Playful Poems | Page 3

I give him a name?Before you all in same,?For he is so fair and free,?By God and by Saint Jame,?So cleped him ne'er his dame,
What woman so it be.
"'Now clepeth him all of us,?Li Beaus Disconus,?For the love of me!?Then may ye wite a rowe,?"'The Faire Unknowe,'?Certes, so hatte he"
John Gower's "Confessio Amantis" was a story book, like the Canterbury Tales, with a contrivance of its own for stringing the tales together, and Gower was at work on it nearly about the time when his friend Chaucer was busy with his Pilgrims. The story here extracted was an old favourite. It appeared in Greek about the year 800, in the romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. It was told by Vincent of Beauvais in the year 1290 in his "Speculum Historiale;" and it was used by Boccaccio for the first tale of the tenth day of his "Decameron."
Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate were the old poetical triumvirate, though Lydgate, who was about thirty years old when Chaucer died, has slipped much out of mind. His verses on the adventures of the Kentish rustic who came to London to get justice in the law courts, and his words set to the action of an old piece of rustic mumming, "Bicorn and Chichevache," here represent his vein of playfulness. He was a monk who taught literature at Bury St. Edmunds, and was justly looked upon as the chief poet of the generation who lived after Chaucer's death.
Next follows in this volume a scrap of wise counsel to take life cheerfully, from the Scottish poet, William Dunbar. He lived at the Scottish Court of James the Fourth when Henry the Seventh reigned in England, and who was our greatest poet of the north country before Burns.
Next we come to the poets "who so did please Eliza and our James," and represent their playfulness by Drayton's "Dowsabell," and that most exquisite of fairy pieces, his "Nymphidia," where Oberon figures as the mad Orlando writ small, and Drayton earned his claim to be the Fairies' Laureate, though Herrick, in the same vein, followed close upon him. Michael Drayton, nearly of an age with Shakespeare, was, like Shakespeare, a Warwickshire man. Empty tradition says that Shakespeare died of a too festive supper shared with his friend Drayton, who came to visit him.
Then follows in this volume the playful treatment of a quarrel between friends, in Pope's "Rape of the Lock." Lord Petre, aged twenty, audaciously cut from the head of Miss Arabella Fermor, daughter of Mr. Fermor of Tusmore, a lock of her hair while she was playing cards in the Queen's rooms at Hampton Court. Pope's friend, Mr. Caryll, suggested to him that a mock heroic treatment of the resulting quarrel might restore peace, and Pope wrote a poem in two cantos, which was published in a Miscellany in 1712, Pope's age then being twenty-four. But as epic poems required supernatural machinery, Pope added afterwards to his mock epic the machinery of sylphs and gnomes, suggested to him by the reading of a French story, "Le Comte de Gabalis," by the Abbe Villars. Here there were sylphs of the air and gnomes of the earth, little spirits who would be in right proportion to the substance of his poem, which was refashioned into five cantos, and republished as we have it now in February 1714.
"John Gilpin" was written by William Cowper in the year 1782, when Lady Austin was lodging in the Vicarage at Olney, and spent every evening with Cowper and Mrs. Unwin, cheering Cowper greatly by her liveliness. One evening she told the story of John Gilpin's ride in a way that tickled the poet's fancy, set him laughing when he woke up in the night, and obliged him to turn it next day into ballad rhyme. Mrs. Unwin's son sent it to the Public Advertiser, for the poet's corner. It was printed in that newspaper, and thought no more of until about three years later. Then it was suggested to a popular actor named Henderson, who gave entertainments of his own, that this piece would tell well among his recitations. He?introduced it into his entertainments, and soon all the town was running after John Gilpin as madly as the six gentlemen and the post-boy.
John Gilpin's flight is followed in this volume by the flight of Tam o' Shanter. Burns wrote "Tam o' Shanter" at Elliesland, and himself considered it the best of all his poems. He told the story to Captain Grose, as it was current among the people in his part of the country, its scene laid almost on the spot where he was born. Captain Grose, the antiquary, who was collecting materials for his "Antiquities of Scotland," published in 1789-91, got Burns to versify it and give it to him. The poem made