Read Ebook: Poetic diction: A study of eighteenth century verse by Quayle Thomas

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Ebook has 952 lines and 66917 words, and 20 pages

Yet not the more Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt Clear Spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill, Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath, That wash thy hallowed feet and warbling flow.

To what extent this catalogue of lifeless words and phrases had established itself as the poetical thesaurus is to be seen in the persistency with which it maintained its position until the very end of the century, when Erasmus Darwin with a fatal certainty evolved from it all its worst features, and thus did much unconsciously to crush it out of existence. James Thomson is rightly regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the Romantic Revolt, and he has had merited praise for his attempts to provide himself with a new language of his own. In this respect, however, he had been anticipated by John Philips, whose "Splendid Shilling" appeared in 1705, followed by "Cyder" a year later. Philips, though not the first Miltonic imitator, was practically the first to introduce the Miltonic diction and phrases, whilst at the same time he acquired the knack of adding phrases of his own to the common stock. He was thus an innovator from whom Thomson himself learned not a little.

But though the "Seasons" is ample testimony to a new and growing alertness to natural scenery, Thomson found it hard to escape from the fetters of the current poetic language. We feel that he is at least trying to write with his eye steadily fixed upon the object, but he could perhaps hardly be expected to get things right from the very beginning. Thus a stanza from his "Pastoral Entertainment" is purely conventional:

The place appointed was a spacious vale Fanned always by a cooling western gale Which in soft breezes through the meadow stray And steal the ripened fragrances away--

while he paraphrases a portion of the sixth chapter of St. Matthew into:

Observe the rising lily's snowy grace, Observe the various vegetable race, They neither toil nor spin, but careless grow Yet see how warm they blush, how bright they glow,

John Dyer , though now and then conventional in his diction, has a good deal to his credit, and is a worthy contemporary of the author of "The Seasons." Thus in the "Country Walk" it is the old stock diction he gives us:

and much the same thing is to be found in "The Fleece," published in 1757:

The crystal dews, impearl'd upon the grass, Are touched by Phoebus' beams and mount aloft, With various clouds to paint the azure sky;

whilst he has almost as many adjectives in y as Ambrose Philips. But these are more than redeemed by the new descriptive touches which appear, sometimes curiously combined with the stereotyped phrases, as in "The Fleece" :

The scatter'd mists reveal the dusky hills; Grey dawn appears; the golden morn ascends, And paints the glittering rocks and purple woods.

Nor must we forget "Grongar Hill," which has justly received high praise for its beauties and felicities of description.

It is scarcely necessary to illustrate further the vogue of this sort of diction in the first half of the eighteenth century; it is to be found everywhere in the poetry of the period, and the conventional epithets and phrases quoted from Dyer and Thomson may be taken as typical of the majority of their contemporaries. But this lifeless, stereotyped language has also invaded the work of some of the best poets of the century, including not only the later classicists, but also those who have been "born free," and are foremost among the Romantic rebels. The poetic language of William Collins shows a strange mixture of the old style and the new. That it was new and individual is well seen from Johnson's condemnation, for Johnson recognized very clearly that the language of the "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" did not conform to what was probably his own view that the only language fit and proper for poetry was such as might bear comparison with the polish and elegance of Pope's "Homer." It is not difficult to make due allowance for Johnson when he speaks of Collins's diction as "harsh, unskilfully laboured, and injudicially selected"; we deplore the classical bias, and are content enough to recognize and enjoy for ourselves the matchless beauty and charm of Collins's diction at its best. Yet much of the language of his earlier work betrays him as more or less a poetaster of the eighteenth century. The early "Oriental Eclogues" abound in the usual descriptive details, just as if the poet had picked out his words and phrases from the approved lists. Thus,

Yet midst the blaze of courts she fixed her love On the cool fountain or the shady grove Still, with the shepherd's innocence her mind To the sweet vale and flowery mead inclined;

When Collins has nothing new to say his poetic language is that of his time, but when his inspiration is at its loftiest his diction is always equal to the task, and it is then that he gives us the unrivalled felicities of "The Ode to Evening."

Through verdant vales and Ceres' golden reign

are not uncommon, though of course the possibility of the direct influence of the classics, bringing with it the added flavour of reminiscence, is not to be ignored in this sort of diction. Moreover, a couplet from the fragmentary "Alliance of Education and Government":

Ye variegated children of the Spring, Ye blossoms blushing with the pearly dew; Ye birds that sweetly in the hawthorn sing; Ye flowery meads, lawns of verdant hue.

