CRITICISM, Page 4
Edgar Allan Poe
It is by no means our intention to deny that in the Culprit Fay are passages of a different order from those to which we have objected- passages evincing a degree of imagination not to be discovered in the plot, conception, or general execution of the poem. The opening stanza will afford us a tolerable example.
Tis the middle watch of a summer's night The earth is dark but the heavens are bright
Naught is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue
A river of light on the welkin blue.
The moon looks down on old Cronest,
She mellows the shades of his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge gray form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below,
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bow and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark Like starry twinkles that momently break
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest rack.
There is Ideality in these lines- but except in the case of the [second and the fourteenth lines]- it is Ideality not of a high order. We have, it is true, a collection of natural objects, each individually of great beauty, and, if actually seen as in nature, capable of exciting in any mind, through the means of the Poetic Sentiment more or less inherent in all, a certain sense of the beautiful. But to view such natural objects as they exist, and to behold them through the medium of words, are different things. Let us pursue the idea that such a collection as we have here will produce, of necessity, the Poetic Sentiment, and we may as well make up our minds to believe that a catalogue of such expressions as moon, sky, trees, rivers, mountains, amp;c., shall be capable of exciting it,- it is merely an extension of the principle. But in the line "the earth is dark, but the heavens are bright" besides the simple mention of the "dark earth" "and the bright heaven," we have, directly, the moral sentiment of the brightness of the sky compensating for the darkness of the earth- and thus, indirectly, of the happiness of a future state compensating for the miseries of the present. All this is effected by the simple introduction of the word but between the "dark earth" and the "bright heaven"- this introduction, however, was prompted by the Poetic Sentiment, and by the Poetic Sentiment alone. The case is analogous in the expression "glimmers and dies," where the imagination is exalted by the moral sentiment of beauty heightened in dissolution.
In one or two shorter passages of the Culprit Fay the poet will recognize the purely ideal, and be able at a glance to distinguish it from that baser alloy upon which we have descanted. We give them without farther comment.
The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katydid;
And the plaint of the wailing whippoorwill
Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings
Ever a note of wail and wo Up to the vaulted firmament
His path the fire-fly courser bent,
And at every gallop on the wind
He flung a glittering spark behind.
He blessed the force of the charmed line
And he banned the water-goblins' spite,
For he saw around in the sweet moonshine,
Their little wee faces above the brine,
Grinning and laughing with all their might
At the piteous hap of the Fairy wight.
The poem "To a Friend" consists of fourteen Spenserian stanzas. They are fine spirited verses, and probably were not supposed by their author to be more. Stanza the fourth, although beginning nobly, concludes with that very common exemplification of the bathos, the illustrating natural objects of beauty or grandeur by references to the tinsel of artificiality.
Oh! for a seat on Appalachia's brow,
That I might scan the glorious prospects round,
Wild waving woods, and rolling floods below,
Smooth level glades and fields with grain embrowned,
High heaving hills, with tufted forests crowned,
Rearing their tall tops to the heaven's blue dome,
And emerald isles, like banners green un-wound,
Floating along the take, while round them roam
Bright helms of billowy blue, and plumes of dancing foam.
In the Extracts from Leon are passages not often surpassed in vigor of passionate thought and expression- and which induce us to believe not only that their author would have succeeded better in prose romance than in poetry, but that his attention would have naturally fallen into the former direction, had the Destroyer only spared him a little longer.
This poem contains also lines of far greater poetic power than any to be found in the Culprit Fay. For example The stars have lit in heaven their lamps of gold,
The viewless dew falls lightly on the world;
The gentle air that softly sweeps the leaves
A strain of faint unearthly music weaves:
As when the harp of heaven remotely plays,
Or sygnets wail- or song of sorrowing fays
That float amid the moonshine glimmerings pale,
On wings of woven air in some enchanted vale.*
* The expression "woven air," much insisted upon by the friends of Drake, seems to be accredited to him as original. It is to be found in many English writers- and can be traced back to Apuleius, who calls fine drapery ventum textilem.
Niagara is objectionable in many respects, and in none more so than in its frequent inversions of language, and the artificial character of its versification. The invocation,
Roar, raging torrent! and thou, mighty river,
Pour thy white foam on the valley below!
Frown ye dark mountains, amp;c. is ludicrous- and nothing more. In general, all such invocations have an air of the burlesque. In the present instance we may fancy the majestic Niagara replying, "Most assuredly I will roar, whether, worm! thou tellest me or not."
