Colonel Richard Lovelace, an enchanting poet, is hardly read, except for two poems which are as famous as any in our language.Perhaps the rumour of his conceits has frightened his reader.It must be granted they are now and then daunting; there is a poem on "Princess Louisa Drawing" which is a very maze; the little paths of verse and fancy turn in upon one another, and the turns are pointed with artificial shouts of joy and surprise.But, again, what a reader unused to a certain living symbolism will be apt to take for a careful and cold conceit is, in truth, a rapture--none graver, none more fiery or more luminous.But even to name the poem where these occur might be to deliver delicate and ardent poetry over to the general sense of humour, which one distrusts.Nor is Lovelace easy reading at any time (the two or three famous poems excepted).The age he adorned lived in constant readiness for the fiddler.Eleven o'clock in the morning was as good an hour as another for a dance, and poetry, too, was gay betimes, but intricate with figures.It is the very order, the perspective, as it were, of the movement that seems to baffle the eye, but the game was a free impulse.Since the first day danced with the first night, no dancing was more natural--at least to a dancer of genius.True, the dance could be tyrannous.It was an importunate fashion.When the Bishop of Hereford, compelled by Robin Hood, in merry Barnsdale, danced in his boots ("and glad he could so get away"), he was hardly in worse heart or trim than a seventeenth century author here and there whose original seriousness or work-a-day piety would have been content to go plodding flat-foot or halting, as the muse might naturally incline with him, but whom the tune, the grace, and gallantry of the time beckoned to tread a perpetual measure.Lovelace was a dancer of genius; nay, he danced to rest his wings, for he was winged, cap and heel.The fiction of flight has lost its charm longsince.Modern art grew tired of the idea, now turned to commonplace, and painting took leave of the buoyant urchins--naughty cherub and Cupid together; but the seventeenth century was in love with that old fancy-- more in love, perhaps, than any century in the past.Its late painters, whose human figures had no lack of weight upon the comfortable ground, yet kept a sense of buoyancy for this hovering childhood, and kept the angels and the loves aloft, as though they shook a tree to make a flock of birds flutter up.
Fine is the fantastic and infrequent landscape in Lovelace's poetry: "This is the palace of the wood, And court o' the royal oak, wherestood The whole nobility."
In more than one place Lucasta's, or Amarantha's, or Laura's hair is sprinkled with dew or rain almost as freshly and wildly as in Wordsworth's line.
Lovelace, who loved freedom, seems to be enclosed in so narrow a book; yet it is but a "hermitage." To shake out the light and spirit of its leaves is to give a glimpse of liberty not to him, but to the world.
In To Lucasta I have been bold to alter, at the close, "you" to "thou." Lovelace sent his verses out unrevised, and the inconsistency of pronouns is common with him, but nowhere else so distressing as in this brief and otherwise perfect poem.The fault is easily set right, and it seems even an unkindness not to lend him this redress, offered him here as an act of comradeship.
LUCASTA PAYING HER OBSEQUIES
That errors should abound in the text of Lovelace is the more lamentable because he was apt to make a play of phrases that depend upon the precision of a comma--nay, upon the precision of the voice in reading.Lucasta Paying her Obsequies is a poem that makes a kind of dainty confusion between the two vestals--the living and the dead; they are "equal virgins," and you must assign the pronouns carefully to either as you read.This, read twice, must surely be placed amongst the loveliest of his lovely writings.It is a joy to meet such a phrase as "her brave eyes."TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON
This is a poem that takes the winds with an answering flight.Shouldthey be "birds" or "gods" that wanton in the air in the first of these gallant stanzas? Bishop Percy shied at "gods," and with admirable judgment suggested "birds," an amendment adopted by the greater number of succeeding editors, until one or two wished for the other phrase again, as an audacity fit for Lovelace.But the Bishop's misgiving was after all justified by one of the Mss.of the poem, in which the "gods" proved to be "birds" long before he changed them.The reader may ask, what is there to choose between birds so divine and gods so light? But to begin with "gods" would be to make an anticlimax of the close.Lovelace led from birds and fishes to winds, and from winds to angels.
"When linnet-like confined" is another modern reading."When, like committed linnets," daunted the eighteenth century.Nevertheless, it is right seventeenth century, and is now happily restored; happily, because Lovelace would not have the word "confined" twice in this little poem.
A HORATIAN ODE
