Only an enthusiast in the study of form would have undertaken the task of reproducing Faust in the original metres. Taylor’s success was so great that his work as a translator has obscured his fame as a poet. Doubtless so nearly perfect a version had been impossible without that wonderful grasp of the spirit of the original. But it must not be forgotten how much it owes to the years of study and practice Taylor gave to the technique of his art.
IV
POETICAL WORK
In 1855 Taylor published a selection from his earlier books of verse under the title Poems of Home and Travel. By this volume and its companion, Poems of the Orient, he wished, so he said at the time, to be judged. For all his other pieces he desired ‘speedy forgetfulness.’
Poems of Home and Travel shows very well the range of Taylor’s art. Here are rhymed stories (‘The Soldier and the Pard’ and ‘Kubleh’), graceful settings of classic or Indian legend (‘Hylas’ and ‘Mon-da-Min’), together with a pretty fancy from Shakespeare (‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’). A deeper chord is struck in poems of human love and loss (‘The Two Visions’) and in poems expressing aspiration for the ideal (‘Love and Solitude’), or in those which voice the poet’s joy in a life of action and struggle (‘The Life of Earth’ and ‘Taurus’). There is an ode, ‘The Harp,’ lamenting the silence of song in our America where there is so much to sing. And there are yet other odes, songs, and sonnets.
Poems of the Orient is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are less prominent. The flavor of Poems of the Orient may be known by such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’ (an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’
The Poet’s Journal, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings, is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life.
The Picture of St. John, an Italian romance, seems made for a popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist after months of conflict with the Power that Denies—these are elements in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts.
Lars, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth,
I do confess
I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills,