It is unnecessary to try to describe the plot of this strange drama, if plot it may be called. The poem rather resembles the old bridge at Lucerne with the gloomy figures of the Dance of Death painted along its wormeaten sides, while over its old timbers rolls the current of busy life, and the laughter of children echoes from its roof. With the exception of Isbrand, the characters of the play are pale and shadowy enough, but the poetry that they speak is wonderful. The gloom and tender beauty of the verse are inextricably united, as in the plays of Webster, whose "intellectual twin" Beddoes might have been. Here is a lovely sketch of "a melancholy lady:"
Duke. Thorwald, I fear hers is a broken heart.
When first I met her in the Egyptian prison,
She was the rosy morning of a woman:
Beauty was rising, but the starry grace
Of a calm childhood might be seen in her.
But since the death of Wolfram, who fell there,
Heaven and one single soul only know how,
I have not dared to look upon her sorrow.
Thorwald. Methinks she's too unearthly beautiful.
Old as I am, I cannot look at her,
And hear her voice, that touches the heart's core,
Without a dread that she will fade o' th' instant.
There's too much heaven in her; oft it rises,
And, pouring out about the lovely earth,
Almost dissolves it. She is tender too;
And melancholy is the sweet pale smile
With which she gently does reproach her fortune
But the greatest beauty of this singular poem, with its wild medley of jesters and spirits, knights and fiends, Deaths and tender women, "like flowers on a grave," is the wonderful perfection of its songs. There are no less than thirteen in this play, some of them the wild mockery remind us of their faults. A turgid inflation in the tragic passages, a tendency to bombast, even more apparent in the man of forty-six than in the boy of nineteen, mar the calm strength of many of his scenes. The cloying sweetness that overloaded the verses of his juvenile work he left behind him as he grew older, but the Marlowe-like extravagance that noted in the soliloquies of Hesperus still comes to the surface occasionally in the pages of Death's Jest-Book. It is the extravagance of strength, however, not of weakness.
It is not often that we see a poet giving up the glorious race from sheer distrust of his power to win, but such was the case of Beddoes. A want of faith in his own genius was for ever paralyzing his hand. To succeed, as he himself knew but too well, and as he wrote to his editor, "a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy and self-denial which is combined with such a temperament—an unconquerable and always enduring will, always working forward to the only goal he knows." This singleness of purpose Beddoes never possessed. Inheriting from his father the qualities of both poet and physician, the faculties of the scientific man, trained and cultivated through a long life by Dr. Thomas Beddoes (with whom poetry was but an occasional pastime), seem to have overbalanced and diverted the poetic genius of his son. The hereditary instinct overcame the individual bent. And in spite of Lovell Beddoes' opinion that "the studies of the dramatist and physician are closely, almost inseparably, allied," is it not true that the analytical faculty so essential to the latter is rarely found in connection with great creative ability? Sainte-Beuve never forgave Balzac for saying that critics were unsuccessful authors, but he should have consoled himself with the of the jesters, but many of them very beautiful; and there are three more in The Brides' Tragedy. Since the days of Elizabeth we have had nothing to compare with them. They have that delicate poise of beauty, like the lighting of a butterfly on a bending flower, that adds to our delight the keen sense of its transitoriness. Here is one—"a voice from the waters:"
The swallow leaves her nest,
The soul my weary breast;
But therefore let the rain
On my grave
Fall pure; for why complain?
Since both will come again
O'er the wave.
The wind dead leaves and snow
Doth hurry to and fro;
And once a day shall break
O'er the wave,
When a storm of ghosts shall shake
The dead, until they wake
In the grave.
This is the least Elizabethan of them all, perhaps, in sentiment, but it has an exquisite sombre tenderness and music of its own. Then follows one of the finest of all Beddoes' songs, a dirge, beginning—
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
which it is useless to quote entire, because it may be found in Dana's Household Poetry, and in the best collection of songs we have, R. H. Stoddard's Melodies and Madrigals, wherein are enshrined three of Beddoes' dirges, all from this one drama of Death's Jest-Book.