FullReads

Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.

“Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me”

is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single gloom in this –

“Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!”

And a single joy in this –

“Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!”

Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion the author of Cherry Ripe –

“A thousand cherubim fly in her looks.”

And yet “a thousand cherubim” is a line of a poem full of the dullest kind of reasoning–curious matter for music–and of the intricate knotting of what is a very simple thread of thought. It was therefore no easy matter to choose something of Campion’s for a collection of the finest work. For an historical book of representative poetry the question would be easy enough, for there Campion should appear by his glorious lyric, Cherry Ripe, by one or two poems of profounder imagination (however imperfect), and by a madrigal written for the music (however the stanzas may flag in their quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics for the sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity of the inspiration, and the poet’s absolute disregard of the moment of its flight and departure. A few splendid lines may be reason enough for extracting a short poem, but must not be made to bear too great a burden.

WHEN THOU MUST HOME

Of the quality of this imaginative lyric there is no doubt. It is fine throughout, as we confess even after the greatness of the opening:-

“When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest–“

It is as solemn and fantastic at the close as at this dark and splendid opening, and throughout, past description, Elizabethan. This single poem must bind Campion to that period without question; and as he lived thirty-six years in the actual reign of Elizabeth, and printed his Book of Airs with Rosseter two years before her death, it is by no violence that we give him the name that covers our earlier poets of the great age. When thou must Home is of the day of Marlowe. It has the qualities of great poetry, and especially the quality of keeping its simplicity; and it has a quality of great simplicity not at all child-like, but adult, large, gay, credulous, tragic, sombre, and amorous.

THE FUNERAL

Donne, too, is a poet of fine onsets. It was with some hesitation that I admitted a poem having the middle stanza of this Funeral; but the earlier lines of the last are fine.

CHARIS’ TRIUMPH

The freshest of Ben Jonson’s lyrics have been chosen. Obviously it is freshness that he generally lacks, for all his vigour, his emphatic initiative, and his overbearing and impulsive voice in verse. There is a stale breath in that hearty shout. Doubtless it is to the credit of his honesty that he did not adopt the country- phrases in vogue; but when he takes landscape as a task the effect is ill enough. I have already had the temerity to find fault for a blunder of meaning, with the passage of a most famous lyric, where it says the contrary of what it would say –

“But might I of Jove’s nectar sup
I would not change for thine;”

and for doing so have encountered the anger rather than the argument of those who cannot admire a pretty lyric but they must hold reason itself to be in error rather than allow that a line of it has chanced to get turned in the rhyming.

IN EARTH

“I ever saw anything,” says Charles Lamb, “like this funeral dirge, except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to resolve itself into the element which it contemplates.”