THE FLOWER OF THE MIND
Page: 26

Fair Annie, for Edom o' Gordon, for The Daemon Lover, for Edward,
Edward, and for the Scottish edition of The Battle of Otterbourne.


MRS. ANNE KILLIGREW


This most majestic ode--one of the few greatest of its kind--is a
model of noble rhythm and especially of cadence. To print it whole
would be impossible, and one of the very few excisions in this book
is made in the midst of it. Dryden, so adult and so far from
simplicity, bears himself like a child who, having said something
fine, caps it with something foolish. The suppressed part of the
ode is silly with a silliness which Dryden's age chose to dodder in
when it would. The deplorable "rattling bones" of the closing
section has a touch of it.


SONG, FROM ABDELAZAR


It is a futile thing--and the cause of a train of futilities--to
hail "style" as though it were a separable quality in literature,
and it is not in that illusion that the style of the opening of
Aphra Behn's resounding song is to be praised. But it IS the
style--implying the reckless and majestic heart--that first takes
the reader of these great verses.


HYMN (The spacious firmament on high)


Whether Addison wrote the whole of this or not,--and it seems that
the inspired passages are none of his--it is to me a poem of
genius, magical in spite of the limited diction.


ELEGY TO THE MEMORY OF AN UNFORTUNATE LADY


Also in spite of limited diction--the sign of thought closing in,
as it did fast close in during those years--are Pope's tenderness
and passion communicated in this beautiful elegy. It would not be
too much to say that all his passion, all his tenderness, and
certainly all his mystery, are in the few lines at the opening and
close. The Epistle of Eloisa is (artistically speaking) but a
counterfeit. Yet Pope's Elegy begins by stealing and translating
into the false elegance of altered taste that lovely and poetic
opening of Ben Jonson's -

"What beckoning ghost, besprent with April dew,
Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew?"

All the gravity, all the sweetness, one might fear, must be lost in
such a change as Pope makes -