric, where it says the contrary of what it would say—
‘But might I of Jove’s nectar sup
I would not change for thine;’
and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the argument of
those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must hold reason itself
to be in error rather than allow that a line of it has chanced to get
turned in the rhyming.
IN EARTH.—Page 64.
‘I never saw anything,’ says Charles Lamb, ‘like this funeral dirge,
except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the
_Tempest_. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth,
earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve
itself into the element which it contemplates.’
SONG.—Page 65.
All Drummond’s poems seem to be minor poems, even at their finest, except
only this. He must have known, for the creation of that poem, some more
impassioned and less restless hour. It is, from the outset to the close,
the sigh of a profound expectation. There is no division into stanzas,
because its metre is the breath of life. One might wish that the English
ode (roughly called ‘Pindaric’) had never been written but with passion,
for so written it is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the
heart and the breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It
has passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not
astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley, long
afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But Drummond’s
(he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. With admirable
judgment it was set up at the very gate of that _Golden Treasury_ we all
know so well; and, therefore, generation after generation of readers, who
have never opened Drummond’s poems, know this fine ode as well as they
know any single poem in the whole of English literature. There was a
generation that had not been taught by the _Golden Treasury_, and
Cardinal Newman was of it. Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great
odes, he called them beautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that
they might some day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry
more complete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that another
stanza might have made a final close; but a master’s ode has the unity of
life, and when it ends it ends for ever.
A poem of Drummond’s has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has
blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused her,
one would think, to hear the flattery with a front as cool as the very
daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden increase of her beauty
is futile, for he cannot admire more: ‘For naught thy cheeks that morn do
raise.’ What sweet, nay, what solemn roses!
Again:
‘Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations overspread her face.’
The seventeenth century has possession of that ‘morn’ caught once upon
its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its freshness to
wither it.
TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS.—Page 75.
The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone—not unique, for it
had sounded somewhere in mediæval poetry in Italy—but in a dreadful sense
divine. At the first reading, this sentence against inconstancy, spoken
by one more than inconstant, moves something like indignation;
nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified, on a ground as it
were beyond the common region of tolerance and pardon.
THE PULLEY.—Page 91.
An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses.
George Herbert was maladroit in using the word ‘rest’ in two senses.
‘Peace’ is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the
place of ‘rest’ in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first
line of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity.
The poem is otherwise perfect beyond description.
MISERY.—Page 94.
George Herbert’s work is so perfectly a box where thoughts ‘compacted
lie,’ that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line,
so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be
well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this—
‘He was a garden in a Paradise.’
THE ROSE.—Page 99.
There is nothing else of Waller’s fine enough to be admitted here; and
even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and
fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class.
Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third
rank is less than great. The wearied argument of _The Rose_ is the
almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: ‘Time is
short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love.’ This
thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was—time out of
mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and
without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the
message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades
you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is
the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the
verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.
L’ALLEGRO.—Page 109.
The sock represents the stage, in _L’Allegro_, for comedy, and the
buskin, in _Il Penseroso_, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic
drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The
poet of _King Lear_ is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.
IL PENSEROSO.—Page 113.
It is too late to protest against Milton’s display of weak Italian.
_Pensieroso_ is, of course, what he should have written.
LYCIDAS.—Page 119.
Most of the allusions in _Lycidas_ need no explaining to readers of
poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north
to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; ‘the great vision’ means the apparition of
the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael’s Mount; Namancos and Bayona
face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium,
the Land’s End.
Arethusa and Mincius—Sicilian and Italian streams—represent the pastoral
poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.
ON A PRAYER-BOOK.—Page 131.
‘Fair and flagrant things’—Crashaw’s own phrase—might serve for a
brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own
verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite
the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw’s line—
‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,’
and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word
to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace, of Crashaw,
and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century—not so much that
their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no reader of taste could
suffer them. A better opinion on that company of poets is that they had
a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not
essentially lax: taste that gave now and then too much room to play, but
anon closed with the purest and exactest laws of temperance and measure.
