'The Half Unwilling Willing Kiss'

Happy birthday, John Dryden, a spry 390 years old today. John who? That would be the poet about whom Mark Van Doren writes in his still useful John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry (1920): “Ears are not everything, but the absence of them leaves poetry dangerously dead. Dryden had great ears.” Van Doren’s volume is remembered, if at all, because T.S. Eliot reviewed it while revising The Waste Land: “It is a book which every practitioner of English verse should study.” Listen to these lines, singled out by Van Doren, from Dryden’s “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” (1684): 

“Farewell, too little, and too lately known,

Whom I began to think and call my own:

For sure our souls were near allied, and thine

Cast in the same poetic mold with mine.

One common note on either lyre did strike,

And knaves and fools we both abhorr’d alike.”

 

Fifty years ago I wrote a paper on Johnson’s “Life of Dryden” that my English professor said she enjoyed. (Praise, when trusted, endures.) I was new to the biographer and his subject but the attraction to both was instantaneous and lasting. Read the life for Johnson’s amusing account of Dryden’s funeral and for such reflections as this:

 

“Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.”

 

Johnson quotes with approval Pope’s assessment of Dryden as translator: “the most noble and spirited translation that I know in any language.” Dryden translated Virgil, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, Theocritus, Plutarch and Homer. I remember his version of Horace’s Ode I.9. The final stanzas are a lovely paean to youth and young love:

 

“Secure those golden early joyes,

  That Youth unsowr’d with sorrow bears,          

E’re with’ring time the taste destroyes,   

  With sickness and unwieldy years!        

For active sports, for pleasing rest,          

This is the time to be possest;

The best is but in season best.

 

“The pointed hour of promis’d Bliss,       

  The pleasing whisper in the dark,          

The half unwilling willing kiss,     

  The laugh that guides thee to the mark,

When the kind Nymph wou’d coyness feign,     

And hides but to be found again; 

These, these are joyes the Gods for Youth ordain.”