V
A large amount of the poetry of the era has been written by women. After the war their thin volumes, bound in creamy vellum and daintily tinted cloth, began more and more to fill the book tables, until reviewers no longer could give separate notice to them, but must consider the poets of a month in groups of ten or twelve. The quality of the feminine product was high enough to find place in the most exclusive monthlies, and the quantity published was surprising. The Atlantic Monthly, for instance, during the decade from 1870 published 108 poems by Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, and Aldrich, and 450 other poems, and of the latter 201 were by women. The feminine novelists and short story writers, so conspicuous during all the period, were, indeed, almost all poets, some of them voluminous. One may note the names not only of the older group—Mrs. Stuart Phelps Ward, Mrs. Cooke, Mrs. Spofford, Miss Woolson—but of such later writers as Mrs. Freeman, Alice Brown, Mrs. Deland, and Mrs. Riggs.
Very little of this mass of poetry has been strong enough to demand republication from the dainty volumes in which it first appeared. It has been smooth and often melodious, but for the most part it has been conventional. Prevailingly it has been short lyric song in minor key, gentle and sentimental—graceful exercises in verse rather than voices from a soul stirred to utterance and caring not. In a sonneteering age this feminine contingent has swelled enormously the volume of sonnets. Helen Hunt Jackson's thin volume contains one hundred, Louise Chandler Moulton's one hundred and thirty-one, yet in both collections occurs no sonnet one would dream of adding to the select few that undoubtedly are worth while. Here and there in Mrs. Jackson a bit of work like "Poppies on the Wheat," "Glimpses," "Vashti," that rises, perhaps, a little above the level monotony of the times, but in the vital seventies in America why should one have published sonnets? Even as she was shaping them, Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) was demanding in major key,
How long, and yet how long,
Our leaders will we hail from over seas,
Masters and kings from feudal monarchies,
And mock their ancient song
With echoes weak of foreign melodies?
* * * * *
This fresh young world I see,
With heroes, cities, legends of her own;
With a new race of men, and overblown
By winds from sea to sea,
Decked with the majesty of every zone.
* * * * *
The distant siren-song
Of the green island in the eastern sea,
Is not the lay for this new chivalry.
It is not free and strong
To chant on prairies 'neath this brilliant sky.
The echo faints and fails;
It suiteth not, upon this western plain,
Our voice or spirit; we should stir again
The wilderness, and make the vales
Resound unto a yet unheard-of strain.
The life of Emma Lazarus was brief and externally eventless. Born in New York City in a home of refinement and wealth, as a child precocious, inclined to seriousness, intense, she passed her early life among books rather than among companions. At seventeen she had issued a collection of verses, melancholy even above the usual poetry of women, valueless utterly; then at twenty-one she had published again, now a long poem, Greek in its chaste beauty, Admetus, inscribed "To My Friend Ralph Waldo Emerson." Two forces were contending, even as they had contended in Heine. In Paris in later years before the Venus of the Louvre she wrote a sonnet, and, miracle among modern sonnets, it is impassioned, unfettered, alive—a woman's soul:
... I saw not her alone,
Serenely poised on her world-worshiped throne,
As when she guided once her dove-drawn car,—
But at her feet a pale, death-stricken Jew,
Her life adorer, sobbed farewell to love.
Here Heine wept! Here still he weeps anew,
Nor ever shall his shadow lift or move,
While mourns one ardent heart, one poet-brain,
For vanished Hellas and Hebraic pain.
Until 1876 quiet emotion, Hellenic beauty, romance without passion. "Tannhäuser" suggests William Morris and The Earthly Paradise. Then came The Spagnioletto, a tense drama, which showed for the first time the latent embers in her Hebraic soul. It needed but a breath to kindle them and that breath came with reports of the Jewish massacres of 1879. No more of Hellenism. With Liebhaid in The Dance of Death, that most tense drama in American literature, she could cry out:
No more of that.
I am all Israel's now—till this cloud pass,
I have no thought, no passion, no desire,
Save for my people.
