And on that grave where English oak and holly
And laurel wreaths entwine,
Deem it not all a too presumptuous folly,
This spray of Western pine![108]
Still better is the poem on the death of Starr King. It is very short; let us have it before us.
RELIEVING GUARD
Thomas Starr King. Obiit March 4, 1864.
Came the relief. “What, sentry, ho!
How passed the night through thy long waking?”
“Cold, cheerless, dark,—as may befit
The hour before the dawn is breaking.”
“No sight? no sound?” “No; nothing save
The plover from the marshes calling,
And in yon western sky, about
An hour ago, a star was falling.”
“A star? There’s nothing strange in that.”
“No, nothing; but above the thicket,
Somehow it seemed to me that God
Somewhere had just relieved a picket.”
What impresses the reader most, or at least first, in this poem is its extreme conciseness and simplicity. The words are so few, and the weight of suggestion which they have to carry so heavy, that the misuse of a single word,—a single word not in perfect taste, would have spoiled the beauty of the whole. Long years ago the “Saturday Review”—the good old, ferocious Saturday—sagely remarked: “It is not given to every one to be simple”; and only genius could have achieved the simplicity of this short poem. “The relief came” would have been prose. “Came the relief” is poetry, not merely because the arrangement of the words is unusual, but because this short inverted sentence strikes a note of abruptness and intensity which prepares the reader for what is to come, and which is maintained throughout the poem;—had it not so been maintained, an anti-climax would have resulted.
Moreover, short and simple as this poem is, it seems to contain three distinct strands of feeling. There is, first, the personal feeling for Thomas Starr King; and although he was a minister and not a soldier, there is a suitability in connecting him with the picket, for, as we have seen, it was owing to him, more than to any other man, that California was saved to the Union in the Civil War. Secondly, there is the National patriotic feeling which forms the strong under-current of the poem, nowhere expressed, but unmistakably implied, and present in the minds of both poet and reader. Possibly, we may even find in “the hour before the dawn” an allusion to the period when Mr. King died and the poem was written; for that was the final desperate period of the war, darkened by a terrible expenditure of human life and suffering, and lightened only by a prospect of the end then slowly but surely coming into view. Thirdly, there is the feeling for nature which the poem exhibits in its firm though scanty etching of the sombre night, the lonely marshes, and the distant sky. The poem is a blending of these three feelings, each one enhancing the other;—and even this does not complete the tale, for there is the final suggestion that the death of a man may be of as much consequence in the mind of the Creator, and as nicely calculated, as the falling of a star.
The truth is that Bret Harte’s national poems, with which this tribute to Starr King may properly be classed, have a depth of personal feeling not often found elsewhere in his poetry. In common with all men of primitive impulses, he was genuinely patriotic. “America was always ‘my country’ with him,” writes one who knew him in England; “and I remember how he flushed with almost boyish pleasure when, in driving through some casual rural festivities, his quick eye noted a stray American flag among the display of bunting.”
This patriotic feeling gave to his national poems the true lyrical note. Among the best of these is that stirring song of the drum, called The Reveille, which was read at a crowded meeting held in the San Francisco Opera House immediately after President Lincoln had called for one hundred thousand volunteers. In this poem the student of American history, and especially the foreign student, will find an expression of that National feeling which animated the Northern people, and which sanctified the horrors of the Civil War,—one of the few wars recorded in history that was waged for a pure ideal,—the ideal of the Union.
With these poems may be classed some stanzas from Cadet Grey describing the life of the West Point cadet, and this one in particular:—