ABSTRACT
We are sorry to have to reiterate all these complaints in speaking of a volume of poetry of a far higher class than any that we have yet noticed, —The Strayed Reveller and other Poems, by A. It is evidently the work of a scholar, a gentleman, and a true poet. The short pieces which it contains shew care and thought, delicate finish, and an almost faultness severity of language and metre. ‘Mycerinus’ is a fragment worthy of Tennyson. There is a sonnet to Shakespeare, among other, well worth giving as an extract:— [Quotes ‘Shakespeare’ in its entirety] But the gem of the book is ‘The Forsaken Merman,’ one of the most painfully affecting pieces of true poetry which we have fallen on for a long time past. It is too long, we regret to say, to quote at length; but some extracts will, perhaps, suffice to tell the story, and give a fair notion of the whole, which, though it reminds us in subject of poor Hood’s exquisite poem of ‘Hero and Leander,’ and also of Tennyson’s ‘Merman and Mermaid,’ surpasses them, we think, in simple
naturalness, and a certain barbaric wildness of metre and fancy, thoroughly appropriate to the subject:— [Quotes ‘The Forsaken Merman’, ll. 1-107, 124-43] We are not ashamed to confess that this poem ‘upset’ us. We have seldom read deeper or healthier pathos in the English language. The half-human, simple affection of the husband, the wonderful churchyard scene, the confusion of feeling and arrangement in the former part of the poem, and the return to the simple and measured melody of resignation in the close, are all perfect. And consciously or unconsciously, probably the latter, there is in it ‘godly doctrine, and profitable for these days,’ when the great heresy of ‘Religion versus God’ is creeping on more subtilly than ever: by which we mean the setting up forms of worship and systems of soul-saving in opposition to the common instincts and affections of humanity, divine, because truly human; in opposition to common honesty and justice, mercy and righteousness; in short, in opposition to God. Any one who opens just now the leading religious periodicals on any side of the question, and has human eyes to see and a human heart to feel, will not be at a loss to understand our drift. The poet may have had no such intentional meaning; but no man can write true poetry, that is true nature, without striking on some eternal key in harmony with the deepest laws of the universe.
