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Spirit and chief contents of the volume– Sonnets and timed heroics-The Chapman sonnet– The ‘How many bards’ sonnet– The sexchivalry group– The Leigh Hunt group– The Haydon pair– The Leander sonnet– Epistles– History of the ‘heroic’ couplet– The closed and free systems– Marlowe– Drayton–William Browne-Chapman and Sandys– Decay of the free system– William Chamberlayne– Milton and Marvell–Waller– Katherine Phillips–Dryden-Pope and his ascendency– Reaction: The Brothers Warton-Symptoms of Emancipation– Coleridge, Wordsworth and Scott-Leigh Hunt and couplet reform– Keats to Mathew: influence of Browne– Calidore: influence of Hunt–Epistle to George Keats-Epistle to Cowden Clarke–Sleep and Poetry and I stood tip-toe– Analysis of Sleep and Poetry– Double invocation– Vision of the Charioteer-Battle-cry of the new poetry– Its strength and weakness– Challenge and congratulation– Encouragements acknowledged– Analysis of I stood tip-toe– Intended induction to Endymion– Relation to Elizabethans– Relation to contemporaries–Wordsworth and Greek Mythology– Tintern Abbey and the three stages– Contrastas of method-Evocation versus Exposition.<\/p>\n
The note of Keats’s early volume is accurately struck in the motto from Spenser which he prefixed to it:–<\/p>\n
What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty?<\/p>\n
The element in which his poetry moves is liberty, the consciousness of release from those conventions and restraints, not inherent in its true nature, by which the art had for the last hundred years been hampered. And the spirit which animates him is essentially the spirit of delight: delight in the beauty and activities of nature, in the vividness of sensation, in the charm of fable and romance, in the thoughts of friendship and affection, in anticipations of the future, and in the exercise of the art itself which expresses and communicates all these joys.<\/p>\n
Technically considered, the volume consists almost entirely of experiments in two metrical forms: the one, the Italian sonnet of octave and sestet, not long fully re-established in England after being disused, with some exceptions, since Milton<\/a>: the other, the decasyllabic or five-stressed couplet first naturalised by Chaucer, revived by the Elizabethans in all manner of uses, narrative, dramatic, didactic, elegiac, epistolary, satiric, and employed ever since as the predominant English metre outside of lyric and drama. The only exceptions in the volume are the boyish stanzas in imitation of Spenser, –truly rather of Spenser’s eighteenth-century imitators; the Address to Hope of February 1815, quite in the conventional eighteenth-century style and diction, though its form, the sextain stanza, is ancient; the two copies of verses To some Ladies and On receiving a curious Shell from some Ladies, composed for the Misses Mathew, about May of the same year, in the triple-time jingle most affected for social trifles from the days of Prior to those of Tom Moore; and the set of seven-syllabled couplets drafted in February 1816 for George Keats to send as a valentine to Miss Wylie. So far as their matter goes these exceptions call for little remark. Both the sea-shell verses and the valentine spring from a brain, to quote a phrase of Keats’s own,<\/p>\n –new stuff’d in youth with triumphs gay Of old romance,–<\/p>\n especially with chivalric images and ideas from Spenser. Of the second set of shell stanzas it may perhaps be noted that they seem to suggest an acquaintance with Oberon and Titania not only through the Midsummer Night’s Dream but through Wieland Oberon, a romance poem which Sotheby’s translation had made well known in England and in which the fairy king and queen are divided by a quarrel far deeper and more durable than in Shakespeare<\/a>‘s play.(20)<\/p>\n Taking first the score or so of sonnets in the volume, we find that none of them are love-sonnets and that few are written in any high mood of passion or exaltation. They are for the most part of the class called ‘occasional’, –records of pleasant experience, addresses of friendly greeting or invocation, or compact meditations on a single theme. They bespeak a temper cordial and companionable as well as enthusiastic, manifest sincerity in all expressions of personal feeling, and contain here and there a passage of fine mature poetry. These, however, are seldom sustained for more than a single quatrain. The great exception of course is the sonnet, almost too well known to quote,–but I will quote it nevertheless,–on Chapman Homer. That walk in the morning twilight from Clerkenwell to the Borough had enriched our language with what is by common consent one of its masterpieces in this form, having a close unsurpassed for the combined qualities of serenity and concentration: concentration twofold, first flashing on our mind’s eye the human vision of the explorer and his companions with their looks and gestures, then symbolically evoking through that vision a whole world-wide range of the emotions of discovery.<\/p>\n Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold, The ‘realms of gold’ lines in the Chapman sonnet, recording Keats’s range of reading in our older poetry, had been in a measure anticipated in this other, written six months earlier (21):–<\/p>\n How many bards gild the lapses of time! Technical points worth attention here are the bold reversal of the regular accentual stress twice over in the first line, and the strained use of ‘store’ for ‘fill’ and ‘recognizance’ for ‘recognition.’ But the main interest of the sonnet is its comparison of the working of Keats’s miscellaneous poetic reading in his mind and memory with the effect of the confused but harmonious sounds of evening on the ear,–a frank and illuminating comment by himself on those stray echoes and reminiscences of the older poets which we catch now and again throughout his work. Such echoes and reminiscences are always permitted to genius, because genius cannot help turning whatever it takes into something new of its own: and Keats showed himself from the first one of those chartered borrowers who have the right to draw inspiration as they please, whether direct from nature or, in the phrase of Wordsworth,<\/p>\n From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty poets.(22)<\/p>\n Compare Shelley<\/a> in the preface to Prometheus Unbound: –‘One great poet is a masterpiece of nature which another not only ought to study but must study.<\/p>\n Most of the remaining sonnets can best be taken in groups, each group centering round a single theme or embodying a single mood or vein of feeling. One is what may be called the sex-chivalry group, including the sequence of three printed separately from the rest and beginning, ‘Woman, when I <\/a>behold thee flippant, vain’; that beginning ‘Had I a man’s fair form’; that addressed to Georgiana Wylie, with its admirable opening, ‘Nymph of the downward smile, etc.,’ and its rather lame conclusion; to which, as more loosely connected with the group, and touched in some degree with Byronic suggestion, may be added ‘Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters.’ That excellent critic, the late F. T. Palgrave, had a singular admiration for the set of three which I have placed at the head of this group: to me its chief interest seems not poetical but personal, inasmuch as in it Keats already defines with self-knowledge the peculiar blend in his nature of ardent, idealising boyish worship of woman and beauty with an acute critical sensitiveness to flaws of character defacing his ideal in actual women: a sensitiveness which grew with his growth and many a time afterwards put him ill at ease with his company and himself.<\/p>\n A large proportion of the remaining sonnets centre themselves more or less closely about the figure of Leigh Hunt. Two introduce him directly by name and had the effect of definitely marking Keats down, in the minds of reactionary critics, as a victim to be swooped upon in association with Hunt whenever occasion offered. The two are the early sonnet composed on the day of Hunt’s release from prison (February 5, 1815), and shewn shyly as a first flight to Cowden Clarke immediately afterwards, and the dedicatory sonnet already quoted on the decay of the old pagan beauty, written almost exactly two years later. Intermediate in date between these two come two or three sonnets of May and June 1816 which, whether inspired directly or not by intercourse with Hunt, are certainly influenced by his writing, and express a townsman’s enjoyment of country walks in a spirit and vocabulary near akin to his:–‘To one who has been long in city pent’ (this opening comes with only the change of a word from Paradise Lost), ‘O Solitude, if I with thee must dwell,’ ‘As late I rambled in the happy fields.’ There is a memory of Wordsworth, and probably also of Epping Forest walks, in the cry to Solitude.–<\/p>\n Let me thy vigils keep Next comes the autumn group definitely recording the happiness received by the young poet from intercourse with Hunt and his friends, from the society of his brothers in London, and from walks between the Hampstead cottage and in their city lodgings:–‘Give me a golden pen,’ ‘Small, busy flames play through the fresh-laid coals,’ ‘Keen, fitful gusts are whispering here and there’: to which may be added the sonnet On the Grasshopper and Cricket , Grasshopper and Cricket written in Hunt’s house and in friendly competition with him.<\/p>\n A second new friend, Haydon, has a pair of sonnets in the volume all to himself, including that well-known one which brackets him with Wordsworth and Leigh Hunt among great spirits destined to give the world another heart and other pulses. A few of the sonnets stand singly apart from the rest by their subject or occasion. Such is the sonnet in honour of the Polish hero Kosciusko; and such again is that addressed to George Keats from Margate, with its fine ocean quatrain (Keats was always well inspired in writing of the sea):–<\/p>\n The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Now that we are posthumously acquainted with the other sonnets written by Keats in these early years it is a little difficult to see on what principle he made his choice of the specimens to be published in this 1817 volume. Among those excluded, he may well have thought the early attempts on the peace of 1814, on Chatterton, and on Byron, too feeble, though he has included others scarcely better. That headed ‘As from the darkening gloom a silver dove’ he may have counted too conventionally pious; and that satirizing the starched gloom of church-goers too likely on the other hand to give offence. The second Haydon pair, on visiting the Elgin marbles, and the recently discovered pair on receiving a laurel crown from Leigh Hunt,(23) seem not to have been written (as that on the Floure and the Lefe certainly was not) until the book was passing, or had passed, the press. The last-named pair he would probably have had the good sense to omit in any case, as he has the sonnet celebrating a like laureation at the hands of a young lady at an earlier date. But why leave out ‘After dark vapours’ and ‘Who loves to peer,’ and above all why the admirable sonnet on Leander? The date of this was March 16, 1816, the occasion the gift by a lady of one of James Tassie’s coloured paste reproductions of an engraved gem of the subject. ‘ Tassie’s gems’ were at this time immensely popular among lovers of Grecian taste, and were indeed delightful things, though his originals were too uncritically chosen and included but a small proportion of true antiques among a multitude of Renaissance and eighteenth-century imitations. Keats at one time proposed to make a collection of them for himself, and at another asked his young sister whether she would like a present of some. The sonnet opens with lines curiously recalling those invitations, or invocations, with which Dante begins some of his sonnets in the Vita Nuova.