The golden treasury

Front matter

I : THE GOLDEN TREASURY r-':A.L.GRAV

15 .-n Book / O

Copyright ]^^,

Introduction

The Golden Treasury has for half a century been the accepted collection of the best English verse, for the period it covers, from the age of Ehzabeth to about 1830, The selections were made by a poet, Francis Turner Palgrave, with the advice of one of the greatest modern poets, Alfred Tennyson.^

What lyric poetry is, and what it means to a man of poetic appreciation, can best be seen by reading Palgrave's own Preface (p. 29). As we turn over the leaves of the book, we see that the subjects of poetry are as varied as life itself; we find poems on war and patriotism, on birth and death, on flowers, trees, and streams, on the sea and the sky; poems on friendship and on love in all degrees, — youthful romance, lovers parted or forsaken, love in marriage and in old age; poems of compliment, of humor, of regret, of aspiration. It is not the subject that makes the poem, but what the poet sees in it, beyond the vision of the rest of us. Shakespeare's banished duke found

"Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything;"

and Wordsworth said

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

This power of seeing beyond the superficial fact to some more important and significant truth is what we mean by the poetic imagination. By this power of imagination the poet summons up whatever comparisons will throw the essential quality of

1 See introduction by Edward Hutton to the Booklovers' Library edition of The Golden Treasury.

the fact out into the Hght. The song of an unseen skylark, for instance, reminds Shelley (p. 393) of all manner of pure and bright loveliness from a hidden source, — moonlight from behind a cloud, hymns of an unknown poet, love songs of a maiden in a palace tower, a glow-worm hidden in the grass, or a rose bud in its own leaves, —

"all that ever was Joyous and clear and fresh," —

and those of us who have never even heard a skylark, gain an appreciation of the beauty of its song far above any matter-offact description. Still greater is the poet's power of seeing, imaginatively, into the hearts of commonplace people, and finding their hidden motives and ideals. We may think of sailors as a rather ordinary set of men; but Campbell's ringing verses (p. 341)

"Ye mariners of England That guard our native seas!"

rouse us to a different idea of them, — an idea justified by naval history.

Nothing is more fatal to poetry than to have these imaginings false; once the poet has proclaimed them, they must ring true, — true at least to some aspects of the subject, at some time, under the right circumstances; if not the whole truth, j^et true as far as they go. And this truth must, for poetry, be of a kind that stirs our feelings; that moves us to delight, laughter, sympathy, horror, anger, patriotism, reverence. Here, again, the emotion must be genuine; a pretended emotion trumped up for its own sake is sentimentality. The reader who thinks poetry is sentimental or "slushy" should turn to Suckling's ''Encouragement to a Lover" (p. 162) or Cunningham's "A wet sheet and a flowing sea" (p. 340) or Mickle's "The Sailor's Wife" (p. 269). The sailor's wife is far from sentimental when she exclaims

"There's twa fat hens upo' the coop Been fed this month and mair; Mak' haste and thraw their necks about That Colin weel may fare," — she's undoubtedly glad to get Colin home again, and is showing it in a very natural way.

There are various ways in which the power of seeing beyond the fact is expressed in the poet's style. Figures of speech, for instance, must not be thought of as ornaments, added to the poem, but as ways of making more clear or more intense, by suggested comparisons, the poet's real meaning. For instance, when Marvel, in his "Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda" (p. 193), tells us that God

" — hangs in shades the orange bright Like golden lamps in a green night,"

or when Wordsworth says of Milton (p. 350)

" Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart,"

we feel more vividly the beauty of the orange-grove and the loftiness of Milton's spirit. Shakespeare's sonnets are full of such comparisons, or similes. His imagination often seized on a hkeness which could be carried out in detail, as in these lines (p. 63) :

"Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend."

Here we get not merely the apt comparison of the passage of time with waves following one after another and disappearing, but also the quick pen-picture of the hurry of waves crowding each other up the beach, — a picture that intensifies the idea of the rapid passing of the minutes.