The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the
extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none;
moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were
pleased to call a ‘rage,’ and this expatiated (to use another word of
their own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in
the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an
eighteenth century ‘rage.’ A ‘noble rage,’ properly provoked, could be
backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous
sweet poet of the older time to run upon. He was fancy’s child, and the
bard of the eighteenth century was the child of common sense with straws
in his hair—vainly arranged there. The eighteenth century was never
content with a moderate mind; it invented ‘rage’; it matched rage with a
flagrant diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made
vacant and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be
behind no century in passion—nay, to show the way, to fire the nations.
Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, ‘where to rage’;
and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the
lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of misgiving as to the resulting
verse. Take such a phrase as ‘the madded land’; there, indeed, is a word
coined by the noble rage as the last century evoked it. ‘The madded
land’ is a phrase intended to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson
himself, could lodge the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred.
‘And dubious title shakes the madded land.’ It would be hard to find
anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.
Take _The Weeper_ of Crashaw—his most flagrant poem. Its follies are all
sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and abundant
shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the flagrant that it is
difficult to quote them without rousing that general sense of humour of
which any one may make a boast; and I am therefore shy even of citing the
‘brisk cherub’ who has early sipped the Saint’s tear: ‘Then to his
music,’ in Crashaw’s divinely simple phrase; and his singing ‘tastes of
this breakfast all day long.’ Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper,
and when sorrow would be seen in state, ‘then is she drest by none but
thee.’ Then you come upon the fancy, ‘Fountain and garden in one face.’
All places, times, and objects are ‘Thy tears’ sweet opportunity.’ If
these charming passages lurk in his worst poems, the reader of this
anthology will not be able to count them in his best. In the Epiphany
Hymn the heavens have found means
‘To disinherit the sun’s rise,
Delicately to displace
The day, and plant it fairer in thy face.’
_To the Morning_: _Satisfaction for Sleep_, is, all through, luminous.
It would he difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of that time,
more daylight or more spirit. True, an Elizabethan would not have had
poetry so rich as in _Love’s Horoscope_, but yet an Elizabethan would
have had it no fresher. The _Hymn to St. Teresa_ has the brevities which
this poet—reproached with his _longueurs_—masters so well. He tells how
the Spanish girl, six years old, set out in search of death: ‘She’s for
the Moors and Martyrdom. Sweet, not so fast!’ Of many contemporary
songs in pursuit of a fugitive Cupid, Crashaw’s _Cupid’s Cryer_: _out of
the Greek_, is the most dainty. But if readers should be a little vexed
with the poet’s light heart and perpetual pleasure, with the late
ripeness of his sweetness, here, for their satisfaction, is a passage
capable of the great age that had lately closed when Crashaw wrote. It
is in his summons to nature and art:
‘Come, and come strong,
To the conspiracy of our spacious song!’
I have been obliged to take courage to alter the reading of the
seventeenth and nineteenth lines of the _Prayer-Book_, so as to make them
intelligible; they had been obviously misprinted. I have also found it
necessary to re-punctuate generally.
WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS.—Page 139.
This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown
together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom with it.
I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas that repeated
the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious.
ON THE DEATH OF MR. CRASHAW.—Page 157.
This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that, better
known, _On the Death of Mr. William Harvey_. In the Crashaw ode, and in
the _Hymn to the Light_, Cowley is, at last, tender. But it cannot be
said that his love-poems had tenderness. He wrote in a gay language, but
added nothing to its gaiety. He wrote the language of love, and left it
cooler than he found it. What the conceits of Lovelace and the
rest—flagrant, not frigid—did not do was done by Cowley’s quenching
breath; the language of love began to lose by him. But even then, even
then, who could have foretold what the loss at a later day would be!
HYMN TO THE LIGHT.—Page 159.
It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should show Cowley
as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two lines. For he it
was who first used (or first conspicuously used) the alexandrine that is
organic, integral, and itself a separate unit of metre. He first passed
beyond the heroic line, or at least he first used the alexandrine freely,
at his pleasure, amid heroic verse; and after him Dryden took possession
and then Pope. But both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines,
wrote them in the French manner, divided. Cowley, however, with
admirable art, is able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the
middle of his line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the
speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any lingering.
Take this one instance—
‘Like some fair pine o’erlooking all the ignobler wood.’
If Cowley’s delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and he surely
had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrine would have
taken its own place as an important line of English metre, more mobile
than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramatic poetry, but a line
liberally lyrical. It would have been the light, pursuing wave that runs
suddenly, outrunning twenty, further up the sands than these, a swift
traveller, unspent, of longer impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller
and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to
have done. Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it,
and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in
this a valuable bequest.
Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard Crashaw, and
the alexandrine is to be found—to be found by searching—in Crashaw; and
he took precisely the same care as Cowley that the long wand of that line
should not give way in the middle—should be strong and supple and should
last. Here are four of his alexandrines—
‘Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise.’
‘Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more.’
‘And everlasting series of a deathless song.’
‘To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name.’
A later poet—Coventry Patmore—wrote a far longer line than even these—a
line not only speeding further, but speeding with a more celestial
movement than Cowley or Crashaw heard with the ear of dreams.
‘He unhappily adopted,’ says Dr. Johnson as to Cowley’s diction, ‘that
which was predominant.’ ‘That which was predominant’ was as good a
vintage of English language as the cycles of history have ever brought to
pass.
TO LUCASTA.—Page 163.
Colonel Richard Lovelace, an enchanting poet, is hardly read, except for
two poems which are as famous as any in our language. Perhaps the rumour
of his conceits has frightened his reader. It must be granted they are
now and then daunting; there is a poem on ‘Princess Louisa Drawing’ which
is a very maze; the little paths of verse and fancy turn in upon one
another, and the turns are pointed with artificial shouts of joy and
surprise. But, again, what a reader unused to a certain living symbolism
will be apt to take for a careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a
rapture—none graver, none more fiery or more luminous. But even to name
the poem where these occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry
over to the general sense of humour, which one distrusts. Nor is
Lovelace easy reading at any time (the two or three famous poems
excepted). The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the
fiddler. Eleven o’clock in the morning was as good an hour as another
for a dance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate with
figures. It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of the
movement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a free impulse.
Since the first day danced with the first night, no dancing was more
natural—at least to a dancer of genius. True, the dance could be
tyrannous. It was an importunate fashion. When the Bishop of Hereford,
compelled by Robin Hood, in merry Barnsdale, danced in his boots (‘and
glad he could so get away’), he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a
seventeenth century author here and there whose original seriousness or
work-a-day piety would have been content to go plodding flat-foot or
halting, as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune,
the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetual
measure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest his
wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flight has lost
its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to
commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant urchins—naughty
cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth century was in love with
that old fancy—more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past. Its
late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the
comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering
childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook
a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up.
Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace’s poetry:
‘This is the palace of the wood,
And court o’ the royal oak, where stood
The whole nobility.’
In more than one place Lucasta’s, or Amarantha’s, or Laura’s hair is
sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in
Wordsworth’s line.
Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow a book;
yet it is but a ‘hermitage.’ To shake out the light and spirit of its
leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him, but to the world.
In _To Lucasta_ I have been bold to alter, at the close, ‘you’ to ‘thou.’
Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and the inconsistency of pronouns
is common with him, but nowhere else so distressing as in this brief and
otherwise perfect poem. The fault is easily set right, and it seems even
an unkindness not to lend him this redress, offered him here as an act of
comradeship.
LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES.—Page 165.
That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more lamentable
because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend upon the
precision of a comma—nay, upon the precision of the voice in reading.
_Lucasta Paying her Obsequies_ is a poem that makes a kind of dainty
confusion between the two vestals—the living and the dead; they are
‘equal virgins,’ and you must assign the pronouns carefully to either as
you read. This, read twice, must surely be placed amongst the loveliest
of his lovely writings. It is a joy to meet such a phrase as ‘her brave
eyes.’
TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON.—Page 166.
This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight. Should
they be ‘birds’ or ‘gods’ that wanton in the air in the first of these
gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at ‘gods,’ and with admirable
judgment suggested ‘birds,’ an amendment adopted by the greater number of
succeeding editors, until one or two wished for the other phrase again,
as an audacity fit for Lovelace. But the Bishop’s misgiving was after
all justified by one of the MSS. of the poem, in which the ‘gods’ proved
to be ‘birds’ long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is
there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin
with ‘gods’ would be to make an anticlimax of the close. Lovelace led
from birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels.
‘When linnet-like confined’ is another modern reading. ‘When, like
committed linnets,’ daunted the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it is
right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored; happily, because
Lovelace would not have the word ‘confined’ twice in this little poem.
A HORATIAN ODE.—Page 169.
