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