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STUDIES IN POETRY
 
STUDIES IN POETRY

CRITICAL, ANALYTICAL,
INTERPRETATIVE

BY

THOMAS O’HAGAN, M.A., PH.D.
a :

BOSTON:
MARLIER & COMPANY, LimiITED,
173 TREMONT STREET.
§

?
A.373466

Copyright, 1900,
By Tuomas O’Hacan
TO ALL WHO DREAM AND BUILD AND DWELL IN THE
ENCHANTED REALMS OF POESY

This volume is inscribey by

Tue AUTHOR.
THE STUDY OF POETRY

ART has its root in the spiritual, and poetry, which
is in many ways the greatest of the arts, cannot
be properly studied or interpreted save through
the spiritual.

Now, as the first function of any piece of art is
to give delight in some form, the reader of poetry
must seek for this delight and joy, which should
flow from every true poem.

The primary and chief purpose in the study of
poetry is not discipline and instruction, but exalta-
tion and inspiration, — the liberation of the im-
agination and enrichment of the spirit.

For poetry, which is the flowering of the soul,
the golden ear of the century, the summit of
thought, is something more than thought. It is,
as Dr. Hamilton Mabie says, “thought plus the
personality of a man of genius.”

The insulated intellect cannot get the best out
of a poem, for poetry appeals to the whole man as
a thinking, rational, moral, and spiritual being.
THE STUDY OF POETRY

All poetry, too, is written Co be rend, to be
volved, and only through voewl interpredition can
the indefinite cloment tia poem be reached.

Nor should any analytienl exegesis be entered
upon GIL the poem as a work of ardoas an artistic
wnil, has impressed itself upon the mind and soul.

Let both teacher and student Tae ae enre, boo,
that they pause not at the threshold of the temple
of pootry, lest they enteb nota vision of the glory
upon the altar within!

TT. OL

‘Toronto, Canapa, May 1, 1900.
CONTENTS.

Tenxyson’s “1x Mr morram”’ SS? ce IS bl 1
Brownina’s “A Dearuois Tur Desert” 2. 2 .) D4

Mrs. Brownina’s *Soxxers FROM THE Portv-

GUESE ge ow. oc es oe ae a) ge eh Cg 3 3s
Worpsworti’s Ong “On Ixtriaarions oF ImMor-

TAREE soar es! Se! ae le Cte es te ae) (we ee
CoLentmpark’s “ ANciENT MARINER 2.0. 2 ke 70
SHELLEY'S ** Prometurus Uxpouxn” . 2...) 8
Keats's “Evie or St. AGNES” ee ae ee

Gray's “ELgey mw A Country Cuurncuyarp” . . 102
STUDIES IN POETRY

&

TENNYSON’S “IN MEMORIAM”

Like Dante’s “ Divina Commedia” and Goethe’s
« Faust,” Tennyson’s “In Memoriam ” is a world-
poem. It is an autobiographic docu- ay, piace of
ment of the nineteenth century, mirror- ‘In Memori-
nee : : am” in the
ing its deepest life and summing up Literature of
its most subtle and complex thought. cone

Like every great poem, too, it is a chapter in the
spiritual history of the race —a revelation of
what is in the heart of man, in his contact with
the world. Poetry which has its root in the spir-
itual universalizes and eternalizes. It deals with
the permanent and absolute in man — with that
which is independent of both time and place. “In
Memoriam” is a lyrical drama of the soul, the
record of a great moral and intellectual conflict,
““the poetical expression of a soul’s moral and in-
tellectual growth through sorrow, and through
strife with the difficulties that beset the truths

and mysteries of religion.”
1
2 STUDIES IN POETRY

If “In Memoriam” did naught but embalm a
personal sorrow, it would not be the great art-
product that it is. Not until the genesis of its
particular sorrow swells out into the universal,
does the deep significance of this great poem lay
hold of us; then indeed we realize that “In
Memoriam” is a world-poem, that it touches the
eternal in man, that within this great Cathedral
of sorrow we may each and all find an oratory or
chapel, — an altar decked with the flowers of our
own particular grief.

The proper approach to the study and interpre-
tation of a poem is always of paramount value to
The Approach & Student. Let us see, therefore, what
to its Study. = should be our approach to a clear, care-
ful, and sympathetic interpretation of this great
masterpiece. Just here let it be remembered at
the outset that the charm of “In Memoriam ”’ re-
sides in the poetry and-not in the thought; that, as
Dr. Hamilton Mabie says, it issues out of the total-
ity of the poem, and not out of any single element.
“In Memoriam” should, then, be studied first
as a work of art. When the complete beauty and
charm of the poem have impressed themselves, it
is time to seek for the meaning of the poem, — to
probe its depth and get at its secret. Little by
little through a study of its integral parts, lyric
by lyric, the student will be led to observe the
“IN MEMORIAM ” 3

noble unity of the whole poem. He will observe,
too, how the lyrics or sections are related to each
other, grow out of each other, and sometimes are a
complement of each other. Before studying each
lyric separately and seeking out its central idea,
the question of the germ-thought or poetic moment
of the poem should also first receive attention,
for this germ-thought has not a little to do in the
fashioning, moulding, and coloring of the whole
poem — it is this germ-thought which, so to speak,
holds the poem in its moral orbit. What stanza
or stanzas, then, contain the germ-thought of “In
Memoriam”? Is not the nucleus of thought
around which the whole poem crystallizes to be
found in these well known and oft-quoted lines ? —
“ This truth came borne with bier and pall,
I felt it when I sorrow’d most,

’T is better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”

The question as to how much Tennyson is
indebted in the construction of “In Memoriam” to
the great masters who preceded him, eer
can never be fully ascertained. There Technique
is no doubt, as Brother Azarias points eee
out, that the author had before his mind, as he
wrote, the sonnets and odes of Petrarch on the
death of Laura, Shakespeare’s sonnets,and Shelley’s
“ Adonais.” Although Tennyson tells us himself,
4 STUDIES IN POETRY

in speaking of “In Memoriam,” “ the general way
of its being written was so queer that if there were
a blank space I would put in a poem,” that he
formulated at the outset the plan which shines
through his work as an organic whole seems,
nevertheless, more than probable. The fact that
the author, according to his own words, added a
lyric here and a lyric there does not nullify this
probability.

Now, as to the stanza employed in “In Memo-
riam,” a very interesting study of rhyme effect is
afforded through its examination. Did Tennyson
borrow this form of stanza from Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, Ben Jonson, or Dante Gabriel Rossetti?
for all three had employed it before Tennyson had
put his hand to the “In Memoriam.” We believe
a careful study of the * In Memoriam ” stanza form
will convince the reader or student that, while not
original, it became in the author’s hands a poetic
necessity —an outcome of the moulding power
or divine energy of inspiration. It will be noticed,
too, how admirably adapted the form of this
stanza is, with its second and third verses closely
braced, and the terminal rhyme emphasis of the
stanza reduced, for bearing along unchecked the
flow of spiritualized sorrow, thus imparting to
the poem throughout a true elegiac tone.

Where the stanzas admit of a change in the
“IN MEMORIAM” 5

rhyme-scheme without affecting the sense, let the
student convert them into alternate rhymes and
notice how this transposition will change the whole
tone of the poem. ‘There is atmosphere in a poem
as well as in a painting, and were the alternate
rhyme-scheme to be introduced in this atmosphere
it would not serve so well to conduct the in-
definitely spiritual element which constitutes the
essential life of this poem. A fine example of the
peculiar adaptedness of the stanza employed in “In
Memoriam” to the continuous flow of thought
is to be found in the eighty-sixth section. It is
said to have been a favorite lyric of Tennyson’s.
Note how continuous and even is the movement
of the verse, how the sense is suspended till the
close, and what a charm there is in the reposeful
ending on the final word “ Peace”:

“ Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,

That rollest from the gorgeous gloom

Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare

‘The round of space, and rapt below
Thro’ all the dewy-tassell’d wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows and blow

‘The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
6 STUDIES IN POETRY

“From belt to belt of crimson seas,
On leagues of odour, streaming far

To where, in yonder orient star,
A hundred spirits whisper ‘ Peace.’”

It is customary on the part of some critics to
make a general onslaught on “In Memoriam”
catholic As. 20d charge it with being a poem of
pects of ‘In scepticism. It is indeed quite easy to
Memoriam.’’ “Gy.

make such a charge, but it is much
more difficult to convict it from its own teachings,
“In Memoriam” is not a poem of scepticism, but
the record of a soul growing through doubt into
faith. Not only is “In Memoriam” not a poem
of scepticism, but there is much in its teachings
that coincides with Catholic dogma.

The very opening invocation in the prologue to
the poem, written by the poet in 1849, testifies to
Tennyson’s faith in the Divinity of Christ and the
mysteries of God:

‘Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove.”

In the third stanza he says : —

“Thou madest man, he knows not why.”

Here the poet departs from Catholic teaching,
else what is the meaning of the Incarnation of the
“IN MEMORIAM” 7

“Son of God” and nineteen centuries of light of
his divine gospel? Yet does not the poet himself
tell us in the very same lyric why man was
created ? —

“Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”

In the fourth stanza of the same prologue, ad-
dressing the “Son of God,” the poet says:

‘‘ Thou seemest human and divine
The highest, holiest manhood, thou.”

This would, at first reading, appear to imply a
doubt as to the divinity of Christ, but if a care-
ful and an extended study be made of the mean-
ing which Tennyson attaches to the word seem, it
will be found that no such meaning can be or
should be read out of this line; for the poet uses
the word seem here, not in the sense of appearing
to be what a thing is not, but in the sense of
appearing to be what it is.

In the third last stanza of the prologue and in
the first stanza of the thirty-third section, note the
use attached to the word seem:

“Forgive what seem’d my sin in me;
What seem’d my worth since I began.

O Thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reached a purer air.”
8 STUDIES IN POETRY

How very close to Catholic doctrine, too, is
Tennyson’s invocation of the departed in sections
ninety-three and ninety-four :

“T shall not see thee. Dare I say
No spirit ever brake the band
That stays him from the native land
Where first he walk’d when claspt in clay ?

“QO, therefore from thy sightless range
With gods in unconjectured bliss,
O, from the distance of the abyss
Of tenfold-complicated change,

“Descend, and touch, and enter; hear
The wish too strong for words to name 3

That in this blindness of the frame

My ghost may feel that thine is near.

“ How pure at heart and sound in head,
With what divine affections bold
Should be the man whose thought would hold
An hour’s communion with the dead.”

With Tennyson, prayer is the truest religion.
This is set forth in the thirty-second and thirty-
third sections:

“Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers,
Whose loves in higher love endure ;
What souls possess themselves so pure,
Or is there blessedness like theirs ?”
‘““IN MEMORIAM” 9

‘Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow’'d hint confuse

A life that leads melodious lays.”

Again, take sections one hundred and twenty-
three and one hundred and twenty-four and com-
pare them with Cardinal Newman’s beautiful
passage in the * Apologia,” page 877, and note how
parallel they are in line of argument in their
proof of the existence of a God. Both Newman
and Tennyson consider that the voice of con-
science and the feelings of the heart are much
more conclusive of the existence of a God than
any arguments that are discoverable in the works
of nature. Tennyson’s lines are:

“There rolls the deep where grew the tree,
O Earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.

“The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

“But in my spirit will I dwell
And drewn my dream, and hold it true;
For though iy lips may breathe adieu
I cannot think the thing farewell.
10 STUDIES IN POETRY

N

“ Tf e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
I heard a voice ‘ believe no more’
And heard an ever breaking shore

That tumbled in the Godless deep ;

“ A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart

Stood up and answered ‘I have felt.’”

Newman tells us, “ Were it not for this voice
speaking so clearly in my conscience and my
heart, I should be an atheist or a pantheist or a
polytheist when I looked into the world.... I
am far from denying the real force of the argu-
ments in proof of a God drawn from the general
facts of human society; but these do not warm
me or enlighten me; they do not take away the
winter of my desolation or make the buds unfold
and the leaves grow within me and my moral
being rejoice.”

Who has ever rebutted in verse more ably than
Tennyson has in the “In Memoriam ” the arguments
adduced by infidels in support of their unbelief? —
as witness the following sections of the poem: The
Fates not blind, 111; Life shall be for evermore,
xxxIv; If Death were death, love would not be
true love, xxxv; Individuality defies the tomb,
XLVI; Immortality, LIV and Lv; Doubt issuing
in belief, xcv; Knowledge without wisdom, oxi;
“IN MEMORIAM” 11

Progress, ‘Cxvit; We are not all matter, CxIx;
and The course of human things, cxxvu.

There is one stanza in section ninety-six which
is often quoted by those who charge “In Memo-
riam” with being a poem of scepticism, and declare
its ethical teaching to be dangerous, that demands
our attention at this point fora moment. Here is
the oft cited quatrain:

‘« Perplext in faith but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds!”

It should be remembered that faith, which has
held conflict with doubt throughout the whole
development and progress of the poem, has not
gained supremacy at this point, and does not gain
full supremacy till the close of the poem, — doubt
pressing in many instances, as here, hard upon the
shield of faith. It is easy to single out stanzas in
“In Memoriam” wherein doubt is the flowering
of sorrow not yet sanctified, and faith comes out of
the conflict apparently maimed ; and so has it often
been in conflicts in the world. Faith appears to
suffer for the time, but ever comes out triumphant
at the close.

“In Memoriam” is a history of the genesis of a
great sorrow, and the story of a heart girt around,
12 STUDIES IN POETRY

encompassed, by the perplexing problems of life,
death, and the mystery of hereafter. Never be-
; : fore was there such a beautiful temple
Biographical
and Auto- of song erected to the memory of man,
Bographical. and Arthur Hallam may indeed ret
secure within its transepts, assured of the undying
light of immortality. “In Memoriam” is both bio-
graphical and autobiographical. It deals with the
character, friendship, and memory of one of the
most gifted and perfect young men who have ever
lived in the tide of times. It is autobiographical
in so far as it records the life history of the
author himself through the various phases of sor-
row which mark the progress of the poem.

While reading “In Memoriam” once to Mr.
James Knowles, Tennyson thus commented on
the poem as to its personal and impersonal char-
acter :

“Tt is rather the cry of the whole human race
than mine. In the poem altogether, private grief
swells out into thought of and hope for the whole
world. It begins with a funeral and ends with a
marriage; begins with death and ends in promise
of a new life, —a sort of Divine Comedy, cheerful
at the close. It is a very impersonal poem as
well as personal. There is more about myself in
‘Ulysses,’ which was written under the sense of
loss, and that all had gone by, but that still life
,

“IN MEMORIAM ” ; 13

must be fought out to the end. It was more
written with the feeling of his loss upon me
than many poems in ‘In Memoriam.’ .. . It’s too
hopeful, this poem, more than I am myself... . The
general way of its being written was so queer that
if there were a blank space I would put in a poem.
. . . [think of adding another to it, a speculative
one, bringing out the thoughts of the Higher Pan-
theism and showing that all the arguments are
about as good on one side as the other, and thus
throw man back more on the primitive impulses
and feelings.”

