Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons

by Richard Hovey

There have been now and again, however, certain poets who seem to have been born out of due time. They have not been opposed to their age so much as apart from it. The Hamlets of verse, for them the time has been out of joint, and they have not had the intensity or the resolution to strive to set it right. Thrown back upon themselves by an environment which was distasteful to them, but which they lacked either the force or the inclination to wrestle with and overcome, they have necessarily had little to say. But on that very account they have frequently given more thought to the purely artistic side of their work than more copious writers. Such men were Collins and Gray, and afterward Landor; men whom we admire more for the classic beauty of their style and for other technical qualities than for the scope of their imagination or the penetration of their insight. Of this class of poets, and with no mean rank among them, was Thomas William Parsons.

Beginning to write contemporaneously with the earliest American poets, at a time when only the veriest doggerel had yet been perpetrated in this country, he felt keenly the sense of isolation which it was the lot of men of letters in those days to experience—an isolation the reality of which the younger generation finds it difficult to appreciate. This is the excuse, though it is certainly not a justification, for the deprecatory and provincial tone which characterizes what are probably the earliest of his poems that have been preserved, the "Letters" which stand at the beginning of his first volume. Not Dickens himself was more flippantly scornful of America and the Americans than is Parsons in these "Letters;" and though in the preface to them he attributes the sentiments they contain to an imaginary "wandering Englishman," thus disclaiming them as personal, he shows even in doing so something more than a dramatic sympathy with the attitude they portray. This provincialism Parsons soon outgrew, but he never came to be in perfect touch with his country, nor to have that sense of easy security with regard to her which should mark the citizen of a nationality fully mature.

Yet even in these presumably juvenile verses there is much vigorous writing and some genuine humor. This on Boston, for example:

"This town, in olden times of stake and flame,
A famous nest of Puritans became:
Sad, rigid souls, who hated as they ought
The carnal arms wherewith the devil fought;
Dancing and dicing, music, and whate'er
Spreads for humanity the pleasing snare.
Stage-plays, especially, their hearts abhorred,
Holding the muses hateful to the Lord,
Save when old Sternhold and his brother bard
Oped their hoarse throats, and strained an anthem hard.
From that angelic race of perfect men
(Sure, seraphs never trod the world till then!)
Descends the race to whom the sway is given
Of the world's morals by confiding Heaven."

There was always a strain of true religious feeling in Parsons, which deepened at the last into something rapt and intense; but Puritanism never ceased to be hateful to him, and this antagonism contributed to make him feel that his footsteps were on alien soil. An artist first of all, he was drawn more toward the services of the ancient Church, for whose adornment art has so bountifully poured out its treasures, than to any balder form of worship. To him the world was a problem in beauty and emotion. He was not incommoded with a message, as so many of his contemporaries were. This has been, perhaps, to the detriment of his reputation in the past; it may be to its advantage in the future. The man who speaks too consciously a message to his own time is apt to have none for any other. Parsons wrought from first to last in the true artistic spirit, and it is not unlikely that his chief claims to the recognition of the future will be found in qualities of form and style.

Not the least among these qualities will be that sturdy literary independence which, amid the widespread æsthetic revival of this century, achieved a success of a purely æsthetic nature on lines entirely unaffected by the contemporary fashion. In a time of metrical experiment, and of the new and strange harmonies of Rossetti and Swinburne, he alone of the artistic school of poets, uninfluenced even by Coleridge or Shelley, worked in the severe methods of an earlier day. Dryden and Pope seem to have been his earliest masters, but not for long. The versification of Dryden, which Keats learned to appreciate at its true value, remained always to some extent a factor in Parsons's art, but he soon threw over the jingle of Pope's measure for the fuller, statelier, and in truth simpler manner of Collins and Gray. Yet his matured style is neither that of Collins, with whom he had close resemblances, personal and poetical, nor that of Gray, though unquestionably akin to both. Parsons had, besides, a certain bent for plain words and homely images that sometimes became Dantesque. Indeed, the lifelong study which he gave to Dante could not be without its influence on his own expression—an influence potent for strength and directness.

Parsons was probably Gray's inferior in point of taste, for otherwise we can hardly understand how he could put forth in the same volume, and sometimes in the same poem, such inequalities as he permitted himself. Yet it must be said, as an offset to this, that he seldom made himself responsible for a poem by publishing it. He occasionally had verses in the magazines, and even, if the whim took him, in the newspapers; but only twice in his life did he bring the question of his critical judgment fairly within the scope of comment by issuing a volume to the public. The first of these volumes, which contains the famous "Lines on a Bust of Dante," may perhaps rely upon the youth of its author as an explanation of its unevenness. The other, "Circum Præcordia," published in the year of his death, and consisting of a versification of the collects of the Church together with a few original poems of a religious character, is of even and sustained excellence, though rising to the level of his best work only in its concluding poem, "Paradisi Gloria." Mrs. Parsons had several other volumes printed for private circulation only, but of these the author frequently knew nothing until the bound copies were placed in his hands. What he would himself now select to give to the world no one can tell; possibly as carefully edited a volume as even that of Gray.

Such a volume would, I believe, be one of the treasures of American verse—a book that lovers of poetry would carry with them as they would similar thin volumes of Herrick, Marvell, Collins or Landor. The lyrics addressed to Francesca are true Herrick for grace and daintiness, and there is nothing in Landor finer than such passages as this:

"His heart was written o'er, like some stray page
Tom out from Plutarch, with majestic names;"

or these, from "Francesca di Rimini:"