Though, asked, I know not how she would resist.
CHARLES COTTON.
Apart from Milton, almost all the good poets of the seventeenth century are colloquial poets; they write a language spoken or speakable by any cultivated gentleman. Herbert is gravely colloquial about God; Herrick, gaily, about girls and flowers. All are talkers.
In these two sonnets by Charles Cotton the talk is particularly light, humorous and easy. Reading, we seem to hear a warm and cultured voice discoursing across the dinner table. It is delightful—all the more so since this knowledgeable chat about feminine charms and feminine temperaments is also genuinely poetry.
For the poetical heightening of his speech, Cotton relies, partly on rhythm, partly on a judicious choice of images. How admirably phrased, for example, is the first quatrain of the second sonnet! Curiously stretched, the syntax seems to vibrate under the impact of the meaning; a simple conversational statement goes out, in consequence, with a peculiar and unexpected resonance. And how apposite, with its suggestion of something good to eat—de délicieux à croquer—is “white as blanched almonds”! And at the sound of “full-cheeked beauties” what a vision swims up before the inward eye! Peonies, peaches, the backsides of cherubs, a whole Wallace Collection of Bouchers and Fragonards. . . .
Some people hang portraits up
In a room where they dine or sup:
And the wife clinks tea-things under,
And her cousin, he stirs his cup,
Asks, “who was the lady, I wonder?”
“ ’Tis a daub John bought at a sale.”
Quoth the wife—looks black as thunder:
“What a shade beneath her nose!
Snuff-taking I suppose,”
Adds the cousin, while John’s corns ail.
Or else there’s no wife in the case,
But the portrait’s Queen of the place,
Alone ’mid the other spoils
Of youth—masks, gloves and foils,
And pipe-sticks, rose, cherry-tree, jasmine,
And the long whip, the tandem-lasher,
And the cast of a fist (“not alas mine,
But my master’s, the Tipton Slasher”)
And the cards where pistol-balls mark ace,
And a satin shoe used for cigar-case,
And the chamois horns (“shot in the Chablais”)
And prints—Rarey drumming on Cruiser,
And Sayers, our champion, the bruiser,
And the little edition of Rabelais:
Where a friend with both hands in his pockets,
May saunter up close to examine it,
And remark a good deal of Jane Lamb in it,
“But the eyes are half out of their sockets:
That hair’s not so bad, where the gloss is,
But they’ve made the girl’s nose a proboscis:
Jane Lamb, that we danced with at Vichy!
What, isn’t she Jane? Then, who is she?”
All that I own is a print,
An etching, a mezzotint;
’Tis a study, a fancy, a fiction,
Yet a fact (take my conviction)
Because it has more than a hint
Of a certain face, I never
Saw elsewhere touch or trace of
In women I’ve seen the face of:
Just an etching, and, so far, clever.
I keep my prints, an imbroglio,
Fifty in one portfolio.
When somebody tries my claret,
We turn round chairs to the fire,
Chirp over days in a garret,
Chuckle o’er increase in salary,
Taste the good fruits of our leisure,
Talk about pencil and lyre,
And the National Portrait Gallery:
Then I exhibit my treasure.
After we’ve turned over twenty,
And the debt of wonder my crony owes
Is paid to my Marc Antonios,
He stops me—“Festina lente!
What’s that sweet thing there, the etching?”
How my waistcoat strings want stretching,
How my cheeks grow red as tomatoes,
How my heart leaps! But hearts, after leaps, ache.
“By the by, you must take, for a keepsake,
That other, you praised, of Volpato’s.”
The fool! Would he try a flight further and say—
He never saw, never before to-day,
What was able to take his breath away,
A face to lose youth for, to occupy age
With the dream of, meet death with,—why, I’ll not engage
But that, half in a rapture and half in a rage,
I should toss him the thing’s self—“ ’Tis only a duplicate,
A thing of no value! Take it, I supplicate!”
ROBERT BROWNING.
What is he buzzing in my ears?
“Now that I come to die,
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”
Ah reverend sir, not I!
What I viewed there once, what I view again
Where the physic bottles stand
On the table’s edge,—is a suburb lane,
With a wall to my bedside hand.
That lane sloped, much as the bottles do,
From a house you could descry
O’er the garden wall: is the curtain blue
Or green to a healthy eye?
To mine, it serves for the old June weather
Blue above lane and wall:
And that furthest bottle labelled “Ether”
Is the house o’ertopping all.
