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Flower of the Mind and Later Poems

Alice Meynell

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Flower of the Mind

and

Later Poems

by Alice Meynell

February, 2000 [Etext #2080]

Project Gutenberg Etext of Flower of the Mind, by Alice Meynell

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Later Poems, by Alice Meynell

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk

from the 1893 Grant Richards edition of The Flower of the Mind and

the 1902 John Lane edition of Later Poems.

THE FLOWER OF THE MIND

INTRODUCTION

Partial collections of English poems, decided by a common subject

or bounded by narrow dates and periods of literary history, are

made at very short intervals, and the makers are safe from the

reproach of proposing their own personal taste as a guide for the

reading of others. But a general Anthology gathered from the whole

of English literature--the whole from Chaucer to Wordsworth--by a

gatherer intent upon nothing except the quality of poetry, is a

more rare enterprise. It is hardly to be made without tempting the

suspicion--nay, hardly without seeming to hazard the confession--of

some measure of self-confidence. Nor can even the desire to enter

upon that labour be a frequent one--the desire of the heart of one

for whom poetry is veritably "the complementary life" to set up a

pale for inclusion and exclusion, to add honours, to multiply

homage, to cherish, to restore, to protest, to proclaim, to depose;

and to gain the consent of a multitude of readers to all those

acts. Many years, then--some part of a century--may easily pass

between the publication of one general anthology and the making of

another.

The enterprise would be a sorry one if it were really arbitrary,

and if an anthologist should give effect to passionate preferences

without authority. An anthology that shall have any value must be

made on the responsibility of one but on the authority of many.

There is no caprice; the mind of the maker has been formed for

decision by the wisdom of many instructors. It is the very study

of criticism, and the grateful and profitable study, that gives the

justification to work done upon the strongest personal impulse, and

done, finally, in the mental solitude that cannot be escaped at the

last. In another order, moral education would be best crowned if

it proved to have quick and profound control over the first

impulses; its finished work would be to set the soul in a state of

law, delivered from the delays of self-distrust; not action only,

but the desires would be in an old security, and a wish would come

to light already justified. This would be the second--if it were

not the only--liberty. Even so an intellectual education might

assuredly confer freedom upon first and solitary thoughts, and

confidence and composure upon the sallies of impetuous courage. In

a word, it should make a studious anthologist quite sure about

genius. And all who have bestowed, or helped in bestowing, the

liberating education have given their student the authority to be

free. Personal and singular the choice in such a book must be, not

without right.

Claiming and disclaiming so much, the gatherers may follow one

another to harvest, and glean in the same fields in different

seasons, for the repetition of the work can never be altogether a

repetition. The general consent of criticism does not stand still;

and moreover, a mere accident has until now left a poet of genius

of the past here and there to neglect or obscurity. This is not

very likely to befall again; the time has come when there is little

or nothing left to discover or rediscover in the sixteenth century

or the seventeenth; we know that there does not lurk another

Crashaw contemned, or another Henry Vaughan disregarded, or another

George Herbert misplaced. There is now something like finality of

knowledge at least; and therefore not a little error in the past is

ready to be repaired. This is the result of time. Of the slow

actions and reactions of critical taste there might be something to

say, but nothing important. No loyal anthologist perhaps will

consent to acknowledge these tides; he will hardly do his work well

unless he believe it to be stable and perfect; nor, by the way,

will he judge worthily in the name of others unless he be resolved

to judge intrepidly for himself.

Inasmuch as even the best of all poems are the best upon

innumerable degrees, the size of most anthologies has gone far to

decide what degrees are to be gathered in and what left without.

The best might make a very small volume, and be indeed the best, or

a very large volume, and be still indeed the best. But my labour

has been to do somewhat differently--to gather nothing that did not

overpass a certain boundary-line of genius. Gray's Elegy, for

instance, would rightly be placed at the head of everything below

that mark. It is, in fact, so near to the work of genius as to be

most directly, closely, and immediately rebuked by genius; it meets

genius at close quarters and almost deserves that Shakespeare

himself should defeat it. Mediocrity said its own true word in the

Elegy:

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

But greatness had said its own word also in a sonnet:

"The summer flower is to the summer sweet

Though to itself it only live and die."