When one thing is not merely compared to another, but spoken of as if it were that other, we have the figure known as metaphor. This, if the meaning is not obscure, is a more forcible figure than simile, as it enables the poet to put his idea in a condensed, almost telegraphic, form. When Keats says (d. 333)

"When I behold upon the night's starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance And think that I may never Uve to trace Their shadows,"

we pass over almost without notice the suggestion of the night being a real creature with a "face, " and seize upon the wonderful thought of the clouds on a starry night being for Keats so full of romantic visions, of which his poems were merely shadows, that he would never be able to write them all.

A comparison, whether metaphor or simile, may run on to some length, as in Waller's "Go, lovely Rose" (p. 150) or Drummond's "Of this fair volume which we World do name" (p. 99). In such cases, the poet may greatly strengthen his effect, by the aptness with which the two ideas continue to parallel each other; there is danger, however, that we may think more of his cleverness and ingenuity than the importance of his thought.

Another frequently used figure is pcrso7iificaHon, by which objects of nature, or mere abstractions of qualities, are spoken of as if they had life and personality. The first line in the book personifies Spring, as "the year's pleasant king." Shakespeare speaks of "that churl, Death," and "Captive Good attending Captain 111"; Milton, of "Laughter, holding both his sides." It is fatally easy to slip into the habit of merely spelling abstract nouns with capitals, without imagining them transformed into persons at all; "printer's-devil personification," as it has been called. Gray is sometimes guilty of this, as in the lines (p. 275) :

"Where grateful Science still adores Her Henry's holy shade."

In true personification, the thing personified really appears to Hve. Shelley's "Night" (p. 320) is besought to

"Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought : Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day,"

and later we hear of his "brother Death," and his "sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed."

Another poetic device, not exactly a figure of speech, but allied to them, is the pretty pretense known as the pastoral. In poems of this kind, everyone is thought of as a shc]:)her(l, in a sort of golden age of simplicity; with nothing to do but sit in the shade watching the sheep, playing on rustic instruments of music, singing songs, or making love. This convention goes back to ancient Greek times, when people who had become tired of artificial city hfe turned with delight to the fresh shepherd poems of Theocritus, from the mountains of Sicily. The modern pastoral is usually sheer artifice: we don't need to be told that Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd (p. 38) is no Enghsh sheep-tender, when he ofifers his love

"Fair linM slippers for the cold With buckles of the purest gold,"

as well as silver dishes on an ivory table. Milton (p. 120) speaks of his dead friend as Lycidas, a shepherd, when we very well know his real name was Edward King, and he was a college student preparing for the ministry. Artificial as the pastoral seems at first, we come to recognize it as a graceful and often a beautiful device, specially fit for somewhat formal poems of compliment, of regret, or of bereavement.

The pastoral is sometimes hard to distinguish from the poem really descriptive of country life; the two shade into each other.

A further characteristic of poetic thought is the ability of poets to put some universal human observation or ideal into such a striking phrase as to satisfy the race that it is the one best and permanent expression for that thought. So we get our so-called "quotations," the lines everybody knows, without perhaps knowing where they come from; such as

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen." {Gray, p. 259) "I could not love Thee, dear, so much

Loved I not honour more." {Lovelace, p. 146)

" We carved not a line and we raised not a stone,

But we left him alone with his glory." {Wolfe, p. 357)

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." {Keats, p. 473)

— "old, unhappy far-off things

And battles long ago." {Wordsworth, p. 412)

