The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV

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Lamb IV by Charles and Mary Lamb
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Title: The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV
Poems and Plays
Author: Charles and Mary Lamb
Release Date: March 14, 2004 [EBook #11576]
Language: English
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THE WORKS OF CHARLES AND MARY LAMB
IV. POEMS AND PLAYS
[Illustration: Charles Lamb (aged 23)
From a drawing by Robert
Hancock]
POEMS AND PLAYS
BY
CHARLES AND MARY LAMB
INTRODUCTION

The earliest poem in this volume bears the date 1794, when Lamb was
nineteen, the latest 1834, the year of his death; so that it covers an even
longer period of his life than Vol. I.--the "Miscellaneous Prose." The
chronological order which was strictly observed in that volume has
been only partly observed in the following pages--since it seemed
better to keep the plays together and to make a separate section of
Lamb's epigrams. These, therefore, will be found to be outside the
general scheme. Such of Lamb's later poems as he did not himself
collect in volume form will also be found to be out of their
chronological position, partly because it has seemed to me best to give
prominence to those verses which Lamb himself reprinted, and partly
because there is often no indication of the year in which the poem was
written.
Another difficulty has been the frequency with which Lamb reprinted
some of his earlier poetry. The text of many of his earliest and best
poems was not fixed until 1818, twenty years or so after their
composition. It had to be decided whether to print these poems in their
true order as they were first published--in Coleridge's Poems on
Various Subjects, 1796; in Charles Lloyd's ems on the Death of
Priscilla Farmer, 1796; in Coleridge's Poems_, second edition, 1797;
in _Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798; and in
John Woodvil, 1802--with all their early readings; or whether to
disregard chronological sequence, and wait until the time of the
Works--1818--had come, and print them all together then. I decided, in
the interests of their biographical value, to print them in the order as
they first appeared, particularly as Crabb Robinson tells us that Lamb
once said of the arrangement of a poet's works: "There is only one good
order--and that is the order in which they were written--that is a history
of the poet's mind." It then had to be decided whether to print them in
their first shape, which, unless I repeated them later, would mean the
relegation of Lamb's final text to the Notes, or to print them, at the
expense of a slight infringement upon the chronological scheme, in
their final 1818 state, and relegate all earlier readings to the Notes.
After much deliberation I decided that to print them in their final 1818
state was best, and this therefore I did in the large edition of 1903, to
which the student is referred for all variorum readings, fuller notes and

many illustrations, and have repeated here. In order, however, that the
scheme of Lamb's 1818 edition of his Works might be preserved, I have
indicated in the text the position in the Works occupied by all the
poems that in the present volume have been printed earlier.
The chronological order, in so far as it has been followed, emphasises
the dividing line between Lamb's poetry and his verse. As he grew
older his poetry, for the most part, passed into his prose. His best and
truest poems, with few exceptions, belong to the years before, say,
1805, when he was thirty. After this, following a long interval of
silence, came the brief satirical outburst of 1812, in The Examiner, and
the longer one, in 1820, in The Champion; then, after another interval,
during which he was busy as Elia, came the period of album verses,
which lasted to the end. The impulse to write personal prose, which
was quickened in Lamb by the London Magazine in 1820, seems to
have taken the place of his old ambition to be a poet. In his later and
more mechanical period there were, however, occasional inspirations,
as when he wrote the sonnet on "Work," in 1819; on "Leisure," in 1821;
the lines in his own Album, in 1827, and, pre-eminently, the poem "On
an Infant Dying as Soon as Born," in 1827.
This volume contains, with the