None the less have science and scientific terms invaded his poetry; nor is it simply the larger and the elemental aspects of modern discovery that claim his regard. With his individualistic turn of mind, he can not choose but have an eye for the precise and specific:
Ah! well I mind the calendar,
Faithful through a thousand years,
Of the painted race of flowers,
Exact to days, exact to hours.
* * * * *
I know the trusty almanac
Of the punctual coming-back,
On their due days, of the birds.
He understands his own interest in such matters; not being very objective, he cannot understand the impulse of the young botanist. Lacking the dramatic and historical impulse, he wrote no long poems. “May-Day” is his longest and most sustained, although he never quite succeeded in ordering its parts. It “was probably written in snatches in the woods on his afternoon walks, through many years.” The volume to which it gave its name (1867) marked a distinct advance in fluency over the collection of his poems that had appeared twenty years earlier. But even considering his own final selection (1876) or considering the now standard text of all his poetry (published in 1904), we can scarcely affirm that the longing he expressed in 1839 was ever fully satisfied: “I am naturally keenly susceptible to the pleasures of rhythm, and cannot believe but one day I shall attain to that splendid dialect, so ardent is my wish; and these wishes, I suppose, are ever only the buds of power; but up to this hour I have never had a true success in such attempts.” It is probable that in spite of his New England good sense, his inherent esteem for propriety, his insight into the subtler workings of nature, he did not have the initial impulse of a Bryant and a Longfellow toward what he most needed in his education. Nature works also through the scientist and the pedagogue. Emerson doubts it:
Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man’s or maiden’s eye;
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world’s flowing fates in his own mould recast.
Henry David Thoreau.—Emerson had the originality that enables a seer to pierce beneath the surface, and to find a likeness in things where passive minds detect no brotherhood; he did not have the originality by virtue of which amply creative minds gather a multitude of elements, properly subordinated one to another, into new, harmonious, and embracing wholes. His is a crucial defect in American poetry, a defect in the constructive imagination. This defect is intimately associated with an unscholarly dread of minute research. Emerson’s attitude of distrust toward science was shared by his friend and disciple Thoreau (1817–62), in whom the creed of individualism ran almost to the point of caricature. In his youth and prime, Thoreau wrote a great deal of verse, only a little of which has been preserved. The conception of Prometheus, suffering and isolated friend of humanity, tenacious in the assertion of his own will, was to Thoreau’s taste; hence his rough but stirring translation from the tragedy by Æschylus. He had the Emersonian fondness for gnomic sentences and verses, such as he found scattered through the “Odes” of Pindar. His versions of Pindaric gnomes show that he was not afraid of difficult Greek; still, he hovered between belief and disbelief in scholarship. His ear was better than Emerson’s. It is unfortunate that his unrivalled gift of observation did not more frequently leave a record of itself in lines like those “To a Stray Fowl.” His mind was not without the New England love of the startling and paradoxical. Yet his search for hidden analogies borders oftener on true imagination than was the case with Holmes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes.—“The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” has already given evidence that it will outlast “Elsie Venner” and “The Guardian Angel”; yet if the miscellanies of Dr. Holmes (1809–94) possess more vitality than his novels, this is in some measure due to the “Autocrat’s” occasional employment of verse. In the “Breakfast-Table” series appeared “The Chambered Nautilus” and “The Wonderful ‘One-Hoss Shay,’” which, with his youthful “Old Ironsides,” and “The Broomstick Train,” have retained the firmest hold on the popular memory. Holmes was pleased to trace his ancestry back to Anne Bradstreet, the first American poetess. His own poetry commenced with a schoolboy rendering into heroic couplets from Virgil, and hardly ended with his tribute to the memory of Whittier in 1892. In the standard edition of his works his poems occupy three volumes. Many of them, corresponding to his turn for the novel, are narrative; for story-telling he had a knack amounting to a high degree of talent. His sense of order and proportion is stronger than that of other members of the New England school, and he has a command of at least formal structure. One may not unreasonably attribute this command in part to his studies in human anatomy. At the same time Holmes is beset with the temptation to value manner and brilliancy rather than substance, and he will go out of his way for a fanciful conceit or a striking expression. In the use of odds and ends of recondite lore his cleverness is amazing. He had a tenacious memory and a habit of rapid association, so that as a punster he is almost without a match. However, his glance is not deeply penetrating; he sees fantastic resemblances between things that are really far removed from one another, not so often the fundamental similarities in things whether near or apart. One may in vain search through Holmes for anything so truly poetic as Thoreau’s comparison of sex in human beings and flowers. Accordingly, his mind may be classed as fanciful rather than imaginative. It ought not to be misunderstood, and will not be unduly detracting from his great excellence, if we say that the poetry of Holmes does not always evince the highest moral seriousness—a lack that is not fully supplied when he attempts moral subjects, as in “The Chambered Nautilus,” where, though the comparison of the growing mollusk with the expanding human soul is beautiful, the preaching is a little trite.