Odors of may-apples blossoming,
And violets stirring and blue-bells shaken—
Shadows that start from the thrush's wing
And float on the pools, and swim and waken—
Unslaken, untaken—
Bronze wood-Naiads that wait forsaken.
All day the lireodendron droops
Over the thickets her moons of gold;
All day the cumulous dogwood groups
Flake the mosses with star-snows cold,
While gold untold
The oriole pours from his song-thatched hold!
Carol of love, all day in the thickets,
Redbird; warble, O thrush, of pain!
Pipe me of pity, O raincrow, hidden
Deep in the wood! and, lo! the refrain
Of pain, again
Shall out of the bosom of heaven bring rain!
[LANGDON SMITH]
Langdon ("Denver") Smith, maker of a very clever and learned poem, was born in Kentucky, January 4, 1858. From 1864 to 1872 he attended the public schools of Louisville. As a boy Smith served in the Comanche and Apache Wars, and he was later a correspondent in the Sioux War. In 1894 Smith was married to Marie Antoinette Wright, whom he afterwards memorialized in his famous poem, and who survived him but five weeks. In the year following his marriage, he went to Cuba for The New York Herald to "cover" the conflict between Spain and Cuba; and three years later he represented the New York Journal during the Spanish-American War. Smith was at the bombardment of Santiago and at the battles of El Caney and San Juan. After the war he returned to New York, in which city he died, April 8, 1908. He was the author of a novel, called On the Pan Handle, and of many short stories, but his poem, Evolution, made him famous. The first stanzas of this poem were written in 1895; and four years later he wrote several more stanzas. Then from time to time he added a line or more, until it was completed. Evolution first appeared in its entirety in the middle of a page of want advertisements in the New York Journal. It attracted immediate and wide notice, but copies of it were rather difficult to obtain until it was reprinted in The Scrap-Book for April, 1906, and in The Speaker for September, 1908.
Bibliography. Evolution, a Fantasy (Boston, 1909), is a beautiful and fitting setting for this famous poem. In the introduction to this edition Mr. Lewis Allen Browne brings together the facts of Langdon Smith's life and work with many fine words of criticism for the poem. In 1911 W. A. Wilde and Company, the Boston publishers, issued an exquisite edition of Evolution. Thus it will be seen that Smith and his masterpiece have received proper recognition from the publishers and the public; the judgment of posterity cannot be hurried; but that judgment can be anticipated, at least in part. That it will be favorable, characterizing Evolution as one of the cleverest, smartest things done by a nineteenth century American poet, the present writer does not for a moment doubt.
EVOLUTION[20]
[From Evolution, a Fantasy (Boston, 1909)]
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