Complete Poetical Works of a E Housman

by A E Housman

  The blackbird has fled to another retreat

  Where the hazels afford him a screen from the heat,

  And the scene where his melody charmed me before

  Resounds with his sweet-sounding ditty no more.

  But it was notably unsure of foot, and seldom went without stumbling for much more than four lines at a time: it was for ever collapsing into such meanness as this:

  There is mercy in every place,

  And mercy, encouraging thought!

  Gives even affliction a grace

  And reconciles man to his lot.

  Yet this is almost the very stanza which Swinburne dignified and strengthened till it yielded a combination of speed and magnificence which nothing in English had possessed before.

  Out of Dindymus heavily laden

  Her lions draw bound and unfed

  A mother, a mortal, a maiden,

  A queen over death and the dead.

  She is cold, and her habit is lowly,

  Her temple of branches and sods;

  Most fruitful and virginal, holy,

  A mother of gods.

  She hath wasted with fire thine high places

  She hath hidden and marred and made sad

  The fair limbs of the Loves, the fair faces

  Of gods that were goodly and glad.

  She slays, and her hands are not bloody;

  She moves as a moon in the wane,

  White-robed, and thy raiment is ruddy,

  Our Lady of Pain.

  Other stanzas he invented for it, to display its capacities.

  In the darkening and whitening

  Abysses adored,

  With dayspring and lightning

  For lamp and for sword,

  God thunders in heaven, and his angels are red with the wrath of the Lord.

  There lived a singer in France of old

  By the tideless dolorous midland sea.

  In a land of sand and ruin and gold

  There shone one woman, and none but she.

  And finding life for her love’s sake fail,

  Being fain to see her, he bade set sail,

  Touched land, and saw her as life grew cold,

  And praised God, seeing; and so died he.

  True, the anapaestic rhythm, even when invested by a master with these alluring splendours, is not, in English, the best vehicle for poetry. Better poetry has been written in iambics and trochaics than will ever be written in anapaests; but still it is an unparalleled achievement, at so late a period of the literature, to have added this new and resonant string to the lyre.

  In the second place, not only did he create new metres but he recreated old; and in particular he resuscitated the heroic couplet. It might have been thought, after all the practitioners through whose hands this measure had passed, that nothing remained for it but decent burial. The valley was full of bones; and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and lo, they were very dry. The form which the couplet had taken in the seventeenth century it retained to the nineteenth, and the innovations or reactions of Leigh Hunt and Keats were not improvements. Upon these dry bones Swinburne brought up new flesh and breathed into them a new spirit. In the hands of the last considerable poet who had used it, the metre still went to the tune of Pope and Dryden:

  Night wanes – the vapours round the mountains curl’d,

  Melt into morn, and Light awakes the world.

  Man has another day to swell the past,

  And lead him near to little, but his last;

  But mighty Nature bounds as from her birth,

  The sun is in the heavens, and life on earth;

  Flowers in the valley, splendour in the beam,

  Health on the gale, and freshness in the stream.

  Immortal man! behold her glories shine,

  And cry, exulting inly, “They are thine!”

  Gaze on, while yet thy gladden’d eye may see,

  A morrow comes when they are not for thee;

  And grieve what may above thy senseless bier,

  Nor earth nor sky will yield a single tear;

  Nor cloud shall gather more, nor leaf shall fall,

  Nor gale breathe forth one sigh for thee, for all;

  But creeping things shall revel in their spoil,

  And fit thy clay to fertilise the soil.

  These lines are much above Byron’s average; they say something worth saying, and they say it capably and with emotion; but their structure is still formal, and their vocabulary a trifle poor. Now take Swinburne:

  Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be

  As the rose born of one same blood with thee,

  As a song sung, as a word said, and fall

  Flower-wise, and be not any more at all,

  Nor any memory of thee anywhere;

  For never Muse has bound above thine hair

  The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows

  All summer kinship of the mortal rose

  And colour of deciduous days, nor shed

  Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head,

  Nor reddened brows made pale by floral grief

  With splendid shadow from that lordlier leaf.

  It is hardly recognisable as the same metre. You are free to like it less: it is less brisk and forthright, but its fulness and richness and variety are qualities of which one would never have supposed the couplet to be capable.

