There are lofty reasons to enjoy reading old books, but it's also nice to run across yet another of the minor allusions made by . (I realize there are annotated anthologies, but I feel it only counts when I meet something on, as it were, its own terms in the wild. It's like a birder's life-list.) For instance, in The Parent's Assistant:
Delightful task! to rear the tender thought,--
To teach the young idea how to shoot,--
To pour the fresh instruction o'er the mind,--
To breathe th' enlivening spirit,--and to fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.
THOMSON.
I can't remember when Wimsey quotes that, but it will come to me. More from the same poem:
An elegant sufficiency, content,
Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,
Ease and alternate labour, useful life,
Progressive virtue, and approving Heaven!
The Seasons. Spring. Line 1158.
Thomson is compared to , although comes to my mind. Thomson wrote poems of Gothic gloom in modern setting, including The City of Dreadful Night, which is gloriously purple prose, roiled and shot with black and curdled red:
We bow down to the universal laws,
Which never had for man a special clause
Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
If tigers burn with beauty and with might,
Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?
And Thomson lived 1834-1882, note you; that's out of a mechanistic, very faintly evolutionary, probably shocking run of stanzas.
The Castle of Indolence has a modernism of its own: there was a 19th c. solitaire card game with the same name. The game version of the poem, ha. Maybe Studio Foglio will put out a deck.
"The City of Dreadful Night" is Project Gutenberg etext #1238; more poems are kindly provided by the Vasthead.
So wrote clew in Poetry. | TrackBack