These three epochs of grief belong to the stages
in the development of every true sorrow, and if
we examine the genesis or develop-
ment of the sorrow in “In Memoriam,” oe eee
from sensuous sorrow at the outset to nee
sanctified sorrow at the close, it will Grief Trans-
be found that these three forms of “™*™
grief correspond very distinctly with the three
periods in the life of the poem. From section one
to section seventy-one inclusive, we have grief
felt: vi—-vi, grief and sense; IxX-xxI, grief and
imagination; XXII-xxvu, grief and thought;
XXVIU-Xxxvu, grief in the atmosphere of faith.
Change here of key from faith to hope: XxxvIII-
XLIX, grief and hope; L-Lvul, grief in faith and
hope united; LIX-Lxv, grief and love; LXvI-
14 STUDIES IN POETRY

LXxI, grief in the region beyond consciousness.
From Lxxu to XCVII, we have grief reflected on:
LXXII-LXXVU, the world’s loss in him estimated;
LXXVII-LXXXIU, my own loss in him estimated ;
LXXXIV-LXXXVIII, memories linked with hopes;
LXXXIX-XCVII, our communion an_ intellectual
one. From Xcvit to CXxXI, we have erief trans-
formed: XCVIII-CVI, to heighten the contrast,
the poet allows himself to be carried back by
associations of time and by the severing of associa-
tions of place to renewed freshness of grief, but
shakes off this feeling and loses it in the world’s
hope; cvil-cxv, the fruit of sorrow the deathless
ideal; CXVI-CXxv, grief, too, has its spring of
transformation ; CXXVI-CXXXI, the victory of love.

Let there be added here the “nine natural groups
or divisions” of the poem as given to Mr. Knowles
by Tennyson himself: From 1 to vim; from Ix
to XxX; from XXI to XXVU; from XXVIII to XLIX;
from L to LvIIt; from LIX to LXI; from LXII
to xcvur; from xcrx to cm and from civ to
CXXXIL

When Tennyson hears of Arthur’s death he is
overwhelmed with grief. His sorrow drowns the
The Anniver. world. Nature seems purposeless—
meu eS. «A. hollow form with empty hands.”
Death. The darkness of his heart he finds '
symbolized in the sullen changeless yew tree.
“IN MEMORIAM” 15

*‘ And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
I seem to fail from out my blood,
And grow incorporate into thee.”

He regards sorrow as a “cruel fellowship,” rails
against it, and repels the trite condolence that loss
is common to the race. Even sleep, the “balm of
hurt minds,” gives way and in the gray dawn of
morning he visits the house of Hallam on Wimpole
street.

“ Dark house, by which once more I stand,
Here in the long unlovely street.
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.

« A hand that can be clasped no more, —
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.”

At the end of a year, as the first anniversary of
Arthur’s death comes around (section Lxx11),
there is little abatement in his sorrow. His world
seems yet dominated by sorrow, and nature shares
this influence. He does not rail against nature —

se. . . no, nor death;
For nothing is that errs from law.”

When the next anniversary dawns (Sept. 15,
1836) (section x¢Ix), the tone is changed, the
16 STUDIES IN POETRY

birds are singing, the meadows breathe softly of
the past, and. the woodlands are holy to the dead.
But the greatest change is that the transformation
in ‘Tennyson’s sorrow has brought him to think
less of his own pain, and more of the pain of man-
kind.

When the bells of the first Christmas Eve ring
out peace and good-will (section xxvim1), he re-
The Three members that he had almost wished to
Christmas- lie in his grief before he heard them,
me but they control his spirit with a touch
of joy. Faith brings hope and consolation; and
here we have the first prophecy of the soul’s tri-
umph over sorrow, — the first budding and blos-
soming of hope: ~

“Our voices took a higher range ;
Once more we sang: ‘They do not die,
Nor lose their mortal sympathy,
Nor change to us, although they change.

“¢ Rise, happy morn, rise, holy morn,
Draw forth the cheerful day from night:
O Father, touch the east, and light
The light that shone when Hope was born.’”

The anniversary of the second Christmas is not
so sad as the first. The snow is silent and the day
calm. A sense of loss broods over nature, but
“IN MEMORIAM” 17

sorrow within his heart, now calm, is reflected in
peace around him:

“O last regret, Regret can die!”

Not yet has his grief passed out of the personal
into the universal, nor has the poet escaped from
himself. His half-intellectual analysis of doubts,
and the replies of the understanding to them have
as yet brought his soul no victory. There has
been a lull in his sorrow, but no real transforma-
tion,

The third Christmastide (1837) beholds a change
in everything (section crv.). Tennyson has moved
from Lincolnshire, and the change from the old
home for another has broken, like the growth of
time, the bond of dying use.

“No more shall wayward grief abuse
The genial hour with mask and mime ;
For change of place, like growth of time,
Has broke the bond of dying use.

“ Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;
Nor harp be touch’d, nor flute be blown ;
No dance, no motion, save alone
What lightens in the lucid east

“Of rising worlds by yonder wood.
Long sleeps the summer in the seed ;
Run out your measured arcs, and lead
The closing cycle rich in good.”
2
18 STUDIES IN POETRY

With the dawn of the new year (section CVI),
his personal sorrow disappears. His heart is full
of mankind, and his own victory over sorrow has
taught him the victory over sorrow that awaits the
race.

The thirty-eighth section commemorates the first
ane anes springtide (in 1834), six months after
Springtides.  Arthur’s death. Here, though the poet

has some comfort, he has no delight:

“No joy the blowing season gives,
The herald melodies of spring,
But in the songs I love to sing

A doubtful gleam of solace lives.”

The spring of 18385 brings more cheerfulness.
Sorrow has not yet entirely departed, but already
the poet feels in his soul the harbinger of a spir-
itual spring, when he shall rise above his pall of
SOrTOW :

ee Bring ores, bring the fosgione spire,

And dived a ee throat with song.”

In the third springtide (sections cxv, CXV1), re-
gret has wholly died out. The re-orient life of the
world is the symbol of the departure of a wintry
grief that looks to a friendship that is to be.

We have thus far traced the genesis and trans-
formation of sorrow through the anniversaries of
“IN MEMORIAM” 19

Arthur’s death, the three Christmastides and the
three springtides. The contrasts that mark these
periods of grief are enough to indicate clearly
“that ‘In Memoriam’ is the history of a soul in
progress from darkness to light; from the selfish-
ness to the unselfishness of sorrow; from despair of
God and man to faith in both; and, as a personal
matter, from the thought that friendship was utterly
lost in death to the thought that friendship was
gained through death at a higher level of love and
with a deeper union.”

No person can read the “In Memoriam” without
feeling the delight imparted by its vital beauty.
So many of its lyrics are as polished as some of the
the bosom of a star, so many deep-set fin ae
with meaning and freighted with sig- icant Lyrics
nificance, that the making of a choice is beset with
embarrassment. Here are five stanzas (section
XI.) which sound like one long rippling swell of
Cathedral music:

“Calm is the morn without a sound,
Calm as to suit a calmer grief,
And only thro’ the faded leaf
‘The chestnut pattering to the ground:

“ Calm and deep peace on this high wold,
And on these dews that drench the furze,
And all the silvery gossamers

That twinkle into green and gold:
20 STUDIES IN POETRY

“Calm and still light on yon great plain
That sweeps, with all its autumn bowers,
And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main:

“Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair :

“Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest.
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.”

Again, the lyric which makes up the sixty-fourth
section is full of beauty, strength, and significance:

“Dost thou look back on what hath been,
As some divinely gifted man,
Whose life in low estate began,
And on a simple village green ;

*¢ Who breaks his birth’s invidious bar,
And grasps the skirts of happy chance,
And breasts the blows of circumstance,

And grapples with his evil star;

“Who makes by force his merit known,
And lives to clutch the golden keys,
To mould a mighty state’s decrees,
And shape the whisper of the throne;
“IN MEMORIAM” 21

“Who ploughs with pain his native lea,
And reaps the labor of his hands,
Or in the furrow musing stands:

‘Does my old friend remember me?’”

Section cr. is a descriptive lyric of great beauty.
It should be read and re-read till its charm and
beauty find lodgment in the heart.

Section CUI. contains fourteen stanzas, whosé
meaning will not break upon the mind at first
reading. This section is also remarkable for the
perfection of its poetic diction. Note the prepon-
derance of Saxon words and the great number of
monosyllables. A most admirable interpretation
of this section will be found in Brother Azarias’
study of the “In Memoriam” in “Phases of
Thought and Criticism.”

Tennyson tells us that this dream described in
section CIII.was a real dream, and he has furnished
Mr. Gatty with this note: “I rather believe that
the maidens are the muses, arts, etc. Everything
that made life beautiful here we may hope may
pass on with us beyond the grave.” To Mr.
Knowles the poet said that “the maidens are all
the human powers and talents that do not pass
with life, but go along with it.’ The “river” is
“life,” and the “hidden summits” are the high,
the divine, —the origin of life.’ The sea in the
fourth stanza is eternity. The seventh stanza
22 STUDIES IN POETRY

refers to “the great progress of the age as well as
the opening of another world;” and the ninth to
‘call the great hopes of science and men.”

Section crx. is valuable as setting forth the char-
acter and gifts of Arthur Hallam:

ee Heart-affluence’ in discursive talk
From household fountains never dry;
The critic clearness of an eye,

That saw thro’ all the Muses’ walk ;

“ And manhood fused with female grace
In such a sort, the child would twine
A trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,
And find his comfort in thy face.”

The last lyric, or section, in ‘In Memoriam”
contains the whole idea of the poem. Tennyson
nied has struggled through doubt and dark-
portofthe ness and has risen to the pure light of
mastigets faith, | This’ fhnal lyric contains the
key to the poet’s successful struggle with doubt
and sorrow into the clear light of faith. And
this clear light of faith has been reached, not
through reasoning, but an act of the will. So the
poet sings in the final lyric:

“O living will that shalt endure,
When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock,
Flow thro’ our deeds and make them pure,
“IN MEMORIAM” 23

“That we may lift from out the dust
A voice as unto him that hears,
A cry above the conquered years
To one that with us works, and trust,

“With faith that comes of self-control,
The truths that never can be proved
Until we close with all we loved,

And all we flow from, soul in soul.”

QUESTIONS.

1. Why is “In Memoriam ” called a world-poem ?

2. What should be our approach to a clear, careful, and
sympathetic interpretation of this great masterpiece ?

3. What is meant by the germ-thought, or poetic mo-
ment of a poem ?

4, What stanza or stanzas contain the germ-thought of
“Tn Memoriam ” ?

5. Discuss, briefly, the plan and technique of the poem.

6. Point out some of the Catholic aspects of “In Me-
moriam.”

7. Illustrate the personal and impersonal character of
the poem.

8. What three epochs of grief are developed in the
poem ? .

9. Show the effect of time on Tennyson’s sorrow, as re-
fle:ted through the anniversaries of Arthur Hallam’s death.

10. What do the contrasts that mark these periods of
grief indicate ?

11. [llustrate the beauty and significance of some of
the lyrics in the poem.
BROWNING’S “A DEATH IN THE
DESERT.”

Ir will be noticed that Browning has a most
abrupt method of introducing his subject. Some-
whe eaiiar el times, in consequence of this, we may
ou read page after page of one of his

“poems before we can quite know whither
we are going. To understand Browning fully,
to catch the connection and antecedents of his
thought, it would be necessary that the student
should be a companion of the poet's own reading
and research, which were multifarious —it might
be almost said universal.

It is said that Browning, on being once asked
why he did not popularize and make easy the
study of his poems, replied that he did “not write
for the smoking-room.” It will be well, we think,
if every student who takes up the study of Brown-
ing would treasure these words of the great seer
in his heart, —if he would fruitfully realize how
serious and laborious is the effort to follow in the
footsteps of the poet’s thought.
 
‘“‘A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 25

Brother Azarias, in his essay on Browning, in
“ Books and Reading,” says that he would not rec-
ommend the study of Browning to children in years
or to children in mind. Certainly, Browning was
no “idle singer of an empty day.” His lines are
freighted with the very deepest meaning, and the
study of his poems, in this our day of literary dilet-
tanteism and palaver, is indeed a very tonic of the
gods.

In studying “ A Death in the Desert,” it will be
well for us to gain our approach to the poem first.
Like Browning’s magnum opus, “The Ring and
the Book,” this poem is true in spirit, though
of course in detail it is largely the work of the
poet’s imagination. The manner in which the
poet breathes into old dead facts, fusing his soul
into the “inert stuff,” and thus planting life where
death had been before, and giving to the dead facts
a “resurrection and uprise,” is well illustrated by
Browning in the following lines:

** Was not Elisha once? —
Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face.
There was no voice, no hearing: he went in ;
Therefore and shut the door upon them twain,
And prayed unto the Lord: and he went up
And lay upon the corpse, dead on the couch,
And put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyes
Upon its eyes, his hands upon its hands,
26 STUDIES IN POETRY

And stretched him on the flesh ; the flesh waxed warm:
And he returned, walked to and fro the house,

And went up, stretched him on the flesh again,

And the eyes opened. ’T is a credible feat

With the right man and way.”

There is a certain kinship in Browning’s four
religious poems : “ Caliban upon Setebos,”’ ** Cleon,”
AGroup of Ree “ Rabbi Ben Ezra,” and “ A Death in
ligious Poems. the Desert;” and in the study of the
latter poem it would be literary wisdom to group
these four together. Each poem is representative
of a particular phase of religious thought: ‘ the
natural, uncultured reasoning of the savage, the cul-
tured reasoning of the Greek, the inspired reason-
ing of the Jew, and the reason based on the belief
in incarnation of the Christian.” It will be noticed
that the Setebos which Caliban conceives is a
reflection from his own nature; but Cleon, the
cultured Greek, has advanced beyond the stage
where his God is a reflection of himself. The
difference between Cleon and the Rabbi in “ Rabbi
Ben Ezra,” as to their idea of the progress of the
human soul, is that Cleon’s progress is an intel-
lectual progress; while the Rabbi’s is a spiritual
progress. In the “Death in the Desert” it is
the God of love that is made manifest. No
place is accorded doubt by St. John. Note how
the various stages of religious belief as exemplified
‘‘A DEATH IN TIii DESERT” 27

by Caliban and Cleon are set forth in the follow-
ing lines :
“ First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God’s gift was that man should conceive of truth

And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake,
As midway help till he reach fact indeed.”

