From
Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1921)
Herbert J. C. Grierson INTRODUCTION I Metaphysical poetry, in the full sense of the term, is poetry which, like that of the Divina Commedia, the De Natura Rerum, perhaps Goethe's Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe and the ro1e assigned to the human spirit in the great drama of existence. These poem were written because a definite interpretation of the riddle, the atoms of Epicurus rushing through infinite empty space, the theology of the schoolmen as elaborated in the catechetical disquisitions of St. Thomas, Spinoza's vision of life sub specie aeternitatis, beyond good and evil, laid hold on the mind and the imagination of a great poet, unified and illumined his comprehension of life, intensified and heightened his personal consciousness of' joy and sorrow, of hope and fear, by broadening their significance, revealing to him in the history of' his own soul a brief abstract of' the drama of human destiny. 'Poetry is the first and last of' all knowledge-it is as immortal as the heart of man.' Its themes are the simplest experiences of the surface of life, sorrow and joy, love and battle, the peace of the country, the bustle and stir of towns, but equally the boldest conceptions, the profoundest intuitions, the subtlest and most complex classifications and 'discourse of reason ', if into these too the poet can 'carry sensation ', make of them passionate experiences communicable in vivid and moving imagery, in rich and varied harmony. |
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It
is no such great metaphysical poetry as that of Lucretius and Dante that
the present essay deals with, which this volume seeks to illustrate. Of
the poets from whom it culls, Donne is familiar with the definitions and
dimensions of Mediaeval Scholasticism; Cowley's bright and alert, if not
profound mind, is attracted by the achievements of science and the systematic
materialism of Hobbes. Donne, moreover, is metaphysical not only in virtue
of his scholasticism, but by his deep reflective interest in the experiences
of which his poetry is the expression, the new psychological curiosity
with which he writes of love and religion. The divine poets who follow
Donne have each the inherited metaphysic, if one may so call it, of the
Church to which he is attached, Catholic or Anglican. But none of the
poets has for his main theme a metaphysic like that of Epicurus or St.
Thomas passionately apprehended and imaginatively expounded. Donne, the
most thoughtful and imaginative of them all, is more aware of disintegration
than of comprehensive harmony, of the clash between the older physics
and metaphysics on the one hand and the new science of Copernicus and
Galileo and Vesalius and Bacon on the other:
The greatest English
poet, indeed, of the century was, or believed himself to be, a philosophical
or theological poet of the same order as Dante. Paradise Lost
was written to be a justification of 'the ways of God to men ', resting
on a theological system as definite and almost as carefully articulated
in the De Doctrina Christiana as that which Dante had accepted
from the Summa of Aquinas. And the poet embodied his argument in a dramatic
poem as vividly and intensely conceived, as magnificently and harmoniously
set forth, as the Divina Commedia. But in truth Milton was no
philosopher. The subtleties of theological definition and inference
eluded his rationalistic, practical, though idealistic, mind. He proved
nothing. The definitely stated argument of the poem is an obvious begging
of the question. What he did was to create, or give a new definiteness
and sensible power to, a great myth which, through his poem, continued
for a century or more to dominate the mind and imagination of pious
protestants without many of them suspecting the heresies which lurked
beneath the imposing and dazzling poem in which was retold the Bible
story of the fall and redemption of man. Metaphysical in
this large way, Donne and his followers to Cowley are not, yet the word
describes better whet is the peculiar quality of their poetry than any
other, e.g. fantastic, for Foray may he fantastic in so many different
ways, witness Skelton and the Elizabethans, and Hood and Browning. It
lays stress on the right things-the survival, one might say the reaccentuation,
of the metaphysical strain, the concetti metafisici ad ideali as Testi
calls them in contrast to the simpler imagery of classical poetry, of
mediaeval Italian poetry; the more intellectual, less verbal, character
of their wit compared with the conceits of-the Elizabethans ; the finer
psychology of which their conceits are often the expression; their learned
imagery; the argumentative, subtle evolution of their lyrics; above
all the peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination
which is their greatest achievement, Passionate thinking is always apt
to become metaphysical, probing and investigating the experience from
which it takes its rise. All these qualities are in the poetry of Donne,
