Summary
Oldham's talent manifested at a young age, Dryden reflects, so he doesn't necessarily need to age more in order to get better. Aging might have helped him become a more eloquent user of English, but as a satirist, wit is more important than perfect phrasing anyway. These days, not enough poets make the relatively sympathetic error of valuing wit over perfection in meter and rhyme. The fruits of Oldham's labors, a product of his youth, reveal a quick-wittedness that might have actually grown less interesting as it mellowed with time. Finally, Dryden wishes his friend farewell, comparing him to Marcellus, a Roman military leader. He observes that Oldham is crowned with glory, with laurels and ivy adorning his head, even as he is in a place of gloom and darkness.
Analysis
This poem offers not just a look at Dryden's particular relationship to Oldham, but his attitudes toward satire more broadly. He argues here that poetry depends on several disparate types of intelligence or beauty: an aesthetically-oriented one in which sound-based elements like meter are of the highest importance, and a more conceptual one in which incisiveness of ideas matters most. To Dryden, these are both important virtues, and they work in collaboration with one another. The best poetry, he suggests, is both aesthetically beautiful and conceptually clever. At the same time, a satirist should value the conceptual over the aesthetic, and Oldham's relative lack of delicacy in matters of meter and rhyme is forgivable. When describing this indelicacy Dryden demonstrates it himself, with the line "Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line." This line navigates iambic pentameter awkwardly, requiring stress to fall unnaturally on the words "the" and "of." This can be understood as a bit of good-humoured mockery, in which the somber mood of an elegy is granted a bit of levity through a parody of the beloved Oldham's style. At the same time, we can understand Dryden's parodic subverting of iambic pentameter to pertain to his thoughts on satire more broadly. As much as aesthetic pleasure should be valued, Dryden seems to hint, aesthetic choices can also reflect or evoke the concepts being described, even if this results in a form that is not conventionally "pleasing." Roughness, in this context, is a description of Oldham's own style, rather than a stylistic flaw.
Because Dryden is both poking fun at his subject and expressing mournful admiration, he has to strike a careful balance, ensuring that he doesn't come across as cruel or uncaring. He limits his explicit mockery to a few lines and keeps it gentle, always backing up to explain why Oldham's flaws (lack of technical prowess) are actually signs of a deeper intelligence, or at least are minimally important. There's another balance that he has to strike in the final lines, as he veers away from making fun of Oldham and begins to wrap up his elegy and say his farewell to his subject. Now, it is important for Dryden to balance praise of Oldham with sadness over his death. The poem's final lines are surprising in their submission to gloom. Dryden first praises his friend, comparing him to the general Marcellus, and describing the gloriousness of his legacy. But, at the very end of the poem, he seems to admit that none of this grand legacy matters, at least not to Oldham himself. Oldham is now surrounded by the darkness of death, regardless of how much Dryden or others love his work. One way to understand the dark, moody tone of this final line is as yet another tribute to Oldham, one that does in a sense celebrate his life and work despite its focus on death and oblivion. Dryden and Oldham are both satirists, known for sharp comic commentary and lucid observation. By talking about Oldham's death in a clear-eyed way rather than ending on a note of optimistic veneration, Dryden taps into the poetic tradition that he claims to have learned from Oldham. This honest, slightly prickly discussion of life and grief alike in all their messiness are echoed in the messiness of Dryden's rhyme scheme, which breaks from its strict pattern of heroic couplets just once. Five lines from the end of the poem, with the line "But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme," Dryden chooses not to move on and begin a new rhyming couplet (as we expect him to). Instead, he adds a third line to a preexisting couplet, rhyming "rhyme" with "prime" and "time." Even as he describes the way that time might have mellowed Oldham's writing into neater rhymes, Oldham ironically disrupts his own "sweets of rhyme," in a reflection of the way Oldham's own life and poetic development have been cut short and thrown off course. This line also breaks the iambic pentameter meter in a striking way, using an entire extra two syllables, and making it impossible to miss the moment of subversion and disruption.