(24)The last three lines are an example, hardly to be bettered, of condensed expression and of imagination kindling into instantaneous tragic vitality a cold and meagre image presented to the eye.<\/p>\n Come hither all sweet maidens soberly, More than half the volume is taken up with epistles and meditative pieces (Drayton would have called them Elegies and Ben Jonson Epigrams) in the regular five-stressed or decasyllabic couplet. The earliest of these is the epistle to Felton Mathew from which I have already given a quotation. The form of the verse in this case is modelled pretty closely on Browne Britannia’s Pastorals. Keats, as has been said, was already familiar with the work of this amiable Spenserian allegorist, so thin and tedious in the allegorical part of his work proper, in romantic invention so poorly inspired, so admirable, genuine, and vivacious on the other hand in his scenes and similitudes from real west-country life and in notes of patriotism both local and national. By the following motto chosen from Browne’s work Keats seems to put the group of Epistles in his volume under that poet’s particular patronage:–<\/p>\n Among the rest a shepheard (though but young But before coming to questions of the special influences which successively shaped Keats’s aims both as to style and versification in poems of this form, I shall ask the reader to pause with me awhile and get freshly and familiarly into his ear and mind, what to special students is well known but to others only vaguely, the story of the chief phases which this most characteristic of English measures had gone through until the time when Keats tried to handle it in a spirit more or less revolutionary. Some of the examples I shall quote by way of illustration are passages which we know to have been specially familiar to Keats and to which we shall have occasion to recur. Let us first consider Chaucer’s use, as illustrated in a part of the prayer of Emilia to Diana in the Knightes Tale:–<\/p>\n O chast\u00eb goddesse of the wod\u00ebs grene, The rime-syllables with which Chaucer<\/a> ends his lines are as a rule strong and followed by a pause, or at least by the grammatical possibility of a pause, though there are exceptions like the division of ‘I \u2223 desire.’ The general effect of the metre is that of a succession of separate couplets, though their separation is often slight and the sentence is allowed to run on with little break through several couplets divided from each other by no break of more than a comma. When a full stop comes and ends the sentence, it is hardly ever allowed to break a line by falling at any point except the end.<\/p>\n On the other hand it is as often as not used to divide the couplet by falling at the end not of the second but of the first line, so that the end has to wait a moment in expectancy until the second, beginning a new sentence, catches up the rime of the first like an echo. Other, slighter pauses fall quite variably where they will, and there is no regular breathing pause or caesura dividing the line after the second or third stress.<\/p>\n When the measure was revived by the Elizabethans two conflicting tendencies began to appear in its treatment. One was to end each line with a full and strong rime-syllable, noun or verb or emphatic adjective, and to let each couplet consist of a single sentence, or at any rate a single clause of a sentence, so as to be both grammatically and rhythmically almost independent of the next. Under this, which is called the closed or stopped couplet system, the rime-pattern and the sense or sentencepattern, which together compose the formal elements in all rimed verse, are made strictly to coincide, and within the limits of a couplet no full break of the sense is allowed. Rhetorical and epigrammatical point and vigour are the special virtues of this system: its weaknesses are monotony of beat and lack of freedom and variety in sentence structure. The other and opposite tendency is to suffer the sentence or period to develop itself freely, almost as in prose, running over as it will from one couplet into another, and coming to a full pause at any point in the line; and at the same time to let any syllable whatever, down to the lightest of prepositions or auxiliaries, serve at need as a rime-syllable. Under this system the sense and consequent sentence-pattern winds in and out of the rime-pattern variously and deviously, the rime-echo striking upon the ear now with emphasis, now lightly and fugitively, and being sometimes held up to follow a full pause and sometimes hurried on with the merest suggestion or insinuation of a possible pause, or with none at all. The virtues of this system are variety and freedom of movement; its special dangers are invertebrateness and a tendency to straggle and wind itself free of all real observance of rime-effect or metrical law.