It was the attacks upon the historical bases of
Christianity, so vigorously maintained in Germany
during the beginning and middle of what peter-
the present century by Strauss and mined te Form
other sceptical philosophers, that de- the Desert.”
termined in Browning’s mind the form of the
“ Death in the Desert.” We feel sure, from the
unattractive description he gives of the professor
in “Christmas Eve,” that Browning had little sym-
pathy with this band of sceptics.

In the critical examination of the svenulial
records, the Gospel of St. John suffered most.
Strauss denied that St. John had anything to do
with its composition, pronouncing it to be a con-
troversial work written by some learned Greek
Gnostic about the close of the second century.
In his poem “ A Death in the Desert” Browning
restores the St. John of the Gospel, — the disciple
of love who leaned on his Master’s breast at supper,
—mystical and visionary as became him who had
28 STUDIES IN POETRY

received the revelation of Patmos. It is wonder-
ful how Browning has breathed into this poem —
endued it with—the very spirit and character of
St. John, the herald of Love Divine. As the last
survivor of those who had seen and known Christ,
St. John, realizes the responsibility which rests upon
him, and he is fearful of the heresies already be-
ginning to disturb the Church, particularly the
Ebionites, or followers of Cerinthus.

Now, in order to obtain some definite idea of
this noble poem, and reach its meaning, we must
first seek the significance and intent of
its prologue. This meaning is well set
forth by Rev. G. W. Pope, D.D., in his study of
this poem, in the following passage: “ Some Chris-
tian, whose name is not given (9, 10), is supposed
to be examining his library, —looking up and
classifying his choice treasures. One imagines
that he was an Ephesian (or perhaps an Alex-
andrian); that he may have lived in the beginning
‘of the third century; that it was a time of hot
persecution, when he was in daily peril of death ;
and that he is looking over a few of the more
ancient Christian records to strengthen himself for
coming trial by the contemplation of the struggles
of those that had gone before. He finds among
others a parchment scroll attributed to Pamphylax
of Antioch, who had died a martyr in Ephesus,

Its Prologue.
“A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 29

just after the death of St. John the Apostle. This
manuscript is described in a very minute and
realistic way. Itis No. 5 in his library; consists
of three skins of parchment glued together; is in
the Greek language; is incomplete, since it ranges
from Epsilon to Mu, so that four sections — pages,
we may call them—are missing in the beginning,
and perhaps some at the end. This precious
manuscript is kept in a ‘select chest,’ an ark
containing the most precious part of his literary
treasures. This chest—the poet may have seen
such an one in several museums — was stained and
rendered proof against the attacks of insects by
being rubbed with turpentine, was covered with
hair cloth, and had on its front the _X7, since it had
been given him by a relative named Xanthus ‘ now
at peace.’ Two other letters seem to have been on
the chest. These were the initials of his own
names, or perhaps the first and last letters of his
ordinary name. This name he will not state, but
instead of it signs his note with a cross, ‘to show I
wait his coming with the rest.” Why he withheld
his name, we are left to conjecture; probably it
was humility, since there is one Name that is above
every name and alone worthy to be held in remem-
brance. There is throughout a remarkable reti-
cence as to names: even St. John is not here dis-
tinctly called so. The intensely real religious tone
30 STUDIES IN POETRY

—the spirit of primitive Christianity —is heard
and felt in the minutest details of the poem.”

The sixty-eight lines, from line thirteen to line
eighty-one, are descriptive and narrative, and re-
St. Johninthe late what happened in the desert cave
roe before the apostle began the great dis-
course in uttering which he died.

An edict had been issued in the time of Trajan,

A. D. 98-117, ordering the seizure and death of all
Christians, and when tidings of this edict reached
Ephesus, Pamphylax himself, with Xanthus (a kins-
man of the owner of the manuscript) and another
Christian, called Valens, assisted by a strong Bac-
trian convert and a Christian boy, bore the aged
and dying apostle off to a place of safety in the
desert, where he lingered on for sixty days.
. The place of retreat is fully described. It is a
cave in a sandy plain. There are three compart-
ments in the cave, the most interior admitting no
light, and the “ midmost grotto” a few straggling
rays at noontide. Into this ‘ midmost grotto” St.
John’s loving attendants, feeling that his death is
imminent, now bear him, that he may die in the
light. The picture of the dying apostle amid the
group of faithful followers is most touching:

‘¢¢ Here is wine,’ answered Xanthus — dropped a drop ;
I stooped and placed the lap of cloth aright,
Then chafed his right hand, an | the Boy his left:
“A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 31

But Valens had bethought him, and produced
And broke a ball of nard and made perfume.
Only he did — not so much wake, as — turn
And smile a little as a sleeper does~

If any dear one call him, touch his face

And smiles and loves, but will not be disturbed.
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept ;
(It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,

Was burned and could not-write the Chronicle )
Then the Boy sprang up from his knees and ran
Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought,

And fetched the seventh plate of graven lead
Out of the secret chamber, found a place,
Pressing with finger on the deeper dints,

And spoke, as ’t were his mouth proclaiming first
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’” ,

Beginning with line eighty-two, the writer of

the manuscript adds a note professing os

to give a gloss or interpretation of a Does, What
passage in St. John’s own writings: What Is.

“[This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul: first, to wit,
A soul of each and all the bodily parts,
Seated therein, which works, and is What Does,
And has the use of Earth, and ends the man
Downward: but tending upward for advice,
Grows into and again is grown into
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,
Useth the first with its collected use,
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,— is What Knows:
32 STUDIES IN POETRY

Which duly tending upward in its turn,
Grows into and again is grown into

By the last soul, that uses both the first,
Subsisting whether they assist or no,

And constituting man’s self, is What Is —
And leans upon the former, makes it play
As that played off the first : and tending up,
Holds, is upheld, by God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him,
What Does, What Knows, What Is; three souls, one man. ]”

According to Browning this curious gloss or
commentary (of Theotypas, an imaginary person-
age) supplies an explanation of the spiritual and
subjective character of St. John’s faith. The doc-
trine set forth in this strange passage seems to
have in it something of Plato’s idea of the
Three Souls in each man— the Vegetative, the
Sensitive or Active, and the Intellectual. Of
course there can be no division of the human soul.
Its unity is insisted upon by all Catholic philoso-
phers; and Dante, whose philosophy is the phi-
losophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, testifies to —

« un’ alma sola
Che vive e sente e se in se rigira.
“. . . one only soul
Which lives, and feels, and on itself revolves,”

Browning’s whole purport in this poem, “A

Death in the Desert,” is to diminish the importance
“A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 33

~

of history and tradition as witness and proof of

the divine origin of Christianity, and the General
fall back upon the Love and Knowledge Furport of A
which Christ left to mankind as endur- Desert.”

ing evidences of His divinity. And shall man
now, when he has gained such love and knowledge,

doubt their very source?

‘«T say the acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Wouldst thou unprove this to re-prove the proved ?
In life’s mere minute, with power to use that proof,
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?
Thou hast it ; use it and forthwith or die!”

Tn this poem, “A Death in the Desert,” Brown-
ing truthfully represents St. John as especially the
teacher of love. As St. Paul is the The Personal-
teacher of faith and Christian philos- Aes
ophy so is St. John the herald of Love of St. Jonn.
Divine. It was Love, as the essence of the gospel,

that filled the apostle’s mind:

“ Such ever was love’s way: to rise, it stoops.

Since I, whom Christ’s mouth taught, was bidden teach,
I went, for many years, about the world,

Saying ‘It was so; so I heard and saw.’

Speaking as the case asked: and men believed.
Afterwards came the message to myself

In Patmos isle ; I was not bidden teach,

3
34 STUDIES IN POETRY

But simply listen, take a book and write,

Nor set down other than the given word,

With nothing left to my arbitrament

To choose or change: I wrote and men believed.”

Two words are used in the Latin Vulgate to ex-
press Christ’s love for St. John, — diligebat and ama-
bat, the latter word marking a personal affection.
- It is evident that Browning, believed in the Divine
inspiration under which St. John wrote his Gospel,
as he makes the apostle say:

“What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars.

Guarded and guided still to see and speak.”

We find at the end of St. John’s discourse an
epitome of Browning’s religious faith as expressed
Browning’s in a number of his poems. Summed

Religi . 3 : :
Faith as set up, we find this faith contained in the

forth in the i :
Pica. lines:

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp
Or what’s a heaven for?”

According to Browning, man’s life consists in
never-ceasing progress. ‘The godlike power is
imparted to him gradually, and step by step he
approaches nearer to absolute truth—-to divine
perfection.” He was made —

“Lower than God who knows all and can all,
Higher than beasts which know and can, so far
‘A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 35

As each beast’s limit, perfect to an end,

Nor conscious that they know, nor craving more ;
While man knows partly, but conceives beside,
Creeps ever on from fancies to the fact,

And in this striving, this converting air

Into a solid he may grasp and use,

Finds progress, man’s distinctive mark alone,

Not God’s and not the beasts’: God is, they are, —
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.”

Should man cease to strive, and renounce the
divine ideals, he brings upon himself the condem-
nation of death:

“Tf ye demur, this judgmeut on your head,

Never to reach the ultimate, angel’s law,
Indulging every instinct of the soul ‘
There where law, life, joy, impulse are one thing!”

This strong and noble poem is studded with
beautiful passages. Perhaps the finest of these
is where the apostle, in prophetic A Passage of
vision, looks down the avenues of Rare Beauty.
time and beholds the disciples of Christ ponder-
ing and discoursing in divers lands of the things
which he had taught and written :

‘«T see you stand conversing, each new face,
Either in fields of yellow summer eves,
On islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter ‘neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town
Where now the lark sings in a solitude;
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus.”
36 STUDIES IN POETRY

QUESTIONS.

1. What is Browning’s method of introducing his
subject ?

2. What is necessary to catch the connection and ante-
cedents of his thought and to understand Browning fully ?

3. What reason did Browning give upon being qucs-
tioned why he did not popularize the study of his poems?

4. Name Browning’s four religious poems, and explain
their kinship.

5. How does Browning exemplify the various stages of
religious belief ?

6. What determined the form of “A Death in the
Desert”?

7. What reason have we to suppose that Browning had
no sympathy with the German sceptical philosophers,
Strauss and others ?

8. What did these sceptics affirm regarding the Gos-
pel of St. John ?

9. How may we obtain some definite idea of “A
Death in the Desert” ?

10. What is the meaning of this poem? Explain the
Prologue.

11. Relate Browning’s description of St. John in the
desert — line thirteen to line eighty-one.

12. What, according to Browning, supplies an explana-
tion of the spiritual and subjective character of St. John’s
faith ?

13. What is the general import of “A Death in the
Desert ” ?
\
‘““A DEATH IN THE DESERT” 37

14. How does Browning in his poem represent the
character and personality of St. John ?

15. What was Browning’s religious faith as set forth
in the poem ?

16. Indicate some of the most beautiful passages in the
poem.
MRS. BROWNING’S “SONNETS FROM
THE PORTUGUESE.”

Love has ever been a fitting theme for the sonnet-
eer, from Spenser to Rossetti. Enshrined in this
Loveandthe @lt-form the poet has poured out his
Sonuets tide of love and tenderly confessed ta
the passionate emotions of his heart. Fourteen
iambic lines and the confession is made! The one
idea, the one sentiment, reigns supreme. The ses-
tet crowns the octave. The thought must be
gathered up intense, not weakened by diffusion.

How suitable, then, is not the sonnet as a vehicle
of the loftiest thoughts as well as the tenderest and
most impassioned emotions! The vernacular of
love is clear and direct —just what the sonnet
must be. It burns and blazes as a star, transfigur-
ing the whole world around; the sonnet must be
luminous, too, lighting up with its beams the world
of thought embodied within its lines.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the greatest woman
poet of any age, has given us a cycle of sonnets,
Mrs. Brown. Known under the title of “Sonnets
ing’s Cycleof from the Portuguese,” which contain
Sonnets. é >

some of the finest subjective poetry to
 
“SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 39

be found in English literature. “Their form re-
minds us,” says Stedman, “of an English proto-
type, and it is no sacrilege to say that their music
is showered from a higher and purer atmosphere
than that of the Swan of Avon. We need not
enter upon cold comparison of their respective ex-
cellences; but Shakespeare’s personal poems were
the overflow of his impetuous youth: his broader
vision, that took a world within its ken, was abso-
lutely objective; while Mrs. Browning’s Love
Sonnets are the outpourings of a woman’s tender-
est emotions at an epoch when her art was most
mature, and her whole nature exalted by a passion
that to such a being comes but once and for all.
Here indeed the singer rose to her height. Here
she is absorbed in rapturous utterance, radiant and
triumphant with her own joy. The mists have,
risen and her sight is clear. Her mouthing and
affectation are forgotten, her lips cease to stammer,
the lyrical spirit has full control. The sonnet,
artificial in weaker hands, becomes swift with feel-
ing, red with a ‘veined humanity,’ the chosen
vehicle of a royal woman’s vows.”

The history of how the “Sonnets from the Portu-_
guese” came to be written has been 4. tne
given to the world. They are the pee eetnel
notes and chronicle of Mrs. Browning’s guese* came
betrothal. Mr. Browning little sus- *  Wtten.
40 STUDIES IN POETRY

pected that the circumstances of their betrothal had
led Miss Barrett into any artistic expression of feel-
ing. During the months of their brief courtship
neither poet showed any verses to the other.

After a honeymoon spent in Paris, Browning
and his young wife took up their residence in Pisa,
each pursuing his or her own literary work. One
day early in 1847, Mrs. Browning came downstairs
from her literary study and pushing a packet of
papers into Browning’s pocket told him to read it,
and to tear it up if he did not like it; and then
she fled again to her own room.

This parcel contained the series of sonnets which
have rendered the name of Mrs. Browning illustri-
ous. These sonnets were first published in the
volumes of 1850, and in order to veil their true
authorship it was agreed, at the suggestion of
Browning, that they should appear under the title
of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.”

Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Rossetti
—each has given us a deliberate set of sonnets,
Mrs. Brown- but it is not too much to say that Mrs.
ing ane weat Browning’s cycle of love poems excels
_ Sonneteers. the work of these four masters. °

Of course, strictly speaking, these forty-four ex-
quisite sonnets of Mrs. Browning’s are not sonnets
at all. Itis true they are built after the Petrarchan
model, but with the exception of the first, fourth,
‘““SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 41

and thirteenth, they cannot be said to realize with
any distinctness the idea and the peculiar artistic
effect of the sonnet proper.

As a critic points out, the natural bent of Mrs.
Browning was certainly not to the sonnet. She
was too dithyrambic, too tumultuous to be wil-
lingly restrained within a rigid form of verse.
One of the earliest sonnets of her mature years is
entitled “The Soul’s Expression,” and it is inter-
esting as a revelation of her own consciousness of
the difficulties which technical art presented to her:

“ With stammering lips and insufficient sound
I strive and struggle to deliver right
That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling interwound,
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
This song of soul I struggle to outbear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air.
But if I did it as the thunder-roll
Breaks its own cloud, my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.”

