The Flower of the Mind, and Later Poems Part 4

This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight.

Should they be "birds" or "G.o.ds" that wanton in the air in the first of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy s.h.i.+ed at "G.o.ds," 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 "G.o.ds" proved to be "birds" long before he changed them. The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and G.o.ds so light? But to begin with "G.o.ds" 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 c.u.mbered its mouth with phrases of such foolish burden and made literature stiff with them. Andrew Marvell's political rect.i.tude, 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 G.o.ds, 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 sh.o.r.e."

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 impa.s.sioned tenderness not to be found elsewhere in Marvell.

THE DEFINITION OF LOVE

The n.o.ble phrase of the Horatian Ode is not recovered again, high or low, throughout Marvell's book, it we except one single splendid and surpa.s.sing pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing of time between them is strange enough, but the pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sages of genius--a line here and there of surpa.s.sing imagination and poetry--rare in even the best folk- songs. Such pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages, 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 surpa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 s.p.a.cious firmament on high)

Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,--and it seems that the inspired pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sion communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not be too much to say that all his pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sage (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