There's a certain mood -- real but infrequent for me -- in which this is not awful. It seems to me that old Sam must have recognized the grating disjunction of form and content here, must have known he was loading the poor beast with language it couldn't bear, and so in more charitable moments I look for what might lie outside the poem that inspired such excess. Most of the time, though, I'm inclined to turn away in embarrassment, as I do from so much of Romanticism, even the sainted Keats.
Richard Wakefield
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