It can be judged from these examples how a stereotyped mode of expression may depreciate to a large extent the value of much of the work of a poet of real genius. Chatterton is content in most of his avowedly "original" work to turn his poetic thoughts into the accepted moulds, which is all the more surprising when we remember his laborious methods of manufacturing an archaic diction for his mediaeval "discoveries," even if we may assume that it reflected a strong desire for something fresh and new.

on every spray The warbling birds exalt their evening lay, Blithe skipping o'er yon hill the fleecy train Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain.

When he leaves this second-hand description, and describes scenes actually experienced and strongly felt, Falconer's language is correspondingly fresh and vivid, the catastrophe of the shipwreck itself, for example, being painted with extraordinary power.

When we come to Johnson and Goldsmith, here again a distinction must be made between the didactic or satiric portion of their work and that which is descriptive. Johnson's didactic verse, marked as it is by a free use of inversion and ellipsis, rarely attains the clearness and simplicity of Goldsmith's, whilst he has also much more of the stock descriptive terms and phrases. His "Odes" are almost entirely cast in this style. Thus in "Spring":

Now o'er the rural Kingdom roves Soft Pleasure with her laughing train, Love warbles in the vocal groves And vegetation plants the plains,

whilst exactly the same stuff is turned out for a love poem, "To Stella":

Not the soft sighs of vernal gales The fragrance of the flowery vales The murmurs of the crystal rill The vocal grove, the verdant hill.

The slow canal, the yellow-blossomed vale, The willow-tufted bank, the gliding sail

we feel that Goldsmith too has been writing with his eye on the object, and even in such a line as

The breezy covert of the warbling grove

Ye glittering towns, with wealth and splendour crowned Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale,

and so on for another dozen lines.

Only the slightest traces, however, of this mechanical word-painting appear in "The Deserted Village," almost the only example of the stereotyped phrase being in the line

Thus whilst Goldsmith in much of his work continues the classical school of Pope, alike in his predilection for didactic verse and his practice of the heroic couplet, in his poetic language he is essentially individual. In his descriptive passages he rarely uses the conventional jargon, and the greater part of the didactic and moral observations of his two most famous poems is written in simple and unadorned language that would satisfy the requirements of the Wordsworthian canon.

That pure and unaffected diction could be employed with supreme effect in other than moral and didactic verse was soon to be shown in the lyric poetry of William Blake, who, about thirty years before Wordsworth launched his manifestoes, evolved for himself a poetic language, wonderful alike in its beauty and simplicity. In those of the "Songs of Innocence" and "The Songs of Experience," which are concerned with natural description, the epithets and expressions that had long been consecrated to this purpose find little or no place. Here and there we seem to catch echoes of the stock diction, as in the lines,

the starry floor the watery shore

of the Introduction to the "Songs of Experience," or the

of "The Cradle Song"; but in each case the expressions are redeemed and revitalized by the pure and joyous singing note of the lyrics of which they form part. Only once is Blake to be found using the conventional epithet, when in his "Laughing Song" he writes

whilst with his usual unerring instinct he marks down the monotonous smoothness of so much contemporary verse in that stanza of his ode "To the Muses" in which, as has been well said, the eighteenth century dies to music:

How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move, The sound is forced, the notes are few.

Not that he altogether escaped the blighting influence of his time. In the early "Imitation of Spenser," we get such a couplet as

To sit in council with his modern peers And judge of tinkling rhimes and elegances terse,

whilst the "vicious diction" Wordsworth was to condemn is also to be seen in this line from one of the early "Songs":

and Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage.

Even as late as 1800 Blake was capable of writing

Receive this tribute from a harp sincere.

But these slight blemishes only seem to show up in stronger light the essential beauty and nobility of his poetical style.

But, as later in the case of Wordsworth, Cowper in his early work has not a little of the language which he is at such pains to condemn. Thus Horace again appears in the old familiar guise,

Now o'er the spangled hemisphere, Diffused the starry train appear

whilst even in "Table Talk" we find occasional conventional descriptions such as

Nature... Spreads the fresh verdure of the fields and leads The dancing Naiads through the dewy meads.

Whilst Cowper was thus at once heralding, and to a not inconsiderable extent exemplifying, the Romantic reaction in form, another poet, George Crabbe, had by his realism given, even before Cowper, an important indication of one characteristic aspect of the new poetry.

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