To bend with apples the moss'd cottage- Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy Have ye souls in heaven too, Thus ye live on high, and then On the earth ye live again; And the souls ye left behind you Teach us, here, the way to find you, Where your other souls are joying, Never slumber'd, never cloying. Here, your earth-born souls still speak To mortals, of their little week; Of their sorrows and delights; Of their passions and their spites; Of their glory and their shame; What doth strengthen and what maim. Thus ye teach us, every day, Wisdom, though fled far away. Bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Ye have souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new! ROBIN HOOD No! those days are gone away, No, the bugle sounds no more, And the twanging bow no more; Silent is the ivory shrill Past the heath and up the hill; There is no mid-forest laugh, Where lone Echo gives the half To some wight, amaz'd to hear Jesting, deep in forest drear. 30 10 40 Gone, the merry morris din; Gone, the song of Gamelyn; Gone, the tough-belted outlaw Idling in the "grenè shawe;" All are gone away and past! And if Robin should be cast Sudden from his turfed grave, And if Marian should have Once again her forest days, She would weep, and he would craze: He would swear, for all his oaks, Fall'n beneath the dock-yard strokes, Have rotted on the briny seas; She would weep that her wild bees Sang not to her-Strange! that honey Can't be got without hard money! SONNETS ON FIRST LOOKING INTO CHAPMAN'S HOMER Much have I travel'd in the realms of gold, a And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; been Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. a Oft of one wide expanse had I been told a That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne: Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies. When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific-and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmisec Silent, upon a peak in Darien. ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET The poetry of earth is never dead: When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new mown mead; That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead In summer luxury, he has never done With his delights; for when tired out with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never: The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever, &That I shall never look upon thee more, And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love; then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. TO ONE WHO HAS BEEN LONG IN CITY PENT To one who has been long in city pent, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven,-to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament. Who is more happy, when, with heart's content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair He mourns that day so soon has glided by: NARRATIVE POETRY OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD MUCH admirable narrative poetry was written during the romantic period but most of it came from poets whose genius was essentially lyrical. Sir Walter Scott was the one story-teller of the group who did not intrude his own personality between the reader and the narrative; with him the story is the thing and we are scarcely conscious of him who relates it. In the narratives by other poets of the century, however, the poet himself is felt constantly. Byron is identified with his own hero; Wordsworth uses the story as a medium for interpreting life as he sees it, illustrating the power of nature over man; in Keats we are conscious of the poet's individualities of style and treatment. The narratives here represented comprehend very different types of story. The Cotter's Saturday Night by Robert Burns is an idyll, a quiet tale of country life, as is Michael by William Wordsworth. Both are pictorial and reflective, the poet commenting upon what the story suggests to him. Byron's Prisoner of Chillon is not so much a story as it is a representation of the prisoner's emotions in different situations. The pictures are graphic, but most of all we are conscious of Byron's fiery love of liberty. Christabel by S. T. Coleridge and The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats take us away into the indefinite, picturesque past, with the lure of the atmosphere that spells romance. The narrative thread is just enough to bind together the series of highly colored pictures. The appeal is to the imagination through the senses. There is something of symbolism, or allegory, in Christabel, the two young women representing innocence and guilt respectively, but the story was never finished and the beauty, as is usual in romantic art, lies in the exquisite details rather than in the whole. Keats's poem is remarkable for the impression of purity it leaves, in spite of the warmth of its colorful imagery. Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel is closer to the old epic. Scott is the greatimproviser of stories in verse and unfolds his tale with ease and charm. He writes, as Homer did, of men who achieved things, and recreates the past as a world of reality, not a beautiful shadowland. Although he lacked command of the subtleties of artistic versification, there is compensation in the vigor and sweep of his narrative, in his ability to make the past live again, and in his emphasis upon the qualities of good and gallant manhood. |
