The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1088]
O’er the desolate sand desert of my heart and life undone?”
The ghost of the Great Frederic might, to be sure, quote at us, in his own Latin, his favorite adage, “De gustibus non est disputandus;” — but, when we take into consideration the moral designed, the weirdness of effect intended, and the historical adaptation of the fact alluded to, in the line italicized, (a fact of which it is by no means impossible that the critic is ignorant), we cannot refrain from expressing our conviction — and we here express it in the teeth of the whole horde of the Ambrosianians — that from the entire range of poetical literature there shall not, in a century, be produced a more sonorous — a more vigorous verse — a juster — a nobler — a more ideal — a more magnificent image — than this very image, in this very verse, which the most noted magazine of Europe has so especially and so contemptuously condemned.
“The Lady Geraldine” is, we think, the only poem of its author which is not deficient, considered as an artistical whole. Her constructive ability, as we have already suggested, is either not very remarkable, or has never been properly brought into play: — in truth, her genius is too impetuous for the minuter technicalities of that elaborate Art so needful in the building up of pyramids for immortality. This deficiency, then — if there be any such — is her chief weakness. Her other foibles, although some of them are, in fact, glaring, glare, nevertheless, to no very material ill purpose. There are none which she will not readily dismiss in her future works. She retains them now, perhaps, because unaware of their existence.
Her affectations are unquestionably many, and generally inexcusable. We may, perhaps, tolerate such words as “ble,” “chrysm,” “nympholeptic,” “oenomel,” and “chrysopras” — they have at least the merit either of distinct meaning, or of terse and sonorous expression; — but what can be well said in defence of the unnecessary nonsense of “‘ware” for “aware,” — of “bide,” for “abide” — of “ ‘gins,” for “begins” — of “ ‘las,” for “alas” — of “oftly,” “ofter,” and “oftest,” for “often,” “more often,” and “most often” — or of “erelong” in the sense of “long ago”? That there is authority for the mere words proves nothing; those who employed them in their day would not employ them if writing nom. Although we grant, too, that the poetess is very usually Homeric in her compounds, there is no intelligibility of construction, and therefore no force of meaning in “dew-pallid,” “pale-passioned,” and “silver-solemn.” Neither have we any partiality for “crave” or “supreme,” or “lament”; and while upon this topic, we may as well observe that there are few readers who do anything but laugh or stare, at such phrases as “L. E. L.’s Last Questio” — “The Cry of the Human” — “Leaning from my Human” — “Heaven assist the human” — “the full sense of your mortal” — “a grave for your divine” — “falling off from our created” — “he sends this gage for thy pity’s counting” — they could not press their futures on the present of her courtesy — or “could another fairer lack to thee, lack to thee?” There are few, at the same time, who do not feel disposed to weep outright, when they hear of such things as “Hope withdrawing her peradventure” — “spirits dealing in pathos of antithesis” — “angels in antagonism to God and his reflex beatitudes” — “songs of glories ruffling down doorways” — God’s possibles” — and “rules of Mandom.”
We have already said, however, that mere quaintness within reasonable limit, is not only not to be regarded as affectation, but has its proper artistic uses in aiding a fantastic effect. We quote, from the lines “To my dog Flush,” amplification:
Leap! thy broad tail waves a light!
Leap! thy slender feet are bright,
Canopied in fringes!
Leap! those tasselled ears of shine
Flicker strangely, fair and fine,
Down their golden inches!
And again — from the song of a tree-spirit, in the “Drama of Exile:”
The Divine impulsion cleaves
In dim movements to the leaves
Dropt and lifted, drops and lifted,
In the sun-light