A Study of Poetry by Bliss Perry (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

“Timor Mortis conturbat me,”

or the haunting burden of the “Lyke-Wake Dirge” (Oxford, No. 381),

“This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

—Every nighte and alle,

Fire and sleet and candle-lighte,

And Christe receive thy saule,”

we now find English poets echoing Aucassin and Nicolette:

“In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only

to have Nicolette, my sweet lady that I love so well. For into Paradise

go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go these same

old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower

continually before the altars and in the crypts; and such folk as wear

old amices and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and

covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst and of cold, and of

little ease. These be they that go into Paradise; with them I have

naught to make. But into Hell would I fain go; for into Hell fare the

goodly clerks, and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars,

and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go.

And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers or

three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold and the

silver, the cloth of vair and cloth of gris, and harpers and makers, and

the prince of this world. With these I would gladly go, let me but have

with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady.”

5. The Elizabethan Lyric

The European influence came afresh to England, as we have seen, with those “courtly makers” who travelled into France and Italy and brought back the new-found treasures of the Renaissance. Greece and Rome renewed, as they are forever from time to time renewing, their hold upon the imagination and the art of English verse. Sometimes this influence of the classics has worked toward contraction, restraint, acceptance of human limitations and of the “rules” of art. But in Elizabethan poetry the classical influence was on the side of expansion. In that release of vital energy which characterized the English Renaissance, the rediscovery of Greece and Rome and the artistic contacts with France and Italy heightened the confidence of Englishmen, revealed the continuity of history and gave new faith in human nature. It spelled, for the moment at least, liberty rather than authority. It stimulated intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm. Literary criticism awoke to life in the trenchant discussions of the art of poetry by Gascoigne and Sidney, by Puttenham, Campion and Daniel. The very titles of the collections of lyrics which followed the famous Tottel’s Miscellany of 1557 flash with the spirit of the epoch: A Paradise of Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, A Handfull of Pleasant Delights, The Phoenix Nest, England’s Helicon, Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody.

Bullen, Schelling, Rhys, Braithwaite, and other modern collectors of the Elizabethan lyric have ravaged these volumes and many more, and have shown how the imported Italian pastoral tallied with the English idyllic mood, how the study of prosody yielded rich and various stanzaic effects, how the diffusion of the passion for song through all classes of the community gave a marvelous singing quality to otherwise thin and mere “dildido” lines. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and his friends have revived the music of the Elizabethan song-books, and John Erskine and other scholars have investigated the relation of the song-books—especially the songs composed by musicians such as Byrd, Dowland and Campion—to the form and quality of the surviving lyric verse. But one does not need a knowledge of the Elizabethan lute and viol, and of the precise difference between a “madrigal” and a “catch” or “air” in order to perceive the tunefulness of a typical Elizabethan song:

“I care not for these ladies,

That must be woode and praide:

Give me kind Amarillis,

The wanton countrey maide.

Nature art disdaineth,

Here beautie is her owne.

Her when we court and kisse,

She cries, Forsooth, let go:

But when we come where comfort is,

She never will say No.”

It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free, even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword, and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly “Elizabethan.” Spenser’s “vine-like” luxuriance, Marlowe’s soaring energy, Donne’s grave realistic subtleties, illustrate indeed that note of individualism which is never lacking in the great poetic periods. This individualism betrays itself in almost every song of Shakspere’s plays. For here is English race, surely, and the very echo and temper of the Renaissance, but with it all there is the indescribable, inimitable timbre of one man’s singing voice.

6. The Reaction

If we turn, however, from the lyrics of Shakspere to those of Ben Jonson and of the “sons of Ben” who sang in the reigns of James I and Charles I, we become increasingly conscious of a change in atmosphere. The moment of expansion has passed. The “first fine careless rapture” is over. Classical “authority” resumes its silent, steady pressure. Scholars like to remember that the opening lines of Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes” are a transcript from the Greek. In his “Ode to Himself upon the Censure of his New Inn” in 1620 Jonson, like Landor long afterward, takes scornful refuge from the present in turning back to Greece and Rome:

“Leave things so prostitute,

And take the Alcaic lute;

Or thine own Horace, or Anacreon’s lyre;

Warm thee by Pindar’s fire.”

The reaction in lyric form showed itself in the decay of sonnet, pastoral and madrigal, in the neglect of blank verse, in the development of the couplet. Milton, in such matters as these, was a solitary survival of the Elizabethans. Metrical experimentation almost ceased, except in the hands of ingenious recluses like George Herbert. The popular metre of the Caroline poets was the rhymed eight and six syllable quatrain:

“Yet this inconstancy is such

As thou too shalt adore;

I could not love thee, Dear, so much

Loved I not Honour more.”

