_The Death-Wake_
is the work of a lad who certainly had read Keats, Coleridge and
Shelley, but who is no imitator of these great poets. He has, in a few
passages, and at his best, an accent original, distinct, strangely
musical, and really replete with promise. He has a fresh unborrowed
melody and mastery of words, the first indispensable sign of a true
poet. His rhymed heroic verse is no more the rhymed heroic verse of
_Endymion_, than it is that of Mr. Pope, or of Mr. William Morris. He
is a new master of the old instrument.
His mood is that of Scott when Scott was young, and was so anxious to
possess a death's head and cross-bones. The malady is "most incident"
to youth, but Mr. Stoddart wears his rue with a difference. The mad
monkish lover of the dead nun Agathe has hit on precisely the sort of
fantasy which was about to inspire Theophile Gautier's _Comedie de la
Mort_, or the later author of _Gaspard de la Nuit_, or Edgar Poe.
There is here no "criticism of life;" it is a criticism of strange
death; and, so far, may recall Beddoes's _Death's Jest-Book_,
unpublished, of course, in 1830. Naturally this kind of poetry is
"useless," as Mr.
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