Averse Miscellany: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury

Collated by Francis Turner Palgrave and adjudicated, finally, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861) remains a national treasure (Robert Frost once said he came to England because it was “the land of the Golden Treasury”), or at least a container of British ideals up to the nineteenth century. The anthology presents work meeting the description of “the best original Lyrical pieces and Songs in our language” with the covert goal of giving readers, estimated to be mostly rude mechanicals, with a tool for self-improvement. (See Clare Bucknell’s recent book, The Treasuries, for more on this.) In six months, it sold 10,000 copies; by now, many hundreds of thousands, in a few editions, with another likely coming soon. Beginning with early modern poets, its first edition carries four books to the end of the Romantic period; later editions go further. Palgrave, like most other editors I’ve covered, doesn’t include contemporaries, citing doubts regarding who will stand the test of time. Among those older names of whose longevity he seems convinced, however, some have shrunk from sight.

William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649) is known, where he is known at all, for his canorous and fine-tuned essay A Cypresse Grove (1623), most accurately likened to the prose of Thomas Browne, and his shorter poems, including sonnets based, writes L. E. Kraster, on Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591). Records of his library show something of the ways of early modern education (Drummond studied at the embryonic University of Edinburgh), culture and poetic maturation. Based on those many and sometimes recherché volumes, mostly in Latin, French and Italian, and a letter to Arthur Johnson (where he wrote, with admittedly Procrustean attachment to existing rules, that “what is not like the ancient and conform to those rules with hath been agreed upon by all Times, may (indeed) be something like unto Poetry but it is no more Poetry than a Monster is a Man”), the author of The Poetry Foundation’s Drummond entry claims that “Drummond was conservative and imitative”. The lack of attention thereafter afforded his work, in the piece and elsewhere, would suggest that these potential attributes must relegate him to the mediocre–middling measure of the merit spectrum. Sadly, and though he is still worth reading, this is largely true. 

Of the poems sampled here, a few stand out, albeit sometimes more for blatant borrowings than merits of their own. “Summons to Love” is similar, in its fantasia of pastoral, to Spenser’s “Prothalamion”; but it is more uncertain: it feels as though its moment of summation – consummation – is on pause. Drummond begs the sun that “morn should bring unto this grove / My Love, to hear and recompense my love”. That second line’s epanalepsis calls for closure, but this deal is not yet done: the speaker fears that “cruel stars have … my ruin sworn”. Then, in a magnific, in-closing envelope-rhymed quatrain,

– The winds all silent are,
And Phoebus in his chair
Ensaffroning sea and air
Makes vanish every star.

Finally, “Night like a drunkard reels / Beyond the hills to shun his flaming wheels” (a naff abstraction of “And fleckled darkness, like a drunkard, reels / From forth day’s path and Titan’s burning wheels” from Romeo and Juliet, of which Drummond owned a quarto edition). And then – “nothing wanting is, save She, alas!” The only thing worse than being stood up is being stood up after telling the cosmos about your date. Metrically, his “Madrigal” is quite like Thomas Nashe’s “Litany in a Time of Plague” (compare the on-the-nose “My thoughts hold mortal strife, / I do detest my life” with Nashe’s roomier “Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss; / This life uncertain is”). Drummond’s “This Life” looks embarrassed to almost share a page with the similarly bubbly, better-known vanitas poem “The Life of Man” by Francis Bacon. 

Another laird-descended graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Thomas Campbell (1777–1844), is perhaps neglected owing to the patriotic nature of the work for which he was admired in his lifetime; or he may have just been bettered in the public’s memory by another, very well-known Scotsman. But there’s more to him than that. He is a sturdy presence in the Treasury, which offers poems like the martial “Hohenlinden” (1800; narratively and somewhat formally echoed by Lord Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib”, 1815) as well as more marital moments like “Freedom and Love”, “To the Evening Star” (in quatrains) and “To the Evening Star” (another, in sextains). Like some of Drummond’s, these works are often lugubrious, sometimes soulful, animated by his hope’s frustration. The “and” in the title of “Freedom and Love” is both in- and exclusive: the twain shan’t meet; or, if they meet, when either wants the other, one of them must go. It is a hymn to libertinism, or else a dirge for romance. This verse is its core:

Bind the sea to slumber stilly,
Bind its odour to the lily,
Bind the aspen ne’er to quiver, 
Then bind love to last for ever.

