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The English Poets
Volume 41 opened on a poet unknown to me, J. Campbell who must have been born in the 1780s. He belonged to the period of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Percy Byshe Shelly, and many more contemporaries – all of them hugely romantic poets writing at the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century.
As you read them you must surely see that they are superbly superior as lyricists to their counterpart, the folksingers and popstars of the 20th century. Some of their poems, with their rhythms and repetitious phrases (see Lady Nairn and Elizabeth Browning) beg to be put to music. Some, of course, were.
Their romanticism sailed beyond their age; and some of it fits the cult of the 21st century.
Take this passage from my newly discovered poet J. Campbell, in a piece called ‘Freedom & Love’:
Love’s a fire that needs renewal
Of fresh beauty for its fuel;
Love’s wing moults when caged and captured,
Only free, he soars enraptured.
Can you keep the bee from ranging,
Or the ringdove’s neck from changing?
No! nor fetter’d Love from dying
In the knot there’s no untying.
Because my ‘ten-minute' read turned into an hour, I was able to find two poems in this volume about the Maid of Neidpath.
nother poetic Campbell named Thomas begins the legend thus:
Earl March look’d on his dying child,
And, smit with grief to view her-
The youth, he cried, whom I exiled
Shall be restored to woo her.
She’s at the window many an hour
is coming to discover:
nd he look’d up to Ellen’s bower
And she looked on her lover—
But ah! So pale, he knew her not,
Though her smile on him was dwelling—
And am I then forgot – forgot?
It broke the heart of Ellen
In vain he weeps, in vain he sighs,
Her cheek is cold as ashes:
Nor love’s own kiss shall wake those eyes
To lift those silken lashes.
But read Sir Walter Scott’s version of the Maid of Neidpath to compare. . . and despair.
I found this book of ballads and sonnets and sagas utterly charming, for I was revisiting my childhood and early youth. There was Young Lochinvar, come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best:
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none.
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar. . .
Riding right into the Castle of his love’d one’s parents, and scooping up the bride and abducting her before she could marry a wimp.
reat stuff for a 14-year-old.
But there’s also Byron, and Wordsworth, Keats and Shelly. Not to mention Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
(In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
Great stuff. The kind you repeat to yourself when climbing a mountain, or jogging forever.
Or Blake: Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night (Hope I quoted that right).
Ah, youth, and its memories of life to come.
But in this volume I was reminded that it was Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864) who wrote all those trite but true things about the end of life:
At the age of 75:
I strove with none; for none was worth my strife
Nature I loved and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands at the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
As an octogenerian:
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear;
In his strange language all I know
Is: There is not a word of fear
And some time later:
It is not better at an early hour
On its calm cell to rest the weary head,
While birds are singing and while blooms the bower,
Than sit the fire out and go starv’d to bed?
Yes, yes indeed, fun for all ages in this volume.
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