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'To disinherit the sun's rise, Delicately to displace The day, and plant itfairer in thy face."
To the Morning: Satisfaction for Sleep, is, all through, luminous.It would be difficult to find, even in the orient poetry of that time, more daylight or more spirit.True, an Elizabethan would not have had poetry so rich as in Love's Horoscope, but yet an Elizabethan would have had it no fresher.The Hymn to St.Teresa has the brevities which this poet-- reproached with his longueurs-- masters so well.He tells how the Spanish girl, six years old, set out in search of death: "She's for the Moors and Martyrdom.Sweet, not so fast!" Of many contemporary songs in pursuit of a fugitive Cupid, Crashaw's Cupid's Cryer: out of the Greek, is the most dainty.But if readers should be a little vexed with the poet's light heart and perpetual pleasure, with the late ripeness of his sweetness, here, for their satisfaction, is a passage capable of the great age that had lately closed when Crashaw wrote.It is in his summons to nature and art:
"Come, and come strong, To the conspiracy of our spacious song!"I have been obliged to take courage to alter the reading of the seventeenth and nineteenth lines of the Prayer-Book, so as to make them intelligible; they had been obviously misprinted.I have also found it necessary to re-punctuate generally.
WISHES TO HIS SUPPOSED MISTRESS
This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom with it.I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas that repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious.
ON THE DEATH OF MR.CRASHAW
This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that, better known, On the Death of Mr.William Harvey.In the Crashaw ode, and in the Hymn to the Light, Cowley is, at last, tender.But it cannot be said that his love-poems had tenderness.Be wrote in a gay language, but added nothing to its gaiety.He wrote the language of love, and left it cooler than he found it.What the conceits of Lovelace and the rest-- flagrant, not frigid--did not do was done by Cowley's quenching breath; the language of love began to lose by him.But even then, even then, who could have foretold what the loss at a later day would be!
HYMN TO THE LIGHT
It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should show Cowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two lines.For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used) the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separate unit of metre.He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at least he first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroic verse; and after him Dryden took possession and then Pope.But both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in the French manner, divided.Cowley, however, with admirable art, is able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of his line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any lingering.Take this one instance -"Like some fair pine o'erlooking all the ignobler wood."If Cowley's delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and he surely had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrine would have taken its own place as an important line of English metre, more mobile than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramatic poetry, but a line liberally lyrical.It would have been the light, pursuing wave that runs suddenly, outrunning twenty, further up the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longer impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done.Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in this a valuable bequest.
Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard Crashaw, and the alexandrine is to be found--to be found by searching--in Crashaw; and he took precisely the same care as Cowley that the long wand of that line should not give way in the middle--should be strong and supple and should last.Here are four of his alexandrines -"Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise." "Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more." "And everlasting series of a deathless song." "To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name."A later poet--Coventry Patmore--wrote a far longer line than eventhese--a line not only speeding further, but speeding with a more celestial movement than Cowley or Crashaw heard with the ear of dreams.
"He unhappily adopted," says Dr.Johnson as to Cowley's diction, "that which was predominant." "That which was predominant" was as good a vintage of English language as the cycles of history have ever brought to pass.
TO LUCASTA
