FullReads

ALICE MEYNELL’S COMMENTS/NOTES

EPITHALAMION

Written by Spensor on his marriage in Ireland, Elizabeth Boyle of Kilcoran, who survived him, married one Roger Seckerstone, and was again a widow. Dr. Grosart seems to have finally decided the identity of the heroine of this great poem. It is worth while to explain, once for all, that I do not use the accented e for the longer pronunciation of the past participle. The accent is not an English sign, and, to my mind, disfigures the verse; neither do I think it necessary to cut off the e with an apostrophe when the participle is shortened. The reader knows at a glance how the word is to be numbered; besides, he may have his preferences where choice is allowed. In reading such a line as Tennyson’s

“Dear as remembered kisses after death,”

one man likes the familiar sound of the word “remembered” as we all speak it now; another takes pleasure in the four light syllables filling the line so full. Tennyson uses the apostrophe as a rule, but neither he nor any other author is quite consistent.

ROSALYND’S MADRIGAL

It may please the reader to think that this frolic, rich, and delicate singer was Shakespeare’s very Rosalind. From Dr. Thomas Lodge’s novel, Euphues’ Golden Legacy, was taken much of the story, with some of the characters, and some few of the passages, of As You Like It.

ROSALINE

This splendid poem (from the same romance), written on the poet’s voyage to the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries, has the fire and freshness of the south and the sea; all its colours are clear. The reader’s ear will at once teach him to read the sigh “heigh ho” so as to give the first syllable the time of two (long and short).

FAREWELL TO ARMS

George Peele’s four fine stanzas (which must be mentioned as dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, but are better without that dedication) exist in another form, in the first person, and with some archaisms smoothed. But the third person seems to be far more touching, the old man himself having done with verse.

THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD

The sixth stanza is perhaps by Izaak Walton.

TAKE, O TAKE THOSE LIPS AWAY

The author of this exquisite song is by no means certain. The second stanza is not with the first in Shakespeare, but it is in Beaumont and Fletcher.

KIND ARE HER ANSWERS

These verses are a more subtle experiment in metre by the musician and poet, Campion, than even the following, Laura, which he himself sweetly commended as “voluble, and fit to express any amorous conceit.” In Kind are her Answers the long syllables and the trochaic movement of the short lines meet the contrary movement of the rest, with an exquisite effect of flux and reflux. The “dancers” whose time they sang must have danced (with Perdita) like “a wave of the sea.”

DIRGE

I have followed the usual practice in omitting the last and less beautiful stanza.

FOLLOW

Campion’s “airs,” for which he wrote his words, laid rules too urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play, hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line, “touching in its majesty”-

“Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!”

Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are speechless, with these two final lines –

“If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!”