Select Poems Of Thomas Gray Part 13

"where the Attic bird Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long."

Cf. Ovid, _Hal._ 110: "Attica avis verna sub tempestate queratus;"

and Propertius, ii. 16, 6: "Attica volucris."

_Pours her throat_ is a metonymy. H. p. 85. Cf. Pope, _Essay on Man_, iii. 33: "Is it for thee the linnet pours her throat?"

6, 7. Cf. Thomson, _Spring_, 577:

"From the first note the hollow cuckoo sings, The symphony of spring."

9, 10. Cf. Milton, _Comus_, 989:

"And west winds with musky wing About the cedarn alleys fling Nard and ca.s.sia's balmy smells."

12. Cf. Milton, _P. L._ iv. 245: "Where the unpierc'd shade Imbrown'd the noontide bowers;" Pope, _Eloisa_, 170: "And breathes a browner horror on the woods;" Thomson, _Castle of Indolence_, i. 38: "Or Autumn's varied shades imbrown the walls."

According to Ruskin (_Modern Painters_, vol. iii. p. 241, Amer. ed.) there is no brown in nature. After remarking that Dante "does not acknowledge the existence of the colour of _brown_ at all," he goes on to say: "But one day, just when I was puzzling myself about this, I happened to be sitting by one of our best living modern colourists, watching him at his work, when he said, suddenly and by mere accident, after we had been talking about other things, 'Do you know I have found that there is no _brown_ in nature? What we call brown is always a variety either of orange or purple. It never can be represented by umber, unless altered by contrast.' It is curious how far the significance of this remark extends, how exquisitely it ill.u.s.trates and confirms the mediaeval sense of hue," etc.

14. _O'ercanopies the glade_. Gray himself quotes Shakes. _M. N. D._ ii. 1: "A bank o'ercanopied with luscious woodbine."[1] Cf. Fletcher, _Purple Island_, i. 5, 30: "The beech shall yield a cool, safe canopy;" and Milton, _Comus_, 543: "a bank, With ivy canopied."

[Footnote 1: The reading of the folio of 1623 is:

"I know a banke where the wilde time blowes, Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes, Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine."

Dyce and some other modern editors read,

"Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine."]

15. _Rushy brink_. Cf. _Comus_, 890: "By the rushy-fringed bank."

19, 20. These lines, as first printed, read:

"How low, how indigent the proud!

How little are the great!"

22. _The panting herds_. Cf. Pope, _Past._ ii. 87: "To closer shades the panting flocks remove."

23. _The peopled air_. Cf. Walton, _C. A._: "Now the wing'd people of the sky shall sing;" Beaumont, _Psyche_: "Every tree empeopled was with birds of softest throats."

24. _The busy murmur_. Cf. Milton, _P. R._ iv. 248: "bees'

industrious murmur."

25. _The insect youth_. Perhaps suggested by a line in Green's _Hermitage_, quoted in a letter of Gray to Walpole: "From maggot-youth through change of state," etc. See on 31 below.

26. _The honied spring_. Cf. Milton, _Il Pens._ 142: "the bee with honied thigh;" and _Lyc._ 140: "the honied showers."

"There has of late arisen," says Johnson in his Life of Gray, "a practice of giving to adjectives derived from substantives the termination of participles, such as the _cultured plain_, the _daisied bank_; but I am sorry to see in the lines of a scholar like Gray the _honied_ spring." But, as we have seen, _honied_ is found in Milton; and Shakespeare also uses it in _Hen. V._ i. 1: "honey'd sentences." _Mellitus_ is used by Cicero, Horace, and Catullus. The editor of an English dictionary, as Lord Grenville has remarked, ought to know "that the ready conversion of our substances into verbs, participles, and participial adjectives is of the very essence of our tongue, derived from its Saxon origin, and a main source of its energy and richness."

27. _The liquid noon_. Gray quotes Virgil, _Geo._ iv. 59: "Nare per aestatem liquidam."

