_Diction in English Poetry_
Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The date is not an
inconvenient one to set at the beginning of a study of the poetry of
the age to which she gave her name. Shelley, Byron, and Keats were
dead, Wordsworth’s most important work was finished, Alfred Tennyson,
Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett had made their first appearances
in print, Matthew Arnold was at school, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and
his sister Christina were children, William Morris and Algernon
Charles Swinburne had just been born. Walter Savage Landor, one of
the strangest figures in our poetical literature, whose first poems
had been published in 1795, was still at the prime of his genius, but
the small body of his best work does not mark him very definitely as
either Romantic or Victorian. There were a number of less famous but by
no means inconsiderable poets whose work will call for notice as we
proceed.
The Romantic Revival in English poetry is generally accepted as having
Blake and Gray and Collins for its pioneers. It must, however, be
remembered that the earlier part of the eighteenth century, the age of
reason, had not been wholly without the Romantic note. To read the work
of the almost forgotten smaller men of that time is to chance often
upon a phrase in which the tenderness, and heart-ache, and the warm
sense of colour and natural beauty, which were so to dominate the great
epoch from Wordsworth to Keats, break through the witty and balanced
argument of an age when it was not considered to be the thing to say
too much about the heart. Even the master, Pope himself, in some of his
pastorals and elegies, and in such a poem as _Eloisa to Abelard_,
sometimes lets the glow of passion play upon a poetic habit that was
not used to have its cold and logical brilliance ruffled except by
anger. In those days, however, the Romantic note when it was struck
seems rather to have been struck by accident than by deliberation,
while in Gray and Collins there is continually an instinct for it, in
conflict with an inherited tradition that gives it no encouragement.
Blake, although he definitely helped the Romantic Revival on its way,
was himself, like Landor, rather an isolated manifestation of poetry
belonging not very clearly to any particular age. The Romantic Revival,
when it did come, came with a full force of reaction against the age
of reason, with its often admirable rhetoric, its emotional timidity
and its concern with etiquette at the expense of character. But the
Romantic Revival, for all the splendour of its common spirit and the
great personal genius of its masters, had one radical condition of
weakness, namely, that it was a revival. In many ways it was, and
remains, the richest period in English poetry, but it was also the
first period in English poetry that had something in the inspiration of
its actual poetic method that was second-hand and not original. This
is not to say that Wordsworth and the others were not original poets.
The discovery of nature, the revolutionary passion, the preoccupation
with the everyday life of the emotions, one or another of these marked
Keats and Shelley and Byron, and the rest of them, as discoverers. But
in the actual machinery through which their poetic mood worked there
was often something literary and remembered in a sense more marked
than can be observed in the practice of poets in England before. It
is true that no good poet has ever worked without some example in his
mind, but the Elizabethans were conscious of an Italian influence as of
something vivid and present among them, a very part of their own lives,
as it were, whereas the Elizabethan influence upon Keats was something
deliberately remembered, something won back from a long past age.
Without in the least detracting from the achievement of Keats, which
must remain among the greatest in English poetry, it may be said that
in this respect the Elizabethans were Italians but that Keats imitated
the Elizabethans. The poets of the Romantic Revival were as rich in
creative endowment as the Elizabethans themselves, certainly richer
than the Augustans. But, in a sense, even the polished formality of
Pope’s verse and the artificiality of his manner were more exactly his
own than were the free music and luxurious emotional life the unaided
discoveries of the Romantics who used them in the next age.
This circumstance of the Romantic Revival has had a profound influence
upon English poetry ever since, and so far as may be prophesied it
is likely to continue to do so. Poetry since the death of Keats and
Shelley and Byron has acquired many new interests, chiefly intellectual
interests, which did not belong to it before their time, or, at least,
did not belong to it in anything like the same measure, but it has,
also, become definitely a less original thing both as to manner and
in its emotional content. Whether this is a gain or loss is for each
reader to determine for himself, but in the conclusion it is likely
that there would be at least as many people glad of the fact as sorry
for it. I must elaborate this position first as to the manner, and
later as to the content.
