'The old notes still are new'

 Born on this day in 1840 was (Henry) Austin Dobson, a poet and essayist who is barely remembered today, but left some interesting work behind. Strongly influenced by French literature, Dobson delighted, like many writers of the late nineteenth century, in mastering a wide range of poetical forms – this was the period when the British Museum was, in Edmund Gosse's phrase, 'a hive of rondeliers'. Triolets, villanelles, sestinas, even the pantoum  – all were within Dobson's range. But he could write in a plainer, more discursive style too – as here, where he ponders the future of poetry in 'our prose-bound community' and sets out his poetic credo, a credo that seems to me pretty sound: that 'song must sing', that form matters, and that, in the right hands, 'the old notes still are new' and 'the Truth that pleased will please again'. The closing line refers to the scene in the Iliad when Hector comes to take his farewell of his wife Andromache and his son Astyanax, and leaves for what Andromache is convinced will be his certain death...

On the Future of Poetry    

Bards of the Future! you that come
  With striding march, and roll of drum,
  What will your newest challenge be
  To our prose-bound community?
  What magic will you find to stir
  The limp and languid listener?
  Will it be daring and dramatic?
  Will it be frankly democratic?
  Will Pegasus return again
In guise of modern aeroplane,
Descending from a cloudless blue
To drop on us a bomb or two?
I know not. Far be it from me
To darken dark futurity;
Still less to render more perplexed
The last vagary, or the next.
Leave Pindus Hill to those who list,
Iconoclast or anarchist —
So be it. "They that break shall pay."
I stand upon the ancient way.
I hold it for a certain thing,
That, blank or rhyming, song must sing;
And more, that what is good for verse,
Need not, by dint of rhyme, grow worse.
I hold that they who deal in rhyme
Must take the standpoint of the time —
But not to catch the public ear,
As mountebank or pulpiteer;
That the old notes are still the new,
If the musician's touch be true —
Nor can the hand that knows its trade
Achieve the trite and ready-made;
That your first theme is Human Life,
Its hopes and fears, its love and strife —
A theme no custom can efface,
Common, but never commonplace;
For this, beyond all doubt, is plain:
The Truth that pleased will please again,
And move men as in bygone years
When Hector's wife smiled through her tears.