The fact that the words most frequently used in this stock poetic diction have usually some sort of connexion with dress or ornament has not escaped notice, and it has its own significance. It is, as it were, a reflex of the fact that the nature poetry of the period is in large measure the work of writers to whom social life is the central fact of existence, for whom meadow, and woodland, and running water, mountain and sea, the silent hills, and the starry sky brought no inspiration, or at least no inspiration powerful enough to lead them to break through the shackles of conventionality imposed upon them by the taste of their age. Words like “paint” and “painted,” “gaudy,” “adorn,” “deck,” “gilds” and “gilded,” “damasked,” “enamelled,” “embroidered,” and dozens similar form the stock vocabulary of natural description; apart from the best of Akenside, and the works of one or two writers such as John Cunningham, it can safely be said that but few new descriptive terms were added to the “nature vocabulary” of English poetry during this period. How far English poetry is yet distant from a recognition of the sea as a source of poetic inspiration may be perhaps seen from the fact that its most frequent epithet is the feeble term “watery,” whilst the magic of the sky by night or day evokes no image other than one that can be expressed by changes rung on such words as “azure,” “concave,” “serene,” “ætherial.” Even in “Night Thoughts,” where the subject might have led to something new and fresh in the way of a “star-vocabulary,” the best that Young can do is to take refuge in such periphrases as “tuneful spheres,” “nocturnal sparks,” “lucid orbs,” “ethereal armies,” “mathematic glories,” “radiant choirs,” “midnight counsellors,” etc.
And the same lack of direct observation and individual expression is obvious whenever the classicists have to mention birds or animals. Wild life had to wait for White of Selborne, and for Blake and Burns and Cowper and Wordsworth, to be observed with accuracy and treated with sympathy; and it has been well remarked that if we are to judge from their verse, most of the poets of the first quarter of the eighteenth century knew no bird except the goldfinch or nightingale, and even these probably only by hearsay. For the same generalized diction is usually called upon, and birds are merely a “feathered,” “tuneful,” “plumy” or “warbling” choir, whilst a periphrasis, allowing of numerous and varied labels for the same animal, is felt to be the correct thing. In Dryden sheep are “the woolly breed” or “the woolly race”; bees are the “industrious kind” or “the frugal kind”; pigs are “the bristly care” or “the tusky kind”; frogs are “the loquacious race”; crows, “the craven kind,” and so on: “the guiding principle seems to be that nothing must be mentioned by its own name.”[60]
Many of these stock epithets owed their appearance of course to the requirements imposed upon poets by their adherence to the heroic couplet. Pope himself calls attention to the fact that the necessities of rhyme led to the unceasing repetition of stereotyped phrases and locutions:
Where’er you find the “cooling western breeze.”
In the next line it “whispers through the trees”;
If crystal streams “with pleasing murmur creep”
The reader’s threaten’d, not in vain, with “sleep”—
adducing, with unconscious irony, the very rhymes prevalent in much of his own practice.[61]
It was also recognized by the versifiers that the indispensable polish and “correctness” of the decasyllabic line could only be secured by a mechanical use of epithets in certain positions. “There is a vast beauty [to me],” wrote Shenstone, “in using a word of a particular nature in the 8th and 9th syllable of an English verse. I mean what is virtually a dactyl. For instance,