IILIZETTE WOODWORTH REESEMISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding.Her first collection is aptly named,A Handful of Lavender, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment withone. She has been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal.There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it! “Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards.Illustration of Lizette Woodworth ReeseMiss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one, being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems, by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her lines “To A White Lilac”:I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,Long-gone but unforgot;Wherein I had for guerdon and for dowerThat one thing I have not.Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,O phantom up the lane;For back may come that spent and lovely weather,And I be glad again!To analyze this, would be to pluck the mystical white feather that a poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of “some lone, delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot;” but the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the disillusioned day with a mood the same—yet not the same. Miss Reese has put it in two lines in her “Song of the Lavender Woman”:Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese’s susceptibility to impression from the most intangible sources:Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,The box dripped in the air;Its odor through my house was blownInto the chamber there.Remote and yet distinct the scent,The sole thing of the kind,As though one spoke a word half meantThat left a sting behind.I knew not Grief would go from meAnd naught of it be plain,Except how keen the box can beAfter a fall of rain.Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction betweensimplesseandsimplicité? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion, they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well.In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s,such as “Trust,” or her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reesehaswashed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words:Love came back at fall o’ dew,Playing his old part;But I had a word or two,That would break his heart.“He who comes at candlelight,That should come before,Must betake him to the nightFrom a barréd door.”This the word that made us partIn the fall o’ dew;This the word that brake his heart—Yet it brake mine, too!A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose? The linescalled “Trust,” illustrate with equal minuteness the gift of putting into the simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they illustrate the point in question, that of absolute simplicity without insipidity. This is not, however, to be taken as advice to all poets to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve such an effect through it, when she chooses, as “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any case. Song is impulse, not effort, and back of it is temperament. Miss Reese is a poet-singer; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, fitness, and individuality of her words.Very few modern lyrics possess the singing quality. The term “lyric verse,” as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year; composers search almost vainlythrough modern volumes of verse for lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence; something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity and truth, and a revealer of them in his art, though he reveal ofttimes but to conceal.Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market-women, the common ear was trained to grace and melody; but how many of the country folk of to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could grasp them? Who is writing the lays of the people? One can only answer that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a song as “Gather ye rosebudswhile ye may,” or “Come live with me and be my love,” and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the rosary of Art.The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree, doubtless, as to the increasing separation between poetry and song, the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes; but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting theme and melody to the common ear—how many modern poets would agree upon that? There is a middle ground, however; the reaction against the highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal appeal.And how does this pertain to Miss Reese? It pertains in that her ideal is the very return to clear, sympathetic song of which we have spoken. She would recapture the blitheness of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace, would lighten song’s wings of their heaviness and shift Care and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While the reminiscent mood is prevalent in her work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs, although “with finger at his lip, bidding adieu.” Miss Reese’s strife is towarda valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in the poem called “Laughter”:Spirit of the gust and dew,Herrick had the last of you!Empty are the morning hills.Herrick, he whose hearty airsStill are heard in our dull squares;Herrick of the daffodils!· · · · ·Now the pulpit and the martMake an unquiet thing of Art,For we trade or else we preach;Even the crocus,’stead of song,Serves for text the April long;Thus we set it out of reach.There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s distilling into the truth which is the essence ofthings. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion.Having this creed of song, Miss Reese’s themes are not widely inclusive. They are, however, the universal themes,—love, beauty, reverence, remembrance, joy that has been tempered to cheer, having met pain by the way; for, as we have said, no encounter with pain—and her poems give abundant evidence of such encounter—has been able to subdue the valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at the springs of her feeling, albeit the buoyant, brimful joy has given place to acquiescent cheer.There is a certain quality in Miss Reese’s poems, a quaintness, an elder grace, that is wholly unique. It is the union of theme, phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former have been considered, but the spirit, after all, is in the last, in that which analysis cannot reach. One selects a poem fromA Quiet Roadillustrative of this art of correlating Then and Now, making quick the dead in memory and hope, and sets about to analyze it,—when, lo, as if one had prisoned a white butterfly, it escapes, leaving only the dust of its wing in one’s hand! Miss Reese’s poems are not to be analyzed, they are to be felt; that, too, is the creed of her song.Is it difficult to feel these delicate lines called “The Road of Remembrance”?—The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;The tree is blossoming;Northward the road runs to the sea,And past the House of Spring.The folk go down it unafraid;The still roofs rise before;When you were lad and I was maid,Wide open stood that door.Now, other children crowd the stair,And hunt from room to room;Outside, under the hawthorn fair,We pluck the thorny bloom.Out in the quiet road we stand,Shut in from wharf and mart,The old wind blowing up the land,The old thoughts at our heart.Miss Reese’s growth, as shown in her two volumes, is so marked that whileA Handful of Lavenderhas the foreshadowing of her later work, and also some notably fine poems,—such as “That Day You Came,” “The Last Cricket,” “A Spinning Song,” and “The Old Path,”—it has not the same perfectly individual note that pervadesA Quiet Road. The personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon nearly everything in the later collection, is frequentlyabsent from the first. That part ofA Handful of Lavenderfirst issued asA Branch of Mayis naturally the least finished of Miss Reese’s work. It is unsure and yet indicative of that—Oncoming hour of light and dew,Of heartier sun, more certain blue,which shines in her later work.“The Death Potion,” from the first collection, is a case in point: it is strong in idea, and here and there in execution, but its metre is faulty, and it departs so often from the initial measure that one who has set himself in tune with that is thrown from the key, and in adapting himself to the changed rhythm loses the pleasure of the poem.It must be said, however, that such lack of metrical sensitiveness is very rare even in the earlier poems. In general, they are of unimpeachable rhythm; indeed, the singing note is so much Miss Reese’s natural expression that it creeps into this sonnet, “The Old Path,” and turns it in effect to a lyric:O Love! O Love! this way has hints of youIn every bough that stirs, in every bee,Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from someFast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,You were so near, so near, yet did not come!Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;With any breath of brier or note of bird?If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,All my sad life would I go comforted.A Handful of Lavendershows the tendency of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tendency laudable enough if one be a natural sonneteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived and well-executed sonnets, but few that are unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics. That she recognizes wherein her surest power lies is obvious from the fact that, whereasA Handful of Lavendercontains some thirty-two sonnets,A Quiet Roadcontains but twelve. Those of nature predominated in the former, nature for its own sake; but in the latter there is far less accent upon nature and more upon life.They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There are certain sonnets inA Handful of Lavender, such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling than the later onesand equal to them in manner; but in general the mechanism is much more apparent—onedoesoccasionally see the wires, which is never the case in the later work.“The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets inA Quiet Road:Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,Of the old days, but only of these new;I sow; I reap; my house in order set.Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,That I remember naught but your dead face,And other folk forgotten, you are all.When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!And I, thereafter, am like unto oneWho from the lilac bloom and the young yearComes to a chamber shuttered from the street,Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,For that the recompensing Spring is near!There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said, however, one comes back toA Quiet Roadfor the songs it holds, and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines “Writ In A Book OfElizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own reed, when she says:Mine is the crocus and the callOf gust to gust in shrubberies tall;The white tumult, the rainy hush;And mine the unforgetting thrushThat pours its heart-break from the wall.For I am tears, for I am Spring,The old and immemorial thing;To me come ghosts by twos and threes,Under the swaying cherry-trees,From east and west remembering.O elder Hour, when I am not,Gone out like smoke from road and plot,More perfect Hour of light and dew,Shall lovers turn away from you,And long for me, the Unforgot!Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!Miss Reese’s work inA Quiet Roadis so uniformly quotable that one distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. Oneneed hardly be told that she is of the “mystic fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization, of which a part must suffice to show the quality:In his old gusty garden of the North,He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—At last they drove him forth.Now there were two rang silverly and long;And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;And one was that of Song.Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,These were the Shapes that all around him came,—That we let go with tears.His was the unstinted English of the Scot,Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of KnoxThrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,To keep it unforgot.No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,To see appealing things in all he knew,He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,And would have naught of chaff.David and Keats and all good singing men,Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—Where you do sing again!There! I have repented me and quoted it all, to preserve the unity.To be rare and quaint without being fantastic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that many overlook—this is Miss Reese’s gift. You shall not go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruction of any kind, for that is contrary to her creed; but you shall go to her for truth, truth that has become personal through experience; go to her for beauty, uplift, and refreshment, and above all for the recovery of the departed mood.
MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding.
Her first collection is aptly named,A Handful of Lavender, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment withone. She has been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal.
There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it! “Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards.
Illustration of Lizette Woodworth Reese
Miss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one, being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems, by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her lines “To A White Lilac”:
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,Long-gone but unforgot;Wherein I had for guerdon and for dowerThat one thing I have not.Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,O phantom up the lane;For back may come that spent and lovely weather,And I be glad again!
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,Long-gone but unforgot;Wherein I had for guerdon and for dowerThat one thing I have not.Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,O phantom up the lane;For back may come that spent and lovely weather,And I be glad again!
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,Long-gone but unforgot;Wherein I had for guerdon and for dowerThat one thing I have not.
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,
Long-gone but unforgot;
Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower
That one thing I have not.
Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,O phantom up the lane;For back may come that spent and lovely weather,And I be glad again!
Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,
O phantom up the lane;
For back may come that spent and lovely weather,
And I be glad again!
To analyze this, would be to pluck the mystical white feather that a poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of “some lone, delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot;” but the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the disillusioned day with a mood the same—yet not the same. Miss Reese has put it in two lines in her “Song of the Lavender Woman”:
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?
So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.
In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese’s susceptibility to impression from the most intangible sources:
Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,The box dripped in the air;Its odor through my house was blownInto the chamber there.Remote and yet distinct the scent,The sole thing of the kind,As though one spoke a word half meantThat left a sting behind.I knew not Grief would go from meAnd naught of it be plain,Except how keen the box can beAfter a fall of rain.
Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,The box dripped in the air;Its odor through my house was blownInto the chamber there.Remote and yet distinct the scent,The sole thing of the kind,As though one spoke a word half meantThat left a sting behind.I knew not Grief would go from meAnd naught of it be plain,Except how keen the box can beAfter a fall of rain.
Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,The box dripped in the air;Its odor through my house was blownInto the chamber there.
Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,
The box dripped in the air;
Its odor through my house was blown
Into the chamber there.
Remote and yet distinct the scent,The sole thing of the kind,As though one spoke a word half meantThat left a sting behind.
Remote and yet distinct the scent,
The sole thing of the kind,
As though one spoke a word half meant
That left a sting behind.
I knew not Grief would go from meAnd naught of it be plain,Except how keen the box can beAfter a fall of rain.
I knew not Grief would go from me
And naught of it be plain,
Except how keen the box can be
After a fall of rain.
Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction betweensimplesseandsimplicité? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion, they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well.
In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s,such as “Trust,” or her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reesehaswashed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words:
Love came back at fall o’ dew,Playing his old part;But I had a word or two,That would break his heart.“He who comes at candlelight,That should come before,Must betake him to the nightFrom a barréd door.”This the word that made us partIn the fall o’ dew;This the word that brake his heart—Yet it brake mine, too!
Love came back at fall o’ dew,Playing his old part;But I had a word or two,That would break his heart.“He who comes at candlelight,That should come before,Must betake him to the nightFrom a barréd door.”This the word that made us partIn the fall o’ dew;This the word that brake his heart—Yet it brake mine, too!
Love came back at fall o’ dew,Playing his old part;But I had a word or two,That would break his heart.
Love came back at fall o’ dew,
Playing his old part;
But I had a word or two,
That would break his heart.
“He who comes at candlelight,That should come before,Must betake him to the nightFrom a barréd door.”
“He who comes at candlelight,
That should come before,
Must betake him to the night
From a barréd door.”
This the word that made us partIn the fall o’ dew;This the word that brake his heart—Yet it brake mine, too!
This the word that made us part
In the fall o’ dew;
This the word that brake his heart—
Yet it brake mine, too!
A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose? The linescalled “Trust,” illustrate with equal minuteness the gift of putting into the simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they illustrate the point in question, that of absolute simplicity without insipidity. This is not, however, to be taken as advice to all poets to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve such an effect through it, when she chooses, as “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any case. Song is impulse, not effort, and back of it is temperament. Miss Reese is a poet-singer; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, fitness, and individuality of her words.
Very few modern lyrics possess the singing quality. The term “lyric verse,” as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year; composers search almost vainlythrough modern volumes of verse for lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence; something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity and truth, and a revealer of them in his art, though he reveal ofttimes but to conceal.
Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market-women, the common ear was trained to grace and melody; but how many of the country folk of to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could grasp them? Who is writing the lays of the people? One can only answer that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a song as “Gather ye rosebudswhile ye may,” or “Come live with me and be my love,” and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the rosary of Art.
The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree, doubtless, as to the increasing separation between poetry and song, the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes; but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting theme and melody to the common ear—how many modern poets would agree upon that? There is a middle ground, however; the reaction against the highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal appeal.
And how does this pertain to Miss Reese? It pertains in that her ideal is the very return to clear, sympathetic song of which we have spoken. She would recapture the blitheness of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace, would lighten song’s wings of their heaviness and shift Care and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While the reminiscent mood is prevalent in her work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs, although “with finger at his lip, bidding adieu.” Miss Reese’s strife is towarda valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in the poem called “Laughter”:
Spirit of the gust and dew,Herrick had the last of you!Empty are the morning hills.Herrick, he whose hearty airsStill are heard in our dull squares;Herrick of the daffodils!· · · · ·Now the pulpit and the martMake an unquiet thing of Art,For we trade or else we preach;Even the crocus,’stead of song,Serves for text the April long;Thus we set it out of reach.
Spirit of the gust and dew,Herrick had the last of you!Empty are the morning hills.Herrick, he whose hearty airsStill are heard in our dull squares;Herrick of the daffodils!· · · · ·Now the pulpit and the martMake an unquiet thing of Art,For we trade or else we preach;Even the crocus,’stead of song,Serves for text the April long;Thus we set it out of reach.
Spirit of the gust and dew,Herrick had the last of you!Empty are the morning hills.Herrick, he whose hearty airsStill are heard in our dull squares;Herrick of the daffodils!· · · · ·Now the pulpit and the martMake an unquiet thing of Art,For we trade or else we preach;Even the crocus,’stead of song,Serves for text the April long;Thus we set it out of reach.
Spirit of the gust and dew,
Herrick had the last of you!
Empty are the morning hills.
Herrick, he whose hearty airs
Still are heard in our dull squares;
Herrick of the daffodils!
· · · · ·
Now the pulpit and the mart
Make an unquiet thing of Art,
For we trade or else we preach;
Even the crocus,’stead of song,
Serves for text the April long;
Thus we set it out of reach.
There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s distilling into the truth which is the essence ofthings. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion.
Having this creed of song, Miss Reese’s themes are not widely inclusive. They are, however, the universal themes,—love, beauty, reverence, remembrance, joy that has been tempered to cheer, having met pain by the way; for, as we have said, no encounter with pain—and her poems give abundant evidence of such encounter—has been able to subdue the valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at the springs of her feeling, albeit the buoyant, brimful joy has given place to acquiescent cheer.
There is a certain quality in Miss Reese’s poems, a quaintness, an elder grace, that is wholly unique. It is the union of theme, phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former have been considered, but the spirit, after all, is in the last, in that which analysis cannot reach. One selects a poem fromA Quiet Roadillustrative of this art of correlating Then and Now, making quick the dead in memory and hope, and sets about to analyze it,—when, lo, as if one had prisoned a white butterfly, it escapes, leaving only the dust of its wing in one’s hand! Miss Reese’s poems are not to be analyzed, they are to be felt; that, too, is the creed of her song.Is it difficult to feel these delicate lines called “The Road of Remembrance”?—
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;The tree is blossoming;Northward the road runs to the sea,And past the House of Spring.The folk go down it unafraid;The still roofs rise before;When you were lad and I was maid,Wide open stood that door.Now, other children crowd the stair,And hunt from room to room;Outside, under the hawthorn fair,We pluck the thorny bloom.Out in the quiet road we stand,Shut in from wharf and mart,The old wind blowing up the land,The old thoughts at our heart.
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;The tree is blossoming;Northward the road runs to the sea,And past the House of Spring.The folk go down it unafraid;The still roofs rise before;When you were lad and I was maid,Wide open stood that door.Now, other children crowd the stair,And hunt from room to room;Outside, under the hawthorn fair,We pluck the thorny bloom.Out in the quiet road we stand,Shut in from wharf and mart,The old wind blowing up the land,The old thoughts at our heart.
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;The tree is blossoming;Northward the road runs to the sea,And past the House of Spring.
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;
The tree is blossoming;
Northward the road runs to the sea,
And past the House of Spring.
The folk go down it unafraid;The still roofs rise before;When you were lad and I was maid,Wide open stood that door.
The folk go down it unafraid;
The still roofs rise before;
When you were lad and I was maid,
Wide open stood that door.
Now, other children crowd the stair,And hunt from room to room;Outside, under the hawthorn fair,We pluck the thorny bloom.
Now, other children crowd the stair,
And hunt from room to room;
Outside, under the hawthorn fair,
We pluck the thorny bloom.
Out in the quiet road we stand,Shut in from wharf and mart,The old wind blowing up the land,The old thoughts at our heart.
Out in the quiet road we stand,
Shut in from wharf and mart,
The old wind blowing up the land,
The old thoughts at our heart.
Miss Reese’s growth, as shown in her two volumes, is so marked that whileA Handful of Lavenderhas the foreshadowing of her later work, and also some notably fine poems,—such as “That Day You Came,” “The Last Cricket,” “A Spinning Song,” and “The Old Path,”—it has not the same perfectly individual note that pervadesA Quiet Road. The personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon nearly everything in the later collection, is frequentlyabsent from the first. That part ofA Handful of Lavenderfirst issued asA Branch of Mayis naturally the least finished of Miss Reese’s work. It is unsure and yet indicative of that—
Oncoming hour of light and dew,Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
Oncoming hour of light and dew,Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
Oncoming hour of light and dew,Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
Oncoming hour of light and dew,
Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
which shines in her later work.
“The Death Potion,” from the first collection, is a case in point: it is strong in idea, and here and there in execution, but its metre is faulty, and it departs so often from the initial measure that one who has set himself in tune with that is thrown from the key, and in adapting himself to the changed rhythm loses the pleasure of the poem.
It must be said, however, that such lack of metrical sensitiveness is very rare even in the earlier poems. In general, they are of unimpeachable rhythm; indeed, the singing note is so much Miss Reese’s natural expression that it creeps into this sonnet, “The Old Path,” and turns it in effect to a lyric:
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of youIn every bough that stirs, in every bee,Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from someFast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,You were so near, so near, yet did not come!Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;With any breath of brier or note of bird?If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,All my sad life would I go comforted.
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of youIn every bough that stirs, in every bee,Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from someFast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,You were so near, so near, yet did not come!Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;With any breath of brier or note of bird?If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,All my sad life would I go comforted.
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of youIn every bough that stirs, in every bee,Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from someFast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,You were so near, so near, yet did not come!Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;With any breath of brier or note of bird?If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,All my sad life would I go comforted.
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of you
In every bough that stirs, in every bee,
Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,
In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;
And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,
Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from some
Fast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,
You were so near, so near, yet did not come!
Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?
Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?
Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;
With any breath of brier or note of bird?
If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,
All my sad life would I go comforted.
A Handful of Lavendershows the tendency of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tendency laudable enough if one be a natural sonneteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived and well-executed sonnets, but few that are unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics. That she recognizes wherein her surest power lies is obvious from the fact that, whereasA Handful of Lavendercontains some thirty-two sonnets,A Quiet Roadcontains but twelve. Those of nature predominated in the former, nature for its own sake; but in the latter there is far less accent upon nature and more upon life.
They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There are certain sonnets inA Handful of Lavender, such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling than the later onesand equal to them in manner; but in general the mechanism is much more apparent—onedoesoccasionally see the wires, which is never the case in the later work.
“The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets inA Quiet Road:
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,Of the old days, but only of these new;I sow; I reap; my house in order set.Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,That I remember naught but your dead face,And other folk forgotten, you are all.When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!And I, thereafter, am like unto oneWho from the lilac bloom and the young yearComes to a chamber shuttered from the street,Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,For that the recompensing Spring is near!
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,Of the old days, but only of these new;I sow; I reap; my house in order set.Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,That I remember naught but your dead face,And other folk forgotten, you are all.When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!And I, thereafter, am like unto oneWho from the lilac bloom and the young yearComes to a chamber shuttered from the street,Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,For that the recompensing Spring is near!
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,Of the old days, but only of these new;I sow; I reap; my house in order set.Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,That I remember naught but your dead face,And other folk forgotten, you are all.When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!And I, thereafter, am like unto oneWho from the lilac bloom and the young yearComes to a chamber shuttered from the street,Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,For that the recompensing Spring is near!
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;
Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,
Of the old days, but only of these new;
I sow; I reap; my house in order set.
Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,
By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,
That I remember naught but your dead face,
And other folk forgotten, you are all.
When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!
And I, thereafter, am like unto one
Who from the lilac bloom and the young year
Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street,
Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,
For that the recompensing Spring is near!
There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said, however, one comes back toA Quiet Roadfor the songs it holds, and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines “Writ In A Book OfElizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own reed, when she says:
Mine is the crocus and the callOf gust to gust in shrubberies tall;The white tumult, the rainy hush;And mine the unforgetting thrushThat pours its heart-break from the wall.For I am tears, for I am Spring,The old and immemorial thing;To me come ghosts by twos and threes,Under the swaying cherry-trees,From east and west remembering.O elder Hour, when I am not,Gone out like smoke from road and plot,More perfect Hour of light and dew,Shall lovers turn away from you,And long for me, the Unforgot!
Mine is the crocus and the callOf gust to gust in shrubberies tall;The white tumult, the rainy hush;And mine the unforgetting thrushThat pours its heart-break from the wall.For I am tears, for I am Spring,The old and immemorial thing;To me come ghosts by twos and threes,Under the swaying cherry-trees,From east and west remembering.O elder Hour, when I am not,Gone out like smoke from road and plot,More perfect Hour of light and dew,Shall lovers turn away from you,And long for me, the Unforgot!
Mine is the crocus and the callOf gust to gust in shrubberies tall;The white tumult, the rainy hush;And mine the unforgetting thrushThat pours its heart-break from the wall.
Mine is the crocus and the call
Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall;
The white tumult, the rainy hush;
And mine the unforgetting thrush
That pours its heart-break from the wall.
For I am tears, for I am Spring,The old and immemorial thing;To me come ghosts by twos and threes,Under the swaying cherry-trees,From east and west remembering.
For I am tears, for I am Spring,
The old and immemorial thing;
To me come ghosts by twos and threes,
Under the swaying cherry-trees,
From east and west remembering.
O elder Hour, when I am not,Gone out like smoke from road and plot,More perfect Hour of light and dew,Shall lovers turn away from you,And long for me, the Unforgot!
O elder Hour, when I am not,
Gone out like smoke from road and plot,
More perfect Hour of light and dew,
Shall lovers turn away from you,
And long for me, the Unforgot!
Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,
Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!
The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;
Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!
The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.
The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;
The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;
Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,
And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.
The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.
The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;
There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;
For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;
The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.
I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.
I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;
Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;
The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;
The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.
When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,
The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;
The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;
And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
Miss Reese’s work inA Quiet Roadis so uniformly quotable that one distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. Oneneed hardly be told that she is of the “mystic fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization, of which a part must suffice to show the quality:
In his old gusty garden of the North,He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—At last they drove him forth.Now there were two rang silverly and long;And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;And one was that of Song.Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,These were the Shapes that all around him came,—That we let go with tears.His was the unstinted English of the Scot,Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of KnoxThrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,To keep it unforgot.No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,To see appealing things in all he knew,He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,And would have naught of chaff.David and Keats and all good singing men,Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—Where you do sing again!
In his old gusty garden of the North,He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—At last they drove him forth.Now there were two rang silverly and long;And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;And one was that of Song.Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,These were the Shapes that all around him came,—That we let go with tears.His was the unstinted English of the Scot,Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of KnoxThrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,To keep it unforgot.No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,To see appealing things in all he knew,He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,And would have naught of chaff.David and Keats and all good singing men,Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—Where you do sing again!
In his old gusty garden of the North,He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—At last they drove him forth.
In his old gusty garden of the North,
He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;
Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—
At last they drove him forth.
Now there were two rang silverly and long;And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;And one was that of Song.
Now there were two rang silverly and long;
And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,
And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;
And one was that of Song.
Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,These were the Shapes that all around him came,—That we let go with tears.
Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,
The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,
These were the Shapes that all around him came,—
That we let go with tears.
His was the unstinted English of the Scot,Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of KnoxThrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,To keep it unforgot.
His was the unstinted English of the Scot,
Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox
Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,
To keep it unforgot.
No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,To see appealing things in all he knew,He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,And would have naught of chaff.
No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,
To see appealing things in all he knew,
He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,
And would have naught of chaff.
David and Keats and all good singing men,Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—Where you do sing again!
David and Keats and all good singing men,
Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,
Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—
Where you do sing again!
There! I have repented me and quoted it all, to preserve the unity.
To be rare and quaint without being fantastic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that many overlook—this is Miss Reese’s gift. You shall not go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruction of any kind, for that is contrary to her creed; but you shall go to her for truth, truth that has become personal through experience; go to her for beauty, uplift, and refreshment, and above all for the recovery of the departed mood.
IIIBLISS CARMANTHE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets of the States, needs no explanation; so identified is he with the artistic life of the younger generation on this side the border that we have come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to consider his work, most of which has been produced here, as distinctly our own. But while it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse has drawn its inspiration from nature and life as we know them, one could little spare Mr. Carman’s first book of lyrics,Low Tide on Grand Pré, which is purely Canadian—set in the air of the “blue North summer.”It lacks as a collection the confident touch of his later work, but is imbued with an indefinable delicacy; it withholds the uttermost word, and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially is this true of the initial poem, a lyric with a poignant undernote calling one back thrice and again to learn its spell.It has been Mr. Carman’s method to issue at intervals small volumes containing work of a related sort; but it is open to question whether this method of publishing, with the harmony which results from grouping each collection under a certain key, may not have a counterbalancing danger in the tendency toward monotony. As a matter of fact, Mr. Carman has a wide range of subject; but unless one be ever taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, it is likely to seem restricted, owing to the reiterance of the same note in whatever collection he chance to have in hand. A case in point is that furnished byBallads of Lost Haven, one of his most characteristic and fascinating volumes, a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no fewer than four poems, succeeding one another at the close of the collection, prefiguring death under the titles of “The Shadow Boatswain,” “The Master of the Isles,” “The Last Watch,” and “Outbound.”Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but differentphrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain” contains these fine lines:Don’t you know the sailing orders?It is time to put to sea,And the stranger in the harborSends a boat ashore for me.· · · · ·That’s the Doomkeel. You may know herBy her clean run aft; and thenDon’t you hear the Shadow BoatswainPiping to his shadow men?And “The Master of the Isles,” immediately following, opens in this equally picturesque, but essentially similar, manner:There is rumor in Dark Harbor,And the folk are all astir;For a stranger in the offingDraws them down to gaze at her,In the gray of early morning,Black against the orange streak,Making in below the ledges,With no colors at her peak.Illustration of Bliss CarmanWhile each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of blurringfrom the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it to an impalpable thing.Judging them individually, it is doubtful if Mr. Carman has done anything more representative, more imbued with his own temperament, than these buoyant, quickening songs that freshen one as if from a plunge in the sea, and take one to themselves as intimately. The opening poem sets the key to the collection:I was born for deep-sea faring;I was bred to put to sea;Stories of my father’s daringFilled me at my mother’s knee.I was sired among the surges;I was cubbed beside the foam;All my heart is in its verges,And the sea wind is my home.All my boyhood, from far vernalBourns of being, came to meDream-like, plangent, and eternalMemories of the plunging sea.And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in this picture at whose faithfulness one shudders:Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,And well his work is done.With an equal grave for lord and knave,He buries them every one.Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,He makes for the nearest shore;And God, who sent him a thousand ship,Will send him a thousand more;But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,And shoulder them in to shore,—Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,Shoulder them in to shore.How the swing of the lines befits the action, and how it puts on grace in this stanza,Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of TyreWent out, and where are they?In the port they made, they are delayedWith the ships of yesterday.The remaining strophes tempt one beyond what he is able, especially this characterization,Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to himIs the sexton of the town;but we must take a glance at the ballads, at the “Nancy’s Pride,” that went outOn the long slow heave of a lazy sea,To the flap of an idle sail,· · · · ·and… faded downWith her creaking boom a-swing,Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,And caught her wing and wing.· · · · ·She lifted her hull like a breasting gullWhere the rolling valleys be,And dipped where the shining porpoisesPut ploughshares through the sea.· · · · ·They all may home on a sleepy tideTo the sag of an idle sheet;But it’s never again the Nancy’s PrideThat draws men down the street.But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon, behold this apparition:When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,They see by the after railAn unknown schooner creeping upWith mildewed spar and sail.Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,With the Judgment in their face;And to their mates’ “God save you!”Have never a word of grace.Then into the gray they sheer away,On the awful polar tide;And the sailors know they have seen the wraithOf the missing Nancy’s Pride.There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so vividly that one may almost see thecrew lean forth by the rotting shroudsWith the Judgment in their face,and watch them asinto the gray they sheer awayOn the awful polar tide.The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a very simple line, as this,With her creaking boom a-swing,or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled, “weather-breeder” days one knows so well.From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and frequentlya crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr. Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it.One pardons this over-elaboration inBallads of Lost Havenbecause of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to theblue leagues of sea; and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s debtor.Behind the Arrashas proven a stumbling-block and rock of offence to some of Mr. Carman’s readers, because of its recondite character. They regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysticism is half whimsical, and requires no superconsciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is founding no cult; it pleases him for the nonce to mask his thought in symbols, and there are, alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no use for symbols! It is a book containing many strong poems, such as “Beyond the Gamut,” “Exit Anima,” and “Hack and Hew,”—a book of spiritual enigmas through which one catches hints of the open secret, ever-alluring, ever-eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, immanent, yet undivined.Earth one habitat of spirit merely,I must use as richly as I may,—Touch environment with every sense-tip,Drink the well and pass my wander way,—says this sane poet who holds his gift as a tribute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny:O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,While time endures,To acquiesce and learn!For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,Let soul discern.And who through the grime and in the babel still sees and hears,Always the flawless beauty,—always the ChordOf the Overword,Dominant, pleading, sure,No truth too small to save and make endure;No good too poor!This is the vision that shall lighten our eyes, quicken our ears, and restore our hope,—the vision which we expect the poet to see and to communicate. He must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is orbing. It is not by disregarding the tragic, the sombre, the inexplicable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. Pain has more than touched him; it has become incorporate in him.Low Tide on Grand Préhas its poignant note;Ballads of Lost Haven, its undertone;Behind the Arras, its overtone, its sublimation.Mr. Carman’s work is more subjective than that of many of the younger poets without being less objective, as the Vagabondia books attest. In one mood he is the mystic, dwelling in a speculative nebula of thought, in another the realist concerning himself only with the demonstrable, and hence his work discloses a wide range of affinities. He is not a strongly constructive thinker, but intuitional in his mental processes, and his verse demands that gift in his readers. Without it what could one make of “The Juggler” but a poem of delicious color and music? If its import were none other than appears upon the face of it, it would still be admirable, but as a symbol of the Force projecting us, it is a subtle bit of art.Mr. Carman’s sensitiveness to values of rhythm keeps his verse free from lapses in that direction. He never, to my memory, makes use of the sonnet, which shows critical judgment, as the lyric is his temperamental medium. The apogee of his art is in his diction, which has a predestined fitness, and above all a personal quality. To quote Pater again, he has “begotten a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit,” and one cannot mistake even a fragment of his verse. Now and again one comes upon an archaic expression,as “Aweirdis in their song,” using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaningless solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as “illumining thisquenchof clay,” but in general Mr. Carman does not find it necessary to go outside the established limits of the language for variety and force in diction. He has a genius for imagery, and conjures the most unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. The Vagabondia books are abrim with them, and while there are idle lines and padded stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not strike true flashes here and there, few that miss of justification, while their gay and rollicking note heartens one and bids him up and join in the revel.There are others in a graver key, such as Hovey’s “At the End of the Day,” and Carman’s “The Mendicants,” and “The Marching Morrows;” and certain lyric inspirations, such as the “Sea Gypsy,” by Hovey, and the “Vagabond Song,” by Carman, that have not been bettered by either, that could not well be bettered within their limits. The former has been quoted in the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an inspiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does notanalyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers; under his touch it subtilizes into atmosphere and thus communicates the incommunicable:There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—Touch of manner, hint of mood;And my heart is like a rhyme,With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cryOf bugles going by.And my lonely spirit thrillsTo see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;We must rise and follow her,When from every hill of flameShe calls and calls each vagabond by name.Throwing aside all that is ephemeral in the Vagabondia books, all mere boyish ebullition, there is a goodly residuum of nature-poetry of the freshest and most unhackneyed sort. It is the blithe, objective type; eyes and ears are its informers, and it enters into one’s mood with a keen sense of refreshment. Who does not know the impulse that prompted these lines?Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!When thy flowery hand deliversAll the mountain-prisoned rivers,And thy great heart beats and quiversTo revive the days that were,Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!The temper of the Vagabondia books is thoroughly wholesome; courage and cheer dominate them; in short, they are good to know; and while it is not vitally necessary to remember all they contain, one would be distinctly the loser should he forget such poems as “Non Omnis Moriar” or “The Deserted Inn” fromThe Last Songs.The collection of Memorabilia,By the Aurelian Wall, takes its title from the burial-place of Keats, and includes “A Seamark,” the fine threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of Phillips Brooks; a spiritual, poetic visioning of Shelley under the symbol of “The White Gull;” a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and other things equally well-wrought. Some of them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point—but what haunting sweetness it carries with it! To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beatingin the void his luminous wings in vain,” has come to dominate the popular fancy in regard to him. Mr. Carman’s poem, though touched with this mood, is not set to it, and he has several stanzas which have in them the essence of Shelley’s spirit,—the real Shelley, the passionate idealist, the spent runner who, falling, handed on the torch.The Stevenson threnody is probably the best of the elegies, as Mr. Carman is by temperament one of the Stevenson brotherhood, and no subject could better command him. That “intimate and magic name,” a password to fellowship, conjures many a picture of him—Whose courage lights the dark’ning portWhere every sea-worn sail must come.Mr. Carman has singular power to visualize a scene; one becomes an eye-witness of it as of this:But I have wander-biddings now.Far down the latitudes of sun,An island mountain of the sea,Piercing the green and rosy zone,Goes up into the wondrous day.And there the brown-limbed island menAre bearing up for burial,Within the sun’s departing ken,The master of the roving kind.And there where time will set no markFor his irrevocable rest,Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him, they have laid him downAbove the crumbling of the sea,Beyond the turmoil of renown.This island procession to the mountain, leaving the master to his “irrevocable rest,”Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him,is an artist’s picture not easily forgotten.Mr. Carman’s three volumes in the projected “Pipes of Pan” series, including thus farThe Book of the Myths,The Green Book of the Bards, andThe Sea Children, make new disclosures of his talent, and the title poem “Pipes of Pan,” is a bit of anointed vision that would waken the dullest eyes from lethargy as to the world around them. There is necromancy in Mr. Carman’s words when the outer world is his theme; something of the thrill, the expectancy in the heart of growing things, the elation of life, comes upon one as he reads the “Pipes of Pan.” It is a nobler vision than illumined Vagabondia days, revealingPower out of hurt and stainTo bring beauty back again,and showing theScope and purpose, hint and planLurking in the Pipes of Pan,as well as the sheer delight that we noted in Vagabondia.It seems that every mood of every creature has been divined and uttered, uttered with deep love, with a human relatedness that melts the barriers between life and life, whether in man or inAll the bright, gay-colored thingsBuoyed in air on balanced wings.This relatedness, and all the molding influences of nature leading us on from beauty to strength, are developed in Mr. Carman’s poem until they become to us religion. We realize that at heart we are all pantheists, and that revelation antedates the Book; that the law is written on the leaves of roses as well as on tables of stone,—a testament both new and old, given for our learning that we might have hope.The remaining poems ofThe Book of the Mythsare not the best things Mr. Carman has done, though renewals of classic verse-forms in the Sapphic and other metres, and oftenpicturesque in story. “The Lost Dryad” is the most attractive, “The Dead Faun” the least so, to my ears; but perhaps from lack of sympathy with the subject-matter I cannot think the collection, with the exception of the poem “Pipes of Pan,” is of especial value. It is not to be named, still excepting the above poem, with its companion volume,The Green Book of the Bards, which contains some of the strongest work of Mr. Carman’s pen as to subject and thought, but which has one pronounced limitation,—its monotony of form.The entire volume, with a sole exception, and that not marked, is written in the conventional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr. Carman’s work of late has been cast. Within this compass, the accomplishment is as varied as to theme and diction, as that of his other work; but when one sings on and on in the same numbers, it induces a state of mental indolence in the reader, and presupposes a similar state in the writer. The verse goes purling musically along, until, as running water exercises an hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized by the mere melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness to find that he has no notion what they are about, and must re-read them to find out. To be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, andwill make new disclosures whenever one returns to them; but had they greater variety as to manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the mind would be startled to perception by unexpectedness, instead of lulled by the same note in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that Mr. Carman has a principle at stake in this,—it may indeed be a reactionary measure against over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire for simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the first canons of art, but variety in metre and form is another canon by no means annulling the first. One may have variety to the superlative degree, and never depart from the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity.WereThe Green Book of the Bardsrelieved by contrasts of form, it would rank with the finest work of Mr. Carman’s pen, as the individual poems have strong basic ideas,—such as the “Creature Catechism,” full of pregnant thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word as to the mystic union of the creative Soul with the creatures of feather and fin and fleece. The marked evolution of Mr. Carman’s philosophy of life, as influenced by his growing identity with nature, comes out so strongly in the “Pipes of Pan” series, and inThe Word at Saint Kavin’s, as almost to reveal a new individuality.He had gone out in