The reproof here is too sure; not always does it touch so quick,

but it is not seldom manifest, and it makes exclusion a simple

task. Inclusion, on the other hand, cannot be so completely

fulfilled. The impossibility of taking in poems of great length,

however purely lyrical, is a mechanical barrier, even on the plan

of the present volume; in the case of Spenser's Prothalamion, the

unmanageably autobiographical and local passage makes it

inappropriate; some exquisite things of Landor's are lyrics in

blank verse, and the necessary rule against blank verse shuts them

out. No extracts have been made from any poem, but in a very few

instances a stanza or a passage has been dropped out. No poem has

been put in for the sake of a single perfectly fine passage; it

would be too much to say that no poem has been put in for the sake

of two splendid passages or so. The Scottish ballad poetry is

represented by examples that are to my mind finer than anything

left out; still, it is but represented; and as the song of this

multitude of unknown poets overflows by its quantity a collection

of lyrics of genius, so does severally the song of Wordsworth,

Crashaw, and Shelley. It has been necessary, in considering

traditional songs of evidently mingled authorship, to reject some

one invaluable stanza or burden--the original and ancient surviving

matter of a spoilt song--because it was necessary to reject the

sequel that has cumbered it since some sentimentalist took it for

his own. An example, which makes the heart ache, is that burden of

keen and remote poetry:

"O the broom, the bonnie, bonnie broom,

The broom of Cowdenknowes!"

Perhaps some hand will gather all such precious fragments as these

together one day, freed from what is alien in the work of the

restorer. It is inexplicable that a generation resolved to forbid

the restoration of ancient buildings should approve the eighteenth

century restoration of ancient poems; nay, the architectural

"restorer" is immeasurably the more respectful. In order to give

us again the ancient fragments, it is happily not necessary to

break up the composite songs which, since the time of Burns, have

gained a national love. Let them be, but let the old verses be

also; and let them have, for those who desire it, the solitariness

of their state of ruin. Even in the cases--and they are not few--

where Burns is proved to have given beauty and music to the ancient

fragment itself, his work upon the old stanza is immeasurably finer

than his work in his own new stanzas following, and it would be

less than impiety to part the two.

I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope

will be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in

leaving aside a multitude of composite songs--anachronisms, and

worse than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch

wild feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are some

exceptions. The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter

Scott and Burns restored is given with the restorations of both,

those restorations being severally beautiful; and the burden,

"Hame, hame, hame," is printed with the Jacobite song that carries

it; this song seems so mingled and various in date and origin that

no apology is needed for placing it amongst the bundle of Scottish

ballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir Patrick Spens is treated

here as an ancient song. It is to be noted that the modern, or

comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of quantitative

metre--"Hame, hame, hame," is one of these--full of long notes,

rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in

anapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine,

various, and subtle metre of the older. Assuredly the popularity

of the metre which, for want of a term suiting the English rules of

verse, must be called anapaestic, has done more than any other

thing to vulgarise the national sense of rhythm and to silence the

finer rhythms. Anapaests came quite suddenly into English poetry

and brought coarseness, glibness, volubility, dapper and fatuous

effects. A master may use it well, but as a popular measure it has

been disastrous. I would be bound to find the modern stanzas in an

old song by this very habit of anapaests and this very

misunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of the

older stanzas. This, for instance, is the old metre:

"Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!"

and this the lamentable anapaestic line (from the same song):

"Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me -."

It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including A

Divine Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out four

stanzas of a poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorest

argument. This passage at least shall speak for the first three:

"Thou didst appear

A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,

As Nature did intend

All should confess, but none might comprehend."

