"
It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or
to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to
mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with
regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not
wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a
departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to
overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to
retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.
More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In
Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic
muses,
He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.
In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses
this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been
expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_:
I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,
or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:
I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea.
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