Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 5

be
less than impiety to part the two.
I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope will
be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in
leaving aside a multitude of composite songs--anachronisms, and worse
than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch wild
feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are some exceptions.
The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter Scott and Burns
restored is given with the restorations of both, those restorations being
severally beautiful; and the burden, "Hame, hame, hame," is printed
with the Jacobite song that carries it; this song seems so mingled and
various in date and origin that no apology is needed for placing it
amongst the bundle of Scottish ballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir
Patrick Spens is treated here as an ancient song. It is to be noted that
the modern, or comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of
quantitative metre--"Hame, hame, hame," is one of these--full of long
notes, rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in
anapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine, various, and
subtle metre of the older. Assuredly the popularity of the metre which,
for want of a term suiting the English rules of verse, must be called
anapaestic, has done more than any other thing to vulgarise the national

sense of rhythm and to silence the finer rhythms. Anapaests came quite
suddenly into English poetry and brought coarseness, glibness,
volubility, dapper and fatuous effects. A master may use it well, but as
a popular measure it has been disastrous. I would be bound to find the
modern stanzas in an old song by this very habit of anapaests and this
very
misunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of the
older stanzas. This, for instance, is the old metre:
"Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!"
and this the lamentable anapaestic line (from the same song):
"Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me -."
It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including A Divine
Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out four stanzas of a
poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorest argument. This
passage at least shall speak for the first three:
"Thou didst appear
A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,
As Nature
did intend
All should confess, but none might comprehend."
From Christ's Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for its
length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage upon
"Justice," who looks "as the eagle
"that hath so oft compared
Her eye with heaven's";
from Marlowe's poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to
the priestess
"And laid his childish head upon her breast";
with that which tells how Night,
"deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the
world upon
Breathed darkness forth";

from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:
"Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
His wings were wet with
ranging in the rain";
from Ben Jonson's Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza:
"Beauties, have ye seen a toy,
Called Love, a little boy,
Almost
naked, wanton, blind;
Cruel now, and then as kind?
If he be
amongst ye, say;
He is Venus' run-away";
from Francis Davison:
"Her angry eyes are great with tears";
from George Wither:
"I can go rest
On her sweet breast
That is the pride of Cynthia's
train";
from Cowley:
"Return, return, gay planet of mine east"!
The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, but the
citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love.
At the very beginning, Skelton's song to "Mistress Margery

Wentworth" had almost taken a place; but its charm is hardly fine
enough.
If it is necessary to answer the inevitable question in regard to Byron,
let me say that in another Anthology, a secondary Anthology, the one
in which Gray's Elegy would have an honourable place, some more of
Byron's lyrics would certainly be found; and except this there is no
apology. If the last stanza of the "Dying Gladiator" passage, or the last
stanza on the cascade rainbow at Terni,

"Love watching madness with unalterable mien,"
had been separate poems instead of parts of Childe Harold, they would
have been amongst the poems that are here collected in no spirit of
arrogance, or of caprice, of diffidence or doubt.
The volume closes some time before the middle of the century and the
death of Wordsworth.
0. M.
[As there would be considerable overlap between the poems in this
book and those already released by Project Gutenberg the text of the
poems is not included in this eText. The poems that Alice selected are
shown below and are followed