A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory,
Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.[537]
A superstition attached to "desert wildernesses," where the wanderer who lost sight of his associates could seldom strike into their track on the pathless waste, was made known to Milton by the travels of Marco Polo. "If," says the old Venetian, in his account of the great Asiatic desert, Lop or Gobi, "any one at night stays behind, or diverges from his company, he hears, when he wishes to rejoin it, spirits speaking in the air, who seem to be his comrades, and sometimes call him by his name, beguiling him out of the right road, so that many continue to go astray and perish."[538] The lady in Comus was in a like situation. She was benighted, she had lost her way, she heard "the tumult of loud mirth," and when she reached the spot from whence the merriment proceeded she found "nought but darkness." Then the "calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire," that lure poor wanderers to destruction, rushed into her thoughts, and she conceived she might be the dupe of malignant phantoms.[539] Pope's beckoning ghost was not of this class of "dire" counterfeit "shadows." She is represented as an honest, sympathising spirit, who could never have designed to entice her lover or friend into the glade with a murderous intent. Warton quotes the commencement of Ben Jonson's Epitaph on Lady Winchester, which Pope must have had in his mind when he wrote his Elegy. The ghost beckoned Jonson to pluck a garland from the yew tree.[540] A spirit could not have revisited the world, for a more frivolous purpose, but at least the poet felt that he must assign a cause for the beckoning. The omission in Pope arose from a frequent source of misapplied language. Isolated lines and phrases, which had the sanction of classic authors, lingered in his memory, and he forgot the accompaniments to which they owed their fitness.
The spectacle of the bleeding ghost of the lady haunting the glade by moonlight suggests to the poet that she may be doing penance for her self-inflicted death. He reasons himself into the conviction that her violence was meritorious, and he concludes that she has been "snatched to the pitying sky." At ver. 47 comes a couplet in which the christian idea of a spirit in heaven is superseded by the pagan notion of an ever "injured shade" to whom nothing can compensate for the loss of the customary funereal rites. Out of his ambition to imitate classic poets Pope jumbled discordant creeds together, and introduced this remnant of an extinct mythology, absurd in itself and offensive in a modern elegy. The passage which follows, from ver. 51 to ver. 68, is the most pleasing part of the poem, though the ten lines from ver. 59 have been severely criticised by Lord Kames. Fictitious topics of consolation were not, he said, "the language of the heart, but of imagination indulging its flights at ease," and were incompatible with "the deeply serious and pathetic."[541] Warburton criticised the criticism. He said it "smelled furiously of old John Dennis," and Bowles allowed that it was "absurd." The tone of Lord Kames is, perhaps, too contemptuous, for the lines have a certain sweetness of sentiment. Yet he was right when he maintained that they were not in harmony with the professions of grief and indignation which follow or go before. All ages and nations have shared the conviction that the omnipotence behind the phenomena of nature deputes them on special occasions to speak in exceptional ways to the affections, hopes, and fears of man. In the rear of these beliefs are numerous cases in which appearances are accepted for a symbolical language, not with an absolute faith, but with a fond acquiescence because they are the just reflection of our thoughts. Wordsworth's exquisite Hart-leap Well,—perfect in its descriptive power, its easy flow of beautiful English, and its mingled strains of animation and pathos—culminates in the creed that the bleakness of the once luxuriant enclosure in which the stag fell dead, is the protest of nature against the palace and bowers erected there by the knight in exultant commemoration of his cruel chase. Wide is the range in this domain of poetry, from sublimity down to prettinesses, from prettinesses to poor conceits. What is legitimate in itself may be wrongly placed, and here is the fault of Pope's lines. Amid the tempest of sorrow and anger he derives consolation from the notion that the first roses of the year will blow on the grave of the unfortunate lady, that the earliest dew-drops of the morning will weep her loss, that the turf will lie light on her insensate corpse, and that angels will overshadow in perpetuity the spot of earth which conceals it. The reveries of fancy may gratify the tranquil mind. They would be mockery to a man absorbed by terrible realities, to a man distracted by the suicide of the woman he adored.