30. _Quick-glancing to the sun_. Gray quotes Milton, _P. L._ vii.

405:

"Sporting with quick glance, Show to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold."

31. Gray here quotes Green, _Grotto_: "While insects from the threshold preach." In a letter to Walpole, he says: "I send you a bit of a thing for two reasons: first, because it is of one of your favourites, Mr. M. Green; and next, because I would do justice. The thought on which my second Ode turns [this Ode, afterwards placed first by Gray] is manifestly stole from hence; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the Author, I took it for my own." Then comes the quotation from Green's _Grotto_. The pa.s.sage referring to the insects is as follows:

"To the mind's ear, and inward sight, There silence speaks, and shade gives light: While insects from the threshold preach, And minds dispos'd to musing teach; Proud of strong limbs and painted hues, They perish by the slightest bruise; Or maladies begun within Destroy more slow life's frail machine: From maggot-youth, thro' change of state, They feel like us the turns of fate: Some born to creep have liv'd to fly, And chang'd earth's cells for dwellings high: And some that did their six wings keep, Before they died, been forc'd to creep.

They politics, like ours, profess; The greater prey upon the less.

Some strain on foot huge loads to bring, Some toil incessant on the wing: Nor from their vigorous schemes desist Till death; and then they are never mist.

Some frolick, toil, marry, increase, Are sick and well, have war and peace; And broke with age in half a day, Yield to successors, and away."

47. _Painted plumage_. Cf. Pope, _Windsor Forest_, 118: "His painted wings; and Milton, _P. L._ vii. 433:

"From branch to branch the smaller birds with song Solaced the woods, and spread their painted wings."

See also Virgil, _Geo._ iii. 243, and _aen._ iv. 525: "pictaeque volucres;" and Phaedrus, _Fab._ iii. 18: "pictisque plumis."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

ODE ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT.

This ode first appeared in Dodsley's _Collection_, vol. ii. p. 274, with some variations noticed below. Walpole, after the death of Gray, placed the china vase on a pedestal at Strawberry Hill, with a few lines of the ode for an inscription.

In a letter to Walpole, dated March 1, 1747, Gray refers to the subject of the ode in the following jocose strain: "As one ought to be particularly careful to avoid blunders in a compliment of condolence, it would be a sensible satisfaction to me (before I testify my sorrow, and the sincere part I take in your misfortune) to know for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara and Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), or rather I knew them both together; for I cannot justly say which was which. Then as to your handsome Cat, the name you distinguish her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing one's handsome cat is always the cat one likes best; or if one be alive and the other dead, it is usually the latter that is the handsomest. Besides, if the point were never so clear, I hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the survivor; oh no! I would rather seem to mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be the tabby one that had met with this sad accident. Till this affair is a little better determined, you will excuse me if I do not begin to cry,

Tempus inane peto, requiem spatiumque doloris.

"... Heigh ho! I feel (as you to be sure have done long since) that I have very little to say, at least in prose. Somebody will be the better for it; I do not mean you, but your Cat, feue Mademoiselle Selime, whom I am about to immortalize for one week or fortnight, as follows: [the Ode follows, which we need not reprint here].

"There's a poem for you, it is rather too long for an Epitaph."

2. Cf. Lady M. W. Montagu, _Town Eclogues_:

"Where the tall jar erects its stately pride, With antic shapes in China's azure dyed."

3. _The azure flowers that blow_. Johnson and Wakefield find fault with this as redundant, but it is no more so than poetic usage allows. In the _Progress of Poesy_, i. 1, we have again: "The laughing flowers that round them blow." Cf. _Comus_, 992:

"Iris there with humid bow Waters the odorous banks that blow Flowers of more mingled hue Than her purfled scarf can shew."

4. _Tabby_. For the derivation of this word from the French _tabis_, a kind of silk, see Wb. In the first ed. the 5th line preceded the 4th.

6. _The lake_. In the mock-heroic vein that runs through the whole poem.