And this is easily explicable if only it is borne in mind that the Rowley poems were written by a boy, and that such lovely things as the Dirge in Ælla suggest a maturity that Chatterton did not by any means perfectly possess. In some respects he was as childish (to use the word in no contemptuous sense) as in others he was precocious. And it is a thousand pities that the difficulties of Chatterton's language and the peculiar charm and invention of his metrical technique cannot be appreciated till the boyish love of adventure, delight in imagined bloodshed, and ignorance of sentimental love, have generally been left behind. Nothing—to give an example—could be more frigid than the description of Kennewalcha—
White as the chaulkie clyffes of Brittaines isle,
Red as the highest colour'd Gallic wine
(an unthinkable study in burgundy and whitewash, Battle of Hastings, II, 401); nothing, on the other hand, more vivid, more obviously written with a pen that shook with excitement, than
The Sarasen lokes owte: he doethe feere, &c.
(Eclogue the Second, 23.)
Soe wylle wee beere the Dacyanne armie downe,
And throughe a storme of blodde wyll reache the champyon crowne.
(Ælla, 631.)
Loverdes, how doughtilie the tylterrs joyne!
(Tournament, 92.).
In fine, there is no poet, one may boldly declare, whose pages are so filled with battle, murder and sudden death, as Chatterton's are; and this is perhaps the clearest indication he gives of immaturity.
But if his ideas were sometimes crude and boyish they were not by any means always so; he has flashes of genius, sudden beauties that take away the breath. A better example than this of what is called the sublime could not be found:
See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie;
Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude;
Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie,
Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude.
(Ælla, 872.)
and, from the Songe bie a Manne and Womanne,