and Donne is the great master of English poetry in the seventeenth century. The Italian influence which Wyatt and Surrey brought into English poetry at the Renaissance gave it a more serious, a more thoughtful colour. They caught, especially Wyatt in some of the finest of his sonnets and songs, that spirit of 'high seriousness' which Chaucer with all his admiration of Italian poetry had failed to apprehend. English medieval poetry is often gravely pious, haunted by the fear of death and the judgement, melancholy over the ' Falls of Princes '; it is never serious and thoughtful in the introspective, reflective, dignified manner which it became in Wyatt and Sackville, and our ' sage and serious' Spenser, and in the songs of the first group of Elizabethan courtly poets, Sidney and Raleigh and Dyer. One has but to recall 'My lute, awake ! Perform the last ', 'Forget not yet the tried intent', 'My mind to me a kingdom is' and to contrast them in mind with the songs which Henry VIII and Cornish were still composing and singing when Wyatt began to write, in order to realize what Italy and the Renaissance did to deepen the strain of English lyric poetry as that had flowed under French influence from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. But French influence, the influence of Ronsard and his fellows, renewed itself in the seventies, and the great body of Elizabethan song is as gay and careless and impersonal is the earlier lyric had been, though richer in colour and more varied in rhythm. Then came Donne and Jonson (the schoolman and the classical scholar, one might say, emphasizing for the moment single aspects of their work), and new qualities of spirit and form were given to lyrical poetry, and not to lyrical poetry done. In dealing with
poets who lived and wrote before the eighteenth century we are always
confronted with the difficulty of recovering the personal, the biographical
element, which, if sometimes disturbing and disconcerting, is yet essential
to a complete understanding of their work. Men were not different from
whet they are now, and if there he hardly a lyric of Goethe's or Shelley's
that does not owe something to the accidents of their lives, one may
feel sure it was in varying degrees the same with poets three hundred
years ago. Poems are not written by influences or movements or sources,
but come from the living hearts of men. Fortunately, in the use of Donne,
one of the most individual of poets, it is possible to some extent to
reproduce the circumstances, the inner experience· from which
his intensely personal poetry flowed. The record of these
early years is contained in Donne's satires--harsh, witty, lucid, full
of a young man's scorn of fools and low callings, and a young thinker's
consciousness of the problems of religion in an age of divided Faiths,
and of justice in a corrupt world-and in his Love songs and Sonnets
and Elegies. The satires were more generally known; the love poems the
more influential in courtly and literary circles. |
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Donne's
genius, temperament, and learning gave to his love poems certain qualities
which immediately arrested attention and have given them ever since a
power at once fascinating and disconcerting despite the faults of phrasing
and harmony which, for a century after Dryden, obscured, and to some still
outweigh, their poetic worth. The first of these is a depth and range
of feeling unknown to the majority of Elizabethan sonneteers and song-writers.
Over all the Elizabethan sonnets, in greater or less measure, hangs the
suggestion of translation or imitation. Watson, Sidney, Daniel, Spenser,
Drayton, Lodge, all of them, with rarer or more frequent touch of individuality,
are pipers of Petrarch's woes, sighing in the strain of Ronsard or more
often of Desportes. Shakespeare, indeed, in his great sequence, and Drayton
in at any rate one sonnet, sounded a deeper notes revealed a fuller sense
of the complexities and contradictions of passionate devotion. But Donne's
treatment of love is entirely unconventional except when he chooses to
dally half ironically with the convention of Petrarchian adoration. His
songs are the expression in unconventional, witty language of all the
moods of a lover that experience and imagination have taught him to understand-sensuality
aerated by a brilliant wit; fascination and scornful anger inextricably
blended:
the passionate joy of mutual and contented love:
the sorrow of parting which is the shadow of such joy; the gentler pathos of temporary separation in married life:
the mystical heights and the mystical depths of love:
If Donne had expressed this wide range of intense feeling as perfectly as he has done at times poignantly and startlingly; if he had given to his poems the same impression of entire artistic sincerity that Shakespeare conveys in the greater of his sonnets and Drayton once achieved; if to his many other gifts had been added a deeper and more controlling sense of beauty, he would have been, as he nearly is, the greatest of love poets. But there is a second quality of his poetry, which made it the fashion of an age, but has been inimical to its general acceptance ever since, and that is its metaphysical wit. "He affects the metaphysics," says Dryden, "not only in his satires but in his amorous verses where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softnesses of love.' ' Amorous verses ', ' the fair sex ', and ' the softnesses of love" are the vulgarities of a less poetic and passionate age than Donne's, but metaphysics he does affect. But a metaphysical strand, concetti metafisici ad ideali, had run