’Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Right or Left as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss’d Thee down into the Field,
He knows about it all—He knows—HE knows!
we cannot but admire the masterly, indeed the unforgettable way in which the philosophic position is set forth, nor can we deny that the statement is fairly within the terms of poetry. But in such notes as this, which are frequent in the Rubaiyat, we detect a certain faltering in imaginative faith, not precisely in intellectual conviction about the creed which is being expounded, but in the spiritual exaltation that may lift any creed, whether it be sacramental and beatific as in Crashaw’s St. Theresa, or stoic as in Emily Brontë’s Last Lines, or inscrutably naturalistic as in Mr. Ralph Hodgson’s Song of Honour, above the regions of debate to the very pinnacle of authority. When all these reservations have been made, there is enough virtue and to spare in Victorian poetry to leave it written as a new and glorious chapter in the most national of our arts, nor can spiritual ecstasy itself be wholly denied it, as Dost Thou Not Care? and many other poems by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, Browning’s Prospice, and, dark though its conclusions be, Arnold’s Dover Beach, and Mrs. Browning’s Weeping Saviour, and Coventry Patmore’s Vesica Piscis, to name half a dozen poems at a venture, can testify. But, considering the manifestations of poetry in that age as a whole, spiritual ecstasy was one of its least constant achievements.