The prevailing tone of Father Ryan's poems is one of sadness. His harp rarely vibrated to cheerful strains. What was the cause of this sadness? It may have been his keen sense of the tragic side of human life; it may have been the enduring anguish that came from the crucified love of his youth. The poet himself refused to tell. In Lines—1875, he says:—
"Go list to the voices of air, earth, and sea,
And the voices that sound in the sky;
Their songs may be joyful to some, but to me
There's a sigh in each chord and a sigh in each key,
And thousands of sighs swell their grand melody.
Ask them what ails them: they will not reply.
They sigh—sigh forever—but never tell why.
Why does your poetry sound like a sigh?
Their lips will not answer you; neither shall I."
Yet, in spite of the prevailing tone of sorrow and weariness, Father Ryan was no pessimist. He held that life has "more of sweet than gall"—
"For every one: no matter who—
Or what their lot—or high or low;
All hearts have clouds—but heaven's blue
Wraps robes of bright around each woe;
And this is truest of the true:
"That joy is stronger here than grief,
Fills more of life, far more of years,
And makes the reign of sorrow brief;
Gives more of smiles for less of tears.
Joy is life's tree—grief but its leaves."
Father Ryan conceived of the poet's office as something seerlike or prophetic. With him, as with all great poets, the message counted for more than do rhythm and rhyme. Divorced from truth, art seemed to him but a skeleton masque. He preferred those melodies that rise on the wings of thought, and come to human hearts with an inspiration of faith and hope. He regarded genuine poets as the high priests of Nature. Their sensitive spirits, holding themselves aloof from common things, habitually dwell upon the deeper mysteries of life in something of a morbid loneliness. In Poets he says:—
"They are all dreamers; in the day and night
Ever across their souls
The wondrous mystery of the dark or bright
In mystic rhythm rolls.
"They live within themselves—they may not tell
What lieth deepest there;
Within their breast a heaven or a hell,
Joy or tormenting care.
"They are the loneliest men that walk men's ways,
No matter what they seem;
The stars and sunlight of their nights and days
Move over them in dream."
With Wordsworth, or rather with the great Apostle to the Gentiles, he held that Nature is but the vesture of God, beneath which may be discerned the divine glory and love. The visible seemed to him but an expression of the invisible.