There was a generation that had not been
taught by the Golden Treasury, and Cardinal Newman was of it.
Writing to Coventry Patmore of his great odes, he called them
beautiful but fragmentary; was inclined to wish that they might
some day be made complete. There is nothing in all poetry more
complete. Seldom is a poem in stanzas so complete but that another
stanza might have made a final close; but a master's ode has the
unity of life, and when it ends it ends for ever.
A poem of Drummond's has this auroral image of a blush: Anthea has
blushed to hear her eyes likened to stars (habit might have caused
her, one would think, to bear the flattery with a front as cool as
the very daybreak), and the lover tells her that the sudden
increase of her beauty is futile, for he cannot admire more: "For
naught thy cheeks that morn do raise." What sweet, nay, what
solemn roses!
Again:
"Me here she first perceived, and here a morn
Of bright carnations overspread her face."
The seventeenth century has possession of that "morn" caught once
upon its uplands; nor can any custom of aftertime touch its
freshness to wither it.
TO MY INCONSTANT MISTRESS
The solemn vengeance of this poem has a strange tone--not unique,
for it had sounded somewhere in mediaeval poetry in Italy--but in a
dreadful sense divine.
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