"The fiend, consistent, who had steeled all hearts / Against their feeling for ingenuous arts,"
— Stockdale, Percival (1736-1811)
Work Title
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and W. Clarke, By W. Pople
Date
1810
Metaphor
"The fiend, consistent, who had steeled all hearts / Against their feeling for ingenuous arts,"
Metaphor in Context
In that cursed land, whence Virtue long had flown;
Where vice, gigantick vice, spurned either throne;
Murdered the monarch of it's fair domain;
Waged impious war with Heaven's eternal reign;--
With disposition faithful to her creed,
Blackened each hour with some atrocious deed;
The hoary priest was butchered in the fane;
Beauty's resistless pathos pled, in vain:
The fiend, consistent, who had steeled all hearts
Against their feeling for ingenuous arts,
By which, at once, we're strengthened, and refined,
By which blows all the beauty of the mind;
With a new tragic pall enforced her scene:
Obdurate, slew, a fair, a helpless queen;
(Yet genuine virtue, true religion thought
Her sufferings had atoned for every fault.)
Ingenious, next, her tenets to display;
To fix her civil, and her moral sway,
More poison still she breathes;--her subject elves
Lead to the church an emblem of themselves;
To a bright deity exalt a whore;
Their mimick Freedom, in the trull, adore;
Where Piety, and Christ, were throned, before.
Where vice, gigantick vice, spurned either throne;
Murdered the monarch of it's fair domain;
Waged impious war with Heaven's eternal reign;--
With disposition faithful to her creed,
Blackened each hour with some atrocious deed;
The hoary priest was butchered in the fane;
Beauty's resistless pathos pled, in vain:
The fiend, consistent, who had steeled all hearts
Against their feeling for ingenuous arts,
By which, at once, we're strengthened, and refined,
By which blows all the beauty of the mind;
With a new tragic pall enforced her scene:
Obdurate, slew, a fair, a helpless queen;
(Yet genuine virtue, true religion thought
Her sufferings had atoned for every fault.)
Ingenious, next, her tenets to display;
To fix her civil, and her moral sway,
More poison still she breathes;--her subject elves
Lead to the church an emblem of themselves;
To a bright deity exalt a whore;
Their mimick Freedom, in the trull, adore;
Where Piety, and Christ, were throned, before.
Categories
Provenance
Searching "heart" and "steel" in HDIS (Poetry)
Citation
Text from The Poetical Works of Percival Stockdale. 2 vols. (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, and W. Clarke, By W. Pople, 1810).
Date of Entry
06/11/2005
