This brings us to write of Fr. Tabb’s poetry that it is elusive, from a critical point of view. When you bring your preconceived literary canons to bear upon it, they are found wanting—too clumsy to test the delicacy, fineness of touch, and the permeated spiritualism embodied in the verse-gem. It is well summarized in the saying that “it possesses to the full a white estate of virginal prayerful art.” One might define it by negatives, such as the contrary of passion poetry. The point of view most likely to give the clearest conception would be found in the sentence: an evocation from within by a highly spiritualized intelligence. The poet has caught the higher music, the music of a soul in which dwell order and method. In other words, he has assiduously cultivated to its fullest development both the spiritual sense and the moral sense.
It is easy to trace in Fr. Tabb’s poetry the influence of Sidney Lanier. It has been asserted, and with much truth, that Lanier’s influence has strangely fascinated the younger school of Southern poets. Sladen, in his book on Younger American Poets, tells us that “Lanier differs from the other dead poets included in his book, in that he was not only a poet but the founder of a school of poetry.” To his school belongs Fr. Tabb, a school following the founder whose aim is to depict
“All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark mottlings, fibre spiralings,
Fern wavings and leaf flickerings.
Yea, all fair forms and sounds and lights,
And warmths and mysteries and mights,
Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights.”
The defects of this school are best seen in the founder. He was a musician before a poet, and helplessly strove to catch shades by words that can only be rendered by music. Fr. Tabb has learned this limitation of his school. For the glowing semi-pantheism of Lanier he has substituted the true and no less beautiful doctrine of Christianity. All his verse-gems are redolent of his faith. They are religious in the sense that they are begotten by faith and breathe the air of the sanctuary. To read them is to leave the hum and pain of life behind, and enter the cloister where all is silent and peaceful, where dwelleth the spirit of God. Of them it is safe to assert that their white estate of virginal, prayerful art shall constitute their immortality. Fr. Tabb has not, as yet, thought fit to give them a more permanent form than they have in the current magazines. Catholic literature, and especially poetry, is so meagre that when a true singer touches the lyre it is not to be wondered at that those of his household should desire to possess his songs in a more worthy dwelling than that of an ephemeral magazine. In the absence of the coming charming volume I quote from my scrap-book a few of the verse-gems, thereby trusting to widen the poet’s audience and in an humble way gain lovers for his long-promised volume.
What could illustrate the peculiar genius of our poet better than the delicious gem that he has called