Full fathom five thy father lies just as the great Webster's Call for the robin red-breast and the wren as Charles Lamb said, is "of the earth earthy." Or, lastly, with what magic does Shakespeare transport us to the fairy landscape Where the bee sucks, there suck I Come unto these yellow sands . . Over hill, over dale . . . Thus in Midsummer-Night's Dream— You spotted snakes with double tongue, Sing in our sweet lullaby; Weaving spiders, come not here : Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence ! Beetles black, approach not near; Worm nor snail, do no offence. Compare this with the clownish realism of Bottom's ditty in the same play The ousel cock so black of hue, With orange-tawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill,1— The finch, the sparrow and the lark, The plain-song cuckoo gray, Whose note full many a man doth mark, And dares not answer nay. But These are mere hints-flying, insufficient touches. Shakespeare, of all poets, is most emphatically his own best commentator. Song-voice: So, "mine oaten quill."-Colin Clout. CHAPTER XII LANDSCAPE POETRY UNDER THE STUART KINGS SOME lesser poets who cross the boundary between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may now be taken. They show how, as the early Elizabethan impulse waned, new directions gradually opened for landscape treatment. Ben Jonson, in his Forest, has a really full description, the earliest of the kind known to me, of Penshurst, the garden and the park; in this sense making a real advance. But the treatment is prosaic-the art of selecting and poetising details has not been here attained. Alexander Hume, a Scotsman of this age, in a volume of Hymns (published in 1599), has left us a picture singularly modern both in its skilful versification and its clearly defined landscape. It is a summer scene, which, in the Latinised Scots diction still prevalent at the time, he calls the Day Estival. It opens with early dawn— The shadow of the earth anon Removes and drawis by, The time so tranquil is and clear, An air of passing wind. All trees and simples, great and small, That balmy leaf do bear, 1 We have had an earlier example of this fancy in Gawin Douglas. L Than they were painted on a wall, What pleasure, then, to walk and see End-lang a river clear, The perfect form of every tree Michael Drayton (1563-1631), one of our most fluently fertile versifiers, has left some Pastorals, so quick and airy in touch, so attractive in feeling, that it is vexing to find how completely the landscape which he saw and must have enjoyed was silenced or exiled from his poetry by the mere conventionalities of pseudo-classicalism. Witness these lines from Sirena The verdant meads are seen, When she doth view them, And every little grass Broad itself spreadeth, In this large cincture, Leaveth some tincture. Presently we find how, when Sirena looks forth at night, the stars stand "fearfully blazing "— As wondering at her eyes, With their much brightness, Dimming their brightness. This exaggerated, unreal mode of thought is of too frequent occurrence in our poetry. Can he have felt true passion who thus paints his lady love? or, mayhap, was She pleased by it? Drayton, however, deserves praise for another landscape poem, the plan of which, perhaps, is wholly original and unique in literature-the giant Polyolbion (1612-22), a picture of England and Wales filling thirty vast Songs in rhyming Alexandrines, after the French fashion. One may doubt whether any human power could animate a mass so huge and heterogeneous; it is to Drayton's praise that, so far as my incursions into this wilderness have gone, he maintains a level, monotonous indeed, yet above prose. The expedient, however, by which he contrives this result, unhappily for his readers-once, it is said, numerous-is to personify every stream or hill, plain or wood. Yet it is a truly affectionate interest in each natural feature of his country in turn to which he thus gives utterance. A few lines taken at random from this Gazetteer in rhyme may suffice to do justice to a writer whom my subject could not fairly neglect. The first example describes Lundy Island off the south-west coast of Devon This Lundy is a nymph to idle toys inclined; And, all on pleasure set, doth wholly give her mind Not provident of pelf, as many islands are: A lusty black-brow'd girl, with forehead broad and high, The next scene is on the summit of Skiddaw, "of the Cam"brian hills the highest," and Most like Parnassus self that is supposed to be, Skiddaw is hence emboldened to speak The rough Hibernian sea I proudly overlook, 1 Eagles. 2 Song IV. The inhabitants about tempestuous storms to fear, And so forth. Yet to this singular writer we owe not only the noble ballad of Agincourt, not only also those splendid lines upon Marlowe which are one of the finest tributes ever offered by poet to poet, but that enchanting sonnet of absolute first-rate beauty-a praise how rare!-worthy of Shakespeare, yet essentially unlike his style— Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part . . George Wither (1588-1667), in an Eclogue (1615), has a pretty thanksgiving to Poetry, who gives him pleasure Through the meanest object's sight, The seventeenth century, we have remarked, was a time of new attempts—a larger range of natural phenomena was embraced by landscape poetry. I quote two short illustrative passages. Donne, in his powerful way, describing a primrosecovered hill, says— -Where their form and their infinity Make a terrestrial galaxy, As the small stars do in the sky. Carew, again (cir. 1589–cir. 1639), in a Pastoral Dialogue, has a noteworthy sky scene: the shepherd tells his Love it is dawning, they must part; she replies Albania, Scotland, Song XXX. |