the light-foot, light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with the woods and winds; glad to be quit of the gyves, to drink from the wayside spring, eat of the forest fruit, sleep ’neath the tent of night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He had sought nature in a mood of pagan joy; but the wayside spring had excited a thirst it could not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it could not allay, and the blithe seeker of freedom and delight became at length the anointed votary, and lingered to watch the God at work shaping life from death, and expressing His yearning in beauty.The mere objective delight of the earlier time has grown steadily into the subjective identity with every manifestation of the Force that operates within this world of wonder and beauty, from the soul of man, shaping his ideals and creating his environment, to the butterfly whose sun-painted wings, set afloat in the buoyant air, are upheld by the breath of God. Coming into the finer knowledge, through long intimacy with the earth and its multitudinous life, fulfilling itself in joy,—Mr. Carman has come at length toreadjustThe logic of the dust,and to shape from it a creed and law for his following, which he has put into the mouth of Saint Kavin for expounding. The opening stanzas of the volume give the setting and note:Once at St. Kavin’s doorI rested. No sigh moreOf discontent escaped me from that day.For there I overheardA Brother of the WordExpound the grace of poverty, and say:Thank God for povertyThat makes and keeps us free,And lets us go our unobtrusive way,Glad of the sun and rain,Upright, serene, humane,Contented with the fortune of a day.The poem follows simple, but no less picturesque phrase, as becomes Saint Kavin, and is, from the technical side, quaint and artistic. On the philosophical, it develops at first the initial thought that one shall “keep his soul”Joyous and sane and wholeby obeying the wordThat bade the earth take form, the sea subside,and thatWhen we have laid asideOur truculence and pride,Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—we shall have found the boon of our ultimate striving,—room to live and let our spirits grow, and give of their growth and higher gain to another. Here is the giving that turns to one’s own enrichment:And if I share my crust,As common manhood must,With one whose need is greater than my own,Shall I not also giveHis soul, that it may live,Of the abundant pleasures I have known?And so, if I have wrought,Amassed or conceived aughtOf beauty, or intelligence or power,It is not mine to hoard;It stands there to affordIts generous service simply as a flower.The poem then broadens into a dissertation upon the complexities of life, one’s servitude to custom and “vested wrong,” the lack of individual courage toLive by the truth each one of us believes,and turns, for illustration of the nobler development and poise, back to nature, and the evolutionary round of life through which one traces his course and kinship. These stanzas are among the finest spoken by the wiseBrother of the Word. After citing the strength and serenity of the fir-trees, and what a travesty upon man’s ascent it were, did one bear himself less royally than they, he adverts to the creature kin-fellows whose lot we have borne:I, too, in polar nightHave hungered, gaunt and white,Alone amid the awful silences;And fled on gaudy fin,When the blue tides came in,Through coral gardens under tropic seas.And wheresoe’er I strove,The greater law was love,A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;There was no wanton greed,Depravity of breed,Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.Nay, not till I was man,Learned I to scheme and planThe blackest depredation on my kind,Converting to my gainMy fellow’s need and painIn chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.Therefore, my friends, I sayBack to the fair sweet wayOur Mother Nature taught us long ago,—The large primeval mood,Leisure and amplitude,The dignity of patience strong and slow.Let us go in once moreBy some blue mountain door,And hold communion with the forest leaves;Where long ago we trodThe Ghost House of the God,Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements of this place of return, a more thoughtful one of its requitals, and the infinitude of care bestowed upon every task to which the Master Craftsman sets his hand, and orbs into a vision of the soul enlarged by breathing the freer air and by regaining therefrom her “primal ecstasy and poise.” It traces also the soul’s commission,To fill her purport in the ampler plan.Altogether the Word is admirably expounded by Saint Kavin, and one is distinctly the gainer for having rested at his door to learn not only the grace of joyousness, but the means to that grace.In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but one whose promise hehas made good, as poetry, however near it may approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have gone to oblivion.Of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” the most complete Sapphic poem extant, many translations and paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin Arnold, John Addington Symonds, Ambrose Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among the finest; and were there space it would be interesting to show by comparison that Mr. Carman’s rendering of the Ode ranks well with the standard already set.Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, aswell as the poet’s touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres, together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines:O heart of insatiable longing,What spell, what enchantment allures thee,Over the rim of the worldWith the sails of the sea-going ships?And when the rose petals are scatteredAt dead of still noon on the grass-plot,What means this passionate grief,—This infinite ache of regret?[1]Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown;whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to tell as a stroke in a sketch:Art thou the topmost appleThe gatherers could not reach,Reddening on the bough?Shall not I take thee?Art thou a hyacinth blossomThe shepherds upon the hillsHave trodden into the ground?Shall not I lift thee?The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic play upon words explaining that, although the gatherers did not get the coveted apple, theyForgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is hardly in keeping with the dignity of the comparison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well preserved.Another fragment made familiar by adaptation is that to Hesperus, expanded by Byroninto one of the great passages of “Don Juan.” Mr. Carman gives a more compact rendering and again brings the lines to such a close as shall render them a complete lyric. They scarcely vie in beauty with the Byron passage, which is one of the surest strokes of his hand, but have their own charm and grace:Hesperus, bringing togetherAll that the morning star scattered,—Sheep to be folded in twilight,Children for mothers to fondle,—Me, too, will bring to the dearest,Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.The fragment, “I loved thee, Athis, in the long ago,” has been expanded by Mr. Carman into a poem of reminiscent mood, the long, slow-moving pentameter enhancing the effect of pensive meditation which the lines convey. Many of the fragments are of a blither note, having the variety which distinguishes the original.Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint in his treatment of the fragments. They are not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, and while there is a certain atmosphere of insubstantiality about many of them, as couldscarcely fail to result from the attempt to restore, by imagination alone, what had existence but in tradition, they justify themselves as artistic poetry, which is the only consideration of moment.[1]From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. Copyright, 1903, by L. C. Page &Co.
THE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets of the States, needs no explanation; so identified is he with the artistic life of the younger generation on this side the border that we have come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to consider his work, most of which has been produced here, as distinctly our own. But while it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse has drawn its inspiration from nature and life as we know them, one could little spare Mr. Carman’s first book of lyrics,Low Tide on Grand Pré, which is purely Canadian—set in the air of the “blue North summer.”
It lacks as a collection the confident touch of his later work, but is imbued with an indefinable delicacy; it withholds the uttermost word, and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially is this true of the initial poem, a lyric with a poignant undernote calling one back thrice and again to learn its spell.
It has been Mr. Carman’s method to issue at intervals small volumes containing work of a related sort; but it is open to question whether this method of publishing, with the harmony which results from grouping each collection under a certain key, may not have a counterbalancing danger in the tendency toward monotony. As a matter of fact, Mr. Carman has a wide range of subject; but unless one be ever taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, it is likely to seem restricted, owing to the reiterance of the same note in whatever collection he chance to have in hand. A case in point is that furnished byBallads of Lost Haven, one of his most characteristic and fascinating volumes, a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no fewer than four poems, succeeding one another at the close of the collection, prefiguring death under the titles of “The Shadow Boatswain,” “The Master of the Isles,” “The Last Watch,” and “Outbound.”
Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but differentphrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain” contains these fine lines:
Don’t you know the sailing orders?It is time to put to sea,And the stranger in the harborSends a boat ashore for me.· · · · ·That’s the Doomkeel. You may know herBy her clean run aft; and thenDon’t you hear the Shadow BoatswainPiping to his shadow men?
Don’t you know the sailing orders?It is time to put to sea,And the stranger in the harborSends a boat ashore for me.· · · · ·That’s the Doomkeel. You may know herBy her clean run aft; and thenDon’t you hear the Shadow BoatswainPiping to his shadow men?
Don’t you know the sailing orders?It is time to put to sea,And the stranger in the harborSends a boat ashore for me.· · · · ·That’s the Doomkeel. You may know herBy her clean run aft; and thenDon’t you hear the Shadow BoatswainPiping to his shadow men?
Don’t you know the sailing orders?
It is time to put to sea,
And the stranger in the harbor
Sends a boat ashore for me.
· · · · ·
That’s the Doomkeel. You may know her
By her clean run aft; and then
Don’t you hear the Shadow Boatswain
Piping to his shadow men?
And “The Master of the Isles,” immediately following, opens in this equally picturesque, but essentially similar, manner:
There is rumor in Dark Harbor,And the folk are all astir;For a stranger in the offingDraws them down to gaze at her,In the gray of early morning,Black against the orange streak,Making in below the ledges,With no colors at her peak.
There is rumor in Dark Harbor,And the folk are all astir;For a stranger in the offingDraws them down to gaze at her,In the gray of early morning,Black against the orange streak,Making in below the ledges,With no colors at her peak.
There is rumor in Dark Harbor,And the folk are all astir;For a stranger in the offingDraws them down to gaze at her,
There is rumor in Dark Harbor,
And the folk are all astir;
For a stranger in the offing
Draws them down to gaze at her,
In the gray of early morning,Black against the orange streak,Making in below the ledges,With no colors at her peak.
In the gray of early morning,
Black against the orange streak,
Making in below the ledges,
With no colors at her peak.
Illustration of Bliss Carman
While each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of blurringfrom the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it to an impalpable thing.
Judging them individually, it is doubtful if Mr. Carman has done anything more representative, more imbued with his own temperament, than these buoyant, quickening songs that freshen one as if from a plunge in the sea, and take one to themselves as intimately. The opening poem sets the key to the collection:
I was born for deep-sea faring;I was bred to put to sea;Stories of my father’s daringFilled me at my mother’s knee.I was sired among the surges;I was cubbed beside the foam;All my heart is in its verges,And the sea wind is my home.All my boyhood, from far vernalBourns of being, came to meDream-like, plangent, and eternalMemories of the plunging sea.
I was born for deep-sea faring;I was bred to put to sea;Stories of my father’s daringFilled me at my mother’s knee.I was sired among the surges;I was cubbed beside the foam;All my heart is in its verges,And the sea wind is my home.All my boyhood, from far vernalBourns of being, came to meDream-like, plangent, and eternalMemories of the plunging sea.
I was born for deep-sea faring;I was bred to put to sea;Stories of my father’s daringFilled me at my mother’s knee.
I was born for deep-sea faring;
I was bred to put to sea;
Stories of my father’s daring
Filled me at my mother’s knee.
I was sired among the surges;I was cubbed beside the foam;All my heart is in its verges,And the sea wind is my home.
I was sired among the surges;
I was cubbed beside the foam;
All my heart is in its verges,
And the sea wind is my home.
All my boyhood, from far vernalBourns of being, came to meDream-like, plangent, and eternalMemories of the plunging sea.
All my boyhood, from far vernal
Bourns of being, came to me
Dream-like, plangent, and eternal
Memories of the plunging sea.
And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in this picture at whose faithfulness one shudders:
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,And well his work is done.With an equal grave for lord and knave,He buries them every one.Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,He makes for the nearest shore;And God, who sent him a thousand ship,Will send him a thousand more;But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,And shoulder them in to shore,—Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,Shoulder them in to shore.
