Слике страница
PDF
ePub

relating to slavery was published in 1849, under the title of Voices of Freedom. These verses doubtless exerted a strong influence towards advancing the cause of abolitionism and emancipation. In the following year (1850) he lifted up his voice in favor of the workingman, and issued a volume entitled Songs of Labor. Of this volume, an English critic, not altogether pleased with his championship of the anti-slavery party, says: "His tender sympathy and unvarying kindliness in all that concerns the labors and distress of mankind attract and secure our approval more than his froward, needless, and valueless partisanship in verse repels us." His War Lyrics, published in 1865, are, as a matter of course, intensely partisan, but some of them are full of the finest poetic feeling. The old hatred of slavery still exists, and is the burden of almost every song:

In vain the bells of war shall ring

Of triumphs and revenges,
While still is spared the evil thing
That severs and estranges.

But blest the ear

That yet shall hear
The jubilant bell
That rings the knell
Of slavery forever!

Then let the selfish lips be dumb,

And hushed the breath of sighing;
Before the joy of peace, must come

The pains of purifying.
God give us grace
Each in his place

To bear his lot

And murmuring not

Endure and wait and labor.

Many of Whittier's miscellaneous pieces are of a decidedly high degree of poetic merit, and will take rank among the best lyrics in our language. They are so

numerous that we shall make no attempt at specification, but direct the reader to the complete works of the poet, from which he will be at no loss to select the best.

Songs Before Sunrise is the title of a volume of poems published by Algernon Charles Swinburne in 1871. No poems in our language possess more real genuine music than is exhibited in some of these songs. In them Swinburne's varied and remarkable lyrical powers are shown at their best. "The conflict of day with night before the sunrise of freedom is rehearsed in two-score pieces, which chant the democratic uprising of Continental Europe and the outbreak in Crete." "The one faculty," says Stedman," in which Swinburne excels any living English poet, is his miraculous gift of rhythm, his command over the unsuspected sources of a language. Before the advent of Swinburne, we did not realize the full scope of English verse. In his hands it is like the violin of Paganini. The range of his fantasias, roulades, arias, new effects of measure and sound, is incomparable with anything hitherto known. The first, emotion of one who studies even his immature work is that of wonder at the freedom and richness of his diction, the su-surrus of his rhythm, his unconscious alliterations, the endless change of his syllabic harmonies, resulting in the alternate softness and strength, height and fall, riotous or chastened music, of his affluent verse. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language-a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and débonnaire lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. It is safe to declare that at last a time has come when the force of expression can no farther go. I do not say it has not gone too far. The fruit may be, and here is, too luscious; the flower is often of an odor too intoxicating to endure. Yet what execution! The voice may not be equal to the grandest music, nor trained and restrained as it should be. But the voice is there, and its possessor has the finest natural organ to which this generation has listened."

REFERENCES.

COLLATERAL READING.

IN connection with the subject of ballads, study the social condition of England during the Transition Period. For information, refer to Knight's, Hume's, Lingard's, or any other standard History of England. Read James's History of Chivalry, and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Study the history of the Scotch border.. Read Jane Porter's Scottish Chiefs; Scott's Fair Maid of Perth, The Legend of Montrose, and Old Mortality.

LITERARY STUDIES.

BALLADS: For collections of ballads, see Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Bohn); Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; Jamieson's Popular Ballads and Songs; Chambers's The Scottish Ballads; Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England (1857); Aytoun's Ballads of Scotland (1861); Allingham's The Ballad Book; Child's Collection of Ballads (1857-59).

SONNETS: See The Book of the Sonnet, by Leigh Hunt; Dennis's English Sonnets; French's Dublin Afternoon Lectures; Stedman's Victorian Poets; Massey's Shakspeare's Sonnets and his Private Friends; Henry Brown's Sonnets of Shakspeare Solved. See, also, references elsewhere given to Petrarch, the Troubadours, Trouvères, etc.

ELEGIES: For Astrophel and Lycidas, see other references, respectively, to Spenser and Milton. For Adonais, see Hutton's Essays, and references elsewhere given to Shelley. For In Memoriam, see F. W. Robertson's Analysis of In Memoriam (1862). For Gray's Elegy, see Johnson's Life of Gray (in Lives of the Poets); Hazlitt's English Poets, Roscoe's Essays; Drake's Literary Hours (1798); and Brydges's Censura Literaria (1805).