The American Flag commences with a collection of those bald conceits, which we have already shown to have no dependence whatever upon the Poetic Power- springing altogether from Comparison.
When Freedom from her mountain height
Unfurled her standard to the air,
She tore the azure robe of night
And set the stars of glory there.
She mingled with its gorgeous dyes
The milky baldric of the skies,
And striped its pure celestrial white
With streakings of the morning light;
Then from his mansion in the sun
She called her eagle bearer down
And gave into his mighty hand
The symbol of her chosen land.
Let us reduce all this to plain English, and we have- what? Why, a flag, consisting of the "azure robe of night," "set with stars of glory," interspersed with "streaks of morning light," relieved with a few pieces of "milky way," and the whole carried by an "eagle bearer," that is to say, an eagle ensign, who bears aloft this "symbol of our chosen land" in his "mighty hand," by which we are to understand his claw. In the second stanza, "the thunder-drum of Heaven" is bathetic and grotesque in the highest degree- a commingling of the most sublime music of Heaven with the most utterly contemptible and common-place of Earth. The two concluding verses are in a better spirit, and might almost be supposed to be from a different hand. The images contained in the lines
When Death careering on the gale
Sweeps darkly round the bellied sail,
And frighted waves rush wildly back,
Before the broadsides reeling rack, are of the highest order of Ideality. The deficiencies of the whole poem may be best estimated by reading it in connection with "Scots wha hae," with the "Mariners of England," or with "Hohenlinden." It is indebted for it
s high and most undeserved reputation to our patriotism- not to our judgment.
The remaining poems in Mr. Dearborn's edition of Drake, are three Songs; Lines in an Album; Lines to a Lady; Lines on leaving New Rochelle; Hope; A Fragment; To-; To Eva; To a Lady; To Sarah; and Bronx. These are all poems of little compass, and with the exception of Bronx and a portion of the Fragment, they have no character distinctive from the mass of our current poetical literature. Bronx, however, is in our opinion, not only the best of the writings of Drake, but altogether a lofty and beautiful poem, upon which his admirers would do better to found a hope of the writer's ultimate reputation than upon the niaiseries of the Culprit Fay. In the Fragment is to be found the finest individual passage in the volume before us, and we quote it as a proper finale to our review.
Yes! thou art lovelier now than ever,
How sweet't would be when all the air
In moonlight swims, along thy river
To couch upon the grass, and hear
Niagra's everlasting voice
Far in the deep blue west away,
That dreamy and poetic noise
We mark not in the glare of day,
Oh! how unlike its torrent-cry,
When o'er the brink the tide is driven,
As if the vast and sheeted sky
In thunder fell from Heaven.
Halleck's poetical powers appear to us essentially inferior, upon the whole, to those of his friend Drake. He has written nothing at all comparable to Bronx. By the hackneyed phrase, sportive elegance, we might possibly designate at once the general character of his writings and the very loftiest praise to which he is justly entitled.
Alnwick Castle is an irregular poem of one hundred and twenty-eight lines- was written, as we are informed, in October 1822- and is descriptive of a seat of the Duke of Northumberland, in Northumberlandshire, England. The effect of the first stanza is materially impaired by a defect in its grammatical arrangement. The fine lines,
Home of the Percy's high-born race,
Home of their beautiful and brave,
Alike their birth and burial place,
Their cradle and their grave! are of the nature of an invocation, and thus require a continuation of the address to the "Home, amp;c." We are consequently disappointed when the stanza proceeds with Still sternly o'er the castle gate
Their house's Lion stands in state
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners "flout the sky"
Above his princely towers.
The objects of allusion here vary, in an awkward manner, from the castle to the lion, and from the Lion to the towers. By writing the verses thus the difficulty would be remedied.
Still sternly o'er the castle gate
Thy house's Lion stands in state,
As in his proud departed hours;
And warriors frown in stone on high,
And feudal banners "flout the sky"
Above thy princely towers.
The second stanza, without evincing in any measure the loftier powers of a poet, has that quiet air of grace, both in thought and expression, which seems to be the prevailing feature of the Muse of Halleck.
A gentle hill its side inclines,
Lovely in England's fadeless green,
To meet the quiet stream which winds
Through this romantic scene
As silently and sweetly still,
As when, at evening, on that hill,
While summer's wind blew soft and low,
Seated by gallant Hotspur's side
His Katherine was a happy bride
A thousand years ago.
