POEMS BY CHRISTOPHER SMART (326 pp.] Edited, with an Introduction & Notes, by Robert BrittainPrinceton University ($4).
When Poet Robert Browning stumbled across a devotional poem entitled A Song to David, by one Christopher Smart (1722-1771), he was both awed and delighted. Poet Smart's Song was a haunting combination of the lyrical and the intellectual, clothed in words that threw fresh lights and colors upon many a common thing:
Where rain in clasping boughs inclos'd,
And -vines with oranges dispos'd,
Embow'r the social laugh . . .
The nectarine his strong tint imbibes,
And apples of ten thousand tribes,
And quick peculiar...
