N A CRY FROM ERIN. ERIN, our country, -our dear one! Sadder thy days grow, and sadder; To teach us our strength and our weakness, Never the true and the strong. As one which has bartered its birthright; O green isle in the ocean, Land of the soldier who fears not, None can sing now, in the shade! Peace, and good-will unto men. Thou sentest glad tidings again. 'But now we are fallen, are fallen! Discord, and tumult, and murder, Clamor, and impotent ravings, Are the voices we give to the world. We are slaves to our own meanest passions; WHEN first the merry days of June Are dancing in the meadow green, Who goes beneath the trees at noon Shall worship all the summer sheen That falls with golden light between The tender, perfect, happy leaves. There is no sight that could be seen, Except the wheat's ungathered sheaves, That has such power of joy upon the heart that grieves. For when all men with sorrow bend, The summer comes with bright young face, Singing and smiling like a friend, With voice and motion full of grace; "Go, Sorrow, by, and give Joy place! For happiness is yet alive I am the winner in the race; While skies are blue, in vain shall strive Dark griefs to run more swift, and at the goal arrive." 777 From The Fortnightly Review. THE POETRY OF ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.* Rough Satyrs danced, and Fauns with cloven From the glad sound would not be absent long; 66 CLOUGH's first important poem was described as a "Long-Vacation Pastoral," and it is in a pastoral poem, called "Thyr- My sturdy Yorkshire sense of reality was sis," and a very beautiful pastoral poem, very much revolted, when I was a lad, by one which may be read by the side of this conventional imagery. What," I Milton's "Lycidas" without losing by the used to say to myself, "can the man mean comparison, that Matthew Arnold has by talking of himself and Mr. Edward commemorated the death of the contem- King as having fed their flock upon the porary and friend of whom I am to speak self-same hill, and piped on oaten flutes to-night. Yet I think no one would be till the rough satyrs danced, and fauns disposed to term Clough's poetry, poetry with cloven heel from the glad sound exactly of the pastoral order, in spite of would not be absent long? It was all the pastoral elements which it undoubt- rubbish, of course. Milton and Mr. Ededly contains. For what is pastoral ward King were together at Cambridge, poetry? I remember the time when my and both thought of going into the Church, favorite aversion - I may almost say, the which has been compared in parable to object of my severest moral indignation feeding sheep; but they never did feed -was what I understood to be pastoral even metaphorical flocks together, and poetry. When, on August 10th, 1637, certainly never had satyrs, and fauns Mr. Edward King was shipwrecked in a with cloven heel, dancing to their music. crazy vessel bound from Chester for Dub- Why can't even poets say what they want lin, all the crew and passengers being to say a little more directly, and without lost, nineteen Latin, thirteen English, and those conventional equivalents for things three Greek poems were written upon his which are a great deal more interesting death by his Cambridge friends, of which to the imagination when adequately conone became very famous - Milton's "Ly- ceived, than they are when conceived uncidas." You remember the general drift der the disguise of these fanciful and not of this pastoral, which was at the time very impressive metaphors? Why call much praised for being a pastoral," on Mr. Edward King Lycidas at all? Why the ground that "both Mr. King and set up the fiction that he belonged to Milton had been designed for Holy Orders | ancient Greece, and lived in the circle of and the pastoral care, which," as the mythological ideas, most of which were, phrase went, "gave a peculiar propriety as Mr. Pecksniff once remarked, 'Pagan, to several passages in it." Such a pas- I regret to say'?" I do not quote these sage, I suppose, is this exquisitely grace- grumblings of mine against the convenful and musical one: tions of poetic speech for their wisdom. I am well aware now that it is one test of 66 For we were nursed upon the self-same hill, rill; Together both, ere the high lawns appeared Oft till the star that rose at evening, bright, Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, the power of a great poet to have a certain pleasure in the apt use of a conventional field of fancy, all good verse, indeed, being itself the product of a rare faculty for the apt use of conventional rhythm and artistic which is, in one sense, artificial -rhyme. It would, indeed, be as absurd to say that to burst into operatic airs is a natural mode of expression for the despairing lover or the assassin, as to say that the most natural mode of expressing the ecstasy of wrath, even of an unhinged mind, is to inveigh in such verses as Lecture recently delivered at the Philosophical these, which King Lear launches against Hall, Leeds. the storm: Blow, winds! and crack your cheeks! rage! | supreme idealizing of shepherds and of blow!... You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, Vaunt couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! We all know that wrath and misery at their highest point do not, in fact, take orderly imaginative shape in this way. True poetry, in my belief, comes nearer reality than any other effort of human energy; but it always has, always must have, a conventional element in it-an element foreign to the natural products of the bare emotions of men and this, though it is actually by virtue of the use of that conventional element that it pierces deeper to the core of existence than any one who abjures all convention will ever succeed in piercing. Listen to any woman who has lost all that