  In the third place he possessed an altogether unexampled command of rhyme, the chief enrichment of modern verse. The English language is comparatively poor in rhymes, and most English poets, when they have to rhyme more than two or three words together, betray their embarrassment. They betray it, for instance, when they write sonnets after the strict Petrarchian rule: the poetical inferiority of most English sonnets, if compared with what their own authors have achieved in other forms of verse, is largely though not entirely the result of this difficulty. Milton is embarrassed by it; Wordsworth, though probably the best of our sonneteers, is pitiably embarrassed, and driven to end the noblest of his sonnets with a wretched tag about ‘titles manifold’; Rossetti, our most determined workman in this line, dissimulates his embarrassment by inventing, for the purpose of sonnet-writing, a jargon in which every word is so unnatural that the words which form the rhymes are no more unnatural than the rest and so give rise to no special wonder. To Swinburne the sonnet was child’s play: the task of providing four rhymes was not hard enough, and he wrote long poems in which each stanza required eight or ten rhymes, and wrote them so that he never seemed to be saying anything for the rhyme’s sake. His pre-eminence was most remarkable in the mastery of feminine rhymes, as we call them, rhymes of two syllables. Before Swinburne, few English poets had used them much, few without doing themselves an injury. They would start swimmingly enough:

  How delicious is the winning

  Of a kiss at love’s beginning,

  When two mutual hearts are sighing

  For the knots there’s no untying.

  But unless they make up their mind to desert the scheme it would generally entice them to use words they would rather not have used:

  Yet remember, ‘midst your wooing,

  Love has bliss, but love has ruing,

  Other smiles may make you fickle,

  Tears for other charms may trickle.

  The word trickle, in that verse, is not preferred to the word flow because of its intrinsic merit, but for quite another reason. Swinburne’s language, no doubt, is often wanting in clearness and aptness, but that defect is never caused by any difficulty in finding feminine rhymes: they come at call as readily as any other. I will mention one significant detail. The ordinary versifier, if he employs feminine rhymes, makes great use of words ending with ing: they are the largest class of these rhymes, and they form his mainstay. Swinburne, so plentiful and ready to hand were his stores, almost disdains this expedient: in all the four hundred and forty lines of Dolores, for example, he only twice resorts to it.

&n
bsp; The ornament of verse especially associated with the name of Swinburne is alliteration. This of course was no invention of his. Not to speak of the old poetry extinguished by Chaucer and his rhymes, whose very base was alliteration, this artifice had been used, and even used to excess, by many earlier poets than Swinburne. The greatest of our poets did not largely avail themselves of its aid: in Milton, for instance, its appearance is sporadic and sometimes even, one would say, unintentional: we are arrested and surprised at encountering now and then such lines as these:

  Fairer than feigned of old or fabled since

  Of fairy damsels met in forest wide

  By Knights of Logres or of Lyones,

  Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

  The first English poet to employ alliteration methodically and scientifically was Gray, and after Gray it was most systematically practised by Tennyson: in Gray it is perhaps less effective than one might expect, and in Tennyson, though effective, it is rather too prominent and ubiquitous. Swinburne, in much of his writing, employed the artifice so profusely, so wastefully, and indeed so ignorantly, that in the end he brought it into disrepute and sent it out of fashion. The proper function of alliteration is to add speed and force to the motion of verse. How it should be applied, if it is to compass these ends, is a matter on which I might say a good deal; but that belongs rather to a paper on the artifice of versification than to a paper on Swinburne. From Swinburne I will take one example, and I might take hundreds, of how it should not be applied.

  Many a long blithe wave

  Buoyed their blithe bark between the bare bald rocks

  Deep, steep, and still, save for the swift free flocks…

  but that is enough. Those verses make on the ear and mind two immediate impressions: they are cumbrous and they are artificial; and if they are analysed it will be found that their unskilful artifice is the chief cause of their cumbrousness. They are the work of a craftsman who has forgotten his trade; who has lost sight of the end proposed, and who actually defeats the end by mechanically hammering away at the means. This is mere bungling; but in the celebrated stanzas about the lilies and languors of virtue and the raptures and roses of vice, though the artifice is rather crude and obvious, the effect is nevertheless attained: the verse, though it pays a price for them, does gain force and rapidity. In his best time he used alliteration, never indeed with perfect art, but still with some rectitude of instinct: this he lost in his later years, as he lost almost everything else. He had deafened himself with his own noise, till his verse became downright unpleasant to ears which were still open. His growing obtuseness of perception showed itself most clearly in his employment of trochaic rhythms. This metre he had never written so skilfully as iambics or anapaests, and in the end he may be said to have written it worse than anyone had ever written it before. The parody of Laura Matilda in the Rejected Addresses is not exactly good verse; but it is better verse than Swinburne’s poem on Grace Darling.

  If you turn from his versification to his diction, the case is much the same, though it cannot be examined in the same detail. The first impression produced by his style, as it was in 1866, is one of great and even overpowering richness. He seemed to have ransacked all the treasuries of the language and melted down the whole plunder into a new and gorgeous amalgam. In the poems of his later life his style was threadbare. It had not become austere: it was as voluble and diffuse as ever, but it had ceased to be rich and various. The torrent streamed on, but it streamed from an impoverished vocabulary, and consisted of a dwindled stock of words repeated again and again. A few favourite epithets were conferred on all manner of different things, instead of different and truly descriptive epithets. If he admired something very much he would not wait to find a word indicative of its quality, but he would call it ‘god-like’; upon which one of his critics observed that, in view of Mr Swinburne’s theological opinions, to call a thing god-like must be very much the same as calling it devilish good. If an epithet struck him as pretty in itself he would work it to death by associating it with objects to which it had no special appropriateness; and it would be interesting to draw up a list of the various unlike things which he has called ‘sun-bright’ or ‘flower-soft’ or ‘deep as the sea’. This is a fashion of speaking which attains its legitimate culmination in the conversational style of the British workman, who thinks that no noun should be without its adjective, and that one adjective is suitable to every noun.

