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poets of his time cannot be predicted with confidence. A very large amount of his political verse is of ephemeral interest; its day has passed with the situations that gave rise to it. His mannerisms and tricks of style may weigh against his enduring quality; and, more than these, the fact that he is so largely untouched by finer intellectual and spiritual issues that his code is, to use Arnold's terminology, so largely Hebraic, so little Hellenistic. If he is not among the greater poets, he is assuredly among the greater men of letters of his century. One index of his greatness is the number of Kipling phrases which have become as much a part of English speech as anything in Gray or Pope. That in itself is a token of very impressive literary power.

THE LAST CHANTEY

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For the motto, see Revelation, XXI, I, as in the Authorized Version. (637.) 1. Vault: i.e., of Heaven. - The Cherubim (Cherubs) were next in rank below the Seraphim who surrounded God's throne.

9. In the deep etc.: In the Resurrection the Lord had raised them from the bottom of the sea. See Revelation, XX, 13.

10. barracout': barracouta, corrupt form of "barracuda," a large fish belonging to the neighborhood of the West Indies.

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14. floe: mass of floating ice. In medieval legend, the voyaging Saint Brandan finds Judas thus enjoying his respite from fire.

27. picaroon: pirate-ship.

32. frapped a ship: strengthened the frame of their ship by lashing ropes tightly about it. See Acts, XXVII, 14 ff.

33. these: mariners. Saint Paul points at the present chorus, by way of reproach for their previous complaint against the sea (lines 6-10).

(638.) 46. Gothavn: a whaling-port in Greenland. 'speckshioner: specktioneer, chief harpooner.

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47. flinching: snaping, i.e., the bevelling of timbers in shipbuilding.

channel.

52. lead: (pronounced "leed")

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A "recessional" is a hymn sung while choir and clergy are passing out of church at the close of a service. The poem was published, just after the commemoration of Queen Victoria's sixtieth anniversary, in the London "Times," which remarked, editorially: "At this moment of imperial exaltation, Mr. Kipling does well to remind his countrymen that we have something more to do than to build battle-ships and multiply guns."

22. the Law: the Hebrew Law. The poet is thinking of his compatriots as "the chosen people" (cf. line 30), and would remind them of two virtues they have long claimed (lines 21-22).

26. shard: a hard fragment; here used figuratively for projectiles.

27. dust: in apposition with "heart" (line 25).

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Nietzsche is evident in his various prose "Testaments" and his essay "On Poetry," which defends the thesis that "poetry is Matter become vocal," and combines penetrating literary analysis with startling pseudo-scientific hypothesis.

Beginning life as assistant in a chemistry laboratory, Davidson was successively pupil-teacher at an academy, student for one year at Edinburgh University, teacher of science, clerk, journalist, and littérateur. He suffered from poverty and illhealth, and finally, in a despondent mood, killed himself. By his own direction, no biography of him has been written. His poetry glorifies suffering as a purifying part of the cosmic process, and gives no quarter to either religion or humanitarianism. Though at times strained, there is distinct power in his symbolic delineations of spiritual triumph or infamy. With much that is stern and terrible, Ballads and Songs (his best known volume) has beautiful descriptions of natural scenes, and is interesting for its technique and its ideas. His narrative verse may be compared with that of other "realists": see the introductory note under W. W. Gibson, below. The present lyric, and its companion piece "To the New Women," are the introductory poems of Ballads and Songs.

(640.) 19-20. Let the whole past go etc.: Cf. the second and fourth stanzas.

A. E. HOUSMAN (1859- )

The secure position of Alfred Edward Housman among modern lyricists rested for twenty-five years upon one slender volume, A Shropshire Lad (1896). The greater number of the short poems contained in it were written in the early months of the year preceding publication,

- a period during which the author was visited (as he records) by a continuous poetic excitement. In 1922 he published a second, even shorter, collection, Last Poems, about a quarter of which were composed in the April of that year, the others mainly between 1895 and 1910.

After taking his degree at Oxford, Mr. Housman was for ten years a "higher division clerk" in H. M. Patent Office in London. Since 1892, he has been a pro

fessor of Latin, first in University College, London, later in Cambridge University; and he is a distinguished classical scholar. From the frequent mention in his poems of redcoats, soldiering, and the like, one might fancy that he had at some time a strong personal interest in military service, either through his own enlistment or through friendship with men in the ranks. However that may be, Housman's is essentially not a martial spirit, so exclusively is it concerned with personal_relationships and private sentiments. The constant themes of his delicately wrought lyrics are the young man's response to the exquisite beauty of an April in Shropshire, the devotion of friends, the pains of lovers, the transiency of youth, and the nostalgia of the sojourner in London for his home country (as in section LII, page 640). The spirited note of "Reveille" (page 640) is hardly characteristic of the collection as a whole; and even here the last two lines carry a sombre suggestion. This hint of mortality is seldom far from Housman's mood; and quite a few of the poems deal with violent forms of death — murder, hanging, suicide or the sickness of the soul that leads to suicide: a motif not infrequent in the literature of "the decadence," though these verses of Housman's had perhaps some more immediate inspiration. In other poems, man's hard doom is accepted without bitterness but without reconciliation:

"And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,

These foreign laws of God and man.”

