Ch. 2: Of Modern English Poetry - Page 2

war and love, or to make certain of a future in which war is not, and all love is pure heavenly. If one were to choose favourites from "The Defence of Guinevere," they would be the ballads of "Shameful Death," and of "The Sailing of the Sword," and "The Wind," which has the wind's wail in its voice, and all the mad regret of "Porphyria's Lover" in its burden.

The use of "colour-words," in all these pieces, is very curious and happy. The red ruby, the brown falcon, the white maids, "the scarlet roofs of the good town," in "The Sailing of the Sword," make the poem a vivid picture. Then look at the mad, remorseful sea-rover, the slayer of his lady, in "The Wind":

"For my chair is heavy and carved, and with sweeping green behind It is hung, and the dragons thereon grin out in the gusts of the wind; On its folds an orange lies with a deep gash cut in the rind; If I move my chair it will scream, and the orange will roll out far, And the faint yellow juice ooze out like blood from a wizard's jar, And the dogs will howl for those who went last month the war."

"The Blue Closet," which is said to have been written for some drawings of Mr. Rossetti, is also a masterpiece in this romantic manner. Our brief English age of romanticism, our 1830, was 1856-60, when Mr. Morris, Mr. Burne Jones, and Mr. Swinburne were undergraduates. Perhaps it wants a peculiar turn of taste to admire these strange things, though "The Haystack in the Floods," with its tragedy, must surely appeal to all who read poetry.

For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris's long later poems, "The Earthly Paradise" especially, were less art than "art manufacture." This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment. "The Earthly Paradise," and still more certainly "Jason," are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give. As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are "good, but copious." Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold's parable of "The Progress of Poetry."

"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."

Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue cold fields and folds of air," in all the primitive