VI
The two most prominent younger poets of the South were Robert Burns Wilson (1850–1916) and Madison Cawein (1865–1914), both residents of Kentucky, one at Frankfort, the other at Louisville, and both contemplative Nature poets who voiced but little the spirit of their period. Of the two, Wilson undoubtedly was the most inspired singer, as Cawein was the most careful observer of Nature.
Of Wilson we may say that he was a later Thomas Buchanan Read, a devotee of art, a painter of landscapes and portraits, whose work was seen in many distinctive galleries, and in addition to this a poet—most pictorial of poets, whose stanzas seem like inscriptions for his paintings. When the lyrics "When Evening Cometh On" and "June Days" appeared in Harper's in 1885, it was felt that a new singer had come. There was distinction in the lines, there was restraint, there was more than promise, there was already fulfilment. One feels a quality in a stanza like this that he may not explain:
Though all the birds be silent—though
The fettered stream's soft voice be still,
And on the leafless bough the snow
Be rested, marble-like and chill—
Yet will the fancy build from these
The transient but well-pleasing dream
Of leaf and bloom among the trees,
And sunlight glancing on the stream.
It has somehow the singing quality that may not be learned, that may not be taught. Finer still when there is joined with it graphic power that arrests and pleases the eye, and pathos that grips hard the heart, as in a lyric like this:
Such is the death the soldier dies:
He falls—the column speeds away;
Upon the dabbled grass he lies,
His brave heart following, still, the fray.
The smoke-wraiths drift among the trees,
The battle storms along the hill;
The glint of distant arms he sees;
He hears his comrades shouting still.
A glimpse of far-borne flags, that fade
And vanish in the rolling din:
He knows the sweeping charge is made,
The cheering lines are closing in.
Unmindful of his mortal wound,
He faintly calls and seeks to rise;
But weakness drags him to the ground—
Such is the death the soldier dies.
Wilson's poetic product was small, but it stands distinctive.
The work of Cawein has been far more widely trumpeted. He had the good fortune to attract the attention of Howells with his first book and to be commended by him persistently and with no uncertain voice. "There is much that is expressive of the new land," Howells wrote in "The Editor's Study," "as well as of the young life in its richly sensuous, boldly achieved pieces of color. In him one is sensible (or seems so) of something different from the beautiful as literary New England or literary New York conceived it. He is a fresh strain."[149] He deplored the gorgeous excesses of the poems and the touches for merely decorative effect, but he defended them as the natural exuberance of extreme youth. With time they would disappear: undoubtedly a great poet had arisen. Thus encouraged, Cawein began upon a poetic career that in single-hearted devotion to the lyric muse has been equaled only by Clinton Scollard. Before his death he had issued more than twenty volumes of lyrics and his collected work had been published in five thick volumes.
The final estimate of the poet cannot yet be written. It is too soon, but even now one may venture certain predictions. Cawein wrote enormously too much, and he wrote all too often with merely literary intent. He was not a lyrist born: he had little ear for music, and he blended meters and made rimes seemingly with the eye alone. One can not feel that a passage like this, for instance, sang itself spontaneously:
Seemed that she
Led me along a flower-showered lea
Trammeled with puckered pansy and the pea;
Where poppies spread great blood-red stain on stain,
So gorged with sunlight and the honied rain
Their hearts are weary; roses lavished beams
Roses, wherein were huddled little dreams
That laughed coy, sidewise merriment, like dew
Or from fair fingers fragrant kisses blew.
There is a straining constantly for the unusual in epithet, a seeking for a picturing adjective that shall give verisimilitude in an utterly new way. "The songs have all been sung," he would seem to argue, "but the picturing adjectives have not all been used and the striking conceits." One might open at random for an illustration:
Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold;
A bullion bulk the wide Ohio lies.
Up from the glimmering east the full moon swung,
A golden bubble buoyed zenithward.
Between the pansy fire of the west,
And poppy mist of moonrise in the east,
This heartache will have ceased.
"It is as if we had another Keats," says Howells, and in saying it he touches the fatal weakness of the poet. There is lack of virility in great parts of his work, there is lack of definiteness and of vigor. He tells nothing new and he adds nothing to the old by his telling. Even Baskerville can say, "There is little or no Southern, not to say Kentucky, atmosphere in Mr. Cawein's poetry. His flowers and birds and rocks and trees do not appear to us as objects of the rich, warm Southern nature. He frequently mentions the whole register of flowers and birds in his poetry—almost, we might say, drags them into his descriptions by force—but he has not created a warm, genial, Southern poetic atmosphere in which they may thrive."[150]
Nevertheless, it is only in his Nature poetry that he is at all convincing. He can paint a summer noon, or a summer shower, and he can detail minutely the flowers and the mosses and the birds in an old fence corner or an old garden. Pictures like this have, undoubtedly, a certain kind of value:
Bubble-like the hollyhocks
Budded, burst, and flaunted wide
Gipsy beauty from their stocks;
Morning-glories, bubble-dyed,
Swung in honey-hearted flocks.
Tawny tiger-lilies flung
Doublets slashed with crimson on;
Graceful girl slaves, fair and young,
Like Circassians, in the sun
Alabaster lilies swung.
Ah, the droning of the bee
In his dusty pantaloons,
Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis;
In the drowsy afternoons
Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea.
Always is he heavy with adjectives, profuse, gorgeous; always is he dreamy and remote. One turns page after page of the thick volumes of the collected lyrics to find some simple human bit that came hot from the heart of a poet, some stanza that compels quotation, but one gets lost at length in the maze of sweetness. If any of his poems are to outlast their generation it will be some of the Nature pieces, but landscape studies, flower songs, and pretty conceits about bees and birds are thin material of which to make enduring poetry.