The Flower of the Mind, and Later Poems Part 3

IL PENSEROSO

It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian.

Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.

LYCIDAS

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

"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 "n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sion--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 n.o.ble 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 t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sages 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 be 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.cious 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

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

This ode has been chosen as more n.o.bly 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. Be 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

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 pa.s.sed 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 ign.o.bler 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.s.

TO LUCASTA

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 n.o.bility."

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 p.r.o.nouns 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

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 a.s.sign the p.r.o.nouns 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