I would be dogmatic at once and say that in spite of all the
experimenters in _vers libre_ and polyphonic prose and what not,
there is now no new verse form to be discovered in English. Every
poet as he comes along can invent new combinations of existing forms,
often enchantingly, but that is another matter, though even this
becomes increasingly difficult. Poetry will never take kindly to free
verse as a common method, though any poet is likely to practise it at
intervals. So-called polyphonic prose, which is only a variety of free
verse, may lend itself often to admirable writing when it happens to be
used by an admirable writer, but for most of us it is incapable of the
peculiar delight given by regular verse forms which have been evolved
through centuries of experience. The introduction of classical metres
into English poetry is a lost cause, as it always has been, attractive
though it may be to a fine spirit now and again. There remains for
the use of the poets the vast technique of recognised verse form with
its infinite variety of line length and stanzaic structure. None of
the considerable poets in our literature has ever found it irksome to
work within these limitations, an observation which is as just to-day
as it ever was. Since the Romantic poets the possibilities of line
and stanza in themselves have hardly been extended in any important
manner, unless we allow to the contrary, for example, Swinburne’s
exploitation of anapæstic measures, which, on the whole, was to the bad
rather than to the good in spite of its occasional triumphs. Strictly
speaking, as to line and stanza in themselves, it might be said that
even the Romantics did nothing that could not be matched somewhere or
another in English poetry before them. Their technical invention was
mostly rediscovery, though none the less creditable to them for that.
Their rediscovery was of something so forgotten that they might claim
that it was new, but, however that may be, there has been nothing new
since them in the strictly formal contour of English verse. What has
been new, and what must always be new when a true poet is at work, is
the rhythmic beat within that contour, and the genius of our language
is happily such as to give this beat boundless freedom. Among our
contemporaries no one has achieved a technique more distinctively his
own, perhaps, than Mr. Walter de la Mare, but upon examination it will
be found that this distinctiveness is entirely one of his rhythmic
beat, and that there is no invention of metrical form.
“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
is peculiarly marked by Mr. de la Mare’s rhythmic genius; but alter the
beat a little and you get--
And they changed their lives and departed, and came
back as the leaves of the trees.
And again, to go back beyond Morris, we come even to--
What are the wild waves saying,
Sister, the whole day long.
Leaving out the question of the stanzaic form and line lengths, and
the way these are set out on the printed page, there is in these three
examples an almost exact stress-equivalence, but each has its own
entirely individual rhythmic life; rather commonplace and obvious in
the last of the three, deep-lunged and heroic in Morris, and very
delicate and subtle in Mr. de la Mare.
It is true that now and again a poet even to-day may contrive charming
variations upon stanzaic form, as Tennyson did in his _Recollections
of the Arabian Nights_, or as Mr. Thomas Hardy has done more
recently in many of his lyrics. Every now and again also a poet
may invent some attractive little device of his own in the smaller
things of technique, as, for example, Mr. Frank Kendon, a new poet
who makes an interesting experiment with rhyme-sounds thus--musing,
mind, attuned, despising. But there is no particular virtue in these
gestures once their novelty has passed, and the fact remains that from
the coming of Wordsworth until all our best contemporary poets, by
far the greater part of the most original work, and important work,
has been done in recognised verse forms, and it has relied for its
personal accent upon an individual rhythmic beat within those forms.
The domination of the rhymed heroic couplet in the age preceding
Wordsworth was so complete as to make the return to other more
definitely lyric measures almost a feat of invention, but, even so,
it is doubtful whether there is any verse form used by Wordsworth or
Blake or Shelley or Keats, or any of their contemporaries, which could
not in its essential character be matched somewhere in the sixteenth or
seventeenth centuries.
