Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Richard Watson Dixon (18331900)Critical Introduction by Henry Charles Beeching
[R. W. Dixon was born May 5, 1833, and died in January, 1900. He was a schoolfellow of Edward Burne-Jones at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and carried on the friendship at Oxford, where, with William Morris and others of the set, he founded the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. His first volume, Christ’s Company and other Poems, appeared in 1861; a second, Historical Odes and other Poems, followed in 1864; in the previous year he had won the Oxford prize for a sacred poem, the subject being St. John in Patmos. He took Orders in 1858, and after serving for a few years as second master of Carlisle High School, became a Minor Canon of the Cathedral. In 1875 he was presented to the vicarage of Hayton, and in 1883 to that of Warkworth, both in the same diocese. The first volume of his History of the Church of England from the abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction appeared in 1877, the fifth and last after his death. The rest of his poetical work was published in the following order: Mano, 1883; Odes and Eclogues, 1884; Lyrical Poems, 1887; The Story of Eudocia and her Brothers, 1888; Last Poems (a posthumous volume), 1905. In 1895 a selection of his later poems was published under the title of Songs and Odes; and in 1909 a larger selection with a memoir by Robert Bridges, and present Poet Laureate.]
His first book, Christ’s Company, published in 1861, three years after Morris’s Defence of Guenevere, had even less chance of attracting popular attention. The Defence of Guenevere, though it might surprise by occasional quaintness and offend by the absence of Tennysonian polish, contained stories of human passion which are at any rate intelligible, and, as we know, it made on many sympathetic minds an ineffaceable impression. Dixon’s poems were at the opposite pole to these straightforward tales in easy verse. The first impression they gave was of queerness. The vocabulary was queer, there were words like agraffes, stroom, graith, which are not known to the dictionary, and lines like “the flax was bolled upon my crine;” the rhymes were queer and assertive, “only, conely;” “writhing, high thing;” often the syntax was queer. “Who,” asks St. Peter, “shall ban my sorrow?” and this is the answer he gives:
But no less evident to an attentive reader is the fact that in each poem the writer has something to say which he is earnest about saying, and that he is saying it as well as he can, with his eye upon some ideal beauty which he is endeavouring to reproduce. What is unfortunate is that through want of skill the artist’s hand does not always answer to his imagination, and thus the reader is sorely puzzled to make out the meaning. St. Mary Magdalene is perhaps the most successful of these early poems. It has the accent of Rossetti, and could never have been written without his influence. But it has a beauty of its own; and if it had been furnished with an argument, so that the ordinary reader could have mastered the general meaning, it might have become as popular in the Butterfield period of Churchmanship as many of Miss Rossetti’s picturesque poems. The St. John contains a fine series of pictures of “the seven archangels with his army each,” done in the same Pre-Raphaelite manner. And many of the descriptions of natural scenery with which the book abounds are in the same style of careful detail.
Dixon published no more poetry for twenty years. In 1878 the late Father Hopkins, S. J., who admired the early volumes, introduced himself to him and then made him known to Mr. Robert Bridges, and the stimulus of this poetic sympathy provoked an aftermath in a series of fine odes, dealing chiefly with the thoughts and experiences of age, which remain Dixon’s most original and effective contribution to poetry.