Login or Join
|
|
Read Ebook: Victorian Poetry by Drinkwater John
Font size: Background color: Text color: Add to tbrJar First Page Next PageEbook has 424 lines and 47340 words, and 9 pagesPAGE PREFACE ix PART I THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY PART II THE MATERIAL OF VICTORIAN POETRY INDEX 233 PART I: THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY VICTORIAN POETRY PART I: THE MANNER OF VICTORIAN POETRY Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. The date is not an inconvenient one to set at the beginning of a study of the poetry of the age to which she gave her name. Shelley, Byron, and Keats were dead, Wordsworth's most important work was finished, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett had made their first appearances in print, Matthew Arnold was at school, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina were children, William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne had just been born. Walter Savage Landor, one of the strangest figures in our poetical literature, whose first poems had been published in 1795, was still at the prime of his genius, but the small body of his best work does not mark him very definitely as either Romantic or Victorian. There were a number of less famous but by no means inconsiderable poets whose work will call for notice as we proceed. This circumstance of the Romantic Revival has had a profound influence upon English poetry ever since, and so far as may be prophesied it is likely to continue to do so. Poetry since the death of Keats and Shelley and Byron has acquired many new interests, chiefly intellectual interests, which did not belong to it before their time, or, at least, did not belong to it in anything like the same measure, but it has, also, become definitely a less original thing both as to manner and in its emotional content. Whether this is a gain or loss is for each reader to determine for himself, but in the conclusion it is likely that there would be at least as many people glad of the fact as sorry for it. I must elaborate this position first as to the manner, and later as to the content. "Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; is peculiarly marked by Mr. de la Mare's rhythmic genius; but alter the beat a little and you get-- And they changed their lives and departed, and came back as the leaves of the trees. And again, to go back beyond Morris, we come even to-- What are the wild waves saying, Sister, the whole day long. Leaving out the question of the stanzaic form and line lengths, and the way these are set out on the printed page, there is in these three examples an almost exact stress-equivalence, but each has its own entirely individual rhythmic life; rather commonplace and obvious in the last of the three, deep-lunged and heroic in Morris, and very delicate and subtle in Mr. de la Mare. In its structural foundations, therefore, Victorian verse in England may be said to be a direct inheritance from the Romantic age, and through it from the longer general ancestry of English poetry. The body of fine work done between Victoria's succession and the death of Tennyson is sufficient proof that the poetic instinct of the race knew very well what it was about in this. At the same time, the more restless talents were sometimes troubled by allegiance to forms that, whatever their virtue, had no longer the first flush of inventive delight. The sombre, charnel-house genius of a Webster, the rugged, almost fierce, intellectual power of a Ben Jonson, the religious ecstasy of a Vaughan, the tender irresponsibility of a Lovelace or a Suckling, and the spiritual ingenuity of a Donne, were all alike content to work in the simplest lyric forms, and were able to find complete expression through these, because as forms they were still fresh enough to be for each man treasure-trove. Nowhere in the whole range of passion and wit and subtle argument was there a mood to be found that wanted at any time to break the mould. To a large extent this has remained true until our own day, but as time has gone on a poet has now and again suddenly, as it were, become too conscious of the long service already done by the more established measures and has been tempted into irregularities which have sometimes been admirable in result and have sometimes tumbled over into excesses only to be forgotten. A great deal of Browning's verse is the result of some such uneasiness in his mind, a fear lest he should accept tradition too easily, a deliberate realisation on his part that a poet has to be original. Browning's genius could stand the strain, but a strain it was. Matthew Arnold's experiments in free verse have much the same origin. He, again, justified himself, but without doing anything to show that the main traditions in which he worked habitually were becoming less important to English poetry. In the case of Whitman, the one example in the Victorian age of a great poetic genius working consistently without respect for the established practice of English verse, there is no doubt that to minds and ears aware of all that custom has achieved, a great energy denied itself more than half its effect. Whitman's revolt was complete, and, broadly speaking, it has had no effect upon English poetry. Arnold's departures from established practice were occasional and, even so, pretty much in the example of Milton, who himself made but few experiments, and those not violent departures from the establishment. Browning's nonconformity was another matter. Unlike Whitman, he remained essentially always within the tradition, but his unrest within the tradition was more or less constant and not, as with Arnold, the accident of a mood here and there. Browning's was the most important poetic revolt of his age, and it is a revolt that is a matter of diction more precisely than of metrical form. And in its manner, as distinguished from its content, it is in diction that the Victorian age most importantly modified tradition. Leaving Whitman out of the question, the Victorian use of verse was, as we have seen, with one or two insignificant exceptions, an acknowledgment of the fitness of all that had