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.