In its structural foundations, therefore, Victorian verse in England
may be said to be a direct inheritance from the Romantic age, and
through it from the longer general ancestry of English poetry. The
body of fine work done between Victoria’s succession and the death
of Tennyson is sufficient proof that the poetic instinct of the race
knew very well what it was about in this. At the same time, the more
restless talents were sometimes troubled by allegiance to forms that,
whatever their virtue, had no longer the first flush of inventive
delight. The sombre, charnel-house genius of a Webster, the rugged,
almost fierce, intellectual power of a Ben Jonson, the religious
ecstasy of a Vaughan, the tender irresponsibility of a Lovelace or
a Suckling, and the spiritual ingenuity of a Donne, were all alike
content to work in the simplest lyric forms, and were able to find
complete expression through these, because as forms they were still
fresh enough to be for each man treasure-trove. Nowhere in the whole
range of passion and wit and subtle argument was there a mood to be
found that wanted at any time to break the mould. To a large extent
this has remained true until our own day, but as time has gone on a
poet has now and again suddenly, as it were, become too conscious of
the long service already done by the more established measures and has
been tempted into irregularities which have sometimes been admirable
in result and have sometimes tumbled over into excesses only to be
forgotten. A great deal of Browning’s verse is the result of some
such uneasiness in his mind, a fear lest he should accept tradition
too easily, a deliberate realisation on his part that a poet has to
be original. Browning’s genius could stand the strain, but a strain
it was. Matthew Arnold’s experiments in free verse have much the same
origin. He, again, justified himself, but without doing anything to
show that the main traditions in which he worked habitually were
becoming less important to English poetry. In the case of Whitman,
the one example in the Victorian age of a great poetic genius working
consistently without respect for the established practice of English
verse, there is no doubt that to minds and ears aware of all that
custom has achieved, a great energy denied itself more than half its
effect.
Whitman’s revolt was complete, and, broadly speaking, it has had no
effect upon English poetry. Arnold’s departures from established
practice were occasional and, even so, pretty much in the example of
Milton, who himself made but few experiments, and those not violent
departures from the establishment. Browning’s nonconformity was
another matter. Unlike Whitman, he remained essentially always within
the tradition, but his unrest within the tradition was more or less
constant and not, as with Arnold, the accident of a mood here and
there. Browning’s was the most important poetic revolt of his age,
and it is a revolt that is a matter of diction more precisely than of
metrical form. And in its manner, as distinguished from its content,
it is in diction that the Victorian age most importantly modified
tradition. Leaving Whitman out of the question, the Victorian use of
verse was, as we have seen, with one or two insignificant exceptions,
an acknowledgment of the fitness of all that had been done by the
age-long instinct of the race. Nor, taking the Victorian achievement as
a whole, shall we find any violent or general change in the management
of diction itself. But practice here was to some extent modified, and
chiefly by Browning and through his influence.
The history of diction in English poetry is one that has never
been written, and one that would need a great volume of argument
and illustration. But taking a summary view of the whole field
certain characteristics define themselves from age to age. The first
generalisation that may be made about good diction in poetry is that
it should derive from the common speech of the time and yet be a
heightened idiomatic form of that speech, achieving from the emotional
pressure of poetry a new dignity and beauty. And we shall find that in
English poetry the diction has always associated itself in this way
with the natural speech of the time. Chaucer, in taking English speech,
and for the first time making it the language of English literature,
was dealing, so far as we can reconstruct the facts of that far-off
time, with a language unsophisticated, unlearned, and quite ingenuous
in its sincerity. And the language of his poetry is marked by these
qualities, quickened by the breath of the poet’s genius.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowle maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open yë,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages):
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages....
