Occasionally Hunt’s choice of colloquial words fitted the subject, as in the Feast of the Poets, where humor and satire permit such expressions as “bards of Old England had all been rung in,” “twiddling a sunbeam,” “bloated his wits,” “tricksy tenuity” or such words as “smack,” “pop-in” and “sing-song.” His poetical epistles suffer without injury such departures from dignified diction, but in other cases, of which the Story of Rimini is a notable example, a grave subject in the garb of everyday language is degraded into the incongruous and prosaic. It is in physical descriptions that this undignified diction most strikingly violates good taste. Examples are:
“And both their cheeks, like peaches on a tree,
Leaned with a touch together, thrillingly.”
“So lightsomely dropped in, his lordly back,
His thigh so fitted for the tilt or dance.”
Sometimes the prosaic quality of Hunt’s diction is due to its being pitched upon a merely “society” level:
“May I come in? said he:—it made her start,—
That smiling voice;—she coloured, pressed her heart
A moment, as for breath and then with free
And usual tone said, ‘O Yes,—certainly.’”
Such a treatment of the meeting of Paolo and Francesca in the bower is wholly inadequate to the situation and the emotion of the moment. Additional illustrations of his colloquialisms from the Story of Rimini and from other poems of the same period are: “to bless his shabby eyes,” “that to the stander near looks awfully,” “banquet small, and cheerful, and considerate,” “clipsome waist,” “jauntiness behind and strength before” (description of a horse), “lend their streaming tails to the fond air,” “sweepy shape,” “cored in our complacencies,” “lumps of flowers,” “smooth, down-arching thigh,” “tapering with tremulous mass internally.”
Hunt’s second principle to be considered is the excessive use of vague and passionless words. Instances of such words to be found very frequently in his poetry are: fond, amiable, fair, rural, cordial, cheerful, gentle, calm, smooth, serene, earnest, lovely, balmy, dainty, mild, meek, tender, kind, elegant, quiet, sweet, fresh, pleasant, warm, social, and many others of like character.
A third principle was the employment of unusual words; examples are found in the Story of Rimini in the first edition and in other poems produced about this same time. In the Poetical Works, 1832, most of them have been discarded. The preface states that the “occasional quaintnesses and neologisms” which “formerly disfigured the poems did not arise from affectation but from the sheer license of animal spirits”; that they are not worth defending and that he has left only two in the Story of Rimini, “swirl” and “cored.” “Swaling” had been the most famous one in the poem because of the ridicule heaped upon it by the enemies of the Cockney School.
To use ordinary words in an extraordinary sense was a fourth principle. The effect was often extremely awkward. Core passes as a synonym for heart; fry occurs in Rimini in a strange sense; hip and tiptoe are employed with a special Huntian significance. Nouns and adjectives are used as verbs and verbs as nouns and adjectives with an unpoetical effect: cored (verb); drag (noun); frets (noun); feel (noun); patting (adjective); spanning (adjective); lull’d (adjective); smearings; measuring; doings.[72]
The use of compounds is a fifth distinguishing feature. Such combinations are found as bathing-air, house-warm lips, side-long pillowed meekness, fore-thoughted chess, pin-drop silence, tear-dipped feeling.
The sixth and last peculiarity is the preference for adjectives in y and ing, many of them of his own coinage; for adverbs in ly; and for unauthorized or awkward comparatives: examples are plumpy (cheeks), knify, perky, sweepy, farmy, bosomy, pillowy, arrowy, liny, leafy, scattery, winy, globy; hasting, silvering, doling, blubbing, firming, thickening, quickening, differing, perking; lightsomely, refreshfully, thrillingly, kneadingly, lumpishly, smilingly, preparingly, crushingly,[73] finelier, martialler, tastefuller, apter.