Henry Austin Dobson

Henry Austin Dobson Poems

Just for a space I met her –
Just for a day in the train!
It began when she feared it would wet her,
That tiniest spurtle of rain:
...

I INTENDED an Ode,
   And it turn'd to a Sonnet
It began a la mode,
I intended an Ode;
...

Fame is a food that dead men eat,-
I have no stomach for such meat.
In little light and narrow room,
They eat it in the silent tomb,
...

Rose kissed me to-day.
Will she kiss me tomorrow?
Let it be as it may,
...

HERE in this sequester'd close
Bloom the hyacinth and rose,
Here beside the modest stock
Flaunts the flaring hollyhock;
...

King Philip had vaunted his claims;
He had sworn for a year he would sack us;
With an army of heathenish names
...

When Spring comes laughing
By vale and hill,
By wind-flower walking
And daffodil,-
...

'More Poets yet!'-I hear him say,
Arming his heavy hand to slay;-
'Despite my skill and 'swashing blow,'
They seem to sprout where'er I go;-
...

Look at his pretty face for just one minute !
His braided frock and dainty buttoned shoes,
His firm-shut hand, the favorite plaything in it,
...

YES; when the ways oppose—
When the hard means rebel,
Fairer the work out-grows,—
More potent far the spell.
...

Shade of Herrick, Muse of Locker,
Help me sing of Knickerbocker!
Boughton, had you bid me chant
...

Rondeau

IN after days when grasses high
O'er-top the stone where I shall lie,
...

Here is this leafy place
Quiet he lies,
Cold, with his sightless face
Turn'd to the skies:
...

O SINGER of the field and fold,
Theocritus! Pan’s pipe was thine,—
Thine was the happier Age of Gold.
...

O BABBLING Spring, than glass more clear,
Worthy of wreath and cup sincere,
To-morrow shall a kid be thine
...

Melek the sultan, tired and wan,
Nodded at noon on the divan.
...

DEAR COSMOPOLITAN,—I know
I should address you a Rondeau,
Or else announce what I ’ve to say
At least en Ballade fratriseé
...

Charles,—for it seems you wish to know,—
You wonder what could scare me so,
And why, in this long-locked bureau,
With trembling fingers,—
...

I intended an Ode,
And it turned to a Sonnet.
It began à la mode,
I intended an Ode;
...

“IN teacup-times”! The style of dress
Would suit your beauty, I confess;
BELINDA-like, the patch you ’d wear;
...

Henry Austin Dobson Biography

Commonly known as Austin Dobson, was an English poet and essayist. Life He was born at Plymouth, the eldest son of George Clarisse Dobson, a civil engineer, of French descent. When he was about eight, the family moved to Holyhead, and his first school was at Beaumaris in Anglesey. He was later educated at Coventry, and the Gymnase, Strasbourg. He returned at the age of sixteen with the intention of becoming a civil engineer. At the beginning of his career, he continued to study at the South Kensington School of Art, in his spare time, but without definite ambition. In December 1856 he entered the Board of Trade, gradually rising to the rank of principal in the harbour department, from which he retired in the autumn of 1901. In 1868, he had married Frances Mary, daughter of the distinguished civil engineer Nathaniel Beardmore (1816–1872) of Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, and settled at Ealing. He died in 1921 and is buried in the Westminster Cemetery, Uxbridge Rd, Hanwell, Middlesex. Works His official career was uneventful, but as a poet and biographer he was distinguished. Those who study his work are struck by its maturity. It was about 1864 that he turned his attention to writing original prose and verse, and some of his earliest work was his best. It was not until 1868 that the appearance of St Paul's, a magazine edited by Anthony Trollope, gave Harry Dobson an opportunity and an audience; and during the next six years he contributed some of his favourite poems, including "Tu Quoque," "A Gentleman of the Old School," "A Dialogue from Plato," and "Une Marquise." Many of his poems in their original form were illustrated—some, indeed, were written to support illustrations. By the autumn of 1873 Dobson had produced enough verse for a volume, and published Vignettes in Rhyme, which quickly went through three editions. During the period of their appearance in the magazine the poems had received unusual attention, George Eliot, among others, encouraging the anonymous author. The little book immediately introduced him to a larger public. The period was an interesting one for a first appearance, since the air was full of metrical experiment. Swinburne's bold excursions into classical metre had broken new ground; it was hopeless to attempt to compete, and the poets of the day were looking for fresh forms and variations. Early in 1876, a small body of English poets discovered the French forms of Théodore de Banville, Clement Marot and François Villon, and determined to introduce them into English verse. Austin Dobson, who had already made successful use of the triolet, was at the head of this movement, and in May 1876 he published in The Prodigals the first original ballade written in English. This he followed by English versions of the rondel, rondeau and villanelle. An article in the Cornhill Magazine by Edmund Gosse, "A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse," appearing in July 1877, simultaneously with Dobson's second volume, Proverbs in Porcelain, drew the general eye to the possibilities and achievements of the movement. The experiment was deemed a success. In 1883 Dobson published Old-World Idylls, which contained some of his most characteristic work. By this time his taste was gradually settling on the period with which it has since become almost exclusively associated; and the spirit of the 18th century was revived in "The Ballad of Beau Brocade" and in "The Story of Rosina", as nowhere else in modern English poetry. In "Beau Brocade", the pictorial quality of his work is at its very best. He has been compared with Randolph Caldecott, with which it has much in common; but Dobson's humour was not so "rollicking" and his portraiture not so broad as that of the illustrator of John Gilpin. His appeal was more intellectual. At the Sign of the Lyre (1885) was the next of Dobson's separate volumes of verse, and he also published a volume of Collected Poems (1897). At the Sign of the Lyre contains much variety. The admirably fresh and breezy "Ladies of St James's" has precisely the qualities we have traced in his other 18th-century poems; there are ballades and rondeaus, with all the earlier charm; and in "A Revolutionary Relic," as in "The Child Musician" of the Old-World Idylls, the poet reaches a depth of true pathos which he does not often attempt, but in which, when he seeks it, he never fails. Contrasting with these are the light occasional verses, influenced by Winthrop Mackworth Praed, but also quite individual. The chief novelty in At the Sign of the Lyre was the series of "Fables of Literature and Art," founded in manner upon John Gay. It is in these perhaps, more than in any other of his poems, that we see how Dobson interpenetrates the literature of fancy with the literature of judgment. After 1885 Dobson was engaged mainly in critical and biographical prose, by which he added considerably to the general knowledge of his favourite 18th century. His biographies of Henry Fielding (1883), Thomas Bewick (1884), Richard Steele (1886), Oliver Goldsmith (1888), Horace Walpole (1890) and William Hogarth (1879-1891-1897-1902-1907) are studies marked alike by assiduous research, sympathetic presentation and sound criticism. In Four Frenchwomen (1890), in the three series of Eighteenth-Century Vignettes (1892-1894-1896), and in The Paladin of Philanthropy (1899), which contain unquestionably his most delicate prose work, the accurate detail of each study is relieved by a charm of expression which could only be attained by a poet. In 1901 he collected his hitherto unpublished poems in a volume entitled Carmina Votiva. In 2005 the Industrial/Nu metal band, Industrial Frost, used the words of a Dobson poem called "Before Sedan" as the lyrics of a song of the same name.)

