The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.
Then, with no throbs of fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
This is a poor thing, perhaps, to set beside the splendours of Lycidas; yet it has in it all that Johnson looked for, half puzzled, in that greater elegy, and looked for in vain. It tells us more of Levett than of Johnson; in Lycidas we are told more of Milton than of Edward King.
Johnson’s dislike of blank verse is easily explained; it is of a piece with the rest of his doctrine. Poetry, according to him, should express natural sentiments in language, dignified indeed, but not too remote from the speech of daily life. The use of new words, or of an unfamiliar order of words, destroys, as he remarks in his essay on Cowley, the intimacy and confidence of the relation between writer and reader. But if this be so, it may at once be objected that verse is at a disadvantage compared with prose. If all is to be on an easy, natural level of probability and familiarity, why not write in prose?
Johnson could not have answered this question quite so confidently as some other poets can. His own diction tends to the prosaic. Where it fails to be simple, it fails by dropping into the extravagances not of verse, but of prose. He wrote prose better than verse; and it may be suspected that he would have agreed with Sir Henry Savile, who, when asked his opinion of poetry, declared that he liked it best of all kinds of writing, next to prose.