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,And well his work is done.With an equal grave for lord and knave,He buries them every one.Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,He makes for the nearest shore;And God, who sent him a thousand ship,Will send him a thousand more;But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,And shoulder them in to shore,—Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,Shoulder them in to shore.
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,And well his work is done.With an equal grave for lord and knave,He buries them every one.
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,He makes for the nearest shore;And God, who sent him a thousand ship,Will send him a thousand more;But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,And shoulder them in to shore,—Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,Shoulder them in to shore.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
How the swing of the lines befits the action, and how it puts on grace in this stanza,
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of TyreWent out, and where are they?In the port they made, they are delayedWith the ships of yesterday.
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of TyreWent out, and where are they?In the port they made, they are delayedWith the ships of yesterday.
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of TyreWent out, and where are they?In the port they made, they are delayedWith the ships of yesterday.
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre
Went out, and where are they?
In the port they made, they are delayed
With the ships of yesterday.
The remaining strophes tempt one beyond what he is able, especially this characterization,
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to himIs the sexton of the town;
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to himIs the sexton of the town;
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to himIs the sexton of the town;
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him
Is the sexton of the town;
but we must take a glance at the ballads, at the “Nancy’s Pride,” that went out
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,To the flap of an idle sail,· · · · ·
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,To the flap of an idle sail,· · · · ·
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,To the flap of an idle sail,· · · · ·
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,
To the flap of an idle sail,
· · · · ·
and
… faded downWith her creaking boom a-swing,Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,And caught her wing and wing.· · · · ·She lifted her hull like a breasting gullWhere the rolling valleys be,And dipped where the shining porpoisesPut ploughshares through the sea.· · · · ·They all may home on a sleepy tideTo the sag of an idle sheet;But it’s never again the Nancy’s PrideThat draws men down the street.
… faded downWith her creaking boom a-swing,Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,And caught her wing and wing.· · · · ·She lifted her hull like a breasting gullWhere the rolling valleys be,And dipped where the shining porpoisesPut ploughshares through the sea.· · · · ·They all may home on a sleepy tideTo the sag of an idle sheet;But it’s never again the Nancy’s PrideThat draws men down the street.
… faded downWith her creaking boom a-swing,Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,And caught her wing and wing.· · · · ·She lifted her hull like a breasting gullWhere the rolling valleys be,And dipped where the shining porpoisesPut ploughshares through the sea.· · · · ·They all may home on a sleepy tideTo the sag of an idle sheet;But it’s never again the Nancy’s PrideThat draws men down the street.
… faded down
With her creaking boom a-swing,
Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,
And caught her wing and wing.
· · · · ·
She lifted her hull like a breasting gull
Where the rolling valleys be,
And dipped where the shining porpoises
Put ploughshares through the sea.
· · · · ·
They all may home on a sleepy tide
To the sag of an idle sheet;
But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride
That draws men down the street.
But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon, behold this apparition:
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,They see by the after railAn unknown schooner creeping upWith mildewed spar and sail.Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,With the Judgment in their face;And to their mates’ “God save you!”Have never a word of grace.Then into the gray they sheer away,On the awful polar tide;And the sailors know they have seen the wraithOf the missing Nancy’s Pride.
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,They see by the after railAn unknown schooner creeping upWith mildewed spar and sail.Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,With the Judgment in their face;And to their mates’ “God save you!”Have never a word of grace.Then into the gray they sheer away,On the awful polar tide;And the sailors know they have seen the wraithOf the missing Nancy’s Pride.
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,They see by the after railAn unknown schooner creeping upWith mildewed spar and sail.
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,
They see by the after rail
An unknown schooner creeping up
With mildewed spar and sail.
Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,With the Judgment in their face;And to their mates’ “God save you!”Have never a word of grace.
Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,
With the Judgment in their face;
And to their mates’ “God save you!”
Have never a word of grace.
Then into the gray they sheer away,On the awful polar tide;And the sailors know they have seen the wraithOf the missing Nancy’s Pride.
Then into the gray they sheer away,
On the awful polar tide;
And the sailors know they have seen the wraith
Of the missing Nancy’s Pride.
There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so vividly that one may almost see the
crew lean forth by the rotting shroudsWith the Judgment in their face,
crew lean forth by the rotting shroudsWith the Judgment in their face,
crew lean forth by the rotting shroudsWith the Judgment in their face,
crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds
With the Judgment in their face,
and watch them as
into the gray they sheer awayOn the awful polar tide.
into the gray they sheer awayOn the awful polar tide.
into the gray they sheer awayOn the awful polar tide.
into the gray they sheer away
On the awful polar tide.
The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a very simple line, as this,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled, “weather-breeder” days one knows so well.
From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and frequentlya crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr. Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it.
One pardons this over-elaboration inBallads of Lost Havenbecause of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to theblue leagues of sea; and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s debtor.
Behind the Arrashas proven a stumbling-block and rock of offence to some of Mr. Carman’s readers, because of its recondite character. They regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysticism is half whimsical, and requires no superconsciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is founding no cult; it pleases him for the nonce to mask his thought in symbols, and there are, alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no use for symbols! It is a book containing many strong poems, such as “Beyond the Gamut,” “Exit Anima,” and “Hack and Hew,”—a book of spiritual enigmas through which one catches hints of the open secret, ever-alluring, ever-eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, immanent, yet undivined.
Earth one habitat of spirit merely,I must use as richly as I may,—Touch environment with every sense-tip,Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
Earth one habitat of spirit merely,I must use as richly as I may,—Touch environment with every sense-tip,Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
Earth one habitat of spirit merely,I must use as richly as I may,—Touch environment with every sense-tip,Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
Earth one habitat of spirit merely,
I must use as richly as I may,—
Touch environment with every sense-tip,
Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
says this sane poet who holds his gift as a tribute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny:
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,While time endures,To acquiesce and learn!For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,Let soul discern.
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,While time endures,To acquiesce and learn!For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,Let soul discern.
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,While time endures,To acquiesce and learn!For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,Let soul discern.
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,
While time endures,
To acquiesce and learn!
For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,
Let soul discern.
And who through the grime and in the babel still sees and hears,
Always the flawless beauty,—always the ChordOf the Overword,Dominant, pleading, sure,No truth too small to save and make endure;No good too poor!
Always the flawless beauty,—always the ChordOf the Overword,Dominant, pleading, sure,No truth too small to save and make endure;No good too poor!
Always the flawless beauty,—always the ChordOf the Overword,Dominant, pleading, sure,No truth too small to save and make endure;No good too poor!
Always the flawless beauty,—always the Chord
Of the Overword,
Dominant, pleading, sure,
No truth too small to save and make endure;
No good too poor!
This is the vision that shall lighten our eyes, quicken our ears, and restore our hope,—the vision which we expect the poet to see and to communicate. He must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is orbing. It is not by disregarding the tragic, the sombre, the inexplicable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. Pain has more than touched him; it has become incorporate in him.Low Tide on Grand Préhas its poignant note;Ballads of Lost Haven, its undertone;Behind the Arras, its overtone, its sublimation.
Mr. Carman’s work is more subjective than that of many of the younger poets without being less objective, as the Vagabondia books attest. In one mood he is the mystic, dwelling in a speculative nebula of thought, in another the realist concerning himself only with the demonstrable, and hence his work discloses a wide range of affinities. He is not a strongly constructive thinker, but intuitional in his mental processes, and his verse demands that gift in his readers. Without it what could one make of “The Juggler” but a poem of delicious color and music? If its import were none other than appears upon the face of it, it would still be admirable, but as a symbol of the Force projecting us, it is a subtle bit of art.
Mr. Carman’s sensitiveness to values of rhythm keeps his verse free from lapses in that direction. He never, to my memory, makes use of the sonnet, which shows critical judgment, as the lyric is his temperamental medium. The apogee of his art is in his diction, which has a predestined fitness, and above all a personal quality. To quote Pater again, he has “begotten a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit,” and one cannot mistake even a fragment of his verse. Now and again one comes upon an archaic expression,as “Aweirdis in their song,” using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaningless solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as “illumining thisquenchof clay,” but in general Mr. Carman does not find it necessary to go outside the established limits of the language for variety and force in diction. He has a genius for imagery, and conjures the most unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. The Vagabondia books are abrim with them, and while there are idle lines and padded stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not strike true flashes here and there, few that miss of justification, while their gay and rollicking note heartens one and bids him up and join in the revel.
There are others in a graver key, such as Hovey’s “At the End of the Day,” and Carman’s “The Mendicants,” and “The Marching Morrows;” and certain lyric inspirations, such as the “Sea Gypsy,” by Hovey, and the “Vagabond Song,” by Carman, that have not been bettered by either, that could not well be bettered within their limits. The former has been quoted in the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an inspiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does notanalyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers; under his touch it subtilizes into atmosphere and thus communicates the incommunicable:
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—Touch of manner, hint of mood;And my heart is like a rhyme,With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cryOf bugles going by.And my lonely spirit thrillsTo see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;We must rise and follow her,When from every hill of flameShe calls and calls each vagabond by name.
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—Touch of manner, hint of mood;And my heart is like a rhyme,With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cryOf bugles going by.And my lonely spirit thrillsTo see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;We must rise and follow her,When from every hill of flameShe calls and calls each vagabond by name.
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—Touch of manner, hint of mood;And my heart is like a rhyme,With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cryOf bugles going by.And my lonely spirit thrillsTo see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;We must rise and follow her,When from every hill of flameShe calls and calls each vagabond by name.
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
Throwing aside all that is ephemeral in the Vagabondia books, all mere boyish ebullition, there is a goodly residuum of nature-poetry of the freshest and most unhackneyed sort. It is the blithe, objective type; eyes and ears are its informers, and it enters into one’s mood with a keen sense of refreshment. Who does not know the impulse that prompted these lines?
Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!When thy flowery hand deliversAll the mountain-prisoned rivers,And thy great heart beats and quiversTo revive the days that were,Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!
Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!When thy flowery hand deliversAll the mountain-prisoned rivers,And thy great heart beats and quiversTo revive the days that were,Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!
Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!When thy flowery hand deliversAll the mountain-prisoned rivers,And thy great heart beats and quiversTo revive the days that were,Make me over, mother April,When the sap begins to stir!
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
When thy flowery hand delivers
All the mountain-prisoned rivers,
And thy great heart beats and quivers
To revive the days that were,
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
The temper of the Vagabondia books is thoroughly wholesome; courage and cheer dominate them; in short, they are good to know; and while it is not vitally necessary to remember all they contain, one would be distinctly the loser should he forget such poems as “Non Omnis Moriar” or “The Deserted Inn” fromThe Last Songs.
The collection of Memorabilia,By the Aurelian Wall, takes its title from the burial-place of Keats, and includes “A Seamark,” the fine threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of Phillips Brooks; a spiritual, poetic visioning of Shelley under the symbol of “The White Gull;” a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and other things equally well-wrought. Some of them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point—but what haunting sweetness it carries with it! To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beatingin the void his luminous wings in vain,” has come to dominate the popular fancy in regard to him. Mr. Carman’s poem, though touched with this mood, is not set to it, and he has several stanzas which have in them the essence of Shelley’s spirit,—the real Shelley, the passionate idealist, the spent runner who, falling, handed on the torch.
The Stevenson threnody is probably the best of the elegies, as Mr. Carman is by temperament one of the Stevenson brotherhood, and no subject could better command him. That “intimate and magic name,” a password to fellowship, conjures many a picture of him—
Whose courage lights the dark’ning portWhere every sea-worn sail must come.
Whose courage lights the dark’ning portWhere every sea-worn sail must come.
Whose courage lights the dark’ning portWhere every sea-worn sail must come.
Whose courage lights the dark’ning port
Where every sea-worn sail must come.
Mr. Carman has singular power to visualize a scene; one becomes an eye-witness of it as of this:
But I have wander-biddings now.Far down the latitudes of sun,An island mountain of the sea,Piercing the green and rosy zone,Goes up into the wondrous day.And there the brown-limbed island menAre bearing up for burial,Within the sun’s departing ken,The master of the roving kind.And there where time will set no markFor his irrevocable rest,Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him, they have laid him downAbove the crumbling of the sea,Beyond the turmoil of renown.
But I have wander-biddings now.Far down the latitudes of sun,An island mountain of the sea,Piercing the green and rosy zone,Goes up into the wondrous day.And there the brown-limbed island menAre bearing up for burial,Within the sun’s departing ken,The master of the roving kind.And there where time will set no markFor his irrevocable rest,Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him, they have laid him downAbove the crumbling of the sea,Beyond the turmoil of renown.
But I have wander-biddings now.Far down the latitudes of sun,An island mountain of the sea,Piercing the green and rosy zone,
But I have wander-biddings now.
Far down the latitudes of sun,
An island mountain of the sea,
Piercing the green and rosy zone,
Goes up into the wondrous day.And there the brown-limbed island menAre bearing up for burial,Within the sun’s departing ken,
Goes up into the wondrous day.
And there the brown-limbed island men
Are bearing up for burial,
Within the sun’s departing ken,
The master of the roving kind.And there where time will set no markFor his irrevocable rest,Under the spacious melting dark,
The master of the roving kind.
And there where time will set no mark
For his irrevocable rest,
Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented starsAbout him, they have laid him downAbove the crumbling of the sea,Beyond the turmoil of renown.
With all the nomad tented stars
About him, they have laid him down
Above the crumbling of the sea,
Beyond the turmoil of renown.
This island procession to the mountain, leaving the master to his “irrevocable rest,”
Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him,
Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him,
Under the spacious melting dark,With all the nomad tented starsAbout him,
Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented stars
About him,
is an artist’s picture not easily forgotten.
Mr. Carman’s three volumes in the projected “Pipes of Pan” series, including thus farThe Book of the Myths,The Green Book of the Bards, andThe Sea Children, make new disclosures of his talent, and the title poem “Pipes of Pan,” is a bit of anointed vision that would waken the dullest eyes from lethargy as to the world around them. There is necromancy in Mr. Carman’s words when the outer world is his theme; something of the thrill, the expectancy in the heart of growing things, the elation of life, comes upon one as he reads the “Pipes of Pan.” It is a nobler vision than illumined Vagabondia days, revealing
Power out of hurt and stainTo bring beauty back again,
Power out of hurt and stainTo bring beauty back again,
Power out of hurt and stainTo bring beauty back again,
Power out of hurt and stain
To bring beauty back again,
and showing the
Scope and purpose, hint and planLurking in the Pipes of Pan,
Scope and purpose, hint and planLurking in the Pipes of Pan,
Scope and purpose, hint and planLurking in the Pipes of Pan,
Scope and purpose, hint and plan
Lurking in the Pipes of Pan,
as well as the sheer delight that we noted in Vagabondia.
It seems that every mood of every creature has been divined and uttered, uttered with deep love, with a human relatedness that melts the barriers between life and life, whether in man or in
All the bright, gay-colored thingsBuoyed in air on balanced wings.
All the bright, gay-colored thingsBuoyed in air on balanced wings.
All the bright, gay-colored thingsBuoyed in air on balanced wings.
All the bright, gay-colored things
Buoyed in air on balanced wings.
This relatedness, and all the molding influences of nature leading us on from beauty to strength, are developed in Mr. Carman’s poem until they become to us religion. We realize that at heart we are all pantheists, and that revelation antedates the Book; that the law is written on the leaves of roses as well as on tables of stone,—a testament both new and old, given for our learning that we might have hope.
The remaining poems ofThe Book of the Mythsare not the best things Mr. Carman has done, though renewals of classic verse-forms in the Sapphic and other metres, and oftenpicturesque in story. “The Lost Dryad” is the most attractive, “The Dead Faun” the least so, to my ears; but perhaps from lack of sympathy with the subject-matter I cannot think the collection, with the exception of the poem “Pipes of Pan,” is of especial value. It is not to be named, still excepting the above poem, with its companion volume,The Green Book of the Bards, which contains some of the strongest work of Mr. Carman’s pen as to subject and thought, but which has one pronounced limitation,—its monotony of form.
The entire volume, with a sole exception, and that not marked, is written in the conventional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr. Carman’s work of late has been cast. Within this compass, the accomplishment is as varied as to theme and diction, as that of his other work; but when one sings on and on in the same numbers, it induces a state of mental indolence in the reader, and presupposes a similar state in the writer. The verse goes purling musically along, until, as running water exercises an hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized by the mere melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness to find that he has no notion what they are about, and must re-read them to find out. To be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, andwill make new disclosures whenever one returns to them; but had they greater variety as to manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the mind would be startled to perception by unexpectedness, instead of lulled by the same note in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that Mr. Carman has a principle at stake in this,—it may indeed be a reactionary measure against over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire for simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the first canons of art, but variety in metre and form is another canon by no means annulling the first. One may have variety to the superlative degree, and never depart from the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity.
WereThe Green Book of the Bardsrelieved by contrasts of form, it would rank with the finest work of Mr. Carman’s pen, as the individual poems have strong basic ideas,—such as the “Creature Catechism,” full of pregnant thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word as to the mystic union of the creative Soul with the creatures of feather and fin and fleece. The marked evolution of Mr. Carman’s philosophy of life, as influenced by his growing identity with nature, comes out so strongly in the “Pipes of Pan” series, and inThe Word at Saint Kavin’s, as almost to reveal a new individuality.He had gone out in the light-foot, light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with the woods and winds; glad to be quit of the gyves, to drink from the wayside spring, eat of the forest fruit, sleep ’neath the tent of night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He had sought nature in a mood of pagan joy; but the wayside spring had excited a thirst it could not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it could not allay, and the blithe seeker of freedom and delight became at length the anointed votary, and lingered to watch the God at work shaping life from death, and expressing His yearning in beauty.
The mere objective delight of the earlier time has grown steadily into the subjective identity with every manifestation of the Force that operates within this world of wonder and beauty, from the soul of man, shaping his ideals and creating his environment, to the butterfly whose sun-painted wings, set afloat in the buoyant air, are upheld by the breath of God. Coming into the finer knowledge, through long intimacy with the earth and its multitudinous life, fulfilling itself in joy,—Mr. Carman has come at length to
readjustThe logic of the dust,
readjustThe logic of the dust,
readjustThe logic of the dust,
readjust
The logic of the dust,
and to shape from it a creed and law for his following, which he has put into the mouth of Saint Kavin for expounding. The opening stanzas of the volume give the setting and note:
Once at St. Kavin’s doorI rested. No sigh moreOf discontent escaped me from that day.For there I overheardA Brother of the WordExpound the grace of poverty, and say:Thank God for povertyThat makes and keeps us free,And lets us go our unobtrusive way,Glad of the sun and rain,Upright, serene, humane,Contented with the fortune of a day.
Once at St. Kavin’s doorI rested. No sigh moreOf discontent escaped me from that day.For there I overheardA Brother of the WordExpound the grace of poverty, and say:Thank God for povertyThat makes and keeps us free,And lets us go our unobtrusive way,Glad of the sun and rain,Upright, serene, humane,Contented with the fortune of a day.
Once at St. Kavin’s doorI rested. No sigh moreOf discontent escaped me from that day.For there I overheardA Brother of the WordExpound the grace of poverty, and say:
Once at St. Kavin’s door
I rested. No sigh more
Of discontent escaped me from that day.
For there I overheard
A Brother of the Word
Expound the grace of poverty, and say:
Thank God for povertyThat makes and keeps us free,And lets us go our unobtrusive way,Glad of the sun and rain,Upright, serene, humane,Contented with the fortune of a day.
Thank God for poverty
That makes and keeps us free,
And lets us go our unobtrusive way,
Glad of the sun and rain,
Upright, serene, humane,
Contented with the fortune of a day.