through the mediaeval love poetry of which the Elizabethan sonnets are a descendant. It had attained its fullest development in the poems of Dante and his school, had been subordinated to rhetoric and subtleties of expression rather than thought in Petrarch, and had lost itself in the pseudo-metaphysical extravagances of Tebaldeo, Carlteo, and Serafino. Donne was no conscious reviver of the metaphysics of Dante, but to the game of elaborating fantastic conceits and hyperboles which was the fashion throughout Europe, he brought not only a fullblooded temperament and acute mind, but a vast and growing store of the same scholastic learning, the same Catholic theology, as controlled Dante's thought, jostling already with the new learning of Copernicus and Paracelsus. The result is startling and disconcerting,-the comparison of parted lovers to the legs of a pair of compasses, the deification of his mistress by the discovery that she is only to be defined by negatives or that she can read the thoughts of his heart, a thing ' beyond an angel's art'; and a thousand other subtleties of quintessences and nothingness, the mixture of souls and the significance of numbers, to say nothing of the aerial bodies of angels, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and non abstantes 'late schoolboys and sour prentices ', ' the king's real and his stamped face '. But the effect aimed at and secured is not entirely fantastic and erudite. The motive inspiring Donne's images is in part the same as that which led Shakespeare from the picturesque, natural and mythological images of A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, to the homely but startling phrases and metaphors of Hamlet and Macbeth, the "blanket of the dark ," the
' the rank sweat of an enseamed bed '. It is the same desire for vivid and dramatic expression. The great master at a later period of dramatic as well as erudite pulpit oratory coins in his poems many a startling, jarring, arresting phrase:
These vivid, simple,
realistic touches are too quickly merged in learned and fantastic elaborations,
and the final effect of every poem of Donne's is a bizarre and blended
one; but if the greatest poetry rises clear of the bizarre, the fantastic,
yet very great poetry may be bizarre if it be the expression of a strangely
blended temperament, an intense motion, a vivid imagination.
The wrenching of accent which Johnson complained of is not entirely due to carelessness or indifference. It has often both a rhetorical and a harmonious justification. Donne plays with rhythmical effects as with conceits and words and often in much the same way. Mr. Fletcher Melton's interesting analysis of his verse has not, I think, established his main thesis, which like so many "research" scholars he over-emphasizes, that the whole mystery of Donne's art lies in his use of the same sound now in arsis, now in thesis; but his examples show that this is one of many devices by which Donne secures two effects, the troubling of the regular fall of the verse stresses by the intrusion of rhetorical stress on syllables which the metrical pattern leaves unstressed, and, secondly, an echoing and re-echoing of similar sounds parallel to his fondness for resemblance in thoughts and things apparently the most remote from one another. There is, that is to say, in his verse the same blend as in his diction of the colloquial and the bizarre. He writes as one who will say what he has to say without regard to conventions of poetic diction or smooth verse, but what he has to say is subtle and surprising, and so are the metrical effects with which it is presented. There is nothing of unconscious or merely careless harshness in such an effect as this:
In Donne's pronunciation,
as in southern English to-day, ' thou ', ' how ', 'soul ', 'know ',
'though', and 'so' were not far removed from each other in sound and
the reiterated notes ring through the lines like a tolling bell. Mr.
Melton has collected, and any careful reader may discover for himself,
many similar subtleties of poetical rhetoric; for Donne is perhaps our
first great master of poetic rhetoric, of poetry used, as Dryden and
Pope were to use it, for effects of oratory rather than of song, and
the advance which Dryden achieved was secured by subordinating to oratory
the more passionate and imaginative qualities which troubled the balance
and movement of Donne's packed but imaginative rhetoric. It was not indeed
in lyrical verse that Dryden followed and developed Donne, but in his
eulogistic, elegiac, satirical, and epistolary verse. The progress of
Dryden's eulogistic style is traceable from his earliest metaphysical
extravagances through lines such as those addressed to the Duchess of
York, where Waller is his model, to the verses on the death of Oldham
in which a more natural and classical strain has entirely superseded
his earlier extravagances and elegancies. In truth Donne's metaphysical
eulogies and elegies and epistles are a hard nut to crack for his most
sympathetic admirers. And yet they have undeniable qualities. The metaphysics
are developed in a more serious, a less paradoxical, strain than in
some of the songs and elegies. In his letters he is an excellent, if
far from a perfect, talker in verse; and the personality which they
reveal is a singularly charming one, grave, loyal, melancholy, witty.
