Or here:—
The meal sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door
Made misty with the floating meal.
—The Miller’s Daughter.
His blank verse is best described by negatives. It has not the endless variety, the elasticity and freedom of Shakespeare’s, it has not the massiveness and majesty of Milton’s, it has not the austere grandeur of Wordsworth’s at its best, it has not the wavy swell, “the linked sweetness long drawn out” of Shelley’s, but its distinguishing feature is, if we may use the expression, its importunate beauty. What Coleridge said of Claudian’s style may be applied to it: “Every line, nay every word stops, looks full in your face and asks and begs for praise”. is earlier blank verse is less elaborate and seemingly more spontaneous and easy than his later.[[3]] But it is in his lyric verse that his rhythm is seen in its greatest perfection. No English lyrics have more magic or more haunting beauty, more of that which charms at once and charms for ever.
In his description of nature he is incomparable. Take the following from The Dying Swan:—
Some blue peaks in the distance rose,
And white against the cold-white sky,
Shone out their crowning snows.
One willow over the river wept,
And shook the wave as the wind did sigh;
Above in the wind was the swallow,
Chasing itself at its own wild will,
or the opening scene in Œnone and in The Lotos Eaters, or the meadow scene in The Gardener’s Daughter, or the conclusion of Audley Court, or the forest scene in the Dream of Fair Women, or this stanza in Mariana in the South:—
There all in spaces rosy-bright
Large Hesper glitter’d on her tears,
And deepening through the silent spheres,
Heaven over Heaven rose the night.
A single line, nay, a single word, and a scene is by magic before us, as here where the sea is looked down upon from an immense height:—
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.
—The Eagle.
Or here of a ship at sea, in the distance:—