There are one or two brief passages in the poem evincing a degree of rich imagination not elsewhere perceptible throughout the book. For example Gaze on the Abbey's ruined pile:
Does not the succoring Ivy keeping,
Her watch around it seem to smile
As o'er a lov'd one sleeping? and,
One solitary turret gray
Still tells in melancholy glory
The legend of the Cheviot day.
The commencement of the fourth stanza is of the highest order of Poetry, and partakes, in a happy manner, of that quaintness of expression so effective an adjunct to Ideality, when employed by the Shelleys, the Coleridges and the Tennysons, but so frequently debased, and rendered ridiculous, by the herd of brainless imitators.
Wild roses by the abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom:
They were born of a race of funeral flowers,
That garlanded in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.
The tone employed in the concluding portions of Alnwick Castle, is, we sincerely think, reprehensible, and unworthy of Halleck. No true poet can unite in any manner the low burlesque with the ideal, and not be conscious of incongruity and of a profanation. Such verses as
Men in the coal and cattle line
From Tevoit's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooler, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle upon Tyne. may lay claim to oddity- but no more. These things are the defects and not the beauties of Don Juan. They are totally out of keeping with the graceful and delicate manner of the initial portions of Alnwick Castle, and serve no better purpose than to deprive the entire poem of all unity of effect. If a poet must be farcical, let him be just that, and nothing else. To be drolly sentimental is bad enough, as we have just seen in certain passages of the Culprit Fay, but to be sentimentally droll is a thing intolerable to men, and Gods, and columns.
Marco Bozzaris appears to have much lyrical without any high order of ideal beauty. Force is its prevailing character- a force, however, consisting more in a well ordered and sonorous arrangement of this metre, and a judicious disposal of what may be called the circumstances of the poem, than in the true material of lyric vigor. We are introduced, first, to the Turk who dreams, at midnight, in his guarded tent, of the hour
When Greece her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power He is represented as revelling in the visions of ambition.
In dreams through camp and court he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;
In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring;
Then pressed that monarch's throne- a king;
As wild his thoughts and gay of wing
As Eden's garden bird.
In direct contrast to this we have Bozzaris watchful in the forest, and ranging his band of Suliotes on the ground, and amid the memories of Plataea. An hour elapses, and the Turk awakes from his visions of false glory- to die. But Bozzaris dies- to awake. He dies in the flush of victory to awake, in death, to an ultimate certainty of Freedom. Then follows an invocation to death. His terrors under ordinary circumstances are contrasted with the glories of the dissolution of Bozzaris, in which the approach of the Destroyer is welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land-wind from woods of palm,
And orange groves and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
The poem closes with the poetical apotheosis of Marco Bozzaris as
One of the few, the immortal names
That are not born to die.
It will be seen that these arrangements of the subject are skillfully contrived- perhaps they are a little too evident, and we are enabled too readily by the perusal of one passage, to anticipate the succeeding. The rhythm is highly artificial. The stanzas are well adapted for vigorous expression- the fifth will afford a just specimen of the versification of the whole poem.
Come to the bridal Chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's when she feels
For the first time her first born's breath;
Come when the blessed seals
And crowded cities wail its stroke,
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm,
With banquet song and dance, and wine;
And thou art terrible- the tear,
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier,
And all we know, or dream, or fear
Of agony, are thine.
Granting, however, to Marco Bozzaris, the minor excellences we have pointed out we should be doing our conscience great wrong in calling it, upon the whole, any more than a very ordinary matter. It is surpassed, even as a lyric, by a multitude of foreign and by many American compositions of a similar character. To Ideality it has few pretensions, and the finest portion of the poem is probably to be found in the verses we have quoted elsewhere Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land,
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese,
When the land-wind from woods of palm
And orange groves, and fields of balm
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.
The verses entitled Burns consist of thirty-eight quatrains- the three first lines of each quatrain being of four feet, the fourth of three. This poem has many of the traits of Alnwick Castle, and bears also a strong resemblance to some of the writings of Wordsworth. Its chief merits, and indeed the chief merit, so we think, of all the poems of Halleck is the merit of expression. In the brief extracts from Burns which follow, our readers will recognize the peculiar character of which we speak.
Wild Rose of Alloway! my thanks:
Thou mind'st me of that autumn noon
When first we met upon "the banks
And braes o'bonny Doon" Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's bough,
My sunny hour was glad and brief We've crossed the winter sea, and thou
Art withered-flower and leaf,
There have been loftier themes than his,
And longer scrolls and louder lyres
And lays lit up with Poesy's
Purer and holier fires.
And when he breathes his master-lay
Of Alloways witch-haunted wall
All passions in our frames of clay
