Or he can put into a single line all the long memories of adoration:
My love was much;
My life but an inhabitant of his.
Or he can pass in a moment from tiny sweetness to colossal turmoil:
I should not say
How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow,
On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm
And soft at evening: so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water
Close to the golden welcome of its breast,
Delighting in the touch of that which led
The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops
Tritons and lions of the sea were warring,
And sometimes ships on fire sunk in the blood,
Of their own inmates; others were of ice,
And some had islands rooted in their waves,
Beasts on their rocks, and forest-powdering winds,
And showers tumbling on their tumbling self,
And every sea of every ruined star
Was but a drop in the world-melting flood.
He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic, dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:—
... What shall I do? I speak all wrong,
And lose a soul-full of delicious thought
By talking. Hush! Let's drink each other up
By silent eyes. Who lives, but thou and I,
My heavenly wife?...
I'll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second
By thy cheek's change.
In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost hear the gnashing of the teeth. 'Never!' exclaims the duke to his son Torrismond:
There lies no grain of sand between
My loved and my detested! Wing thee hence,
Or thou dost stand to-morrow on a cobweb
Spun o'er the well of clotted Acheron,
Whose hydrophobic entrails stream with fire!
And may this intervening earth be snow,
And my step burn like the mid coal of Aetna,
Plunging me, through it all, into the core,
Where in their graves the dead are shut like seeds,
If I do not—O, but he is my son!
Is not that tremendous? But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality. One must wander with him through the pages of Death's Jest Book, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn that 'the dead are most and merriest,' one must ask—'Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?'—one must realise that 'murder is full of holes.' Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,
Whose tumultuous waves
Are heaped, contending ghosts,