———“There dwells a loved one, But cruel is she; She left lonely for ever The kings of the sea.”
“The Strayed Reveller” is written without rhyme—(not being blank verse, however,)—and not unfrequently, it must be admitted, without rhythm. Witness the following lines:
“Down the dark valley—I saw.”— “Trembling, I entered; beheld”— “Thro' the islands some divine bard.”—
Nor are these by any means the only ones that might be cited in proof; and, indeed, even where there is nothing precisely contrary to rhythm, the verse might, generally speaking, almost be read as prose. Seldom indeed, as it appears to us, is the attempt to write without some fixed laws of metrical construction attended with success; never, perhaps, can it be considered as the most appropriate embodiment of thought. The fashion has obtained of late years; but it is a fashion, and will die out. But few persons will doubt the superiority of the established blank verse, after reading the following passage, or will hesitate in pronouncing that it ought to be the rule, instead of the exception, in this poem:
“They see the merchants On the Oxus stream:—but care Must visit first them too, and make them pale: Whether, thro' whirling sand, A cloud of desert robber-horse has burst Upon their caravan; or greedy kings, In the walled cities the way passes thro', Crushed them with tolls; or fever airs On some great river's marge Mown them down, far from home.”—p. 25.
The Reveller, going to join the train of Bacchus in his temple, has strayed into the house of Circe and has drunk of her cup: he believes that, while poets can see and know only through participation in endurance, he shares the power belonging to the gods of seeing “without pain, without labour;” and has looked over the valley all day long at the Mœnads and Fauns, and Bacchus, “sometimes, for a moment, passing through the dark stems.” Apart from the inherent defects of the metre, there is great beauty of pictorial description in some passages of the poem, from which the following (where he is speaking of the gods) may be taken as a specimen:—
“They see the Indian Drifting, knife in hand, His frail boat moored to A floating isle, thick-matted With large-leaved low-creeping melon plants, And the dark cucumber. He reaps and stows them, Drifting—drifting:—round him, Round his green harvest-plot, Flow the cool lake-waves: The mountains ring them.”—p. 20.
From “the Sick King in Bokhara,” we have already quoted at some length. It is one of the most considerable, and perhaps, as being the most simple and life-like, the best of the narrative poems. A vizier is receiving the dues from the cloth merchants, when he is summoned to the presence of the king, who is ill at ease, by Hussein: “a teller of sweet tales.” Arrived, Hussein is desired to relate the cause of the king's sickness; and he tells how, three days since, a certain Moollah came before the king's path, calling for justice on himself, whom, deemed a fool or a drunkard, the guards pricked off with their spears, while the king passed on into the mosque: and how the man came on the morrow with yesterday's blood-spots on him, and cried out for right. What follows is told with great singleness and truth: “Thou knowest,” the man says,
“‘How fierce In these last day the sun hath burned; That the green water in the tanks Is to a putrid puddle turned; And the canal that from the stream Of Samarcand is brought this way Wastes and runs thinner every day. “‘Now I at nightfall had gone forth Alone; and, in a darksome place Under some mulberry-trees, I found A little pool; and, in brief space, With all the water that was there I filled my pitcher, and stole home Unseen; and, having drink to spare, I hid the can behind the door, And went up on the roof to sleep.
“‘But, in the night, which was with wind And burning dust, again I creep Down, having fever, for a drink.