From Christ's Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for

its length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage

upon "Justice," who looks "as the eagle

"that hath so oft compared

Her eye with heaven's";

from Marlowe's poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to

the priestess

"And laid his childish head upon her breast";

with that which tells how Night,

"deep-drenched in misty Acheron,

Heaved up her head, and half the world upon

Breathed darkness forth";

from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:

"Cupid abroad was lated in the night,

His wings were wet with ranging in the rain";

from Ben Jonson's Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza:

"Beauties, have ye seen a toy,

Called Love, a little boy,

Almost naked, wanton, blind;

Cruel now, and then as kind?

If he be amongst ye, say;

He is Venus' run-away";

from Francis Davison:

"Her angry eyes are great with tears";

from George Wither:

"I can go rest

On her sweet breast

That is the pride of Cynthia's train";

from Cowley:

"Return, return, gay planet of mine east"!

The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, but

the citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love.

At the very beginning, Skelton's song to "Mistress Margery

Wentworth" had almost taken a place; but its charm is hardly fine

enough.

If it is necessary to answer the inevitable question in regard to

Byron, let me say that in another Anthology, a secondary Anthology,

the one in which Gray's Elegy would have an honourable place, some

more of Byron's lyrics would certainly be found; and except this

there is no apology. If the last stanza of the "Dying Gladiator"

passage, or the last stanza on the cascade rainbow at Terni,

"Love watching madness with unalterable mien,"

had been separate poems instead of parts of Childe Harold, they

would have been amongst the poems that are here collected in no

spirit of arrogance, or of caprice, of diffidence or doubt.

The volume closes some time before the middle of the century and

the death of Wordsworth.

A. M.

[As there would be considerable overlap between the poems in this

book and those already released by Project Gutenberg the text of

the poems is not included in this eText. The poems that Alice

selected are shown below and are followed by her comments on them.-

-DP]

Anonymous.

The first carol

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

Verses before death

Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)

Easter

Fresh spring

Like as a ship

Epithalamion

John Lyly (1554?-1606)

The Spring

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

True love

The moon

Kiss

Sweet judge

Sleep

Wat'red was my wine

Thomas Lodge (1556-1625)

Rosalynd's madrigal

Rosaline

The solitary shepherd's song

Anonymous

I saw my lady weep

George Peele (1558?-1597)

Farewell to arms

Robert Greene (1560?-1592)

Fawnia

Sephestia's song to her child

Christopher Marlowe (1562-1593)

The passionate shepherd to his love

Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)

Sleep

My spotless love

Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

Since there's no help

Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618)

Were I as base

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth

O me! What eyes hath love put in my head

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

When in the chronicle of wasted time

That time of year thou may'st in me behold

How like a winter hath my absence been

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes

They that have power to hurt, and will do

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye

The forward violet thus did I chide

O lest the world should task you to recite

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st

Full many a glorious morning have I seen

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Fancy

Fairies

Come away

Full fathom five

Dirge (Fear no more the heat o' the sun)

Song (Take, O take those lips away)

Song (How should I your true love know)

Anonymous

Tom o' Bedlam

Thomas Campion (circa 1567-1620)

Kind are her answers

Laura

Her sacred bower

When thou must home

Western wind

Follow your saint

Cherry-ripe

Thomas Nash (1567-1601?)

Spring

John Donne (1573-1631)

This happy dream

Death

Hymn to God the father

The funeral

Richard Barnefield (1574?-?)

The nightingale

Ben Jonson (1574-1637)

Charis' triumph

Jealousy

Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H.

Hymn to Diana

On my first daughter

Echo's lament for Narcissus

An epitaph on Salathiel Pavy, a child of Queen Elizabeth's

Chapel

John Fletcher (1579-1625)

Invocation to sleep, from Valentinian

To Bacchus

John Webster (-?1625)

Song from the Duchess of Malfi

Song from the Devil's Law-case

In Earth, dirge from Vittoria Corombona

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649)

Song (Phoebus, arise!)

