Truly heroic couplets

Amid the enmities of contemporary letters, it’s salutary to recognise that for most of us allegiances go farther back, and are just as partisan. Neill Powell’s excellent evaluation of Crabbe delights me not just because Crabbe has always been one of my favourite poets but because this study of a writer usually held to be unrepresentative of his time calls into question received literary history. Powell demonstrates that Crabbe’s best poetry, couched almost invariably in heroic couplets, is as tinged with Romanticism as Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s. Where, to my mind, it is superior is in its avoidance of the limp diction and wayward syntax of almost all Romantics, apart from Keats and the best bits of Byron.

Crabbe and Wordsworth were near contemporaries, with Wordsworth the obvious Establishment figure and the Slaughden Quay saltmaster’s son the outsider. Rhyming couplets may still seem more remote from us than Wordsworth- ian blank verse, yet Crabbe’s ‘Infancy’ is a truer if not a greater poem than The Prelude:

Joys I remember like phosphoric light
Or Squibs and Crackers on a Gala Night
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Joys are like Oil: thrown upon the Tide
Of glowing Life they mix not nor subside;
Griefs are like Waters on the River thrown,
They mix entirely and become its own.

And later in the poem:

The female servants showed a Child their fear,
And Men full wearied wanted strength to cheer;
And when at length the dreaded storm went past
And there was Peace and Quietness at Last
’Twas not the Morning’s Quiet — It was not
Pleasure revived but Miseries forgot.

This is somewhat dismal (Crabbe is English literature’s only rival to the full lyrical depression of Italy’s Leopardi), but it derives from the real world.