FullReads

I have obeyed a profound conviction which I have reason to hope will be more commended in the future than perhaps it can be now, in leaving aside a multitude of composite songs–anachronisms, and worse than mere anachronisms, as I think them to be, for they patch wild feeling with sentiment of the sentimentalist. There are some exceptions. The one fine stanza of a song which both Sir Walter Scott and Burns restored is given with the restorations of both, those restorations being severally beautiful; and the burden, “Hame, hame, hame,” is printed with the Jacobite song that carries it; this song seems so mingled and various in date and origin that no apology is needed for placing it amongst the bundle of Scottish ballads of days before the Jacobites. Sir Patrick Spens is treated here as an ancient song. It is to be noted that the modern, or comparatively modern, additions to old songs full of quantitative metre–“Hame, hame, hame,” is one of these–full of long notes, rests, and interlinear pauses, are almost always written in anapaests. The later writer has slipped away from the fine, various, and subtle metre of the older. Assuredly the popularity of the metre which, for want of a term suiting the English rules of verse, must be called anapaestic, has done more than any other thing to vulgarise the national sense of rhythm and to silence the finer rhythms. Anapaests came quite suddenly into English poetry and brought coarseness, glibness, volubility, dapper and fatuous effects. A master may use it well, but as a popular measure it has been disastrous. I would be bound to find the modern stanzas in an old song by this very habit of anapaests and this very misunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of the older stanzas. This, for instance, is the old metre:

“Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!”

and this the lamentable anapaestic line (from the same song):

“Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me -.”

It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including A Divine Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out four stanzas of a poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorest argument. This passage at least shall speak for the first three:

“Thou didst appear
A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,
As Nature did intend
All should confess, but none might comprehend.”

From Christ’s Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for its length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage upon “Justice,” who looks “as the eagle

“that hath so oft compared
Her eye with heaven’s”;

from Marlowe’s poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to the priestess

“And laid his childish head upon her breast”;

with that which tells how Night,

“deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the world upon
Breathed darkness forth”;

from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:

“Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
His wings were wet with ranging in the rain”;

from Ben Jonson’s Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza:

“Beauties, have ye seen a toy,
Called Love, a little boy,
Almost naked, wanton, blind;
Cruel now, and then as kind?
If he be amongst ye, say;
He is Venus’ run-away”;

from Francis Davison:

“Her angry eyes are great with tears”;

from George Wither:

“I can go rest
On her sweet breast
That is the pride of Cynthia’s train”;

from Cowley:

“Return, return, gay planet of mine east”!

The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, but the citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love.