Anapaests came quite suddenly into English poetry
and brought coarseness, glibness, volubility, dapper and fatuous
effects. A master may use it well, but as a popular measure it has
been disastrous. I would be bound to find the modern stanzas in an
old song by this very habit of anapaests and this very
misunderstanding of the long words and interlinear pauses of the
older stanzas. This, for instance, is the old metre:
"Hame, hame, hame! O hame fain wad I be!"
and this the lamentable anapaestic line (from the same song):
"Yet the sun through the mirk seems to promise to me -."
It has been difficult to refuse myself the delight of including A
Divine Love of Carew, but it seemed too bold to leave out four
stanzas of a poem of seven, and the last four are of the poorest
argument. This passage at least shall speak for the first three:
"Thou didst appear
A glorious mystery, so dark, so clear,
As Nature did intend
All should confess, but none might comprehend."
From Christ's Victory in Heaven of Giles Fletcher (out of reach for
its length) it is a happiness to extract here at least the passage
upon "Justice," who looks "as the eagle
"that hath so oft compared
Her eye with heaven's";
from Marlowe's poem, also unmanageable, that in which Love ran to
the priestess
"And laid his childish head upon her breast";
with that which tells how Night,
"deep-drenched in misty Acheron,
Heaved up her head, and half the world upon
Breathed darkness forth";
from Robert Greene two lines of a lovely passage:
"Cupid abroad was lated in the night,
His wings were wet with ranging in the rain";
from Ben Jonson's Hue and Cry (not throughout fine) the stanza:
"Beauties, have ye seen a toy,
Called Love, a little boy,
Almost naked, wanton, blind;
Cruel now, and then as kind?
If he be amongst ye, say;
He is Venus' run-away";
from Francis Davison:
"Her angry eyes are great with tears";
from George Wither:
"I can go rest
On her sweet breast
That is the pride of Cynthia's train";
from Cowley:
"Return, return, gay planet of mine east"!
The poems in which these are cannot make part of the volume, but
the citation of the fragments is a relieving act of love.
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