If some of the elegiac pieces are packed with tasteless and extravagant
hyperboles, the Anniversaries (especially the second) remains, despite
all its faults, one of the greatest poems on death in the language,
the fullest record in our literature of the disintegrating collision
in a sensitive mind of the old tradition and the new learning. Some
of the invocational passages in Of the Progress of the Soul are among
the finest examples of his subtle and passionate thinking as well as
of his most elaborate verse rhetoric. But the most intense and personal of Donne's poems, after the love songs and elegies, are his later religious sonnets and songs and their influence on subsequent poetry was even more obvious and potent. They are as personal and as tormented as his earlier 'love-song weeds ', for his spiritual Aeneid was a troubled one. To date his conversion to Anglicanism is not easy. In his satires there is a veiled Roman tone. By 1602 he disclaims to Egerton "all love of a corrupt religion," but in the autumn of the previous year he had been meditating a satire on Queen Elizabeth as one of the world's great heretics. His was not a conversion but a reconciliation, an acquiescence in the faith of his country, the established religion of his legal sovereign, and the act cost him some pangs. "A convert from Popery to Protestantism,' said Dr. Johnson, "gives up as much of what he has held as sacred as anything that he retains, there is so much laceration of mind in such a conversion, that it can hardly be sincere and lasting.' Something of that laceration of mind is discernible in Donne's religious verse:
But the conflict between the old and the reformed faiths was not the only, nor perhaps the principal trouble for Donne's enlightened mind ready to recognize in all the Churches "virtual beams of one sun', 'connatural pieces of one circle'. A harder fight was that between the secular, the ' man of the world" temper of his mind and the claims of a pious and ascetic calling. It was not the errors of his youth, as the good Walton supposed, which constituted the great stumbling block-though he never ignores these:
It was rather the
temperament of one who, at a time when a public career was more open
to unassisted talent, might have proved an active and useful, if ambitious,
civil servant, or professional man, at war with the claims of a religious
life which his upbringing had taught him was incompatible with worldly
ambition. George Herbert, a much more contented Anglican than Donne
ever became, knew something of the same struggle before he bent his
neck to the collar.
In the remaining
six lines the same sound never recurs. A metaphysical,
a philosophical poet, to the degree to which even his contemporary Fulke
Greville might be called such, Donne was not. The thought in his poetry
is not his primary concern but the feeling. No scheme of thought, no
interpretation of life became for him a complete and illuminating experience.
The central theme of his poetry is ever his own intense personal moods,
as a lover, a friend, an analyst of his own experiences worldly and
religious. His philosophy cannot unify these experiences. It represents
the reaction of his restless and acute mind on the intense experience
of the moment, a reading of it in the light now of one, now of another
philosophical or theological dogma or thesis caught from his multifarious
reading, developed with audacious paradox or more serious intention,
as an expression, an illumination of that mood to himself and to his
reader. Whether one choose to call him a metaphysical or a fantastic
poet, the stress must be laid on the word 'poet '. Whether verse or
prose be his medium, Donne is always a poet, a creature of feeling and
imagination, seeking expression in vivid phrase and complex harmonies,
whose acute and subtle intellect was the servant, if sometimes the unruly
servant, of passion and imagination. |
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II Donne's influence was felt in his own day by two strangely different classes of men, both attached by close ties to the Court. For the Court, the corrupt, ambitious, intriguing, dissolute but picturesque and dazzling court of the old pagan Elizabeth, the pedantic and drunken James, the dignified and melancholy and politically blinded Charles, was the centre round which all Donne's secular interests revolved. He can speak of it as bitterly and sardonically as Shakespeare in Hamlet:
He knows its corruptions as well as Milton and commends Lady Bedford as Milton might have commended Alice Egerton. All the same, to be shut out from the Court in the city or the country, is to inhabit a desert, or sepulchre, for there:
It was among the younger generation of Courtiers that Donne found the warmest admirers of his paradoxical and sensual audacities as a 1ove-poeh as it was the divines who looked to Laud and the Court for Anglican doctrine and discipline who revered his memory, enshrined by the pious Izaak Walton, as of a divine poet and preacher. The 'metaphysicals' were all on the King's side. Even Andrew Marvell was neither Puritan nor Republican. ' Men ought to have trusted God', was his final judgement on the Rebellion, 'they ought to have trusted the King with the whole matter '. They were on the side of the King, for they were on the side of the humanities; and the Puritan rebellion, whatever the indirect constitutional results, was in itself and at the moment a fanatical upheaval, successful because it also threw up the John Zizka of his age; its triumph was the triumph of Cromwell's sword.
