Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/134

 cxxx INTRODUCTION ���The song of the bird in Eastwell Park seems, it must be confessed, tame, circumscribed, even thin, when compared with the rich, voluptuous, soul-enthralling notes of the nightingale that a century and a quarter later sang in the garden in Hampstead Heath and moved the poet Keats to thoughts of easeful death. But when considered in connec- tion with its predecessors, and especially its contemporaries, Lady Winchilsea's poem becomes a remarkable production. �Of other animals than birds little is said except in the fables. Their first duty there is loyalty to the moral, and they are only secondarily independent animals, but they are often touched off with a sly, gay humor that makes some of them interesting even apart from the fable. �The traditional lover who flees to the shades to hide his �mortal wound, who sees nothing in nature but rocks and �thorns and other painful reminders of Sylvia's �cruelty, and who, therefore, with rare good �sense, goes back to the city, preferring to die by realities �rather than by shadows, is described in By Love Persu'd. �And in Aristomenes are examples of the subordination of �nature to man, as when Climander hears Herminia utter the �word "love" and exclaims: �Oh! speak it once again, and the fond Vine Shall with a stricter grasp embrace the Elm, Whilst joyful birds shall hail it from the Branches. �This reads like a reminiscence of Tasso's Aminta, and is an unusual note in Lady Winchilsea's poetry. Even in the description of Marina the lover said that she seemed to give all the sweetness to nature, not that she did give it, and the lament of Aristomenes for his son distinctly recognizes the independence of Nature. It is especially in elegiac verse that Lady Winchilsea's conception of the relation between man and nature is shown to be widely different from the ideas then dominant. In the customary elegy, Nature is ��� �