COVENTRY PATMORE

To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to recognize the law of The Unknown Eros. It is to look, not only for such precision, but for its rare companions—liberty, flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to come, The Unknown Eros will hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness is its own quality, conferred by no world’s neglect; not an effect of conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative to nothing.

The reader undertakes at least to know and to watch that solitude. It was assuredly a sense of the gravity of this enterprise that inspired the 95phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies’; a star is lonely, and its student, whatever his conditions, lonely as he watches. Pausing upon that significant phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not Keats’s, evidently; and it proves at last to be a word of Patmore’s own; and the lonely watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In a now cancelled passage of Coventry Patmore’s ode, Tired Memory, occurs the ‘lonely’ astronomer. Who can complain that there are not many prepared for such a vigil? Moreover, The Unknown Eros, although we may attempt images of sidereal distance to express its profound flight, has the more dreadful solitude of an experience, and goes far in an inverse flight, through the essentially single human heart—intimately into time and space, remotely into the heart of hearts.

Of many words of praise, the word ‘classic’ is chosen here because it suggests no exclusions of schools or kinds, nor even any preferences for poetry of one kind of perfection, to the slighting of poetry of another. None the less is it the most sharp and severe of all words of criticism, or it shall here have that character, if the reader will agree to understand as ‘classic’ all poetry that is one—thought and word. The fusion of thought and word is unmistakable, whether the fire of an impassioned thought bring it to pass, or the close coldness of fancy made perfect; for since we hear that metals pass into one another, in vacuo, by 96pressure in the cold, this latter image is possible; but even if, with Thomas à Kempis, we contemplate the metal that is one with fire and is changed into fire, it is less by the fusion of fire that a greatly classic poem is to be figured, than by a more vital union; mind and body, where tidal thought and feeling are quick with the blood and various with the breath of life, give a juster, as well as a simpler and a human, image of a vital poem. Besides, the fire of life is made sensible to us by warmth and not by flame, and there are in literature a far greater number of humanly warm poems that are classic and vital, than of poems that are classic and vital with apparent and uncovered flame. Some of these last, indeed, there are, but few. The image of warm life is the general measure of poetry. Then is poetry proved classic and alive when a reader, struck to the heart, moved and shaken like Leontes looking on the figure of Hermione, having seen her colour, her height, her light, her age, knows her indeed, and confesses her at last by another sign: ‘Oh, she’s warm!’

In The Unknown Eros the poet’s intention, single, separate, strikes unique strokes against which the reader’s human heart is all unarmed by custom. It is mastery, and not violence, that so comes home, dividing soul and spirit. There is not a violence in the world that does not seem a dissipation and an essential weakness when 97reproached by such a majestic energy, able to curb its hand.

Not without profoundly conscious art did Coventry Patmore achieve the ultimate, the mortal, pathos of such an ode as Eurydice. He was ready to tell the secret which no others could use as he used it, however it might be guessed; and the secret of Eurydice was: ‘After exceeding ill, a little good.’ The slenderness of the good and the poignancy of the ill are mingled, in this ode on dreams, with such closeness of fear as no other poet has ever endured. Eurydice is the dream of the mourner, who night by night follows some dreary clue through labyrinths without hope, to find the dear dead living the thin, remote, neglected life that the dead do live in these intolerable dreams. But Coventry Patmore does not always capture terror for such purposes of eternal sadness; he is able to marry terror to joy in the magnificent ode of reunion, The Day after To-morrow:

O, heaving sea,

That heav’st as if for bliss of her and me,

And separatest not dear heart from heart,

Though each ’gainst other beats too far apart

O, weary Love, O, folded to her breast,

Love in each moment years and years of rest.

· · · · ·

O Life, too liberal, when to take her hand

Is more of hope than heart can understand.

· · · · ·

98One day’s controlled hope, and one again,

And then the third, and ye shall have the rein,

O Life, Death, Terror, Love!

