and after Evadne's death,
My soul grows weary of her house, and I
All over am a trouble to myself;—
by the wounded Aspatia's
I shall sure live, Amintor, I am well;
A kind of healthful joy wanders within me;
and her parting whisper,
Give me thy hand; mine eyes grope up and down,
And cannot find thee.
This is Nature sobbing into verse: the unadorned poetry of the human heartbreak. Where other than in Shakespeare do we find among the Jacobean poets such verse?
That a style of this kind should be rich in apothegm is not surprising. Instances rare in wisdom and phrasal conciseness are to be encountered on every other page of Beaumont.
It may, in short, be said of this dramatist's rhetorical and poetic diction, that, while the vocabulary may not be more varied, it is more intimate, musical, and reverberant than Fletcher's; that the periods, though sometimes appropriately syncopated and parenthetically broken, as in dramatic conversation, are, in rhapsodical and descriptive passages, both complex and balanced of structure,—pregnant of ideas labouring for expression rather than enumerative; that they echo Shakespeare's grandeur of phrase, with its involution, crowding of illustration and fresh insistent thought, in a degree utterly foreign to the rhetoric of Fletcher; and that his brief sentences are marked by a direct and final resplendence and simplicity.
In the larger movements of composition the purely poetic quality predominates over the narrative, dramatic or conversational. This characteristic is especially noticeable in declamatory speeches and soliloquies; sometimes idyllic as in Philaster's description of Bellario,—"I found him sitting by a fountain's side,"—or in the well-known "Oh that I had been nourished in these woods with milk of goats and acorns"; often operatic, as in Aspatia's farewells to Amintor and to love; always lyrical, imaginatively surcharged. Beaumont's figures of rhetoric when not hyperbolic, are picturesquely natural; his poetic tropes are creative, vitalizing. His speakers are self-revelatory: expressive of temperament, emotion, reflection. Their utterances are frequently descriptive, picturesquely loitering, rather than, by way of dialogue, framed to further the action alone. And yet, when they will, their conversation is spontaneous, fragmentary, and abrupt, intensifying the dramatic situation; not simply, as with Fletcher, by giving opportunity for stage-business, but by differencing the motive that underlies the action.