When he put these dreams and this music into verse, with a craft which he had perfected for his own use, the poetry was for the most part a splendid rhetoric, imaginative and passionless, as if the moods went by, wrapped in purple, in a great procession. The Hound of Heaven has the harmonies of a symphony, and there are delicacies among its splendors, and, among instants of falsely fanciful sentiment, such august moments as this:
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.
It is full of fine and significant symbolism, it is an elaborate pageant of his own life, with all its miseries, heights, relapses, and flight after some eternity; but, as he writes it, it turns intellectual, and the voice is like that of one declaiming his confession. It was not thus that Christina Rossetti let us overhear a few of the deepest secrets of her soul.
The genius of Francis Thompson was oriental, exuberant in color woven into elaborate patterns, and went draped in old silken robes that had survived many dynasties. The spectacle of him was an enchantment; he passed like a wild vagabond of the mind, dazzling our sight. He had no message, but he dropped sentences by the way, cries of joy or pity, love of children, worship of the Virgin and saints and of those who were patron saints to him on earth; his voice was heard like a wandering music, which no one heeded for what it said, in a strange tongue, but which came troublingly into the mind, bringing it the solace of its old recaptured melodies. Other poets of his time have had deeper things to say, and a more flawless beauty; others have put more of their hearts into their song; but no one has been a torch waved with so fitful a splendor over the gulfs of our darkness.
[COVENTRY PATMORE]
The most austere poet of our time, Coventry Patmore, conceived of art as a sort of abstract ecstasy, whose source, limit and end are that supreme wisdom which is the innermost essence of love. Thus the whole of his work, those "bitter, sweet, few and veiled" songs, which are the fruit of two out of his seventy years, is love-poetry; and it is love-poetry of a quite unique kind. In the earlier of his two books, The Angel in the House, we see him, in the midst of a scientific generation (in which it was supposed that by adding prose to poetry you doubled the value of poetry) unable to escape the influence of his time, desperately set on doing the wrong thing by design, yet unable to keep himself from often doing the right thing by accident. In his later book, The Unknown Eros, he has achieved the proper recognition of himself, the full consciousness of the means to his own end; and it is by The Unknown Eros that he will love, if it is enough claim to immortality to have written the most devout, subtle and sublimated love-poetry of our century.
Patmore tells us in The Angel in the House that it was his intention to write
That hymn for which the whole world longs,
A worthy hymn in woman's praise.
But at that time his only conception of woman was the conception of woman as the lady. Now poetry has nothing whatever to do with woman as the lady; it is in the novel, the comedy of manners, that we expect the society of ladies. Prose, in the novel and the drama, is at liberty to concern itself with those secondary emotions which come into play in our familiar intercourse with one another; with those conventions which are the "evening dress" by which our varying temperaments seek the disguise of an outward uniformity; with those details of life which are also, in a sense, details of costume, and thus of value to the teller of a tale, the actor on a stage. But the poet who endeavors to bring all this machinery of prose into the narrow and self-sufficing limits of verse is as fatally doomed to failure as the painter who works after photographs, instead of from the living model. At the time when The Angel was written, the heresy of the novel in verse was in the air. Were there not, before and after it, the magnificent failure of Aurora Leigh, the ineffectual, always interesting, endeavors of Clough, and certain more careful, more sensitive, never quite satisfactory, experiments of Tennyson? Patmore went his own way, to a more ingenious failure than any. The Angel in the House is written with exquisite neatness, occasional splendor; it is the very flower of the poetry of convention; and is always lifting the trivialities and the ingenuities to which, for the most part, it restricts itself, miraculously near to that height which, now and again, in such lines as The Revelation, it fully attains. But it is not here, it is in The Unknown Eros alone, that Patmore has given immortality to what is immortal in perishable things.