A study of the sonnet will reveal the fact that
the sonnet architecture of Petrarch, 44. charac-
Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, _ teristics ofa

Good Sonnet.

widely differ. The Italian is generally
42 STUDIES IN POETRY

taken as the normal type, but it would be folly to
say that, because a sonnet is not fashioned after
the Italian type, therefore it should not be regarded
as @ sonnet proper. Speaking of this deviation
from the normal type, Mark Pattison says: ‘ How
far any given specimen may deviate from type
without ceasing to be a sonnet is as impossible to
decide as it is in botany to draw the line between
a variety and a distinct species. Perhaps we may
say that success is the best test, and that a brilliant
example justifies its own structural form. Or we
may look for legislative sanction in consent, and
demand compliance with those rules which the
majority of poets agree to respect. The mighty
masters are a law unto themselves and the validity
of their legislation will be attested and held against
all comers by the splendour of an unchangeable
success.”

We came across the following wise bit on the
sonnet not long ago, and we think it strikes off
fairly well the chief characteristics of a good
sonnet:

“A sonnet should be grave, but not heavy. It
must have a severity tempered by sweetness, like
the breviary character of the Venerable Bede. It
must linger meditatively ; it must not loiter or
fumble with its meaning. It must be sinuous,
never headlong; feeling its rhymes delicately, not
“SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 43

falling upon them; for these are less rhymes than
the most prominent of many assonances upon all
of which the rhythm hangs.”

It will be interesting for the student to take a
Petrarchan sonnet, a Shakespearean sonnet, and a
Wordsworthian sonnet, and note the joanana
difference in their architecture. Per- English Types
haps the great difference between the aaa,
English and Italian sonnet is to be found in the
fact that in the English sonnet the sense flows on
without break from the-octave into the sestet;
whereas the Italian sonnet is required at the end
of the octave to have a complete change in the
idea. So that while the form of a sonnet may be
Italian, the progress of the idea it embodies may
be English.

The rhyme-schemes of the three chief types of
Italian sonnets are the following: Type I., abbaabba
edecde. Type II., abbaabba cdeded. Type III.,
abbaabba cdedce.

A few of the finest sonnets in the English
language are: Wordsworth’s “The World is too
much with us”; Longfellow’s “Sonnet on Na-
ture”; Byron’s “ Sonnet on Chillon ” ; Keats’ “ On
Looking into Chapman’s Homer”; and Shake-
speare’s “Shall I Compare thee to a Summer's
Day?”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti has given us a wonder-
44 STUDIES IN POETRY

fully fine cycle of sonnets in his “ House of Life.”
Rossett?s HIS introductory sonnet on the Sonnet
Sonnetona is very fine and is worthy of reproduc-
Sonnet. :

tion here:

“ A sonnet is a moment’s monument, —
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent :
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule ; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.
A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul, — its converse to what Power ’t is due: —
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love’s high retinue
It serve; or, ’mid the dark wharf’s cavernous breath,
In Charon’s palm it pay the toll to Death.”

A key to the central idea which informs this
cycle of sonnets is found in the opening sonnet.
The Central It is ‘‘an overture containing the motive

Idea in ‘‘ Son- . 7 +
netsfrom the Of the canticle; ‘not Death but Love

Portuguese.” had seized her unaware.” Laughing
Love has invaded her sequestered chamber:

“I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals old or young;
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue;
I saw in gradual vision, through my tears,
‘“‘SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 45

The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,

Those of my own life, who by turns had flung

A shadow across me. Straightway I was ‘ware,

So weeping, how a mystic shape did move

Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair ;

And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,

* Guess now who holds thee ?’ — ‘ Death,’ I said. But there
The silver answer rang, ‘ Not Death but Love.’”

In the fifth sonnet there is a beautiful piece of
imagery. It is that in which Mrs. Browning
likens herself to Electra pouring her sepulchral
urn and all its ashes at the feet of Love.

Between sonnets five and six the student should
read Mrs. Browning’s little poem “ Question and
Answer.” It belongs to the same orbit of thought
and emotion and is co-radical with “Sonnets from
the Portuguese.” Here it is:

“ Love you seek for presupposes
Summer heat and sunny glow.
Tell me, do you find moss-roses
Budding, blooming in the snow ?
Snow might kill the rose-tree’s root :
Shake it quickly from your foot,
Lest it harm you as you go.

From the ivy where it dapples

A gray ruin, stone by stone,

Do you look for grapes or apples

Or for sad green leaves alone ?

Pluck the leaves off, two or three;

Keep them for morality

When you shall be safe and gone.”
‘
46 STUDIES IN POETRY

In the tenth sonnet Mrs. Browning makes full
confession of her love:

* And when I say at need
I love thee. . . mark!. . . I love thee — in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face towards thine.”

From this point forward the sonnets play-in
their exquisite masque as if to celestial dance
music with the wild thoughts and tremulous
frolics of accepted love.

In the fourteenth sonnet Mrs. Browning pleads
that Browning may not love her for her desert’s
sake, but for love’s sake:

“Tf thou must love me let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
‘T love her for her smile, her look, her way
Of speaking gently, for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day ;’
For these things in themselves beloved may
Be changed, or change for thee: and love so wrought
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry:
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love’s sake that evermore
Thou mayst love on through love’s eternity.”
‘““SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 47

At the end of: the eighteenth sonnet the follow-
ing little lyric “ Inclusions ” should be inserted —
it is really a part of the sonnets :

‘¢Qh, wilt thou have my hand, dear, to lie along in thine?

As a little stone in a running stream, it seems to lie and
pine.

New drop the poor, pale hand, dear, unit to plight with
thine.

“Oh, wilt thou have my cheek, dear, drawn closer to thine
own?

My cheek is white, my cheek is worn by many a tear run
down.

Now leave a little space, dear, lest it should wet thine own.

“Oh, must thou have my soul, dear, commingled with thy
soul?

Red grows the cheek and warm the hand; the part is in the
whole:

Nor hands nor cheeks keep separate when soul is joined to
soul.’’

It will be noticed that these sonnets are not
heaped together in accidental sequence as Spenser’s
and Shakespeare’s seem to be, but are 4. sistori-
arranged historically. They move along cal Arranze-
from the first surprise of unexpected =
passion to the final complete resignation of soul
and body in a rapture which is to be sanctified and
heightened by death itself.

Though all these sonnets exhibit the rhyme-
48 STUDIES IN POETRY

scheme of the Italian type of sonnet, —that is,
Mould and abbaabba cdeded, — they are not organ-
Technique. = ically sonnets. As Professor Corson
points out, in their rhyme-schemes they take on
the exterior semblance of what organically they
are not. The whole cycle is a beautiful casket of
gems, full of lyrical splendor, deeply inlaid with
the rubies and diamonds of a woman’s purest and
truest love.

The key-note of Mrs. Browning as an artist
was sincerity. This is the quality which holds
aon ae together the edifice of her style. Her
Sonnets. nature was intense. When love in-
tuguese’?Re- vaded the chamber of her heart she
Geet the -mrs, hearkened to its whisperings, left her
Browning. polar region of dreams, solitude, and
introspection, and lived in the arms of her new-
born world of thought The long closed tideways
of her woman’s heart were opened and Love’s
torrent swept all before it.

“ Sonnets from the Portuguese ” are a record,
a chronicle, of the genesis of love in the pure and
noble heart of the world’s great priestess of song.
They not only chronicle every heart-beat of her
love, but reflect the strength of her genius as an
artist.

It is peculiarly true that women poets rarely, if
ever, take us into their confidence when they deal
“SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE” 49

with love. A natural delicacy leads them to write
of love so platonically or so obscurely that it is
difficult at times to know just what they wish to
communicate. There is no doubting the meaning
of Mrs. Browning in her “Sonnets from the Por-
tuguese.” Her “song of soul” is clear, and de-
livered with no stammering lips. The burden of
her heart is love, and this she clothes with a tech-
nical beauty and sincerity that glorify the heart of
woman.

Before Robert Browning achieved eminence as
a poet, Tennyson and Mrs. Browning were the
obvious inheritors of Wordsworth’s «Sonnets
throne. The two volumes of 1844 aa
lifted Mrs. Browning at once to a place “11 Memo-

riam’’ con-
among the living poets of her country,  trasted.
Tennyson’s great elegy, “In Memoriam,” which
is devoted to the analysis of philosophic grief,
was published about the same time that Mrs.
Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese”
appeared. There is a certain analogy between
the two poems — one dealing with grief the other
with love. “In Memoriam” is the record of a
greatfriendship. “Sonnets from the Portuguese,”
one of the acknowledged glories of our literature, is
built patiently and unquestionably on the union in
stainless harmony of two of the most distinguished
spirits which our century has produced.
4
50 STUDIES IN POETRY

QUESTIONS.

1. Define the sonnet.

2. Why is the sonnet suitable as a form of verse to
express the emotions of love ?

2. What is Mrs. Browning’s place among the women
poets of the world ?

4. What, in brief, is Stedman’s appreciation of Mrs.
Browning’s ‘¢ Sonnets from the Portuguese ” ?

5. Relate how these sonnets came to be written.

6. Contrast the sonnets of Mrs. Browning with the
sonnets of Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and
Rossetti.

7. Should “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” be really
designated sonnets?

8. What are the characteristics of a good sonnet?

9. Explain the difference between the Italian and
English types of the sonnet.

10. What is the central idea in “Sonnets from the
Portuguese ”?

11. Are these sonnets heaped together in accidental
sequence 4

12. Are these poems organically sonnets ?

13. What was the keynote of Mrs. Browning as an
artist ?

14. How far do these sonnets reflect the genius of
Mrs. Browning ?

15. Contrast “In Memoriam” and “Sonnets from the
Portuguese.”
 
WORDSWORTH’S ODE “ON INTIMA-
TIONS OF IMMORTALITY.”

WorpswortH’s ode “On Intimations of In-
mortality” is, perhaps, the most organic poem to
be found in the whole range of English an organic
literature. It is, indeed, an embodi- Poem.
ment of the happiest and truest inspiration. The
idea and matter in the ode so interpenetrate — are
so fused — and the poet’s individuality becomes so
absorbed in the creation of his imagination, that a
Wordsworthian poem of rare power and vital beauty
is the result.

Where there is a lack of true inspiration this
organic character in a poem will be wanting, and
the idea will seem to stand above the matter as a
master above a slave. The absence, too, of that
sacred flame which fuses and fashions the precious
ore of poetic thought with its unifying power, will
affect the organic character of a poem not only on
its thought side, but also on its metrical side.

Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality” is a most
vital creation and represents the genius of Words-
worth at its very best. It is the embodiment of
52 STUDIES IN POETRY

the poet's own mystical ideality, and may be justly
regarded as the crowning effort of modern imag-
inative discourse. Emerson calls it the high-
water mark of English thought in the nineteenth
century, and Principal Shairp says that it marks
the highest limit which the tide of poetic inspira-
tion has reached in England within this century,
or, indeed, since the days of Milton.

Of this poem, “Ode on Intimations of Immor-
Wordsworth’s tality,” published in 1807, Wordsworth
fit odea wrote as follows in 1843, explanatory
andImpert. of its genesis and import:

“This was composed during my residence at
Town End, Grasmere. Two years at least passed
between the writing of the first four stanzas and
the remaining part. To the attentive and com-
petent reader, the whole sufficiently explains it-
self; but there may be no harm in adverting here
to particular feelings or experiences of my own
mind on which the structure of the poem partly
rests. Nothing was more difficult for me in child-
hood than to admit the notion of death as a state
applicable to my own being. I have said else-
where :

“¢A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death!”
‘‘ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 53

‘But it was not so much from feelings of animal
vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of
the indomitableness of the spirit within me. I
used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah,
and almost to persuaie myself that, whatever
might become of others, I should be translated in
something of the same way to heaven. With a
feeling congenial to this I was often unable to
think of eternal things as having external exist-
ence, and I communed with all that I saw as some-
thing not apart from, but inherent in, my own
immaterial nature.

“Many times while going to school have I
grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from
this abyss of idealism to reality. At that time I
was afraid of such processes. In later periods of
life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do,
a subjugation of an opposite character, and have
rejoiced over the remembrances as is expressed in
the lines:

‘¢¢ Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,’ etc.

“To that dream-like vividness and splendour
which invest objects of sight in childhood, every
one, I believe, if he would look back, could bear
testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here; but
having in the poem regarded it as presumptive
54 STUDIES IN POETRY

evidence of a prior state of existence, I think it
right to protest against a conclusion which has
given pain to some good and pious persons, that I
meant to inculcate such a belief. It is far too
shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith
as more than an element in our instincts of
immortality.

“But let us bear in mind that, though the idea
is not advanced in revelation, there is nothing there
to contradict it, and the fall of man presents an
analogy in its favor. Accordingly, a pre-existent
state has entered into the popular creeds of many
nations, and among all persons acquainted with
classic literature is known as an ingredient in
Platonic philosophy.

“ Archimedes said that he could move the world
if he had a point whereon to rest his machine.
Who has not felt the aspirations as regards the
world of his own mind? Having to wield some
of its elements when I was impelled to write this
poem on the ‘Immortality of the Soul,’ I took hold
of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient
foundation in humanity for authorizing me to
make for my purpose the best use of it I could
as a poet.”

The germ, or shall we call it main idea of this
ItsGermin Ode will be found in a fine poem by Henry
Literature. Vaughan, a Platonic poet of the seven-
ce ON

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 55

teenth century. The poem is entitled «The Re-

treat.”
germ:

Here is the passage -which embodies the

‘Happy those early days when I
Shin’d in my angel-infancy !
Before I understoo 1 this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought ;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love,
And looking back — at that short space —
Could see a glimpse of his bright face ;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity :
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A sev’ral sin to ev’ry sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.”

Again in our later poets we find hints and glints

of the

informing idea in this poem. Shelley in

his “Lament” touches it:

“O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that whereon I stood before —
When will return the glory of your prime?

No more—oh, never more!”’
56 STUDIES IN POETRY

Hood, in his poem “I remember, I remember,”
embodies a thought-also kindred to this:

“T remember, remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
J used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky.
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’t is little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.”

In structure this great ode stands alone, being
modelled on no other poem. Its rhythm, metre,
rhyme, melody, harmony, and stanza,
are vital and organic, -— the outcome
of the unifying, or what Coleridge terms the esem-
plastic power, of the feeling or emotion embodied
in the poem. It should be remembered that poetic
unities — metre, melody, rhythm, etc.—are not
accidents or things apart from the life of a poem,
but are inherent and contained in the divine en-
ergy of the art work.

