THE POETS' CORNER--VII

(Pall Mall Gazette, October 24, 1888.)

Mr. Ian Hamilton's Ballad of Hadji is undeniably clever. Hadji is a
wonderful Arab horse that a reckless hunter rides to death in the pursuit
of a wild boar, and the moral of the poem--for there is a moral--seems to
be that an absorbing passion is a very dangerous thing and blunts the
human sympathies. In the course of the chase a little child is drowned,
a Brahmin maiden murdered, and an aged peasant severely wounded, but the
hunter cares for none of these things and will not hear of stopping to
render any assistance. Some of the stanzas are very graceful, notably
one beginning

Yes--like a bubble filled with smoke--
The curd-white moon upswimming broke
The vacancy of space;

but such lines as the following, which occur in the description of the
fight with the boar--

I hung as close as keepsake locket
On maiden breast--but from its socket
He wrenched my bridle arm,

are dreadful, and 'his brains festooned the thorn' is not a very happy
way of telling the reader how the boar died. All through the volume we
find the same curious mixture of good and bad. To say that the sun
kisses the earth 'with flame-moustachoed lip' is awkward and uncouth, and
yet the poem in which the expression occurs has some pretty lines. Mr.
Ian Hamilton should prune. Pruning, whether in the garden or in the
study, is a most healthy and useful employment. The volume is nicely
printed, but Mr. Strang's frontispiece is not a great success, and most
of the tail-pieces seem to have been designed without any reference to
the size of the page.

Mr. Catty dedicates his book to the memory of Wordsworth, Shelley,
Coleridge and Keats--a somewhat pompous signboard for such very ordinary
wine--and an inscription in golden letters on the cover informs us that
his poems are 'addressed to the rising generation,' whom, he tells us
elsewhere, he is anxious to initiate into the great comprehensive truth
that 'Virtue is no other than self-interest, deeply understood.' In
order to further this laudable aim he has written a very tedious blank
verse poem which he calls The Secret of Content, but it certainly does
not convey that secret to the reader. It is heavy, abstract and prosaic,
and shows how intolerably dull a man can be who has the best intentions
and the most earnest beliefs. In the rest of the volume, where Mr. Catty
does not take himself quite so seriously, there are some rather pleasing
things. The sonnet on Shelley's room at University College would be
admirable but for the unmusical character of the last line.

Green in the wizard arms
Of the foam-bearded Atlantic,
An isle of old enchantment,
A melancholy isle,
Enchanted and dreaming lies;
And there, by Shannon's flowing
In the moonlight, spectre-thin,
The spectre Erin sits.

Wail no more, lonely one, mother of exile wail no more,
Banshee of the world--no more!
Thy sorrows are the world's, thou art no more alone;
Thy wrongs the world's--

are the first and last stanzas of Mr. Todhunter's poem The Banshee.