Wishes to his Supposed Mistress.—Page [139].
This beautiful and famous poem has its stanzas so carelessly thrown together that editors have allowed themselves a certain freedom with it. I have done the least I could, by separating two stanzas that repeated the rhyme, and by suppressing one that grew tedious.
On the Death of Mr. Crashaw.—Page [157].
This ode has been chosen as more nobly representative than that, better known, On the Death of Mr. William Harvey. In the Crashaw ode, and in the Hymn to the Light, Cowley is, at last, tender. But it cannot be said that his love-poems had tenderness. He wrote in a gay language, but added nothing to its gaiety. He wrote the language of love, and left it cooler than he found it. What the conceits of Lovelace and the rest—flagrant, not frigid—did not do was done by Cowley’s quenching breath; the language of love began to lose by him. But even then, even then, who could have foretold what the loss at a later day would be!
Hymn to the Light.—Page [159].
It is somewhat to be regretted that this splendid poem should show Cowley as the writer of the alexandrine that divides into two lines. For he it was who first used (or first conspicuously used) the alexandrine that is organic, integral, and itself a separate unit of metre. He first passed beyond the heroic line, or at least he first used the alexandrine freely, at his pleasure, amid heroic verse; and after him Dryden took possession and then Pope. But both these masters, when they wrote alexandrines, wrote them in the French manner, divided. Cowley, however, with admirable art, is able to prevent even an accidental pause, making the middle of his line fall upon the middle of some word that is rapid in the speaking and therefore indivisible by pause or even by any lingering. Take this one instance—
‘Like some fair pine o’erlooking all the ignobler wood.’
If Cowley’s delicate example had ruled in English poetry (and he surely had authority on this one point, at least), this alexandrine would have taken its own place as an important line of English metre, more mobile than the heroic, less fitted to epic or dramatic poetry, but a line liberally lyrical. It would have been the light, pursuing wave that runs suddenly, outrunning twenty, further up the sands than these, a swift traveller, unspent, of longer impulse, of more impetuous foot, of fuller and of hastier breath, more eager to speak, and yet more reluctant to have done. Cowley left the line with all this lyrical promise within it, and if his example had been followed, English prosody would have had in this a valuable bequest.
Cowley probably was two or three years younger than Richard Crashaw, and the alexandrine is to be found—to be found by searching—in Crashaw; and he took precisely the same care as Cowley that the long wand of that line should not give way in the middle—should be strong and supple and should last. Here are four of his alexandrines—
‘Or you, more noble architects of intellectual noise.’
‘Of sweets you have, and murmur that you have no more.’
‘And everlasting series of a deathless song.’
‘To all the dear-bought nations this redeeming name.’