precious volumes had been sent showed the slightest realisation of this "grey secret of the east"; and only the most perfunctory acknowledgments reached the author. So, with characteristic disdain, Patmore consigned all of the edition remaining to his own log fire. "Tired Memory" was one of the collection; so also was the brief and beautiful "Beata"; "Faint Yet Pursuing," an exquisite piece with what we now know as the true Patmorean flavour; and the resurgent loveliness of "Deliciæ Sapientiæ de Amore." With these were two or three ironic Jeremiads of political and philosophic nature, and "Pain"—which no other modern English poet, except perhaps Francis Thompson, could have written. The poet's brooding and scornful reflections as he watched the flames consume these first fruits of his richest thought scarcely tended to commute the pessimistic opinion he had already formed upon latter-day tastes and institutions.
The genuine significance of these Odes, both metrically and philosophically, can scarcely be overstated. To discerning readers, even the extracts already quoted must reveal a divine intensity, a subtlety of poetic feeling, beside which all of Patmore's early work seems tentative and imperfect. Their verse form (which the poet somewhat vaguely described as based upon catalexis) has successfully defied all but the broadest critical analysis, and its effect would seem to depend almost wholly upon some intuition, alike musical and emotional, of pause and rhythm.[1]
- ↑ "It is in the management of the pauses—in the recognition of the value of time-beats—that Coventry Patmore's supremacy in the Ode form lies. In his 'domestic verses,' he uses rhyme in places where Tennyson would not have dreamed of it—recklessly, audaciously, but in his highest moods . . . he treats rhyme as an echo." Maurice Francis Egan: "Ode Structure of Coventry Patmore," in Studies in Literature.
