It was no easy matter to choose a group of representative ballads from among so many almost equally fine and equally damaged with thin places.Finally, it seemed best to take, from among the finest, those that had passages of genius--a line here and there of surpassing imagination and poetry--rare in even the best folk- songs.Such passages do not occur but in ballads that are throughout on the level of the highest of their kind."None but my foe to be my guide" so distinguishes Helen of Kirconnell; the exquisite stanza about the hats of birk, The Wife of Usher's Well; its varied refrain, The Dowie Dens of Yarrow; the stanza spoken by Margaret asking for room in the grave, Sweet William and Margaret; and a number of passages, Sir Patrick Spens, such as that beginning, "I saw the newmoon late yestreen," the stanza beginning "O laith, laith were our gude Scots lords," and almost all the stanzas following.A Lyke Wake Dirge is of surpassing quality throughout.I am sorry to have no room for Jamieson's version of Fair Annie, for Edom o' Gordon, for The Daemon Lover, for Edward, Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.
MRS.ANNE KILLIGREW
This most majestic ode--one of the few greatest of its kind--is a model of noble rhythm and especially of cadence.To print it whole would be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book is made in the midst of it.Dryden, so ***** and so far from simplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said something fine, caps it with something foolish.The suppressed part of the ode is silly with a silliness which Dryden's age chose to dodder in when it would.The deplorable "rattling bones" of the closing section has a touch of it.
SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR
It is a futile thing--and the cause of a train of futilities--to hail "style" as though it were a separable quality in literature, and it is not in that illusion that the style of the opening of Aphra Behn's resounding song is to be praised.But it IS the style--implying the reckless and majestic heart-- that first takes the reader of these great verses.
HYMN (The spacious firmament on high)
Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,--and it seems that the inspired passages are none of his--it is to me a poem of genius, magical in spite of the limited diction.
ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADYAlso in spite of limited diction--the sign of thought closing in, as it did fast close in during those years--are Pope's tenderness and passion communicated in this beautiful elegy.It would not be too much to say that all his passion, all his tenderness, and certainly all his mystery, are in the few lines at the opening and close.The Epistle of Eloisa is (artistically speaking) but a counterfeit.Yet Pope's Elegy begins by stealing and translating into the false elegance of altered taste that lovely and poetic opening of Ben Jonson's -"What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew, Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?"All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost in such a change as Pope makes -"What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?"Yet they are not lost.Pope's awe and ardour are authentic, and they prevail; the succeeding couplet--inimitably modulated, and of tragic dignity--proves, without delay, the quality of the poem.The poverty and coldness of the passage (towards the end), in which the roses and the angels are somewhat trivially sung, cannot mar so veritable an utterance.The four final couplets are the very glory of the English couplet.
LINE ON RECEIVING HIS MOTHER'S PICTURE
Cowper, again, by the very directness of human feeling makes his narrowing English a means of absolutely direct communication.Of all his works (and this is my own mere and unshared opinion) this single one deserves immortality.
LIFE
This fragment (the only fragment, properly so called, in the present collection) so pleased Wordsworth that he wished he had written the lines.They are very gently touched.
THE LAND OF DREAMS
When Blake writes of sleep and dreams he writes under the very influence of the hours of sleep--with a waking consciousness of the wilder emotion of the dream.Corot painted so, when at summer dawn he went out and saw landscape in the hours of sleep.
SURPRISED BY JOY
It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth's sonnets--the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; "I wished to share the transport" is by no means an uncommon reading.Into the history of the variant I have not looked.It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impassioned lines are lost by that "wished" in the place of "turned." The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in thatheart-moving poem, 'Tis said that some have died for love, is Wordsworth to be confessed as an impassioned poet.
STEPPING WESTWARD
