Yet it provides an ideally perfect vehicle for the intermittent stress and reticence, the amazing passional surge, the mystic and often scholastic reasoning of the poems themselves. Always fascinating and usually dangerous has it proved as a model to younger poets; but at its best and in the master's hand, there is an impetuous freshness about this ode form which is the next thing to a new-blown wind flower. And this spontaneity was no mere illusion. Patmore spent months, even years, in maturing the matter of his greatest odes, but their actual form was often the work of two or three hours.
"I have hit upon the finest metre that ever was invented, and on the finest mine of wholly unworked material that ever fell to the lot of an English poet," Coventry Patmore wrote exultantly when the Unknown Eros was in preparation. This mine was mystic Catholic theology, in particular the nuptial relations of the soul to its God, and in general that essential and passionate humanity which is at the core of nearly every doctrine of the Church. But here was a task to stagger Orpheus himself had Orpheus turned Christian! For how translate the secrets of the saints to a gaping multitude? How teach men what love meant, and what the Word made Flesh implied? How draw back the veil of mystery and symbol and allegory without breaking in upon the "Divine Silence"? In an agony of concentration, in prayer and fasting, the poet toiled on, still falling short of that infinite "beauty and freedom" which the work demanded, were it to be done at all. Patmore reached at length his own explanation of this failure: not until these things should become controlling realities in his own spiritual life could he sing of them worthily! No shade of religious doubt had crossed his
