"Criticism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Poe Edgar Allan)

Her watch around it seem to smile
As o'er a lov'd one sleeping?

and,

One solitary turret gray
Still tells in melancholy glory
The legend of the Cheviot day.

The commencement of the fourth stanza is of the highest order of
Poetry, and partakes, in a happy manner, of that quaintness of
expression so effective an adjunct to Ideality, when employed by the
Shelleys, the Coleridges and the Tennysons, but so frequently debased,
and rendered ridiculous, by the herd of brainless imitators.

Wild roses by the abbey towers
Are gay in their young bud and bloom:
They were born of a race of funeral flowers,
That garlanded in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.

The tone employed in the concluding portions of Alnwick Castle,
is, we sincerely think, reprehensible, and unworthy of Halleck. No
true poet can unite in any manner the low burlesque with the ideal,
and not be conscious of incongruity and of a profanation. Such
verses as

Men in the coal and cattle line
From Tevoit's bard and hero land,
From royal Berwick's beach of sand,
From Wooler, Morpeth, Hexham, and
Newcastle upon Tyne.

may lay claim to oddity- but no more. These things are the defects and
not the beauties of Don Juan. They are totally out of keeping with the
graceful and delicate manner of the initial portions of Alnwick
Castle, and serve no better purpose than to deprive the entire poem of
all unity of effect. If a poet must be farcical, let him be just that,
and nothing else. To be drolly sentimental is bad enough, as we have
just seen in certain passages of the Culprit Fay, but to be
sentimentally droll is a thing intolerable to men, and Gods, and
columns.
Marco Bozzaris appears to have much lyrical without any high order
of ideal beauty. Force is its prevailing character- a force,
however, consisting more in a well ordered and sonorous arrangement of
this metre, and a judicious disposal of what may be called the
circumstances of the poem, than in the true material of lyric vigor.
We are introduced, first, to the Turk who dreams, at midnight, in
his guarded tent,