is dearest to her in life, and she will certainly not say unless she is insincere and affected sheep, and of all the details of pastoral life. He has even written one short pastoral of extreme beauty, describing the feelings with which a Swiss herds woman, whose lover is seeking his fortune far away from her, drives home her little herd through a sudden Alpine storm to their shelter in the byres; and muses, as she presses her three cows onwards through the driving rain, whether her lover will have strength to be faithful to her in the foreign scenes which he is visiting, nay, whether she herself will have strength to be faithful to him, if the time drags on, and no further confirmation of his love for her be received: The skies have sunk, and hid the upper snow, (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie,) The rainy clouds are filing fast below, And wet will be the path, and wet shall we. what Cleopatra says on the death of Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La Palie. Antony And there is nothing left remarkable All the imaginative expressions of feeling in true poetry are far more perfect, far more elaborate than any one not a charlatan would or could use, under the immediate influence of that emotion. None the less, the expressions which are here, within the conventional license always permitted to a poet, put into Cleopatra's mouth, are the most memorable and magnificent expressions of the sense of loss which the English tongue contains. I referred, then, to my old sentiment of wrath against pastoral poetry, not to justify it, though I do think that in many schools of poetry the conventional has almost edged out the real, and left us with no spiritual meaning engraven on the background of lackadaisical assumption, but to indicate what it is, in my opinion, that was alone wanting to Clough, to make him one of the greatest of our poets I mean a certain pliancy to the more conventional methods of expressing poetic feeling. Clough had many of the ele. ments even of a pastoral poet in him; especially that love of the earth, and the homely things of the earth in their utmost simplicity, which has led, no doubt, to the Ah dear, and where is he a year agone, The lightning zigzags shoot across the sky, And through the vale the rains go sweeping Cold, dreary cold, the stormy winds feel they And doth he e'er, I wonder, bring to mind The thunder bellows far from snow to snow, And loud and louder roars the flood below, (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La | blown, the pipes, and the shepherds, and Palie.) For weary is work, and weary day by day When sweethearts wander far away from me. no the silly sheep, used to describe the rhymings of Oxford students or tutors, the teachers of the university, and the undergraduates, whom Clough was longer content to teach; while "the life of men unblest," "the storms that rage outside our happy ground," had reference, I suppose, to the questions agitated at the time Clough left the university concerning the true conditions of subscription to the Articles of the Church, and Mr. Carlyle's turbulent exhortations to all the The sky behind is brightening up anew, (Home, Rose, and home, Provence and La world to abjure cant, and to live strictly Palie,) The rain is ending, and our journey, too; Heigh-ho! aha! for here at home are we :— In, Rose, and in, Provence and La Palie. Now, that is a true pastoral, full of pastoral feeling and simplicity, but it has not that background of artificial convention which we find in "Lycidas" or indeed in much more modern pastorals. There is no artificial use in it of the metaphors of the pastoral life such as Matthew Arnold, for instance, in commemorating Clough himself, has freely used. He calls Clough Thyrsis," just as Milton called Edward King "Lycidas," and reproaches him thus for his dissatisfaction with Oxford life and labor: Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here! But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick, And with the country-folk acquaintance made My pipe is lost, my shepherd's holiday! heart Into the world and wave of man depart! For that a shadow lower'd on the fields, He went, his piping took a troubled sound Here we have the pastoral imagery full 66 up or down to the truth that was in him. Carlyle," says Clough, "led us out into the wilderness, and left us there." And I, for my part, do not at all doubt that it was in great measure Mr. Carlyle's stern exhortations to all men to clear their lives of all misleading professions, which induced Clough to throw up his Oxford fellowship, and which, to use Mr. Arnold's metaphor, made his piping take "a troubled sound." However, this is all by the way. I took the passage from Matthew Arnold's tribute to Clough, only to contrast it with his own poetry, which never adopts the conventional metaphors of the pastoral school of poetry, or conforms to its limits, except, indeed, those limits of rhythm and rhyme which all verse of any dignity must observe, — and allows itself none of those freedoms with the uses of conventional association of which Milton and Arnold so freely avail themselves. In one word, Clough was almost too grimly in earnest, even at the very moment he was writing poetry, for the fanciful play of that sheet-lightning of the fancy which when not indulged too far - adds so much to the charm of the poet. His mind was always fixed on the real world. The greatest poet puts the trouble of the world far from him, in the very moment of imagining and delineating it with his utmost force. It is the imaginative force with which he projects it, so as to make it vividly visible to himself, that really keeps the weight of it off his heart. When Shakespeare makes Macbeth say: Methought I heard a voice cry, "Sleep no more ! Macbeth does murder sleep." |