The poem follows simple, but no less picturesque phrase, as becomes Saint Kavin, and is, from the technical side, quaint and artistic. On the philosophical, it develops at first the initial thought that one shall “keep his soul”
Joyous and sane and whole
Joyous and sane and whole
Joyous and sane and whole
Joyous and sane and whole
by obeying the word
That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,
That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,
That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,
That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,
and that
When we have laid asideOur truculence and pride,Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—
When we have laid asideOur truculence and pride,Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—
When we have laid asideOur truculence and pride,Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—
When we have laid aside
Our truculence and pride,
Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—
we shall have found the boon of our ultimate striving,—room to live and let our spirits grow, and give of their growth and higher gain to another. Here is the giving that turns to one’s own enrichment:
And if I share my crust,As common manhood must,With one whose need is greater than my own,Shall I not also giveHis soul, that it may live,Of the abundant pleasures I have known?And so, if I have wrought,Amassed or conceived aughtOf beauty, or intelligence or power,It is not mine to hoard;It stands there to affordIts generous service simply as a flower.
And if I share my crust,As common manhood must,With one whose need is greater than my own,Shall I not also giveHis soul, that it may live,Of the abundant pleasures I have known?And so, if I have wrought,Amassed or conceived aughtOf beauty, or intelligence or power,It is not mine to hoard;It stands there to affordIts generous service simply as a flower.
And if I share my crust,As common manhood must,With one whose need is greater than my own,Shall I not also giveHis soul, that it may live,Of the abundant pleasures I have known?
And if I share my crust,
As common manhood must,
With one whose need is greater than my own,
Shall I not also give
His soul, that it may live,
Of the abundant pleasures I have known?
And so, if I have wrought,Amassed or conceived aughtOf beauty, or intelligence or power,It is not mine to hoard;It stands there to affordIts generous service simply as a flower.
And so, if I have wrought,
Amassed or conceived aught
Of beauty, or intelligence or power,
It is not mine to hoard;
It stands there to afford
Its generous service simply as a flower.
The poem then broadens into a dissertation upon the complexities of life, one’s servitude to custom and “vested wrong,” the lack of individual courage to
Live by the truth each one of us believes,
Live by the truth each one of us believes,
Live by the truth each one of us believes,
Live by the truth each one of us believes,
and turns, for illustration of the nobler development and poise, back to nature, and the evolutionary round of life through which one traces his course and kinship. These stanzas are among the finest spoken by the wiseBrother of the Word. After citing the strength and serenity of the fir-trees, and what a travesty upon man’s ascent it were, did one bear himself less royally than they, he adverts to the creature kin-fellows whose lot we have borne:
I, too, in polar nightHave hungered, gaunt and white,Alone amid the awful silences;And fled on gaudy fin,When the blue tides came in,Through coral gardens under tropic seas.And wheresoe’er I strove,The greater law was love,A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;There was no wanton greed,Depravity of breed,Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.Nay, not till I was man,Learned I to scheme and planThe blackest depredation on my kind,Converting to my gainMy fellow’s need and painIn chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.Therefore, my friends, I sayBack to the fair sweet wayOur Mother Nature taught us long ago,—The large primeval mood,Leisure and amplitude,The dignity of patience strong and slow.Let us go in once moreBy some blue mountain door,And hold communion with the forest leaves;Where long ago we trodThe Ghost House of the God,Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!
I, too, in polar nightHave hungered, gaunt and white,Alone amid the awful silences;And fled on gaudy fin,When the blue tides came in,Through coral gardens under tropic seas.And wheresoe’er I strove,The greater law was love,A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;There was no wanton greed,Depravity of breed,Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.Nay, not till I was man,Learned I to scheme and planThe blackest depredation on my kind,Converting to my gainMy fellow’s need and painIn chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.Therefore, my friends, I sayBack to the fair sweet wayOur Mother Nature taught us long ago,—The large primeval mood,Leisure and amplitude,The dignity of patience strong and slow.Let us go in once moreBy some blue mountain door,And hold communion with the forest leaves;Where long ago we trodThe Ghost House of the God,Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!
I, too, in polar nightHave hungered, gaunt and white,Alone amid the awful silences;And fled on gaudy fin,When the blue tides came in,Through coral gardens under tropic seas.
I, too, in polar night
Have hungered, gaunt and white,
Alone amid the awful silences;
And fled on gaudy fin,
When the blue tides came in,
Through coral gardens under tropic seas.
And wheresoe’er I strove,The greater law was love,A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;There was no wanton greed,Depravity of breed,Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.
And wheresoe’er I strove,
The greater law was love,
A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;
There was no wanton greed,
Depravity of breed,
Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.
Nay, not till I was man,Learned I to scheme and planThe blackest depredation on my kind,Converting to my gainMy fellow’s need and painIn chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.
Nay, not till I was man,
Learned I to scheme and plan
The blackest depredation on my kind,
Converting to my gain
My fellow’s need and pain
In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.
Therefore, my friends, I sayBack to the fair sweet wayOur Mother Nature taught us long ago,—The large primeval mood,Leisure and amplitude,The dignity of patience strong and slow.
Therefore, my friends, I say
Back to the fair sweet way
Our Mother Nature taught us long ago,—
The large primeval mood,
Leisure and amplitude,
The dignity of patience strong and slow.
Let us go in once moreBy some blue mountain door,And hold communion with the forest leaves;Where long ago we trodThe Ghost House of the God,Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!
Let us go in once more
By some blue mountain door,
And hold communion with the forest leaves;
Where long ago we trod
The Ghost House of the God,
Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!
Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements of this place of return, a more thoughtful one of its requitals, and the infinitude of care bestowed upon every task to which the Master Craftsman sets his hand, and orbs into a vision of the soul enlarged by breathing the freer air and by regaining therefrom her “primal ecstasy and poise.” It traces also the soul’s commission,
To fill her purport in the ampler plan.
To fill her purport in the ampler plan.
To fill her purport in the ampler plan.
To fill her purport in the ampler plan.
Altogether the Word is admirably expounded by Saint Kavin, and one is distinctly the gainer for having rested at his door to learn not only the grace of joyousness, but the means to that grace.
In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but one whose promise hehas made good, as poetry, however near it may approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have gone to oblivion.
Of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” the most complete Sapphic poem extant, many translations and paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin Arnold, John Addington Symonds, Ambrose Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among the finest; and were there space it would be interesting to show by comparison that Mr. Carman’s rendering of the Ode ranks well with the standard already set.
Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, aswell as the poet’s touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres, together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines:
O heart of insatiable longing,What spell, what enchantment allures thee,Over the rim of the worldWith the sails of the sea-going ships?And when the rose petals are scatteredAt dead of still noon on the grass-plot,What means this passionate grief,—This infinite ache of regret?[1]
O heart of insatiable longing,What spell, what enchantment allures thee,Over the rim of the worldWith the sails of the sea-going ships?And when the rose petals are scatteredAt dead of still noon on the grass-plot,What means this passionate grief,—This infinite ache of regret?[1]
O heart of insatiable longing,What spell, what enchantment allures thee,Over the rim of the worldWith the sails of the sea-going ships?
O heart of insatiable longing,
What spell, what enchantment allures thee,
Over the rim of the world
With the sails of the sea-going ships?
And when the rose petals are scatteredAt dead of still noon on the grass-plot,What means this passionate grief,—This infinite ache of regret?[1]
And when the rose petals are scattered
At dead of still noon on the grass-plot,
What means this passionate grief,—
This infinite ache of regret?[1]
Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown;whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to tell as a stroke in a sketch:
Art thou the topmost appleThe gatherers could not reach,Reddening on the bough?Shall not I take thee?Art thou a hyacinth blossomThe shepherds upon the hillsHave trodden into the ground?Shall not I lift thee?
Art thou the topmost appleThe gatherers could not reach,Reddening on the bough?Shall not I take thee?Art thou a hyacinth blossomThe shepherds upon the hillsHave trodden into the ground?Shall not I lift thee?
Art thou the topmost appleThe gatherers could not reach,Reddening on the bough?Shall not I take thee?
Art thou the topmost apple
The gatherers could not reach,
Reddening on the bough?
Shall not I take thee?
Art thou a hyacinth blossomThe shepherds upon the hillsHave trodden into the ground?Shall not I lift thee?
Art thou a hyacinth blossom
The shepherds upon the hills
Have trodden into the ground?
Shall not I lift thee?
The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic play upon words explaining that, although the gatherers did not get the coveted apple, they
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,
which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is hardly in keeping with the dignity of the comparison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well preserved.
Another fragment made familiar by adaptation is that to Hesperus, expanded by Byroninto one of the great passages of “Don Juan.” Mr. Carman gives a more compact rendering and again brings the lines to such a close as shall render them a complete lyric. They scarcely vie in beauty with the Byron passage, which is one of the surest strokes of his hand, but have their own charm and grace:
Hesperus, bringing togetherAll that the morning star scattered,—Sheep to be folded in twilight,Children for mothers to fondle,—Me, too, will bring to the dearest,Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.
Hesperus, bringing togetherAll that the morning star scattered,—Sheep to be folded in twilight,Children for mothers to fondle,—Me, too, will bring to the dearest,Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.
Hesperus, bringing togetherAll that the morning star scattered,—
Hesperus, bringing together
All that the morning star scattered,—
Sheep to be folded in twilight,Children for mothers to fondle,—
Sheep to be folded in twilight,
Children for mothers to fondle,—
Me, too, will bring to the dearest,Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.
Me, too, will bring to the dearest,
Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.
The fragment, “I loved thee, Athis, in the long ago,” has been expanded by Mr. Carman into a poem of reminiscent mood, the long, slow-moving pentameter enhancing the effect of pensive meditation which the lines convey. Many of the fragments are of a blither note, having the variety which distinguishes the original.
Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint in his treatment of the fragments. They are not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, and while there is a certain atmosphere of insubstantiality about many of them, as couldscarcely fail to result from the attempt to restore, by imagination alone, what had existence but in tradition, they justify themselves as artistic poetry, which is the only consideration of moment.
[1]From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. Copyright, 1903, by L. C. Page &Co.