Poetry
The Culprit Fay
Joseph Rodman Drake · 1816
Opening lines
'Tis the middle watch of a summer's night—
The earth is dark, but the heavens are bright;
Nought is seen in the vault on high
But the moon, and the stars, and the cloudless sky,
And the flood which rolls its milky hue,
A river of light on the welkin blue.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
At midnight, on the banks of the Hudson, the fairy court assembles to judge one of its own, guilty of having loved a mortal. The sentence is twofold: he must watch for the leap of the sturgeon and, despite the spirits of the waters, bring back a drop from its bow of foam to wash the stain from his wings, then climb to the sky to follow a shooting star and take the last spark of its train to relight his extinguished lamp. He sets out armed with an acorn helmet, a cuirass made from a bee's golden waistcoat and a shield cut from a ladybird's shell.
Context
Nothing of it appeared in the author's lifetime; he had asked his wife to destroy his unpublished verse. One of his daughters had nineteen of his poems printed in 1835, by George Dearborn in New York, and dedicated them to the poet Halleck, her father's friend. Edgar Allan Poe devoted a severe article to the collection, in which he took apart the poem's imagination, which he judged in places childish and sublimely ridiculous. A scholarly edition of the author's life and works appeared in 1935.
Who it is for
A narrative poem of six hundred and forty short lines, in couplets, with no French translation. The inventory of tiny weapons occupies a large part of the text and is either its pleasure or its tedium.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's best poem, it inspired a rhapsody for orchestra by the composer Henry Kimball Hadley in 1908.
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