and the opening line of the poem,
Before him the immeasurable heaven,
cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to the question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the lines above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded. The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as in the one which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ the hiatus which occurs when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word may be so great as to
become intolerable. The reason why elision is sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with w, r, or l, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of a peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded in a line like that which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ where the pause of the line fall upon the. To make the main pause of the line fall upon the is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a consonant; but when the word following the begins with a vowel, the line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English prosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain discourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the second syllable of the word music in the other line quoted above is equally faulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges’s treatise on Milton’s prosody, nothing is more striking than the helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple question of elision.
In an ‘Ode to a Star’ there is great beauty and breadth of thought and expression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in
one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard to irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim for himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ is that of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear.”
If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’s famous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, and passionate,” as does Milton’s own poetry, which answers to only the second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither sensuous nor passionate. The so-called coldness displayed by ‘Lycidas’ arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton’s part of sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Of course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetry’s domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of art,
Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings.
In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leading poet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines,” every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical.