“And on the glimmering summit far withdrawn,
God made himself an awful rose of dawn.”
He kept this level, though here following not Tennyson or Keats but Shelley, in the three ambitious and elaborate lyrics, The Voice, To Fausta, and Stagirius, fine things, if somehow a little suggestive of inability on their author’s part fully to meet the demands of the forms he attempts—“the note,” in short, expressed practically as well as in theory. Stagirius in particular wants but a very little to be a perfect expression of the obstinate questionings of the century; and yet wanting a little, it wants so much! Others, To a Gipsy Child and The Hayswater Boat (Mr Arnold never reprinted this), are but faint Wordsworthian echoes; and thus we come to The Forsaken Merman.
It is, I believe, not so “correct” as it once was to admire this; but I confess indocility to correctness, at least the correctness which varies with fashion. The Forsaken Merman is not a perfect poem—it has longueurs, though it is not long; it has those inadequacies, those incompetences of expression, which are so oddly characteristic of its author; and his elaborate simplicity, though more at home here than in some other places, occasionally gives a dissonance. But it is a great poem—one by itself, one which finds and keeps its own place in the foreordained gallery or museum, with which every true lover of poetry is provided, though he inherits it by degrees. No one, I suppose, will deny its pathos; I should be sorry for any one who fails to perceive its beauty. The brief picture of the land, and the fuller one of the sea, and that (more elaborate still) of the occupations of the fugitive, all have their own charm. But the triumph of the piece is in one of those metrical coups which give the triumph of all the greatest poetry, in the sudden change from the slower movements of the earlier stanzas or strophes to the quicker sweep of the famous conclusion—
“The salt tide rolls seaward,
Lights shine from the town”—
to
“She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.”
Here the poet’s poetry has come to its own.
In Utrumque Paratus sounds the note again, and has one exceedingly fine stanza:—
“Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow,
And faint the city gleams;
Rare the lone pastoral huts—marvel not thou!
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams;
Alone the sun arises, and alone
Spring the great streams.”
But Resignation, the last poem in the book, goes far higher. Again, it is too long; and, as is not the case in the Merman, or even in The Strayed Reveller itself, the general drift of the poem, the allegory (if it be an allegory) of the two treadings of “the self-same road” with Fausta and so forth, is unnecessarily obscure, and does not tempt one to spend much trouble in penetrating its obscurity. But the splendid passage beginning—