English poet (1835-1913)
The love of individuals for each other, whether domestic, romantic, or sexual, is much more common than any of the other three, being practically universal; and it has given birth to so many well-known lyrics that it is unnecessary to cite any of them here. Some of them are very beautiful; but none of them, by reason of the comparative narrowness of their theme, satisfies the essentials of great poetry. Not even Tennyson’s Maud, which is perhaps the most ambitious and the best known of long poems dedicated mainly to the subject, though it contains lovely passages, approaches greatness.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Now frowns the sky, the air bites bleak,
The young boughs rock, the old trunks creak,
And fast before the following gale
Come slanting drops, then slashing hail,
As keen as sword, as thick as shot.
Nay, do not cower, but heed them not!
For these one neither flies nor stirs;
They are but April skirmishers,
Thrown out to cover the advance
Of gleaming spear and glittering lance,
With which the sunshine scours amain
Heaven, earth, and air, and routs the rain.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Defence of English Spring", Lyrical Poems
In Shakespeare, as we might have expected, the masculine note and the feminine note are heard in perfect harmony.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
I daresay larks do not find much music in the thunder. But they have the sense to be silent when they hear the roll of that untrembling diapason that makes all things tremble.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Though my verse but roam the air
And murmur in the trees,
You may discern a purpose there,
As in music of the bees.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Birthday", Lyrical Poems
The bright incarnate spirit of the Morn.
ALFRED AUSTIN
Madonna's Child
From sunny woof and cloudy weft
Fell rain in sheets; so, to myself
I hummed these hazard rhymes, and left
The learned volume on the shelf.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Nature and the Book", At the Gate of the Convent and Other Poems
What real man of letters that ever ventured into the arid and somewhat vulgar domain of Party-politics has not felt the same feeling of revulsion, the same longing for the water-brooks?
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
The public look on, a little bewildered; for who is to decide when doctors disagree?
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
It is not the business of a man of letters to take his politics either from a Monarch or a Mob, or to push his fortunes—slightly to alter a celebrated phrase—by those services which demagogues render to crowds.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
If the love and pursuit of literature do not make a man more independent in character, more disinterested in his reasonings, more elevated in his views, they will not have done for him what I should have expected from them.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Have you never, when waves were breaking, watched children at sport on the beach,
With their little feet tempting the foam-fringe, till with stronger and further reach
Than they dreamed of, a billow comes bursting, how they turn and scamper and screech!
ALFRED AUSTIN
"A Woman's Apology", Soliloquies in Song
The poet, no doubt, has to learn by suffering, but having learnt, he has then, in my opinion, to help others not to be miserable, but to be happy.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism, humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and, if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
The great stumbling-block of literary criticism, alike for the professional critic and the unprofessional reader, is the tacit assumption that the opinions, preferences, and estimates of to-day are not merely passing opinions, preferences, and estimates, but will be permanent ones; opinions, preferences, and estimates for all future time. There is no foundation, save self-complacency, for such a surmise. What solid reason is there to suppose that the present age is any more infallible in its literary judgments than preceding ages? On the contrary, its infallibility is all the less probable because of the precipitation with which its opinions are arrived at. Yet past ages have been proved over and over again, in course of time, to be wrong in their estimate of contemporaneous poetry, in consequence of their mistaking the passing for the permanent. The consequence in our time of this error has been that one has seen the passing away of several works loudly declared on their appearance to be immortal. The only chance a critic has of being right in his judgments is to measure contemporary literature by standards and canons upon which rests the fame of the great poets and writers of the past, and, tried by which, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron have been assigned their enduring rank in the poetic hierarchy.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Now on the summit of Love's topmost peak
Kiss we and part; no farther can we go:
And better death than we from high to low
Should dwindle or decline from strong to weak.
We have found all, there is no more to seek;
All have we proved, no more is there to know;
And Time could only tutor us to eke
Out rapture's warmth with custom's afterglow.
We cannot keep at such a height as this;
And even straining souls like ours inhale
But once in life so rarified a bliss.
What if we lingered till love's breath should fail!
Heaven of my Earth! one more celestial kiss,
Then down by separate pathways to the vale.
ALFRED AUSTIN
"Love's Wisdom", Lyrical Poems
If the Crusades were not politics, we should have to narrow the meaning of the word very considerably.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Bridling of Pegasus
Were it not for one's mistakes, one's failures, and one's disappointments, the love one bears one's garden would soon perish for lack of sustenance. Just as you may admire but can scarcely feel tenderly towards uniformly successful people, so for a garden that was always and everywhere equally gaudy or equally green you might entertain wonder, but you would hardly cherish affection. It is one's failures in life that make one gentle and forgiving with oneself; and I almost think it is the failures of others that mostly endear them to us. The Garden that I Love is very perverse, very incalculable in its ways--falling at times as much below expectations as at others exceeding it. They who have no patience with accident, with waywardness, should not attempt to garden.
ALFRED AUSTIN
The Garden that I Love