Mauberley 63Dr. Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield stands as the archtypal repudiation
of the vague, vain, and irrelevant claims of patronage; but the street of
literary commerce to which Johnson turned has also lost its power to support
the artist:
Beside this thoroughfare
The sale of half-hose has
Long since superseded the cultivation
Of Pierian roses.The Envoiwhich follows is a consummate ironic climax; against these
squalors is asserted the audacious Shakespearean vocation of preserving
transient beauty against the tooth of time (cf. the end of the first Propertius
poem); against the halting and adroitly short-winded quatrains of the ‘dumb-
born book’ is set a magnificently sustained melodic line:
Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity....Seventeenth-century music, the union of poetry with song, immortal beauty,
vocalic melody, treasure shed on the air, transcend for a single page the fogs
and squabbles of the preceding sections in a poem that ironically yearns for
the freedom and power which it displays in every turn of phrase, in
triumphant vindication of those years of fishing by obstinate isles. The poet
who was buried in the first section amid such deprecation rises a Phoenix to
confront his immolators, asserting the survival of at least this song
When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone.There follows a five-part coda in which the Mauberley personacomes
to the fore; gathering up the motifs of the earlier sections, the enigmatic
stanzas mount from-intensity to intensity to chronicle the death of the