Henceforth fiery lyrics of denunciation, rallying cries, translations of Hebrew prophets, songs of encouragement and cheer, as "The Crowing of the Red Cock," "In Exile," "The New Ezekiel," "The Valley of Baca," and, most Hebraic of all, "The Banner of the Jew," with its ringing lines:
Oh, for Jerusalem's trumpet now,
To blow a blast of shattering power,
To wake the sleepers high and low,
And rouse them to the urgent hour!
No hand for vengeance—but to save,
A million naked swords should wave.
The fire was too intense for the frail, sensitive body. Suddenly, like Heine, she was on a "mattress grave," powerless, though never so eager, never so quivering with burning message. She died at thirty-eight.
No more impetuous and Hebraic lines in the literature of the period than hers. Often she achieved a distinction of phrase and an inevitableness of word and of rhythm denied to all but the truest of poets. No other American woman has surpassed her in passion, in genuineness of emotion, in pure lyric effect.
Other impassioned singers there have been. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855——) wrote of love with lyric abandon, but she mingled too much of sentimentality and all too much of posing and of tawdriness. Anne Reeve Aldrich (1866–1892) in Songs About Life, Love, and Death struck deeper notes, and Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832–1911), though she wrote exceedingly much in the key of the conventional mid-century sadness and longing, yet now and then sent forth lyrics that laid bare her woman's soul.
One may not dismiss so confidently Celia Thaxter, the poet of the Isles of Shoals. She was, to be sure, no dominating voice in the period, no poet with whom distinction of phrase and poetic melody were native and spontaneous. Rather was she of the Jean Ingelow type, feminine, domestic, tremulous with sentiment. In one area, however, she commanded: her poetry of the sea was autochthonic, and it sprang not from books, but from her life. Her childhood she had passed in the seclusion of the lighthouse keeper's home on White Island, a storm-beaten rock off the New Hampshire coast. For months at a time no visitors came save the sea gulls and the migrating birds. Her companion through all her young girlhood was the ocean. She grew to know intimately all its thousand moods, the sea gardens along the rocks at low tide, the ships that hovered like clouds on the horizon, the flowers in the rock crannies, the sandpipers that flitted before her on the beach. The birds that flew against the lantern of the lighthouse on migrating nights furnished the first tragedy of her life:
Many a May morning have I wandered about the rock at the foot of the tower, mourning over a little apron brimful of sparrows, swallows, thrushes, robins, fire-winged blackbirds, many-colored warblers and fly-catchers, beautifully clothed yellow-birds, nuthatches, catbirds, even the purple finch and scarlet tanager and golden oreole, and many more besides—enough to break the heart of a small child to think of![146]
No ordinary child, this lonely little islander. The lure of the sea possessed her, the terror of its storms, the beauty of its summer moods, the multitudinous variety of its voice. "Many a summer morning have I crept out of the still house before any one was awake, and, wrapping myself closely from the chill wind of dawn, climbed to the top of the high cliff called the Head to watch the sunrise." It was this communion with the sea that awoke the poet soul within her:
Ever I longed to speak these things that made life so sweet, to speak the wind, the cloud, the bird's flight, the sea's murmur. A vain longing! I might as well have sighed for the mighty pencil of Michel Angelo to wield in my impotent child's hand. Better to "hush and bless one's self with silence"; but ever the wish grew. Facing the July sunsets, deep red and golden through and through, or watching the summer northern lights—battalions of brilliant streamers, advancing and retreating, shooting upward to the zenith, and glowing like fiery veils before the stars; or when the fog bow spanned the silver mist of morning, or the earth and sea lay shimmering in a golden haze of noon; in storm or calm, by day or night, the manifold aspects of Nature held me and swayed all my thoughts until it was impossible to be silent any longer, and I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and broken the notes might be.[147]
The first poem of hers to gain the ear of the public was "Land-Locked," accepted by Lowell and published in the Atlantic, March, 1861. Its closing stanzas ring with sincerity. It is the voice of every inland dweller whose youth has been spent by the sea:
Neither am I ungrateful; but I dream
Deliciously how twilight falls to-night
Over the glimmering water, how the light
Dies blissfully away, until I seem
To feel the wind, sea-scented, on my cheek,
To catch the sound of dusky flapping sail
And dip of oars, and voices on the gale
Afar off, calling low—my name they speak!
