Reviews. Wilde Oscar
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come across any lines of the kind in Mr. Austin’s published works, but it is difficult to help smiling when Mr. Sharp gravely calls upon us to note ‘the illuminative significance’ of such a commonplace verse as
My manhood keeps the dew of morn,
And what have I to give;
Being right glad that I was born,
And thankful that I live.
Nor do Mr. Sharp’s constant misquotations really help him out of his difficulties. Such a line as
A meadow ribbed with drying swathes of hay,
has at least the merit of being a simple, straightforward description of an ordinary scene in an English landscape, but not much can be said in favour of
A meadow ribbed with dying swathes of hay,
which is Mr. Sharp’s own version, and one that he finds ‘delightfully suggestive.’ It is indeed suggestive, but only of that want of care that comes from want of taste.
On the whole, Mr. Sharp has attempted an impossible task. Mr. Austin is neither an Olympian nor a Titan, and all the puffing in Paternoster Row cannot set him on Parnassus.
His verse is devoid of all real rhythmical life; it may have the metre of poetry, but it has not often got its music, nor can there be any true delicacy in the ear that tolerates such rhymes as ‘chord’ and ‘abroad.’ Even the claim that Mr. Sharp puts forward for him, that his muse takes her impressions directly from nature and owes nothing to books, cannot be sustained for a moment. Wordsworth is a great poet, but bad echoes of Wordsworth are extremely depressing, and when Mr. Austin calls the cuckoo a
Voyaging voice
and tells us that
The stockdove broods
Low to itself,
we must really enter a protest against such silly plagiarisms.
Perhaps, however, we are treating Mr. Sharp too seriously. He admits himself that it was at the special request of the compiler of the Calendar that he wrote the preface at all, and though he courteously adds that the task is agreeable to him, still he shows only too clearly that he considers it a task and, like a clever lawyer or a popular clergyman, tries to atone for his lack of sincerity by a pleasing over-emphasis. Nor is there any reason why this Calendar should not be a great success. If published as a broad-sheet, with a picture of Mr. Austin ‘conversing with Æneas,’ it might gladden many a simple cottage home and prove a source of innocent amusement to the Conservative working-man.
Days of the Year: A Poetic Calendar from the Works of Alfred Austin. Selected and edited by A. S. With Introduction by William Sharp. (Walter Scott.)
THE POETS’ CORNER – II
(Pall Mall Gazette, March 8, 1837.)
A little schoolboy was once asked to explain the difference between prose and poetry. After some consideration he replied, ‘“blue violets” is prose, and “violets blue” is poetry.’ The distinction, we admit, is not exhaustive, but it seems to be the one that is extremely popular with our minor poets. Opening at random The Queens Innocent we come across passages like this:
Full gladly would I sit
Of such a potent magus at the feet,
and this:
The third, while yet a youth,
Espoused a lady noble but not royal,
One only son who gave him – Pharamond —
lines that, apparently, rest their claim to be regarded as poetry on their unnecessary and awkward inversions. Yet this poem is not without beauty, and the character of Nardi, the little prince who is treated as the Court fool, shows a delicate grace of fancy, and is both tender and true. The most delightful thing in the whole volume is a little lyric called April, which is like a picture set to music.
The Chimneypiece of Bruges is a narrative poem in blank verse, and tells us of a young artist who, having been unjustly convicted of his wife’s murder, spends his life in carving on the great chimneypiece of the prison the whole story of his love and suffering. The poem is full of colour, but the blank verse is somewhat heavy in movement. There are some pretty things in the book, and a poet without hysterics is rare.
Dr. Dawson Burns’s Oliver Cromwell is a pleasant panegyric on the Protector, and reads like a prize poem by a nice sixth-form boy. The verses on The Good Old Times should be sent as a leaflet to all Tories of Mr. Chaplin’s school, and the lines on Bunker’s Hill, beginning, are sure to be popular in America.
I stand on Bunker’s towering pile,
K. E. V.’s little volume is a series of poems on the Saints. Each poem is preceded by a brief biography of the Saint it celebrates – which is a very necessary precaution, as few of them ever existed. It does not display much poetic power, and such lines as these on St. Stephen, —
Did ever man before so fall asleep?
A cruel shower of stones his only bed,
For lullaby the curses loud and deep,
His covering with blood red —
may be said to add another horror to martyrdom. Still it is a thoroughly well-intentioned book and eminently suitable for invalids.
Mr. Foskett’s poems are very serious and deliberate. One of the best of them, Harold Glynde, is a Cantata for Total Abstainers, and has already been set to music. A Hindoo Tragedy is the story of an enthusiastic Brahmin reformer who tries to break down the prohibition against widows marrying, and there are other interesting tales. Mr. Foskett has apparently forgotten to insert the rhymes in his sonnet to Wordsworth; but, as he tells us elsewhere that ‘Poesy is uninspired by Art,’ perhaps he is only heralding a new and formless form. He is always sincere in his feelings, and his apostrophe to Canon Farrar is equalled only by his apostrophe to Shakespeare.
The Pilgrimage of Memory suffers a good deal by being printed as poetry, and Mr. Barker should republish it at once as a prose work. Take, for instance, this description of a lady on a runaway horse: —
Her screams alarmed the Squire, who seeing the peril of his daughter, rode frantic after her. I saw at once the danger, and stepping from the footpath, show’d myself before the startled animal, which forthwith slackened pace, and darting up adroitly, I seized the rein, and in another moment, had released the maiden’s foot, and held her, all insensible, within my arms. Poor girl, her head and face were sorely bruised, and I tried hard to staunch the blood which flowed from many a scalp-wound, and wipe away the dust that disfigured her lovely features. In another moment the Squire was by my side. ‘Poor child,’ he cried, alarmed, ‘is she dead?’ ‘No, sir; not dead, I think,’ said I, ‘but sorely bruised and injured.’
There is clearly nothing to be gained by dividing the sentences of this simple and straightforward narrative into lines of unequal length, and Mr. Barker’s own arrangement of the metre,
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