Six Centuries of English Poetry Part 24

--_Odyssey_, I, 1.

Milton invokes the

"heavenly Muse that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That shepherd," etc.

--_Paradise Lost_, I, 1.

2. Observe how, in the sixteen lines following, the sound is made in some measure to be "an echo to the sense."

3. =equal temper know.= Evenness of disposition acquire. The music of Timotheus had an opposite effect on Alexander. See "Alexander's Feast."

4. =a.s.suasive.= Moderating.

5. =the Thracian raised his strain.= Orpheus was a Thracian, the son of Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope. Apollo gave him a lyre, and the Muses instructed him in its use; and so sweet was the music which he drew from it that the wild beasts were enchanted and the trees and rocks moved from their places to follow the sound. When Jason and his followers, the Argonauts, were unable to launch their s.h.i.+p Argo, Orpheus played his lyre, and the vessel glided into the sea, while her "kindred trees descended" from the slopes of the mountain (Pelion) and followed her into "the main."

6. =demi-G.o.ds.= Half-G.o.ds; heroes. Among the Argonauts were Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Theseus, Peleus, Nestor, and others similarly renowned.

7. =infernal bounds.= Boundaries of h.e.l.l. The wife of Orpheus was a nymph named Eurydice. She having died from the bite of a serpent, the sweet musician followed her into the infernal regions. He begged of Pluto that his wife might return with him to the earth, but his prayer was granted only upon condition that he should not look back upon her until both had safely pa.s.sed the gates between Hades and the upper world. The poet tells the rest of the story.

=Phlegethon.= A river of h.e.l.l in which flowed fire instead of water.

8. See Song of Solomon viii. 6: "Love is strong as death."

9. =shady forms.= Departed spirits were called "shades," because they were supposed to be perceptible sometimes to the sight but never to the touch. See "heroes' armed shades," below.

10. =Sisyphus.= See note 18, page 147.

=Ixion.= King of the Lapithae. As a punishment for ingrat.i.tude to Zeus, his hands and feet were chained to a wheel which was always in motion.

=Furies.= See note 20, page 167.

11. =h.e.l.l.= The powers of h.e.l.l--or, as he explains below, Proserpine, the queen of the infernal regions. =Styx.= The princ.i.p.al river of h.e.l.l, around which it flows seven--not nine--times.

12. See Milton's "L'Allegro," 135:

"Lap me in soft Lydian airs, Married to immortal verse, . . .

That Orpheus' self may heave his head From golden slumber on a bed Of heaped Elysian flowers, and hear Such strains as would have won the ear Of Pluto to have quite set free His half-regain'd Eurydice."

13. Orpheus's grief for the loss of Eurydice caused him to treat with contempt the Thracian women among whom he dwelt, and they in revenge tore him to pieces, under the excitement of their Baccha.n.a.lian orgies.

His head was given by the Hebrus to the sea, and finally carried to the island of Lesbos, where it was buried. See Milton's "Lycidas," 58:

"What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself for her enchanting son, Whom universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian sh.o.r.e?"

See, also, "Paradise Lost," VII, 32:

"The barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears To rapture, till the savage clamor drown'd Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend Her son."

14. =Rhodope.= A range of mountains in Thrace, sacred to Bacchus. =Haemus= was another range extending from Rhodope, on the west, to the Black Sea, on the east.

15. =Music.= Compare what Pope says of music with:

"Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast."

--_Congreve_, _The Mourning Bride_.

"O Music! sphere-descended maid, Friend of pleasure, wisdom's aid!"

--_Collins_, _The Pa.s.sions_.

"Soft is the music that would charm forever."

--_Wordsworth_, _Sonnets_.