What has been said so far applies, in the main, to all poetry. A lyric poem is distinguished from all other kinds by being short, and by expressing not a story (as does an epic or a ballad) nor a conflict of different persons' wills (as does a drama), but a single idea, mood, or feeling of the poet himself. It is also distinguished (as the title of the book suggests) by being singable. Many lyrics, indeed, in this collection were written originally for tunes; and a great age of lyric verse will always be a musicloving age. Such was the age of Ehzabeth and the half-century following; an age when everybody sang or played some instrument. Shakespeare's characters are always singing; some of his plays, like Twelfth Night, are almost musical comedy. The original music of many of these songs from plays, and others included in this volume, has been traced, and can be found in Elson's Shakespeare in Music; and some of them have been set to music by later composers as many as a score of times. Many popular songs will be found among the later poems; songs hke "Rule Britannia" (p. 213), "Sally in our Alley" (p. 229), "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon" (p. 237), "I arise from dreams of Thee" (p. 302). Many others were clearly written with a tune in mind. Burns's favorite method of composing was to select a popular Scotch air, and then write words to fit. Even lyrics which do not seem to have a tune in them are written for the ear, not for the eye; Scott used to compose while riding horseback; Tennyson and Wordsworth would half recite, half chant their poems while walking. So to get the real spirit of these poems, we must either sing them or read them aloud rhythmically.

The pleasure to be gained from poetry is more than doubled if one understands the technique of versification: just as the pleasure of watching a game of ball depends on knowing the rules of the game. The student is therefore urged to master the following simple rules of poetic technique.

The fundamental feature of verse, as of music, is rhythm. Rhythm is an arrangement of a series of sounds, or objects, or figures, at regular intervals, in a repeating pattern. In studying design, pupils early learn the use of rhythm in oriental rugborders or in wall-paper or embroidery. In music, rhythm appears in the "time," or the way the notes are marked off into measures, each with its proper number of full or half or quarter notes. So in architecture, a cathedral is marked off by a regular series of pillars and arches, each section being equivalent to each other; the carvings, also, are arranged in series, rhythmically. This is why Ruskin could call architecture "frozen music."

In poetry, the rhythm depends on the way the voice is thrown on certain syllables,^ marking out the ones that, as it were, "carry the tune," and slighting the others. The various rhythms are classified (1) by the number of strong accents or stresses in the line, (2) by the way each strong syllable is hnked with one or more light ones or pauses (like rests, in music) to make up a "foot," as we call the repeating group of syllables.

To take some of the familiar poems of The Golden Treasury, we find:

Two-stress (dimeter)

He is gone on the mountain.

He is lost to the forest, Like a summer-dried fountain, When our need was the sorest.

Three-stress (trimeter) ('^'°"' P' ^^°^

John Anderson, my jo, John When we were first acquent Your locks were like the raven, Your bonnie brow was brent.

Four-stress (tetrameter) ^^'''''''' ^' ^^^^

How sleep the brave, who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest!

(Collins, p. 220)

* Pupils who have studied Latin poetry should not confuse this stress, or natural emphasis, with the vowel-quantity which determines the rules of Latin verse. There is "quantity" in English verse, which occasionally is important; but it is rather obscure and will be passed over as not essential in elementary study.

Five-stress (pentameter)

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

Six-stress (hexameter)

And bid the weltering waves their oozy channels keep.

(Milton, p. 107) Seven-stress (heptameter)

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay;

Turning to the arrangement of strong (or stressed) and light syllables within the line, we find in most of the foregoing examples that the syllable that carries the tune is preceded by a light one, this arrangement being repeated enough times to make up the line. If we indicate this by marking the light syllables with a cross, X, and cutting the pairs of syllables apart by upright bars, so as to show how the pattern repeats, we shall have

The cur | few tolls | the knell | of part 1 ing day,

This movement (x ') is called iambic; it is the commonest rhythm in English verse. When the accent is reversed, so that the light syllable follows the strong one (' x) it is called trochaic; as.

Art thou I poor, yet | hast thou | golden | slumbers?

(Dekker, p. 96)

Sometimes two light syllables, instead of one, are associated with a strong one. When the light ones come first (xx '), we have anapaestic movement:

When repos 1 ing that night 1 on my pal 1 let of straw By the wolf- | scaring fag | got that guard | ed the slain,

(Campbell, p. 437)

When two light syllables follow the strong one (' xx), the verse is dactylic:

Fast they come, | fast they come;

'X X 'X

See how they | gather!

