Rhythm of Life

Meynell, Alice Christiana Thompson

• Publisher: pubOne.info
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9782819930839
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

pubOne.info present you this new edition. If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind. Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery. Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed. Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain- it returns. Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise. If we had made a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation instead of a discovery

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE’S ODES

  To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than praise of their imagery. Imagery is the natural language of their poetry. Without a parable she hardly speaks. But undoubtedly there is now and then a poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too vitally, too sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes for love of the beautiful image. Those rare moments are simple, and their simplicity makes one of the reader’s keenest experiences. Other simplicities may be achieved by lesser art, but this is transcendent simplicity. There is nothing in the world more costly. It vouches for the beauty which it transcends; it answer for the riches it forbears; it implies the art which it fulfils. All abundance ministers to it, though it is so single. And here we get the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of art at this perfection. All the faculties of the poet are used for preparing this naked greatness— are used and fruitfully spent and shed. The loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, only to be put to silence— to silence of a kind that would be impossible were they less glorious— are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice and waste.

  But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet’s work with praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a true history of literature would show to be above price, even gauged by the rude measure of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human emotion has been in action. Thus Departure, If I were Dead, A Farewell, Eurydice, The Toys, St. Valentine’s Day— though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling— group themselves apart as the innermost of the poet’s achievements.

  Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images, and display— rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray— the beauties of poetic art. Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes, never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos. If any other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know it. Love and sorrow are pure in The Unknown Eros; and its author has not refused even the cup of terror. Against love often, against sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts. It is only the approach of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion defends himself in the twinkling of an eye. But through nearly the whole of Coventry Patmore’s poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch. Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch. That is, his capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is more than the capacity of other men. He endures therefore what they could but will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they cannot apprehend. Thus, to have studied The Unknown Eros is to have had a certain experience— at least the impassioned experience of a compassion; but it is also to have recognised a soul beyond our compassion.

  What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon our knowing. He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader’s error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading. That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable. It has the obscurity of profound clear waters. What the poet chiefly secures to us is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception, does but rehearse the action of the union of God with humanity— that there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind. When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the truths of the love of God. The thought grows gay in the three Psyche odes, or attempts a gaiety— the reader at least being somewhat reluctant. How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore’s play more often than not wins you to but a slow participation. Perhaps because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.

  But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine allusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is passionate has much of the impulse of gravitation— gravitation that is not falling, as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates and is fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, ‘prays forbearance; ’ the child is ‘fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses. ’ It might be drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.

  The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s poetry, cannot be otherwise than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author’s work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn— political, social, literary. The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects— we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the most modern of adjectives— and call them topical. Here assuredly there is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace— reluctance.

  If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws of verse set for use— cradle verse and march-marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the musical time). Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time measures— if for no other reason, for this: that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed. Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the irregular metre of The Unknown Eros is happily used except for the large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called. Lycidas, the Mrs. Anne Killigrew, the Intimations, and Emerson’s Threnody, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste. So with the graver Odes— much in the majority— of Mr. Coventry Patmore’s series. A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his versification. And what movement of words has ever expressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a celestial line— the eighth in the ode To the Unknown Eros? When we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with something of a jerk. And this adding— as, for instance, of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six— occurs now and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as A Farewell. It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a boat. In The Angel in the House, and other earlier poems, Mr. Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinly packed. Moreover those first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes. And even in his slightest work he proves himself the master— that is, the owner— of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

I shall not ask the commentators whether Blake used these two words in union or in antithesis. They assuredly have an inseverable union in the art of literature. The songs of Innocence and Experience are for each poet the songs of his own separate heart and life; but to take the cumulative experiences of other men, and to use these in place of the virginal fruit of thought— whereas one would hardly consent to take them for ordering even the most habitual of daily affairs— is to forego Innocence and Experience at once and together. Obviously, Experience can be nothing except personal and separate; and Innocence of a singularly solitary quality is his who does not dip his hands into other men’s histories, and does not give to his own word the common sanction of other men’s summaries and conclusions. Therefore I bind Innocence and Experience in one, and take them as a sign of the necessary and noble isolation of man from man— of his uniqueness. But if I had a mind to forego that manner of personal separateness, and to use the things of others, I think I would rather appropriate their future than their past. Let me put on their hopes, and the colours of their confidence, if I must borrow. Not that I would burden my prophetic soul with unjustified ambitions; but even this would be more tolerable than to load my memory with an unjustifiable history.

And yet how differently do the writers of a certain kind of love-poetry consider this matter. These are the love-poets who have no reluctance in adopting the past of a multitude of people to whom they have not even been introduced. Their verse is full of ready-made memories, various, numerous, and cruel. No single life— supposing it to be a liberal life concerned with something besides sex— could quite suffice for so much experience, so much disillusion, so much déception. To achieve that tone in its fulness it is necessary to take for one’s own the praeterita (say) of Alfred de Musset and of the men who helped...

Table of contents

• THE RHYTHM OF LIFE
• DECIVILISED
• A REMEMBRANCE
• THE SUN
• THE FLOWER
• UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM
• THE UNIT OF THE WORLD
• BY THE RAILWAY SIDE
• POCKET VOCABULARIES
• PATHOS
• THE POINT OF HONOUR
• COMPOSURE
• DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
• JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
• DOMUS ANGUSTA
• REJECTION
• THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE
• MR. COVENTRY PATMORE’S ODES
• INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
• PENULTIMATE CARICATURE
• Copyright