V
The best refutation of Aldrich is furnished by Aldrich himself. The years between 1881 and 1890, the period of his editorship of the Atlantic Monthly, were a time of small production, of pause and calm, of ripening, of final adjustment. Following his resignation of the editorship, he began again actively to produce poetry and now for ten or twelve years he worked in contemporary life—in occasional and commemorative odes, monodies and elegies; in studies of the deeper meanings of life; in problems of death and of destiny. The volumes of 1891, 1895, and 1896 contain the soul of all his poetry. From them he omitted practically nothing when at last he made up the definitive edition of his work. The Aldrich of the sixties and the seventies had been trivial, artificial, sentimental; the Aldrich who wrote in the nineties had a purpose: he worked now in the deeps of life; he was in earnest; he had a message. It is significant in view of his oft expressed theories of poetry that when in 1897 Stedman asked him to indicate his best lyrics for publication in the American Anthology, he chose these: "Shaw Memorial Ode," "Outward Bound," "Andromeda," "Reminiscence," "The Last Cæsar," "Alice Yeaton's Son," "Unguarded Gates," "A Shadow of the Night," "Monody on Wendell Phillips," "To Hafiz," "Prescience," "Santo Domingo," "Tennyson," "Memory," "Twilight," "Quits"—all but one of them, "Prescience," first published after 1891. There are no "apricots and dewberries" about these masterly lyrics; they deal with no such trivialities as the fall of an eyelash. They thrill with the problems of life and with experience. It was not until this later period that the poet could say to a bereaved friend: "You will recall a poem of mine entitled 'A Shadow of the Night.' There is a passage here and there that might possibly appeal to you"—a severe test, but one that reveals the true poet. What has he for his generation? What has he for the crises of life, inevitably must be asked at last of every poet. His change of ideals he voiced in "Andromeda":
The smooth-worn coin and threadbare classic phrase
Of Grecian myths that did beguile my youth
Beguile me not as in the olden days:
I think more grace and beauty dwell with truth.
Now in the rich afternoon of his art the poet is no longer content to echo the music of masters. He has awakened to the deeper meanings of life; he is himself a master; he now has something to say, and the years of his apprenticeship have given him a flawless style in which to say it. No other American poet has approached the perfect art of these later lyrics. Who else on this side of the water could have written "The Sisters' Tragedy," with its melody, its finish, its distinction of phrase?
Both still were young, in life's rich summer yet;
And one was dark, with tints of violet
In hair and eye, and one was blonde as she
Who rose—a second daybreak—from the sea
Gold tressed and azure-eyed.
And, moreover, in addition to all this it is a quivering section of human life. One reads on and on and then—sharply draws his breath at the rapier thrust of the closing lines.
What a world of distance between the early sensuous poet of the New York school and the seer of the later period who could pen a lyric beginning,
O short-breathed music, dying on the tongue
Ere half the mystic canticle be sung!
O harp of life so speedily unstrung!
Who, if 't were his to choose, would know again
The bitter sweetness of the last refrain,
Its rapture and its pain?
Or this in its flawless perfectness:
At noon of night, and at the night's pale end,
Such things have chanced to me
As one, by day, would scarcely tell a friend
For fear of mockery.
Shadows, you say, mirages of the brain!
I know not, faith, not I.
Is it more strange the dead should walk again
Than that the quick should die?
A few of his later sonnets, "Outward Bound," redolent of his early love of the sea, "When to Soft Sleep We Give Ourselves Away," "The Undiscovered Country," "Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme," and "I Vex Me Not with Brooding on the Years," have hardly been surpassed in American literature.
It was from this later period that Aldrich chose almost all of his poems in that compressed volume which was to be his lasting contribution to poetry, A Book of Songs and Sonnets. It is but a fraction of his work, but it is all that will survive the years. He will go down as the most finished poet that America has yet produced; the later Landor, romantic yet severely classical; the maker of trifles that were miracles of art; and finally as the belated singer who awoke in his later years to message and vision and produced with his mastered art a handful of perfect lyrics that rank with the strongest that America has given to song.