The “Ode on Immortality” contains eleven
stanzas of varied mould, dependent upon the char-
acter of the sentiment poetically enhoused. It
will be noticed that not only is the metre of this
fine ode singularly appropriate, but its diction is
equally felicitous. ad its stanzas been fashioned
successively, in regular form, such structure would

Its Technique.
‘“ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 57

have proved particularly suitable for the expres-
sion of definite thought; but the irregular yields
itself more pliantly to the imaginative passion
which is of the very life, atmosphere, and essence
of this poem.

Referring to the structure and diction of the
“Ode on Immortality,” Aubrey de Vere says:
“Parts of it are written in that ‘large utterance,’
at once majestic and simple, which makes so much
of Wordsworth’s poetry, when once read, haunt
the ear forever. Parts of it are familiar even to
roughness. That roughness was intentional and
was not mitigated in the later editions. It was
needed, The perfection of a poem may be gravely
impaired by its uniform elaborateness ; as in archi-
tecture ornament becomes offensive if it be not
relieved by contrasted masses of occasional plain-
ness or rudeness. Without such passages the sen-
timent of this ode would have lacked its passionate
impulse, and its doctrine would have been frozen
into a scholastic theory. In this poem many
extremes are reconciled. In no other has Words-
worth’s genius, contemplative at once and emo-
tional, moved through so wide an arc.”

Of the two hundred and three verses which
make up the ode, the metre of one hundred is iam-
bic pentameter. This is the theme-metre of the
ode — indeed, it is the measure in which the
58 STUDIES IN POETRY

greatest portion of English poetry is written. Of
the other metres in the poem there are thirty-nine
dxa, forty-four 8xa, ten 2xa, six 6xa, one 7xa, one
2xxa plus x, one xxa, xa, xxa, xa, and one 8xa, ax,
xa, — a@ representing in every case, according to
Latham’s method of metrical notation, an accented
syllable, and # an unaccented syllable.

It will further be observed that the more reflect-
ive portions of the ode are expressed in the theme-
metre — good examples being found in the eighth
and eleventh stanzas. Where the thought is light
and gay and gladsome, as in the tenth stanza, the
notes are set to a shorter metre.

The third stanza contains a greater variety of
metre than any other section of the ode. Notice
how the music of the verses in their varied form
serves as a chorus to the thought, expressing a
mystic sympathy with it; and notice, too, the exult-
ant note attained in the last verse through the
sweeping close imparted by the iambic heptameter
(Txa). ;

Again, it would be well for the student to note
the rhyme-scheme, followed with the varying
degrees of emphasis imparted, according to the
nearness or remoteness of the rhyme.

There are two marked and well defined transi-
Three Divisions tions in the thought of the poem — be-
of the Poem. tween the fourth and fifth, and eighth
‘CON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 59

and ninth stanzas. The first four stanzas deal
with a loss which has saddened a soul once self-
sufficing; the next four are devoted to a vindica-
tion of the daring doctrine of the poem without
trenching upon polemics; while the concluding
stanzas of the poem restore to the soul peace
through the thought that the spiritual vision, cut
off by the temporal things around, may be regained
and the melancholy fear subdued by a return to
the simple ways in which our childhood walked.
In the first division of the poem is set forth the
experience of our common humanity. In the first
stanza the poet recalls his childhood,
when all ae seemed to him to be in ‘he First
clothed in celestial light; but now that ee
he has reached the years of manhood this celestial
light has given place to a more prosaic aspect in
nature. In the next stanza —a piece of matchless
description — there is revealed to him the fact
that nature is still beautiful and fair in its varied
phenomena; still he knows, realizes, that a glory
has departed from the earth,—a glory which be-
longed to the vision of his childhood. In the third
and:fourth stanzas the poet mingles in the great
festival of nature. He hears the echoes from the
mountain throng, and the winds come to him from
the fields of sleep, but amidst this jubilee grief is
borne in upon him through a single tree, a single
60 STUDIES IN POETRY

field, which speaks to him of something that is
gone. The little pansy at his feet repeats the self-
same tale.

The thought in the second division contains the
argument of the poem. It sets forth the fact that
aannele this earthly life is nothing more than a
inthe Second sleep, or a forgetting, in the midst of
Done the larger life of Eternity; that when
man is born he brings with him recollections of the
glory he has left behind him, and as he grows to
manhood the remembrance becomes dimmer, until
at length the grown man sees the sunrise glory
fade away into the light of common day.

The close of the first division is marked by sad-
ness — gloom:

“‘ Whither is fled the visionary gleam ?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”

The second division opens in hope and light.
As Aubrey de Vere says, “ A hundred bygone mus-
ings have rushed to a single conclusion, and the
problem is solved. Sharply, definitely, and with
nothing of preface, the thought which has wrought
deliverance is enunciated. The loss was even
greater than it seemed to be; but in its very great-
ness there lives a secret hope. It was not the loss
of that gleam which beautified this earth: it was
the loss of a whole world, but of one that cannot
‘“‘ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 61

be lost forever. We have a higher birthplace than
we know; and our sorrow is itself a prophecy that
the exile shall return to his country.”

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy !

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;

At length the man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.”

The succeeding three stanzas of the second divi-
sion illustrate how the soul is gradually beguiled
into a temporary forgetfulness of its celestial origin.
The earth, his foster-mother, with a sort of cruel
kindness does everything in her power to make
him forget “ that imperial palace whence he came.”
Environed by the moving pageantry of life “ the
little actor cons another part, descends from his
62 STUDIES IN POETRY

being’s height,” and wears the yoke which life and
custom place upon his neck.

In the seventh stanza is set forth the life of
man from childhood to old age. It is practically
Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man,” as found in
“As You Like It,” Act 11.; Scene 1: “All the
world’s a stage,” etc.

The last stanza of the second division is probably
more difficult of interpretation than any other
section of the poem. Stopford Brooke, we think,
lays bare its meaning very clearly in the following
comment :

“We can only catch the main idea among ex-
pressions of the child, as the “best philosopher ”
the “eye among the blind,’ “mighty prophet,”
“seer blest,’” — expressions which taken separately
have scarcely any recognizable meaning. By tak-
ing them all together we feel, rather than see,
that Wordsworth intended to say that the child,
having lately come from a perfect existence, in
which he saw truth directly and was at home with
God, retains, unknown to us, that vision — and
because he does, is the best philosopher, since he
sees at once that which we through philosophy
are endeavoring to reach; is the mighty prophet
because in his actions and speech he tells uncon-
sciously the truths he sees, but the sight of which
we have lost; is more closely haunted by God,
“ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 63

more near to the immortal life, more purely and
brightly free, because he half shares in the pre-
existent life and glory out of which he has come.”

The third division indicates the use of the
change, and shows how it reacts upon the earlier
disposition of the mind and tends to cmnc trata
deepen the meaning of the first inti- im the Thira
mations of immortality. Man preserves ae
through life a memory of his first estate. The
obstinate questionings of sense and outward things
make him but conscious of his own finiteness and
the infinity towards which he is going, but which
would not have been possible without his “shadowy
recollections ” of a time when he was intuitively
conscious of an infinite from which he had come.
He can never fully lose sight of this infinity — of
the great “immortal sea” upon whose shores his
childhood dreamed :

“« Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither ;
Can in a moment travel thither ;
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

In the fourth book of “ The Excursion” there is
a passage closely allied in thought to the above
lines, beginning with —
64 STUDIES IN POETRY

“ T have seen
A curious child who dwelt. upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell; ” ete.

Wordsworth regards the universe as a shell
bespeaking communion with its native sea of God’s
Immensity and Omnipotence. The whole passage
is very beautiful and very Wordsworthian in its
thought and teaching.

The sublime ode which we are considering ends
in a hymn of praise, a reconcilement with nature,
which forms the subject of its opening lines. The
spiritual passion which touched and stirred and
tossed its beating heart has sunk at the close into
a tranquillity which retains but a ripple of the
storm beyond the harbor bar.

The estrangement of the poet from his loved
nature is but for a brief season. She is still to
him a very sacrament, bestowing upon him her
spiritual gifts and graces—an intermediary be-
tween the source of all life and love and the
heart of man:

“ And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,
Forbode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
J only have relinquished one delight,
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
“ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 65

_Even more than when I tripped lightly as they ;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day,

Is lovely yet ;-
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality ;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

There is certainly a kinship between these two
poems. “Ode to Immortality” is a great philo-
sophic structure reared on “We are «ogetomm-
Seven.” It embodies the child’s feel- ro ee
ing in “ We are Seven” carried into the Seven”
years of philosophic thought. ‘We ch fi
are Seven,” however, is oe alone the mere tale of
a little cottage girl who tould not fully realize the
meaning of death: it represents as well the poet’s
contemplative contrast between the natural health
and joy of life in the living child and the super-

natural secret of death:
“ She had a rustic woodland air,
And she was wildly clad :

Her eyes were fair and very fair ;
Her beauty made me glad.”

It is worthy of noting, while discussing this
poem, that the poetic moment or inspirational
5
66 STUDIES IN POETRY

thought of the poem is to be found in the last
stanza, which, by the way, Wordsworth tells us
was composed first.

In the “Ode to Immortality ” the poetic moment
is to be found in the fifth stanza. It hints at, nay,
embodies, the idea of the pre-natal existence of the
soul. In “ Weare Seven” the child’s feeling is
horizoned by “ this muddy vesture of clay ” with no
thought of the spirit tabernacled therein. In the
“ Ode to Immortality ” this feeling touches the im-
mortal threshold of philosophic thought and gains
for the poet a faith, a trust, a hope —

“ In the primal sympathy
Which, having been, must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”

In studying the “Ode to Immortality” it would
be well for the student to compare it, (1) as to met-
SomeGreat ical form, (2) as to ethical teaching, and
lsh Peter (3) as to esthetic value, with the fol-
Compared. lowing four great odes: Coleridge’s
“ France”; Gray’s “ Bard” ; Tennyson's “ Death
of Wellington’; and Milton’s “ Nativity.” Note
the share which the poet as seer and singer has in
the building up of an ode. Is Tennyson’s “ Death

of Wellington” characterized by the same deep
“ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 67

and rich thought, sublime conception, and in-
wrought truth as the “ Ode to Immortality”? Is
it not largely labored, and, as Stedman says, built
up of high-sounding lines and refrains in which
rhetoric is substituted for imagination and richness
of thought? Gray’s “Bard” is a Pindaric ode.
Would you designate the “ Ode to Immortality” or
Coleridge’s “ France” or Milton’s “ Nativity” as a
Pindaric ode? The “Bard” is considered to be a
prophetic poem. Does this account for the obscur-
ity which characterizes it? Note the manner in
which each ode open3. Compare the five odes as
to strength, uplift, loftiness of cast, organic mould,
stanza, and rhyme-scheme. “The ode is a grand
conception expressed in language of uniform dig-
nity and often of great beauty.” How far and
how fully do the five odes embody this definition ?
Wherein do the opening and closing of Coleridge’s
“‘ Ode to France” resemble the opening and closing
of the “Ode to Immortality” ? How far does each
ode represent the special poetic characteristics of
its author?

The “Ode to Immortality ” is essentially a philo-
sophical poem. It never, however, descends to the
plane of mere argument, but keeps ever ‘the Ethical
on the high ground of the essential 7eacing of
identity of our childish instincts and Immortality.”
our enlightened reason. The whole poem and its
oS STUDIES IN POETRY

meaning and intent may be summed up as foLows:
There is set before us in the frst part of the poem
an experience common to humanity. Then it is
snown how the s~u. step by step. becoming cen-
tred in the scen and the temyoral. loses sight of
the glory and beauty which were the dower of
childhood. The ethical value of the poem is to be
found in the closing stanzas. which sex forth the
fact that if we would regain the spintual vision
Last to us as our sous have travelled inland in life.
far from “that immortal sea.” we must become
again as little children in this life of the sou.
blending the early intuitions of our childhood with
the mature reason of our manhood. The » Oude wo
Immortality “js generally regarded as Platonic in
ats philosophy. ssigning as it decs to mankind a
tife previeus tT) their human one. There is. how-
ever. a difference in the teaching of the two:

With Worlsworth the infant. with Plat- the
philosopher approashes nearest to the previews
more glorious state.” It should le remembered
tox, that Wordsworth held to the teachings in
this great poem with a poetic. not a religious faith.

QUESTIONS.

1. Why t+ Weriswortl.’s ole “On the Intimations of
Tmmeriahty “ claimed to be te mest organie p<=m in
Enish hterature?
“ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY” 69

PND Tm ww

9.

What does the “ Ode to Immortality ” represent ?
What was the origin of this poem ?

What is its import ?

What is its informing idea ?

Explain its literary structure.

Explain the three divisions of the poem.

What is the thought in the first division ?

What is the thought in the second division ?

10. What is the thought in the third division ?
11. Explain the kinship between the “ Ode to Immor-

tality”

and “ We are Seven.”

12. Compare the “Ode to Immortality” with other

great odes in English literature.
13. What is the ethical teaching of the “Ode to

Immortality ’’?
COLERIDGE’S “ANCIENT MARINER.”

A NEW gospel of poetry received proclamation
at the close of the eighteenth century through the
ANew Gospa lips of Wordsworth and Coleridge, who
of Poetry. Jed the heart of man back in pilgrimage
to the shrine of nature, whose altar lamp had
‘burned unheeded during the reign of the “correct
school of poets.” Burns and Goldsmith and Cow-
per and Thomson prepared the way. The new
movement, which had contemporaneous cradling
in Germany and France, and had touched and
quickened the literary mind and spirit of England,
found fullest and clearest expression in the ardent
and reverent hearts of William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These gifted twain
well represent the school of nature and romance in
English poetry. They came with a message, a
new gospel, to the literary world; and despite the
lashes and stripes, the scorn and contempt of crit-
ics, this message, this gospel, they proclaimed to
the literary sons of men.
A close, intimate, and abiding friendship sprang
up between those two gifted minds, perhaps owing
 
 

  
“ ANCIENT MARINER” 71

to the kinship of their genius. Coleridge first
became acquainted with Wordsworth  worasworth

in 1794, and the two became neigh- 44 Coleridge.
bors in 1797. They formed just estimates of each
other’s powers and soon resolved to unite in a
literary venture. They projected the “Lyrical
Ballads,” — a work which was destined to mark a
momentous epoch in the history of English poetry.
The purpose of the “‘ Lyrical Ballads” was to illus-
trate “the two cardinal points of poetry: the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a
faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the
power of giving the interest of novelty by the
modifying colors of the imagination.’ It was
agreed that Wordsworth was to contribute poems
on: subjects chosen from every-day life, while on
Coleridge’s part “ the incidents and agents were to
be, in part at least, supernatural, and the interest
aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the
affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions
as would naturally accompany such situations, sup-
posing them real.” He was “to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of
truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of the
imagination that willing suspensiofi of disbelief
which constitutes poetic faith.” Coleridge’s part
of the joint volume, which appeared in 1798, vir-
tually consisted of the “ Ancient Mariner” alone.
72 STUDIES IN POETRY

What was the purpose of Coleridge in writing the
“ Ancient Mariner”? Is the poem probable, and has
Purposeand it amoral? These are important ques-
ao ee tions, and should receive the attention of
Mariner.” the student. Coleridge places as an in-
troduction to his poem the following lines from
Burnet, and they may lend some light to the pur-
pose which the author had in building up this re-
markable poem: ‘*I have no difficulty in believing
that there are more invisible than visible beings in
the world. But who shall tell us the story of their
whole family, and the rank, relationship, character-
istics, and duties of each? How they act? Where
they dwell? The mind of man has always striven
for, but never attained, a knowledge of these
things. Meanwhile I shall not deny that some-
times itis useful to view ina mental picture the
image of a greater and better world, so that
the intellect may not, through occupation with the
petty concerns of daily life, become too narrow
and be wholly absorbed in the consideration of
trifles. But, nevertheless, we must watch over the
truth and keep ourselves within bounds, in order to
distinguish the certain from the doubtful, and day
from night.”