O Earth! thy summer song of joy may soar
Ringing to heaven in triumph. I but crave
The sad, caressing murmur of the wave
That breaks in tender music on the shore.
About all her poetry of the sea there are genuineness and truth to experience. All of them are fragments of autobiography: "Off Shore," "The Wreck of the Pocahontas," "The Sandpiper," "Watching," "At the Breakers' Edge," "The Watch of Boon Island," "Leviathan"—all of them have in them the heart of the northern Atlantic. They are not deep like Whitman's mighty voicings, but they are the cry of one who knew and loved the sea better than any other American who has ever written about it.
Her prose study Among the Isles of Shoals, overflorid though it may be in places, is nevertheless one of the notable books of the period. Nowhere may one find so complete a picture of the northern ocean in all its moods and aspects. Its pictures of storm and wreck, its glimpses of the tense and hazardous life of dwellers by the ocean, its disclosings of the mystery and the subtle lure of the sea, stir one at times like the deeper notes of poetry.
One of the most perplexing of later poetic problems came in 1890 with the publication by Thomas Wentworth Higginson of the posthumous poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The explanation by Higginson that the poet was a daughter of the treasurer of Amherst College, that she was a recluse "literally spending years without setting her foot beyond the doorstep and many more years during which her walks were strictly limited to her father's grounds," and that she had written "verses in great abundance," refusing, however, save in three or four instances, to allow any of them to be published, that she wrote "absolutely without thought of publication, and solely by way of expression of the writer's own mind,"—all this aroused curiosity. At last one might see, perchance, a woman's soul.
The poems are disappointing. Critics have echoed Higginson, until Emily Dickinson has figured, often at length, in all the later histories and anthologies, but it is becoming clear that she was overrated. To compare her eccentric fragments with Blake's elfin wildness is ridiculous. They are mere conceits, vague jottings of a brooding mind; they are crudely wrought, and, like their author's letters, which were given to the public later, they are colorless and for the most part lifeless. They reveal little either of Emily Dickinson or of human life generally. They should have been allowed to perish as their author intended.
Most of the feminine poets of the later generation have been over-literary. There is grace and finish in the work of Louise Imogen Guiney (1861——), but nowhere in all her carefully selected final volume, Happy Ending, are there lines that suddenly send the pulses into quicker beat and haunt the memory. It is beautiful, but it is of a piece with ten thousand other beautiful pieces; there is nothing to compel the reader, nothing to lead him into fresh fields. Of all too many of the later feminine poets may we say this: of Ina Donna Coolbrith, for instance, and Helen Gray Cone (1859——), Dora Read Goodale (1866——), Katharine Lee Bates (1859——).
Only one other feminine singer has done work that compels attention, Edith Matilda Thomas (1854——). Only by birth and rearing was she of Ohio. To read her poems is to be transported into that no-man's land which so many poets have called Arcady. She is more Greek than American. She has reacted little upon her time, and she might be dismissed with mere mention were there not in many of her poems a lyric distinction that has been rare in American poetry. A fragment from her work will make this clearer than exposition. Here, for instance, are the opening stanzas of "Syrinx":
Come forth, too timid spirit of the reed!
Leave thy plashed coverts and elusions shy,
And find delight at large in grove and mead.
No ambushed harm, no wanton's peering eye,
The shepherd's uncouth god thou needst not fear—
Pan has not passed this way for many a year.
'Tis but the vagrant wind that makes thee start,
The pleasure-loving south, the freshening west;
The willow's woven veil they softly part,
To fan the lily on the stream's warm breast:
No ruder stir, no footstep pressing near—
Pan has not passed this way for many a year.
Unlooked-for music indeed from the banks of the Ohio. Her muse was remote, unimpassioned, classical, yet no lyrist of the period has had more of the divine poetic gift of expression. She seems curiously out of place in the headlong West in those stormy closing years of the nineteenth century.