Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint
Shows not till it be struck.
And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be, shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give us an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.
With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obvious that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the
leading luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his previous poetry. The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintance with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece. Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the modern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek and Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes from which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountains of beauty Lord de Tabley’s processes were not those of his great contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson’s method on the other.
His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by symbols and
analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a later world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of the phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge is that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments of natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry, and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most learned poet of his time. While Tennyson’s knowledge of natural science, though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley’s knowledge, especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original observation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make his poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry. The leading poem of the present volume, ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ is full of a knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is never obtruded—never more than hinted at, indeed:—
Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come,
Coasting along, as swallows, beating low
Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air,
Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing,
And rather float than fly. Then other spirits,
Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale;
As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream
To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest,
So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung
To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.* * * * *
I hate to watch the flower set up its face.
I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea,
Its heaving roods of intertangled weed
And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit;
The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn,
The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones,
The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves,
Rotting the floors of Autumn.
‘The Death of Phaëthon’ is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet’s subject be lofty or homely.
The line
With sudden ray and music across the sea