Ultima dolcezza was once exquisitely said of the skylark; ultima amarezza should be the words for the lines:

Thou whom ev’n more than Heaven lov’d I have,

And yet have not been true, even to thee;

and the extremity of grief without bitterness, the grief that kisses and says a conscious ‘farewell, farewell’, is in Departure, and in this passage of too significant allusion, with years of tears lightly implied by a negative:

When the one darling of our widowhead,

The nurseling Grief, is dead,

And no dews blur our eyes

To see the peach-bloom come in evening skies.

Nor does a public sorrow utter less life and death. The ode entitled Proem foretells with a singular peace of grief the day when England, ‘a dim heroic nation, long since dead’, shall be benignly remembered no otherwise than by ‘the bird-voice and the blast of her omniloquent tongue’—by the poets of her then dead language.

As to the ‘natural description’ for which the reader is apt to look—it might not unfairly be said that Patmore never described. He claimed the truths of science, to which in youth he had devoted his attention, to serve his poem with 99images; and thus he used them in his speech, as when the perception he gained of Divine truths by the act of contemplation and the holding his spirit still, ready, and free, was likened by him to the photographic picture of stars invisible even to the camera but made visible by a long accumulation of continuous imperceptible impressions. And nature, evasive to the mere describer, yielded imagery to him with an indescribable freshness. There is an instance in the ode, Wind and Wave, with its final flash of sea and sea-margins, and waves that

Traverse wildly, like delighted hands,

The fair and fleckless sands

· · · · ·

And burst in wind-kissed splendours on the deafening beach.

The smile of Psyche is

Like sunny eve in some forgotten place;

love shows in the dark eyes of the dying woman,

As when a south wind sombres a March grove.

In Amelia we receive the candid, simple shock of the line in which every meeting with her beauty is likened to a first beholding of the ocean. In this ode, also, stands the ‘little bright, surf-breathing town’, and the westering sun fills with shade ‘the dimples of our homeward hills’. Whenever Coventry Patmore touches nature it is with a sudden sight, often it is also with a sudden 100insight. The blackbird at dawn, a lonely thrush at evening, singing notes few and fine, and ‘sad with promise of a different sun’, brought him in full the message of the wild suggestion that never left poet’s heart at rest. When he wrote the Odes, and used thus a free metre because he knew himself to be set at liberty by his very knowledge and love of law, that heart beat in the sensitive line, and he caught rapturous breath, or sighed, as a spirit blowing whither it will.

The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated question. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged. This true lover may well have outlived the desire to give to others a convincing or converting reason for his own certainties as to the most poetic things in poetry, but he still desires to know whose mind’s ear is fine, and how many have the ear, as time goes on. To the treasure of these most beautiful things, to which the dramatic and the epic poets have given passages or phrases, the lyric poets stanzas or lines, it is a wonder to find how much Coventry Patmore has added. The slender volume of his odes furnishes them out of all measure. Even those readers who will not hold the author of that small volume to have answered all the conditions on which a poet is acknowledged great, will confess this extraordinary disproportion. The 101mental apprehension of poetry can be put to the proof by Patmore’s odes—and indeed by not a few passages of the contemned Angel in the House—much oftener than by honoured classical poems from which we gather those testing lines by precious threes and twos. The Unknown Eros yields them to us in overwhelming beauty and in strong numbers. Some have that poetry of imagery—so enkindling, so exalting that we say of imagery that it is poetry itself, until we find the poetry of the yonder side, for some again are of the simplicity, the further simplicity, that is beyond imagery. One of the testing lines of our literature has this latter character—Chaucer’s, chosen by Matthew Arnold, on the lot of man:

Now with his love, now in the coldë grave.

From Coventry Patmore’s odes we gather them with both hands, exalted, subdued, and greatly moved by our riches.

