I
should not say
How thou art like the daisy
in Noah’s meadow,
On which the foremost drop
of rain fell warm
And soft at evening:
so the little flower
Wrapped up its leaves, and
shut the treacherous water
Close to the golden welcome
of its breast,
Delighting in the touch of
that which led
The shower of oceans, in whose
billowy drops
Tritons and lions of the sea
were warring,
And sometimes ships on fire
sunk in the blood,
Of their own inmates; others
were of ice,
And some had islands rooted
in their waves,
Beasts on their rocks, and
forest-powdering winds,
And showers tumbling on their
tumbling self,
And every sea of every ruined
star
Was but a drop in the world-melting
flood.
He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic, dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:—
... What shall I do? I speak all wrong, And lose a soul-full of delicious thought By talking. Hush! Let’s drink each other up By silent eyes. Who lives, but thou and I, My heavenly wife?... I’ll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second By thy cheek’s change.
In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost hear the gnashing of the teeth. ‘Never!’ exclaims the duke to his son Torrismond:
There lies no grain of sand
between
My loved and my detested!
Wing thee hence,
Or thou dost stand to-morrow
on a cobweb
Spun o’er the well of
clotted Acheron,
Whose hydrophobic entrails
stream with fire!
And may this intervening earth
be snow,
And my step burn like the
mid coal of Aetna,
Plunging me, through it all,
into the core,
Where in their graves the
dead are shut like seeds,
If I do not—O,
but he is my son!
Is not that tremendous? But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality. One must wander with him through the pages of Death’s Jest Book, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn that ‘the dead are most and merriest,’ one must ask—’Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?’—one must realise that ‘murder is full of holes.’ Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,
Whose
tumultuous waves
Are heaped, contending ghosts,
one may understand how it is that
Death is mightier, stronger,
and more faithful
To man than Life.
Lingering there, one may watch the Deaths come down from their cloister, and dance and sing amid the moonlight; one may laugh over the grotesque contortions of skeletons; one may crack jokes upon corruption; one may sit down with phantoms, and drink to the health of Death.