416 POEMS IN A MINOR KEY BREAK, BREAK, BREAK (Page 313) It is natural to associate the exceptional effectiveness of this poem with its metrical qualities. Equally interesting is it to observe the use of monosyllables of native English origin, contrasted with the exceptional soft-toned words of 66 vanished." foreign origin—“ voice,” THE FLIGHT OF LOVE One of the last of Shelley's poems, written during his residence in Italy, and published after his death. Its imagery and strange melody express the fluctuations of a mood rather than the development of a thought. The unusual metrical effect of alternating different kinds of lines is best brought out when we read the poems aloud. Compare the effect of the same device in One Word Is Too Often Profaned. YOUTH AND AGE It was on hearing of the news of the death of the Duke "the of Dorset, a former school fellow of the poet's, that Byron wrote this poem. He later speaks of the verses as truest, though the most melancholy, I ever wrote." THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN (Page 320) "This arose out of my observation of the affecting music of these birds hanging in this way in the London streets during the freshness and stillness of the Spring morning.”— Wordsworth's note. SIMON LEE, THE OLD HUNTSMAN (Page 321) One of the earliest of Wordsworth's poems, in which he was commending to the public taste a simpler diction and word order than had been commonly found in contemporary English verse. The poem had its origin in an actual occurrence; indeed, Wordsworth records that the expression "I dearly love their voice" was word for word from the old huntsman's own lips. STANZAS WRITTEN IN DEJECTION NEAR NAPLES (Page 324) From such a poem as this our conception of lyric poetry grows clearer. It has its beginning in personal emotion, but its choice of the significant aspects of the feeling, and the sympathetic beauty of its expression, make it stand for experience in which we can all share. The Golden Treasury version of this poem leaves out the last stanza as Shelley wrote it, and so it is added here. Some might lament that I were cold, They might lament, for I am one Whom men love not, and yet regret, Unlike this day, which, when the sun Shall on its stainless glory set, Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet. A DREAM OF THE UNKNOWN (Page 325) Of the line beginning "And wild roses Mr. Palgrave says: "Our language has perhaps no line modulated with more subtle sweetness." A DIRGE (Page 329) Mr. Stopford Brooke quotes, as illustrating the force of the word knells, these lines from Adonais: As the last cloud of an expiring storm and notes how all things are spoken of as sounding, the wind, the cloud, the caves, the sea, and even the trees, straining their branches in the storm. POEMS ON THE IMAGINATION THE REALM OF FANCY These lines were inclosed by Keats in a letter to his brother, in 1819, and they were published the next year. The sensitive, impressionable quality of Keats's mind is indicated by the strong influence upon his writing of the older poets he had been reading. It is interesting, therefore, to verify Mr. Palgrave's comment: “I know no other poem which so closely rivals the richness and melody,-and that in this very difficult and rarely attempted metre,-of Milton's L'Allegro and Penseroso." KUBLA KHAN (Page 334) With reference to this poem Coleridge tells us how he fell asleep, in the summer of 1797, from the effect of an anodyne as he was reading a description from Purchas's Pilgrimage, and how during this sleep the images and words of a poem seemed to come to him of their own accord. On awaking he took pen and paper and eagerly wrote down the lines here preserved; but after being interrupted by a matter of business he was able to retain only a 66 vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision," and so the poem remains " a fragment." It is small wonder, then, that Kubla Khan seems strange to us, for the subtly melodious lines are controlled by no evident purpose, but seem rather to subserve the whim of shifting romantic suggestion. A specially noteworthy example of the haunting, intangible charm are the three lines beginning "A savage place!" The passage from Purchas, which Coleridge refers to, is as follows: "In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfull Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase & game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure." THE MERMAID TAVERN (Page 336) The Mermaid Tavern was the famous inn at which Shakspere, Ben Jonson, and other dramatists of the time used to meet frequently. TO A LADY, WITH A GUITAR (Page 337) To understand the subtle fancy of this poem requires a knowledge of the circumstances of its composition and some familiarity with Shakspere's Tempest. Ariel, the fairy servant of the ancient Prospero, on his enchanted island, had once, it will be recalled, been imprisoned in a cloven pine, until released by the magician. So the spirit of music, Shelley tells his friend Mrs. Williams, is captive in the wood of the guitar, her prisoner now, to follow her commands. But Ariel is not merely an impersonal spirit: Shelley imaginatively identifies the fairy with himself, bringing the guitar to Miranda, the lovely daughter of his old master Prospero. So his fancy plays over the poem-in the first half expressing Shelley's solicitous regard for the happiness and welfare of his friend, in the second the power of her sympathetic spirit to divine the delicate secrets hidden in musical harmony. The guitar which accompanied the poem is still preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford; and an interesting account by Trelawney comes down to us of how Shelley composed the poem, crouched under a fallen pine by a forest pool, scrawling down his words in an absorbed reverie. L'ALLEGRO and IL PENSEROSO (Pp. 339 and 344) The probable date of these poems is 1632, when Milton was twenty-four years of age. In them we find, not the austere man whom we associate with Paradise Lost, but a man with a full sense of joy ripening into thoughtful meditation. In fact, it seems natural to interpret the poems as a balancing between the two ideals of life that the poet was setting before himself,-that of carefree, innocent mirth, the mood of youth, and that of pensive, sober meditation, appropriate to a maturer age. The title of the first poem, The Cheerful Man (L'Allegro), admits of no misunderstanding. But the invocation of the second is likely to deceive us, and we need to remind ourselves that Il Penseroso means, not a melancholy man, but merely one of thoughtful, meditative nature. As we read the poems, we soon find a key to their structure, the successive periods of a day spent according to the two ideals of life. But the day is a poetic, not a literal day: it is not restricted to the experience of a single individual: the scene changes freely from the country to the city, whenever a typical experience of pleasure is to be found. If, then, we meet the poet in his own imaginative mood, it becomes a pleasure to follow the successive phases of each day's occupation, and to observe how they contrast each with the other, part by part. In that same realm of imagination it becomes natural to find Milton ranging at will from classic mythology to Christian traditions and to the new creations of his own fancy: the magic spell is on us, and we follow unquestioning where he leads. One thing that often stands in the way of a natural enjoyment of the poem is the number of classical allusions with which it is studded. Of course, when the allusions are familiar, the flashes of association that they call up enrich the value of the poem for us, and it is indeed only when we so read them that we get their true effect. Yet after all, it is not in the allusions that the greatest value of the poem lies; it is in such lines as those characterizing Shakspere that we take the deepest pleasure. A word finally as to the versification: We recognize at once the prevailing iambic in which the poem is written; but we notice as well the places where irregularities of meter, with trochaic effect, give variety and spontaneity to the lines. It is interesting to observe, in our reading aloud, where these changes come, and how they relate themselves to the emotional mood of the passage. In the notes that follow, only those few details appear that seem really to need explanation. For the rest, we need to |