The Best Poem Of Henry Austin Dobson

Incognita

Just for a space I met her –
Just for a day in the train!
It began when she feared it would wet her,
That tiniest spurtle of rain:
So we tucked a great rug in the sashes,
And carefully padded the pane;
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
Longing to do it again!

Then it grew when she begged me to reach her
A dressing-case under the seat;
She was “really so tiny a creature,
That she needed a stool for her feet.! ”
Which was promptly arranged to her order
With a care that was even minute,
And a glimpse – of an open- worked border,
And a glance – of the fairyest boot.

Then it drooped, and revived at some hovels –
“Were they houses for men or for pigs? ”
Then it shifted to muscular novels,
With a little digression on prigs:
She thought “Wives and Daughters” “so jolly”;
“Had I read it? ” She knew when I had,
Like the rest, I should dote upon “Molly”;
And “poor Mrs Gaskell – how sad! ”

“Like Browning? ” “But so-so.” His proof lay
“Too deep for her frivolous mood,
That preferred your mere metrical soufflé
To the stronger poetical food;
Yet at times he was good – “as a tonic”;
Was Tennyson writing just now?
And was this new poet Byronic,
And clever, and naughty, or how?

Then we trifled with concerts and croquet,
Then she daintily dusted her face;
Then she sprinkled herself with “Ess Bouquet”,
Fished out from the foregoing case;
And we chattered of Gassier and Grisi,
And voted Aunt Sally a bore;
Discussed if the tight rope were easy,
Or Chopin much harder than Spohr.

And oh! The odd things that she quoted,
With the prettiest possible look,
And the price of two buns that she noted
In the prettiest possible book;
While her talk like a musical rillet
Flashed on with the hours that flew,
And the carriage, her smile seemed to fill it
With just enough summer – for Two.

Till at last in her corner, peeping
From a nest of rugs and of furs,
With the white shut eyelids sleeping
On those dangerous looks of hers,
She seemed like a snowdropp breaking,
Not wholly alive nor dead,
But with one blind impulse making
To the sounds of the spring overhead;

And I watched in the lamplights’s swerving
The shade of the down-dropped lid,
And the lip-line’s delicate curving,
Where a slumbering smile lay hid,
Till I longed that, rather than sever,
The train should shriek into space,
And carry us onward – for ever –
Me and that beautiful face.

But she suddenly woke in a fidget,
With fears she was “nearly at home”,
And talk of a certain Aunt Bridget,
Whom I mentally wished – well at Rome;
Got out at the very next station,
Looking back with a merry bon soir,
Adding, too, to my utter vexation,
A surplus, unkind Au Revoir.

So left me to muse on her graces,
To doze and to muse, till I dreamed
That we sailed through the sunniest places
In a glorified galley, it seemed;
But the cabin was made of a carriage,
And the ocean was Eau-de-Cologne,
And we split on a rock labelled MARRIAGE,
And I woke, - as cold as a stone.

And that’s how I lost her – a jewel,
Incognita – one in a crowd,
Not prudent enough to be cruel,
Not worldly enough to be proud.
It was just a shut lid and its lashes,
Just a few hours in a train,
And I sorrow in sackcloth and ashes,
Longing to see her again

Henry Austin Dobson Comments

Sylvia Frances Chan 20 June 2021

Of course I meant The late great Poet Mr. Henry Austin Dobson Sir! I do hope his family would read this.

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Sylvia Frances Chan 20 June 2021

CONGRATULATIONS being chosen as The Poet Of The Day! Today

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Cecil Harrison 31 May 2019

His paradox " Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go."

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