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L’ALLEGRO

The sock represents the stage, in L’Allegro, for comedy, and the buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his wood-notes wild.

IL PENSEROSO

It is too late to protest against Milton’s display of weak Italian. Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.

LYCIDAS

Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest north to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; “the great vision” means the apparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael’s Mount; Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast; Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land’s End.

Arethusa and Mincius–Sicilian and Italian streams–represent the pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.

ON A PRAYER-BOOK

“Fair and flagrant things”–Crashaw’s own phrase–might serve for a brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw’s line –

“Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,”

and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace, of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century– not so much that their inspiration was in bad taste, as that no reader of taste could suffer them. A better opinion on that company of poets is that they had a taste extraordinarily liberal, generous, and elastic, but not essentially lax: taste that gave now and then too much room to play, but anon closed with the purest and exactest laws of temperance and measure. The extravagance of Crashaw is a far more lawful thing than the extravagance of Addison, whom some believe to have committed none; moreover, Pope and all the politer poets nursed something they were pleased to call a “rage,” and this expatiated (to use another word of their own) beyond all bounds. Of sheer voluntary extremes it is not in the seventeenth century conceit that we should seek examples, but in an eighteenth century “rage.” A “noble rage,” properly provoked, could be backed to write more trash than fancy ever tempted the half-incredulous sweet poet of the older time to run upon. He was fancy’s child, and the bard of the eighteenth century was the child of common sense with straws in his hair–vainly arranged there. The eighteenth century was never content with a moderate mind; it invented “rage”; it matched rage with a flagrant diction mingled of Latin words and simple English words made vacant and ridiculous, and these were the worst; it was resolved to be behind no century in passion–nay, to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison taught himself, as his hero taught the battle, “where to rage”; and in the later years of the same literary age, Johnson summoned the lapsed and absent fury, with no kind of misgiving as to the resulting verse. Take such a phrase as “the madded land”; there, indeed, is a word coined by the noble rage as the last century evoked it. “The madded land” is a phrase intended to prove that the law-giver of taste, Johnson himself, could lodge the fury in his breast when opportunity occurred. “And dubious title shakes the madded land.” It would be hard to find anything, even in Addison, more flagrant and less fair.

Take The Weeper of Crashaw–his most flagrant poem. Its follies are all sweet-humoured, they smile. Its beauties are a quick and abundant shower. The delicate phrases are so mingled with the flagrant that it is difficult to quote them without rousing that general sense of humour of which any one may make a boast; and I am therefore shy even of citing the “brisk cherub” who has early sipped the Saint’s tear: “Then to his music,” in Crashaw’s divinely simple phrase; and his singing “tastes of this breakfast all day long.” Sorrow is a queen, he cries to the Weeper, and when sorrow would be seen in state, “then is she drest by none but thee.” Then you come upon the fancy, “Fountain and garden in one face.” All places, times, and objects are “Thy tears’ sweet opportunity.” If these charming passages lurk in his worst poems, the reader of this anthology will not be able to count them in his best. In the Epiphany Hymn the heavens have found means