Within the narrow limits indicated, Housman has shown himself one of the most accomplished craftsmen of his generation. The loveliness of his songs (some of which have been set to music by the American composer C. F. Manney) is partly a matter of skilfully manipulated vowel- and consonant-sounds, partly of poignant imagery condensed without loss of clearness or beauty. In such matters the poet's literary tact is sure. In his best work, as in the lyric "With rue my heart is laden" (page 640), he escapes

from merely self-regarding emotion and touches a simple theme in a manner that gives it universality.

IV. REVEILLE

(640.) 8. Straws: strews.

14. forelands: headlands, capes.

YEATS: INTO THE TWILIGHT

William Butler Yeats (1865), the most representative writer of the Irish Literary Movement that rose in the 1890's, was born in Dublin, the son of a distinguished artist. His residence has been divided between England and Ireland, with sojourns in Paris, and his life has been almost entirely devoted to literature. In his younger years he read widely in English romantic poets from Spenser to Rossetti, edited Blake, and dabbled in theosophy. This preoccupation with romance and mysticism shaped the spirit of his poetry more than the old Irish mythology and folk-lore, into the study of which he next threw himself in pursuance of one of the purposes of the Celtic revival: namely, that appropriate episodes from old Irish tales should be treated in verse retaining the color and spirit of the original. "Contact with a mass of material so long unused for literary purposes that it had been almost forgotten gave his work freshness of appeal; his devotion not merely to Ireland as a nation, but to the Irish spirit as he interpreted it, gave him sincerity and authority of utterance; and his philosophy, though it was one of escape from life rather than a resolute attempt to face its problems and agitations, was not unwelcome to a generation world-weary and somewhat oppressed with a sense of its own meaningless materialism" (J. W. Cunliffe, in English Literature During the Last Half Century). When he published The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899, he had fallen under still another literary influence, that of the French Symbolist School, and had begun to allegorize the personages of Irish legend. Yeats has championed a fundamentally romantic æsthetic theory: that poetry is not a criticism of life, but a

revelation of a hidden life; and that the arts should dissociate themselves from "their age" and busy themselves "with old faiths, myths, dreams, the accumulated beauty of the age." Perhaps the most fascinating of his longer poems is "The Wanderings of Usheen" (i.e., Ossian), to which the lyric here given would serve as a good introduction. Compare the mood of "Into the Twilight" with the mood of Morris's "Apology" (page 587). (641.) 5. Eire: Erin, Ireland.

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SHARP: THE WHITE PEACE

The work of William Sharp (18551905) is related, like that of Yeats and Russell, to the so-called Celtic revival. He too was influenced by the PreRaphaelites, and sought poetic relief from the age of industrialism. Born in the busy mill-town of Paisley near Glasgow, he gave his heart to the Scottish Highlands, and took the pen-name of "Fiona Macleod." From his extraordinary absorption in Highland folk-lore and mysticism came his most distinctive writings, the Dominion of Dreams (1895), The SinEater (1899), and other alluring sketches in prose. He was not lost purely in dreams: he worked very hard, wrote voluminously as critic and biographer, and maintained a fine sweetness of nature. He knew "pain," and he knew also "the white peace" (as distinguished from naturedreams) that can move above pain, through "the Soul of Man." Observe that this poem, though it bears a superficial resemblance to "Into the Twilight" (page 640), moves essentially in the opposite direction-with a suggestive difference in rhythmic movement. Compare Arnold's "Palladium" (page 544).

FRANCIS THOMPSON (1859-1907).

In an age whose main tendencies were still running strongly in the direction of natural science and a materialistic philosophy, appeared the greatest English Catholic poet and one of the most mystical writers of the century. As far as he is the inheritor of nineteenth-century traditions, Thompson owes most to Shelley, Coleridge, DeQuincey, D. G. Rossetti, and Coventry Patmore. But, as is indicated by the copies of Blake and Aeschylus carried in his ragged pockets, his poetry has wider than nineteenth-century affiliations. The Elizabethans, Crashaw, Sir Thomas Browne, the Saints and theologians, all converged their influences upon his remarkable genius.

