ESSAYS AND NOTES NOT CERTAIN TO BE LAMB'S, BUT PROBABLY HIS
[SCRAPS OF CRITICISM]
(1822)
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstacy the living lyre.
Gray's Elegy.
There has always appeared to me a vicious mixture of the figurative with the real in this admired passage. The first two lines may barely pass, as not bad. But the hands laid in the earth, must mean the identical five-finger'd organs of the body; and how does this consist with their occupation of swaying rods, unless their owner had been a schoolmaster; or waking lyres, unless he were literally a harper by profession? Hands that "might have held the plough," would have some sense, for that work is strictly manual; the others only emblematically or pictorially so. Kings now-a-days sway no rods, alias sceptres, except on their coronation day; and poets do not necessarily strum upon the harp or fiddle, as poets. When we think upon dead cold fingers, we may remember the honest squeeze of friendship which they returned heretofore; we cannot but with violence connect their living idea, as opposed to death, with uses to which they must become metaphorical (i.e. less real than dead things themselves) before we can so with any propriety apply them.
He saw, but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.