Page:Peterson's Magazine 1842, Volume I.pdf/52

. MOTHERWELL'S POEMS.*

What is poetry? A thousand times have we asked ourselves that question, and a thousand times have we heard better men than ourselves attempt a reply, but hover, no, never have we met an answer equal to the one we first read in Bacon in our boyhood. It is the most magnificent summary of the quality of poetry that ever mortal penned. Critics have in vain attempted to sut-push this glorious definition. We will use the philosopher's words in place of our own.

“Poesy is a part of learning, in measure for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed and doth truly refer to the imagination, which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which Nature has severed and sever that which Nature has joined, It was taken in two senses, in respect of words or matter: in the first sense, it is but a character of Atyle, belongs to acts of speech, and is not suitable for the present; in the latter, it is, as has been said, one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history. The use of this feigned history hath bon to give some shadows of tatisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there i, agreeable to the spirit of man, « more ample greatness, ‘a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can he found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude that satisfy the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; pecanse true history propounds the sucreases and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue ‘and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in reflection and more according to the revealed Providence Fifth, true history represents events and events more ordinary and toes interchanged; therefore, poetry endueth them with more rarences and more unexpected and alternative variations; so, as it says, poetry serves and confers magnanimity, morality, and delectation. And, therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness because it doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the show of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. ‘And we eee, that by these insinuations and congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath had with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and basbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.”

Not one word has Lord Bacon exaggerated in this subliminal summary. How much meanness and baxeness—how much care and regret—how much of the dull, dreary monotony of life has been shut out from men by the romance, the sweetness, the witchery of poetry! We would not live in a world like this if we were to be deprived of the sins of the "loveliest of the nine." As the song of a bird to a prisoner in a dungeon—and the dream of home to a way-worn old man by the rood side—is the tongue of a countrytoan in a distant land, 50 is thy voice to us—oh! Poesy—amid the darkness and aridity of a careworn life.

The poems before us were but little known in this country. We are surprised at this, for some of them are of high merit. One or two of them—*Jeanie Morrison,” and “My heid is like to rend, Willie,” for instance—have indeed appeared in the newspapers of this country, ‘but the rest are almost as unknown, even to our professing ‘ced critics, as the Talmud to a Black-foot Indian. This ignorance extends to the biography of the poet. Even the American editor of these poems declares his inability to furnish more than a few slender facts respecting the events in the life of Motherwell. He tells us indeed that the poet was an editor in Glasgow—that he occasionally wrote for the periodicals of the day—that he was a dovoted student of the old English poets—that in 1892 he published an edition of his poems—and that, three years later, at the early age of thirty-seven, he died. All of these facts we were already acquainted with, and for which we are really indebted to the editor, throw no new light on the character or genius of the poet. The productions of Motherwell must, therefore, explain themselves, nor can they draw aid from collateral circumstances. They can gain or lose nothing, as in the case of Byron, from their supposed revelations of the writer's secret history. No interct will atlach to them, as to the poems of Burns, on account of the birth of the author. We cannot regard them, as we do the works of Hogg, with a wonder proportioned to the author's eatly ignorance and the lowly station he filled in life. Nothing of romance envelopes them like that which bathes the ‘Arcadia of Sit Philip Sidney in undying glory. We cannot peruse them with an admiration heightened by the knowledge that the author, like Milton, is blind. No mystery, no romance, and no touching story have any connection with these poems. They must either stand or fall on their own merits.

The poems in this volume are of unequal power. Some of them display, as we have said, high merits, but most of them scarcely rise above mediocrity. They ‘are divided into songs aud poeme—and these latter consist of occasional pieces, imitations of the old Ners: poetry, and poema in the ancient ballad style, ‘ The Norse poems consist of “The Battle Flag of Sigurd"—"The""Wooing Cong of Jarl Egill Skallagrim"—the

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Poems narrative and lyrical, by William Motherwell, 1 vol. 18 mo.—pp. 280. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1842. �