Sleep, Silence' child

To the nightingale

Madrigal I

Madrigal II

Beaumont and Fletcher (1586-1616)-(1579-1625)

I died true

Francis Beaumont (1586-1616)

On the tombs in Westminster Abbey

Sir Francis Kynaston (1587-1642)

To Cynthia, on concealment of her beauty

Nathaniel Field (1587-1638)

Matin song

George Wither (1588-1667)

Sleep, baby, sleep!

Thomas Carew (1589-1639)

Song (Ask me no more where Jove bestows)

To my inconstant mistress

An hymeneal dialogue

Ingrateful beauty threatened

Thomas Dekker (-1638?)

Lullaby

Sweet content

Thomas Heywood (-1649?)

Good-morrow

Robert Herrick (1591-1674?)

To Dianeme

To meadows

To blossoms

To daffodils

To violets

To primroses

To daisies, not to shut so soon

To the virgins, to make much of time

Dress

In silks

Corinna's going a-maying

Grace for a child

Ben Jonson

George Herbert (1593-1632)

Holy baptism

Virtue

Unkindness

Love

The pulley

The collar

Life

Misery

James Shirley (1596-1666)

Equality

Anonymous (circa 1603)

Lullaby (Weep you no more, sad fountains)

Sir William Davenant (1605-1668)

Morning

Edmund Waller (1605-1687)

The rose

Thomas Randolph (1606-1634?)

His mistress

Charles Best (-?)

A sonnet of the moon

John Milton (1608-1674)

Hymn on Christ's nativity

L'allegro

Il penseroso

Lycidas

On his blindness

On his deceased wife

On Shakespeare

Song on May morning

Invocation to Sabrina, from Comus

Invocation to Echo, from Comus

The attendant spirit, from Comus

James Graham, Marquis of Montrose (1612-1650)

The vigil of death

Richard Crashaw (1615?-1652)

On a prayer-book sent to Mrs. M. R.

To the morning

Love's horoscope

On Mr. G. Herbert's book

Wishes to his supposed mistress

Quem Vidistis Pastores etc.

Music's duel

The flaming heart

Abraham Cowley (1618-1667)

On the death of Mr. Crashaw

Hymn to the light

Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

To Lucasta on going to the wars

To Amarantha

Lucasta

To Althea, from prison

A guiltless lady imprisoned: after penanced

The rose

Andrew Marvell (1620-1678)

A Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland

The picture of T. C. in a prospect of flowers

The nymph complaining of death of her fawn

The definition of love

The garden

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)

The dawning

Childhood

Corruption

The night

The eclipse

The retreat

The world of light

Scottish Ballads

Helen of Kirconnell

The wife of Usher's well

The dowie dens of Yarrow

Sweet William and May Margaret

Sir Patrick Spens

Hame, hame, hame

Border Ballad

A lyke-wake dirge

John Dryden (1631-1700)

Ode (Thou youngest virgin-daughter of the skies)

Aphre Behn (1640-1689)

Song, from Abdelazar

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

Hymn (The spacious firmament on high)

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Elegy

William Cowper (1731-1800)

Lines on receiving his mother's picture

Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)

Life

William Blake (1757-1828)

The land of dreams

The piper

Holy Thursday

The tiger

To the muses

Love's secret

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

To a mouse

The farewell

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Why art thou silent?

Thoughts of a Briton on the subjugation of Switzerland

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free

On the extinction of the Venetian Republic

O friend! I know not

Surprised by joy

To Toussaint L'ouverture

With ships the sea was sprinkled

The world

Upon Westminster bridge, Sept. 3, 1802

When I have borne in memory

Three years she grew

The daffodils

The solitary reaper

Elegiac stanzas

To H. C.

