صور الصفحة
PDF
النشر الإلكتروني

Harold are clearly due to the peculiar difficulties presented by the Spenserian stanza-the least appropriate metrical form, we may venture to say, which could have been chosen by a poet whose force lay, not in Spenser's long-drawn musical diffuseness of style, but in terseness and rapidity of diction. Perhaps in the gentler scenes the poet appears at his best; he is then less tempted to rhetoric. Such is the following Lake landscape :

It is the hush of night, and all between

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellow'd and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darken'd Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

Let us now pass to a companion picture in Canto iv from Venice, that "fairy city of the heart," as Byron called it in a phrase which must have been in the mind of many English travellers

The moon is up, and yet it is not night—
Sunset divides the sky with her—a sea
Of glory streams along the Alpine height
Of blue Friuli's mountains; Heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colours seems to be
Melted to one vast Iris of the West,
Where the Day joins the past Eternity;
While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest
Floats through the azure air—an island of the blest!

A single star is at her side, and reigns

With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but still
Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains

Roll'd o'er the peak of the far Rhaetian hill.

Byron's enthusiasm for the sea (let me repeat) has been curiously rare among our poets; we have to go back to the

verse before the Conquest to find it painted with the fullness of song, natural, one might say, to Englishmen. The episode which ends Childe Harold is splendid for force of diction and varied imagery, yet strangely marred by forced syntax and forced expression. Perhaps the poet's idea is best concentrated in the three beautiful lines

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow-
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

The Landscape of Don Juan, notably in the magnificent shipwreck scene of the second Canto,-almost overwhelming in its forthright, volcanic, force,-ranks with the best of Byron's other work. But it is difficult to disentangle these descriptive elements from the cynical humour which blends in the whole action of that unique poem.

To conclude: Byron's love of landscape was a passion, deep and sincere perhaps as that of any poet. One rendering of this we have already quoted. Let me end with the graceful lines addressed to his justly loved sister, in which also we may note how his energetic mind leads him back perforce to human feeling—

The world is all before me; but I ask
Of Nature that with which she will comply—

It is but in her summer's sun to bask,

To mingle with the quiet of her sky,

To see her gentle face without a mask,

And never gaze on it with apathy.

She was my early friend, and now shall be

My sister—till I look again on thee.

CHAPTER XV

LANDSCAPE IN RECENT POETRY-COLERIDGE,
KEATS, SHELLEY

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834) presents a new, a more complex and difficult problem to us than his four great contemporaries. Every poet's treatment of Nature, we should often remind ourselves, like his treatment of Man, must always and inevitably be governed by his whole character, his heart, and head; what, in brief, was comprehensively named by the « Greeks his os. Scott, Byron, Keats, offer little analysis of human character, little ethical interpretation of life; nor can any serious validity be justly assigned to Shelley's incoherently eloquent boyish essays in philosophy. But Coleridge, as our lamented W. H. Pater notes, in an admirable sketch,1 to which I am here indebted, was a a "subtle-souled psychologist, as Shelley calls him,". "that is, a more minute observer "than other men of the phenomena of mind." This habit, when the landscape is concerned, takes the form, Pater remarks, "of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and ex"pression of natural scenery," as if physically piercing to the inner soul of Nature; or, perhaps, in Bishop Berkeley's fashion, almost thinking of the landscape itself, or at least its beauty, as half created by the observing eye and mind; in Coleridge's own phrase

[ocr errors]

We receive but what we give,

And in our life alone does Nature live.

Hence, perhaps, his landscape rarely takes the form of descrip

1 Ward's English Poets, vol. iv.

tion as such; in exquisite hints and touches it is that we mostly find it; and hence, also, it is coloured by a peculiar and personal imaginative insight; has special reference to the human interests which constantly form the poet's subject; is deeply interfused with vital passion.

A fuller study of Coleridge's poetry is eminently needed than (I fear) it now generally receives, if his genius is to be truly felt. His work, like that of Byron or Shelley, is indeed very unequal; and the bulk of it has been unduly thrown into.. shadow by the splendour of two or three masterpieces in the region of eerie glamour, of "delicately marvellous super"naturalism" 1-miracles of "natural magic" and exquisite cadence.2 No poems since poetry began more completely than these answer the requisites for the imaginative treatment of a story, laid down with admirable judgment and mastery of language by Charles Lamb. The subject of each has so acted upon the poet, "that it has seemed to direct him"not to be arranged by him. . . . Its leading or collateral "points have impressed themselves [upon him] so tyrannically "that he dare not treat it otherwise, lest he should falsify a "revelation." From the landscape of Christabel, the Mariner, and Kubla Khan, we may first take a few-vignettes rather than pictures—which reflect well the varied weirdness which gives these poems their distinctive tone.

We begin with the opening of the mystic Christabel—
The thin gray cloud is spread on high,

It covers but not hides the sky.
The moon is behind, and at the full ;
And yet she looks both small and dull.
The night is chill, the cloud is gray :
'Tis a month before the month of May,
And the Spring comes slowly up this way.

1 W. H. Pater.

2 They assuredly love not wisely but too well, who, justly enamoured of these unique lyrics-or of the later verse bequeathed to us by Keats,-think to exalt the Masters by thrusting aside as of little or no worth the rest of their poetry. Strange and illiberal blindness which cannot see that Nature, in the child, ever prefigures the beauty of the maiden; in the rosebud, the rose! It was praise such as this which Tacitus immortalised in his terrible Pessimum inimicorum genus, laudantes.

With this compare also a later written night scene of two lovers in a wood

The stars above our heads were dim and steady,

Like eyes suffused with rapture.

Presently, as the "lovely lady" enters

There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.

Both these Christabel passages, it should be noticed, are closely founded on Miss Wordsworth's tenderly felt journals, as shown by Mr. J. D. Campbell in his excellent edition of the Poems.1 Now from the Mariner on his spellbound voyage—

Again

All in a hot and copper sky,

The bloody Sun, at noon,

Right up above the mast did stand,

No bigger than the Moon.

The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out :

At one stride comes the dark;

With far-heard whisper, o'er the sea,

Off shot the spectre-bark.

-The coming wind did roar more loud,

And the sails did sigh like sedge;

And the rain pour'd down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge.

The thick black cloud was cleft, and still

The Moon was at its side:

1 Macmillan, 1893. Beyond praise for the accuracy and research which this volume exhibits, it is impossible not to feel that the publication of the larger portion among the verses now first printed or gathered together (although often biographically interesting) would be injurious to the fame of Coleridge, if, indeed, it could be injured. Burns, Keats, Shelley, and others have suffered similar wrong. Well for the poets of old, who destroyed all their scaffoldings and sketches!

« السابقةمتابعة »