"Eros" belongs to a group of five or six shorter poems that I
would commend as major works. "Low Barometer," "Elegy among the Tombs," "Dejection,"
"Elegy for a Lady" and "Poor Poll" are the others. These
poems are so distinctive as to compare favorably with the best poetry of
the last two centuries and to assure Bridges of an important place in the
history of English literature.
The subject of "Eros" is the Greek god of antiquity. The verses
assume the conventional manner of an apostrophe to that god or, perhaps, to his
visible likeness in the form of a statue. Bridges eschews the cherubic and
playful Cupid of Latin literature and presents, instead, that archaic and potent
incarnation celebrated, in "Hymn of Orpheus V," as an “ineffable, occult,
all shining flower” (see Thomas Taylor, trans., The Hymns of Orpheus,
Paraphrase, that modest but efficient endeavor, is necessary to rend
the veil and comprehend the subtle complexity of Bridges’ argument. He remarks,
in the first verse-paragraph, that Eros is devoid of human meaning (“why hast
thou nothing in thy face”). That the “exuberant flesh” of the deity is
comparable to the “chaste” marble statuary of Pheidias, a statuary that has yet
to suffer Time’s decay, clarifies the poet’s earlier assertion that Eros is an
“idol,” his youth being “an image of eternal Truth” for which we yearn, but
not that Truth itself.
The middle verse-paragraph expands upon Bridges’ claim that Eros is a
“tyrant” that rules human emotion and impulse, his naked beauty and power
inspiring a subversion of reason (“Surely thy body is thy mind”). The quiet and
restrained movement of this passage is remarkable for its clarity and precision
in depicting Eros and for a telling stroke of genius,
For in thy face is nought to
find,
Only thy soft unchristen’d
smile …
where “unchristen’d” reminds the reader that the god is wholly alien to the
prevailing Christian order and that his visage, concealing as it does a
“shameless will,” is unblest. Certainly, “unchristen’d” must be judged one of
the happier choices of an adjective in our literature.
The poem draws to its close with an exemplary economy of diction. The
reader is warned, by the apostrophe that opens the final verse-paragraph, that
Eros is, indeed, the “king of joy” but that we who partake of his potent and
seductive pleasures must participate in the subversion of our reason. That Eros
would “come in darkness,” his body his mind, reiterates the earlier statement
that the god is without reason, although he is the maker of light as that “image
of eternal Truth,” that ideal of beauty beyond decay. The deity’s celebrants,
those who long to participate in his passion and who, by making an idol of him,
would honor that passion as a good superior to reason, are truly his “victims”
and powerless before his ineffable countenance. The ideal and the illumination
are chimeras.
"Eros" shares with the other major poems cited that rare
intellectual ardor so characteristic of Bridges while, unlike much of his
poetry, being composed in a simple measure (iambic tetrameter couplets) without
learned metrical variations. Its deviations from the iambic norm are infrequent
and slight: an occasional trochee for iamb in the initial foot (a practice so
universal in English iambic measures as to approximate no substitution
whatsoever); subtle elisions such as “exu-berant,” “Phei-dias,”
“marmor-eal” and “sen-suous” (chosen, in each instance, to hasten
the rhythm just perceptibly while suggesting, perhaps, the sinuous and supple
movement of the god); and the mild convention of treating “flower” and “power”
as monosyllables. Bridges relies on careful placement of pauses, alternation of
end-stopped and enjambed verses, and close attention to the quantity of his
syllables to provide a quiet rhythmic variety. This should be remarked, for a
common prejudice today asserts that metrical variation is good or necessary
in-and-of-itself and without reference to meaning. Such works as "Eros"
stand as a profound refutation of the prevailing prosodial view and demonstrate
the virtue of a wedding of meter and sense.
Bridges’ transgressions are few: the lamentable inversions in verses
four and ten and a superfluous comma closing verse seven. These are minor flaws
in a brief but difficult poem whose theme is of universal import. Contemporary
readers may object to the archaic diction, though I find it well-suited to the
matter of the poem. Wordsworth, Shelley and Tennyson, who enjoy greater
reputations, employ the same archaisms without, it must be added, the serious
purpose and broad scope that justify Bridges. Their practice, if compared to
"Eros," strikes one as a quaint and literary indulgence.
Low Barometer
The south-wind strengthens to a gale,
Across the moon the clouds fly fast,
The house is smitten as with a flail,
The chimney shudders to the blast.
On such a night, when air has loosed
Its guardian grasp on blood and brain,
Old terrors then of god or ghost
Creep from their caves to life again.
And reason kens he herits in
A haunted house. Tenants unknown
Assert their squalid lease of sin
With earlier title than his own.
Unbodied presences, the packed
Pollution and remorse of Time,
Slipped from oblivion reenact
The horrors of unhouseld crime.
Some men would quell the thing with prayer
Whose sightless footsteps pad the floor,
Whose fearful trespass mounts the stair
Or bursts the locked forbidden door.
Some have seen corpses long interred
Escape from hallowing control,
Pale charnel forms--nay ev'n have heard
The shrilling of a troubled soul,
That wanders till the dawn hath crossed
The dolorous dark, or Earth hath wound
Closer her storm-spread cloke, and thrust
The baleful phantoms underground.
Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee,
With promise of strength and manhood full and fair!
Though cold and stark and bare,
The bloom and the charm of life doth awhile remain on thee.
Thy mother's treasure wert thou;—alas! no longer
To visit her heart with wondrous joy; to be
Thy father's pride:—ah, he
Must gather his faith together, and his strength make stronger.
To me, as I move thee now in the last duty,
Dost thou with a turn or gesture anon respond;
Startling my fancy fond
With a chance attitude of the head, a freak of beauty.
Thy hand clasps, as 'twas wont, my finger, and holds it:
But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff;
Yet feels to my hand as if
'Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that enfolds it.
So I lay thee there, thy sunken eyelids closing,—
Go lie thou there in thy coffin, thy last little bed!—
Propping thy wise, sad head,
Thy firm, pale hands across thy chest disposing.
So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither hath he taken thee?
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this?
The vision of which I miss,
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and awaken thee?
Ah! little at best can all our hopes avail us
To lift this sorrow, or cheer us, when in the dark,
Unwilling, alone we embark,
And the things we have seen and have known and have heard of, fail us.