THE PRE-ROMANTICS 76In another (1,218) he writes about the sad memories evoked in his mind by
the discovery among his clothes of her wom-out handkerchief with her
embroidered initials long after her death.
Mutran's first volume of verse is full of such deeply subjective love poetry
of varying degrees of emotional intensity.^16 It is therefore strange to find
Mandur and his disciple Dusuql asserting that Mutran seldom expressed
his personal emotion;^17 Mandur even attributes that partly to the poet's rigid
Roman Catholic upbringing, partly to what Mutran himself described as his
great propensity for self-examination which may have made it difficult for
him to let himself be carried away by his emotions. However, in Mutran's
poetry love is always idealized and free from any sensual or sexual overtones.
In 'My Moon and That in the Sky' (i,23) the conventional comparison be-
tween the beloved and the full moon is set against a natural background
drawn with such sensitivity that the poet's passion becomes ennobled and
almost spiritualized. In 'The Star and I: a mutual complaint' <i,29) Mutran
imagines the star to be lovesick like him and suffering from disappointed
passion for an unattainable object. Here the poet's beloved is likened to a crea-
ture of light. In 'The Two Pigeons' (i,73) we find a deeply felt description of the
lament of a pigeon over its departed mate which inspires the poet to lament his
own solitude and to appeal to his beloved not to continue to desert him: al-
though the situation is highly traditional, the intensity of the feeling makes the
experience unmistakably genuine. Moreover Mutran's detailed account of the
sufferings of the bird reveals the extension of the poet's sympathy so as to
include other living creatures, which we findinmanypoemslike,forinstance,
'The Sparrow' (i,101) or Trom a Stranger to a Strange Bird' (n,21) — a feature
one associates with Romantic poetry. Significantly enough the poet tells us that
he composed the last-mentioned poem near the statue of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau in Geneva. In fact, if we examine it we find that it embodies many of the
main themes of Romanticism: complete self-absorption, nostalgia, the spiri-
tual appeal of nature, idealized unattainable love, together with the poet's
power of sympathy evinced in the detailed and loving description of the song
bird. In the beginning its song soothes the poet's heart, but as it goes on it gradu-
ally arouses his grief over the loss of his beloved, whose grave he calls upon the
bird to visit in order to convey the poet's feeling of longing and his yearning
to be united with the spirit of his beloved. Mutran continued to write poems on
the anniversary of the death of his beloved, poems which, while revealing the
poet's singular faithfulness to her memory, express a quiet sort of grief, some-
what etherealized by being set against idealized natural background. Typical
examples are 'A Rose that Died' (n,10) and "The Story of a Rose' (n,288).
Mutran's excessive idealization of woman at times makes one suspect that
he was probably more interested in an abstract ideal than in the warm and