Nothing could be simpler in the most literal sense than the wording of
this passage. It is not the simplicity used by great genius to enforce
some tragic or tender crisis, but the simplicity of a man who wants
to make an entirely matter-of-fact statement, but to make it with
dignity and authority. It is not likely that the people of Chaucer’s
time talked exactly like that, but it is certain that almost any of
them would understand what Chaucer was saying without the smallest
difficulty. And we imagine that his clarity of statement was, in fact,
the chief idiomatic characteristic of the common speech of the time,
and that Chaucer was, in diction, definitely the poet of his age in
realising this. To read this opening of _The Canterbury Tales_ over
three or four times is to be struck more and more by the remarkable
purity of the diction, and it may be said of Chaucer’s work as a
whole that the chief triumph of his dealing with language was that
he took the simplicity which was common around him and transfigured
it into that finer essence of simplicity which is purity. When two
hundred years after Chaucer’s death the great Elizabethans were in
full song, much in the meantime had happened to common English. It
had become instructed, more flexible in its intellectual play, richer
in association, and rather more conscious of its own capacities. At
the same time it was now the instrument of a people fired with ardent
enthusiasm, rich in enterprise, and glowing with the vitality of a
young and prospering national spirit. It was the speech of witty,
passionate, and powerful youth, and triumphant youth, delighting in
problems both of body and mind, immensely fertile in its resources. But
it had not yet become sophisticated, and that is the great bond between
it and the speech of Chaucer’s time, and the great difference between
it and the speech of later ages. And, again, these characteristics
which we suppose with good reason to have been those of everyday speech
are to be found completely explored and enriched in the age’s poetry.
And one of Shakespeare’s sonnets may stand in witness of what was
within the common practice of the poets of the age.
But wherefore do not you a mightier waie
Make warre vppon this bloudie tirant time?
And fortifie your selfe in your decay
With meanes more blessed then my barren rime?
Now stand you on the top of happie houres,
And many maiden gardens, yet vnset,
With vertuous wish would beare your liuing flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit:
So should the lines of life that life repaire
Which this (Time’s pensel or my pupill pen)
Neither in inward worth nor outward faire
Can make you liue your selfe in eies of men,
To giue away your selfe, keeps your selfe still,
And you must liue drawne by your owne sweet skill.
In the succeeding age, from the Elizabethans to the Augustans, the same
principle may be discovered in the practice of poets as different in
their personal quality as, say, Donne, Milton and Lovelace. Donne’s--
By Absence this good means I gain
That I can catch her
Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my brain:
There I embrace and kiss her
And so enjoy her and none miss her....
may have perplexed his readers by its intellectual turn, but it cannot
have seemed anything but easily natural to them in its actual word. If
Donne was startling, it was in what he said and not at all in his way
of saying it. And so with Milton. Common speech could never put on a
sublimer transfiguration than in such passages as--
Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar,
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky....
But it remains the common speech that is being so dignified. Milton’s
diction, more eminently poetical perhaps than any other in the
language, is still founded on the grave, full-syllabled Biblical idiom
that we are sure was current in the ordinary enlightened speech of the
time. The first readers of his poems would find a familiar tongue,
however unsuspected was the beauty that it revealed to them. And in the
lighter lyrists of that age, this relation of poetic to common speech,
secured without any apparent deliberation--we may indeed say definitely
without it--and yet achieving the magic with easy certainty, shines
round us on every hand.
Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly ...
and--
Shut not so soon; the dull-eyed night
Has not as yet begun
To make a seizure on the light,
Or to seal up the sun ...
and--
Out upon it! I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather ...
are all alike loyal both to poetry and to the common English of their
time. Nor do the lyrists whose raptures were less of the world go
elsewhere for their means of expression. Vaughan, with--
Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought....
and Herbert with--
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky--
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night
For thou must die....
and Crashaw with--
Since ’tis not to be had at home
She’ll travel for a martyrdom....
follow the same poetic instinct precisely.
When we pass into a world of new artistic aim, the world of which
Alexander Pope is president, we find the same thing happening. The
worldly pilgrims of Chaucer’s book, Elizabeth’s intrepid adventures,
the saintly learning and gestured gallantry that fought it out in
Puritan England, have in turn passed from the centre of the stage
of articulate national life, to make way for the man about town,
the philanderer, the coquette, and the sententious moralist. The
innuendo and the moral precept are together on every man’s lips,
not wholly insincere in their partnership. And the idiom of this
witty, argumentative, intriguing and rather self-righteous society
is perfectly turned to the use of genius in the Popean poetry. When
_The Dunciad_ and _The Essay on Man_ and the _Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot_ were first read, the coffee-houses and boudoirs may
have been moved by every varying degree of delight and resentment,
but nobody questioned that here was the common language and that at
the same time it was being used above the common pitch. Pastoral,
invective, worldly-wisdom, religious philosophising, the same
instrument was there exactly tempered for each alike, thus--
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
and--
One dedicates in high heroic prose,
And ridicules beyond a hundred foes:
One from all Grub Street will my fame defend,
And, more abusive, calls himself my friend.