Thompson's father, a substantial Roman Catholic physician in Lancashire, educated Francis for the priesthood, but, finding the shy, unpractical boy unfitted for that vocation, sent him to Owens College, Man

Here for six

chester, to study medicine. years Francis evaded his studies, read widely but unsystematically, lost himself in reveries, and unfortunately, to palliate the miseries of incipient tuberculosis, began the use of laudanum. Curiously, it was through his mother's last gift to him, a copy of The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, that he received the suggestion. The habit thus contracted almost destroyed him. Having thrice failed in his examinations in medicine, and been rejected for the army, he drifted (first in Manchester, later in London) from one menial employment to another, — bookseller's collector, shop-assistant, vendor of matches. Neglecting even to collect the small weekly remittance from his father, he went down to "a poverty so absolute that he was often without pen and paper" (E. Meynell, Life of Francis Thompson),

an unkempt tramp, moved on by the police, sleeping sometimes on the Thames Embankment under "the abashless inquisition of each star," and learning how many mugs of tea there are in a penny. Yet enslavement to opium was his only vice. A girl befriended him, sharing her scanty earnings as Ann of the Confessions had done with DeQuincey, and breaking the wholly innocent connection only when more substantial aid was at hand (see the poem "A Child's Kiss"). Some time before, Thompson had sent a bedraggled manuscript to a magazine; and through this circumstance, after he had been two years on the streets, he made the acquaintance of Wilfred Meynell, the editor, and his wife Alice, a poetess of distinction — both Catholics like himself. These gentle people received the half-starved vagrant into their home, protected him until he was restored to health, and opened the way to a literary career. The opium habit, while not completely broken, was henceforth held in control, and sustained creative work became possible. His way of living was still eccentric and disorganized. Getting out of bed, whether in the morning or (more frequently) in the late afternoon, was always "an unnatural act." Ineffectual as he was in everything except literature, he had a childlike lovableness. He lived in lodgings in London, with an occasional retreat to a monastery in Wales,

and enjoyed affectionate intimacy with the family of his discoverer, some of his best poems being inspired by Mrs. Meynell and her children. His three volumes brought enthusiastic recognition from such diverse judges as Burne-Jones, William Archer, and Arnold Bennett; and critical essays from his pen were eagerly sought by the reviews. His essay on Shelley, published posthumously, is a masterpiece of impressionistic criticism. He died peacefully, in a Catholic hospital, from tuberculosis.

Thompson's intellectual range was greater than either Patmore's or Christina Rossetti's. His Ode on "The Nineteenth Century," for instance, in its subtle analysis of the scientific spirit, shows him aware of both the glories and the dangers of that preoccupation of his time. Of "The Mistress of Vision" he himself said that it contained as much science as mysticism, and the long and splendid "Anthem of Earth" is philosophical rather than religious. His most characteristic work, however, was, like Patmore's, a celebration of love, either in its earthly or its theological sense. In poems on human love, Patmore had written as one initiated into its mysteries. Thompson too has treated the passion, as in "Love Declared," with full understanding and great nobility; but commonly he shows such things only through reflex mood induced by dream or imagination he speaks, that is, in the tone of one who has long renounced immediate satisfactions for a wholly ideal experience. The courtly delicacy and restraint of the poems to Mrs. Meynell (see "Before Her Portrait in Youth," page 642), are suggestive of Patmore; but the note of renunciation, the sense of spiritual loneliness, belongs peculiarly to Thompson. The same poignant quality is felt in some of his poems on childhood (e.g., "The Poppy"); in others, and perhaps his best, there is a delightful, almost mediæval freedom from self-consciousness (e.g., "The Making of Viola" and "Ex Ore Infantium").

The abstruse nature of his subjectmatter, and the very fineness of psychological observation which is his distinction, demand utmost concentration in reading. The difficulty is increased by involved syntax and a preference for archaic,

poetic, or unusual words, like shawm, amerce, temerarious, devisal, which, when they do not baffle, may unpleasantly check the reader. Many such terms can be defended on the ground of the poetic tradition in which he was working, but their frequency makes impossible any wide popularity for the bulk of Thompson's writing. Like Shelley, he is a poet's poet, in the sense that his genius will be most appreciated and his difficulties least felt by the poetically-minded. To such readers the glorious imagery and the intricate harmonies of his strophes will always afford keen delight.

It is difficult to assess justly the complex personality which this poet's life and writings reveal. To a not unsympathetic uncle, Francis seemed to lead a "dawdling, sauntering sort of life," and there is both humor and pathos in his practical father's comment on learning of the son's achievement in poetry, "If the lad had but told me!" Unquestionably, there was in Thompson, as in Coleridge and DeQuincey, a certain febrile element which does not belong to the highest type of creative genius. "To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster" is a clear and painful recognition of this disintegration of his own life. On the other hand, it is unsafe to interpret too narrowly such records of the divided self as "The Hound of Heaven," which are founded on both Catholic tradition and universal experience. He did not think of himself, in the evangelical way, as a brand plucked from the burning; and his later poetry imparts, more often than his fears, the great peace of the faith (see "The Kingdom of God," page 645). "To be the poet of the return to nature," said Thompson, "is somewhat; but I would be the poet of the return to God" (E. Meynell, Life, page 205).

BEFORE HER PORTRAIT IN YOUTH

The portrait is that of Mrs. Alice Meynell, Thompson's friend and benefactress, herself a poet (line 28 ff.). See the second paragraph of the biography, above.

(642.) 18. For that: for the reason that.

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