All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun,
A simple child, dear Ibrahim,
there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.
To express a profound emotion, the simpler the language and the less removed from the ordinary course of life the better. There is a very striking example of this in Webster’s tragedy of “The Duchess of Malfy.” The brother of the Duchess has procured her murder, and when he comes in and sees the body he merely says:
“Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.”
Horror could not be better expressed than in these few words, and Webster has even taken care to break up the verse in such a way that a too entire consciousness of the metre may not thrust itself between us and the bare emotion he intends to convey.
In illustration, Mr. Lowell quoted from Shakspeare (“Henry V”), Marlowe, Chapman, Dunbar, Beaumont and Fletcher, Waller, Young, and Cawthorn.
These men [the poets of the eighteenth century] were perfectly conscious of the fact that poetry is not produced under an ordinary condition of the mind, and accordingly, when they begin to grind their barrel-organs, they go through the ceremony of invoking the Muse, talk in the blandest way of divine rages and sacred flames, and one thing or another, and ask for holy fire to heat their little tea-urns with as coolly as one would borrow a lucifer. They appeal ceremoniously to the “sacred Nine,” when the only thing really necessary to them was the ability to count as high as the sacred ten syllables that constituted their verse. If the Muse had once granted their prayer, if she had once unveiled her awful front to the poor fellows, they would have hidden under their beds, every man John of them.
The eighteenth century produced some true poets, but almost all, even of them, were infected by the prevailing style. I cannot find any name that expresses it better than the “Dick Swiveller style.” As Dick always called wine the “rosy,” sleep the “balmy,” and so forth, so did these perfectly correct gentlemen always employ either a fluent epithet or a diffuse paraphrasis to express the commonest emotions or ideas. If they wished to say tea they would have done it thus:
Of China’s herb the infusion hot and mild.