Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/88

 Quite in the spirit of Mr. Rossetti's fleshlier and commoner manner, in which he talks about his lady's hand teaching "memory to mock desire," is Cowley's exquisite meditation, addressed to his mistress:—

Though in thy thoughts scarce any tracts have been So much as of original sin, Such charms thy beauty wears, as might Desires in dying saints excite!"

This is the way Dr. John Donne writes in the beginning of the seventeenth century:—

Are not thy kisses, then, as filthy, and more, As a worm sucking an envenom'd sore? Doth not thy fearful hand in feeling quake, As one which gathering flowers still fears a snake?"

Could anything more closely resemble the horrible manner of Mr. Swinburne's "Anactoria?" It is difficult to believe that our present school of poets have not drunk deep at the muddy Aganippe of their predecessors here in England, as well as at the poetic fountain polluted by the influx of the Parisian sewers. There is a coincidence of affectation in the following parallel passages:—

A mother, I was without mother born, In end, all arm'd, my father I brought forth!"—Author:William Drummond (1585-1649).

That horse, within whose populous womb The birth was death."— (p. 229).

Again, Mr. Rossetti, in Sonnet XXIX., compares to "a " with whom he wandered from the "haunts of men," finding "all bowers amiss" (!) till he came to a place