This awful vision, quick with supernatural seership, is unique in poetry. Sir George Birdwood, the orientalist, wrote in the ‘Athenæum’ of February 5, 1881: “Even in its very epithets it is just such a hymn as a Hindu Puritan (Saivite) would address to Kali (‘the malignant’) or Parvati (‘the mountaineer’). It is to be delivered from her that Hindus shriek to God in the delirium of their fear.”
Then we are shown Percy standing at midnight in front of his hut, while New Year’s morning is breaking:—
Through Fate’s mysterious warp another weft
Of days is cast; and see! Time’s star-built throne,
From which he greets a new-born year, is shown
Between yon curtains where the clouds are cleft!
Old Year, while here I stand, with heart bereft
Of all that was its music—stand alone,
Remembering happy hours for ever flown,
Impatient of the leaden minutes left—The plaudits of mankind that once gave pleasure,
The chidings of mankind that once gave pain,
Seem in this hermit hut beyond all measure
Barren and foolish, and I cry, ‘No grain,
No grain, but winnowings in the harvest sieve!’
And yet I cannot join the dead—and live.Old Year, what bells are ringing in the New
In England, heedless of the knells they ring
To you and those whose sorrow makes you cling
Each to the other ere you say adieu!—
I seem to hear their chimes—the chimes we knew
In those dear days when Rhona used to sing,
Greeting a New Year’s Day as bright of wing
As this whose pinions soon will rise to view.If these dream-bells which come and mock mine ears
Could bring the past and make it live again,
Yea, live with every hour of grief and pain,
And hopes deferred and all the grievous fears—
And with the past bring her I weep in vain—
Then would I bless them, though I blessed in tears.[The clouds move away and show the
stars in dazzling brightness.Those stars! they set my rebel-pulses beating
Against the tyrant Sorrow, him who drove
My footsteps from the Dell and haunted Grove—
They bring the mighty Mother’s new-year greeting:
‘All save great Nature is a vision fleeting’—
So says the scripture of those orbs above.
‘All, all,’ I cry, ‘except man’s dower of love!—
Love is no child of Nature’s mystic cheating!’And yet it comes again, the old desire
To read what yonder constellations write
On river and ocean—secrets of the night—
To feel again the spirit’s wondering fire
Which, ere this passion came, absorbed me quite,
To catch the master-note of Nature’s lyre.New Year, the stars do not forget the Old!
And yet they say to me, most sorely stung
By Fate and Death, ‘Nature is ever young,
Clad in new riches, as each morning’s gold
Blooms o’er a blasted land: be thou consoled:
The Past was great, his harp was greatly strung;
The Past was great, his songs were greatly sung;
The Past was great, his tales were greatly told;The Past has given to man a wondrous world,
But curtains of old Night were being upcurled
Whilst thou wast mourning Rhona; things sublime
In worlds of worlds were breaking on the sight
Of Youth’s fresh runners in the lists of Time.
Arise, and drink the wine of Nature’s light!’
Finally, a dream prepares the sorrowing lover for the true reading of ‘The Promise of the Sunrise’ and the revelation of ‘Natura Benigna’:—
Beneath the loveliest dream there coils a fear:
Last night came she whose eyes are memories now;
Her far-off gaze seemed all forgetful how
Love dimmed them once, so calm they shone and clear.
‘Sorrow,’ I said, ‘has made me old, my dear;
’Tis I, indeed, but grief can change the brow:
Beneath my load a seraph’s neck might bow,
Vigils like mine would blanch an angel’s hair.’
Oh, then I saw, I saw the sweet lips move!
I saw the love-mists thickening in her eyes—
I heard a sound as if a murmuring dove
Felt lonely in the dells of Paradise;
But when upon my neck she fell, my love,
Her hair smelt sweet of whin and woodland spice.
And now ‘Natura Benigna’ reveals to him her mystic consolation:—
What power is this? What witchery wins my feet
To peaks so sheer they scorn the cloaking snow,
All silent as the emerald gulfs below,
Down whose ice-walls the wings of twilight beat?
What thrill of earth and heaven—most wild, most sweet—
What answering pulse that all the senses know,
Comes leaping from the ruddy eastern glow
Where, far away, the skies and mountains meet?
Mother, ’tis I, reborn: I know thee well:
That throb I know and all it prophesies,
O Mother and Queen, beneath the olden spell
Of silence, gazing from thy hills and skies!
Dumb Mother, struggling with the years to tell
The secret at thy heart through helpless eyes.
This is not the pathetic fallacy. It is the poetic interpretation of the latest discovery of science, to wit, that dead matter is alive, and that the universe is an infinite stammering and whispering, that may be heard only by the poet’s finer ear.
The extracts I have given are sufficient to show the originality of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s poetry, both in subject and in form. The originality of any poet is seen, not in fantastic metrical experiments, but rather in new and original treatment of the metres natural to the genius of the language. In ‘The Coming of Love’ the poet has invented a new poetic form. Its object is to combine the advantages and to avoid the disadvantages of lyrical narrative, of poetic drama, of the prose novel, and of the prose play. In Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ and in Mr. Watts-Dunton’s other lyrical drama, “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid,’” the special functions of all the above mentioned forms are knit together in a new form. The story is told by brief pictures. In ‘The Coming of Love’ this method reaches its perfection. Lyrics, songs, elegaic quatrains, and sonnets, are used according to an inner law of the poet’s mind. The exaltation of these moments is intensified by the business parts of the narrative being summarized in bare prose. The interplay of thought, mood, and passion is revealed wholly by swift lyrical visions. In Dante’s ‘Vita Nuova’ a method something like this is adopted, but there the links are in a kind of poetical prose akin to the verse, and as Dante’s poems are all sonnets, there is no harmonic scheme of metrical music like that in ‘The Coming of Love.’ Here the very ‘rhyme-colour’ and the subtle variety of vowel sounds from beginning to end are evidently part of the metrical composition. Wagner’s music is the only modern art-form which is comparable with the metrical architecture of ‘The Coming of Love,’ and “Christmas at the ‘Mermaid.’” No one can fully understand the rhythmic triumph of these great poems who has not studied it by the light of Mr. Watts-Dunton’s theory of elaborate rhythmic effects in music formulated in his treatise on Poetry in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’—a theory which shows that metrical and rhythmical art, as compared with the art of music, is still developing. Both these lyrical dramas ought to be carefully studied by all students of English metres.
The novelty of these forms is not a fortuitous eccentricity, but an extremely valuable experiment in a new kind of dramatic poetry. It is remarkable that in this new and difficult form the poet has achieved in Rhona Boswell a feat of characterization quite without parallel under such conditions. Rhona is so vivid that it is hardly fair to hang her portrait on the same wall as those of the ordinary heroines of poetry. But if, for the sake of comparison, Rhona be set beside Tennyson’s Maud, the difference is startling. Maud does not tingle with personality. She is a type, an abstraction, a common denominator of ‘creamy English girls.’ Rhona, on the other hand, is nervously alive with personality. One makes pictures of her in one’s brain—pictures that never become blurred, pictures that do not run into other pictures of other poetic heroines. How much of this is due to the poetic form? Could Rhona have lived so intensely in a novel or a play? I do not think so. At any rate, she lives with incomparable vitality in this lyrical drama-novel, and therefore the poetic vehicle in which she rushes upon our vision is well worth the study of critics and craftsmen. Mr. Kernahan has called attention to the baldness of the enlinking prose narrative. Perhaps this defect could be remedied by using a more poetic and more romantic prose like that of the opening of ‘Aylwin,’ which would lead the imagination insensibly from one situation or mood to another.