Ode to Psyche.
“1. Why stand’st thou thus at Gaze
In the faint Tapersrays,
With strainëd Eyeballs fixed upon that Bed?
Has he then flown away,
Lost, like a Star in Day,
Or like a Pearl in Depths unfathomëd?
Alas! thou hast done very ill,
Thus with thine Eyes the Vision of thy Soul to kill!
“2. Thought’st thou that earthly Light
Could then assist thy Sight,
Or that the Limits of Reality
Could grasp Things fairer than
Imagination’s Span,
Who communes with the Angels of the Sky,
Thou graspest at the Rainbow, and
Wouldst make it as the Zone with which thy Waist is spanned.
“3. And what find’st thou in his Stead?
Only the empty Bed!
·····
Thou sought’st the Earthly and therefore
The heavenly is gone, for that must ever soar!
“4. For the bright World of
Pure and boundless Love
What hast thou found? alas! a narrow room!
Restore thy Soul its Sight,
For better ’tis to dwell in outward Gloom,
Than thus, by the vile Body’s eye,
To rob the Soul of its Infinity!
“5. Love, Love has Wings, and he
Soon out of Sight will flee,
Lost in far Ether to the sensual Eye,
But the Soul’s Vision true
Can track him, yea, up to
The Presence and the Throne of the Most High:
For thence he is, and tho’ he dwell below,
To the Soul only he his genuine Form will show!”
Mr. Ellison was a boy of twenty-three when he wrote this. That, with so much command of expression and of measure, he should run waste and formless and even void, as he does in other parts of his volumes, is very mysterious and very distressing.
How we became possessed of the poetical Epistle from “E. V. K. to his Friend in Town,” is more easily asked than answered. We avow ourselves in the matter to have acted for once on M. Proudhon’s maxim—“La propriété c’est le vol.” We merely say, in our defence, that it is a shame in “E. V. K.,” be he who he may, to hide his talent in a napkin, or keep it for his friends alone. It is just such men and such poets as he that we most need at present, sober-minded and sound-minded and well-balanced, whose genius is subject to their judgment, and who have genius and judgment to begin with—a part of the poetical stock in trade with which many of our living writers are not largely furnished. The Epistle is obviously written quite off-hand, but it is the off-hand of a master, both as to material and workmanship. He is of the good old manly, classical school. His thoughts have settled and cleared themselves before forming into the mould of verse. They are in the style of Stewart Rose’s vers de société, but have more of the graphic force and deep feeling and fine humor of Crabbe and Cowper in their substance, with a something of their own which is to us quite as delightful. But our readers may judge. After upbraiding, with much wit, a certain faithless town-friend for not making out his visit, he thus describes his residence:—
“Though its charms be few,
The place will please you, and may profit too;—
My house, upon the hillside built, looks down
On a neat harbor and a lively town.
Apart, ’mid screen of trees, it stands, just where
We see the popular bustle, but not share.
Full in our front is spread a varied scene—
A royal ruin, gray, or clothed with green,
Church spires, tower, docks, streets, terraces, and trees,
Back’d by green fields, which mount by due degrees
Into brown uplands, stretching high away
To where, by silent tarns, the wild deer stray.
Below, with gentle tide, the Atlantic Sea
Laves the curved beach, and fills the cheerful quay,
Where frequent glides the sail, and dips the oar,
And smoking steamer halts with hissing roar.”
Then follows a long passage of great eloquence, truth, and wit, directed against the feverish, affected, unwholesome life in town, before which he fears
“Even he, my friend, the man whom once I knew,
Surrounded by blue women and pale men,”
has fallen a victim; and then concludes with these lines, which it would not be easy to match for everything that constitutes good poetry. As he writes he chides himself for suspecting his friend; and at that moment (it seems to have been written on Christmas day) he hears the song of a thrush, and forthwith he “bursts into a song,” as full-voiced, as native, as sweet and strong, as that of his bright-eyed feathered friend.
“But, hark that sound! the mavis! can it be?
