lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

LYRICAL POETRYlife and his saviours, less so in The Dead Cardinal ofWestminster, for an ode on a public theme should atleast affect a more impersonal note. But it is on hiselaborate odes that the high claim made for Thompsonmust stand or fall. The favourite among them, TheHound of Heaven, is not the most elaborate but is themost passionately conceived. Structurally it opensand closes magnificently, but it is doubtful if it wouldlose by the omission of the third stanza where theprogressive movement essential to a great ode falters;there is no clear advance in the thought; but to thisode one might allow in a measure the praise Johnsonbestowed on Gray's Elegy. It " abounds with imageswhich find a mirror in every mind, and with sentimentsto which every bosom returns an echo"—at least everyChristian bosom.The other odes are much more deliberately, more"metaphysically" conceived, and are among the mostgorgeously decorative in the language. Sister Songs,Orient Ode, From the Night of Forebeing, Ode to theSetting Sun, An Anthem of Earth—these get underweigh like "labouring vast Tellurian galleons," withstreamers flying and high carved poops, majestic ofmovement if at times answering a little uncertainlyto the helm. Thompson was well read and does nothesitate to adopt or adapt phrases and images andrhythms from Donne and Crashaw and Spenser andShelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and EdgarAllan Poe; but he took two poets as his models in theode—Crashaw for sentiment and style, " sewing withthe sack rather than with the hand," and CoventryPatmore in construction, affecting at times, but notvery convincingly, that poet's haughty temper. Eachode is, like Patmore's, the elaboration of a thought—146