It seems quite clear, we think, that Coleridge’s
purpose in writing the “ Ancient Mariner,” which
is, as Swinburne says, a very triumph of modern
“ ANCIENT MARINER” 73

poetry, was to show that God’s love animates and
binds together the whole world —

‘* For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.”

—that every creature is a link in His love, and
that he who wantonly destroys one of God’s
creatures cuts himself off from God’s love. By
the killing of the albatross the soul of the ancient
mariner has been wrenched from the animating
principle that linked it to the universe.

In Coleridge’s “Table Talk” we find the following
reference to the moral import of this poem: “ Mrs.
Barbauld once told me that she admired tg gthicat
the ‘Ancient Mariner’ very much, but Teaching.
that there were two faults in it, — it was improba-
ble, and had no moral. As for the probability, I
owned that it might admit some question; but as
to the want of a moral, I told her that in my judg-
ment the poem had too much; and that the only
or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion
of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as
a principle or cause of action in a work of such
pure imagination.” Of course the moral is obvi-
ously contained in the third last stanza of the

poem :
“He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.”
74 STUDIES IN POETRY

The “Ancient Mariner” is an expression of
divine love manifested through objects of nature.

Coleridge did much to restore the note of super-

naturalism to English poetry. It is an element
Supernatural- which belongs especially to medieval
ism in the :
Poem. poets. Later in our century Dante
Gabriel Rossetti introduced it, together with the
temper of religious wonder. It was one of the
outcomes of the romantic movement in English
poetry, which Percy’s “ Reliques” did so much to
foster. Scott employs it with good effect. In the
preparation of the “Lyrical Ballads,” Coleridge
undertook the special romance of the wo:k, an the
blending of supernatural machinery with human
interest. Hence the very life and atmosphere of the
“ Ancient Mariner” have root in the supernatural,
— in fact, it is this which holds the poem together
and gives it artistic unity as well as imaginative
reach and scope. :

Mrs. Oliphant contributes the following brief
study or appreciation of the “ Ancient Mariner.” It
ABrief Study may shed some light upon the student’s
of the ‘‘ Ancient
Mariner.” path and make more clear the purposc,
plan, and meaning of this very unique poem: “The
life of every day is going on gayly; the wedding
guests are close to the festal doors, when Mystery
and Wonder suddenly interpose in the way, shut-
ting out everything else around. The sounds of
“ANCIENT MARINER” 75

the other existence are heard through them; and
even by glimpses that life is visible, — the merry
minstrels ‘nodding their heads,’ the bride in her
blushes, — but the unwilling listener has entered
into the shadow, and the unseen has got hold of
him. It is a parable not only of the ship and the
albatross (which is hard of interpretation) but of
mankind, a stranger upon earth ‘moving about in
worlds not realized, always subject to be seized
by powers to which he is of kin, though he under-
stands them not. ‘There is more of the invisible
than the visible in the world’ is the poet’s motto,
and with a great splendor and force of imagination
he enforces his text. ‘There was a ship,’ quoth
he, and the weird vessel glides before the unwill-
ing listener’s eyes so that he can see nothing else.
It comes between him and the feast, between him
and the figures of his friends, which flit like ghosts
out of the door. Which is the real, and which is
the vision? The mind grows giddy and is unable
to judge; and while everything tangible disappears,
the unseen sweeps triumphantly in and holds pos-
session more real, more true, more unquestionable
than anything that eye can see.

“Throughout the poem this sentiment of isola-
tion is preserved with a magical and most impres-
sive reality. All the action is absolutely shut up
within the doomed ship. The one man who is the
76 STUDIES IN POETRY

chronicler, and to whose fate everything refers, is
never withdrawn from our attention for a moment.
We grow silent with him, ‘with throats unslaked,
with black lips baked,’ in a sympathy which is
the very climax of poetic pain. And then what
touches of tenderness are those which surprise us
in the numbness and trance of awful solitude —

‘O happy living things!’ —

or this other which comes after the horror of the
reanimated bodies, the ghastly crew of the dead-

alive —
‘For when it dawned... ’

When the tale has reached its height of mystery
and emotion a change ensues. Gradually the
great spell is removed. As the voyage approaches
its conclusion ordinary instrumentalities appear
once more.

“This unexpected gentle conclusion brings our
feet back to the common goil with a bewildered
sweetness of relief and soft quiet after the prodi-
gious strain of mental excitement, which is nothing
like anything else we can remember in poetry.
The effect is one rarely produced, and which few
poets have the strength and daring to accomplish ;
sinking from the highest notes of spiritual music
to the absolute simplicity of exhausted nature.”

The “ Ancient Mariner ” is an allegory, and repre-
‘ ANCIENT MARINER” 77

sents the emancipation of the human soul, through
universal love, from the bonds of error tts Artistic
and passion. It is a poem of great Devices.
spiritual significance, but its ethical value, bound
up mystically in its lines, is not its only worth.
This truly organic poem should be studied through
the artistic devices which the poet makes use of in
the fashioning and upbuilding of the poem.

For instance, in order to produce the impressions
of extreme suffering and terror, Coleridge resorted
to certain devices. First, he laid the scene of his
tale at sea —“ in a field of life which is nearest the
primitive forces of nature. Again, the bare inci-
dents of his tale, stripped of their vitality, are in
themselves productive of horror and dread: the
notions of agonized thirst, of stagnation under
tropical heat, of confinement to a ship manned by
the dead, and of utter loneliness under their wide-
open, eternally accusing eyes.” Perhaps the great
artistic device employed by Coleridge is that of
contrast, — contrast in color, sound, motion, and the
larger narrative effects. ‘This artistic device of
contrast will be found in each of the seven sec-
tions of the poem.

There is a goodly mixture of archaic words in the
“ Ancient Mariner.” ‘These color the atmosphere
of the poem and help to give it fit set- a word about
ting. In the picturesque power of ‘$Pictom
78 STUDIES IN POETRY

language, Coleridge excels. There is scarce any-
thing in modern poetry to surpass in vividness and
melody some portions of the “Ancient Mariner”
and “ Christabel.” The words are full of song and
sheen and color. They are more than a garment of
the poetic thought — they throb and glow with the
spirit itself.

In Part Second the stanzas descriptive of the

Some entrance of the ship into the Pacific
Passages of . ¥

Beauty ana Ocean, and the becalming which ensued,
Splendor. are very fine:

“‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free :
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

“ Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down,
’T was sad as sad could be;
And we did speak only to break
The silence of the sea!

“ All in a hot and copper sky
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.

“Day after day, day after day,
We stuck — nor breath, nor motion ;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”
‘ ANCIENT MARINER” 79

Where again can be found sweeter poetic music
than the following ?—

“Tt ceased ; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.”

Charles Algernon Swinburne is a supreme artist
in technique, though lacking in the fuller endow-
ment of poetic thought. His estimate an xstimate
of the “Ancient Mariner” is of value. fhe
Ilere it is: “This poem is beyond Mariner.”
question one of the great triumphs of poetry.
For the execution, I presume no human eye is
too dull to see how perfect it is and how high
in kind of perfection. Here is not the speckless
and elaborate finish which shows everywhere the
fresh rasp of file or chisel on its smooth and spruce
excellence ; this is faultless after the fashion of a
flower or tree.”

QUESTIONS.

1. What is meant by the new gospel of poetry pro-
claimed by Wordsworth and Coleridge ?
2, How were the writings of these two poets received
* by the critics ?
3. What were the relations between Wordsworth and
“Coleridge ?
80 STUDIES IN POETRY

4. In what literary venture did they unite ?

5. What was the purpose of the “ Lyrical Ballads”?

6. What was the character of the poems contributed
by each of these two poets to the “ Lyrical Ballads ” ?

7. What is the purpose and scope of the “ Ancient
Mariner”? :

8. What is the ethical teaching of this poem 4

9. How is the supernatural element manifested in the
“ Ancient Mariner” ?

10. What is Mrs. Oliphant’s appreciation of the
“ Ancient Mariner’?

11. Illustrate the artistic devices of the poem.

12. What may be said of the diction of this poem ?

13. Quote a passage descriptive of the beauty and
splendor of the poem.

14. What is Swinburne’s estimate of the “ Ancient
Mariner ” 3
 
SHELLEY’S “PROMETHEUS UNBOUND.”

To understand Shelley’s work, it is necessary to
understand the poet’s creed. Shelley was a demo-
crat and a communist. “Prometheus  gneney's
Unbound ” is the supreme expression in Creed.
imaginative form of that new democracy which
found dynamic. power in the Revolution of
1789.

Shelley held that the universe is penetrated,
vitalized, by a spirit, and this spirit he sometimes
designates as Nature, and again as something
more than Life and Nature—as Love and Beauty.
He believed that the true object of man was to
adore this spirit, — to clasp it affectionately. We
see this idea set forth in “ Prometheus Unbound,”
for, according to Shelley, the final union of Pro-
metheus with Asia is the consummation of human
destinies.

Shelley pierced through things to their spiritual
essence. He cared more for the world beyond
than for the actual world around him. “TI

seek,” he says, “in what I see, the manifestation
6
82 STCDIES IN POETRY

of something beyond the present and tangible
object.”

In his religious belief Shelley was an atheist.
Antagonism to belief in a personal God is, accord-
ing to William Rossetti, the chief informing pur-
pose of the ~ Prometheus Unbound.” The poem
breathes hatred to historical Christianity. Yet
this great lyrical drama should be carefully studied,
not because of its ethical value, but as an exemplar
of the logical product of the rationalism which was
nurtured through two centuries in the garden of
English song.

It is a noteworthy fact that. the farther the
human mind departs from Catholic truth the less
the Logical Will be the value of the expression of
Productof its genius in art. The “ Divina Com-
Rationalism edia” of Dante, representing the ages of
faith, and the ‘‘ Prometheus Unbound” of Shelley,
representing the age of the Revolution, indicate
pretty clearly the attitude of those two periods
towards spiritual truth. There is no doubting which
is the greater period or which the greater poem.

To Shelley there is no moral evil —no sin. He
does not teach self-conquest, but rebellion against
authority. Itis true he would liberate humanity,
but he offers us no help towards this liberation
save the discipline of sorrow and doubt, — “the
unlimited extension of limited conditions, and our
‘*PROMETHEUS UNBOUND” 83

souls weary of the thought; whereas the poet of
the ‘Paradiso’ promises us the knowledge of the
Most High.”

Dante represents a fulness of faith. Shelley
represents the absence of all faith. The poets of
the Revolution closed with their age and demanded
freedom as an innate right. Dante promises us
freedom through obedience, which, indeed, is the
only true freedom.

“Prometheus Unbound” has its root in the
Greek schylean myth. Like the “ Divine
Comedy” of Dante, Prometheus deals  qhe con-
with spiritual forces, with the eternal ception of

7 7 “‘ Prometheus
conflict of good and evil; the action to Unbound.”
be wrought out is in both the final redemption of
the soul of man.

“In ‘Prometheus,’” says John Addington Sy-
monds, “ Shelley conceived a colossal work of art,
and sketched out the main figures on a scale of
surpassing magnificence. While painting in these
figures he seems to reduce their proportions too
much to the level of earthly life. He quits his
god-creating, heaven-compelling throne of myth-
opeic inspiration and descends to a love story of
Asia and Prometheus. In other words, he does not
sustain the visionary and primeval dignity of these
incarnated abstractions; nor, on the other hand, has
he so elaborated their characters in detail as to

m
84 STUDIES IN POETRY

give them the substantiality of persons. There is
therefore, something vague and hollow in both
figures. Yet in the subordinate passages of the
poem the true mythopeic faculty — the faculty of
finding concrete forms for thought and of in-
vesting emotion with personality —shines forth
with extraordinary force and clearness. We feel
ourselves in the grasp of a primitive myth-maker
while we read the description of Oceanus and the
raptures of the Earth and Moon.”

English genius tends to express itself through
forms of experience and fact. An exception to
oo this is, however, found in the work of
Idealism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and
Shelley. They are ideal, and the idealism which
pervades such poems as the ‘ Ancient Mariner ” and
“ Typerion” finds its fullest manifestation in the
** Prometheus Unbound,” which is the supreme
achievement of Shelley.

In the creation of Prometheus Shelley has
eliminated the taints which stain Milton’s Satan
and the Greek Prometheus. He has given us an
ideal Prometheus, possessing all the qualities which
go to make a perfect life. “ Prometheus is, as it
were,” says the poet himself, “the type of the
highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature
impelled by the purest and the truest motives to
the best and noblest ends.”
‘*PROMETHEUS UNBOUND” 85

The dawn of the nineteenth century saw the
rise of democracy. France expressed 4,
this democracy in brief historic act, Democrayle
while it was the work of England to «Prometheus
express it in eternal art. ae

Shelley voices this democracy in clearest tones
in “ Prometheus Unbound.” Yet this democracy of
Shelley cannot hope to govern, for it knows
neither obedience nor authority, and without these
democracy is an untamed beast. Shelley recognized
fully the law of love. ‘ Unterrified by the grim
realities of pain and crime revealed in nature and
society, he held fast to the belief that if we could
but pierce to the core of things, if we could but be
what we might be, the world and man would both
attain to their perfection in eternal love.” Shelley,
like many of his poetic brethren, taught the rights
of man, but forgot his correlative duties.

A genuine liking for “ Prometheus Unbound,”
says a well known critic, may be reckoned the touch-
stone of a man’s capacity for under- the Lyricat
standing lyric poetry. Scattered haractek of
throughout the drama are lyrics which Unbound.”
are very miracles of workmanship — charged with
an ethereal music which belong rather to the
spheres of heaven than the spheres of earth. The
spirit voice in the air which sings the hymn of
Asia, at the moment of her apotheosis, voices alike
 

 

86 STUDIES IN POETRY

the highest expression of Shelley’s lyrical genius
and. faith: -

“Life of Life! Thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them ;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.