<\/p>\n Most of the Elizabethans used both systems interchangeably, now a string of closed couplets, and now a flowing period carried through a succession of couplets overrunning into one another. Spenser<\/a> in Mother Hubbard’s Tale and Marlowe in Hero and Leander were among the earliest and best revivers of the measure, and both inclined to the closed couplet system, Spenser the more strictly of the two, as the satiric and epigrammatic nature of his theme might naturally dictate. Let us take a well known passage from Marlowe:–<\/p>\n It lies not in our power to love or hate, He kneeled; but unto her devoutly prayed: The first ten lines, conveying moral saws or maxims, furnish almost a complete example of the closed couplet system, and not only of that, but of the division of single lines by a pause or caesura after the second or third stress. When the narrative begins, the verse moves still mainly in detached couplets (partly because a line of moral reflection is now and again paired with a line of narrative), but with a growing inclination to prolong the sentence and vary the rhythm, and with an abundant use, in the rimes, of the double or feminine ending, for which Chaucer affords precedent enough.<\/p>\n Drayton, a poet in whom Keats was well read, is commonly quoted as one who yielded habitually to the attraction of the closed couplet; and indeed he will often run on through page on page of twinned verses, or ‘gemells’ as he calls them, like these from the imaginary Epistle from Eleanor Cobham to Duke Humphrey:–<\/p>\n Why, if thou wilt, I will myself deny, But Drayton is also very capable of the full-flowing period and the loose over-run of couplet into couplet, as witness the following from one of his epistles:–<\/p>\n O God, though Virtue mightily do grieve Turning to Keats’s next favourite among the old poets, William Browne of Tavistock, here is a passage from Britannia’s Pastorals which we know to have stuck in his memory, and which illustrates the prevailing tendency of the metre in Browne’s hands to run in a succession of closed, but not too tightly closed, couplets, and to abound in double or feminine rime-endings which make a variation in the beat:–<\/p>\n And as a lovely maiden, pure and chaste, Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties, constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixth Odyssey:–<\/p>\n These, here arriv’d, the mules uncoach’d, and drave The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance,–<\/p>\n Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St Paul’s, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson<\/a>. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne ( 1659), a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:–<\/p>\n Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit–that is the separate couplet –as the completely dominant element in the measure, the ‘heroic’ measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:–<\/p>\n In every language now in Europe spoke Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college Vacation Exercise, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats’s early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:–<\/p>\n Hail native Language, that by sinews weak But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none more so than Andrew Marvell<\/a>, as for instance in his noble poem on the death of Cromwell. The name especially associated in contemporary and subsequent criticism with the attainment of the admired quality of ‘smoothness’ (another name for clipped and even monotony of rime and rhythm) in this metre is Waller, the famous parliamentary and poetical turncoat who could adulate with equal unction first the Lord Protector and then the restored Charles. By this time, however, every rimer could play the tune, and thanks to the controlling and suggesting power of the metre itself, could turn out couplets with the true metallic and epigrammatic ring: few better than Katherine Phillips (‘the matchless Orinda’), who was a stickler for the strictest form of the couplet and wished even to banish all double endings. Take this from her elegy on the death of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (1662):–<\/p>\n Although the most do with officious heat Cowley in his long ‘heroic’ poem The Davideis admits the occasional Alexandrine or twelve-syllable line as a variation on the monotony of the rhythm. Dryden, with his incomparably sounder and stronger literary sense, saw the need for a richer variation yet, and obtained it by the free use both of triple rimes and of Alexandrines: often getting fine effects of sweeping sonority, although by means which the reader cannot but feel to be arbitrary, imported into the form because its monotony calls for relief rather than intrinsic and natural to it. Chaucer’s prayer, above quoted, of Emilia to Diana runs thus in Dryden’s ‘translation’:–<\/p>\n O Goddess, Haunter of the Woodland Green, In serious work Dryden avoided double endings almost entirely, reserving them for playful and colloquial use in stage prologues, epilogues, and the like, thus:–<\/p>\n I come, kind Gentlemen, strange news to tell ye; In the following generation Pope discarded, with the rarest exceptions, all these variations upon the metre and wrought up successions of separate couplets, each containing a single sentence or clause of a sentence complete, and each line having its breathing-pause or caesura almost exactly in the same place, to a pitch of polished and glittering elegance, of striking, instantaneous effect both upon ear and mind, which completely dazzled and subjugated not only his contemporaries but three full generations of rimers and readers after