THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 16

of The Rose is the almost squalid plea of all the poets, from
Ronsard to Herrick: "Time is short; they make the better bargain
who make haste to love." This thrifty business and essentially
cold impatience was--time out of mind--unknown to the truer love;
it is larger, illiberal, untender, and without all dignity. The
poets were wrong to give their verses the message of so sorry a
warning. There is only one thing that persuades you to forgive the
paltry plea of the poet that time is brief--and that is the
charming reflex glimpse it gives of her to whom the rose and the
verse were sent, and who had not thought that time was brief.


L'ALLEGRO


The sock represents the stage, in L'Allegro, for comedy, and the
buskin, in Il Penseroso, for tragedy. Milton seems to think the
comic drama in England needs no apology, but he hesitates at the
tragic. The poet of King Lear is named for his sweetness and his
wood-notes wild.


IL PENSEROSO


It is too late to protest against Milton's display of weak Italian.
Pensieroso is, of course, what he should have written.


LYCIDAS


Most of the allusions in Lycidas need no explaining to readers of
poetry. The geography is that of the western coasts from furthest
north to Cornwall. Deva is the Dee; "the great vision" means the
apparition of the Archangel, St. Michael, at St. Michael's Mount;
Namancos and Bayona face the mount from the continental coast;
Bellerus stands for Belerium, the Land's End.

Arethusa and Mincius--Sicilian and Italian streams--represent the
pastoral poetry of Theocritus and Virgil.


ON A PRAYER-BOOK


"Fair and flagrant things"--Crashaw's own phrase--might serve for a
brilliant and fantastic praise and protest in description of his
own verses. In the last century, despite the opinion of a few, and
despite the fact that Pope took possession of Crashaw's line -

"Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep,"

and for some time of the present century, the critics had a wintry
word to blame him with. They said of George Herbert, of Lovelace,
of Crashaw, and of other light hearts of the seventeenth century--