Alice Meynell

“ An echo in another’s mind,
While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart.
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:—
‘I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields;—
Reflection, you may come to-morrow,
Sit by the fireside with sorrow.—
You with the unpaid bill, Despair,—
You tiresome verse-reciter, Care,—
I will pay you in the grave,—
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation, too, be off!
To-day is for itself enough;
Hope in pity mock not Woe
With smiles, nor follow where I go ”

“ There is no division into stanzas, because its metre is the breath of life. One might wish that the English ode (roughly called ‘Pindaric’) had never been written but with passion, for so written it is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the heart and the breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It has passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley, long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But Drummond’s (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. ”

“ That her eternal verse employed should be
On a less subject than eternity;
And for a sacred mistress scorned to take
But her whom God Himself scorned not His spouse to make.
It (in a kind) her miracle did do;
A fruitful mother was and virgin too.
How well, blest swan, did Fate contrive thy death,
And make thee render up thy tuneful breath
In thy great Mistress’ arms, thou most divine
And richest offering of Loretto’s shrine!
Where, like some holy sacrifice to expire,
A fever burns thee, and love lights the fire. ”

“ Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace,
Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath:
I long to kiss the image of my death.
TO THE NIGHTINGALE Dear chorister, who from these shadows sends,
Ere that the blushing morn dare show her light,
Such sad lamenting strains, that night attends,
Become all ear, stars stay to hear thy plight:
If one whose grief even reach of thought transcends,
Who ne’er, not in a dream, did taste delight,
May thee importune who like care pretends,
And seems to joy in woe, in woe’s despite ”

“ And the same rosy-fingered hand of thine,
That shuts night’s dying eyes, shall open mine.
But thou, faint god of sleep, forget that I
Was ever known to be thy votary.
No more my pillow shall thine altar be,
Nor will I offer any more to thee
Myself a melting sacrifice; I’m born
Again a fresh child of the buxom morn,
Heir of the sun’s first beams; why threat’st thou so?
Why dost thou shake thy leaden sceptre? Go,
Bestow thy poppy upon wakeful woe,
Sickness and sorrow, whose pale lids ne’er know
Thy downy finger dwell upon their eyes ”

“ Nature could not sorrow hide:
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother, baby bless,
For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
1562–1593 THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals. ”

“ Its late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up.
Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace’s poetry:
‘This is the palace of the wood,
And court o’ the royal oak, where stood
The whole nobility.’
In more than one place Lucasta’s, or Amarantha’s, or Laura’s hair is sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in Wordsworth’s line. ”

“ With secret aid dost succour and supply,
Till they bring forth the fruitful progeny;
Send us the timely fruit of this same night.
And thou, fair Hebe! and thou, Hymen free!
Grant that it may so be.
Till which we cease your further praise to sing;
Ne any woods shall answer, nor your echo ring.
And ye high heavens, the Temple of the Gods,
In which a thousand torches flaming bright
Do burn, that to us wretched earthly clods
In dreadful darkness lend desired light;
And all ye powers which in the same remain,
More than we men can feign! ”

“ And yet this poet two or three times did meet a Muse he had hardly looked for among the trodden paths; a spiritual creature had been waiting behind a laurel or an apple-tree. You find him coming away from such a divine ambush a wilder and a simpler man. All his garden had been made ready for poetry, and poetry was indeed there, but in unexpected hiding and in a strange form, looking rather like a fugitive, shy of the poet who was conscious of having her rules by heart, yet sweetly willing to be seen, for all her haste. ”

“ Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground! ”

“ Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:—
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. ”

“ And when my muse soars with so strong a wing,
’Twill learn of things divine, and first of thee, to sing.
HYMN TO THE LIGHT First-born of chaos, who so fair didst come
From the old Negro’s darksome womb!
Which, when it saw the lovely child,
The melancholy mass put on kind looks and smiled!
Thou tide of glory which no rest dost know,
But ever ebb and ever flow!
Thou golden shower of a true Jove
Who does in thee descend, and Heaven to Earth make love!
Hail, active Nature’s watchful life and health! ”

“ The Muse forgot, and thou beloved no more!
WILLIAM COWPER
1731–1800 LINES ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER’S PICTURE O that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smiles I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
‘Grieve not, my child—chase all thy fears away!’
The meek intelligence of those dear eyes
(Blest be the art that can immortalise,
The art that baffles Time’s tyrannic claim
To quench it) here shines on me still the same. ”

