1900 ‘A Literature Lesson. Sir Patrick Spens in the Eighteenth Century Manner’

Raleigh’s poem ‘A Literature Lesson. Sir Patrick Spens in the Eighteenth Century Manner’ (1900) makes fun of the verbosity of some eighteenth-century poets, thus backwardly praising the tight storytelling of the popular ballad. Raleigh uses ‘Spens’ as the example which need not be tampered. He humourously expands the four-line opening of ‘Spens’ into twenty-two lines. His king expounds on his own leadership and evokes the Greek and Roman Gods for guidance. What is simply in ‘Spens’:

The king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
O quhar will I get guid sailòr,
To sail this schip of mine?

Raleigh expands, in part, to this:

In a famed town of Caledonia’s land,
A prosperous port contiguous to the strand,
A monarch feasted in right royal state;
But care still dogs the pleasures of the Great,
And well his faithful servants could surmise
From his distracted looks and broken sighs
That though the purple bowl was circling free,
His mind was prey to black perplexity.

Raleigh recognizes that the strength of the ballad form, its emotional force, is in its direct unadorned narrative. Through parody he shows how the more loquacious verse of the eighteenth century loses this quality. Raleigh’s poem ends:

Verse II

He spake: and straightway, rising from his side
An ancient senator, of reverend pride,
Unsealed his lips, and uttered from his soul
Great store of flatulence and rigmarole;
—All fled the Court, which shades of night invest,
And Pope and Gay and Prior told the rest.

Sources: ‘A Literature Lesson. Sir Patrick Spens In the Eighteenth Century Manner’, in Laughter from a Cloud, foreword by Hilary Raleigh (London: Constable, 1923), 207-08. PoemHunter; Univ.of Toronto