‘He earned the glorious name,’ says a biographer of Andrew Marvell
(editing an issue of that post’s works which certainly has its faults),
‘of the British Aristides.’ The portly dulness of the mind that could
make such a phrase, and having made, award it, is not, in fairness, to
affect a reader’s thought of Marvell himself nor even of his time. Under
correction, I should think that the award was not made in his own age; he
did but live on the eve of the day that cumbered its mouth with phrases
of such foolish burden and made literature stiff with them. Andrew
Marvell’s political rectitude, it is true, seems to have been of a
robustious kind; but his poetry, at its rare best, has a ‘wild civility,’
which might puzzle the triumph of him, whoever he was, who made a success
of this phrase of the ‘British Aristides.’ Nay, it is difficult not to
think that Marvell too, who was ‘of middling stature, roundish-faced,
cherry-cheeked,’ a healthy and active rather than a spiritual Aristides,
might himself have been somewhat taken by surprise at the encounters of
so subtle a muse. He, as a garden-poet, expected the accustomed Muse to
lurk about the fountain-heads, within the caves, and by the walks and the
statues of the gods, keeping the tryst of a seventeenth century
convention in which there were certainly no surprises. And for fear of
the commonplaces of those visits, Marvell sometimes outdoes the whole
company of garden-poets in the difficult labours of the fancy. The
reader treads with him a ‘maze’ most resolutely intricate, and is more
than once obliged to turn back, having been too much puzzled on the way
to a small, visible, plain, and obvious goal of thought.
And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardly looked
for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had been waiting behind
a laurel or an apple-tree. You find him coming away from such a divine
ambush a wilder and a simpler man. All his garden had been made ready
for poetry, and poetry was indeed there, but in unexpected hiding and in
a strange form, looking rather like a fugitive, shy of the poet who was
conscious of having her rules by heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen,
for all her haste.
The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of a different
character and a higher degree. They have so much authentic dignity that
‘the glorious name of the British Aristides’ really seems duller when it
is conferred as the earnings of the _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return
from Ireland_ than when it inappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell,
cherry-cheeked, caught in the tendrils of his vines and melons. He shall
be, therefore, the British Aristides in those moments of midsummer
solitude; at least, the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never
sought.
The Satires are, of course, out of reach for their inordinate length.
The celebrated Satire on Holland certainly makes the utmost of the fun to
be easily found in the physical facts of the country whose people ‘with
mad labour fished the land to shore.’ The Satire on ‘Flecno’ makes the
utmost of another joke we know of—that of famine. Flecno, it will be
remembered, was a poet, and poor; but the joke of his bad verses was
hardly needed, so fine does Marvell find that of his hunger. Perhaps
there is no age of English satire that does not give forth the sound of
that laughter unknown to savages—that craven laughter.
THE PICTURE OF T. C. IN A PROSPECT OF FLOWERS.—Page 173.
The presence of a furtive irony of the sweetest kind is the sure sign of
the visit of that unlooked-for muse. With all spirit and subtlety does
Marvell pretend to offer the little girl T. C. (the future ‘virtuous
enemy of man’) the prophetic homage of the habitual poets. The poem
closes with an impassioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in
Marvell.
THE DEFINITION OF LOVE.—Page 179.
The noble phrase of the _Horatian Ode_ is not recovered again, high or
low, throughout Marvell’s book, if we except one single splendid and
surpassing passage from _The Definition of Love_—
‘Magnanimous despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing.’
CHILDHOOD.—Page 183.
One of our true poets, and the first who looked at nature with the full
spiritual intellect, Henry Vaughan was known to few but students until
Mr. E. K. Chambers gave us his excellent edition. The tender wit and
grave play of Herbert, Crashaw’s lovely rapture, are all unlike this
meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life. Vaughan’s
imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east. The age seems
to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts
that there should be more than a century—and such a century!—from him to
Wordsworth. The passing of time between them is strange enough, but the
passing of Pope, Prior, and Gray—of the world, the world, whether
reasonable or flippant or rhetorical—is more strange. Vaughan’s phrase
and diction seem to carry the light. _Il vous semble que cette femme
dégage de la lumière en marchant_? _Vous l’aimez_! says Marius in _Les
Misérables_ (I quote from memory), and it seems to be by a sense of light
that we know the muse we are to love.
SCOTTISH BALLADS.—Page 191.
It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from
among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places.
Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had
passages of genius—a line here and there of surpassing imagination and
poetry—rare in even the best folk-songs. Such passages do not occur but
in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind.
‘None but my foe to be my guide’ so distinguishes _Helen of Kirconnell_;
the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, _The Wife of Usher’s Well_;
its varied refrain, _The Dowie Dens of Yarrow_; the stanza spoken by
Margaret asking for room in the grave, _Sweet William and Margaret_; and
a number of passages, _Sir Patrick Spens_, such as that beginning, ‘I saw
the new moon late yestreen,’ the stanza beginning ‘O laith, laith were
our gude Scots lords,’ and almost all the stanzas following. _A Lyke
Wake Dirge_ is of surpassing quality throughout. I am sorry to have no
room for Jamieson’s version of _Fair Annie_, for _Edom o’ Gordon_, for
_The Dæmon Lover_, for _Edward_, _Edward_, and for the Scottish edition
of _The Battle of Otterbourne_.
MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW.—Page 205.
This most majestic ode—one of the few greatest of its kind—is a model of
noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it whole would be
impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book is made in the
midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far from simplicity, bears himself
like a child who, having said something fine, caps it with something
foolish. The suppressed part of the ode is silly with a silliness which
Dryden’s age chose to dodder in when it would. The deplorable ‘rattling
bones’ of the closing section has a touch of it.
SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR.—Page 209.
It is a futile thing—and the cause of a train of futilities—to hail
‘style’ as though it were a separable quality in literature, and it is
not in that illusion that the style of the opening of Aphra Behn’s
resounding song is to be praised. But it _is_ the style—implying the
reckless and majestic heart—that first takes the reader of these great
verses.
HYMN.—Page 209.
Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,—and it seems that the
inspired passages are none of his—it is to me a poem of genius, magical
in spite of the limited diction.
ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.—Page 210.
Also in spite of limited diction—the sign of thought closing in, as it
did fast close in during those years—are Pope’s tenderness and passion
communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not be too much to say
that all his passion, all his tenderness, and certainly all his mystery,
are in the few lines at the opening and close. The _Epistle of Eloisa_
is (artistically speaking) but a counterfeit. Yet Pope’s _Elegy_ begins
by stealing and translating into the false elegance of altered taste that
lovely and poetic opening of Ben Jonson’s—
‘What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?’
All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost in such
a change as Pope makes—
‘What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?’
Yet they are not lost. Pope’s awe and ardour are authentic, and they
prevail; the succeeding couplet—inimitably modulated, and of tragic
dignity—proves, without delay, the quality of the poem. The poverty and
coldness of the passage (towards the end), in which the roses and the
angels are somewhat trivially sung, cannot mar so veritable an utterance.
The four final couplets are the very glory of the English couplet.
LINES ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER’S PICTURE.—Page 213.
Cowper, again, by the very directness of human feeling makes his
narrowing English a means of absolutely direct communication. Of all his
works (and this is my own mere and unshared opinion) this single one
deserves immortality.
LIFE.—Page 217.
This fragment (the only fragment, properly so called, in the present
collection) so pleased Wordsworth that he wished he had written the
lines. They are very gently touched.
THE LAND OF DREAMS.—Page 217.
When Blake writes of sleep and dreams he writes under the very influence
of the hours of sleep—with a waking consciousness of the wilder emotion
of the dream. Corot painted so, when at summer dawn he went out and saw
landscape in the hours of sleep.
SURPRISED BY JOY.—Page 229.
It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth’s sonnets—the greatest
sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they
print this one sonnet; ‘I wished to share the transport’ is by no means
an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked.
It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these
impassioned lines are lost by that ‘wished’ in the place of ‘turned.’
The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and
in that heart-moving poem, _’Tis said that some have died for love_, is
Wordsworth to be confessed as an impassioned poet.
STEPPING WESTWARD.—Page 243.
This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far more
justified, more recollected and sincere than is that more monumental
composition, the famous poem of sympathy, _Hartleap Well_. The most
beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked by the truths of
nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to the straightforward view
of sensitive eyes upon the natural world. Wordsworth shows us the ruins
of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an
innocent creature, hunted, had there broken its heart in a leap from the
rocks above; grass would not grow, nor shade linger there—
‘This beast not unobserved by Nature fell,
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.’
