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direct syntax, firmly rhymed stanzas should sound now a little strange.
These last are precisely Hope's resources, his assured way of drawing
us from detail to detail, finishing a picture which stands powerful and
separate. Here is the close of the tale of the mysterious sea creature, the
Labra; Hope's command of stanzaic form quite clearly measures our
reactions, shapes then alters our feelings:
The divers on these coasts have cruel hands;
Their lives are har.d; they do not make old bones;
The brutal masters send them down too deep.
But sometimes, as he combs the clefts and sands,
Among the oyster-beds and bearded stones
One comes upon the Labra fast asleep
And throws away his knife, his bag of pearl,
To take her in his arms and wrench her free.
Their bodies cling together as they rise
Spinning and drifting in the ocean swirl.
The seamen haul them in and stand to see
The exquisite, fabled creature as she dies.
But while in air they watch her choke and drown,
Enchanted by her beauty, they forget
The body of their comrade at her side,
From whose crushed lungs the bright blood oozing down
Jewel by ruby jewel from the wet
Deck drops and merges in the turquoise tide.
("The Coasts of Cerigo")
Many of Hope's poems are triumphantly responsive to literature.
They revive the sense of excitement in being a cultivated reader: "Man
Friday" projects Crusoe's servant into the loneliness of the civilized world.
"An Epistle: Edward Sackville to Venetia Digby" pursues the writer
through an elegant Ovidian labyrinth of feeling. There are some tart
Cavalier lyrics; some poems on poets (weak on Yeats, splendid on
Coleridge) ; and a moving Renaissance translation, "The Twenty-Second
Sonnet of Louise Labe." At moments the literary reference may be
merely parasitic and bumptious. Echoes of quotations ("Chaos comes
again"; "Where e'er you walk . ..") are scattered like landmines, mostly
for the fun of it.
If
they have no dramatic force, they remind us, on the
other hand, of the delight the poet is taking in joining a literate com–
pany. It is rare to find - as one does with Hope - poems that depend
so successfully on a shared sense of community. His audience is fixed
in position, ready to follow the action within the proscenium his poems
assume.
