Fragments Of Ancient Poetry | Page 3

had read several of the "Fragments" in manuscript he wrote
to Thomas Warton that he had "gone mad about them"; he added,
"I was so struck, so _extasié_ with their infinite beauty, that I writ into
Scotland to make a thousand enquiries....
The whole external
evidence would make one believe
these fragments (for so he calls
them, tho' nothing can
be more entire) counterfeit: but the internal is
so strong on the other side, that I am resolved to believe them genuine
spite of the Devil & the Kirk."
Gray concluded his remarks with the assertion that "this Man is the
very Demon of Poetry, or he has lighted on a treasure hid for ages."[8]
Nearly fifty years later Byron wrote a "humble imitation" of Ossian for
the admirers of Macpherson's work and presented it as evidence of his
"attachment to their favorite author," even though he was aware of the
imposture. In a note to "The Death of Calmar and Orla," he
commented,
"I fear Laing's late edition has completely overthrown every hope that
Macpherson's Ossian might prove the translation
of a series of poems
complete in themselves; but while the
imposture is discovered, the
merit of the work remains undisputed, though not without
faults--particularly, in some parts, turgid and bombastic diction."[9]
In 1819 Hazlitt felt that Ossian is "a feeling and a name that can never
be destroyed in the minds of his readers," and he classed the work as
one of the four prototypes of poetry along with the Bible, Homer, and
Dante. On the question of authenticity he observed,
"If it were indeed possible to shew that this writer was nothing, it
would be another instance of mutability, another blank
made, another
void left in the heart, another confirmation of that feeling which makes
him so often complain, 'Roll on, ye dark brown years, ye bring no joy
on your wing to Ossian!'"[10]
There is some justice in Macpherson's wry assertion that
"those who

have doubted my veracity have paid a compliment to my genius."[11]
By examining briefly the distinctive form of the "Fragments," their
diction, their setting, their tone, and their structure, we may sense
something of the qualities of the poems that made them attractive to
such men as Gray, Byron, and Hazlitt.
IV
Perhaps Macpherson's most important innovation was to cast
his
work into what his contemporaries called "measured prose," and it was
recognized early that this new form contributed greatly to their appeal.
In discussing the Fragments, Ramsey of Ochtertyre commented,
"Nothing could be more happy or judicious than his translating in
measured prose; for had he attempted it in verse, much of the spirit of
the original would have evaporated, supposing him to have had talents
and industry to perform that very arduous task upon a great scale. This
small publication drew the attention of the literary world to a new
species of poetry."[12]
For his new species of poetry Macpherson drew upon the stylistic
techniques of the King James Version of the Bible, just as Blake and
Whitman were to do later. As Bishop Lowth was the first to point out,
parallelism is the basic structural technique.
Macpherson incorporated
two principal forms of parallelism in his poems: repetition, a pattern in
which the second line nearly restates the sense of the first, and
completion in which the second line picks up part of the sense of the
first line and adds to it. These are both common in the Fragments, but a
few examples may be useful. I have rearranged the following lines and
in the other passages relating to the structure of the poems in order to
call attention to the binary quality of Macpherson's verse:
Repetition
Who can reach the source of thy race, O Connal?
And who recount
thy Fathers? ("Fragment V")

Oscur my son came down;
The mighty in battle descended.
("Fragment VI")
Oscur stood forth to meet him;
My son would meet the foe.
("Fragment VIII")
Future times shall hear of thee;
They shall hear of the fallen Morar.
("Fragment XII")
Completion
What voice is that I hear?
That voice like the summer wind.
("Fragment I")
The warriours saw her, and loved;
Their souls were fixed on the maid.

Each loved her, as his fame;
Each must possess her or die.
But
her soul was fixed on Oscur;
My son was the youth of her love.
("Fragment VII")
Macpherson also used grammatical parallelism as a structural device; a
series of simple sentences is often used to describe a landscape:
Autumn is dark on the mountains;
Grey mist rests on the hills.
The
whirlwind is heard on the heath.
Dark rolls the river through the
narrow plain. ("Fragment V")
The poems also have a discernible rhythmical pattern; the
tendency of
the lines to form pairs is obvious enough when there is semantic or
grammatical parallelism, but there is a general binary pattern
throughout. Typically, the first unit is a simple sentence,