Rambles with John Burroughs

by R. J. H. De Loach

"O sad, sad hills! O cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth—
One may go back to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth."

Again in "Snow Birds" he says:

"Thy voice brings back dear boyhood days
When we were gay together."

His contact with out-door life and his habits of observation are unmistakably those of a poet. "In the rugged trail through the woods or along the beach we shall now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a glimpse of something to

"Make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs."

Burroughs says himself, 'the very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. How many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song! Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the poet, and do we not demand of the human thrush or lark that he shake out his carols in the same free manner as his winged prototype?... The best lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!—clear, ringing, ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring of the male bird contains.' Again he says 'Keats and Shelly have pre-eminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks.'

But what shall we say of Burroughs? His poetry is somewhat matter-of-fact, like the songs of the Indigo bunting and the Thrushes, and we cannot help but feel that the songs of these birds had the effect on him that Burns speaks of in one of his letters: "I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of the soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry." Verily he has achieved his purpose. 'He has brought home the bough with the bird he heard singing upon it. His verse is full of the spirit of the woods and fields; the winds of heaven blow through it; there is the rustle of leaves, the glint of sunlight; the voices of the feathered folk are present. One finds himself in touch with out-doors in every line.' O, what a blessing when one can drink from the great fountain of Nature! When one can be so inured with the larger and more wholesome truths of the universe that he forgets to fret and to make records of the negative forces of the world! This we claim is pre-eminently true of Burroughs. He tells truths about Nature in his simple, musical verse, and almost vindicates Wordsworth's definition of poetry: "The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," or "The impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." I would almost say of him what Dryden said of Chaucer: "He is a perpetual fountain of good sense." Perhaps Mr. Dowden, in speaking of Coleridge's poetry, comes nearer than any one else to the truth about Burroughs' poetry. "These poems contemplate and describe Nature in a resting and meditative temper. There is no passionate feeling in their delight. The joy he has in the beauty of the world is the joy of dreaming, often only a recollected joy in what he has seen. He found in poetry, paths of his imagination. The pensiveness, the dying fall, the self-loving melancholy, are harmonized by him with Nature." Thoreau says in one of his books: "Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They overstep her modesty somehow or other, and confer no favor." The richest flavor in the poetry of John Burroughs is the flavor of truth, and 'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' Unlike Thoreau, he never forgets his fellowmen, nor has he ever failed to find beauty in man as well as in Nature.

"He sees the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain,"

and writes a poem. He dislikes the conventional in man no less than he dislikes the conventional in poetry, but man unaffected is as beautiful as the Nature that surrounds him.

A few years ago when Mr. E. H. Harriman took a number of friends to Alaska on what was known as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, John Burroughs was selected as a purely literary man to write a narrative of the Expedition. In addition to the story of the trip, Mr. Burroughs was so inspired with the new scenery of those Borean Hills that the muse seized him and the result was three of his best poems: To the Oregon Robin, To the Golden Crown Sparrow of Alaska, and To the Lapland Longspur. Since that trip in 1899, he has written no verse, I believe, except The Return. Before then he was an irregular contributor of poetry to the current magazines since the appearance of Waiting, in 1862. He says now that he does not seem to be in a mood for poetry, but that he may find his muse again some day. The total number of his poems in print amounts to only thirty-five and none of them are lengthy. The longest of all is his very life which is to me one continuous poem. His verses are only sparks from the life in which they grew, and never rise to the height of the fountain head.