The English Lyric 41 



A cry from the roaring sea overpowers me this night, 

 And it is not easy to relieve me; 

 Common after excess succeeds adversity. 



A cry from the roaring sea comes upon the winds : 

 The mighty and beneficent God has caused it! 

 Common after excess is want. 



A cry from the roaring sea 



Impels me from my resting-place this night; 



Common after excess is far-extending destruction. 



The grave of Seithenhin the weak-minded 

 Between Caer Cenedir and the shore 

 Of the great sea and Cinran. 



Seithenhin, it will be remembered, was a drunkard through whose 

 negligence a gap was rent in the sea-dyke and a city's population 

 swallowed up. In this poem the bard imaginatively hears the 

 cry of the drowning people ringing up with the roar of the sea, 

 which he magically personifies in the Celtic way, throwing it 

 under control of witchery. But the structure interests most. 

 There are three nearly coordinate developments : — of the event 

 described, of the poet's emotion, of his moralizing reflection. 

 The three are interwoven and carried forward by a double re- 

 petend, first verse echoing first and third echoing third, while 

 because of well-knit theme, in place of monotonous reduplication 

 the echoing verses admit progressive development. And the 

 poem, trending toward dramatic development of mood, is made 

 wholly self-sufficient, quite independent of music. 



I have cited these Welsh poems as types, with inference as 

 to the origin of similar forms in English poetry. They appear to 

 show a disintegration of the ballad, the music-form of it made 

 dominant in the first instance, and then, in the second, subordi- 

 nated to a new, subjective dramatic evolution. In Caroline 

 poetry we find parallel instances, showing, it seems to me, the 

 ruling instinct for singing, native to the period. Certainly the 

 following, from Robert Jones' Fift Booke of Ayres — Onely for 

 the Lute, the Basvyoll and voice, 6 has neither dramatic nor song 

 movement : 



6 B. H. Blackwell, Oxford, 1901. 



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