And when he leaps to land,
A lover treads the strand.
The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, and now and again by the declamatory impulse getting the better of the creative; but granting
this it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the time to those who think the days are evil, and more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric gives way to the pensive note,
I lay the singing laurels down
Upon the silent grave,
and grows from this into a glimpsing of Emerson’s most characteristic thought, to which Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. This philosophical résumé has value as critical interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet’s merit, and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal his weakness in writing of this sort, neither does he to any marked degree reveal his strength. It is work of conventional creditability, reaching occasionally some flight of pure poetry, but pervaded in general by the perfunctory note that results from coercing the muse; and here one may interpolate the wish that all poems-for-occasion might be “put upon the list,” for it is certain, not only that
the majority of them “never would be missed,” but that poetry would rebound from a most inert weight if lightened of them; nor is this in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose “Emerson Ode” is a far stronger piece of work than are most compositions of a similar nature. In the “Player’s Elegy,” in the ode written for the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the several poems addressed to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, and the high motive of all must not be lost sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of the individuality of his work.
It is on the spiritually philosophical side of his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth that
The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes