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The Trojans came to oppose their landing, and at the first onset Protesilaus fell by the hand of Hector. Protesilaus had left at home his wife, Laodamia, who was most tenderly attached to him. When the news of his death reached her she implored the gods to be allowed to converse with him only three hours. The request was granted.
'How impossible that it should have been only yesterday afternoon I was lounging up here in the heat, by the pool where the stream rises, watching the white butter-flies on the turf, and reading "Laodamia!" "Laodamia!" she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 'Is it one of those you like best? 'Yes, he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite of the umbrella.
The new poems were "Yarrow Visited," "The Force of Prayer," "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," "Laodamia," "Yew-Trees," "A Night Piece," etc., and it was chiefly on these that Lamb made his comments. John Lamb afterwards gave the picture to Charles, who made it a wedding present to Mrs. Dorothy Wordsworth. Excursion, book v. Excuse this maddish letter; I am too tired to write in formâ.
Nothing could be more different from the style of the sonnets, or of the Ode to Duty, or of Laodamia. And yet both the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were almost always noble; nor is the transition from the one style to the other a perplexing or abnormal thing.
Mercury led Protesilaus back to the upper world, and when he died a second time Laodamia died with him. There was a story that the nymphs panted elm trees round his grave which grew very well till they were high enough to command a view of Troy, and then withered away, while fresh branches sprang from the roots. Wordsworth has taken the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia for the subject of a poem.
If you admit these passages to be fine poetry, I wish much that you would justify me further by reading, out of the second volume, the two poems called 'Laodamia' and 'Tintern Abbey' at page 172 and page 161. I will not ask you to read any more; but I dare say you will rush on of your own account, in which case there is a fine ode upon the 'Power of Sound' in the same volume.
"Laodamia" and "Dion" are classical gems without a flaw; many of the sonnets unite original thought and poetic vividness with a perfection hardly to be surpassed; above all, "The Excursion" rolls on its thousands of blank verse lines with the soul-felt harmony of a divine hymn pealed forth from a cathedral organ.
We know him from other sources to have been a man of really warm and tender feeling; in the poetry which he wrote as laureate of the world of fashion he keeps this out of sight, and outdoes them all in cynical worldliness. It is only when writing in the person of a woman as in the Phyllis or Laodamia of the Heroides that he allows himself any approach to tenderness.
Wordsworth has taken the story of Protesilaus and Laodamia for the subject of a poem. It seems the oracle had declared that victory should be the lot of that party from which should fall the first victim to the war.
If you wish to see a failure, try the ghost, the moral but not affable ghost, in Wordsworth's "Laodamia." It is blasphemy to ask the question, but is the ghost in "Hamlet" quite a success? Do we not see and hear a little too much of him? Macbeth's airy and viewless dagger is really much more successful by way of suggestion.
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