Compare, in the first canto of The White Doe of Rylstone ([p. 117])—
when he, with spear and shield,
Rode full of years to Flodden-field.
He died in 1523, and was buried in the choir of Bolton Priory.
The following is Sarah Coleridge's criticism of the [Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle], in the editorial note to her father's Biographia Literaria (vol. ii. ch. ix. p. 152, ed. 1847):—
"The transitions and vicissitudes in this noble lyric I have always thought rendered it one of the finest specimens of modern subjective poetry which our age has seen. The ode commences in a tone of high gratulation and festivity—a tone not only glad, but comparatively even jocund and light-hearted. The Clifford is restored to the home, the honours and estates of his ancestors. Then it sinks and falls away to the remembrance of tribulation—times of war and bloodshed, flight and terror, and hiding away from the enemy—times of poverty and distress, when the Clifford was brought, a little child, to the shelter of a northern valley. After a while it emerges from those depths of sorrow—gradually rises into a strain of elevated tranquillity and contemplative rapture; through the power of imagination, the beautiful and impressive aspects of nature are brought into relationship with the spirit of him, whose fortunes and character form the subject of the piece, and are represented as gladdening and exalting it, whilst they keep it pure and unspotted from the world. Suddenly the Poet is carried on with greater animation and passion: he has returned to the point whence he started—flung himself back into the tide of stirring life and moving events. All is to come over again, struggle and conflict, chances and changes of war, victory and triumph, overthrow and desolation. I know nothing, in lyric poetry, more beautiful or affecting than the final transition from this part of the ode, with its rapid metre, to the slow elegiac stanzas at the end, when, from the warlike fervour and eagerness, the jubilant strain which has just been described, the Poet passes back into the sublime silence of Nature, gathering amid her deep and quiet bosom a more subdued and solemn tenderness than he had manifested before; it is as if from the heights of the imaginative intellect, his spirit had retreated into the recesses of a profoundly thoughtful Christian heart."
Professor Henry Reed said of this poem—"Had he never written another ode, this alone would set him at the head of the lyric poets of England."—Ed.
VARIANTS:
[1] 1815.
... sorrows ... 1807.