Francis Turner Palgrave

Francis Turner Palgrave Poems

Francis Turner Palgrave Biography

Francis Turner Palgrave (28 September 1824 - 24 October 1897) was a British critic and poet. He was born at Great Yarmouth, the eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, the historian and his wife Elizabeth Turner, daughter of the banker Dawson Turner. His brothers were William Gifford Palgrave, Inglis Palgrave and Reginald Palgrave. His childhood was spent at Yarmouth and at his father's house in Hampstead. At fourteen he was sent as a day-boy to Charterhouse; and in 1843, having in the meanwhile travelled extensively in Italy and other parts of the continent, he won a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1846 he interrupted his university career to serve as assistant private secretary to Gladstone, but returned, to Oxford the next year, and took a first class in Literae Humaniores. From 1847 to 1862 he was fellow of Exeter College, and in 1849 entered the Education Department at Whitehall. In 1850 he accepted the vice-principalship of Kneller Hall Training College at Twickenham. There he came into contact with Alfred Lord Tennyson, and laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. When the training college was abandoned, Palgrave returned to Whitehall in 1855, becoming examiner in the Education Department, and eventually assistant secretary. He married, in 1862, Cecil Grenville Milnes, daughter of James Milnes-Gaskell. In 1884 he resigned his position at the Education Department, and in the following year succeeded John Campbell Shairp as professor of poetry at Oxford. He died in London, and was buried in the cemetery on Barnes Common. Palgrave published both criticism and poetry, but his work as a critic was by far the more important. His Visions of England (1880-1881) has dignity and lucidity, but little of the "natural magic" which the greatest of his predecessors in the Oxford chair considered rightly to be the test of inspiration. His last volume of poetry, Amenophis, appeared in 1892. His criticism is considered to demonstrate fine and sensitive tact, quick intuitive perception, and generally sound judgment. His Handbook to the Fine Arts Collection, International Exhibition, 1862, and his Essays on Art (1866), though flawed, were full of striking judgments strikingly expressed. His Landscape in Poetry (1897) showed wide knowledge and critical appreciation of one of the most attractive aspects of poetic interpretation. But Palgrave's principal contribution to the development of literary taste was contained in his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed. Palgrave followed it with a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), and a second series of the Golden Treasury (1897), including the work of later poets, but in neither of these was quite the same exquisiteness of judgment preserved. Among his other works were The Passionate Pilgrim (1858), a volume of selections from Robert Herrick entitled Chrysomela (1877), a memoir of Arthur Hugh Clough (1862) and a critical essay on Sir Walter Scott (1866) prefixed to an edition of his poems.)

The Best Poem Of Francis Turner Palgrave

A Crusader's Tomb

1230

Unnamed, unknown:--his hands across his breast
Set in sepulchral rest,
In yon low cave-like niche the warrior lies,
--A shrine within a shrine,--
Full of gray peace, while day to darkness dies.

Then the forgotten dead at midnight come
And throng their chieftain's tomb,
Murmuring the toils o'er which they toil'd, alive,
The feats of sword and love;
And all the air thrills like a summer hive.

--How so, thou say'st!--This is the poet's right!
He looks with larger sight
Than they who hedge their view by present things,
The small, parochial world
Of sight and touch: and what he sees, he sings.

The steel-shell'd host, that, gleaming as it turns,
Like autumn lightning burns,
A moment's azure, the fresh flags that glance
As cornflowers o'er the corn,
Till war's stern step show like a gala dance,

He also sees; and pierces to the heart,
Scanning the genuine part
Each Red-Cross pilgrim plays: Some, gold-enticed;
By love or lust or fame
Urged; or who yearn to kiss the grave of Christ

And find their own, life-wearied:--Motley band!
O! ere they quit the Land
How maim'd, how marr'd, how changed from all that pride
In which so late they left
Orwell or Thames, with sails out-swelling wide

And music tuneable with the timing oar
Clear heard from shore to shore;
All Europe streaming to the mystic East!
--Now on their sun-smit ranks
The dusky squadrons close in vulture-feast,

And that fierce Day-star's blazing ball their sight
Sears with excess of light;
Or through dun sand-clouds the blue scimitar's edge
Slopes down like fire from heaven,
Mowing them as the thatcher mows the sedge.

Then many a heart remember'd, as the skies
Grew dark on dying eyes,
Sweet England; her fresh fields and gardens trim;
Her tree-embower'd halls;
And the one face that was the world to him.

--And one who fought his fight and held his way,
Through life's long latter day
Moving among the green, green English meads,
Ere in this niche he took
His rest, oft 'mid his kinsfolk told the deeds

Of that gay passage through the Midland sea;
Cyprus and Sicily;
And how the Lion-Heart o'er the Moslem host
Triumph'd in Ascalon
Or Acre, by the tideless Tyrian coast,

Yet never saw the vast Imperial dome,
Nor the thrice-holy Tomb:--
--As that great vision of the hidden Grail
By bravest knights of old
Unseen:--seen only of pure Parcivale.

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