To call these
poets the ' school of Donne' or ' metaphysical ' poets may easily mislead
if one takes either phrase in too full a sense. It is not only time
they show little of Donne's subtlety of mind or ' hydroptic, immoderate
thirst of human learning ', but they want, what gives its interest to
this subtle and fantastic misapplication of learning,--the complexity
of mood, the range of personal feeling which lends such fullness of
life to Donne's strange and troubled poetry. His followers, amorous
and courtly, or pious and ecclesiastical, move in a more rarefied atmosphere
I their poetry is much more truly ' abstract' than Donne's, the witty
and fantastic elaboration of one or two common moods, of compliment,
passion, devotion, penitence. It is very rarely that one can detect
a deep persona[ note in the delightful lovesongs with which the whole
period abounds from Carew to Dryden. The collected work of none of them
would give such an impression of a real history behind it, a history
of many experiences and moods, as Donne's Songs and Sonnets and
the Elegies, and, as one must still believe, the sonnets of Shakespeare
record. Like the Elizabethan sonneteers they all dress and redress the
same theme in much the same manner, though the manner is not quite the
Elizabethan, nor the theme. Song has superseded the 'sonnet, and the
passion of which they sing has lost most of the Petrarchian, chivalrous
strain, and become in a very definite meaning of the words, ' simple
and sensuous'. And if the religious poets are rather more individual
and personal, the personal note is less intense, troubled and complex
than in Donne'a Divine Poems I the individual is more merged in the
Christian, Catholic or Anglican. Donne and Jonson are probably in the main responsible for the unconventional purity and naturalness of their diction, for these had both 'shaken hands with' Spenserian archaism and strangeness, with the ' rhetoric' of the sonneteers and poems like Venus and Adonis and their style is untouched by any foreshadowing of Miltonic diction or the jargon of a later poetic vocabulary. The metaphysicals are the masters of the ' neutral style ', of a diction equally appropriate, according as it may be used, to prose and verse. If purity and naturalness of style is a grace, they deserved well of the English language, for few poets have used it with a more complete acceptance of the established tradition of diction and idiom. There are no poets till we come perhaps to Cowper, and he has not quite escaped from jargon, or Shelley, and his imagination operates in a more ethereal atmosphere, whose style is so entirely that of an English gentleman of the best type, natural, simple, occasionally careless, but never diverging into vulgar colloquialism, as after the Restoration, or into conventional, tawdry splendour, as in the century of Allenside and Erasmus Darwin. Set a poem by George Herbert beside Gray at his best, e.g.
"The language
of the age is never the language of poetry," Gray declares, and
certainly some of our great poets have created for themselves a diction
which was never current, but it is equally true that some of the best
English poetry bus been written in a style which differs from the best
spoken language only as the language of feeling will naturally diverge
from the language of our less exalted moods. It was in the seventeenth-century
poets that Wordsworth found the best corrective to the jargon of the
later eighteenth-century poetry, descriptive and reflective, which he
admired in his youth and imitated in his early poems; for as Coleridge
pointed out, the style of the 'metaphysicals ' 'is the reverse of that
which distinguishes too many of our most recent versifiers; the one
conveying the most fantastic thoughts in the most correct language,
the other in the most fantastic language conveying the most trivial
thoughts '.
