The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [955]
Art yielded, think, Oh Lady, think again.
the whole of which would read better if it were
Ere thou, irrevocable, to this d—d doggrel
Art yielded, Lord, think! think! — ah think again.
Even with the great theme, Niagara, our poet fails in his obvious effort to work himself into a fit of inspiration. One of his poems has for title “A Hymn to Niagara” — but from beginning to end it is nothing more than a very silly “Hymn to Mr. Lord.” Instead of describing the fall (as well as any Mr. Lord could be supposed to describe it) he rants about what I feel here, and about what I did not feel there — till at last the figure of little Mr. Lord, in the shape of a great capital I gets so thoroughly in between the reader and the waterfall that not a particle of the latter is to be discovered. At one point the poet directs his soul to issue a proclamation as follows:
Proclaim, my soul, proclaim it to the sky!
And tell the stars, and tell the hills whose feet
Are in the depths of earth, their peaks in heaven,
And tell the Ocean’s old familiar face
Beheld by day and night, in calm and storm,
That they, nor aught beside in earth or heaven,
Like thee, tremendous torrent, have so filled
Its thoughts of beauty, and so awed with might!
The “Its” has reference to the soul of Mr. Lord, who thinks it necessary to issue a proclamation to the stars and the hills and the ocean’s old familiar face — lest the stars and the hills and the ocean’s old familiar face should chance to be unaware of the fact that it (the soul of Mr. Lord,) admitted the waterfall to be a fine thing — but whether the cataract for the compliment, or the stars for the information, are to be considered the party chiefly obliged — that, for the life of us, we cannot tell.
From the “first impression” of the cataract, he says:
At length my soul awaked — waked not again
To be o’erpressed, o’ermastered, and engulphed,
But of itself possessed, o’er all without
Felt conscious mastery!
And then
Retired within, and self-withdrawn, I stood
The two-fold centre and informing soul
Of one vast harmony of sights and sounds,
And from that deep abyss, that rock-built shrine,
Though mute my own frail voice, I poured a hymn
Of “praise and gratulation” like the noise
Of banded angels when they shout to wake
Empyreal echoes!
That so vast a personage as Mr. Lord should not be o’ermastered by the cataract, but feel “conscious mastery over all without” — and over all within, too — is certainly nothing more than reasonable and proper — but then he should have left the detail of these little facts to the cataract or to some other uninterested individual — even Cicero has been held to blame for a want of modesty — and although, to be sure, Cicero was not Mr. Lord, still Mr. Lord may be in danger of blame. He may have enemies (very little men!) who will pretend to deny that the “hymn of praise and gratulation” (if this is the hymn) bears at all points more than a partial resemblance to the “noise of banded angels when they shout to wake empyreal echoes.” Not that we intend to deny it — but they will: — they are very little people and they will.
We have said that the “remarkable” feature, or at least one of the “remarkable” features of this volume is its platitude — its flatness. Whenever the reader meets anything not decidedly flat, he may take it for granted at once, that it is stolen. When the poet speaks, for example, at page 148, of
Flowers, of young poets the first words —
who can fail to remember the line in the Merry Wives of Windsor.
Fairies use flowers for their charactery?
At page 10 he says:
Great oaks their heavenward lifted arms stretch forth
In suppliance!
The same thought will be found in “Pelham,” where the author is describing the dead tree beneath which is committed the murder. The grossest plagiarisms, indeed, abound. We would have no trouble, even, in pointing out a score from our most unimportant self. At page 27, Mr. Lord says:
They, albeit with inward pain
Who thought to sing thy dirge, must sing thy Pæan!
In a poem called