Robinson he
Sez this kind o’ thing’s an exploded idee.
Lowell was surprised at his own success. What he at first thought ‘a mere fencing stick’ proved to be a weapon. The blade was two-edged, and the Yankees did well to fall back a little when he lifted it against the enemy. For in writing The Biglow Papers Lowell took real delight in noting the oddities and laughing at the foibles of his own New Englanders, a people whom he loved with all tenderness, but to whose faults he was not in the least blind.
In 1861 the little puppets were taken out of the box where they had lain for fifteen years and furbished up for a new tragi-comedy. The second series of The Biglow Papers was read no less eagerly than the first had been. Quite as brilliant as their predecessors, the later poems are more impassioned, and in those touching on English hostility to the North the satire is bitterly stinging.
While the numbers of the first series were in course of publication Lowell produced a rhymed primer of contemporary American literature under the title of A Fable for Critics. It was an improvisation, and therefore the buoyancy, the jovial off-hand manner, the impudence even, were a matter of course and all in its favor. Often penetrating and just in his criticisms, Lowell was invariably amusing, and in the cleverness of the rhyme and word play quite inimitable.
Two months after the appearance of the Fable the popular Vision of Sir Launfal was published. Though undoubtedly read more for the sake of the preludes than for the slight but touching story, it is by no means certain that the preludes, brought out as independent poems, could have won the number of readers they now have. In other words, The Vision of Sir Launfal has a unity which it seems on first acquaintance to lack.
V
UNDER THE WILLOWS, THE CATHEDRAL, COMMEMORATION ODE, THREE MEMORIAL POEMS, HEARTSEASE AND RUE
‘Under the Willows’ is a poem of Nature in which the poet at no time loses sight either of the world of books or of the world of men. If he be driven indoors by the rigors of May, he is content to sit by his wood-fire and read what the poets have said in praise of that inclement month. Or if June has come and he can dream under his favorite willows, his reveries gain a zest from the interruptions of the tramp, ‘lavish summer’s bedesman,’ the scissors-grinder, that grimy Ulysses of New England, the school-children, and the road-menders,
Vexing Macadam’s ghost with pounded slate.
It is a poem of thanksgiving in which the poet voices his gratitude for the benediction of the higher mood and the human kindness of the lower.