These are the chief rhythms of Enghsh verse; but the poets seldom or never carry them out in a purely mechanical fashion, any more than a musician tries to play exactly like a pianola. For the sake of throwing emphasis on an important word, or of changing the time, for the moment, to suit the thought, or of making a significant pause at the end or the middle of a hne, or merely of lightness and variety of touch, the poet may do one of three things :

(1) Add or insert an extra light syllable:

X X' XX' XX' X X'X

In the down | hill of life [ when I find | I'm declin | ing,

(Collins, p. 288)

X ' X ' X 'XX '

(Marvel, p. 179)

(2) Omit a light syllable or more, leaving pauses or "rests" to fill out the meter:

'X 'X 'X 'X

Souls of I Poets I dead and | gone, o

'X'X X 'X

What E I lysium | have ye | known, o

'X 'X 'X'X

Happy, I field or | mossy | cavern Choicer | than the | Mermaid 1 Tavern?

X' X' X' X'X' X'

The fields | o breathe | o sweet, the dais | ies kiss | our feet,

X'X'X 'X ' X' X'

o Young I o lov I ers meet, | old wives | a-sun | ning sit.

X'X' X ' X '

O what 1 can ail | thee, knight- [ at-arms,

X ' X ' X'X'

Alone I and pale | ly loit | ering?

X ' X'X ' X '

The sedge | has with | er'd from | the lake

X ' X ' X '

And no | o birds | o sing.

(3) Throw the accent in an unexpected place, as by introducing a trochaic foot into an iambic Hne. This is most commonly done after a pause, as at the beginning of a new line, or a new thought:

' X X ' X 'X '

Pack, clouds, | away, | and wel | come day.

(Hey wood, p. 89)

X ' X'X' X ' 'XX'

Then blooms | o each | o thing, | then maids | dance in | a ring.

Aside from these easily recognized variations of rhythm, English words vary so much in their accent that we have not a sharp division into light and strong syllables, but a series of many gradations, from almost no sound at all, to a heavy stress. Sometimes the stress will be sharp and clear cut, as in

" Waken, lords and ladies gay, On the mountain dawns the day; All the jolly chase is here With hawk and horse and hunting spear."

Sometimes the stress is so evenly placed as to leave in doubt whether one syllable is heavier than another. This gives an even, slow movement, full of dignity; as in Sidney's hne (p. 78);

"With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the skies!"

Sometimes one accent seems to be demanded by the verse, another by the sense, with the claims so evenly divided that the accent is said to "hover" between the two. Of the following lines, the first begins with an accent clearly reversed: the second, with hovering accent.

" Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill."

(Wo7-dsworth, p. 404)

These, and other variations, form to the trained ear one of the chief delights of versification. The poet, however, must not introduce so many of them as to leave any doubt as to what is the fundamental rhythm from which he is varying. And the variations must not be due to carelessness or lack of skill, but must be such as to strengthen the beauty and effectiveness of the verse.

The largest unit of verse-form is the stanza, a group of lines bound together by some systematic scheme, and usually by the rime. The simplest group, two equal lines riming, is called a couplet. Marvell's " Song of the Emigrants in Bermuda" (p. 193) is written in couplets. Lines grouped in threes are called triplets or tercets. They may be unrimed, or rimed; of equal or unequal length; as in the following:

"I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful schooldays; All, ail are gone, the old familiar faces."

" Whenas in silks my Julia goes Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows That liquefaction of her clothes."

