IN EARTH
"I ever saw anything," says Charles Lamb, "like this funeral dirge,
except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in
the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the
earth, earthy. Both have that intentness of feeling which seems to
resolve itself into the element which it contemplates."
SONG (Phoebus, arise!)
All Drummond's poems seem to be minor poems, even at their finest,
except only this. He must have known, for the creation of that
poem, some more impassioned and less restless hour. It is, from
the outset to the close, the sigh of a profound expectation. There
is no division into stanzas, because its metre is the breath of
life. One might wish that the English ode (roughly called
"Pindaric") had never been written but with passion, for so written
it is the most immediate of all metres; the shock of the heart and
the breath of elation or grief are the law of the lines. It has
passed out of the gates of the garden of stanzas, and walks (not
astray) in the further freedom where all is interior law. Cowley,
long afterwards, wrote this Pindaric ode, and wrote it coldly. But
Drummond's (he calls it a song) can never again be forgotten. With
admirable judgment it was set up at the very gate of that Golden
Treasury we all know so well; and, therefore, generation after
generation of readers, who have never opened Drummond's poems, know
this fine ode as well as they know any single poem in the whole of
English literature.
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