The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [956]
Avaunt! to-night my heart is light — no dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a Pæan of old days.
At page 13, Mr. Lord says of certain flowers that
Ere beheld on Earth they gardened Heaven!
We print it as printed — note of admiration and all. In a poem called “Al Aaraaf” we have it thus:
———— A gemmy flower,
Inmate of highest stars, where erst it shamed
All other loveliness: — ‘twas dropped from Heaven
And fell on gardens of the unforgiven
In Trebizond.
At page 57, Mr. Lord says:
On the old and haunted mountain,
There in dreams I dared to climb,
Where the clear Castalian fountain
(Silver fountain) ever tinkling
All the green around it sprinkling
Makes perpetual rhyme —
To my dream enchanted, golden,
Came a vision of the olden
Long-forgotten time.
There are no doubt many of our friends who will remember the commencement of our “Haunted Palace.”
In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace
(Radiant palace) reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion
It stood there.
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow —
This — all this — was in the olden
Time, long ago.
At page 60, Mr. Lord says:
And the aged beldames napping,
Dreamed of gently rapping, rapping,
With a hammer gently tapping,
Tapping on an infant’s skull.
In “The Raven” we have it:
While I pondered nearly napping,
Suddenly there came a rapping,
As of some one gently tapping,
Tapping at my chamber door.
But it is folly to pursue these thefts. As to any property of our own, Mr. Lord is very cordially welcome to whatever use he can make of it. But others may not be so pacifically disposed, and the book before us might be very materially thinned and reduced in cost, by discarding from it all that belongs to Miss Barrett, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley, Proctor, Longfellow and Lowell — the very class of poets, by the way, whom Mr. William W. Lord, in his “New Castalia” the most especially affects to satirize and to contemn.
It has been rumored, we say, or rather it has been announced that Mr. Lord is a graduate or perhaps a Professor of Princeton College — but we have had much difficulty in believing anything of the kind. The pages before us are not only utterly devoid of that classicism of tone and manner — that better species of classicism which a liberal education never fails to impart — but they abound in the most outrageously vulgar violations of grammar — of prosody in its most extended sense.
Of versification, and all that appertains to it, Mr. Lord is ignorant in the extreme. We doubt if he can tell the difference between a dactyl and an anapæst. In the Heroic (Jambic) [[(Iambic)]] Pentameter he is continually introducing such verses as these:
A faint symphony to Heaven ascending —
No heart of love, O God, Infinite One —
Of a thought as weak an aspiration —
Who were the original priests of this —
Of grace, magnificence and power
O’erwhelm me; this darkness that shuts out the sky —
Alexandrines, in the same metre, are encountered at every step — but it is very clear from the points at which they are met, and at which the cœsura [[cæsura]] is placed, that Mr. Lord has no idea of employing them as Alexandrines: — They are merely excessive, that is to say, defective Pentameters. In a word, judging by his rhythm, we might suppose that the poet could neither see, hear, nor make use of his fingers. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible.
His most extraordinary sins, however, are in point of English. Here is his dedication, embodied in the very first page of the book: —
“To Professor Albert B. Dod, These Poems, the offspring of an Earnest (if ineffectual) Desire towards the True and Beautiful, which were hardly my own by Paternity, when they became his by Adoption, are inscribed, with all Reverence and Affection, by the Author.”
What is anybody to make of all this? What is the meaning of a desire toward? —