'Tis said that some have died for love

The pet lamb

Stepping westward

The childless father

Ode on intimations of immortality

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Proud Maisie

A weary lot is thine

The Maid of Neidpath

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Kubla Khan

Youth and age

The rime of the ancient mariner

Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)

Rose Aylmer

Epitaph

Child of a day

Thomas Campbell (1767-1844)

Hohenlinden

Earl March

Charles Lamb (1775-1835)

Hester

Allan Cunningham (1784-1842)

A wet sheet and a flowing sea

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1823)

The Isles of Greece

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Hellas

Wild with weeping

To the night

To a skylark

To the moon

The question

The waning moon

Ode to the west wind

Rarely, rarely comest thou

The invitation, to Jane

The recollection

Ode to heaven

Life of life

Autumn

Stanzas written in dejection near Naples

Dirge for the year

A widow bird

The two spirits

John Keats (1795-1821)

La Belle Dame sans merci

On first looking into Chapman's Homer

To sleep

The gentle south

Last sonnet

Ode to a nightingale

Ode on a Grecian urn

Ode to Autumn

Ode to Psyche

Ode to Melancholy

Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849)

She is not fair

ALICE MEYNELL'S COMMENTS/NOTES

EPITHALAMION

Written by Spensor on his marriage in Ireland, 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

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

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

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

The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.

TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY

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

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

I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less

beautiful stanza.

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

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

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

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 overbearing 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

"I ever 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 (Phoebus, arise!)

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 bear 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

The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone--not unique,

for it had sounded somewhere in mediaeval 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

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

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

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

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

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 "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 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 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

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 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. 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 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

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

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

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

"He earned the glorious name," says a biographer of Andrew Marvell

(editing an issue of that poet'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

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

The noble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, high

or low, throughout Marvell's book, it we except one single splendid

and surpassing passage from The Definition of Love -

"Magnanimous despair alone

Could show me so divine a thing."

CHILDHOOD

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

degage de la lumiere en marchant? Vous l'aimez! says Marius in Les

Miserables (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

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 Daemon Lover, for Edward,

Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.

MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW

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

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 (The spacious firmament on high)

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

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.

LINE ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 (Are those her ribs through which the Sun)

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 (I feer thee, ancient Mariner!)

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

Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect

stanzas.

THE ISLES OF GREECE

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

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 (With thy clear keen joyance)--

will remind the reader of the special habitual error of Drummond of

Hawthornden.

THE WANING MOON

In these few lines the Shelley spirit seems to be more intense than

in any other passage as brief.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great poses

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

No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucent

verse.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

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

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.

End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Flower of the Mind, by Alice Meynell

More below. . .

LATER POEMS

Contents:

The Shepherdess

"I am the Way"

Via, et Veritas, et Vita

Why wilt Thou Chide?

The Lady Poverty

The Fold

Cradle-song at Twilight

The Roaring Frost

Parentage

The Modern Mother

West Wind in Winter

November Blue

Chimes

Unto us a Son is given

A Dead Harvest

The Two Poets

A Poet's Wife

Veneration of Images

At Night

THE SHEPHERDESS

She walks--the lady of my delight -

A shepherdess of sheep.

Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;

She guards them from the steep.

She feeds them on the fragrant height,

And folds them in for sleep.

She roams maternal hills and bright,

Dark valleys safe and deep.

Into that tender breast at night

The chastest stars may peep.

She walks--the lady of my delight -

A shepherdess of sheep.

She holds her little thoughts in sight,

Though gay they run and leap.

She is so circumspect and right;

She has her soul to keep.

She walks--the lady of my delight -

A shepherdess of sheep.

"I AM THE WAY"

Thou art the Way.

Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,

I cannot say

If Thou hadst ever met my soul.

I cannot see -

I, child of process--if there lies

An end for me,

Full of repose, full of replies.

I'll not reproach

The way that goes, my feet that stir.

Access, approach,

Art Thou, time, way, and wayfarer.

VIA, ET VERITAS, ET VITA

"You never attained to Him?" "If to attain

Be to abide, then that may be."