“Child of Light! Thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them,
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds, ere they divide them ;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.

“Fair are others; none beholds thee.
But thy voice sounds low and tender,
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,

As I feel now lost forever.

“Lamp of Earth! where’er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the wings with lightness,
Till they fail as I am failing,

Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing.”

The “ Divina Commedia” of Dante reflects as ina
crystal sphere the ages of faith, Shelley’s “ Prome-
“ PROMETHEUS UNBOUND” 87

theus Unbound” the age of the Revolution. Both
are symbolic. One was written in ase asi ins
1320, the other in 1819. The “Divina Commedia”ana
Commedia” represents a time of re- oan
ligious contemplation, “Prometheus” a Contrast.
time of revolution. With Dante the great pur-
pose, the great problem, is the purification of
the soul; with Shelley, the liberation of the soul.
The central idea in Dante is obedience; the cen-
tral idea in Shelley is freedom. The hero of the
“ Divina Commedia” is Dante the mystic, the hero
of “Prometheus Unbound,” Prometheus the rebel.
Both poems tell the same story — the story of a
human soul that moves from passion to peace.
The characters of the two protagonists in these
poems are thus contrasted by an eminent literary
critic:

“ Prometheus is lofty of spirit, forgiving towards
enemies, untouched by sin, nobly firm in the re-
jection of evil or compromise, patient through
suffering, filled with compassion and with univer-
sal love. All these traits are shown to us in verse
of sweetest harmonies. To what result? We
place beside Shelley’s faultless Titan the ashen
Florentine, with tight-set lip and the sign of sin
on his forehead, and straightway human life be-
comes a holier thing. For the greatness of the
buman soul is to be measured less by the qualities
88 STUDIES IN POETRY

it possesses than by the resistance it has overcome.
The majesty of Prometheus springs from his re-
sistance of tyranny without; but having no foes
to fight within he suggests vacuity. Dante has
sinned, therefore he is lower than Prometheus ; he
feels penitence, and therefore he is higher. He
knows experiences into which the elemental Titan
of Shelley cannot enter, — the rapture of pardon,
the blessing of humility, the might of worship.

“Into the medizval protagonist has passed the
passion of generations; into the hero of the modern
poet have passed the theories of his author. The
scope of emotion is vastly greater in the older
poem. Prometheus cannot hate; Dante is su-
preme as a hater. If the modern attitude seem
the higher we must remember that the charity of
Prometheus finds its source in his fatalism. To
Shelley the sense of moral responsibility is a
shadow; Dante passes with silent scorn souls
that have chosen evil for their god.”

Professor Trent, of the University of the South, is
a clear, thoughtful, and, generally speaking, sound
Rapa sicee critic. It is evident from the follow-
the‘Prome- ing estimate that he is not borne away
moat een by the praise lavished at times on this
representative and epochal poem of Shelley’s. -Re-
ferring to the “Prometheus Unbound” and the
extravagant claims put forth for it, Professor
Trent says:
‘*PROMETHEUS UNBOUND” 89

“With regard to what may be called the intellec-
tual claims put forth for this poem, which has been
edited for schools and been made the subject of
essays by the dozen, I can say only that, however
true they may be when applied to special passages,
they are by no means true when applied to the
drama as a whole. The fourth act which is a
favorite with the Shelleyans, seems to have been
an afterthought and is a most lame and impotent
conclusion. The characters are, except for short
intervals, vague, misty, and devoid of personality.
The solution proposed for the problem of human
destiny, for the freeing of the Promethean spirit of
man, is as impossible and ineffectual as if it had
been generated in the heated brain of a maniac.
This great poem is really little more than a series
of wonderful phantasmagoria flashed.forth upon
the curtain of the reader’s mind by a very unsteady
hand. When the reader voluntarily shuts off the
light, 2. c. ceases to think or judge, the effect is
dazzling; when he allows the light of reason to
play upon his mind the effect is just the reverse.
I admire the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ as the dar-
ing and, in parts, splendid achievement of a bril-
liant, unbalanced, but nobly poetic nature; but I
cannot admit that it is worthy of language which
would be hyperbolical in the case of any other
poet than Shakespeare or Milton.”
90 STUDIES IN POETRY

QUESTIONS.
1. What is necessary in order to understand Shelley’s

work ?
2. Of what is “Prometheus Unbound” the supreme

/

expression ?

3. Describe Shelley’s creed.

4. What, according to William Rossetti, is the chief
informing purpose of the “ Prometheus Unbound ”?

5. Why should this great lyrical drama be carefully
studied ? ‘

6. Compare the “Prometheus Unbound” and the
“Divina Commedia” as representing Rationalism and
Catholicism.

7. Explain the conception of the “Prometheus Un-
bound.” How does it compare with the “Divina Com-
media” in its conception ?

8. Give briefly John Addington Symonds’ appreciation
of the poem.

9. What is the tendency of English poetic genius?

10. Name some exceptions to this tendency. Where
does idealism find its fullest manifestation ?

11. How is the ideal impersonation of Prometheus
described by Shelley ?

12. How was democracy expressed in England and
France at the dawn of the nineteenth century ?

13. Why cannot the democracy of Shelley as expressed
in the “ Prometheus Unbound” hope to govern ?

14. How would Shelley have the world and man attain
to their perfection ?
‘“ PROMETHEUS UNBOUND” 91

15. What is the lyrical character of ‘“ Prometheus
Unbound ”?

16. Contrast briefly the “Divina Commedia” and
“ Prometheus Unbound.”

17. Justify Professor Trent’s estimate of the “ Prome-
theus Unbound.”
KEATS'S “EVE OF ST. AGNES.”

Apovut the literary fame of no other English
poet has the strife of critics been so intensely and
bitterly waged as that of poor John
A Word about
the Genius of Keats,——from the brutal assaults of
wor “ Blackwood’s Magazine” and the
“Quarterly Review” to the kindly words of Sir
James Mackintosh, indignant at the cruel and
savage attacks made upon our young, sensitive
poet, and the letter of admiration by Lord Jeffrey,
wherein he wrote, “I never regretted anything
more than to have been too late with my testimony
to his merits.” Indeed the name of John Keats
continued to be for some time a very storm centre
—now dark with the clouds of bitterness and
wrath, now brightened by the rays of just appre-
ciation and praise.

The voices of Keats’s contemporaries were so
loud in the academic groves of English song,
that Keats remained for the time unheard, un-
heeded. In the year of Keats’s birth, 1795, Words-
worth was twenty-five, Coleridge twenty-three,
Southey twenty-one, Landor twenty, and Scott
 
“EVE OF ST. AGNES” 93

twenty-four. Byron and Shelley, of volcanic
and ethereal fame, were at the time too young
for even poetic dreams, while Leigh Hunt, who
was destined to be in future years Keats’s warm
and constant friend, had just reached his eleventh
year.

It was, however, fortunate for Keats that he
had fallen upon such a period, when, as Dr. Hamil-
ton Mabie says, “the intellectual and spiritual
tides were rising, and English literature was recall-
ing, in the breadth and splendour of its movement,
the great Elizabethan age.” It was enough that
Keats responded to his time, and his genius took
birth from what Matthew Arnold rightly considers
to be the powers that concur in the creation of a
master-work of literature : “ the power of the man
and the power of the moment.”

The very essence of Keats’s poetic creed is to be
found in his lines:

‘“* Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

His poetic vision pierced the soul of things. It
was not merely surface beauty which concerned
him, it was that beauty which is the reflection of °
the very soul of things. ‘ When I wrote it,” he
said of one of his poems, “it was a regular step-
ping of the imagination toward a truth.” In
94 STUDIES IN POETRY

another place our young poet writes: “Scenery
is fine, but human nature is finer. The sward is
richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot ;
the eagle’s nest is finer for the mountaineer having
looked into it.”

Keats’s imagination was fed and fashioned by his
early reading. He dipped into old classical myth-
see saration ology, finding room for his fancy in the
for Poetic pages of ‘ Tooke’s Pantheon,” “ Spence’s
_— Polymetis,” and ‘‘ Lempriere’s Diction-
ary.” It was Charles Cowden Clarke who first
introduced him to the glowing pages of Spenser.
Together they read the “ Epithalamium,” and Keats
borrowed from his friend the “Faerie Queene,”

‘“ramping,” as Clarke writes, ‘ through the scenes of
the romance like a young horse turned into a spring
meadow.” The most poetic of poets became to his
young heart a passionate delight. He revelled in
the color and imagery of Spenser’s great allegory,
catching up with the wings of his spirit the mysti-
cal beauty and splendor of its enchanted lines.
“He hoisted himself up,” says Clarke, “and looked
burly and dominant as he said, ‘What an image
that is — sea-shouldering whales !’” It was the full
birth of poetry in his mind, The boy had suddenly
become a poet.

Such is the influence of genius upon genius; yet,
as a critic remarks, the genius of Keats was too
“EVE OF ST. AGNES” 95

virile and original to be dominated or held as debtor
by even a master of song. There is no doubt that
Keats owes much to Spenser. His first poem, ‘‘ Imi-
tation of Spenser,” testifies to this. Surely there
could be nothing more Spenserian in mould, spirit,
and color than the following lines which form the
opening stanza of this poem:

“ Now morning from her orient chamber came,
And her first footsteps touched a verdant hill:
Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,
Silvering the untainted gushes of its rill;
Which, pure from mossy beds, did dawn distil,
And aftcr parting beds of simple flowers,

By many streams a little lake did fill,
Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.”

During the winter of 1819 Keats produced a
noble group of poems —“ Hyperion,” “Ode on a
Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode a croup of
to a Nightingale,” and “The Eve of St. Poems.
Agnes.”

“Endymion” had already reached the public,
and the reviews had accorded it a most ungracious
welcome. The opinion has gained credence, some-
what widely too, that the reviewers killed Keats,
and that there was some truth in Byron’s jingling
rhyme referring to our modern young Greek as
“that fiery particle snuffed out by a magazine
96 STUDIES IN POETRY

article.” Such a tradition has done too much
honor to the whole brood of brutal reviewers,
whose crime was not murder, but vulgarity and
stupidity. Keats possessed too sound a nature,
too great a mind, to be killed by adverse criticism.
No doubt he felt the meanness of the attacks made
upon him. Referring to these he writes:

“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on
the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes
him asevere critic of his own work. ... The Genius
of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a
man. It cannot be matured by law and precept,
but by sensation and watchfulness in itself. That
which is creative must create itself. In ‘En-
dymion’ I leapt headlong into the sea, and thereby
have become better acquainted with the soundings,
the quicksands, and the rocks than if I had stayed
upon the shore and piped a silly pipe and taken tea
and confortable advice. I was never afraid of fail-
ure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the
greatest.”

“T have loved the principle of beauty in all
things,” said the author of “ Hyperion,” during
“Eveof st. the closing days of his life. In this
meee our young poet was certainly a modern
Greek. But while he had the temperament of
the Greek in his delight in beauty and his repose
in it, his manner was, as Dr. Hamilton Mabie
 

“EVE OF ST. AGNES” 97

points out, pre-eminently romantic. Take for in-
stance “The Eve of St. Agnes.” In form and
idea the poem belongs to the romantic. It is full
of color and warmth and fragrance. Speaking of
this exquisite poem, Dr. Mabie says: ‘There is no
magic of colour in written speech that is not mixed
in the diction of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes,’ —-a
vision of beauty deep, rich, and glowing as one
of those dyed windows in which the heart of the
Middle Ages still burns.”

It is interesting to note how differently Keats
and Tennyson treat the same poetic theme. “ The
Eve of St. Agnes” is a good exempli- jy estment
fication of this. Tennyson’s “Eve of of the Same
St. Agnes” is more severe and classical ee
than is that of Keats, while there is a Tennyson

i. ‘ Contrasted.
warmth and fragrance in Keats’s poem :
entirely wanting to Tennyson’s. Keats approaches
the theme through the avenue of romance, giving
color and glow to his lines within the radiant
dome of his imagination. The genius of Tenny-
son turns from the romantic to the ascetic and de-
votional and paints a St. Agnes more in accord-
ance with the life and spirit of the early saints, and
martyrs. Tennyson’s is the more real and Cath-
olic, Keats’s the more ideal and pagan.

Keats was responsive to the beauty of the world
around him. He was sensuous, but his love of the

7 SS
98 STUDIES IN POETRY

beautiful was something more than that of the sur-

ashen face. Keats’s vision penetrated the soul

“The Eveof of things, and his greatness lay in his

hoe eat mastery of the unity of life and his

eo sag identification of the highest beauty with
‘the highest truth.

His genius is well reflected in “ The Eve of St.
Agnes.” It is, as the poet himself said, a regular
stepping of the imagination towardsatruth. “The
Eve of St. Agnes”’ is not only radiant with beauty,
it is beauty itself. Its poetic thought is flashed
through the cloister windows of the imagination
and is warm with the breath of incense and prayer.
Take for instance the twenty-fourth stanza of this
poem. Did poet ever before write lines so full of
pomp and grace and color as the following ?—

‘« A casement, high and triple-arched, there was,

All garlanded with carven imageries

Of fruits, and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,

And diamonded with panes of quaint device,

Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings ;

And in the midst, ’mong thousand heraldries,

And Twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

Ashielded ’scutcheon Blushed with blood of queens and kings.”

“The Eve of St. Agnes” is, indeed, a casket of
pres ‘ : ;
aeereae SC Perhaps there is nothing finer in
Beauty. the forty-two stanzas that make up the

entire poem than the following exquisite lines :
“EVE OF ST. AGNES” 99

“ Soon trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
In sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Until the poppied warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs, and soul fatigued away,
Flown like a thought until the morrow-day ;
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain ;
Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray ;
Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain,

As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.”

Again, what could be more beautiful than the
twenty-fifth stanza ? —

“ Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,
As down she knelt for Heaven’s grace and boon ;
Rose-bloom fell on her hands together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory like a saint:
She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven. Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.”

Commenting on this passage Leigh Hunt writes :
“The lovely and innocent creature, thus praying
under the gorgeous painted window, completes the
exceeding and unique beauty of this picture, —
one that will forever stand by itself in poetry as an
addition to the stock. It would have struck a
glow on the face of Shakespeare himself. He
might have put Imogen or Ophelia under such a
shrine, How proper as well as pretty the heraldic
100 STUDIES IN POETRY

term gules, considering the occasion. Red would
not have been a fiftieth part so good. And with
what elegant luxury he touches the ‘silver cross’
with ‘amethyst’ and the fair woman with ‘ rose-
color,’ the kin to their carnation.”

