A POET AND HIS POEM
(From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, September, 1907)
WHATEVER length of days may be accorded to this magazine, it is not likely to do anything more notable in literature that it accomplishes in this issue by publication of Mr. George Sterling’s poem, “A Wine of Wizardry.” Doubtless the full significance of this event will not be immediately apprehended by more than a select few, for understanding of poetry has at no time been a very general endowment of our countrymen. After a not inconsiderable acquaintance with American men of letters and men of affairs I find myself unable to name a dozen of whom I should be willing to affirm their possession of this precious gift—for a gift it indubitably is; and of these not all would, in my judgment, be able to discern the light of genius in a poem not authenticated by a name already famous, or credentialed by a general assent. It is not commonly permitted to even the luckiest of poets to “set the Thames on fire” with his first match; and I venture to add that the Hudson is less combustible than the Thames. Anybody can see, or can think that he sees, what has been pointed out, but original discovery is another matter. Carlyle, indeed, has noted that the first impression of a work of genius is disagreeable—which is unfortunate for its author if he is unknown, for upon editors and publishers a first impression is usually all that he is permitted to make.
From the discouraging operation of these uncongenial conditions Mr. Sterling is not exempt, as the biography of this poem would show; yet Mr. Sterling is not altogether unknown. His book, The Testimony of the Suns, and Other Poems, published in 1903, brought him recognition in the literary Nazareth beyond the Rocky Mountains, whose passes are so vigilantly guarded by cismontane criticism. Indeed, some sense of the might and majesty of the book’s title poem succeeded in crossing the dead-line while watch-worn sentinels slept “at their insuperable posts.” Of that work I have the temerity to think that in both subject and art it nicks the rock as high as anything of the generation of Tennyson, and a good deal higher than anything of the generation of Kipling; and this despite its absolute destitution of what contemporary taste insists on having—the “human interest.” Naturally, a dramatist of the heavens, who takes the suns for his characters, the deeps of space for his stage, and eternity for his “historic period,” does not “look into his heart and write” emotionally; but there is room in literature for more than emotion. In the “other poems” of the book the lower need is supplied without extravagance and with no admixture of sentimentality. But what we are here concerned with is “A Wine of Wizardry.”
In this remarkable poem the author proves his allegiance to the fundamental faith of the greatest of those “who claim the holy Muse as mate”—a faith which he has himself “confessed” thus:
Remiss the ministry they bear
Who serve her with divided heart;
She stands reluctant to impart
Her strength to purpose, end, or care.
Here, as in all his work, we shall look in vain for the “practical,” the “helpful.” The verses serve no cause, tell no story, point no moral. Their author has no “purpose, end, or care” other than the writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of a skylark—it is merely poetry. No one knows what poetry is, but to the enlightened few who know what is poetry it is a rare and deep delight to find it in the form of virgin gold. “Gold,” says the miner “vext with odious subtlety” of the mineralogist with his theories of deposit—“gold is where you find it.” It is no less precious whether you have crushed it from the rock, or washed it from the gravel, but some of us care to be spared the labor of reduction, or sluicing. Mr. Sterling’s reader needs no outfit of mill and pan.
I am not of those who deem it a service to letters to “encourage” mediocrity—that is one of the many ways to starve genius. From the amiable judgment of the “friendly critic” with his heart in his head, otherwise unoccupied, and the laudator literarum who finds every month, or every week—according to his employment by magazine or newspaper—more great books than I have had the luck to find in a half-century, I dissent. My notion is that an age which produces a half-dozen good writers and twenty books worth reading is a memorable age. I think, too, that contemporary criticism is of small service, and popular acclaim of none at all, in enabling us to know who are the good authors and which the good books. Naturally, then, I am not overtrustful of my own judgment, nor hot in hope of its acceptance. Yet I steadfastly believe and hardily affirm that George Sterling is a very great poet—incomparably the greatest that we have on this side of the Atlantic. And of this particular poem I hold that not in a lifetime has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as any of the “ardent gems” that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all the imagination of “Comus” and all the fancy of “The Faerie Queene.” If Leigh Hunt should return to earth to part and catalogue these two precious qualities he would find them in so confusing abundance and so inextricably interlaced that he would fly in despair from the impossible task.
Great lines are not all that go to the making of great poetry, but a poem with many great lines is a great poem, even if it have—as usually it has, and as “A Wine of Wizardry” has not—prosaic lines as well. To quote all the striking passages in Mr. Sterling’s poem would be to quote most of the poem, but I will ask the reader’s attention to some of the most graphic and memorable.
A cowled magician peering on the damned
Thro’ vials wherein a splendid poison burns.
’Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned,
Undominated firmament.
It is not for me to say what may be meant here by “undominated,” any more than to explain what Shakspeare meant by
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.
A poet makes his own words and his own definitions: it is for the rest of us to accept them and see to it that there is no interference by that feeble folk, the lexicographers.
a dell where some mad girl hath flung
A bracelet that the painted lizards fear—
Red pyres of muffled light!
Dull fires of dusty jewels that have bound
The brows of naked Ashtaroth.
she marks the seaward flight
Of homing dragons dark upon the West.
Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire
To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire.
Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom,
Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame.
silent ghouls,
Whose king hath digged a sombre carcanet
And necklaces with fevered opals set.
Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light
Dip to the ocean’s phosphorescent caves.
What other words could so vividly describe gleams of fire on a troubled sea? Who but a masterful poet could describe them at all?
There priestesses in purple robes hold each
A sultry garnet to the sea-linkt sun,
Or, just before the colored morning shakes
A splendor on the ruby-sanded beach,
Cry unto Betelgeuze a mystic word.
Faith! I would give value to know that word!
Where icy philters brim with scarlet foam.
Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed.
A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse,
Beside a caldron vext with harlots’ blood,
The stars of that red Sign which spells her doom.
halls
In which dead Merlin’s prowling ape hath spilt
A vial squat whose scarlet venom crawls
To ciphers bright and terrible.
ere the tomb-thrown echoings have ceased,
The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.
Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the imagination to Coleridge’s
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover,
or Keats’s
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn—
passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human thought.
One of a poet’s most authenticating credentials may be found in his epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician, are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt, spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider a few of Mr. Sterling’s epithets, besides those in the lines already quoted:
“Purpled” realm; “striving” billows; “wattled” monsters; “timid” sapphires of the snow; “lit” wastes; a “stainèd” twilight of the South; “tiny” twilight in the jacinth, and “wintry” orb of the moonstone; “winy” agate and “banded” onyx; “lustrous” rivers; “glowering” pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.
Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made poet?—to the “poet of the day”—poet by resolution of a “committee on literary exercises”? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve felicities like these!