lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THE NINETIESthe sixteenth, "In our old shipwrecked days"; theforty-fourth, "They say that Pity in Love's servicedwells"; the forty-sixth, "At last we parley"; theforty-seventh:We saw the swallows gathering in the sky,And in the osier-isle we heard them noise.We had not to look back on summer joys,Or forward to a summer of bright dye :But in the largeness of the evening earthOur spirits grew as we went side by side.The hour became her husband and my bride ;and to these add the forty-ninth and the great closinglines of the last of the series:Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soulWhen hot for certainties in this our life !—In tragic hints see here what evermoreMoves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,To throw that faint, thin line upon the shore.In the same large manner, grave of mood and ampleof rhythm, are composed some of the finest of hisPoems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth and A Readingof Earthy e.g. the best of the sonnets, the noble ifobscure Hymn to Colour, the closely akin Ballad ofPast Meridian (marred a little by the threefold repetitionof "night" in the last stanza) and the finelymooded and cadenced Melampus, the most adequateexpression of Meredith's almost more than Wordsworthiansympathy with the life of nature, even thelifeof the thingsThat glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck ;Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wingsFrom branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck ;127