"Endless the way, followed with how much pain!"

"The way was He."

"WHY WILT THOU CHIDE?"

Why wilt thou chide,

Who hast attained to be denied?

Oh learn, above

All price is my refusal, Love.

My sacred Nay

Was never cheapened by the way.

Thy single sorrow crowns thee lord

Of an unpurchasable word.

Oh strong, Oh pure!

As Yea makes happier loves secure,

I vow thee this

Unique rejection of a kiss.

I guard for thee

This jealous sad monopoly.

I seal this honour thine. None dare

Hope for a part in thy despair.

THE LADY POVERTY

The Lady Poverty was fair:

But she has lost her looks of late,

With change of times and change of air.

Ah slattern, she neglects her hair,

Her gown, her shoes. She keeps no state

As once when her pure feet were bare.

Or--almost worse, if worse can be -

She scolds in parlours; dusts and trims,

Watches and counts. Oh, is this she

Whom Francis met, whose step was free,

Who with Obedience carolled hymns,

In Umbria walked with Chastity?

Where is her ladyhood? Not here,

Not among modern kinds of men;

But in the stony fields, where clear

Through the thin trees the skies appear;

In delicate spare soil and fen,

And slender landscape and austere.

THE FOLD

BEHOLD,

The time is now! Bring back, bring back

Thy flocks of fancies, wild of whim.

Oh lead them from the mountain-track -

Thy frolic thoughts untold.

Oh bring them in--the fields grow dim -

And let me be the fold.

Behold,

The time is now! Call in, O call

Thy posturing kisses gone astray

For scattered sweets. Gather them all

To shelter from the cold.

Throng them together, close and gay,

And let me be the fold!

CRADLE-SONG AT TWILIGHT

The child not yet is lulled to rest.

Too young a nurse, the slender Night

So laxly holds him to her breast

That throbs with flight.

He plays with her and will not sleep.

For other playfellows she sighs;

An unmaternal fondness keep

Her alien eyes.

THE ROARING FROST

A flock of winds came winging from the North,

Strong birds with fighting pinions driving forth

With a resounding call!

Where will they close their wings and cease their cries -

Between what warming seas and conquering skies -

And fold, and fall?

PARENTAGE

"When Augustus Caesar legislated against the unmarried citizens of

Rome, he declared them to be, in some sort, slayers of the people."

Ah no, not these!

These, who were childless, are not they who gave

So many dead unto the journeying wave,

The helpless nurslings of the cradling seas;

Not they who doomed by infallible decrees

Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave.

But those who slay

Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs,

The death of innocences and despairs;

The dying of the golden and the grey.

The sentence, when these speak it, has no Nay.

And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.

THE MODERN MOTHER

Oh what a kiss

With filial passion overcharged is this!

To this misgiving breast

The child runs, as a child ne'er ran to rest

Upon the light heart and the unoppressed.

Unhoped, unsought!

A little tenderness, this mother thought

The utmost of her meed

She looked for gratitude; content indeed

With thus much that her nine years' love had bought.

Nay, even with less.

This mother, giver of life, death, peace, distress,

Desired ah! not so much

Thanks as forgiveness; and the passing touch

Expected, and the slight, the brief caress.

Oh filial light

Strong in these childish eyes, these new, these bright

Intelligible stars! Their rays

Are near the constant earth, guides in the maze,

Natural, true, keen in this dusk of days.

WEST WIND IN WINTER

Another day awakes. And who -

Changing the world--is this?

He comes at whiles, the Winter through,

West Wind! I would not miss

His sudden tryst: the long, the new

Surprises of his kiss.

Vigilant, I make haste to close

With him who comes my way.

I go to meet him as he goes;

I know his note, his lay,

His colour and his morning rose;

And I confess his day.

My window waits; at dawn I hark

His call; at morn I meet

His haste around the tossing park

And down the softened street;

The gentler light is his; the dark,

The grey--he turns it sweet.

