“…the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic… The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion…. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.” ~ John Dryden

While for the most part it is “easier” to read Romantic and Contemporary poets than “Classical” ones, you really cannot say that you understand poetry in any meaningful way until you have read the giants that came before the Romantic period: George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Robert Burns, and John Dryden. Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser are, of course, a given.

A poet is always writing in the shadow of poets who have gone before, and hence, is always writing in reference to them: echoing and examining and extrapolating and expounding on the words and images and sounds of his or her creative “ancestors.” Because in the end, the very language we use as tool and sport were created by the poets who have gone before.

Dryden’s influence on English Poetry is immense: the Heroic Couplet and the Alexandrine form. He influenced and was admired by poets as varied as: Pope, Keats, Byron, Eliot, and Auden.

This is one of my favorite Dryden poems and one that has been on my mind much of late.

Enjoy!

SONG TO A FAIR YOUNG LADY 

Ask not the cause why sullen spring
So long delays her flow'rs to bear;
Why warbling birds forget to sing,
And winter storms invert the year?
Chloris is gone; and Fate provides
To make it spring where she resides.

Chloris is gone, the cruel fair;
She cast not back a pitying eye:
But left her lover in despair,
To sigh, to languish, and to die:
Ah, how can those fair eyes endure
To give the wounds they will not cure!

Great god of Love, why hast thou made
A face that can all hearts command,
That all religions can invade,
And change the laws of ev'ry land?
Where thou hadst plac'd such pow'r before,
Thou shouldst have made her mercy more.

When Chloris to the temple comes,
Adoring crowds before her fall;
She can restore the dead from tombs,
And ev'ry life but mine recall.
I only am by love design'd
To be the victim for mankind.

 

How can you not love these lines? True beauty is a blessing and a curse. It is a terrible thing to behold. Poets from Homer onward have known that beauty has the power to ravish, change, and destroy. Beauty is why young men first begin to read poetry and why old men so fiercely refuse to give it up. It is why young women first pick up a pen to write and why old women never forget the songs of their youth.