LYRICS IN GENERAL: For choice specimens and extracts, see Ward's English Poets; Appleton's Library of British Poets; The Family Library of British Poets; The Fireside Library of British Poets; Chambers's Cyclopedia of English Literature.

ROBERT BURNS: See Life and Works of Robert Burns, by Robert Chambers (4 vols., 1859); Burns, by Principal Shairp (English Men of Letters); Works of Professor Wilson; Carlyle's Essay on Burns; Hazlitt's English Poets.

JAMES HOGG: See Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianæ.

MISCELLANEOUS AND ADDITIONAL: Consult Hallam's Literature of Europe. Find specimens and extracts in the works of Shelley, Cole. ridge, Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson, Mrs. Sigourney, Swinburne, Whittier, and others.

CHAPTER X.

SATIRICAL POETRY.

Definition and Classification-John Skelton-Why Come Ye not to
Court? Speake Parrot-Barclay's Shyp of Fooles-Wyatt and Sur-
rey-The Steele Glass, by Gascoigne Donne-Joseph Hall's Satires
-Butler's Hudibras-Dryden-Absalom and Achitophel-Replies by
Settle and Pordage-The Medal-The Medal Reversed-The Medal
of John Bayes-Mac Flecknoe-Pope's Dunciad-Byron's English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers-Lowell's Fable for Critics-Pope's
Moral Essays-Swift's Poetry-Chatterton's Prophecy-Burns's Holy
Willie's Prayer and the Holy Fair-Churchill's Satires-Peter Pindar
-Moore's The Fudge Family in Paris-Trumbull's McFingall-
Butler's Nothing to Wear.

"Satire has always shone among the rest,
And is the boldest way, if not the best,

To tell men freely of their faintest faults,

To laugh at their vain deeds and vainer thoughts."

DRYDEN.

SATIRICAL poetry is of three kinds: first, that which attempts to reform the morals and manners of society by exposing its vices and follies to ridicule; second, that which aims to advance the interests of one sect or party by exhibiting all others in a contemptuous or odious light; third, that which is directed against certain individuals simply for purposes of revenge, or from like unworthy motives. In satirical poetry, there is usually much bitterness and but little courtesy; it may tear down and destroy, but it seldom builds up or actively improves. It may deter men from evil by turning the world's laugh against them, but the reformation which it achieves is not one of the heart.

Satire is an important element in much of our carlier. poetry. We have already given some examples under

other heads; as, The Country of Cokaygne, spoken of in the chapter on Transition Poetry; the allegorical poem of Piers the Plowman; and some of Chaucer's poems.

The first professional writer of satire in English was John Skelton, poet-laureate from 1489 to 1529. Skelton was a scholar of rather extraordinary attainments for the times in which he lived, and was for some years tutor to prince Henry, afterwards Henry VIII. Caxton wrote of him that "he hath redde Vergyle, Ovyd, Tullye, and all the other noble poets and orators, to me unknown. And also he hath redde the nine muses, and understandeth theyr musicall scyences, and to whom of them eche scyence is appropred. I suppose he hath dronken of Elcyon's well." The great Erasmus, also, spoke of Skelton as being "the glory and light of English Literature." His earlier poems were of a serious cast, and, instead of being professedly satirical, were either allegorical or lyrical and written in a strain of pompous declamation which to us appears insupportably stiff and pedantic. He was appointed to the rectory of Diss, in Norfolk, in 1504, but having used the pulpit as a means for disseminating certain satirical and unbecoming reflections upon the mendicant orders, he is said to have been suspended from exercising the sacerdotal functions. Then his natural disposition for buffoonery and audacious ridicule found vent in numerous rhyming libels. Afterwards, in 1524, being influenced by the general demand for a reformation in church affairs, he engaged in a series of the most furious attacks upon Cardinal Wolsey himself, and it is said that for this audacity he was finally obliged to take shelter in the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where he was protected and entertained by the abbot Islip until his death in 1529. His comic and satirical writings have a style peculiarly their own, called Skeltonic, although it is doubtful whether it originated with Skelton. His verses are short, grotesque doggerels, with constantly recurring rhymes, cant expressions, newlycoined words, and trite quotations from the Latin and

« ПретходнаНастави »