Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 8

proves Campion the
author of Cherry Ripe -
"A thousand cherubim fly in her looks."
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
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:-
"When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived,
a new admired guest--"
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
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
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 overbearing 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 countryphrases 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 -
"But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine;"
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
"I ever 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 (Phoebus, arise!)
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