It employs the same contemptuous rhetorical technique – adynaton – as John Donne’s “Song”. Both mean that “love will be constant when Hell freezes over” (though Donne’s is more gender-targeted). The second “Evening Star”, meanwhile, says as much through its form as through language. Its AABCBC rhyme scheme reverses that of Shakespeare’s advancing and affirming Venus and Adonis stanza, creating a somnambulistic atmosphere of drawn-out-ness and longing. The poetically conventional apostrophe of its first stanza (“Star that bringest home the bee, / And sett’st the weary labourer free!”) transforms – via the almost decadent second stanza’s smoke “curl[ing] yellow in the sun” – into a finale where even the addressee is in retrograde, a delayed subject:

Their remembrancer in Heaven
         Of thrilling vows thou art,
Too delicious to be riven
         By absence from the heart.

The music of “art” and “heart”, “remembrancer” and “absence”, barely needs noting, nor the horrible half-rhyme of “Heaven” with “riven”; Campbell does not say that he experiences distance as the vital source of pleasure, but he means to. In some poems not anthologized, he also takes on human smallness and experience of time exquisitely: see “Benlomond” and “The Last Man”, and especially “The River of Life”.  

Apart from those poets included but lately forgotten, Palgrave dares to mention en passant four from his own time he expects will be included in anthologies in future: “[Alfred] Tennyson, [William Cullen] Bryant, [John] Clare, [James Russell] Lowell”. Of these, only the last does not appear in later versions edited by Lawrence Binyon (1924), Cecil Day-Lewis (1954) and John Press (1994; 2002 – the latter includes one Elizabeth Garrett, discussed in my previous column). A nineteenth-century prophet-poet and abolitionist, James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) was the great-granduncle of Robert Lowell and a cousin of Amy Lowell. He was once famous. He is today the least famous poet in his family. In his Popean Fable for Critics (1848), he takes other writers to task (of Poe he observes, “Here comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, / Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge”) but saves some of the starkest criticism for himself: he can’t tell the difference “twixt singing and preaching”. Margaret Fuller, whom he also attacked in the Fable, noted that “his verse is stereotyped … and posterity will not remember him”. 

His work does have an overweening worthiness, contrived or even costive, and his music an effortful clanging. His closest modern analogue is Amanda Gorman, whose lines (“where can we find light in this never-ending shade?”; “It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit / it’s the past we step into / and how we repair it” – “The Hill We Climb”, 2021) would, if metred, sound like his (“Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime;– / … / Turn those tracks toward Past or Future, that made Plymouth Rock sublime” – “The Present Crisis”, 1845). Then there are his eerie overreachings for originality. In “The Sirens”, a po-faced Poe-style poem, “the waters gurgle longingly”. (Do they?) Lowell’s influence survives today, if anywhere, in the works of Mark Twain and other writers using the Yankee dialect, which Lowell brought to international attention through Hosea Biglow, his persona in The Biglow Papers (1848). It was probably for this that Palgrave knew him. 

If part of the reason for Drummond’s disappearance is conservatism of aesthetics, part of why we rarely discuss the more recent South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957), included in Book Five of John Press’s editions, is political complexity. He is – yes – problematic. Styled in The Observer as “the right-wing Hemingway”, he was the Thirties poet who joined Franco’s army in the Spanish Civil War, both physically and intellectually: as Mary Campbell later wrote in a letter, “He did a bit of fighting but they told him they wanted ‘plumas mas que espallas’”. He was frequently antisemitic. Yet he refused to join Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. As Bernard Bergonzi has noted, at least Campbell, unlike Ezra Pound, did also take up arms against fascism in the Second World War. He was unclassifiable – belligerent. He stood alone artistically, as well: as a poet-critic, he mocked MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis’s literary efforts through the satirical lyricist MacSpaunday in Talking Bronco (1946); in The Georgiad (1931), responding partly to his wife’s affair with Vita Sackville-West, he sent up the Bloomsbury Group and Georgian poets such as Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater. 

It is difficult to part the art and artist in The Flowering Rifle: A poem from the battlefield of Spain (1938), which John E. Coombes considered “the longest fascist poem in English (apart from Ezra Pound’s)”. Yet perhaps the work is worth examining precisely for that reason. It remains a human artefact, albeit an unpalatable one. In any case, if we cast out his poems with his politics, we lose not just a masterclass in pungent, heady formalism (see “Choosing a Mast”, unfortunately not included in the Treasury: “I chose her for her fragrance, when the spring / With sweetest resins swelled her fourteenth ring / And with live amber welded her young thews: / I chose her for the glory of the Muse”), but also such zoomed-in, looming imagery as that in “Autumn”, with its “clean anatomy” of wintered leaves whose reduction is a metaphor for the making of great art, which “kill[s] all forms of life and feeling / Save what is pure and will survive”. Subscribing to the view that what’s preserved in the making of art is necessarily unkillable, or that what survives must be, on the strength of its survival, art, he may well have connived at the reality of canon (back)formation, which must always be a little bit reliant on right place/right time – or else on poet-critics helpfully resuscitating one another, years beyond their deaths.