This prints my letters, that expects a bribe,
And others roar aloud, “Subscribe, subscribe!” ...
and--
A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring ...
and--
All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
It is true that the Augustan school in its decline, which was
contemporary with the faint prelude of the Romantic Revival, fell into
an extreme artificiality of diction that can hardly have had its model
even by suggestion in the common speech of the time. So good a poet as
Gray, who was himself one of the preludists, was not blameless in this
respect, and could write--
Him the dog of darkness spied,
His shaggy throat he open’d wide,
While from his jaws, with carnage fill’d,
Foam and human gore distill’d:
Hoarse he bays with hideous din,
Eyes that glow, and fangs that grin;
And long pursues, with fruitless yell,
The father of the powerful spell ...
which Collins, at his best even surer than Gray in prophecy of a new
age, could match with--
Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air,
Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare:
On whom that ravening brood of Fate,
Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait:
Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,
And look not madly wild, like thee?
These excesses were, however, at no time characteristic of the better
poets of the time, and were rather the mumbo-jumbo of versifiers who,
lacking any personal inspiration, caught a rumour at second or even
third hand of a spurious Arcadia, and rhymed it--or blank-versed
it--into a spiritless rhetoric. It is only suggestive at a very distant
cry, and by the merest implication, of the true nature of Augustan
poetry that Richard Jago could write--
And oft the stately Tow’rs, that overtop
The rising Wood, and oft the broken Arch,
Or mould’ring Wall, well taught to counterfeit
The Waste of Time, to solemn Thought excite,
And crown with graceful Pomp the shaggy Hill.
No age of English poetry has suffered more in reputation through the
malpractices of its more undistinguished writers than that of Pope, and
in all its finer expression it worked its own way as closely in touch
as any other with the ordinary speech of its own time.
In these references to common speech, the standard referred to, it
may be said, is the speech of the intelligent and vivid, though not
necessarily the most highly educated, members of the community. There
is no telling at any time where exactly you are going to catch the true
turn of racy or imaginative idiom, and it is as unsafe to generalize
in favour of the rustic as it is to do so in favour of the tutored
townsman. Good minds make good speech, and cumulatively they give the
common diction of an age a character which cannot escape the poets
when poetry has any health in it, which, to do it justice in looking
back over five hundred years of achievement, is nearly always. Apart
from those lapses of quite unrepresentative poets, the relation which
is being discussed was preserved, as we have seen, with unbroken
continuity from the beginnings down to the time of the late Augustans,
the immediate predecessors of Wordsworth.
While, however, the poetasters of the Popean descent[1] are now seen
clearly enough to have fallen far short of the poetic stature of their
time, they were widely read and admired, and in 1798, when Wordsworth
prefaced the _Lyrical Ballads_ with the now famous but then
slightly noted challenge to a false poetic diction, their example
seemed no doubt to be a more dangerous influence than was in fact
the case. If Wordsworth’s protest had never been explicitly made, we
should have lost a masterpiece of critical prose, but English poetry
would none the less surely have remained loyal to the principle that
Wordsworth so earnestly advocated. The big men had never lost sight of
it, nor were they in any general sense likely to. In attacking the
windy pomposity that for a time stole poetic honours, with a power that
flattered its importance, Wordsworth did not recognise that, among the
more considerable poets, even those who were demonstrably touched by
the falsity of style prevalent among their inferiors were at the same
time preparing the reform of which he himself was the new and conscious
gospeller. Gray who, as has been shown, could belabour his muse with
any of them, and who was named by Wordsworth as a particular example
for censure, did also write the _Elegy_, in which whatever lapses
there may be are far more than atoned for in the main movement by
the very purity of style which was the aim of Wordsworth’s pleading.
