Instead of dismissing old great poetry as old, which is the default reaction of many a modernist and post-modernist, it might profit the next generation, and the practice and appreciation of poetry in general, if we analyze why it is great.
The following poems by Christopher Marlowe and A. E. Housman (the Marlowe, a famous excerpt from his play, Faustus) positively shine with sweetness, glory, and popularity:
WAS THIS THE FACE? —Marlowe
Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!
WHEN I WAS ONE AND TWENTY –Housman
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
This is one of those Scarriet March Madness contests in which it is a shame to have a loser—well, that’s been true of every contest this year.
Why are these two poems particularly great?
We might begin with this phrase: dramatic action.
These poems both ring with speech-action.
Sound and sense co-vibrate in the reader’s comprehension.
There is serial-interlocking action, serial-interlocking thought; the whole moves forward rapidly in its thought-action progress.
The rapidity is due not only to a wise choice of sounds, but due to the swift painting of rhetoric, rather than the inefficient rhetoric that attempts to paint.
What you get so often in contemporary poems is a series of dry, detached statements—the interlocking quality of thought, sound, painting, and action simply does not exist, because this would carry the contemporary poet towards a style which does not sound contemporary enough.
This is the horrible truth. Seeming stylistic choices, made in order to sound contemporary, lead the poet down a cul-de-sac of loosely-made, dull-sounding poems.
The error involves confounding style with method.
For it isn’t about style at all, really.
The compositional method of a Shelley or a Swinburne, for instance, is thought by the brain-washed modern to be a stylistic tic of a certain time period—which, because it seems to be a style belonging to a certain time period, is automatically rejected.
Thus poetry, by a mere trick, is overthrown.
We note also a kind of moral, cause-and-effect urgency is present in both poems—is this the atmosphere great poems swim in, or is it a mere accident of what inspired the poet? Probably the latter; we tend to think the issue is one of compositional method rather than morals, though these two might be mysteriously linked in some way.
Housman wins, 55-52, and advances to the second round.
