Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Thomas Gordon Hake (18091895)Critical Introduction by Thomas Humphry Ward
[Born 1809, of an old Devonshire family on the father’s side, his mother being a Gordon, aunt of Gordon of Khartoum. Educated at Lewes, at St. George’s Hospital, and at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, where he acquired remarkable medical and surgical knowledge. His very lively Memoirs of Eighty Years, published 1892, show that during the first half of his long life his mind was occupied with these studies; and, except for one or two youthful ventures in verse and prose—the drama called Piromides and the romance Vates—he gave himself up to science, not to poetry. In 1866, however, he privately printed The World’s Epitaph, which led to an intimacy with D. G. Rossetti and his group of friends. His medical assistance made him for some years, as W. M. Rossetti said, “the earthly Providence of the Rossetti family.” On the other hand, their influence helped forward his revived poetical instincts, and between 1872 and 1890 he wrote and published many volumes of verse, including Madeline (1871), Parables and Tales (1872), New Symbols (1876), and The New Day (1890); and in 1894 Mrs. Meynell printed a volume of Selections from his works, with a preface. He died in January, 1895.]
None the less, one clever artist and writer attached to that circle could not resist giving a rather malicious account of Hake’s method of composition. This was W. B. Scott, who in his Autobiographical Notes (ii, p. 178) thus describes Hake at Kelmscott, whither in 1874 he had taken Rossetti for a rest-cure. While young George Hake was attending to the patient,
The picture is overdone, but it helps to explain the elaboration which sometimes causes Hake’s poems to be not easy to understand at a first reading. His prose Memoirs of Eighty Years (1892) contains some pages of poetical theory which also, from their very abstruseness, help to explain why the poems are difficult. But their music makes a universal appeal; their reading of Nature has the exactitude to be expected from a trained observer; they are, as Rossetti so often insisted, thoroughly original. The two longer ones here given are from the volume which his literary friends thought the best, New Symbols; two sonnets follow from The New Day, following his beloved Shakespeare in their form and dwelling in thought upon the good things that are to follow when a close study of Nature shall have driven away the clouds with which Ignorance darkens the spirit of man.