The work of Chatterton represents another aspect of this revival of the past, but it is curious to find that, in his acknowledged “original” verse there are not many instances of the personified abstraction, whilst they are freely used in the Rowley poems. Where they do occur in his avowedly original work they are of the usual type, though more imaginative power is revealed in his personification of Winter:
Pale rugged Winter bending o’er his tread,
His grizzled hair bedropt with icy dew:
His eyes a dusky light congealed and dead,
His robe a tinge of bright ethereal blue.
From our special point of view the “antiquarianism” of the Rowley poems might almost be disproved by the prevalence of abstractions and personifications, which in most instances are either unmistakably of the eighteenth century or which testify to the new Romantic atmosphere now manifesting itself. The stock types of frigid abstraction are all brought on the stage in the manner of the old Moralities, and each is given an ample speaking part in order to describe his own characteristics.
But in addition to these lifeless abstractions, there are to be found in the Rowley poems a large number of detailed and elaborate personifications. Some of these are full length portraits in the Spenserian manner, and now and then the resulting personification is striking and beautiful, as when, in “Ælla” (59), Celmond apostrophizes Hope, or the evocation of Truth in “The Storie of William Canynge.”
Chatterton has also in these poems a few personifications of natural powers, but these are mainly imitative as in the lines (“Ælla,” 94) reminiscent of Milton and Pope[230]:
Bright sun had in his ruddy robes been dight
From the red east he flitted with his train,