Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 089.jpg



poet, Patmore himself once declared in a moment of luminous paradox, "occupies a quite peculiar position—somewhere between that of a Saint and that of Balaam's Ass": and save for the fact that both saint and ass are notoriously humble in demeanour, it seems impossible that any phrase should more suggestively crystallise his own lifelong attitude. With meet dramatic insight, Mr. John Sargent chose this poet as model for his Prophet Ezekiel, for to the sense of friend and foe alike there played about him flashes of the untranslatable Vision, echoes of the Voice Crying in the Wilderness. From the days of his vivid and self-conscious childhood, through that maturity of passionate antagonisms and inviolate fealties, into the prophetic old age, ominous, aloof, yet strangely tender, Coventry Patmore was at each moment a unique and compelling personality. Aristocrat, pessimist, scholar, poet of human love and of transcendent mysticism, he stood as a stumbling-block and a foolishness to the Philistines of his age. He himself loved and hated strongly: and in the eternal justice it has been decreed that strongly, too, should he be loved and hated—a scandal to the timid or unbelieving multitude, a seer to the few who cared to understand.

From the first, there was a singular interdependence between Patmore's life and his literary work: a consistent absorption in certain ideals which must always be rare in human nature.