Why The Unknown Eros should have found so few readers it might be hard to say. We should have expected something different from the literary liberty and literary variety of England. Ignorance of Patmore’s odes might have been looked for, that is, from readers fairly of one mind in the admiration of Byron and Scott, but it is not easily to be explained in readers of various minds admiring Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, Crashaw, Campion, Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare 102the lyrist. Probably a doubt as to the whole meaning of many among the odes has discouraged even Patmore’s willing readers. The beauty was there, but it was to them an uncertain magnificence, a glow from a doubtful fire, a pealing call of an uncertain word, remote as thunder, the heart-piercing utterance of an obscure grief—obscure as waters are obscure because they are profound, not because they are turbid. Some of our esteemed poets have left us meanings troubled by the lowest of difficulties—the grammatical. Their waters have matter in mechanical suspension rather than in chemical solution. It is often impossible to decide to what nouns some of the pronouns in Sordello refer. But Patmore’s pure diction, uttered in the composure that gives high dignity to his most poignant poems, permits no such baffling of inquiry. Nevertheless some of the odes of The Unknown Eros are difficult. Some, we say, and are again puzzled at finding them so few. The Day after To-morrow is not readily understood to refer to reunion after death; the Psyche odes sing of a spiritual experience alien to the history, to the aspirations, and even the desires, of the greater number of deeply spiritual men; the matter of the mystical ode called The Unknown Eros itself is all but hidden; Deliciae Sapientiae de Amore darkly sings the triumph of virginity and its sacrifice at once; few or no readers will guess the Arbor Vitae of a very fine 103ode to be the Catholic Church, and the ‘nests of the hoarse bird, who talks and understands not his own word’ to be (a most unjust image) the clusters of her clergy; and a few other necessities for explanation there may be. But, on the other hand, there can be no doubt, to all initiate in the world of poetry, as to the full significance—the furthest significance, to every inner alley and retreat of meaning, to every ultimate pang of sensitiveness—expressed in that terrible record of a mourner’s dreams, Eurydice; in Departure; in If I were dead; in Saint Valentine’s Day; or in the ode on the decline of England, already named, which contains the memorable description of her literature. Why, of these all-intelligible poems, is only one generally known, even with the relative generalness possible among the little minority that cares for poetry? That one is, needless to say, The Toys, a very beautiful and tender poem, but one containing less essential poetry than any other page of the odes.

It must be owned that some of the accessory persons and conditions of the story of The Angel in the House are unwelcome to poetry as we have learnt to hold it. But this is an avowal that we are either content, or very weakly, very ineffectually, ill content, to live in a social world that we confess to be unworthy of poetry. Coventry Patmore, as we understand his attitude, refused 104to be content with such a world, and refused, moreover, to be impotently discontent. If the world was unfit for his poem, he would reject the world—and he at least knew how to reject and did not play at rejection. He did not believe that there was such unfitness, because love and immortality were there, as elsewhere, with humanity. The modern age chose to be ashamed of the manner in which it chose to live, to be associated, to prosper, to order its affairs; no other age had condescended to that kind of shame. But Coventry Patmore was not modern in this matter. He thought the daily civilized ways of a Cathedral town, granted that they were delicate and gay, and not dull, no more unfit for ‘realistic’ art than other contemporary ways, neither delicate nor gay, have been held to be before, and notably since, the writing of The Angel in the House. Coventry Patmore wrote of conventions in the manner of a realist, and he had for this precedents older than his critics stopped to remember. If so much of explanation is to be offered in answer to still current criticisms, how does it befall that any reader should pause upon the mere intervals in poetry so profound and penetrating as, in a hundred passages, shakes the metre with a hand of control?

Among such passages are these records of beauty:

Her eyes incredulously bright,

And all her happy beauty blown

Beneath the beams of my delight.

105So much simplicity of mind

In such a pomp of loveliness!

Eyes that softly lodge the light.

And elsewhere are words that touch the heart so close as these:

His only Love, and she is wed!

His fondness comes about his heart

As milk comes when the babe is dead.

