For rhyme does go with reason, since the aim of both is to bring things
to an end. The tragic necessity of puns tautened and hardened Hood's
genius; so that there is always a sort of shadow of that sharpness
across all his serious poems, falling like the shadow of a sword.
"Sewing at once with a double thread a shroud as well as a shirt"--"We
thought her dying when she slept, and sleeping when she died"--"Oh God,
that bread should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap"--none can
fail to note in these a certain fighting discipline of phrase, a
compactness and point which was well trained in lines like "A
cannon-ball took off his legs, so he laid down his arms." In France he
would have been a great epigrammatist, like Hugo. In England he is a
punster.
There was nothing at least in this group I have loosely called the
Eccentrics that disturbs the general sense that all their generation was
part of the sunset of the great revolutionary poets. This fading glamour
affected England in a sentimental and, to some extent, a snobbish
direction; making men feel that great lords with long curls and whiskers
were naturally the wits that led the world.
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