Once more! It is. High perched on yon bare tree,
He starts the wondering winter with his trill;
Or by that sweet sun westering o’er the hill
Allured, or for he thinks melodious mirth
Due to the holy season of Christ’s birth.—
And hark! as his clear fluting fills the air,
Low broken notes and twitterings you may hear
From other emulous birds, the brakes among;
Fain would they also burst into a song;
But winter warns, and muffling up their throats,
They liquid—for the spring—preserve their notes.
O sweet preluding! having heard that strain,
How dare I lift my dissonant voice again?
Let me be still, let me enjoy the time,
Bothering myself or thee no more with rugged rhyme.”
This author must not be allowed to “muffle up his throat,” and keep his notes for some imaginary and far-off spring. He has not the excuse of the mavis. He must give us more of his own “clear fluting.” Let him, with that keen, kindly and thoughtful eye, look from his retreat, as Cowper did, upon the restless, noisy world he has left, seeing the popular bustle, not sharing it, and let his pen record in such verses as these what his understanding and his affections think and feel and his imagination informs, and we shall have something in verse not unlike the letters from Olney. There is one line which deserves to be immortalized over the cherished bins of our wine-fanciers, where repose their
“Dear prisoned spirits of the impassioned grape.”
What is good makes us think of what is better, as well, and it is to be hoped more, than of what is worse. There is no sweetness so sweet as that of a large and deep nature; there is no knowledge so good, so strengthening as that of a great mind, which is forever filling itself afresh. “Out of the eater comes forth meat; out of the strong comes forth sweetness.” Here is one of such “dulcedines veræ”—the sweetness of a strong man:—
“Now came still evening on, and twilight gray
Had in her sober livery all things clad;
Silence accompany’d; for beast and bird,
They to their grassy couch, these to their nests,
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glow’d the firmament
With living saphirs; Hesperus that led
The starry host rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen unveil’d her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.”
Were we inclined to do anything but enjoy this and be thankful—giving ourselves up to its gentleness, informing ourselves with its quietness and beauty,—we would note the simplicity, the neutral tints, the quietness of its language, the “sober livery” in which its thoughts are clad. In the first thirty-eight words, twenty-nine are monosyllables. Then there is the gradual way in which the crowning fantasy is introduced. It comes upon us at once, and yet not wholly unexpected; it “sweetly creeps” into our “study of imagination;” it lives and moves, but it is a moving that is “delicate;” it flows in upon us incredibili lenitate. “Evening” is a matter of fact, and its stillness too—a time of the day; and “twilight” is little more. We feel the first touch of spiritual life in “her sober livery,” and bolder and deeper in “all things clad.” Still we are not deep, the real is not yet transfigured and transformed, and we are brought back into it after being told that “Silence accompanied,” by the explanatory “for,” and the bit of sweet natural history of the beasts and birds. The mind dilates and is moved, its eye detained over the picture; and then comes that rich, “thick warbled note”—“all but the wakeful nightingale;” this fills and informs the ear, making it also “of apprehension more quick,” and we are prepared now for the great idea coming “into the eye and prospect of our soul”—SILENCE WAS PLEASED! There is nothing in all poetry above this. Still evening and twilight gray are now Beings, coming on, and walking over the earth like queens, “with Silence,”
“Admiration’s speaking’st tongue,”
as their pleased companion. All is “calm and free,” and “full of life,” it is a “Holy Time.” What a picture!—what simplicity of means! what largeness and perfectness of effect!—what knowledge and love of nature! what supreme art!—what modesty and submission! what self-possession!—what plainness, what selectness of speech! “As is the height, so is the depth. The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the seeing and the service, and the submission to the Supreme Will. As the ideal genius and the originality, so must be the resignation to the real world, the sympathy and the intercommunion with Nature.”—Coleridge’s Posthumous Tract “The Idea of Life.”
Since writing the above, our friend ”E. V. K.” has shown himself curiously unaffected by “that last infirmity of noble minds,”—his “clear spirit” heeds all too little its urgent “spur.” The following sonnets are all we can pilfer from him. They are worth the stealing:—