DRAYTON.
“The Poly-olbion” of Drayton is a stupendous work, “a strange Herculean toil,” as the poet himself has said, and it was the elaborate production of many years. The patriotic bard fell a victim to its infelicitous but glorious conception; and posterity may discover a grandeur in this labour of love, which was unfelt by his contemporaries.
The “Poly-olbion” is a chorographical description of England and Wales; an amalgamation of antiquarianism, of topography, and of history; materials not the most ductile for the creations of poetry. This poem is said to have the accuracy of a road-book; and the poet has contributed some notices, which add to the topographic stores of Camden; for this has our poet extorted an alms of commendation from such a niggardly antiquary as Bishop Nicholson, who confesses that this work affords “a much truer account of this kingdom than could be well expected from the pen of a poet.”
The grand theme of this poet was his fatherland! The muse of Drayton passes by every town and tower; each tells some tale of ancient glory, or of some “worthy” who must never die. The local associations of legends and customs are animated by the personifications of mountains and rivers; and often, in some favourite scenery, he breaks forth with all the emotion of a true poet. The imaginative critic has described the excursions of our muse with responsive sympathy. “He has not,” says Lamb, “left a rivulet so narrow that it may be stepped over without honourable mention, and has associated hills and streams with life and passion beyond the dreams of old mythology.” But the journey is long, and the conveyance may be tedious; the reader, accustomed to the decasyllabic or heroic verse, soon finds himself breathless among the protracted and monotonous Alexandrines, unless he should relieve his ear from the incumbrance, by resting on the cæsura, and thus divide those extended lines by the alternate grace of a ballad-stanza. The artificial machinery of Drayton’s personifications of mountains and rivers, though these may be often allowed the poet, yet they seem more particularly ludicrous, as they are crowded together on the maps prefixed to each county, where this arbitrary mythology, masculine and feminine, are to be seen standing by the heads of rivers, or at the entrances of towns.
This extraordinary poem remains without a parallel in the poetical annals of any people; and it may excite our curiosity to learn its origin. The genealogy of poetry is often suspicious; but I think we may derive the birth of the “Poly-olbion” from Leland’s magnificent view of his designed work on “Britain,” and that hint expanded by the “Britannia” of Camden, who inherited the mighty industry, without the poetical spirit of Leland: Drayton embraced both.
It is a nice question to decide how far history may be admitted into poetry; like “Addison’s Campaign,” the poem may end in a rhymed gazette. And in any other work of invention, a fiction, by too free an infusion of historical matter, can only produce that monster called “the Romance of History,” a nonsensical contradiction in terms, for neither can be both; or that other seductive and dangerous association of real persons and fictitious incidents, the historical romance! It is remarkable that Drayton censures Daniel, his brother poet, for being too historical in his “Civil Wars,” and thus transgressing the boundaries of history and poetry, of truth and invention. Of these just boundaries, however, he himself had no clear notion. Drayton in his “Baron’s Wars” sunk into a grave chronicler; and in the “Poly-olbion,” we see his muse treading a labyrinth of geography, of history, and of topography!
The author of the “Poly-olbion” may truly be considered as the inventor of a class of poems peculiar to our country, and which, when I was young, were popular or fashionable. These are loco-descriptive poems. Such were Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill,”[1] and its numerous and, some, happy imitations. In these local descriptions some favoured spot in the landscape opens to the poet not only the charm of its natural appearance, but in the prospect lie scenes of the past. Imagination, like a telescope fixed on the spot, brings nearer to his eyes those associations which combine emotion with description; and the contracted spot, whence the bard scattered the hues of his fancy, is aggrandized by noble truths.
The first edition of the “Poly-olbion,” in 1613, consisted of eighteen “Songs,” or cantos, and every one enriched by the notes and illustrations of the poet’s friend, our great national antiquary, Selden, whose avarice of words in these recondite stores conceals almost as many facts as he affords phrases. This volume was ill received by the incurious readers of that age. Drayton had vainly imagined that the nobles and gentlemen of England would have felt a filial interest in the tale of their fathers, commemorated in these poetic annals, and an honourable pride in their domains here so graphically pictured. But no voice, save those of a few melodious brothers, cheered the lonely lyrist, who had sung on every mountain, and whose verse had flowed with every river. After a hopeless suspension of nine years, the querulous author sent forth the concluding volume to join its neglected brother. It appeared with a second edition of the first part, which is nothing more than the unsold copies of the first, to which the twelve additional “Songs” are attached, separately paged. These last come no longer enriched by the notes of Selden, or even embellished by those fanciful maps which the unfortunate poet now found too costly an ornament. Certain accidental marks of the printer betray the bibliographical secret, that the second edition was in reality but the first.[2] The preface to the second part is remarkable for its inscription, in no good humour,
To any that will read it!