Fragments Of Ancient Poetry | Page 4

the second
almost any grammatical structure--an appositive, a prepositional phrase,
a participle, the second element of a compound verb, a dependent
clause. A simile--in grammatical terms,
an adverbial
phrase--sometimes constitutes the second element. These pairs are
often balanced roughly by the presence of two, three, or four accents in
each constituent; there are a large number of imbedded iambic and
anapestic feet, which give the rhythm an ascending quality:

The da/ughter of R/inval was n/ear;
Crim/ora, br/ight in the arm/our of m/an;
Her ha/ir loose beh/ind,
Her b/ow in her h/and.
She f/ollowed the y/outh to w/ar,
Co/nnal her m/uch bel/oved.
She dr/ew the st/ring on D/argo;
But e/rring pi/erced her C/onnal. ("Fragment V")
As E. H. W. Meyerstein pointed out, "Macpherson can, without
extravagance, be regarded as the main originator (after the translators
of the Authorized Version) of what's known as 'free verse."[13]
Macpherson's work certainly served to stimulate prosodic
experimentation during the next half century; it is certainly no
coincidence that two of the boldest innovators, Blake and Coleridge,
were admirers of Macpherson's work.
Macpherson's diction must have also appealed to the growing taste for
poetry that was less ornate and studied. His practice was to use a large
number of concrete monosyllabic words of Anglo-Saxon origin to
describe objects and forces common to rural life. A simple listing of the
common nouns from the opening of "Fragment I" will serve to illustrate
this tendency: _love, son, hill, deer, dogs, bow-string, wind, stream,
rushes, mist, oak, friends_. Such diction bears an obvious kinship to
what was to become the staple diction of the romantic lyric; for
example, a similar listing from "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" would
be this: _slumber, spirit, fears, thing, touch, years, motion, force, course,
rocks, stones, trees_.
The untamed power of Macpherson's wild natural settings is
also
striking. Samuel H. Monk has made the point well:

"Ossian's strange exotic wildness and his obscure, terrible glimpses of
scenery were in essence something quite new.... Ossian's images were
far from "nature methodized." His imagination illumined fitfully a
scene of mountains and blasted heaths, as artificially wild as his
heroines were artificially sensitive; to modern readers they resemble
too much the stage-settings of melodrama. But in 1760, his descriptions
carried with them the thrill of the genuine and of naïvely archaic."
And Monk adds, "imperceptibly the Ossianic poems contributed toward
converting Britons, nay, Europeans, into enthusiastic admirers of nature
in her wilder moments."[14]
Ghosts are habitually present in the poems, and Macpherson
is able to
present them convincingly because they are described by a poet who
treats them as though they were part of his and his audience's habitual
experience. The supernatural world is so familiar, in fact, that it can be
used to describe the natural; thus Minvane in "Fragment VII" is called
as fair "as the spirits of the hill when at silent noon they glide along the
heath." As Patricia M. Spacks has observed, the supernatural seems to
be a "genuine part of the poetic texture"; and she adds that
"within this poetic context, the supernatural seems convincing because
believed in: it is part of the fabric of life for the characters of the poem.
Ghosts in the Ossianic poems, almost uniquely in the mid-eighteenth
century, seem genuinely to belong; to this particular poetic conception
the supernatural does not seem extraneous."[15]
The Fragments was also a cause and a reflection of the rising appeal of
the hero of sensibility, whose principal characteristic was that he could
feel more intensely than the mass of humanity. The most common
emotion that these acutely empathetic heroes felt was grief, the emotion
that permeates the Fragments and the rest of Macpherson's work. It was
the exquisite sensibility of Macpherson's heroes and heroines that the
young Goethe was
struck by; Werther, an Ossianic hero in his own
way, comments,
"You should see what a silly figure I cut when she
is mentioned in

society! And then if I am even asked
how I like her--Like! I hate that
word like death. What
sort of person must that be who likes Lotte, in
whom all
senses, all emotions are not completely filled up by her!

Like! Recently someone asked me how I like Ossian!"[16]
That Macpherson chose to call his poems "fragments" is indicative of
another quality that made them unusual in their day.
The poems have
a spontaneity that is suggested by the fact that the poets seem to be
creating their songs as the direct reflection of an emotional experience.
In contrast to the image of the poet as the orderer, the craftsman, the
poets of the Fragments have a kind of artlessness (to us a very studied
one, to be sure) that gave them an aura of sincerity and honesty. The
poems are fragmentary in the sense that they do not follow any orderly,
rational plan but seem to