The Flower of the Mind, and Later Poems Part 2

"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 pa.s.sage 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 impa.s.sioned 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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-cla.s.s. 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.