16. Compare these lines with the four which end Dryden's "Alexander's Feast."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

ALEXANDER POPE was born in London in 1688. He had some instruction at home, and was afterwards sent, first to a Roman Catholic seminary near Winchester, then to another in London. "This," he said, "was all the teaching I ever had, and G.o.d knows it extended a very little way. When I had done with my priests, I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry: and in a few years I had dipped into a very great number of the English, Italian, Latin, and Greek poets." He was small of stature and deformed, and his ill health made him peevish, irritable, and selfish. Yet his rare intellectual abilities and the deserved success of his earlier poetry secured for him the friends.h.i.+p of many of the most influential men of the time. Bolingbroke declared that he never knew a man more tenderly devoted to his friends; and Warburton said, "He is as good a companion as poet, and, what is more, appears to be a good man."

Pope's "Essay on Criticism" was published in 1711; the "Rape of the Lock" in 1714; his translation of Homer's "Iliad" in 1715-18, and of the "Odyssey" in 1726; the "Dunciad" in 1728; the "Essay on Man" in 1732. A revised and enlarged version of the "Dunciad" was published in 1742. The latter part of Pope's life was spent at his country-seat of Twickenham, which he enlarged and beautified from the proceeds of his translation of Homer. He died in 1744.

"Pope is our greatest master in didactic poetry," says Stopford Brooke, "not so much because of the worth of the thoughts as because of the masterly form in which they are put."

"In two directions," says Mark Pattison, "in that of condensing and pointing his meaning, and in that of drawing the utmost harmony of sound out of the couplet, Pope carried versification far beyond the point at which it was when he took it up. The matter which he worked up into his verse has a permanent value, and is indeed one of the most precious heirlooms which the eighteenth century has bequeathed us."

=Other Poems to be Read:= The Rape of the Lock; The Dying Christian to his Soul; The Universal Prayer; Pastorals; Windsor Forest.

REFERENCES: Johnson's _Lives of the Poets_; Stephen's _Hours in a Library_; De Quincey's _Literature of the Eighteenth Century_; Lowell's _My Study Window_; _Pope_ (English Men of Letters), by Leslie Stephen.

The Seventeenth Century.

"_The people of the seventeenth century were weary of liberty, weary of the unmitigated rage of the dramatists, cloyed with the roses and the spices and the kisses of the lyrists, tired of being carried over the universe and up and down the avenues of history at the freak of every irresponsible rhymester. Literature had been set open to all the breezes of heaven by the bl.u.s.tering and glittering Elizabethans, and in the hands of their less gifted successors it was fast declining into a mere Cave of the Winds. . . . We know the poets of the early Caroline period almost entirely by extracts, and their ardor, quaintness, and sudden flashes of inspiration give them a singular advantage in this form. The sustained elevation which had characterized Shakespeare and Spenser, and even in some degree several of the chief of their contemporaries, had pa.s.sed away, but still the poets were most brilliant, most delectable in their purple patches. . . . As the last waves of the Renaissance died away, a deathly calm settled down upon the pools of thought. Man returned from the particular to the general, from romantic examples to those disquisitions on the norm which were thought to display a cla.s.sical taste. The seer disappeared, and the artificer took his place.

For a whole century the singer that only sang because he must, and as the linnets do, was entirely absent from English literature. He came back at the close of the eighteenth century, with Burns in Scotland, and with Blake in England._"--EDMUND GOSSE.

"_At the same time, amid the cla.s.sical coldness which then dried up English literature, and the social excess which then corrupted English morals . . . appeared a mighty and superb mind (Milton), prepared by logic and enthusiasm for eloquence and the epic style; the heir of a poetical age, the precursor of an austere age, holding his place between the epoch of unselfish dreaming and the epoch of practical action._"--TAINE.

=Poets of the Seventeenth Century.=

=Ben Jonson= (1573-1637). See biographical note, page 213.

=William Drummond of Hawthornden= (1585-1649). Short poems; "Poems: Amorous, Funerall, Divine, Pastorall, in Sonnets, Songs, s.e.xtains, Madrigals"; "Floures of Sion."

=William Browne= (1588-1643). "Britannia's Pastorals"; "The Shepherd's Pipe"; "The Inner Temple Masque."

=George Wither= (1588-1667). Short poems; "Collection of Emblems"; "Nature of Man"; "The Shepheard's Hunting"; "Fidelia."