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Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have disappeared long ago. Nor is Clarinda's love-poet, Sylvander, the real Burns either. But he tells us himself: "These English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.
If there are fifty applicants for a benefit in our gift, one of the fifty wins his way to our preference at first sight, though with no better right to it than his fellows. We can no more say why we like the man than we can say why we fall in love with a woman in whom no one else would discover a charm. "There is," says a Latin love-poet, "no why or wherefore in liking."
Now Adonis is supposed to be the same with Bacchus; and there are a great many rites in both their sacrifices which confirm this opinion. Others will have Adonis to be Bacchus's paramour; and Phanocles an amorous love-poet writes thus, Bacchus on hills the fair Adonis saw, And ravished him, and reaped a wondrous joy.
Sometimes in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself. She had two eyes as blue as Heaven, Ten times as warm they shone; And yet her heart was hard and cold As any shell or stone.
It is as a love-poet that Gower thinks of Chaucer when paying a tribute to him in his own verse; it is to the attacks made upon him in his character as a love-poet, and to his consciousness of what he has achieved as such, that he gives expression in the "Prologue" to the "Legend of Good Women," where his fair advocate tells the God of Love:
And so he resumes his favourite theme once more, to tell, as the "Man of Law" says, "of lovers up and down, more than Ovid makes mention of in his old 'Epistles." This fact alone that our first great English poet was also our first English love-poet, properly so called would have sufficed to transform our poetic literature through his agency.
The burden of his song is "Si douce est la marguerite:" he has learnt the ways of French gallantry as if to the manner born, and thus becomes, as it were without hesitation or effort, the first English love-poet.
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