I shared a sonnet by the Irish poet, biographer and literary critic Edward Dowden yesterday, and here is another by him… with the intriguing title and subject ‘Dawinism in Morals’; I am sure if my group had been given this to discuss when I was studying for my degree there would have been fierce debate about it… I’m not going to enter such a debate now, but just enjoy the language and the images conjured… ‘a barbarous past… mixed with fresh clay’, ‘the dead chief’s ghost’, ‘the roving clan’, ‘ancient sunsets and lost hours’… Marvellous!
Dowden was educated at Queen’s College in Cork, and attended Trinity College in Dublin where he became professor of English literature at Trinity at the age of twenty-four. he moved to England and lectured at both Oxford and Cambridge during the 1890’s. Dowden is the first person who looked at Shakespeare and his work in terms of his development, both as a writer of individual works, and his plays as a body of work. He wrote not only for other academics, but for ordinary people too, opening intellectual debate about Shakespeare more widely; literature should be a part of not separate from ordinary life. He became the Irish Commissioner of Education in Ireland, a trustee of the National Library of Ireland, secretary to the Irish Liberal Union and vice-president of the Irish Unionist Alliance. Altogether a great man.
Darwinism in Morals
High instincts, dim perversions, sacred fears,
–Whence issuing? Are they but the brain’s amassed
Tradition, shapings of a barbarous past,
Remoulded ever by the younger years,
Mixed with fresh clay, and kneaded with new tears?
No more? The dead chief’s ghost a shadow cast
Across the roving clan, and thence at last
Comes God, who in the soul His law uprears?
Is this the whole? Has not the Future powers
To match the Past,–attractions, pulsings, tides,
And voices for purged ears? Is all our light
The glow of ancient sunsets and lost hours?
Advance no banners up heaven’s eastern sides?
Trembles the margin with no portent bright?
Lois Elsden 