(Herrick, p. 156) " Whoe'er she be, That not impossible She That shall command my heart and me — "

{Crashaw, p. 137)

A group of four lines makes a quatrain; the most frequent arrangement being the ''ballad meter," or "common meter" of the hymn-books, with four feet in the first and third lines (which may rime) and three feet in the second and fourth (which must rime). Examples are Herrick's "Gather ye Rosebuds" (p. 145), and Campbell's "Lord Ulhn's Daughter" (p. 310). There are many other arrangements, both as to length of line and rime. When we get more than four Hues in the stanza, there are various combinations in frequent use, and an almost countless number that have been tried by individual poets; many of them are analyzed in standard books on versification. The student will find much interest in the ingenuity of poets in inventing new stanza forms, and the unexpected beauties resulting. The more complex the stanza is, the more it depends on rime to bind the parts together, and to make clear the structure.

Rime is likeness of sound in words, a likeness which must include the last accented vowel and all of the word that follows it. It is the sound, not the spelling, that counts; so we find Wordsworth (p. 416) riming cloud — crowd, hills — daffodils, trees — breeze. If the final syllable is not accented, the rime must go back to the last one that is accented. Byron (p. 301) rimes daughters — waters, causing — pausing, gleaming — dreaming; and Hood (p. 373) rimes unfortunate — importunate, tenderly — slenderly. But the likeness in sound must not go further back than the last accented vowel, or we have not rime, but identity — even if the speHing differs. Thus sec is not a good rime for sea. In studying verse, it is convenient to indicate lines that rime by the same letter, as a, b, or c, and lines that do not rime, by x. Thus the rime scheme of Wordsworth's " Daffodils " (p. 416) would be described as ababcc; the rime scheme of Campbell's " Hohenlinden " (p. 351) as aaax.

Two of the more complex forms of verse are so important in English poetry, and so well represented in this collection, as to need special note. These are the sonnet and the ode.

The sonnet always has just fourteen lines, of the same length and rhythm, five iambic feet. The rime scheme varies, according to whether the poet is following strictly the model of the Italian sonnet (from which ours was originally taken) or the freer form used by Shakespeare and the writers of his time. The Italian sonnet divides the fourteen lines into two groups, the octave (eight lines) and the sestet (six Hnes). The octave has only two rimes, arranged abbaabba, the sestet may have two or three, arranged in any of a variety of waj's, the preferred schemes being cdecde, cdcdcd, cdedce, and cddcee. The thought should be such that while there is but one central idea, it is presented in one light in the octave, in another in the sestet. This is a difficult, rather formal verse; but fine and dignified, when well handled. Very noble examples are Milton's sonnet " On his Blindness" (p. 130), and Wordsworth's on Milton (p. 350).

The Shakespearian sonnet is divided into three quatrains and a couplet. The quatrains take up an idea or a question and present it in several different lights, — perhaps by a succession of different comparisons; the couplet binds the whole poem into a unit by phrasing aptly the poet's conclusion, explanation, or fundamental thought. One of the best of this type is Shakespeare's

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eye," (p. 45).

The ode is a long form of poem, taken over from the Greek poets, especially Pindar. Originally, the Greek odes, which were chanted or sung by a chorus, to the accompaniment of music and stately dancing, were divided into three sections. The first two (called strophe and antistrophe) had to be ahke in meter, as the singers moved to one side during the strophe, and back during the antistrophe. They stood still during the third section, or epode, whi(^h accordingly did not have to match the others in meter. In English odes, the three divisions are sometimes called turn, counter-turn, and stand. They may be seen in Gray's "The Progress of Poetry" (p. 238), w^here the first strophe or turn begins

"Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake,"

the first antistrophe or counter-turn,

"Oh Sovereign of the willing soul! "

and the first epode or stand,

"Thee the voice, the dance obey,"

after which comes the second strophe,

"Man's feeble race what ills await! "

Most English odes, however, do not follow this pattern, the name being loosely applied to any long poem, with no fixed length of line or stanza and no regularity to the rime except that every line finds an answering rime somewhere. It is a form especially suited to recitation on public occasions, and to the expression of important and dignified thought.

