A Poet's Notebook by Edith Sitwell

Author:Edith Sitwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448201587
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

XXV

Notes on Herrick

THE spirit of Herrick might have been the ‘apparition’ seen Anno 1670, near Cirencester, of whom John Aubrey tells us in his Miscellanies: ‘Being demanded whether a good spirit or a bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a most melodious Twang. Mr. W. Lilly believes it was a Fairie.’

Or again, he could have appeared among those spirits that Mr. Thomas Allen, ‘in those darke (Elizabethan) times Astrologer, Mathematician, and Conjurer’, met ‘coming up his stairs like bees’ (John Aubrey, Brief Lives). At other times his spirit resembles those small birds which, according to Antonio Galvano of New Spain,’ live of the dew, and the juyce of flowers and roses. Their feathers bee small and of divers colours. They be greatly esteemed to work gold with. They die or sleepe every yeare in the moneth of October, sitting upon a little bough in a warme and close place. They revive or wake againe in the moneth of April after the flowers be sprung.’

• • • • • •

The poems are as subtle, and as delicate, as the warm airs that awaken those little birds ‘whose feathers be greatly esteemed to work gold with’,— they are faint as the breaths of air and perfume wafting through the branches of the flowering plum, or the stillness of a sweet night.

The night is still,

The darkness knows

How far away

A wavering rill

Of darkness goes;

Though no bough hums,

Between April and May

A streak of plum-blossom comes.

But that exquisite fragment is from a song by Gordon Bottomley, not by Herrick.

In the flawlessly beautiful ‘Lovers how they come and part’, the only emphasis is in the shapes of the pear and plum, the only colour that which steals into them:

A Gyges Ring they beare about them still,

To be, and not seen when and where they will.

They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,

They fall like dew, but make no noise at all.

So silently they one to th’ other come,

As colours steale into the Peare or Plum,

And Aire-like, leave no pression to be seen

Where e’er they met, or parting place has been.

To these shapes the p’s give body, — the first shape being longer and more delicate, tapering down from the roundness, through the long double vowels, to the fading r, — the second rounder, and with more body, because of the enclosing pl and m ‘… So silently’, with the alliterative s’s, the rising vowels, give another, but fainter, embodiment, ‘clouds’ melts into ‘come,’ ‘come’ fades into ‘colours’. ‘Peare or Plum’ have the faintest echo in the p and the pl of ‘parting place’. There is the slightest possible lengthening of line, — a lengthening so faint as to be hardly perceptible, that comes from the wavering movement of the double-vowelled ‘Peare’ and ‘Aire’ (with that hardly-perceptible flutter caused by the r) — and the echo of these in ‘where e’er’. ‘Beare’ has not the same wavering movement, because the b, which begins the word, concentrates it.

In these lovely lines from ‘Corinna

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