them. Everyone knows the tune; it is the same whether applied to purposes of pastoral sentiment or rhetorical passion or playful fancy, of Homeric translation or Horatian satire, of witty and plausible moral and critical reflection or of savage personal lampoon and invective. Let the reader turn in memory from Ariel’s account of the duties of his subordinate elves and fays:–<\/p>\n Some in the fields of purest ether play, let the reader turn in memory from this to the familiarly known lines in which Pope congratulates himself<\/p>\n That not in fancy’s maze he wandered long, and again from this to his castigation of the unhappy Bayes:–<\/p>\n Swearing and supperless the hero sate, The author thus brilliantly and evenly accomplished in one metre and so many styles ruled as a sovereign long after his death, his works being published in nearly thirty editions before the end of the century; and the measure as thus fixed and polished by him became for a full hundred years the settled norm and standard for English ‘heroic’ verse, the length and structure of periods, sentences and clauses having to be rigidly clipped to fit it. In this respect no change of practice came till after the whole spirit of English poetry had been changed. Almost from Pope’s own day the leaven destined to produce what came afterwards to be called the romantic revolution was working, in the main unconsciously, in men’s minds. Of conscious rebels or pioneers, two of the chief were that admirable, ridiculous pair of clerical brothers Joseph and Thomas Warton, Joseph long headmaster of Winchester, Thomas professor of poetry at Oxford and later poet laureate<\/a>. Joseph Warton made at twenty-four, within two years of Pope’s death, a formal protest against the reign of the polished and urbane moral essay in verse, and at all times stoutly maintained ‘Invention and Imagination’ to be the chief qualities of a poet; illustrating his views by what he called odes, to us sadly uninspired, of his own composition. His younger brother Thomas, with his passion for Gothic architecture, his masterly editing of Spenser, and his profound labours on the origin and history of our native English poetry, carried within him, for all his grotesque personality, many of the germs of the spirit that was to animate the coming age. As the century advanced, other signs and portents of what was to come were Chatterton’s audaciously brilliant blunder of the Rowley forgeries, with the interest which it excited, the profound impression created by the pseudo-Ossian of Macpherson, and the enthusiastic reception of Percy Reliques. But current critical taste did not recognize the meaning of these signs, and tacitly treated the breach between our older and newer literatures as complete. Admitting the older as a worthy and interesting subject of study and welcoming the labour of scholars–even those of pretended scholars–in collecting and publishing its remains or what purported to be such, criticism none the less expected and demanded of contemporary production that it should conform as a matter of course to the standards established since language and style had been ‘polished’ and reduced to ‘correctness’ by Dryden and Pope. Thomas Warton, wishing to celebrate in verse the glories of the Gothic architecture of Oxford, finds himself constrained to do so strictly in the dominant style and measure. His brother, the protesting Joseph, actually has to enrol himself among Pope’s editors, and when for once he uses the heroic couplet and lets his fancy play upon the sight of a butterfly in Hackwood Park, must do so, he too, in this thoroughly Popeian wise:–<\/p>\n Fair child of Sun and Summer, we behold
\nAnd many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
\nRound many western islands have I been
\nWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
\nOft of one wide expanse had I been told
\nThat deep-brow’d Homer rul’d as his demesne;
\nYet did I never breathe its pure serene
\nTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
\nThen felt I like some watcher of the skies
\nWhen a new planet swims into his ken;
\nOr like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
\nHe star’d at the Pacific–and all his men
\nLook’d at each other with a wild surmise–
\nSilent, upon a peak in Darien.<\/p>\n
\nA few of them have ever been the food
\nOf my delighted fancy,–I could brood
\nOver their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
\nAnd often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
\nThese will in throngs before my mind intrude:
\nBut no confusion, no disturbance rude
\nDo they occasion; ’tis a pleasing chime.
\nSo the unnumber’d sounds that evening store;
\nThe songs of birds–the whisp’ring of the leaves–
\nThe voice of waters–the great bell that heaves
\nWith solemn sound,–and thousand others more,
\nThat distance of recognizance bereaves,
\nMake pleasing music, and not wild uproar.<\/p>\n
\n‘Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
\nStartles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.<\/p>\n
\nIts ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,
\nIts voice mysterious, which whoso hears
\nMust think on what will be, and what has been.<\/p>\n
\nDown-looking aye, and with a chasten’d light
\nHid in the fringes of your eyelids white,
\nAnd meekly let your fair hands joined be,
\nAs if so gentle that ye could not see,
\nUntouch’d, a victim of your beauty bright,
\nSinking away to his young spirit’s night,–
\nSinking bewilder’d ‘mid the dreary sea:
\n‘Tis young Leander toiling to his death;
\nNigh swooning, he doth purse his weary lips
\nFor Hero’s cheek, and smiles against her smile.