is a fresh and
effective appeal to the heart of a woman. And this in what the metaphysicals
are often doing in their unwearied play with conceits, delightfully
naughty, extravagant, fantastic, frigid-they succeed in stumbling upon
some conceit which reveals a fresh intuition into the heart, or states
an old plea with new and prevailing force. And the divine poets express
with the same blend of argument and imagination the deep and complex
currents of religious feeling which were flowing in England throughout
the century, institutional, theological, mystical, while in the metaphysical
subtleties of conceit they found something that is more than conceit,
symbols in which to express or adumbrate their apprehensions of the
infinite. The direct indebtedness of the courtly poets to Ben Jonson is probably, as Professor Gregory Smith has recently argued, small. But not only Herrick, metaphysical poets like Carew and Stanley and others owe much both of their turn of conceit and their care for form to Jonson's own models, the Latin lyrists, Anacreon, the Greek Anthology, neo-Latin or Humanist poetry so rich in neat and pretty conceits. Some of them, as Crashaw and Stanley, and not only these, were familiar with Italian and Spanish poetry, Marino and Garcilasso and their elegantly elaborated confections. But their great master is Donne. If he taught them many heresies, he instilled into them at any ate the pure doctrine of the need of passion for a lover and a poet. What the young courtiers and university wits admired and reproduced in different degrees and fashions were his sensual audacity and the peculiar type of evolution which his poems accentuated, the strain of passionate paradoxical reasoning which knits the first line to the last and is perhaps a more intimate characteristic than even the far-fetched, fantastic comparisons. This intellectual, argumentative evolution had been of course a feature of the sonnet which might fancifully be called, with its double quatrain and sestet, the poetical analogy of the syllogism. But the movement of the sonnet is slow and meditative, a single thought expanded and articulated through the triple division, and the longer, decasyllabic line is the appropriate medium:
The audacious hyperboles
and paradoxical turns of thought give breath to and take wings from
the soaring rhythm. It is needless
here to dwell at length on the several poets from whom l have selected
examples of love-song and complimentary verses. Their range is not wide-love,
compliment, elegy, occasionally devotion. Herrick had to leave the court
to learn the delights of nature and country superstitions. Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, philosopher and coxcomb, was just the person to dilate
on the Platonic theme of soul and body in the realm of love on which
Donne occasionally descanted in half ironical fashion, Habington with
tedious thin-blooded seriousness, Cleveland and others with naughty
irreverence. But Lord Herbert's Ode, which has been, like most of his
poems, very badly edited, seems to me the finest thing inspired by Donne's
and more characteristic of the romantic taste of the court of Charles.
But the poetic ornament of that Court is Thomas Carew. This young careless
liver was a careful artist with a deeper vein of thought and feeling
in his temperament than a first reading suggests. His masque reveals
the influence of Bruno. In Carew's poems and Vandyke's pictures the
artistic taste of Charles's court is vividly reflected, a dignified
voluptuousness, an exquisite elegance, if in some of the higher qualities
of man and artist Carew is as inferior to Wyatt or Spenser as Vandyke
is to Holbein. His Ecstasy is the most daring and poetically the happiest
of the imitations of Donne's clever if outrageous elegies; Cartwright's
Song of Dalliance is its nearest rival. His letter to Aurelian Townshead
on the death of the King of Sweden breathes the very enchanted air of
Charles's court while the storm was brewing as yet unsuspected. The
text of Richard Lovelace's Lucasta (1649) is frequently corrupt, and
the majority of the poems are careless and extravagant, but the few
good things are the finest expression of honour and chivalry in all
the Cavalier poetry of the century, the only poems which suggest what
'Cavalier' came to mean when glorified by defeat. His Grasshopper has
suffered a hard fate by textual corruption and from dismemberment in
recent anthologies. Only the fantastic touch about ' green ice ' ranks
it as ' metaphysical ', for it is in fact an experiment in the manner
of the Horatian ode, not the heroic ode, but the lighter Epicurean,
meditative strain of 'Solvitur acris hiems ' and ' Vides ut alta stet
nive candidum ', description yielding abruptly to reflection. A slightly
better text or a little more care on the poet's part would have made
it perfect. The gayest of the group is Sir John Suckling, the writer
of what should be called vers de societe, a more careless but more fanciful
Prior. His beautiful Ballad on a Wedding is a little outside the scope
of this volume. Thomas Stanley, classical scholar, philosopher, translator,
seems to me one of the happiest of recent recoveries, elegant, graceful,
felicitous, and if at times a little flat and colourless, not always
flat like the Catholic puritan William Habington.
and I might have claimed The Nymph and the Faun had space permitted. But his few love poems and his few devotional pieces are perfect exponents of all the 'metaphysical ' qualities-passionate, paradoxical argument, touched with humour and learned imagery:
and above all the sudden soar of passion in bold and felicitous image, in clangorous lines:
in the seventeenth century. But in that century there were so many poets who could sing, at least occasionally, in the same strain. Of all those whom Professor Saintsbury's ardent and catholic but discriminating taste has collected there is none who has not written too much indifferent verse, but none who has not written one or two songs showing the same fine blend of passion and paradox and music. The 'metaphysicals ' of the seventeenth century combined two things, both soon to pass away, the fantastic dialectics of mediaeval love poetry and the ' simple, sensuous' strain which they caught from the classics-soul and body lightly yoked and glad to run and soar together in the winged chariot of Pegasus. Modern love poetry has too often sacrificed both to sentiment.
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