And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly asserted to be these arid
woodland ruins—cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming
over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such
fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza
especially—
‘The Being that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creature whom He loves.’
We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that
‘reverential care,’ the visible alteration of nature at the scene of
suffering—an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pass
in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed
in a sympathy he asks us—upon such grounds!—to believe in? Did he think
his faith to be worthy of no more than a fictitious sign or a false
proof?
To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large
meshes—so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the
reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely
beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.
YOUTH AND AGE.—Page 256.
Close to the marvellous _Kubla Khan_—a poem that wrests the secret of
dreams and brings it to the light of verse—I place _Youth and Age_ as the
best specimen of Coleridge’s poetry that is quite undelirious—to my mind
the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and
even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in
thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a
rather lamentable close; the likeness to ‘some poor nigh-related guest’
with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or
thought.
THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.—Page 258.
This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry—the
simplest ‘flower of the mind,’ the most single magic—than any other in
our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly.
Page 265.
Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them when
the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness. All
through _The Ancient Mariner_ we see them like apparitions. It is a pity
that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a
star _within_ the tip of the crescent.
Page 266.
The likeness of ‘the ribbed sea sand’ is said to be the one passage
actually composed by Wordsworth,—who according to the first plan should
have written _The Ancient Mariner_ with Coleridge—‘and perhaps the most
beautiful passage in the poem,’ adds one critic after another. It is no
more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable
Coleridge quality.
Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of the senses,
which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simple poet. It is
necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on ‘the moving Moon’ at
the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to the supernatural stanzas on page
271; and, for touch, to the line—
‘And still my body drank.’
ROSE AYLMER.—Page 281.
Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect
stanzas.
THE ISLES OF GREECE.—Page 286.
One really fine and poetic stanza—of course, the third; three stanzas
that are good eloquence—the fourth, fifth, and seventh; and one that is a
fair bit of argument—the tenth—may together perhaps carry the rest.
HELLAS.—Page 290.
The profounder spirit of Shelley’s poem yet leaves it a careless piece of
work in comparison with Byron’s. The two false rhymes at the outset may
not be of great importance, but there is something annoying in the
dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza. Dissyllabic rhymes are
beautiful and enriching when they fall in the right place; that is, where
there is a pause for the second little syllable to stand. For example,
they could not be better placed than they would have been at the end of
the shorter lines of this same stanza, where they would have dropped into
a part of the pause. Another sin of sheer heedlessness—the lapse of
grammar in _The Skylark_, at the top of page 296—will remind the reader
of the special habitual error of Drummond of Hawthornden.
THE WANING MOON.—Page 298.
In these few lines the Shelley spirit seems to be more intense than in
any other passage as brief.
ODE TO THE WEST WIND.—Page 299.
This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great post’s writings,
and one of the most splendid poems on nature and on poetry in a
literature resounding with odes on these enormous themes.
THE INVITATION.—Page 303.
No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucent verse.
LA BELLE DAME BANS MERCI.—Page 316.
Keats is here the magical poet, as he is the intellectual poet in the
great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise of both
imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his day they
seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his poetry. To me he
seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and simplicity, and these he
had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats was to have been a great
intellectual poet, besides all that in fact he was.
ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE.—Page 320.
Of the five odes of Keats, the _Nightingale_ is perhaps the most perfect,
and certainly the most imaginative. But the _Grecian Urn_ is the finest,
even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy
more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea—the emptying of the town
because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn—is
merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy—a prank; it is an irony of man, a
rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with
tenderness. The six lines in which this fancy sports are amongst the
loveliest in all literature: the ‘little town,’ the ‘peaceful
citadel,’—were ever simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats’s final
moral here is undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little.
The _Ode to Autumn_ is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but
lovely and perfect. The _Psyche_ I love the least, because its fancy is
rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the deadly
sickliness of _Endymion_. None the less does it remain just within the
group of the really fine odes of English poets. The eloquent
_Melancholy_ more narrowly escapes exclusion from that group.
* * * * *
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Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty
at the Edinburgh University Press
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FOOTNOTES.
{168} Evidently of love.
{244} In several parts of the north of England, when a funeral takes
place, a basin full of sprigs of boxwood is placed at the door of the
house from which the coffin is taken up, and each person who attends the
funeral ordinarily takes a sprig of this boxwood, and throws it into the
grave of the deceased.