At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
There watched for me, one June,
A girl: I know, sir, it’s improper,
My poor mind’s out of tune.
Only, there was a way . . . you crept
Close by the side, to dodge
Eyes in the house, two eyes except:
They styled their house “The Lodge.”
What right had a lounger up their lane?
But, by creeping very close,
With the good wall’s help, their eyes might strain
And stretch themselves to Oos,
Yet never catch her and me together,
As she left the attic, there,
By the rim of the bottle labelled “Ether,”
And stole from stair to stair.
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,
We loved, sir—used to meet:
How sad and bad and mad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!
ROBERT BROWNING.
Descriptions
Ante fores tumuli, quas saxa immania duro
obice dampnarant, scopulis substructa cavatis,
stat Dominus, nomenque ciet frigentis amici.
Nec mora, funereus revolutis rupibus horror
evomit exsequias gradiente cadavere vivas.
Solvite jam laetæ redolentia vincla sorores.
Solus odor sparsi spiramen aromatis efflat,
nec de corporeo nidorem sordida tabo
aura refert, oculos sanie stillante solutos
pristinus in speculum decor excitat, et putrefactas
tincta rubore genas paulatim purpura vestit.
Quis potuit fluidis animam suffundere membris?
Nimirum qui membra dedit, qui fictilis ulvæ
perflavit venam madidam, cui tabida gleba
traxit sanguineos infecto humore colores.
PRUDENTIUS.
A description so scientifically accurate, so fully realized in all its details, as this of the gradually deputrefying Lazarus, is positively alarming. Reading such passages (and they seem to be fairly common in later Latin poetry) one realizes how extremely unprecise most of the best poetical descriptions are. Poets are seldom much interested in the precise look of things; they are interested in the mind’s reaction to the things. This reaction can generally be rendered quite effectively without resorting to precise description. Indeed, precise description often hinders the poet in his task of expressing what the things have caused him to feel.
La très-chère était nue, et connaissant mon cœur,
Elle n’avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores,
Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l’air vainqueur
Qu’ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Maures.
Quand il jette en dansant son bruit vif et moqueur,
Ce monde rayonnant de métal et de pierre
Me ravit en extase, et j’aime avec fureur
Les choses où le son se mêle à la lumière.
Elle était donc couchée, et se laissait aimer,
Et du haut du divan elle souriait d’aise
A mon amour profond et doux comme la mer
Qui vers elle montait comme vers sa falaise.
Les yeux fixés sur moi, comme un tigre dompté,
D’un air vague et rêveur, elle essayait des poses,
Et la candeur unie à la lubricité
Donnait un charme neuf à ses métamorphoses.
Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins,
Polis comme de l’huile, onduleux comme un cygne,
Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins;
Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne.
Je croyais voir unis par un nouveau dessin
Les hanches de l’Antiope au buste d’un imberbe,
Tant sa taille faisait ressortir son bassin;
Sur ce teint fauve et brun le fard était superbe!
—Et la lampe s’étant résignée à mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre,
Chaque fois qu’il poussait un flamboyant soupir,
Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d’ambre!
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
With an equal precision, Baudelaire describes both what is seen and the feeling of the seer. Realized with extraordinary pictorial intensity, the naked mulatto woman lies there before us; and our eyes, as we read, become those of the poet in his strange ecstasy of detached, intellectual, platonic sensuality.
In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
The floor of plaster and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies—alas, how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay in Clivedon’s proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love:
Or just as gay, at council, in the ring
Of mimic statesmen, and their merry king.
No wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.
ALEXANDER POPE.
The theorists of “Classicism” decreed that all poetical descriptions should be couched in general terms. In spite of which, this admirable purple passage from the Epistle to Lord Bathurst is full of the most accurate particularities.
I remember, the first time I read Pope’s lines, being profoundly impressed by those walls of dung. Indeed, they still disturb my imagination. They express, for me, the Essential Horror. A floor of dung would have seemed almost normal, acceptable. But walls—Ah, no, no!
His body was as straight as Circe’s wand;
Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpassed
The white of Pelops’ shoulder: I could tell ye
How smooth his breast was and how white his belly;
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back; but my rude pen
Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men,
Much less of powerful gods.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
This was the loveliest boy that ever lived. Of the fact of his beauty Marlowe’s description convinces us beyond the possibility of doubt. And yet how little he actually says about the boy! And how indefinite, vague and unspecified is all that he does say! There is, in actual fact, no description at all. Marlowe simply catalogues parts of the boy’s body in association with certain names from classical mythology. The effect is