So too, so too, do I confess

My poet when he sings.

He rushes on my mortal guess

With his immortal things.

I feel, I know him. On I press -

He finds me 'twixt his wings.

NOVEMBER BLUE

The colour of the electric lights has a strange effect in giving a

complementary tint to the air in the early evening.--ESSAY ON

LONDON.

O, Heavenly colour! London town

Has blurred it from her skies;

And hooded in an earthly brown,

Unheaven'd the city lies.

No longer standard-like this hue

Above the broad road flies;

Nor does the narrow street the blue

Wear, slender pennon-wise.

But when the gold and silver lamps

Colour the London dew,

And, misted by the winter damps,

The shops shine bright anew -

Blue comes to earth, it walks the street,

It dyes the wide air through;

A mimic sky about their feet,

The throng go crowned with blue.

CHIMES

Brief, on a flying night,

From the shaken tower,

A flock of bells take flight,

And go with the hour.

Like birds from the cote to the gales,

Abrupt--O hark!

A fleet of bells set sails,

And go to the dark.

Sudden the cold airs swing.

Alone, aloud,

A verse of bells takes wing

And flies with the cloud.

UNTO US A SON IS GIVEN

Given, not lent,

And not withdrawn--once sent -

This Infant of mankind, this One,

Is still the little welcome Son.

New every year,

New-born and newly dear,

He comes with tidings and a song,

The ages long, the ages long.

Even as the cold

Keen winter grows not old;

As childhood is so fresh, foreseen,

And spring in the familiar green;

Sudden as sweet

Come the expected feet.

All joy is young, and new all art,

And He, too, Whom we have by heart.

A DEAD HARVEST [IN KENSINGTON GARDENS]

Along the graceless grass of town

They rake the rows of red and brown,

Dead leaves, unlike the rows of hay,

Delicate, neither gold nor grey,

Raked long ago and far away.

A narrow silence in the park;

Between the lights a narrow dark.

One street rolls on the north, and one,

Muffled, upon the south doth run.

Amid the mist the work is done.

A futile crop; for it the fire

Smoulders, and, for a stack, a pyre.

So go the town's lives on the breeze,

Even as the sheddings of the trees;

Bosom nor barn is filled with these.

THE TWO POETS

Whose is the speech

That moves the voices of this lonely beech?

Out of the long West did this wild wind come -

Oh strong and silent! And the tree was dumb,

Ready and dumb, until

The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.

Two memories,

Two powers, two promises, two silences

Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves

Articulate. This sudden hour retrieves

The purpose of the past,

Separate, apart--embraced, embraced at last.

"Whose is the word?

Is it I that spake? Is it thou? Is it I that heard?"

"Thine earth was solitary; yet I found thee!"

"Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,

Thou visitant divine."

"O thou my Voice, the word was thine."

"Was thine."

A POET'S WIFE

I saw a tract of ocean locked in-land

Within a field's embrace -

The very sea! Afar it fled the strand

And gave the seasons chase,

And met the night alone, the tempest spanned,

Saw sunrise face to face.

O Poet, more than ocean, lonelier!

In inaccessible rest

And storm remote, thou, sea of thoughts, dost stir,

Scattered through east to west, -

Now, while thou closest with the kiss of her

Who locks thee to her breast.

VENERATION OF IMAGES

Thou man, first-comer, whose wide arms entreat,

Gather, clasp, welcome, bind,

Lack, or remember! whose warm pulses beat

With love of thine own kind;

Unlifted for a blessing on yon sea,

Unshrined on this high-way,

O flesh, O grief, thou too shalt have our knee,

Thou rood of every day!

AT NIGHT

Home, home from the horizon far and clear,

Hither the soft wings sweep;

Flocks of the memories of the day draw near

The dovecote doors of sleep.

O which are they that come through sweetest light

Of all these homing birds?

Which with the straightest and the swiftest flight?

Your words to me, your words!

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Later Poems, by Alice Meynell

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