“ To honour’s seat and chastity’s sweet bower.
Why stand ye still, ye virgins, in amaze,
Upon her so to gaze,
Whiles ye forget your former lay to sing,
To which the woods did answer, and your echo ring?
But if ye saw that which no eyes can see,
The inward beauty of her lively spright,
Garnished with heavenly gifts of high degree,
Much more then would ye wonder at that sight,
And stand astonished like to those which read
Medusa’s mazeful head.
There dwells sweet love, and constant chastity,
Unspotted faith, and comely womanhood,
Regard of honour, and mild modesty ”

“ Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
O might it die or rest at last!
WILD WITH WEEPING My head is wild with weeping for a grief
Which is the shadow of a gentle mind.
I walk into the air (but no relief
To seek,—or haply, if I sought, to find;
It came unsought) ; to wonder that a chief
Among men’s spirits should be cold and blind.
TO THE NIGHT Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave
Where, all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear
Which make thee terrible and dear,—
Swift be thy flight! ”

“ The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to call a ‘rage,’ and this expatiated (to use another word of their own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an eighteenth century ‘rage.’ A ‘noble rage,’ properly provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run upon. ”

“ Swiftness and power by birth are thine:
From thy great Sire they came, thy Sire the Word Divine.
’Tis, I believe, this archery to show,
That so much cost in colours thou
And skill in painting dost bestow
Upon thy ancient arms, the gaudy heavenly bow.
Swift as light thoughts their empty career run,
Thy race is finished when begun.
Let a post-angel start with thee,
And thou the goal of earth shalt reach as soon as he.
Thou, in the moon’s bright chariot proud and gay,
Dost thy bright wood of stars survey ”

“ Ne let house-fires, nor lightning’s helpless harms,
Ne let the Pouke, nor other evil sprights,
Ne let mischievous witches with their charms,
Ne let hobgoblins, names whose sense we see not,
Fray us with things that be not:
Let not the shriek-owl nor the stork be heard,
Nor the night raven, that still deadly yells;
Nor damned ghosts, called up with mighty spells,
Nor grisly vultures, make us once afeard:
Ne let the unpleasant choir of frogs still croaking
Make us to wish their choking!
Let none of these their dreary accents sing;
Ne let the woods them answer, nor their echo ring. ”

“ Grief ne’er before did tyrannize
On the honour of that brow,
And at the wheels of her brave eyes
Was captive led, till now.
Thus for a saint’s apostasy,
The unimagined woes
And sorrows of the hierarchy
None but an angel knows.
Thus for lost soul’s recovery,
The clapping of the wings
And triumph of this victory
None but an angel sings.
So none but she knows to bemoan
This equal virgin’s fate;
None but Lucasta can her crown
Of glory celebrate. ”

“ Ne will the woods now answer, nor your echo ring.
Who is the same, which at my window peeps,
Or whose is that fair face that shines so bright?
Is it not Cynthia, she that never sleeps,
But walks about high heaven all the night?
O! fairest goddess, do thou not envy
My love with me to spy:
For thou likewise didst love, though now unthought,
And for a fleece of wool, which privily
The Latmian shepherd once unto thee brought,
His pleasures with thee wrought! ”

“ Ode to a Nightingale.—Page 320.
Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the most perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urn is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea—the emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn—is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy—a prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. ”

“ Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan—a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse—I place Youth and Age as the best specimen of Coleridge’s poetry that is quite undelirious—to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to ‘some poor nigh-related guest’ with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought. ”

“ The tender wit and grave play of Herbert, Crashaw’s lovely rapture, are all unlike this meditation of a soul condemned and banished into life. Vaughan’s imagination suddenly opens a new window towards the east. The age seems to change with him, and it is one of the most incredible of all facts that there should be more than a century—and such a century!—from him to Wordsworth. ”

“ The political poems, needless to say, have an excellence of a different character and a higher degree. They have so much authentic dignity that ‘the glorious name of the British Aristides’ really seems duller when it is conferred as the earnings of the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland than when it inappropriately clings to Andrew Marvell, cherry-cheeked, caught in the tendrils of his vines and melons. He shall be, therefore, the British Aristides in those moments of midsummer solitude; at least, the heavy phrase shall then have the smile it never sought. ”

“ Then sit thou safely on my knee,
And let thy bower my bosom be;
Lurk in mine eyes, I like of thee!
O Cupid! so thou pity me,
Spare not, but play thee!
ROSALINE Like to the clear in highest sphere
Where all imperial glory shines,
Of selfsame colour is her hair
Whether unfolded, or in twines:
Heigh ho, fair Rosaline!
Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Resembling heaven by every wink;
The gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble when I think—
Heigh ho, would she were mine! ”

“ TO THE VIRGINS, TO MAKE MUCH OF TIME Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer ”