Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Volume 2
General
Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Volume 2
English poetry
he lay till the death of Charles. Like some other men of genius, he
beguiled his confinement by literary employment; and in 1649, he
published a book under the title of 'Lucasta,' consisting of odes,
sonnets, songs, and miscellaneous poems, most of which had been
previously composed. After the execution of the King, he was liberated;
but his funds were exhausted, his heart broken, and his constitution
probably injured. He gradually sunk; and Wood says that he became very
poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, 'went in ragged
clothes, and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places.' Alas for the
Adonis of sixteen, the beloved of Lucasta, and the envied of all! Some
have doubted these stories about his extreme poverty; and one of his
biographers asserts, that his daughter and sole heir (but who, pray, was
his wife and her mother?) married the son of Lord Chief-Justice Coke,
and brought to her husband the estates of her father at Kingsdown, in
Kent. Aubrey however, corroborates the statements of Wood; and, at all
events, Lovelace seems to have died, in 1658, in a wretched alley near
Shoe Lane.
There is not much to be said about his poetry. It may be compared to his
person--beautiful, but dressed in a stiff mode. We do not, in every
point, homologate the opinions of Prynne, as to the 'unloveliness of
love-locks;' but we do certainly look with a mixture of contempt and
pity on the self-imposed trammels of affectation in style and manner
which bound many of the poets of that period. The wits of Charles II.
were more disgustingly licentious; but their very carelessness saved
them from the conceits of their predecessors; and, while lowering the
tone of morality, they raised unwittingly the standard of taste. Some of
the songs of Lovelace, however, such as 'To Althea, from Prison,' are
exquisitely simple, as well as pure. Sir Egerton Brydges has found out
that Byron, in one of his be-praised paradoxical beauties, either
copied, or coincided with, our poet. In the 'Bride of Abydos' he says of
Zuleika--
'The mind, the _music_ breathing from her face.'
Lovelace had, long before, in the song of 'Orpheus Mourning for his
Wife,' employed the words--
'Oh, could you view the melody
Of every grace,
And _music of her face_,
You'd drop a tear;
Seeing more harmony
In her bright eye
Than now you hear.'
While many have praised, others have called this idea nonsense;
although, if we are permitted to speak of the harmony of the tones of a
cloud, why not of the harmony produced by the consenting lines of a
countenance, where every grace melts into another, and the various
features and expressions fluctuate into a fine whole? Whatever, whether
it be the beauty of the human face, or the quiet lustre of statuary, or
the mild glory of moonlight, gives the effects of music, and, like that
divine art,
'Pours on mortals a beautiful disdain,'
may surely become music's metaphor and poetic analogy.
SONG.
TO ALTHEA, FROM PRISON.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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