So much for the mechanics of verse. The real art of poetry consists in filling these forms with words which are beautiful in themselves and which by their sound suggest the poet's thought. This art of selecting words for their sound is known as tone-color. Sometimes tone-color lies in the repetition of a single letter at the beginning of the stressed syllables, as the b in the lines

"Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon How can ye bloom sae fair! "

This is known as alliteration. It used to be the chief element of English verse, before rime became popular; but now poets use it only sparingly; when it is too prominent, it seems tricky and artificial. A more subtle beauty comes from hiding the repeated letter in the middle of the word, Hke the I and the d in the following lines :

" By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals."

(Marlowe, p. 38)

These lines are particularly musical because the vowels and consonants are all such as flow into each other without jarring. A careful writer will avoid harsh letters, hke s; as Tennyson said, he will "kick the geese out of the boat; " but a great master of verse can make even a line full of s's beautiful, like Shakespeare's

" When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past."

The fitting of sound to meaning can be seen very plainly in Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" (p. 199), where the bard's songs, now of victory and feasting, now of love, now of vengeance, are imitated in the verse. In Cowper's "Loss of the Royal George" (p. 226) we feel the solemn, bell-like echo of the o and the a in

"Toll for the Brave, The brave that are no more! "

And we feel the whirling of the autumn wind, and the rattle of dry leaves, in Keats's lines (p. 463):

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE 19

"Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow and black and pale and hectic red, Pestilence stricken multitudes."

The same art is heard in Milton's

"I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide watered shore.

Swinging slow with sullen roar." (p. 189).

And more subtly, in Shakespeare's

"Beauty making beautiful old rhyme.

In praise of ladies dead."

But the appreciation of the tone-color is not a thing that can be learned in a moment; it grows with our knowledge of good poetry, and is one of the rewards of continued study.

FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE

1824-1897

Palgrave's boyhood was such as to develop and refine in him a natural taste for the finer things of literature, which was to lead to The Golden Treasury. His father, for whom he was named, was a historical scholar of repute, who had been a friend of Southey, Scott, and Macaulay. His mother, when he came home from school, used to read to him from Dante, or the Faerie Queen, when he was not acting out with his nearest brother scenes from Homer. We hear of the two boys beginning Caesar at seven, and ''to their great delight " Homer and Horace at eleven, besides being interested in models and inventions. The family were also deeply religious. His brother, Gifford, later became a Jesuit missionary and a great traveler in unknown and dangerous parts of the East.

As a student at Oxford, Palgrave devoted his spare time to literature and art, filling his rooms with prints of famous works by Turner, Michael Angelo, and Correggio. He was known also for his gift of attracting about him many friends of similar tastes. He took his degree in 1847, with a "first" in Classics, having dropped out of college for a year (1846) to serve as private secretary to Gladstone.

After a year as Fellow of Exeter College, he entered on what was t^be his profession for thirty-five years, as an official in the Edi^ation Office of the Privy Council, first as Examiner, later as Assistant Secretary; acting for a few years as Vice Principal of a trainiiTg sclrool for teachers. Several times his friends urged him to become a candidate for the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. Once he had come forward for the post, but withdrew his name in favor of his friend the well known scholar, J. C. Shairp. It is pleasant to know that when the chair again became vacant in 1885, another friend, Matthew Arnold, refused to present himself so that the Professorship might go to Palgrave. He held it for twelve years, until his death in 1897.

Besides Gladstone, Shairp, and Arnold, Palgrave knew many of the notable men of his age, being drawn to them by a common appreciation of the finest things in art and literature. He was a friend of Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, the painter Holman Hunt, the sculptor Woolner. His friendship with Tennyson, lasting for forty-three years, he spoke of as "one of the chief est influences in his life." In 1859, when he was thirty-five and Tennyson fifty-one, Palgrave went on a walking-trip with Tennyson, Woolner, and others through Cornwall, the "King Arthur Country," which Tennyson had just been writing about in the Idylls of the King. On this romantic trip, plans were made for The Golden Treasury, which Palgrave completed within the next year and a half. He received much help and encouragement from Tennyson, who read over with him the entire collection, making valuable suggestions.