What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon our knowing.He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader's error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading.That the general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable.It has the obscurity of profound clear waters.What the poet chiefly secures to us is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception, does but rehearse the action of the union of God with humanity--that there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind.When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the truths of the love of God.The thought grows gay in the three Psyche odes, orattempts a gaiety--the reader at least being somewhat reluctant.How is it? Mr.Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to but a slow participation.Perhaps because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.
But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine allusion, is a most familiar truth.Love that is passionate has much of the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies.The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates and is fugitive.St.Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the child is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses.' It might be drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.
The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so authentic, as that of Mr.Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise than consummate.Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation.This is always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work.Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible.Nor is that beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and elsewhere.The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure.And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary.The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects-- we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the most modern of adjectives--and call them topical.Here assuredly there is no composure.Never before did superiority bear itself with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace-- reluctance.
If Mr.Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws of verse set for use--cradle verse and march- marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the musical time).
Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time measures--if for no other reason, for this: that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed.Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the irregular metre of The Unknown Eros is happily used except for the large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called.Lycidas, the Mrs.Anne Killigrew, the Intimations, and Emerson's Threnody, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste.So with the graver Odes--much in the majority--of Mr.Coventry Patmore's series.A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his versification.And what movement of words has ever expressed flight, distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a celestial line--the eighth in the ode To the Unknown Eros? When we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be separated with something of a jerk.And this adding--as, for instance, of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as A Farewell.It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a boat.In The Angel in the House, and other earlier poems, Mr.Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he never left it either heavily or thinly packed.Moreover those first poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes.And even in his slightest work he proves himself the master--that is, the owner--of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.
