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That come before the swallow dares and take The winds of March with beauty,"

may be compared with:

Those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

But it is also impossible in the sonnets to equal the snatches of dramatic intensity, fiery sentences pulled out of particular events and persons, in which the plays abound. The sonnet beginning:

"When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies,"

is as full of passion, of particular life, as Othello's cry:

... Thou weed

That art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet,
That the sense aches at thee."

But the distinction which emerges here and which may be very roughly and imperfectly defined as the difference between general or ideal and particular or personal poetry may, perhaps, throw a clearer light on the meaning of the sonnets than any inquiry into clues and allusions.

For the particular poetry, the utterance of immediate personal feeling, occurs with much greater frequency in the few sonnets in which the dark lady is concerned than in the more numerous sonnets addressed to the friend. An examination of the

two groups reveals a disparity of tone, which is easier to distinguish than to demonstrate or to define. Such sonnets as :

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When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,

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contain, it is true, each a universal reflection and a particular application; but the reader cannot avoid feeling that the universal reflection is in each case the heart and motive of the piece. These are poems, not on the beauty of Shakespeare's friend, but on beauty, not on Shakespeare's separation from his friend, but on separation, not on a particular friendship, but on friendship. But when Shakespeare wrote on his mistress, the particular woman, the emotion of the moment absorbed him. These sonnets are direct cries of passion; but the passion of the sonnets to the friend is born of the contemplation of life as a whole.

This is not meant to imply that Shakespeare's friendship was a fictitious thing, merely an excuse for poetry. The sonnets suggest far more that it was an attachment in the fashion of the time, sincere so far as it went, but not going much further than the adoption of a pleasing young man as an object for an ideal devotion analogous to that which Tuscan poets felt for their ladies. It was this devotion, perhaps somewhat frigid and artificial, which, as it were, served to set free the results of Shakespeare's passionate contemplation of life. His attachment to the dark lady was obviously, from the sonnets in which she appears, a matter which touched him personally in a far more poignant way. The collision between the two attachments, which is the climax of the sonnets, makes a moving

situation. It is the clash between devotion to an idea and passion for a human being realised in the strictest and most difficult terms. And-though perhaps this is due to feeble humanity, which always thinks that a devil is a more realistic creation than an angel-it seems possible even here to find a distinction between the ideal devotion and the fleshly passion, which run side by side, as the water of a muddy tributary is sometimes clearly visible long after it has joined a more limpid stream.

These are no doubt sufficiently inexact attempts at exactitude in definition of a situation which Shakespeare might have found it difficult briefly or even consistently to define. It must be remembered that the position and feelings of the protagonists must have changed from day to day, and consequently from sonnet to sonnet; for it is most unlikely that the whole sequence was written as a set work when the affair was closed. There is no retrospective tinge in the more personal sonnets. But perhaps enough has been said to suggest that the consideration of style is a better avenue by which to approach the problem than the detective method commonly employed, which has yielded as many theories as there are sonnets and still offers no hope of giving any one theory a definite lead over all its rivals.

Shelley as a Lyric Poet

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PROFESSOR HERFORD, in his introduction to this beautiful volume,1 makes out a good case for abandoning Mrs. Shelley's division of her husband's works into "principal " and "miscellaneous " poems. He remarks that it is hard to understand why later editors should have given the rank of a principal" poem to the Letter to Maria Gisborne and denied it to The Sensitive Plant. He contends that Shelley's verse is best displayed when it is grouped according to kinds, that Epipsychidion and Adonais glow brightest when close to the shorter lyrics, and that The Revolt of Islam and Alastor gain lustre by keeping company. He gives therefore in the present volume all the poems which he considers lyrical, followed by all the translations, and he reserves for three further volumes the epic and narrative poetry, the dramatic poetry and the juvenilia.

His theory is plausible, and its plausibility is much increased by the fact that Epipsychidion does shine more gloriously in its chronological place among The Cloud, the Epithalamium and The Recollection. But if a reader who knows Shelley well allows himself to drift once or twice through this book, forming his impressions into a clear picture, he will soon become aware that he is regarding, not a particular facet of Shelley's genius, but the whole of it in epitome. He will be hard put to it to name any peculiar Shelleyan quality

1 The Lyrical Poems and Translations of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Arranged in Chronological Order, with a Preface by C. H. Herford. Florence Press Edition. (Chatto and Windus.)

which is discoverable in the rest of the poet's works and not here. And the deduction to be drawn from this fact is fairly obvious. Shelley's genius is (except in The Cenci and one or two poems of much less note) purely lyrical. There is no perceptible difference between the Epithalamium or the Ode to Heaven and a hundred or more passages from Prometheus Unbound or Hellas. Who could tell, on grounds of style and feeling alone, whether

"I cannot tell my joy when o'er a lake

Upon a drooping bough with nightshade twined I saw two azure halcyons clinging downward And thinning one bright bunch of amber berries, With quick long beaks and in the deep there lay Those lovely forms imaged as in a sky;"

and

"I am drunk with the honey wine

Of the moon-unfolded eglantine, Which fairies catch in hyacinth bowls; and

"Like loveliness panting with wild desire
While it trembles with fear and delight,
Hesperus flies from awakening night,
And pants in its beauty and speed with light
Fast-flashing, soft, and bright;

and

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"A ship is floating in the harbour now,

A wind is hovering o'er the mountain's brow;
There is a path on the sea's azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous Ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free

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