It is not necessary to write notes on Wordsworth's sonnets--the greatest sonnets in our literature; but it would be well to warn editors how they print this one sonnet; "I wished to share the transport" is by no means an uncommon reading. Into the history of the variant I have not looked. It is enough that all the suddenness, all the clash and recoil of these impa.s.sioned lines are lost by that "wished" in the place of "turned." The loss would be the less tolerable in as much as perhaps only here and in that heart-moving poem, 'Tis said that some have died for love, is Wordsworth to be confessed as an impa.s.sioned poet.

STEPPING WESTWARD

This and the preceding two exquisite poems of sympathy are far more justified, more recollected and sincere than is that more monumental composition, the famous poem of sympathy, Hartleap Well.

The most beautiful stanzas of this poem last-named are so rebuked by the truths of nature that they must ever stand as obstacles to the straightforward view of sensitive eyes upon the natural world.

Wordsworth shows us the ruins of an aspen-wood, a blighted hollow, a dreary place forlorn because an innocent creature, hunted, had there broken its heart in a leap from the rocks above; gra.s.s would not grow, nor shade linger there -

"This beast not un.o.bserved by Nature fell, His death was mourned by sympathy divine."

And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly a.s.serted to be these arid woodland ruins--cruelly, because the common sight of the day blossoming over the agonies of animals and birds is made less tolerable by such fictions. We have to shut our ears to the benign beauty of this stanza especially -

"The Being that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For the unoffending creature whom He loves."

We must shut our ears because the poet offers us, as a proof of that "reverential care," the visible alteration of nature at the scene of suffering--an alteration we are obliged to dispense with every day we pa.s.s in the woods. We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth himself believed in a sympathy he asks us--upon such grounds!--to believe in? Did he think his faith to be worthy of no more than a fict.i.tious sign or a false proof?

To choose from Wordsworth is to draw close a net with very large meshes--so that the lovely things that escape must doubtless cause the reader to protest; but the poems gathered here are not only supremely beautiful but exceedingly Wordsworthian.

YOUTH AND AGE

Close to the marvellous Kubla Khan--a poem that wrests the secret of dreams and brings it to the light of verse--I place Youth and Age as the best specimen of Coleridge's poetry that is quite undelirious--to my mind the only fine specimen. I do not rate his undelirious poems highly, and even this, charming and nimble as it is, seems to me rather lean in thought and image. The tenderness of some of the images comes to a rather lamentable close; the likeness to "some poor nigh-related guest" with the three lines that follow is too squalid for poetry, or prose, or thought.

THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

This poem is surely more full of a certain quality of extreme poetry--the simplest "flower of the mind," the most single magic-- than any other in our language. But the reader must be permitted to call the story silly.

Page 265 (Are those her ribs through which the Sun)

Coleridge used the sun, moon, and stars as a great dream uses them when the sleeping imagination is obscurely threatened with illness.

All through The Ancient Mariner we see them like apparitions. It is a pity that he followed the pranks also of a dream when he impossibly placed a star WITHIN the tip of the crescent.

Page 266 (I feer thee, ancient Mariner!)

The likeness of "the ribbed sea sand" is said to be the one pa.s.sage actually composed by Wordsworth,--who according to the first plan should have written The Ancient Mariner with Coleridge--"and perhaps the most beautiful pa.s.sage in the poem," adds one critic after another. It is no more than a good likeness, and has nothing whatever of the indescribable Coleridge quality.

Coleridge reveals, throughout this poem, an exaltation of the senses, which is the most poetical thing that can befall a simple poet. It is necessary only to refer, for sight, to the stanza on "the moving Moon" at the bottom of page 267; for hearing, to the supernatural stanzas on page 271; and, for touch, to the line -

"And still my body drank."

ROSE AYLMER

Never was a human name more exquisitely sung than in these perfect stanzas.

THE ISLES OF GREECE

One really fine and poetic stanza--of course, the third; three stanzas that are good eloquence--the fourth, fifth, and seventh; and one that is a fair bit of argument--the tenth--may together perhaps carry the rest.

h.e.l.lAS

The profounder spirit of Sh.e.l.ley's poem yet leaves it a careless piece of work in comparison with Byron's. The two false rhymes at the outset may not be of great importance, but there is something annoying in the dissyllabic rhymes of the second stanza.

Dissyllabic rhymes are beautiful and enriching when they fall in the right place; that is, where there is a pause for the second little syllable to stand. For example, they could not be better placed than they would have been at the end of the shorter lines of this same stanza, where they would have dropped into a part of the pause. Another sin of sheer heedlessness--the lapse of grammar in The Skylark, at the top of page 296 (With thy clear keen joyance)-- will remind the reader of the special habitual error of Drummond of Hawthornden.

THE WANING MOON

In these few lines the Sh.e.l.ley spirit seems to be more intense than in any other pa.s.sage as brief.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

This magnificent poem is surely the greatest of a great poses writings, and one of the most splendid poems on nature and on poetry in a literature resounding with odes on these enormous themes.

THE INVITATION

No need to point to a poem that so shines as does this lucent verse.

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

Keats is here the magical poet, as he is the intellectual poet in the great sonnet following; and it is his possession or promise of both imaginations that proves him greater than Coleridge. In his day they seem to have found Coleridge to be a thinker in his poetry. To me he seems to have had nothing but senses, magic, and simplicity, and these he had to the utmost yet known to man. Keats was to have been a great intellectual poet, besides all that in fact he was.

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

Of the five odes of Keats, the Nightingale is perhaps the most perfect, and certainly the most imaginative. But the Grecian Urn is the finest, even though it has fancy rather than imagination, for never was fancy more exquisite. The most conspicuous idea--the emptying of the town because its folk are away at play in the tale of the antique urn--is merely a fancy, and a most antic fancy--a prank; it is an irony of man, a rallying of art, a mockery of time, a burlesque of poetry, divine with tenderness. The six lines in which this fancy sports are amongst the loveliest in all literature: the "little town," the "peaceful citadel,"--were ever simple adjectives more happy? But John Keats's final moral here is undeniably a failure; it says so much and means so little. The Ode to Autumn is an exterior ode, and not in so high a rank, but lovely and perfect. The Psyche I love the least, because its fancy is rather weak and its sentiment effusive. It has a touch of the deadly sickliness of Endymion. None the less does it remain just within the group of the really fine odes of English poets. The eloquent Melancholy more narrowly escapes exclusion from that group.