\nO horrid dream! see how his body dips
\nDead-heavy; arms and shoulders gleam awhile:
\nHe’s gone: up bubbles all his amorous breath!(25)<\/p>\n
\nYet hartned to his pipe) with all the skill
\nHis few yeeres could, began to fit his quill.<\/p>\n
\nTo whom bothe hevene and erthe and see is sene,
\nQuene of the regne of Pluto derk and lowe,
\nGoddesse of maydens, that myn herte hast knowe
\nFul many a yeer, and woost what I desire,
\nAs keep me fro thy vengeance and thyn ire,
\nThat Attheon abought\u00eb cruelly.
\nChast\u00eb goddess\u00eb, wel wostow that I
\nDesire to been a mayden al my lyf,
\nNe never wol I be no love ne wyf.
\nI am, thou woost, yet of thy companye,
\nA mayde, and love hunting and venerye,
\nAnd for to walken in the wod\u00ebs wilde,
\nAnd noght to been a wyf, and be with childe.
\nNoght wol I know\u00eb companye of man.
\nNow help me, lady, sith ye may and can,
\nFor tho thre form\u00ebs that thou hast in thee.
\nAnd Palamon, that hath swich love to me,
\nAnd eek Arcite, that loveth me so sore,
\nThis grace I prey\u00eb thee with-out\u00eb more,
\nAs send\u00eb love and pees bitwixte hem two;
\nAnd fro me turne awey hir hert\u00ebs so,
\nThat al hir hot\u00eb love, and hir desyr,
\nAnd al hir bisy torment, and hir fyr
\nBe quevnt, or turn\u00ebd in another place;
\nAnd if so be thou wolt not do me grace,
\nOr if my destinee be shapen so,
\nThat I shal ned\u00ebs have oon of hem two,
\nAs sende me him that most desireth me.<\/p>\n
\nFor will in us is over-ruled by fate.
\nWhen two are stript, long ere the course begin,
\nWe wish that one should lose, the other win;
\nAnd one especially do we affect
\nOf two gold ingots, like in each respect:
\nThe reason no man knows; let it suffice,
\nWhat we behold is censured by our eyes.
\nWhere both deliberate, the love is slight:
\nWho ever loved, that loved not at first sight?<\/p>\n
\nChaste Hero to herself thus softly said,
\n‘Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him;’
\nAnd, as she spake those words, came somewhat near him.
\nHe started up; she blushed as one ashamed;
\nWherewith Leander much more was inflamed.
\nHe touched her hand; in touching it she trembled:
\nLove deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
\nThese lovers parl\u00e8d by the touch of hands:
\nTrue love is mute, and oft amaz\u00e8d stands.
\nThus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled,
\nThe air with sparks of living fire was spangled;
\nAnd Night, deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
\nHeaved up her head, and half the world upon
\nBreathed darkness forth (dark night is Cupid’s day).<\/p>\n
\nNay, I’ll affirm and swear, I am not I:
\nOr if in that thy shame thou dost perceive,
\nLo, for thy dear sake, I my name will leave.
\nAnd yet, methinks, amaz’d thou shouldst not stand,
\nNor seem so much appall\u00e8d at my hand;
\nFor my misfortunes have inur’d thine eye
\n(Long before this) to sights of misery.
\nNo, no, read on, ’tis I, the very same,
\nAll thou canst read, is but to read my shame.
\nBe not dismay’d, nor let my name affright;
\nThe worst it can, is but t’ offend thy sight;
\nIt cannot wound, nor do thee deadly harm,
\nIt is no dreadful spell, no magic charm.<\/p>\n
\nFor all this world, yet will I not believe
\nBut that she’s fair and lovely and that she
\nSo to the period of the world will be;
\nElse had she been forsaken (sure) of all,
\nFor that so many sundry mischiefs fall
\nUpon her daily, and so many take
\nUp arms against her, as it well might make
\nHer to forsake her nature, and behind
\nTo leave no step for future time behind,
\nAs she had never been, for he that now
\nCan do her most disgrace, him they allow
\nThe time’s chief Champion–.<\/p>\n
\nWith naked iv’ry neck, and gown unlaced,
\nWithin her chamber, when the day is fled,
\nMakes poor her garments to enrich her bed:
\nFirst, put she off her lily-silken gown,
\nThat shrieks for sorrow as she lays it down;
\nAnd with her arms graceth a waistcoat fine,
\nEmbracing her as it would ne’er untwine.
