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.
VII
With Richard Hovey (1864–1900), representative of the poets of the second generation of the National period, our survey closes. Hovey was a later Lanier, excited, impetuous, possessed by poetry until it ruled all his thinking. Like Lanier, he was Gallic of temperament rather than Teutonic. He read enormously—the Elizabethans, Tennyson, Whitman, the pre-Raphaelites, Dobson, Kipling, and later, in France, Paul Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Stéphane Mallarmé, and all the later symbolists. After his college course at Dartmouth he was, at brief intervals, theological student, newspaper reporter, actor, lecturer in Alcott's Concord school of philosophy, and in his last year, like Lanier, professor of literature in one of the larger universities—Barnard College, New York—yet his one profession all his life long was poetry. His facility was marvelous. He wrote an elegy of purest Greek type and he added a canto to Don Juan; he wrote Arthurian masques and dramas and then rollicking Bohemian songs and vers de société.
His facility was his weakness. Like Lanier he was too excited, too given to improvisation and the blending of meters. His dramatic interludes like The Quest of Merlin and Taliesin are marvelous in their workmanship, their mastery of all the intricacies of prosody, but they come near to being void of human interest. Lanier dominated his first poem The Laurel and there are echoes of Whitman and others in his later work. He matured slowly. At his death he had arrived at a point where there was promise of creative work of highest distinction. He was breaking from his Bohemianism and his excited Swinburnian music and was touching his time. His definition of poetry makes his early death seem like a tragedy. Of the poet he wrote, "It is not his mission to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the Sybaritic dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose manifestation it is.... In the appointed work of every people, the poets have been the leaders and pioneers."[151]
His most finished work is his elegy on the death of Thomas William Parsons, Seaward, which at times has a lyric quality that brings it into the company even of Adonais and Thyrsis. One is tempted to quote more than a single stanza:
Far, far, so far, the crying of the surf!
Still, still, so still, the water in the grass!
Here on the knoll the crickets in the turf
And one bold squirrel barking, seek, alas!
To bring the swarming summer back to me.
In vain; my heart is on the salt morass
Below, that stretches to the sunlit sea.