Notes

EPITHALAMION.—Page 3.

WRITTEN by Spenser on his marriage in Ireland, in 1594, with Elizabeth Boyle of Kilcoran, who survived him, married one Roger Seckerstone, and was again a widow. Dr. Grosart seems to have finally decided the identity of the heroine of this great poem. It is worth while to explain, once for all, that I do not use the accented e for the longer pronunciation of the past participle. The accent is not an English sign, and, to my mind, disfigures the verse; neither do I think it necessary to cut off the e with an apostrophe when the participle is shortened. The reader knows at a glance how the word is to be numbered; besides, he may have his preferences where choice is allowed. In reading such a line as Tennyson’s

one man likes the familiar sound of the word ‘remembered’ as we all speak it now; another takes pleasure in the four light syllables filling the line so full. Tennyson uses the apostrophe as a rule, but neither he nor any other author is quite consistent.

ROSALYND’S MADRIGAL.—Page 21.

It may please the reader to think that this frolic, rich, and delicate singer was Shakespeare’s very Rosalind. From Dr. Thomas Lodge’s novel, Euphues’ Golden Legacy, was taken much of the story, with some of the characters, and some few of the passages, of As You Like It.

ROSALINE.—Page 22.

This splendid poem (from the same romance), written on the poet’s voyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, has the fire and freshness of the south and the sea; all its colours are clear. The reader’s ear will at once teach him to read the sigh ‘heigh ho’ so as to give the first syllable the time of two (long and short).

FAREWELL TO ARMS.—Page 25.

George Peele’s four fine stanzas (which must be mentioned as dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, but are better without that dedication) exist in another form, in the first person, and with some archaisms smoothed. But the third person seems to be far more touching, the old man himself having done with verse.

THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD.—Page 28.

The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.

TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY.—Page 44.

The author of this exquisite song is by no means certain. The second stanza is not with the first in Shakespeare, but it is in Beaumont and Fletcher.

KIND ARE HER ANSWERS.—Page 46.

These verses are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himself sweetly commended as ‘voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit.’ In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and the trochaic movement of the short lines meet the contrary movement of the rest, with an exquisite effect of flux and reflux. The ‘dancers’ whose time they sang must have danced (with Perdita) like ‘a wave of the sea.’

DIRGE.—Page 44.

I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less beautiful stanza.

FOLLOW.—Page 49.

Campion’s ‘airs,’ for which he wrote his words, laid rules too urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, ‘touching in its majesty’—

Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are speechless, with these two final lines—

Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.

is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in this—

And a single joy in this—

Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion the author of Cherry Ripe—

And yet ‘a thousand cherubim’ is a line of a poem full of the dullest kind of reasoning—curious matter for music—and of the intricate knotting of what is a very simple thread of thought. It was therefore no easy matter to choose something of Campion’s for a collection of the finest work. For an historical book of representative poetry the question would be easy enough, for there Campion should appear by his glorious lyric, Cherry Ripe, by one or two poems of profounder imagination (however imperfect), and by a madrigal written for the music (however the stanzas may flag in their quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics for the sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity of the inspiration, and the poet’s absolute disregard of the moment of its flight and departure.

A few splendid lines may be reason enough for extracting a short poem, but must not be made to bear too great a burden.

WHEN THOU MUST HOME.—Page 50.

Of the quality of this imaginative lyric there is no doubt. It is fine throughout, as we confess even after the greatness of the opening:—

It is as solemn and fantastic at the close as at this dark and splendid opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question; and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his Book of Airs with Rosseter two years before her death, it is by no violence that we give him the name that covers our earlier poets of the great age. When thou must Home is of the day of Marlowe. It has the qualities of great poetry, and especially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and it has a quality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult, large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous.

THE FUNERAL.—Page 56.

Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation that I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral; but the earlier lines of the last are fine.

CHARIS’ TRIUMPH.—Page 58.

The freshest of Ben Jonson’s lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overhearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country-phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault, for a blunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, where it says the contrary of what it would say—

and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the argument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must hold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line of it has chanced to get turned in the rhyming.

IN EARTH.—Page 64.

‘I never saw anything,’ says Charles Lamb, ‘like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.’

SONG.—Page 65.

All Drummond’s poems seem to be minor poems, even at their finest, except only this. He must have known, for the creation of that poem, some more impassioned and less restless hour. It is, from the outset to the close, the sigh of a profound expectation. There is no division into stanzas, because its metre is the breath of life. One might wish that the English ode (roughly called ‘Pindaric’) had never been written but with passion, for so written it is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the heart and the breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It has passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley, long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But Drummond’s (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. With admirable judgment it was set up at the very gate of that Golden Treasury we all know so well; and, therefore, generation after generation of readers, who have never opened Drummond’s poems, know this fine ode as well as they know any single poem in the whole of English literature. There was a generation that had not been taught by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it. Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called them beautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they might some day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry more complete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that another stanza might have made a final close; but a master’s ode has the unity of life, and when it ends it ends for ever.

A poem of Drummond’s has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused her, one would think, to hear the flattery with a front as cool as the very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden increase of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: ‘For naught thy cheeks that morn do raise.’ What sweet, nay, what solemn roses!

Again:

The seventeenth century has possession of that ‘morn’ caught once upon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its freshness to wither it.

TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS.—Page 75.

The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone—not unique, for it had sounded somewhere in mediæval poetry in Italy—but in a dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified, on a ground as it were beyond the common region of tolerance and pardon.

THE PULLEY.—Page 91.

An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses. George Herbert was maladroit in using the word ‘rest’ in two senses. ‘Peace’ is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the place of ‘rest’ in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first line of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity. The poem is otherwise perfect beyond description.

MISERY.—Page 94.

George Herbert’s work is so perfectly a box where thoughts ‘compacted lie,’ that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless, it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this—

THE ROSE.—Page 99.

There is nothing else of Waller’s fine enough to be admitted here; and even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class. Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third rank is less than great. The wearied argument of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: ‘Time is short; they make the better bargain who make haste to love.’ This thrifty business and essentially cold impatience was—time out of mind—unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief—and that is the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.

L’ALLEGRO.—Page 109.

The sock represents the stage, in L’Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.