\nHer flaxen hair, ensnaring all beholders,
\nShe next permits to wave about her shoulders,
\nAnd though she cast it back, the silken slips
\nStill forward steal and hang upon her lips:
\nWhereat she sweetly angry, with her laces
\nBinds up the wanton locks in curious traces,
\nWhilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers,
\nAs loth to be enchain’d but with her fingers.
\nThen on her head a dressing like a crown;
\nHer breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down,
\nAnd all things off (which rightly ever be
\nCall’d the foul-fair marks of our misery)
\nExcept her last, which enviously doth seize her,
\nLest any eye partake with it in pleasure,
\nPrepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her,
\nAnd longingly the down bed swells to meet her.<\/p>\n
\nUp to the gulfy river’s shore, that gave
\nSweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took
\nTheir clothes, and steep’d them in the sable brook;
\nThen put them into springs, and trod them clean
\nWith cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then,
\nWho should have soonest and most cleanly done.
\nWhen having throughly cleans’d, they spread them on
\nThe flood’s shore, all in order. And then, where
\nThe waves the pebbles wash’d, and ground was clear,
\nThey bath’d themselves, and all with glittering oil
\nSmooth’d their white skins; refreshing then their toil
\nWith pleasant dinner, by the river’s side;
\nYet still watch’d when the sun their clothes had dried.
\nTill which time, having dined, Nausicaa
\nWith other virgins did at stool-ball play,
\nTheir shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by.<\/p>\n
\nWith wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit
\nWeighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire;
\nThere are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire
\nMay mollify, milk, honey redolent
\nWith flowers of thyme, thy palate to content.
\nThe prodigal earth abounds with gentle food;
\nAffording banquets without death or blood.
\nBrute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy:
\nAnd yet not all; in pastures horses joy:
\nSo flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath
\nEndued with cruelty, and savage wrath
\n(Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in
\nHot blood delight. How horrible a sin,
\nThat entrails bleeding entrails should entomb!
\nThat greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become!
\nWhile by one creature’s death another lives!<\/p>\n
\nThe fair Pharonnida recovers strength,
\nThough sighs each accent interrupted, to
\nReturn this answer:–‘Wilt, oh! wilt thou do
\nOur infant love such injury–to leave
\nIt ere full grown? When shall my soul receive
\nA comfortable smile to cherish it,
\nWhen thou art gone? They’re but dull joys that sit
\nEnthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could
\nPart, with a less expense of sorrow, would
\nOur rigid fortune only be content
\nWith absence; but a greater punishment
\nConspires against us–Danger must attend
\nEach step thou tread’st from hence; and shall I spend
\nThose hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay
\nWait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day
\nWherein your battles join, how will my fear
\nWith doubtful pulses beat, until I hear
\nWhom victory adorns! Or shall I rest
\nHere without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast,
\nMy heart’s exposed to every danger that
\nAssails thy valour, and is wounded at
\nEach stroke that lights on thee–which absent I,
\nPrompted by fear, to myriads multiply.<\/p>\n
\nBy nations which the Roman Empire broke,
\nThe relish of the Muse consists in rime:
\nOne verse must meet another like a chime.
\nOur Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace
\nIn choice of words fit for the ending place,
\nWhich leave impression in the mind as well
\nAs closing sounds of some delightful bell.<\/p>\n
\nDidst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak,
\n. . . . . . . .
\nI have some naked thoughts that rove about
\nAnd loudly knock to have their passage out;
\nAnd wearie of their place do only stay
\nTill thou hast deck’t them in thy best array;
\nThat so they may without suspect or fears
\nFly swiftly to this fair Assembly’s ears;
\nYet I had rather if I were to chuse,
\nThy service in some graver subject use,
\nSuch as may make thee search thy coffers round,
\nBefore thou cloath my fancy in fit sound:
\nSuch where the deep transported mind may soare
\nAbove the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore
\nLook in, and see each blissful Deitie
\nHow he before the thunderous throne doth lie,
\nListening to what unshorn Apollo sings
\nTo th’ touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings
\nImmortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire:
\nThen passing through the Spheres of watchful fire,
\nAnd mistie Regions of wide air next under,
\nAnd hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder,
\nMay tell at length how green-ey’d Neptune raves,
\nIn Heav’ns defiance mustering all his waves;
\nThen sing of secret things that came to pass
\nWhen Beldam Nature in her cradle was;
\nAnd last of Kings and Queens and Hero’s old,
\nSuch as the wise Demodocus once told
\nIn solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast,
\nWhile sad Ulisses soul and all the rest
\nAre held with his melodious harmonie
\nIn willing chains and sweet captivitie.<\/p>\n
\nOnly adore the living and the great,
\nYet this Queen’s merits Fame so far hath spread,
\nThat she rules still, though dispossest and dead.
