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Page 5
"Is it, then, evening
So soon? [_I see the night-dews
Clustered in thick beads_], dim," etc.
* * *
["_When the white dawn first
Through the rough fir-planks. _"]
* * *
["_Thanks, gracious One!
Ah! the sweet fumes again._"]
* * *
["_They see the Centaurs
In the upper glens._"]
One could treble these--indeed in one instance (the
sketch of the Indian) the entire stanza of _eleven_ lines, by the
insertion of one "and" only, becomes a smooth blank-verse piece of
_seven_, two of which are indeed hemistichs, and three "weak-ended,"
but only such as are frequent in Shakespeare--
"They see the Indian drifting, knife in hand,
His frail boat moored to a floating isle--thick-matted
With large-leaved [_and_] low-creeping melon-plants
And the dark cucumber.
He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him,
Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves,
The mountains ring them."
Nor, perhaps, though the poem is a pretty one, will it stand criticism
of a different kind much better. Such mighty personages as Ulysses and
Circe are scarcely wanted as mere bystanders and "supers" to an
imaginative young gentleman who enumerates, somewhat promiscuously, a
few of the possible visions of the Gods. There is neither classical,
nor romantic, nor logical justification for any such mild effect of
the dread Wine of Circe: and one is driven to the conclusion that the
author chiefly wanted a frame, after his own fashion, for a set of
disconnected vignettes like those of Tennyson's _Palace of Art_
and _Dream of Fair Women_.
But if the title poem is vulnerable, there is plenty of compensation.
The opening sonnet--
"Two lessons, Nature, let me learn of thee"--
is perhaps rather learnt from Wordsworth, yet it does not fail to
strike the note which fairly differentiates the Arnoldian variety of
Wordsworthianism--the note which rings from _Resignation_ to
_Poor Matthias_, and which is a very curious cross between two
things that at first sight may seem unmarriageable, the Wordsworthian
enthusiasm and the Byronic despair. But of this[4] more when we have
had more of its examples before us. The second piece in the volume
must, or should, have struck--for there is very little evidence that
it did strike--readers of the volume as something at once considerable
and, in no small measure, new. _Mycerinus_, a piece of some 120
lines or so, in thirteen six-line stanzas and a blank-verse
_coda_, is one of those characteristic poems of this century,
which are neither mere "copies of verses," mere occasional pieces, nor
substantive compositions of the old kind, with at least an attempt at
a beginning, middle, and end. They attempt rather situations than
stories, rather facets than complete bodies of thought, or
description, or character. They supply an obvious way of escape for
the Romantic tendency which does not wish to break wholly with
classical tradition; and above all, they admit of indulgence in that
immense _variety_ which seems to have become one of the chief
devices of modern art, attempting the compliances necessary to gratify
modern taste.
The Herodotean anecdote of the Egyptian King Mycerinus, his
indignation at the sentence of death in six years as a recompense for
his just rule, and his device of lengthening his days by revelling all
night, is neither an unpromising nor a wholly promising subject. The
foolish good sense of Mr Toots would probably observe--and
justly--that before six years, or six months, or even six days were
over, King Mycerinus must have got very sleepy; and the philosophic
mind would certainly recall the parallel of Cleobis and Biton as to
the best gift for man. Mr Arnold, however, draws no direct moral. The
stanza-part of the poem, the king's expostulation, contains very fine
poetry, and "the note" rings again throughout it, especially in the
couplet--
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