been done by the age-long instinct of the race. Nor, taking the Victorian achievement as a whole, shall we find any violent or general change in the management of diction itself. But practice here was to some extent modified, and chiefly by Browning and through his influence. The history of diction in English poetry is one that has never been written, and one that would need a great volume of argument and illustration. But taking a summary view of the whole field certain characteristics define themselves from age to age. The first generalisation that may be made about good diction in poetry is that it should derive from the common speech of the time and yet be a heightened idiomatic form of that speech, achieving from the emotional pressure of poetry a new dignity and beauty. And we shall find that in English poetry the diction has always associated itself in this way with the natural speech of the time. Chaucer, in taking English speech, and for the first time making it the language of English literature, was dealing, so far as we can reconstruct the facts of that far-off time, with a language unsophisticated, unlearned, and quite ingenuous in its sincerity. And the language of his poetry is marked by these qualities, quickened by the breath of the poet's genius. Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale fowle maken melodye, That slepen al the night with open y?, : Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.... But wherefore do not you a mightier waie Make warre vppon this bloudie tirant time? And fortifie your selfe in your decay With meanes more blessed then my barren rime? Now stand you on the top of happie houres, And many maiden gardens, yet vnset, With vertuous wish would beare your liuing flowers, Much liker than your painted counterfeit: So should the lines of life that life repaire Which this Neither in inward worth nor outward faire Can make you liue your selfe in eies of men, To giue away your selfe, keeps your selfe still, And you must liue drawne by your owne sweet skill. In the succeeding age, from the Elizabethans to the Augustans, the same principle may be discovered in the practice of poets as different in their personal quality as, say, Donne, Milton and Lovelace. Donne's-- may have perplexed his readers by its intellectual turn, but it cannot have seemed anything but easily natural to them in its actual word. If Donne was startling, it was in what he said and not at all in his way of saying it. And so with Milton. Common speech could never put on a sublimer transfiguration than in such passages as-- Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watry floar, So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled Ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.... But it remains the common speech that is being so dignified. Milton's diction, more eminently poetical perhaps than any other in the language, is still founded on the grave, full-syllabled Biblical idiom that we are sure was current in the ordinary enlightened speech of the time. The first readers of his poems would find a familiar tongue, however unsuspected was the beauty that it revealed to them. And in the lighter lyrists of that age, this relation of poetic to common speech, secured without any apparent deliberation--we may indeed say definitely without it--and yet achieving the magic with easy certainty, shines round us on every hand. Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind That from the nunnery Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind To war and arms I fly ... and-- Shut not so soon; the dull-eyed night Has not as yet begun To make a seizure on the light, Or to seal up the sun ... and-- Out upon it! I have lov'd Three whole days together; And am like to love three more, If it prove fair weather ... are all alike loyal both to poetry and to the common English of their time. Nor do the lyrists whose raptures were less of the world go elsewhere for their means of expression. Vaughan, with-- Happy those early days, when I Shined in my Angel-infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought.... and Herbert with-- Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky-- The dew shall weep thy fall to-night For thou must die.... and Crashaw with-- Since 'tis not to be had at home She'll travel for a martyrdom.... follow the same poetic instinct precisely. Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread, Whose flocks supply him with attire; Whose trees in summer yield him shade, In winter fire. and-- One dedicates in high heroic prose, And ridicules beyond a hundred foes: One from all Grub Street will my fame defend, And, more abusive, calls himself my friend. This prints my letters, that expects a bribe, And others roar aloud, "Subscribe, subscribe!" ... and-- A little learning is a dangerous thing, Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring ... and-- All nature is but art unknown to thee, All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good; And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. It is true that the Augustan school in its decline, which was contemporary with the faint prelude of the Romantic Revival, fell into an extreme artificiality of diction that can hardly have had its model even by suggestion in the common speech of the time. So good a poet as Gray, who was himself one of the preludists, was not blameless in this respect, and could write-- Him the dog of darkness spied, His shaggy throat he open'd wide, While from his jaws, with carnage fill'd, Foam and human gore distill'd: Hoarse he bays with hideous din, Eyes that glow, and fangs that grin; And long pursues, with fruitless yell, The father of the powerful spell ... which Collins, at his best even surer than Gray in prophecy of a new age, could match with-- Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare: On whom that ravening brood of Fate, Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait: Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, And look not madly wild, like thee? Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page |
Terms of Use Stock Market News! © gutenberg.org.in2024 All Rights reserved.