Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 7

Noel Gordon, Lord Byron
(1788-1823)
The Isles of Greece
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Hellas
Wild with weeping
To the night
To a skylark
To the

moon
The question
The waning moon
Ode to the west wind

Rarely, rarely comest thou
The invitation, to Jane
The recollection

Ode to heaven
Life of life
Autumn
Stanzas written in dejection
near Naples
Dirge for the year
A widow bird
The two spirits

John Keats (1795-1821)
La Belle Dame sans merci
On first looking into Chapman's Homer

To sleep
The gentle south
Last sonnet
Ode to a nightingale
Ode
on a Grecian urn
Ode to Autumn
Ode to Psyche
Ode to
Melancholy
Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849)
She is not fair
ALICE MEYNELL'S COMMENTS/NOTES
EPITHALAMION
Written by Spensor on his marriage in Ireland, 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
"Dear as remembered kisses after death,"
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

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
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
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
The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.
TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY
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
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
I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less beautiful
stanza.
FOLLOW
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"-
"Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!"
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 -
"If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!"
Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.
"Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me"
is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in this
-
"Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!"
And a single joy in this -

"Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!"
Another solitary line is one that by its splendour