While amorous west-winds kist their fragrant souls away.
This cannot altogether be said of the “Hymn to May” published over twenty years later,[141] despite the fact that Thompson himself draws attention to the fact that he does not consider that a genuine Spenserian imitation may be produced by scattering a certain number of obsolete words through the poem. Nevertheless, we find that he has sprinkled his “Hymn” plentifully with “obsolete” terms, though they include a few, such as purfled, dispredden, goodlihead, that were not the common property of the poetasters. His explanations of the words so used show that not a few of them were used with little knowledge of their original meaning, as when he defines glen[142] as “a country hamlet,” or explains perdie as “an old word for saying anything.” It is obvious also that many obsolete terms are often simply stuck in the lines when their more modern equivalents would have served equally well, as for instance,
Full suddenly the seeds of joy recure (“recover”),
or
Myrtles to Venus algates sacred been.
With these reservations the diction of Thompson’s poems is pure and unaffected, and the occasional happy use of archaism is well illustrated in more than one stanza of “The Nativity.”
It is generally agreed that the best of all the Spenserian imitations is “The Castle of Indolence,” which James Thomson published two months before his death in 1748.[143] Yet even in this case there is evident a sort of quiet condescension, as if it were in Thompson’s mind that he was about to draw the attention of his eighteenth century audience to something quaint and old-fashioned, but which had yet a charm of its own. “The obsolete words,” he writes in his “advertisement” to the poem, “and a simplicity of diction in some of the lines, which borders on the ludicrous, were necessary to make the imitation more perfect.” Hence he makes use of a number of words intended to give an archaic air to his poem, including the usual certes, withouten, sheen, perdie, weet, pleasaunce, ycleped, etc. To the first edition was appended a page of explanation of these and other “obsolete words used in this poem”: altogether between seventy and eighty such words are thus glossed, the large majority of which are familiar enough nowadays, either as part of the ordinary vocabulary, or as belonging especially to the diction of poetry.
Though the archaisms are sometimes scattered in a haphazard manner, they are not used with such mechanical monotony as is obvious in the bulk of the Spenserian imitations. In both cantos there are long stretches without a single real or pseudo-archaism, and indeed, when Thomson is indulging in one of the moral or the didactic surveys characteristic of his age, as, for instance, when the bard, invoked by Sir Industry, breaks into a long tirade on the Supreme Perfection (Canto II, 47-61) his diction is the plain and unadorned idiom perfected by Pope.[144] Yet Thompson occasionally yields to the fascination of the spurious form in -en,[145] as
But these I passen by with nameless numbers moe
(Canto I., 56)