Life of John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame. Sidney Colvin
upon her lips: Whereat she sweetly angry, with her laces Binds up the wanton locks in curious traces, Whilst (twisting with her joints) each hair long lingers, As loth to be enchain’d but with her fingers. Then on her head a dressing like a crown; Her breasts all bare, her kirtle slipping down, And all things off (which rightly ever be Call’d the foul-fair marks of our misery) Except her last, which enviously doth seize her, Lest any eye partake with it in pleasure, Prepares for sweetest rest, while sylvans greet her, And longingly the down bed swells to meet her.
Chapman, a poet naturally rugged of mind and speech and moreover hampered by having to translate, takes much greater liberties, constantly breaking up single lines with a full stop in the middle and riming on syllables too light or too grammatically dependent on the word next following to allow naturally any stress of after-pause, however slight; as thus in the sixth Odyssey:—
| These, here arriv’d, the mules uncoach’d, and drave Up to the gulfy river’s shore, that gave Sweet grass to them. The maids from coach then took Their clothes, and steep’d them in the sable brook; Then put them into springs, and trod them clean With cleanly feet; adventuring wagers then, Who should have soonest and most cleanly done. When having throughly cleans’d, they spread them on The flood’s shore, all in order. And then, where The waves the pebbles wash’d, and ground was clear, They bath’d themselves, and all with glittering oil Smooth’d their white skins; refreshing then their toil With pleasant dinner, by the river’s side; Yet still watch’d when the sun their clothes had dried. Till which time, having dined, Nausicaa With other virgins did at stool-ball play, Their shoulder-reaching head-tires laying by. |
The other classical translation of the time with which Keats was most familiar was that of the Metamorphoses of Ovid by the traveller and colonial administrator George Sandys. As a rule Sandys prefers the regular beat of the self-contained couplet, but now and again he too breaks it uncompromisingly: for instance—
| Forbear yourselves, O Mortals, to pollute With wicked food: fields smile with corn, ripe fruit Weighs down their boughs; plump grapes their vines attire; There are sweet herbs, and savory roots, which fire May mollify, milk, honey redolent With flowers of thyme, thy palate to content. The prodigal earth abounds with gentle food; Affording banquets without death or blood. Brute beasts with flesh their ravenous hunger cloy: And yet not all; in pastures horses joy: So flocks and herds. But those whom Nature hath Endued with cruelty, and savage wrath (Wolves, bears, Armenian tigers, Lions) in Hot blood delight. How horrible a sin, That entrails bleeding entrails should entomb! That greedy flesh, by flesh should fat become! While by one creature’s death another lives! |
Contemporary masters of elegiac and epistolary verse often deal with the metre more harshly and arbitrarily still. Thus Donne, the great Dean of St. Paul’s, though capable of riming with fine sonority and richness, chooses sometimes to write as though in sheer defiance of the obvious framework offered by the couplet system; and the same refusal to stop the sense with the couplet, the same persistent slurring of the rime, the same broken and jerking movement, are plentifully to be matched from the epistles of Ben Jonson. In later and weaker hands this method of letting the sentence march or jolt upon its way in almost complete independence of the rime developed into a fatal disease and decay of the metre, analogous to the disease which at the same time was overtaking and corrupting dramatic blank verse. A signal instance, to which we shall have to return, is the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne, (1659) a narrative poem not lacking momentary gleams of intellect and imagination, and by some insatiate students, including Southey and Professor Saintsbury, admired and praised in spite of its (to one reader at least) intolerable tedium and wretched stumbling, shuffling verse, which rimes indeed to the eye but to the ear is mere mockery and vexation. For example:—
| Some time in silent sorrow spent, at length The fair Pharonnida recovers strength, Though sighs each accent interrupted, to Return this answer:—‘Wilt, oh! wilt thou do Our infant love such injury—to leave It ere full grown? When shall my soul receive A comfortable smile to cherish it, When thou art gone? They’re but dull joys that sit Enthroned in fruitless wishes; yet I could Part, with a less expense of sorrow, would Our rigid fortune only be content With absence; but a greater punishment Conspires against us—Danger must attend Each step thou tread’st from hence; and shall I spend Those hours in mirth, each of whose minutes lay Wait for thy life? When Fame proclaims the day Wherein your battles join, how will my fear With doubtful pulses beat, until I hear Whom victory adorns! Or shall I rest Here without trembling, when, lodged in thy breast, My heart’s exposed to every danger that Assails thy valour, and is wounded at Each stroke that lights on thee—which absent I, Prompted by fear, to myriads multiply.’ |
The tendency which culminated in this kind of verse was met by a counteracting tendency in the majority of poets to insist on the regular emphatic rime-beat, and to establish the rime-unit—that is the separate couplet—as the completely dominant element in the measure, the ‘heroic’ measure as it had come to be called. The rule is nowhere so dogmatically laid down as by Sir John Beaumont, the elder brother of the dramatist, in an address to King James I:—
| In every language now in Europe spoke By nations which the Roman Empire broke, The relish of the Muse consists in rime: One verse must meet another like a chime. Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace In choice of words fit for the ending place, Which leave impression in the mind as well As closing sounds of some delightful bell. |
Milton at nineteen, in a passage of his college Vacation Exercise, familiar to Keats and for every reason interesting to read in connexion with the poems expressing Keats’s early aspirations, showed how the metre could still be handled nobly in the mixed Elizabethan manner:—
| Hail native Language, that by sinews weak Didst move my first endeavouring tongue to speak, ········ I have some naked thoughts that rove about And loudly knock to have their passage out; And wearie of their place do only stay Till thou hast deck’t them in thy best array; That so they may without suspect or fears Fly swiftly to this fair Assembly’s ears; Yet I had rather if I were to chuse, Thy service in some graver subject use, Such as may make thee search thy coffers round, Before thou cloath my fancy in fit sound: Such where the deep transported mind may soare Above the wheeling poles, and at Heav’ns dore Look in, and see each blissful Deitie How he before the thunderous throne doth lie, Listening to what unshorn Apollo sings To th’ touch of golden wires, while Hebe brings Immortal Nectar to her Kingly Sire: Then passing through the Spheres of watchful fire, And mistie Regions of wide air next under, And hills of Snow and lofts of piled Thunder, May tell at length how green-ey’d Neptune raves, In Heav’ns defiance mustering all his waves; Then sing of secret things that came to pass When Beldam Nature in her cradle was; And last of Kings and Queens and Hero’s old, Such as the wise Demodocus once told In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast, While sad Ulisses soul and all the rest Are held with his melodious harmonie In willing chains and sweet captivitie. |
But the strictly closed system advocated by Sir John Beaumont prevailed in the main, and by the days of the Commonwealth and Restoration was with some exceptions generally established. Some poets were enabled by natural fineness of ear and dignity of soul to make it yield fine rich and rolling modulations: none