The mystics like Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne wished and secured a wider metrical liberty, and it is, in truth, these complicated patterns of the devotional lyric of the seventeenth century that are of greatest interest to the poets of our own day. But contemporary taste, throughout the greater portion of that swiftly changing epoch, preferred verse that showed a conservative balance in thought and feeling, in diction and versification. Waller, with his courtier-like instinct for what was acceptable, took the middle of the road, letting Cowley and Quarles experiment as fantastically as they pleased. Andrew Marvell, too, a Puritan writing in the Restoration epoch, composed as “smoothly” as Waller. Herrick, likewise, though fond of minor metrical experiments, celebrated his quiet garden pleasures and his dalliance with amorous fancies in verse of the true Horatian type. “Intensive rather than expansive, fanciful rather than imaginative, and increasingly restrictive in its range and appeal”: that is Professor Schelling’s expert summary of the poetic tendencies of the age.

And then the lyric impulse died away in England. Dryden could be magnificently sonorous in declamation and satire, but he lacked the singing voice. Pope likewise, though he “lisped in numbers,” could never, for all of his cleverness, learn to sing. The age of the Augustans, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, was an age of prose, of reason, of good sense, of “correctness.” The decasyllabic couplet, so resonant in Dryden, so admirably turned and polished by Pope, was its favorite measure. The poets played safe. They took no chances with “enthusiasm,” either in mood or metrical device. What could be said within the restraining limits of the couplet they said with admirable point, vigor and grace. But it was speech, not song.

7. The Romantic Lyric

The revolt came towards the middle of the century, first in the lyrics of Collins, then in Gray. The lark began to soar and sing once more in English skies. New windows were opened in the House of Life. Men looked out again with curiosity, wonder and a sense of strangeness in the presence of beauty. They saw Nature with new eyes; found a new richness in the Past, a new picturesque and savor in the life of other races, particularly in the wild Northern and Celtic strains of blood. Life grew again something mysterious, not to be comprehended by the “good sense” of the Augustans, or expressible in the terms of the rhymed couplet. Instead of the normal, poets sought the exceptional, then the strange, the far-away in time or place, or else the familiar set in some unusual fantastic light. The mood of poetry changed from tranquil sentiment to excited sentiment or “sensibility,” and then to sheer passion. The forms of poetry shifted from the conventional to the revival of old measures like blank verse and the Spenserian stanza, then to the invention of new and freer forms, growing ever more lyrical. Poetic diction rebelled against the Augustan conventions, the stereotyped epithets, the frigid personifications. It abandoned the abstract and general for the specific and the picturesque. It turned to the language of real life, and then, dissatisfied, to the heightened language of passion. If one reads Cowper, Blake, Burns and Wordsworth, to say nothing of poets like Byron and Shelley who wrote in the full Romantic tide of feeling, one finds that this poetry has discovered new themes. It portrays the child, the peasant, the villager, the outcast, the slave, the solitary person, even the idiot and the lunatic. There is a new human feeling for the individual, and for the endless, the poignant variety of “states of soul.” Browning, by and by, is to declare that “states of soul” are the only things worth a poet’s attention.

Now this new individuality of themes, of language, of moods, assisted in the free expression of lyricism, the release of the song-impulse of the “single, separate person.” The Romantic movement was revelatory, in a double sense. “Creation widened in man’s view”; and there was equally a revelation of individual poetic energy which gave the Romantic lyric an extraordinary variety and beauty of form. There was an exaggerated individualism, no doubt, which marked the weak side of the whole movement: a deliberate extravagance, a cultivated egoism. Vagueness has its legitimate poetic charm, but in England no less than in Germany or France lyric vagueness often became incoherence. Symbolism degenerated into meaninglessness. But the fantastic and grotesque side of Romantic individualism should not blind us to the central fact that a rich personality may appear in a queer garb. Victor Hugo, like his young friends of the 1830’s, loved to make the gray-coated citizens of Paris stare at his scarlet, but the personality which could create such lyric marvels as the Odes et Ballades may be forgiven for its eccentricities. William Blake was eccentric to the verge of insanity, yet he opened, like Whitman and Poe, new doors of ivory into the wonder-world.

Yet a lyrist like Keats, it must be remembered, betrayed his personality not so much through any external peculiarity of the Romantic temperament as through the actual texture of his word and phrase and rhythm. Examine his brush-work microscopically, as experts in Italian painting examine the brushstrokes