There is little doubt but that Keats was pos-
sessed of great poetic endowments. Had _ his
Thevicect genes tally ripened it might have
Jain Kosta tn given him a place side by side with
of English Shakespeare and Milton. As Dr. Ham-
ae ilton Mabie justly remarks: “It is
enough that except Shakespeare no other English
poet has found such color in ‘our speech, has
made it linger in the ear in phrase so rich and full.
This magical note, heard only in the greatest
poetry, is heard in Keats, —the evidence alike of
the rare quality of his genius and its depth and
power.”

QUESTIONS.

1. What appreciation was shown for the genius of
Keats by his contemporaries ?

2. What may be termed the essence of Keats’s poetic
creed ?

3. How did Keats make his preparation for his poetic
work ?

4. To whom did Keats owe much for his inspiration ?

5. What group of poems did Keats produce in 1819?
“EVE OF ST. AGNES” 101

6. How was “Endymion” received by the critics, and
how was Keats affected ?

7. What was the temperament of Keats, and in which
poem is it best illustrated ?

8. Compare the treatment of “The Eve of St. Agnes”
by Keats and Tennyson.

9. How far does “The Eve of St. Agnes” reflect the
genius of Keats ?

10. What place has John Keats in the Pantheon of
English poetry ?
GRAY’S “ELEGY IN A COUNTRY
CHURCHYARD.”

Tue genius of English poetry has given the
world some very beautiful elegies. Milton’s
A Word “Lycidas,” the first great elegy in
about Elegies. Enolish poetry, is commemorative of
the death of the poet’s young friend Thomas
King; Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” embalms in
-immortal verse the memory of one of the most
perfect young men that have ever lived in the
tide of times — Arthur Hallam; and Swinburne’s
“ Ave atque Vale” and Matthew Arnold’s “ Thyr-
sis” are noble tributes in elegiac verse to two
gifted souls whom death snatched untimely from
our planet. Nor should Shelley’s sweet and sad
lament over the death of John Keats —his be-
loved Adonais —be denied a place amongst the
greatest of English elegies.

Gray was a contemplative and reflective poet,
origin, and the spirit of his muse sought a
vee kindred environment. The “ Klegy”
Gray’s is the very embodiment and incarnation
“Elegy.” of evening regret. There is no doubt
 
“ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD” 103

that it was within the sacred precincts of Stoke
Poges churchyard, while contemplating each
“frail memorial” and deciphering the rude in-
scriptions “spelt by th’ unlettered muse,” that
Gray first conceived the idea of writing the
“Elegy.” The thoughts which flooded his mind
as he moved noiselessly through the aisles of
“ God's Acre” as the mantle of eventide descended
upon the- cold shoulders of day, were thoughts
common to humanity. The every-day drama of
the poor filled the theatre of his heart. Their
narrow kingdom knew not gold or purple, but love
built for them her lily walls and carpeted the
floors with blossoms of peace.

Gray’s “Elegy” is Burns’ “ Cotter’s Saturday
Night” amplified and transplanted to English soil.
Surely the reader can have no difficulty in finding
in Burns’ beautiful idyll the counterpart of the
following lines:

“For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care ;
No children run to lisp their sire’s return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.”

We do not believe, as some critics maintain,
that Gray’s fame rests in this poem upon his skill
as an artist. - The poet himself attributed the
popularity of the “Elegy” to the nature of its
subject, holding that it would have had a like
104 STUDIES IN PORTRY

popularity bad it boon wrilten in’ prose. The
secre of the greatness of the  Mlegy ” as a pocin
resides in its subject, whieh touches the universal
heart and lifts mankind to a plane of true kinship
in death, OF course there ig no doubting: the
artistic merits of the poom,

An support of this view it may be well to quote
here the opinion of Tales, in hig introdietion to
the poom. Tle says: “The? Blegy? is, perhaps, the
Inost. widely known poom in our dangaage, The
reason of this extensive popularity is, perhaps, to
be sought in the facet that it expresses in an ox-
quisite manber feelings and Gioughts that are
universal [nthe current of ideas in the ¢1lepy ’
there is, perhaps, nothing that is rare or excep-
tional or out of the common way. Pho musings
are of the most rational and obvious character
possible; it is difficult to conceive of any one
mntising under similwr cireumstances who should
not muse sO; bub they are not the Jess deep and
moving on this account. The mystery of Jife docs
not become clearer or less solemn and awful for
any amount of contemplation, Such inevitable,
such cyverlasting questions as rise in the anind
when onc lingers in the precincts of death, ean
never lose their freshness, never coase to fascinate
and to move. Tt is with sich questions, that would
have becn commonplace long ages since, if they
‘ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD” 105

could ever be so, that the ‘Elegy’ deals. It
deals with them in no lofty, philosophical manner,
but in a simple, humble, unpretentious way, always
with the truest and broadest humanity. The poet’s
thoughts turn to the poor; he forgets the fine
tombs inside the church, and thinks only of the
‘mouldering. heaps’ in the churchyard. Hence
the problem that especially suggests itself is the
potential greatness, when they lived, of ‘the rude
forefathers’ that now lie at his feet. He does not
and cannot solve it, though he finds considerations
to mitigate the sadness it must inspire; but he
expresses it in all its awfulness in the most effec-
tive language and with the deepest feeling; and
his expression of it has become a living part of
our language.”

Gray’s “Elegy” is unlike any other of the
great elegies in that it is impersonal. Its subject
touches the .universal,—the life of

e rf The Inform-
man horizoned by a lowly firmament, in ing Idea in
which burns neither star of glory nor er
meteor of fame.

The informing idea in the poem is to be found
in the stanza —

~

“Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.”
106 STUDIES IN POETRY

All the rest of the poem is but an amplification
of the thought in this stanza. Truly, Gray has
built of the “Elegy” a monument more lasting
than a niche in Westminster Abbey, for the thought
so delicately and sincerely enshrined in this beauti-
ful poem will outlive the most cunning or artistic
touch of sculptor when embodying his dream in
Carrara marble. By this elegy Gray becomes lau-
reate of the poor. It is their round of toil — their
simple annals — their narrow cells that mould, fash-
ion, and give purpose to the “ Elegy.” The whole
poem leads up to the central idea — the informing
idea — that man is great, not by virtue of the
magnitude of his achievements, but by virtue of the
performance of his duties. The “rude forefathers
of the hamlet,” though denied by fortune to sway
the rod of empire, are, nevertheless, not to be
mocked or contemned, for within their narrow
spheres they performed each pressing and incum-
bent duty. If they became not real Hampdens
or voiceful Miltons it was because —

“Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray ;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.”

Now, what is the peculiar charm of the “Elegy”?
James Russell Lowell says: “It is to be found in
“ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD ” 10

its embodying that pensively stingless pessimisi
which comes with the first gray hair; that sts peculiar
vague sympathy with ourselves which Charm.
is so much cheaper than sympathy with others
that placid melancholy which satisfies the gener:
appetite for an emotion which titillates rather tha
wounds.” We think, however, that its charn
its peculiar charm, is a thing quite apart from th
“stingless pessimism which comes with the fir
gray hair,” and rests in the simplicity and unive
sality of its thought enshrined in language :
once clear, beauteous, and harmonious. It will |
noticed that in the “Elegy” Gray is more pict
rial than imaginative. Indeed there is scarcely
stanza in the poem that would not form an exce
lent subject for a painting. The opening lin
have oft been transferred to canvas.

How far does the “ Elegy” reflect the genius :
Gray? We think that the chief characteristi
of Tennyson are mirrored in the “In yyy part
Memoriam,” the chief characteristics of ics Aig
Wordsworth in the “Ode to Immortal- Genius ot
ity,” the chief characteristics of Coleridge °*%
in the “ Ancient Mariner.” Is not the “Elegy”
very mirror wherein you may see reflected, n
only the poetic genius of Thomas Gray, but som
thing also of the form and spirit of eighteent
century verse. Decorum was the religion of tl
108 STUDIES IN POETRY

eighteenth century. Gray worshipped at its shrine.
He tells us that the style he aimed at was extreme
conciseness of expression, yet pure, perspicuous,
and musical, and this he assuredly reached in the
“Hlegy.” He united in himself genius and dilet-
tanteism. Poetry is said to be divine madness,
but the English poets of the eighteenth century
were the sanest of the sane. As Lowell says, no
English poet between 1700 and 1800 need have
feared a writ de lunatico inquirendo. Still there
are hints in the “Elegy” that the heart of man
was turning for inspiration to the shrine of nature.
A critic says that Gray never spoke out, —that his
thought lacked spontaneity. “ He was a poetical
scholar and scholarly poet. His poetry twined it-
self around his learning and was saturated by it.
He planted himself in bookish soil and flowered at
last into verse.”

Gray was a great admirer of Dryden and bor-
rowed from him the form or mould in which the
sectchaaual Elegy” is cast. It is the iambic pen-
languageof tameter measure. Of course it was
te “Beey-” not original with Dryden, being first
employed by Raleigh. It is a measure which fits
the theme most admirably. The reader cannot
fail to note its suitableness for pictorial effect.
Gray had a thorough knowledge of perspective,
while his skill as an artist in combining words and
“ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD” 109

sounds gave him a complete command over the
resources of melody. This, as a writer remarks,
explains why he is so easy to remember: why,
though he wrote so little, so much of what he
wrote is familiar on men’s tongues.

It is claimed that Gray borrowed his phrases
and language from other poets. For instance, take
this stanza —

“Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke ;
How jocund did they drive their team afield !
How bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!”

Stubborn glebe is found in Gay, afield in Milton,
and sturdy stroke in Spenser. But has any poet in
his vocabulary the right of eminent domain? Is
not the English language the inheritance of the
people? The gold coinage of exchange when
minted may pass through a thousand hands —
always remaining the property of the possessor.

It is not just, therefore, to Gray to regard his
“Elegy” as a mosaic made up of phrases borrowed
from other poets; it requires genius in itself to
give a fit robing to thought, and certainly it must
be conceded that the author of the “Elegy” has
dressed his poetic offspring in purple and fine
linen.

Few poems have been so tampered with in the
110 STUDIES IN POETRY

text as the “Elegy.” Editors and publishers
AWordasto L&ve, as Thackeray would say, put their
Certain hoofs and horns through it. It will be
Emendations: remembered that it was first published
in book form by Dodsley,in February, 1751. Two
manuscripts of the “ Klegy”’ in Gray’s handwriting
still exist. One of these is known as the Pem-
broke manuscript, which is to be found in Pem-
broke Hall, Cambridge University, and the other
is known as the Wrightson manuscript. As W. J.
Rolfe, in his edition of Gray’s poems, points out,
there is little doubt that the latter is the original
manuscript of the “ Elegy.” Of course, not a few
of the emendations were made by Gray himself
in the various editions which were published. Let
us here note some of these :

The fifth stanza originally read —

“Forever sleep: the breezy call of morn,

Or swallow twit’ring from the straw-built shed,

Or chanticleer so shrill or echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.”

The fourteenth stanza read thus:

“Some village Cato, who, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his field withstood ;
Some mute inglorious Tully here may rest,
Some Cesar guiltless of his country’s blood.”

The substitution of the names of three English-
men for the three Romans, Cato, Tully, and Ceasar,
‘““ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD” 111

indicated in Gray’s time the going out of the
classic taste, or fashion, which had first taken root
in the period of the Renaissance. 7
After the twenty-fifth stanza came the following
stanza which was omitted in subsequent editions:
“Him have we seen the greenwood side along,
While o’er the heath we hied, our labour done,
Oft as the woodlark pip’d her farewell song,
With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.”
Concerning this stanza, Mason remarks: “I
rather wonder that he rejected this stanza, as it
not only has the same sort of Doric delicacy which
charms us peculiarly in this part of the poem, but
also completes the account of his whole day;
whereas, this evening scene being omitted, we have
only his morning walk and his noontide repose.”
Lord Mahon, when telling of the capture of
Quebec, in 1759, in his History of England, relates
how General Wolfe paid a beautiful General wolfe
tribute to the “Elegy.” It was on the “megy.»
‘night of September 13th, 1759— the night pre-
ceding the battle on the Plains of Abraham;
Wolfe was descending the St. Lawrence with a
part of his troops. The historian says: “Swiftly
but silently did the boats fall down with the tide,
unobserved by the enemy’s sentinels at their posts
along the shores. Of the soldiers on board how
eagerly must every heart have throbbed at the
112 STUDIES IN POETRY

coming conflict! How intently must every eye
have contemplated the dark outline, as it lay pen-
cilled upon the midnight sky, and as every mo-
ment it grew closer and clearer, of the hostile
heights! Not a word was spoken — not a sound
heard beyond the rippling of the stream. Wolfe
alone — thus tradition has told us — repeated in a
low tone to the other officers in his boat those
beautiful stanzas with which a country churchyard
inspired the muse of Gray. One noble line, —

‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave,’ —

must have seemed at such a moment fraught with
mournful meaning. At the close of the recitation
Wolfe added, ‘Now, gentlemen, I would rather
be the author of that poem than take Quebec.’ ”

The whole “Elegy” is a casket of gems, and
difficult is the task amid such riches to select the
Some passages of rare beauty. Surely the
eee following stanzas are true to the atmos-
phere of their setting! Surely, too, their music
and verbal lustre must touch and charm both eye
and heart:

“The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock’s shrill clarion or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
“ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD” 1138

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

“ Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

The flace of the “ Elegy” must unquestionably
be among the classics of English poetry. It con-
tains but one hundred and eighteen The Piace of
lines, every line of which is quotable acta 7
and full of that polish and splendor Poetry.
which only real poetic artistry can impart. To no
other poem in the English language has the genius
of mankind paid such homage in translation as to
the “Elegy.” Of these translations there have
been: one in Hebrew, seven in Greek, twelve in
Latin, thirteen in Italian, fifteen in French, six in
German, and one in Portuguese.

The fame of Thomas Gray is assuredly secured
in the “Elegy ” against the teeth of time.

QUESTIONS.

1. Name the great elegies in English poetry.
2. What is the origin and import of Gray’s “Elegy ” ?
3. To what is the greatness of Gray’s “Elegy”

attributed ?
8
114 STUDIES IN POETRY

4, What is the informing idea of the poem ?

5. What resemblance is there between the “Elegy
and Burns’ “ Cotter’s Saturday Night” ?

6. What is the peculiar charm of Gray’s “ Elegy ” ?

7. How far does the “Elegy” reflect the genius of
Gray ?

8. Explain why the “Elegy ” is easy to remember.

9. What does the substitution of the three English
names for the three Roman names — Cato, Tully, and
Cesar — in the “ Elegy,” indicate ?

10. What beautiful tribute did General Wolfe pay to
the author of the ‘‘ Elegy” 4

11. What place does the “Elegy” hold in English
poetry ?

12. How has the world shown appreciation of the
“ce Elegy ” ?

299