Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/70

Rh for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form, when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, will it become to us. Let us but observe how a great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one knows the Lucy Gray and the Ruth of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet’s own feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad-form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he composed Ruth,—his great time, his annus mirabilis, about 1800,—strove to be simple; it was his mission to be simple; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it; he would have used it if he could: but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more augustness, to shake out its folds.