Wordsworth’s cause was a just one, but it was also one that was
obvious to the genius of English poetry, and the fact that he was as
consciously preoccupied with it as he was is not without its reflection
in his own creative work. He was sometimes ridden by his theory, and
then the lovely simplicity that was the basis of a style that is at
the height of English poetry lopped over into mere banality. But in
his normal manner Wordsworth exemplified his critical position with
complete success, and nowhere more strikingly than in his most inspired
passages. The spoken English with which his creative mood was familiar
must have been a blend drawn from the serious intellectualism of
young literary society, the forthright simplicities of the northern
dalesmen, where an old Biblical tradition coloured a natural austerity,
with touches of paternal authority and undergraduate levity--or
perhaps a little less than levity. It was the speech of a new England,
sophisticated, politically self-conscious, rather heavily dialectical,
but it was saved by the Bible, the dalesman, and a community of wit. It
was such a speech, played upon by that knowledge of the poet’s literary
ancestry which is a necessary agent always in the transmutation, that
Wordsworth subdued exactly to his imaginative purposes.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again!
Wordsworth’s great contemporaries, each in his own way, in terms of his
own temperament, were guided by the same principle. The whole nature of
Burns’s genius was governed by his will to sing the common speech of
Scotland into immortality. The _beau monde_, the gaming rooms and
the prize-ring, the purlieus of scandal and the solitudes of romantic
exile filled with the whispers of poetry and heroic history, the world
of new loves and lost causes, of literary loyalties and animosities,
among which Byron moved indifferently, in or out of temper, all spoke
their own language in the motley of his verse. To know the poet and his
environment is to see the same essential man in--
Smart uniforms and sparkling coronets
Are spurned in turn, until her turn arrives,
After male loss of time, and hearts, and bets
Upon the sweepstakes for substantial wives;
And when at last the pretty creature gets
Some gentleman, who fights, or writes, or drives,
It soothes the awkward squad of the rejected
To find how very badly she selected ...
and in--
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 deem myself a slave.
Even Shelley, or that mood in him that was preoccupied with the fiery
pinnacles in the clouds, kept the diction of his most ethereal flights
in tune with the same instinctive necessity.
The glory of her being, issuing thence,
Stains the dead, blank, cold air, with a warm shade
Of unentangled intermixture, made
By Love, of light and motion: one intense
Diffusion, one serene Omnipresence,
Whose flowing outlines mingle in their flowing,
Around her cheeks and utmost fingers glowing
With the unintermitted blood, which there
Quivers (as in a fleece of snow-like air
The crimson pulse of living morning quiver).
Continuously prolonged, and ending never,
Till they are lost, and in that Beauty furled
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world;
Scarce visible from extreme loveliness ...
may perhaps at first glance be elusive in its precise meaning, but it
is not because of anything difficult or uncommon in the actual words,
but because the poet’s mind is engaged with an almost indefinable
emotion. Keats again, for all the emphasis of a clear literary
influence upon his diction, was never anything but easily intelligible
in his actual statement to the simplest reader. _The Eve of St.
Agnes_ and _Isabella_, even the odes, might have come out a
little differently if there had been no Spenser or Marlowe or Chapman,
but the reader of 1820 had no need to be a scholar of Elizabethan
poetry to perceive every shade of their beauty as they were. Alone
among the great poets of his time, Coleridge at intervals sounded
tones in his verse that were archaic, or purely fanciful rather, not
recognisably out of the English of daily use.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
Coming upon that at the opening of _The Ancient Mariner_, the
first readers of _Lyrical Ballads_ must have been conscious
that something a little odd was here being done with language. But
such things are incidents merely even in Coleridge’s style, and need
not be stressed. In any case they were, it may be, done more than
half humorously, and for the most part Coleridge--in the work of his
that matters--was as sure as Wordsworth himself in the purity of his
diction, in drawing it from the one wholesome source.
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the high thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or, if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.
Beside which may be set, as a final example from that age of what
poetry can do in the way of transfiguring plain speech, Landor’s--
Stand close around, ye Stygian set,
With Dirce in one boat convey’d!
Or Charon, seeing, may forget
That he is old and she a shade.