And again:

Alone, alone with sky and sea

And her, the third simplicity.

Here is a quatrain winged, not weighted, with meaning:

Far round each blade of harvest bare

Its little load of bread;

Each furlong of that journey fair

With separate sweetness sped.

Again:

Blest in her place, blissful is she;

And I, departing, seem to be

Like the strange waif that comes to run

A few days flaming near the sun,

And carries back, through boundless night,

Its lessening memory of light.

It is possible that this early poem is contemned because the reader takes the ‘Angel’ to be the woman, and an angel obviously feminine is a kind of sentimentality. But I prefer to take the ‘Angel’ to be Love. Patmore’s masculine mind 106probably referred the name rather to such an angel as he who in the Old Testament took up a prophet by the hair of his head and carried him across country. Together with Love, Patmore’s subject was the Child in the House, before ever Pater had so varied Patmore’s title. Together with the revelation of youthful love he has coupled all the sweet revelations made to a child:

This and the Child’s unheeded Dream

Was all the light of all his day.

We find that there are two master-emotions in modern poetry—in that Romance literature which has been the complementary life of Europe now for many centuries; one dates from Dante’s day, and one chiefly from the day of Henry Vaughan (Wordsworth’s virtually immediate precursor). Love, and the love of Nature, mystically passionate, are what they are with us, not because all men, but because two boys, conceived them. It needs the childish dream to raise these emotions into the regions of mystery, sweetness, tenderness, and terror which they have gained because Dante was a child in love with a girl, and Vaughan a child in love with Nature. Other lovers have loved in childhood, or else they have profited by Dante’s childhood; other poets have conceived the passion for Nature in their childhood, or have profited by the childhood of Wordsworth, of Vaughan, and of Traherne. The wilder and the more real, the more 107delirious and the more innocent these remote experiences, the more has the lover’s love the quality of Romance, and the poet’s imaginative verse the quality of the poetry of Nature. Men could never have done for mankind what these boys have done; literature owes her two ideal adult passions to the dreams of childhood.

Coventry Patmore’s ardour and mystery acknowledged that dear and ignorant origin. He did more than remember that incomparable antiquity; with him childhood hardly needed remembering, for it remained, the companion of his complete intellect, the rapture of his profoundly experienced heart, the strange and delicate witness of manly sorrows.

The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the ‘landscape garden’ of a false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and definite, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wildness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess. Comparable to such a garden is Coventry Patmore’s mind, obedient to an ancient law, but wildly natural under an inspiration of visiting winds and a splendid sun of genius.

No poet ever had a greater value for poetry or 108attributed to it a greater dignity than the value and the dignity that consecrated it in Patmore’s heart. As he very literally and actually held the members of the body to be divine, so may it be said that he saw in poetry also the incarnate word; the metre, the diction, the pause, the rhyme, the phrase were not accidental but essential. Hence his extraordinary mastery of style. And as to his sense of the greatness of poetry as a power and domination we have but to compare it with the sense of one who spared no words in praise of poetry, and who speculated boldly as to its work and mission—Matthew Arnold.^[3] Failing the religious sanction, failing the fundamental law with its code, poetry, Arnold thought, might take its place, whether as temporary regent or regent without a term. It would, he said, console and soothe mankind. As though a race in need of the spur and the curb, the example, the threat, and the canon, were sufficiently to be served by those unmanly ministrations! As though to be soothed in an ill-temper and comforted in an ill-humour were the chief necessities of men, a race worthy of the dignities of chastisement! In raising poetry to what he thought this eminence, assuredly Matthew Arnold did it no honour. Never 109was poetry more conscious than Patmore’s. Nor, perhaps, if we seek among the homages of the poets to their art shall we find graver or profounder veneration than Patmore’s, hardly even excepting Wordsworth’s, explicit and implicit.

He valued his country chiefly for her poets. So must we learn to do, and to value her for him.

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