Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 9

of English literature. There was a generation that had not been taught
by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it. Writing to
Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called them beautiful but
fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they might some day be made
complete. There is nothing in all poetry more complete. Seldom is a
poem in stanzas so complete but that another stanza might have made a
final close; but a master's ode has the unity of life, and when it ends it
ends for ever.
A poem of Drummond's has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has
blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused her,
one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool as the very
daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden increase of her beauty
is futile, for he cannot admire more: "For naught thy cheeks that morn
do raise." What sweet, nay, what solemn roses!
Again:
"Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations
overspread her face."
The seventeenth century has possession of that "morn" caught once

upon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its freshness to
wither it.
TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS
The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone--not unique, for
it had sounded somewhere in mediaeval poetry in Italy--but in a
dreadful sense divine. At the first reading, this sentence against
inconstancy, spoken by one more than inconstant, moves something
like indignation; nevertheless, it is menacingly and obscurely justified,
on a ground as it were beyond the common region of tolerance and
pardon.
THE PULLEY
An editor is greatly tempted to mend a word in these exquisite verses.
George Herbert was maladroit in using the word "rest" in two senses.
"Peace" is not quite so characteristic a word, but it ought to take the
place of "rest" in the last line of the second stanza; so then the first line
of the last stanza would not have this rather distressing ambiguity. The
poem is otherwise perfect beyond description.
MISERY
George Herbert's work is so perfectly a box where thoughts

"compacted lie," that no one is moved, in reading his rich poetry, to
detach a line, so fine and so significant are its neighbours; nevertheless,
it may be well to stop the reader at such a lovely passage as this -
"He was a garden in a Paradise."
THE ROSE
There is nothing else of Waller's fine enough to be admitted here; and
even this, though unquestionably a beautiful poem, elastic in words and
fresh in feeling, despite its wearied argument, is of the third-class.
Greatness seems generally, in the arts, to be of two kinds, and the third
rank is less than great. The wearied argument of The Rose is the almost

squalid plea of all the poets, from Ronsard to Herrick: "Time is short;
they make the better bargain who make haste to love." This thrifty
business and essentially cold impatience was--time out of
mind--unknown to the truer love; it is larger, illiberal, untender, and
without all dignity. The poets were wrong to give their verses the
message of so sorry a warning. There is only one thing that persuades
you to forgive the paltry plea of the poet that time is brief--and that is
the charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the
verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.
L'ALLEGRO
The sock represents the stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin,
in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in
England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of
King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.
IL PENSEROSO
It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian.
Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.
LYCIDAS
Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of poetry.
The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to
Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; "the great vision" means the apparition of
the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael's Mount; Namancos and
Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for
Belerium, the Land's End.
Arethusa and Mincius--Sicilian and Italian streams--represent the
pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.
ON A PRAYER-BOOK
"Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for a
brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own verses.

In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite the fact
that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line -
"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,"
and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word
to blame him with.