Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

Thrapston, and Huntingdon, to Cambridge, where I arrived, 22 October; having met with no rain to signify, till this last day of my journey. There's luck for you!

NOTES ON THE POEMS.

I.

ODE ON THE SPRING.

Gray wrote this Ode at Stoke in June, 1742. He sent it to his school friend, Richard West, not knowing that West's death had already occurred on the first of June. The Ode was first published in 1748, in Dodsley's Collection of Poems by Several Hands, with no signature; it next appeared in the folio of 1753, Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. Gray added the footnotes in the edition of his Poems in 1768. Mason said that Gray originally gave the title of Noontide to this Ode; and Mr. Gosse, Gray's Works, I, 4, notes that in a copy of the poem, in Gray's handwriting, preserved at Pembroke College, the title is : Noon-tide. An Ode. Mason said that Gray probably meant to write two companion pieces, Morning and Evening. He suggested that the Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude, beginning "Now the golden Morn aloft" may have been intended for the Morning ode, and the Elegy for the Evening. These conjectures are ingenious, whether true or not.

1. Hours. The Horae, goddesses of the changes of the seasons. Cf. Comus, 986: "The Graces and the rosy-bosomed Hours." Mitford notes that the Hours are joined with Aphrodite in the second Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (5) and that to Apollo (194–5) and are made part of her train in Hesiod (Works and Days, 75). 3. Disclose. Open, expand. Cf.

"The canker galls the infants of the spring,

Too oft before their buttons [i.e. buds] be disclosed."
Hamlet, i, 2, 39-40.

5. The Attic Warbler. The Nightingale.

This bird is very

common in Attica. Philomela, daughter of Pandion, king of Athens, was supposed to have been changed into a nightingale. — Wakefield compares Milton, Par. Reg., iv, 245:

"Where the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long";

and Mitford adds Pope, Essay on Man, iii, 33:

"Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?"

11. Where'er the oak's, etc. The quiet scenery here described exhibits, perhaps, a touch of Romantic feeling; but the conventional moralizing at the end of the stanza is thoroughly Augustan.

14. The passage from Shakspere that Gray gives in his note on this line is from Mid. Night's Dream, ii, 1, 249-251:

21. Care.

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine."

Gray's fondness for personified abstractions is especially noticeable in his early odes. This custom was very fashionable among his contemporaries. They were all much affected in this

respect by Milton's early poems. See Introduction, p. xxiv. 27. The note by Gray is from the Georgics, iv, 59.

30. Par. Lost, vii, 405, 406.

31. To Contemplation's, etc. Cf. Gray's Letter to Walpole (Gray's Works, ed. Gosse, II, 222): "I send you a bit of a thing for two reasons; first, because it is one of your favourites, Mr. M. Green; and next, because I would do justice. The thought on which my second Ode [Spring] turns is manifestly stole from hence; not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my memory, and, forgetting the Author, I took it for my own. The subject was the Queen's Hermitage." He then quotes a long passage, of which the verses that follow are the most significant :

"The thinking sculpture helps to raise
Deep thoughts, the genii of the place:

To the mind's ear, and inward sight,

There silence speaks, and shade gives light:
While insects from the threshold preach,

And minds dispos'd to musing teach;
Proud of strong limbs and painted hues,

They perish by the slightest bruise;

Or maladies begun within

Destroy more slow life's frail machine;

From maggot-youth, thro' change of state,

They feel like us the turns of fate:

Some born to creep have liv'd to fly

And chang'd earth's cells for dwellings high:
And some that did their six wings keep,
Before they died, been forced to creep.
They politics, like ours, profess;
The greater prey upon the less.

Some strain on foot huge loads to bring,
Some toil incessant on the wing:
Nor from their vigorous schemes desist
Till death; and then they are never mist.
Some frolick, toil, marry, increase,

Are sick and well, have war and peace;
And broke with age in half a day,

Yield to successors, and away."

44. A solitary fly. Mason, writing to Gray, 8 January 1761, said, [I am living] "in that state of life which my old friend Jeremy Taylor so well describes in his sermon aptly entitled the Marriage Ring. Celibate life,' says he, 'like the flie in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined, and dies in singularity. But marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, gathers sweetness from every flower, labours, and unites into societys and republics,' &c. If I survive you, and come to publish your works, I shall quote this passage, from whence you so evidently (without ever seeing it) took that thought, 'Poor moralist, and what art thou,' &c. But the plagiarism had been too glaring had you taken the heart of the apple, in which, however, the great beauty of the thought consists. After all, why will you not read Jeremy Taylor? Take my word and more for it, he is the Shakespeare of divines." It is interesting to learn from Mason's letter that at this time Gray had not read Taylor; his remarks in reply to Mason may be found on page 90 of this volume.

48. Thy youth is flown. Gray had reached the age of twentyfive.

II.

ODE ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE.

Gray wrote this ode in August, 1742, at Stoke, but it was not printed till 1747. It was the first of his English pieces to appear in print, and was published anonymously at sixpence. In 1748 it appeared, once more anonymously, in Dodsley's Collection of Poems;

« ForrigeFortsett »