  But even in the days of its early freshness and abundance his diction has the fault that amidst all its magnificence it did not ring quite true: it would not sustain comparison even with the best contemporary poetry, the best of Tennyson’s and Matthew Arnold’s, no, nor the best of Coventry Patmore’s and Christina Rossetti’s. Speaking broadly, it was a diction of the same cast as Pope’s. The differences between the two are evident and striking; but their differences are less essential than their resemblance in this point – that they both run in a groove. They impose upon all thought and feeling a set mode of speech: they are mannerisms, and consequently they are imitable. Pope’s diction was long imitated successfully; Swinburne’s was imitated successfully, but not long, because those who were clever enough to imitate it were also clever enough to see it was not well worth imitating.

  In fact, what Swinburne wrote, and what Pope and Dryden wrote, was not, in the strictest sense of the word, poetry. It was often capital stuff, and to the taste of their contemporaries it was better than the best poetry. But time went on, and the power of its spell was found to wane; its appeal was not to the core of the human mind and the unalterable element in its constitution. I suppose that most people, while admitting that Swinburne’s poetry is less poetical than Milton’s or even than Tennyson’s, would maintain that on the other hand it is much more poetical than Pope’s or even Dryden’s. Well, I think so too; but I cannot feel sure that I am right in thinking so. The atmosphere of taste in which Swinburne’s poetry grew up is not yet altogether dispersed: we ourselves grew up in it, and we have not all grown out of it. But if permanency is any test of merit, then we must remark that the poetry inaugurated by Dryden was supreme for a century and a half, while the influence of Swinburne spent itself within five and twenty years. It began in 1865, it reached its height before 1880, by 1890 there was not much left of it. Here of course it must be borne in mind that Pope and Dryden had two strings to their bow and Swinburne had only one. If Pope’s and Dryden’s verse were not poetry at all, they still would be very great men of letters and representatives of their age. Their sense, their wit, their knowledge of life and men, and their eminence in those merits which poetry shares with prose, would still preserve for their verse a high place in literature. But if Swinburne’s verse had not poetical merit, it would have no merit at all.

  Poetry, which in itself is simply a tone of the voice, a particular way of saying things, is mainly concerned with three great provinces. First, with human affection, and those emotions which we assign to the heart: no one could say that Swinburne succeeded or excelled in this province. The next province is the world of thought; the contemplation of life and the universe: in this province Swinburne’s ideas and reflections are not indeed identical with those of Mrs Hemans, but they belong to the same intellectual order as hers: unwound from their cocoon of words they are either superficial or second-hand. Last, there is the province of external nature as perceived by our senses; and on this I must dwell for a little, because there is one department of external nature which Swinburne is supposed to have made his own: the sea.

  The sea, to be sure, is a large department; and that is how it succeeded in attracting Swinburne’s attention; for he seldom noticed any object of external nature unless it was very large, very brilliant, or very violently coloured. But the sea as an object of poetry is somewhat barren. Those poets who have a true eye for nature and a sure pen for describing it, spend few words describing the sea; and their few words describe it better than Swinburne’s thousands. It is historically certain that he
had seen the sea, but if it were not, it could not with certainty have been inferred from his descriptions: they might have been written by a man who had never been outside Warwickshire. Descriptions of nature equally accurate, though not equally eloquent, have actually been composed by persons blind from their birth, merely by combining anew the words and phrases which they have had read to them from books. When Swinburne writes thus –

  And the night was alive and anhungered of life as a tiger from toils cast free:

  And a rapture of rage made joyous the spirit and strength of the soul of the sea.

  All the weight of the wind bore down on it, freighted with death for fraught:

  And the keen waves kindled and quickened as things transfigured or things distraught.

  And madness fell on them laughing and leaping; and madness came on the wind:

  And the might and the light and the darkness of storm were as storm in the heart of Ind.

  Such glory, such terror, such passion, as lighten and harrow the far fierce East,

  Rang, shone, spake, shuddered around us: the night was an altar with death for priest –

  it would be cruel to set against such a passage a single line of Tennyson’s or a single epithet of Shakespeare’s: I take instead a snatch of verse whose author few of you know and most of you never heard of:

  Hurry me, Nymphs, O, hurry me

  Far above the grovelling sea,

  Which, with blind weakness and bass roar

  Casting his white age on the shore,

  Wallows along that slimy floor;

  With his wide-spread webbèd hands

  Seeking to climb the level sands,

  But rejected still to rave

  Alive in his uncovered grave.