The Columbia History of British Poetry (128 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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of Heaven" the spiritual terror with which the believer reacts to God's pursuit of his soul. Among the major influences on the poem are St. Augustine's
Confessions
, which depicts the flight from God as a central trope, and the poems of Richard Crashaw, among other seventeenth-century Metaphysical poets. Thompson's startling conceitinvolving the pursuing hound as metaphor for Godsuggests the speaker's irrational flight from the very source of his salvation:
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
    I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
    Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
In a parenthetic aside the speaker reveals his paradoxical spiritual state: "(For, though I knew His love Who followed, / Yet was I sore adread / Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside)." This "tremendous Lover" is too overwhelming for the speaker's spiritual frailty. His flight from divinity becomes a quest for a less-demanding reality, the constant shifts in meter, from the five iambic stresses to three, suggesting the speaker's spiritual turmoil. Only when he is overtaken by the Hound does he acknowledge that he is "of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot." Then Heaven's voice is heard: "Rise, clasp My hand, and come." But the hand is not grasped by the speaker, whose gloom implies doubt of achieving salvation. The impatient, loving voice concludes the poem but not without final ironies: ''Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, / I am He Whom thou seekest! / Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." The poet, critic, and Catholic convert Coventry Patmore has written that, by such a poem as "The Hound of Heaven," Thompson placed himself "in the front rank of the [Catholic] movement, which, if it be not checked as in the history of the world it has once or twice been checked before . . . , must end in creating a 'new heaven and a new earth.'"
The movement also touched two poets whom Thompson met at a meeting of the Rhymers' Club, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowsonboth converts in 1891whose verse, in part, also reflects the desire for a new heaven and earth. To suggest his ecclesiastical preoccupations, Johnson gave Latin titles to a number of his poems. "Te Martyrdum Candidatus," a rousing poem on the Church Militant, depicts "the fair chivalry," the "companions of Christ! / White Horsemen, who ride on
 
Page 517
white horses, the Knights of God!" And characteristic of Catholic Revival verse, the poem's focus is on the ritual of crucifixion: "They saw with their eyes the Eyes of the Crucified," who inspires the White Horsemen"with Christ their Captain''to endure martyrdom and achieve triumph within the communion of saints. Like Hopkins, who perceives nature as a mirror of divinity (the Romantic inheritance that informs Tractarian verse), Johnson in "Pax Christi" celebrates the paradox of the world that "falls," for the "glory of the rose" is a manifestation of divine beauty: "I / Know, that from mortal to immortal goes Beauty: in triumph can the whole world die."
Two of Johnson's best-known poems express his spiritual despair and yearning for deliverance: "Mystic and Cavalier" ("Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come, / To make with you mine home") and "The Dark Angel," which allegorizes his struggle with forbidden desire (critics intimate Johnson's homoeroticism): "Dark Angel, with thine aching lust / To rid the world of penitence." The "dark Paraclete" (a transformation of the Holy Spirit as advocate into a destructive demon) turns the "gracious Muses" to Furies: "And all the things of beauty burn / With flames of evil ecstasy." Resistance to such tempting evil ("I fight thee, in the Holy Name!") concludes the poem:
Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
Divine, to the Divinity
.
Ernest Dowson, who converted at Johnson's urging, gradually drifted from the Church as his family life deteriorated (both parents committed suicide in 1894). In his quest for solace in a fallen world he envisions the nuns, in "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration," as isolated "behind high convent walls":
They heed not time; their nights and days they make
    Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake;
    Meekness and vigilance and chastity.
The world outside is "wild and passionate; / Man's weary laughter and his sick despair / Entreat at their impenetrable gate," but "Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night," for "beside the altar, there, is rest." The turmoil of Dowson's life, complicated by alcoholism, depression, and
 
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the need for spiritual retreat, provides the subtext for this conventional vision of the nuns' existence.
In "Extreme Unction," dedicated to Lionel Johnson, Dowson depicts the ritual of the "atoning oil" and its ''renewal of lost innocence." The "Vials of mercy! Sacring oil!" provide confirmation of hope as death nears, for as the "walls of flesh grow weak. . . . / Through mist and darkness, light will break, / And each anointed sense will see." Yet in "Song of the XIXth Century" (probably written after his parents' death but unpublished in his lifetime) Dowson expresses the doubt common among Victorians: "O give us faith/ In God, Man, anything to rise and break / The mists of doubt."
Aside from the publication of
Silverpoints
(1893)a volume noted for its Decadent motifs and "imitations" of French Symbolist versethe convert John Gray, who met Johnson and Dowson at meetings of the Rhymers' Club, also wrote religious poems in the 1890s, most notably those in
Spiritual Poems
(1896). In poems to the Blessed Virgin, St. Thomas Aquinas, and St. John of the Cross, Gray (the homoerotic poet, soon-to-be chaste priest) concludes with "Paul Verlaine" (Gray had imitated Verlaine' "Parsifal" in
Silverpoints
). The recently deceased Symbolist/Decadent French poet had turned to the Catholicism of his youth when he wrote religious verse while imprisoned for shooting Arthur Rimbaud during a turbulent homosexual relationship. Gray's elegy for Verlaine is in effect a prayer (inspired by the phrase "Agnus Dei""Lamb of God"intoned during the Mass), in which the cursed poet is the symbolic parallel of Christmartyred outcast and sacrificial lamb: "God's Lamb, thou Saviour of us / God's Lamb, who tell'st us passing to our pen; / God's Lamb, have pity of us that we are but men."
Versions of Pastoral Pessimism
Much melancholy poetry in the 1890s expressed a yearning for a past age (historical or mythical) superior to the industrialized nineteenth century, or lamented the brevity of life (the resulting anguish associated with the loss of religious faith or the death of a loved one). Some poets, like Dowson, turned to Old French forms of verse, such as the villanelle (originally, a pastoral genre), in order to suggest a less complex world. The classical scholar A. E. Housman drew inspiration from the ancient form of the pastoral elegy and from the traditional
 
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English ballad (in Housman, often consisting of a stanza of two rhyming couplets). In
A Shropshire Lad
(1896), his only volume of verse published in the nineties, Housman depicts what B. J. Leggett, in
Housman's Land of Lost Content
, has called the "uncomplicated country life, the longing for a return to the simple in the face of the increasing complexity of the problems of life and death." The elegiac tone of many of the poems, half of which have contemporary pastoral settings and half of which are set in London, reveals Housman's acute sense of transient existence, although often accompanied by the poet's ironic voice.
In "To an Athlete Dying Young" (no. XIX) Housman expresses his recurrent theme that an early death in one's primethat moment of victory: "The Time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market-place"may be preferable to the loss of one's powers and the eclipse of one's achievement ("Eyes the shady night has shut / Cannot see the record cut"):
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
As a major theme in the volumethe illusion of permanence in a world subject to changethe enduring image of the athlete dying young provides an ironic contrast to the withering laurel. A variation of this theme occurs in poem XVI (untitled), in which the permanence of death and the brief span of life are the poem's entire burden. Here, the nettle's symbolic dance of life"It nods and curtseys and recovers / When the wind blows above"occurs on the "graves of lovers / That hanged themselves for love." In the following stanza the man in the grave "does not move," in contrast to the recovering nettle. Nevertheless, the "lover of the grave'' has achieved a state of permanent deliverance from the ravages of time.
In "Bredon Hill" (no. XXI) the progression of the seasons from summer to winter parallels the progression of youthful love to early death. When the lovers, lying on Bredon Hill, ignore the church bells calling them to prayer, the speaker interprets the ringing bells as an expression of their love:
I would turn and answer
    Among the springing thyme,

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