With the work of Edward Rowland Sill one must be less positive. Here we find conflict, reaction, spontaneous expression. He was by no means a voice of his era, a robust shouter like Whitman and Miller: he was a gentle, retiring soul who felt out of place in his generation. Seriousness had come to him as a birthright. Behind him were long lines of Connecticut Puritans. He was frail, moreover, of physique, with a shrinking that was almost feminine from all that was discordant and assertive. After his graduation at Yale, the poet of his class, in 1861, he was unable to settle upon a profession. He attempted theology, and then, disillusioned, for bare support he drifted into teaching. Year after year passed with the problem unsettled, until he awoke to find that teaching was to be his life-work. He had hidden among the children in the schoolroom, and the things he had dreamed over had passed him by. His external biography is largely a list of schools and positions. At forty-six he died.
Poetry to Sill was a peculiarly personal thing, almost as much so as it was to Emily Dickinson. He was not eager to publish, and much that he did send to the magazines bore other names than his own. He wrote, as Thoreau wrote his journal, with simple directness for himself and the gods, and as a result we have in his work the inner history of a human soul. There is no artificiality, no sentimental vaporings, no posing for effect. It is not art; it is life.
Here is poetry of struggle, poetry not of the spirit of an epoch but of the life of an individual at odds with the epoch, introspective, personal. One thinks of Clough, who also was a teacher, a gentle soul oppressed with doubts and fears, a struggler in the darkness of the late nineteenth century. But Sill was less masculine than Clough. His doubtings are gentle and half apologetic. Never is he bitter or excited or impetuous. To such robust climaxes as "Say not the Struggle Naught Availeth" he is incapable of rising: he broods, but he is resigned. He exhorts himself deliberately to cheerfulness and faith and to heights of manhood where all that is low may fall away. Erotic passion has no part in his work. He has deliberately conquered it:
Is my life but Marguerite's ox-eyed flower,
That I should stand and pluck and fling away,
One after one, the petal of each hour,
Like a love-dreamy girl, and only say,
"Loves me," and "loves me not," and "loves me"? Nay!
Let the man's mind awake to manhood's power.
No poet has shrunk more sensitively from the realistic, material age of which he was a part than Sill. His poems deal with the realm of the spirit rather than with the tangible. They are without time and place and material basis. One may illustrate with the poems he wrote for Yale gatherings. They are colorless: change but the name and they would apply as well to Harvard or Princeton. Read in connection with Hovey's dramatic, intensely individual Dartmouth poems and they seem like beautiful clouds. They are serious, often over-serious, they have no trace of humor, they deal with the soul life of one upon whom the darkness threatens constantly to fall.
His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, for he was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and Woodberry lacked. Once in a while he made a stanza that approaches lyric distinction, as, perhaps, in this final one of "A Foolish Wish":
'Tis a child's longing, on the beach at play:
"Before I go,"
He begs the beckoning mother, "Let me stay
One shell to throw!"
'Tis coming night; the great sea climbs the shore—
Ah, let me toss one little pebble more,
Before I go!
But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from the beauty and purity of his own personality. His own conception of a poem was, that "coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us." Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a high place among the poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us purer and richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life. Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold their place among the very highest pieces of American reflective poetry.
It was the opinion of Edmund Gosse that the period was notably deficient in serious verse.[148] No statement could be more wide of the mark; the period has abounded in serious poetry and its quality has been high. To consider in detail this mass of poetry, however, were to exceed our limits. We can only single out one here and there a little more notable than the others—John Boyle O'Reilly (1844–1890), for instance, with his Celtic fancy and his graphic power to depict life in the Southern Seas; Maurice Francis Egan (1852——) and Lloyd Mifflin (1846——), makers of beautiful and thoughtful sonnets; S. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), a poet of rare distinction as well as a novelist; Frank Dempster Sherman (1860–1916), maker of madrigals and joyous lyrics; Charles Warren Stoddard (1825–1903), whose songs have a lyric quality that is distinctive, and Abram Joseph Ryan (1839–1886), a beautiful and heroic soul, who had he written but a single lyric would occupy a high place among American poets. His "The Conquered Banner" was the voice of a people:
Furl that Banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently—it is holy—
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not—unfold it never—
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people's hopes are fled.