THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 12

beautiful stanza.


FOLLOW


Campion's "airs," for which he wrote his words, laid rules too
urgent upon what would have been a delicate genius in poetry. The
airs demanded so many stanzas; but they gave his imagination leave
to be away, and they depressed and even confused his metrical play,
hurting thus the two vital spots of poetry. Many of the stanzas
for music make an unlucky repeating pattern with the poor variety
that a repeating wall-paper does not attempt. And yet Campion
began again and again with the onset of a true poet. Take, for
example, the poem beginning with the vitality of this line,
"touching in its majesty"-

"Awake, thou spring of speaking grace; mute rest becomes not thee!"

Who would have guessed that the piece was to close in a jogging
stanza containing a reflection on the fact that brutes are
speechless, with these two final lines -

"If speech be then the best of graces,
Doe it not in slumber smother!"

Campion yields a curious collection of beautiful first lines.

"Sleep, angry beauty, sleep and fear not me"

is far finer than anything that follows. So is there a single
gloom in this -

"Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow!"

And a single joy in this -

"Oh, what unhoped-for sweet supply!"

Another solitary line is one that by its splendour proves Campion
the author of Cherry Ripe -

"A thousand cherubim fly in her looks."

And yet "a thousand cherubim" is a line of a poem full of the
dullest kind of reasoning--curious matter for music--and of the
intricate knotting of what is a very simple thread of thought. It
was therefore no easy matter to choose something of Campion's for a
collection of the finest work. For an historical book of
representative poetry the question would be easy enough, for there
Campion should appear by his glorious lyric, Cherry Ripe, by one or
two poems of profounder imagination (however imperfect), and by a
madrigal written for the music (however the stanzas may flag in
their quibbling). But the work of choosing among his lyrics for
the sake of beauty shows too clearly the inequality, the brevity of