FullReads

Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard Crashaw, and the alexandrine is to be found–to be found by searching–in Crashaw; and he took precisely the same care as Cowley that the long wand of that line should not give way in the middle–should be strong and supple and should last. Here are four of his alexandrines –

“Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise.”
“Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more.”
“And everlasting series of a deathless song.”
“To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name.”

A later poet–Coventry Patmore–wrote a far longer line than even these–a line not only speeding further, but speeding with a more celestial movement than Cowley or Crashaw heard with the ear of dreams.

“He unhappily adopted,” says Dr. Johnson as to Cowley’s diction, “that which was predominant.” “That which was predominant” was as good a vintage of English language as the cycles of history have ever brought to pass.

TO LUCASTA

Colonel Richard Lovelace, an enchanting poet, is hardly read, except for two poems which are as famous as any in our language. Perhaps the rumour of his conceits has frightened his reader. It must be granted they are now and then daunting; there is a poem on “Princess Louisa Drawing” which is a very maze; the little paths of verse and fancy turn in upon one another, and the turns are pointed with artificial shouts of joy and surprise. But, again, what a reader unused to a certain living symbolism will be apt to take for a careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a rapture–none graver, none more fiery or more luminous. But even to name the poem where these occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry over to the general sense of humour, which one distrusts. Nor is Lovelace easy reading at any time (the two or three famous poems excepted). The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the fiddler. Eleven o’clock in the morning was as good an hour as another for a dance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate with figures. It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of the movement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a free impulse. Since the first day danced with the first night, no dancing was more natural–at least to a dancer of genius. True, the dance could be tyrannous. It was an importunate fashion. When the Bishop of Hereford, compelled by Robin Hood, in merry Barnsdale, danced in his boots (“and glad he could so get away”), he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a seventeenth century author here and there whose original seriousness or work-a-day piety would have been content to go plodding flat-foot or halting, as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune, the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetual measure. Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest his wings, for he was winged, cap and heel. The fiction of flight has lost its charm long since. Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant urchins–naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth century was in love with that old fancy–more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past. Its late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up.

Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace’s poetry:

“This is the palace of the wood,
And court o’ the royal oak, where stood
The whole nobility.”