lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICALPOETRYon through all the episodes of an approved courtshipand duly celebrated wedding to marriage, for weddedlove is the theme of the poet's homely details andmetaphysical and religious musings. Patmore was aCatholic too, not drawn thitherward, as far as onemay judge from his poetry, by the imaginative charmof medievalism, but rather by the appeal to the intellectand to his own somewhat arrogant temperamentof the fine definiteness and subtle casuistry of Catholictheology and ethics, and the absoluteness of theChurch's authority. And to tell the truth, thereblends with Patmore's reverent devotion to womanand to the Church a touch, a suspicion of Sir WilloughbyPatterne. Woe to the individual woman or the greatChurchman who in any way falls short of his ideals!If in his diction and verse Patmore drew away fromTennysonian virtuosity it was in the direction ofWordsworthian simplicity, or even the colloquial easeof Leigh Hunt:Our witnesses the cook and groom,We signed the lease for seven years more.But as in Wordsworth's ballads so in Patmore's thisplainness is the ground from which in the Preludes andinterludes he rises to more metaphysical and imaginativeflights; and Patmore's claim to a place amonglyric poets rests less on The Angel in the House, despitesome exquisite writing, than on the irregular odes ofThe New Eros (1878), and not there most securely onthat favourite in anthologies, The Toys, nor the ambitious,prophetic, and political strains, but on suchgreat poems of love and religion as " With all my willbut much against my heart," Tristitia, "It was notlike your great and gracious ways," Eurydice, " Beautiful120