lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

ARNOLD AND PRE-RAPHAELITE GROUPWe are the music-makersAnd we are the dreamers of dream9,Wandering by lone sea-breakers,And sitting by desolate streams,the theme being the shaping and creative effect inhistory of the poet's dreams. The other finds a freshand felicitous image to express the old theme of theearly, unforgotten love:I made another garden, yea,For my new love ;I left the dead rose where it lay,And set the new above.Why did the summer not begin ?Why did my heart not haste ?My old love came and walked therein,And laid the garden waste.But it would be idle to attempt a survey of all thelesser poets who had learned a new fashion. It is themisfortune of every fresh movement in art to begetnumerous too facile, if not always infelicitous, echoesand variations. But one must not class among suchechoes the work of a poet whose career ran parallelwith rather than became a part of the Pre-Raphaeliticstream. Coventry Patmore chose love as the themeof his poetry and object of his devotion, and he wasan artist taking a " lively pleasure in the perfection ofverbal expression for its own sake." But the love ofwhich he sings is not quite the troubled, heavy passionof Rossetti nor even the love, simpler but untroubledby thoughts of law and duty, of William Morris. TheAngel in the House (1863) is a strangely Victorian settingand rendering of the theme set forth in the VitaNuova, but the love here is not frustrated but led119