(1788-1846)
Sir Aubrey de Vere
t Curragh Chase, in the picturesque county of Limerick, Ireland, Aubrey Hunt was born in 1788. On the death of his father he succeeded to the baronetcy and took the name of De Vere. Though his deep love of nature prompted him while very young to write descriptive verses, it was the drama that first seriously attracted him. This form he chose for his first painstaking work, 'Julian the Apostate.' The play opens at the time when Julian, having renounced the faith of his household oppressors, is allowed as a pagan worshiper to participate in the Eleusinian mysteries; when, it is said, he consented to the assassination of his uncle the Emperor Constantius. It found an admiring and enthusiastic audience and received unstinted praise from the critics. One wrote, "Lord Byron has produced nothing equal to it;" and another, "Scott has nothing so intellectual or so elevated among his exquisite sketches."
'Mary Tudor,' a drama written two years before his death in 1846, is his "most considerable work," says his son, and "an expression of his sympathy with great qualities obscured by great errors and great calamities." The sonnet was however the form of composition he preferred, and as a sonneteer he will be remembered. His sonnets are mainly historical, though he wrote also some religious and descriptive ones which Wordsworth considered "the most perfect of our age." His earlier ones, modeled after those of Petrarch and Filicaja, are inferior in imagery, phraseology, and nobility of thought to those produced under the influence of Wordsworth, a poet whose genius De Vere was among the first to acknowledge, and whose friendship he regarded as one of the chief honors of his life.
Like his friend, De Vere was a patriot, and in his historical sonnets he has recorded his love for the land of his remoter ancestors, whereas in the 'Lamentations of Ireland' he has expressed with great ardor his love for the land of his birth. In 1842 he published 'The Song of Faith,' which with the exception of a few translations was all he gave the world in twenty years. Devoted to his occupations as a country gentleman, and being of a singularly modest disposition, he neither loved nor courted fame, nor found in it any incentive to action.
Sir Aubrey De Vere was not in the modern acceptance of the term a national poet, nor was he, as so many of his contemporaries, anti-Irish. He modeled his poems on the great English writers, but all he wrote is pervaded with a deep sympathy for Ireland, and that at a time when such sympathy was rare.
THE CRUSADERS
The flattering crowd wreathe laurels for the brow
Of blood-stained chief or regal conqueror;
To Cæsar or the Macedonian bow;
Meteors of earth that set to rise no more:
A hero-worship, as of old? Not now
Should chieftain bend with servile reverence o'er
The fading pageantry of Paynim lore.
True heroes they whose consecrated vow
Led them to Jewry, fighting for the Cross;
While not by Avarice lured, or lust of power
Inspired, they combated that Christ should reign,
And life laid down for him counted no loss.
On Dorylæum's plain, by Antioch's tower,
And Ascalon, sleep well the martyred slain.
THE CHILDREN BAND
From 'The Crusaders'
All holy influences dwell within
The breast of childhood; instincts fresh from God
Inspire it, ere the heart beneath the rod
Of grief hath bled, or caught the plague of sin.
How mighty was this fervor which could win
Its way to infant souls!—and was the sod
Of Palestine by infant Croises trod?
Like Joseph went they forth, or Benjamin,
In all their touching beauty to redeem?
And did their soft lips kiss the Sepulchre?
Alas! the lovely pageant, as a dream,
Faded! They sank not through ignoble fear;
They felt not Moslem steel. By mountain stream,
In sands, in fens, they died—no mother near!
THE ROCK OF CASHEL
Royal and saintly Cashel! I would gaze
Upon the wreck of thy departed powers
Not in the dewy light of matin hours,
Nor in the meridian pomp of summer blaze,
But at the close of dim autumnal days,
When the sun's parting glance, through slanting showers,
Sheds o'er thy rock-throned battlements and towers
Such awful gleams as brighten o'er decay's
Prophetic cheek. At such a time, methinks,
There breathes from thy lone courts and voiceless aisles
A melancholy moral; such as sinks
On the lone traveler's heart amid the piles
Of vast Persepolis on her mountain stand,
Or Thebes half buried in the desert sand.
THE RIGHT USE OF PRAYER
Therefore when thou wouldst pray, or dost thine alms,
Blow not a trump before thee; hypocrites
Do thus, vaingloriously; the common streets
Boast of their largess, echoing their psalms.
On such the laud of man, like unctuous balms,
Falls with sweet savor. Impious counterfeits!
Prating of heaven, for earth their bosom beats!
Grasping at weeds, they lose immortal palms!
God needs not iteration nor vain cries:
That man communion with his God might share
Below, Christ gave the ordinance of prayer:
Vague ambages and witless ecstasies
Avail not: ere a voice to prayer be given,
The heart should rise on wings of love to heaven.
THE CHURCH
Ay, wisely do we call her Mother—she
Who from her liberal breath breathes sustenance
To nations; a majestic charity!
No marble symbol cold, in suppliant glance
Deceitful smiling; strenuous her advance,
Yet calm; while holy ardors, fancy-free,
Direct her measured steps: in every chance
Sedate—as Una 'neath the forest tree
Encompassed by the lions. Why, alas!
Must her perverse and thoughtless children turn
From her example? Why must the sulky breath
Of Bigotry stain Charity's pure glass?
Poison the springs of Art and Science—burn
The brain through life, and sear the heart in death?
SONNET
Sad is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing
In currents unperceived, because so fleet;
Sad are our hopes, for they were sweet in sowing—
But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they were sweet in blowing—
And still, oh still, their dying breath is sweet;
And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us
Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet is middle life, for it hath left us
A nearer good to cure an older ill;
And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them
Not for their sake, but His who grants them, or denies them!