The paragraph, "So peaceful rests," was much admired by the stone-cutters, and with tasteless ignorance they engraved it, slightly modified, upon hundreds of tombstones. No one in a churchyard requires to be reminded that its buried population is "a heap of dust." Amid the visible signs of mortality monuments should soothe and lift up the mind by speaking of that which is not corruptible—of that which was best in the acts, disposition, endurance, and belief of the dead, or of the contrast between the earthly life that was and the life that is, between the transitory and the immortal. Improper for an epitaph, the lines were not unsuited to an elegy, if the final paragraph had opened up a brighter vista instead of dropping into the lowest style of heathenism. The affection of the elegy-writer was to cease with the "idle business" of life, and the dearest object of his heart would be "beloved by him no more." He had talked of "pale ghosts," and "bright reversions in the skies," but by the time he got to the conclusion of his poetical exercise, skies, and ghosts had faded from his thoughts, and his language would leave the impression that the "last gasp" was the end of all things. In composition the Elegy is terse and powerful; the ideas are erroneous, inconsistent, or inadequate. Pagan and christian notions clash together; the story is represented under contradictory phases; the dreary close of the poem sets aside the faith which consoles survivors; the sentiments at the beginning are false and melodramatic; and the middle, though not devoid of tenderness, chiefly consists of borrowed fictions, which are too artificial for the occasion.
TO THE MEMORY OF
AN UNFORTUNATE LADY.
What beck'ning ghost,[542] along the moon-light shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
'Tis she!—but why that bleeding bosom gored?[543]
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?
Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell, 5
Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well?[544]
To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,
To act a lover's or a Roman's part?
Is there no bright reversion in the sky,
For those who greatly think, or bravely die? 10
Why bade ye else, ye pow'rs! her soul aspire
Above the vulgar flight of low desire?
Ambition first sprung from your bless'd abodes;
The glorious fault of angels[545] and of gods:
Thence to their images on earth it flows, 15
And in the breasts of kings and heroes glows.
Most souls, 'tis true, but peep out once an age,
Dull sullen pris'ners in the body's cage:[546]
Dim lights of life, that burn a length of years
Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres; 20
Like Eastern kings a lazy state they keep,
And, close confined to their own palace, sleep.[547]
From these perhaps (ere nature bade her die)
Fate snatched her early to the pitying sky.
As into air the purer spirits flow, 25
And sep'rate from their kindred dregs below;
So flew the soul to its congenial place,
Nor left one virtue to redeem her race.[548]
But thou, false guardian of a charge too good,[549]
Thou mean deserter of thy brother's blood! 30
See on these ruby lips the trembling breath,
These cheeks now fading at the blast of death;
Cold is that breast which warmed the world before,[550]
And those love-darting eyes[551] must roll no more.[552]
Thus, if eternal justice rules the ball, 35
Thus shall your wives, and thus your children fall:
On all the line a sudden vengeance waits,
And frequent hearses shall besiege your gates;
There passengers shall stand, and pointing say,
(While the long fun'rals blacken all the way) 40
"Lo! these were they, whose souls the furies steeled,
"And cursed with hearts unknowing how to yield."[553]
Thus unlamented pass the proud away,
The gaze of fools, and pageant of a day!
So perish all, whose breast ne'er learned to glow 45
For others' good, or melt at others' woe.[554]
What can atone, oh ever-injured shade!
Thy fate unpitied, and thy rites unpaid?
No friend's complaint, no kind domestic tear
Pleased thy pale ghost, or graced thy mournful bier. 50
By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,[555]
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,[556]
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mourned!
What though no friends in sable weeds appear, 55
Grieve for an hour, perhaps, then mourn[557] a year,
And bear about the mockery of woe
To midnight dances, and the public show?
What though no weeping loves thy ashes grace,
Nor polished marble emulate thy face? 60
What though no sacred earth allow thee room,
Nor hallowed dirge be muttered o'er thy tomb?
Yet shall thy grave with rising flow'rs be dressed,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast:[558]
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow, 65
There the first roses of the year shall blow;
While angels with their silver wings[559] o'ershade
The ground, now sacred[560] by thy reliques made.[561]
So peaceful rests, without a stone, a name,
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame. 70
How loved, how honoured once, avails thee not,
To whom related, or by whom begot;
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be![562]
Poets themselves must fall like those they sung, 75
Deaf the praised ear, and mute the tuneful tongue.[563]
Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays,
Shall shortly want the gen'rous tear he pays;
Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,
And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart, 80
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er,
The muse forgot, and thou beloved no more!