\nFor losing one, two other Crowns remained;
\nOver all hearts and her own griefs she reigned.
\nTwo Thrones so splendid as to none are less
\nBut to that third which she does now possess.
\nHer heart and birth Fortune as well did know,
\nThat seeking her own fame in such a foe,
\nShe drest the spacious theatre for the fight:
\nAnd the admiring World call’d to the sight:
\nAn army then of mighty sorrows brought,
\nWho all against this single virtue fought;
\nAnd sometimes stratagems, and sometimes blows,
\nTo her heroic soul they did oppose:
\nBut at her feet their vain attempts did fall,
\nAnd she discovered and subdu’d them all.<\/p>\n
\nTo whom both Heav’n and Earth and Seas are seen;
\nQueen of the nether Skies, where half the Year
\nThy Silver Beams descend, and light the gloomy Sphere;
\nGoddess of Maids, and conscious of our Hearts,
\nSo keep me from the Vengeance of thy Darts,
\nWhich Niobe’s devoted Issue felt,
\nWhen hissing through the Skies the feather’d Deaths were dealt:
\nAs I desire to live a Virgin-life,
\nNor know the Name of Mother or of Wife.
\nThy Votress from my tender Years I am,
\nAnd love, like thee, the Woods and Sylvan Game.
\nLike Death, thou know’st, I loath the Nuptial State,
\nAnd Man, the Tyrant of our Sex, I hate,
\nA lowly Servant, but a lofty Mate.
\nWhere Love is Duty on the Female Side,
\nOn theirs mere sensual Gust, and sought with surly Pride.
\nNow by thy triple Shape, as thou art seen
\nIn Heav’n, Earth, Hell, and ev’ry where a Queen,
\nGrant this my first Desire; let Discord, cease,
\nAnd make betwixt the Rivals lasting Peace:
\nQuench their hot Fire, or far from me remove
\nThe Flame, and turn it on some other Love.
\nOr if my frowning Stars have so decreed,
\nThat one must be rejected, one succeed,
\nMake him my Lord, within whose faithful Breast
\nIs fix’d my Image, and who loves me best.<\/p>\n
\nI am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly.
\nSweet Ladies, be not frighted; I’ll be civil;
\nI’m what I was, a little harmless Devil.
\nFor, after death, we Sprights have just such Natures,
\nWe had, for all the World, when human Creatures.<\/p>\n
\nAnd bask and whiten in the blaze of day:
\nSome guide the course of wandering orbs on high,
\nOr roll the planets through the boundless sky:
\nSome, less refin’d, beneath the moon’s pale light
\nPursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,
\nOr suck the mists in grosser air below,
\nOr dip their pinions in the painted bow,
\nOr brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,
\nOr o’er the glebe distil the kindly rain.
\nOthers, on earth, o’er human race preside,
\nWatch all their ways, and all their actions guide,–<\/p>\n
\nBut stoop’d to truth, and moraliz’d his song;
\nThat not for fame, but virtue’s better end,
\nHe stood the furious foe, the timid friend,
\nThe damning critic, half approving wit,
\nThe coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;
\nLaughed at the loss of friends he never had,
\nThe dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad;
\nThe distant threats of vengeance on his head,
\nThe blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;
\nThe tale revived, the lie so oft o’erthrown,
\nThe imputed trash, and dulness not his own,–<\/p>\n
\nBlasphem’d his gods, the dice, and damn’d his fate;
\nThen gnaw’d his pen, then dash’d it on the ground,
\nSinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!
\nPlung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there,
\nYet wrote and flounder’d on in mere despair.
\nRound him much embryo, much abortion lay,
\nMuch future ode, and abdicated play;
\nNonsense precipitate, like running lead,
\nThat slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head.<\/p>\n
\nWith eager eyes thy wings bedropp’d with gold;
\nThe purple spots that o’er thy mantle spread,
\nThe sapphire’s lively blue, the ruby’s red,
\nTen thousand various blended tints surprise,
\nBeyond the rainbow’s hues or peacock’s eyes:
\nNot Judah’s king in eastern pomp array’d,
\nWhose charms allur’d from far the Sheban maid,
\nHigh on his glitt’ring throne, like you could shine
\n(Nature’s completest miniature divine):
\nFor thee the rose her balmy buds renews,
\nAnd silver lillies fill their cups with dews;
\nFlora for thee the laughing fields perfumes,
\nFor thee Pomona sheds her choicest blooms.<\/p>\n