lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THE NINETIES"was an equally hard fate that prevented Sir WilliamWatson from occupying some such post, for no poetof his day could have filled it more worthily. ThePrince's Quest (1880), indeed, a verse tale with somelyrics interspersed, after the manner of WilliamMorris, which might quite fittingly have been includedin The Earthly Paradise, gave promise of a differentkind, of a purer, less self-conscious poetry, morelyrical, less oratorical:Often when evening sobered all the air,No doubt but she would sit and marvel whereHe tarried, by the bounds of what strange sea ;And peradventure look at intervalsForth of the window of her palace walls,And watch the gloaming darken fount and tree;And think on twilight shores, with dreaming cavesFull of the groping of bewildered waves,Full of the murmur of their hollow halls.But with the Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature (1884)and Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems (1890)Watson emerged and was hailed as the poet of publicthemes and events, conscious, almost too sensitivelyconscious, of his audience and the tradition of highpoetry, anxious that every poem shall appear in thetenue correct for the occasion and the theme. As thesuccessor of Milton in Lycidas and the sonnets, ofDryden, of Gray, of Tennyson, of Arnold in hiscritical elegiac poems, Watson has done admirablework. There are echoes in his poems, especially ofArnold, and his thought is never strikingly original,but Lachrymce Musarum is a fine piece of musicaldeclamation. Nor could Johnson have accused Watsonas he did Dryden, and justly, of shameless subserviency,of being a eulogist "more delighted with the fertility133