Later Poems and Flower of the Mind | Page 5

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.
1. 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 by her comments on them.- -DP]
Anonymous.
The first carol?Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)
Verses before death?Edmund Spenser (1553-1599)
Easter?Fresh spring?Like as a ship?Epithalamion?John Lyly (1554?-1606)
The Spring?Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
True love?The moon?Kiss?Sweet judge?Sleep?Wat'red was my wine?Thomas Lodge (1556-1625)
Rosalynd's madrigal?Rosaline?The solitary shepherd's song?Anonymous
I saw my lady weep?George Peele (1558?-1597)
Farewell to arms?Robert Greene (1560?-1592)
Fawnia?Sephestia's song to her child?Christopher Marlowe (1562-1593)
The passionate shepherd to his love?Samuel Daniel (1562-1619)
Sleep?My spotless love?Michael Drayton (1563-1631)
Since there's no help?Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618)
Were I as base?William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth?O me! What eyes