It was dedicated to one who was close to his heart, to
“John Boyle O’Reilly,
My very dear friend, and an honorable gentleman.”
It had O’Reilly’s warm word to speed and gain it a hearing, a word that would have remained unwritten were it not that the little volume, of its own worth, demanded that the word but expressed its merit. Since those days, it has travelled and found a ready home. Its gentle humor has made it quotable in the fashionable salons, its quaintness tickled the lonely scholar, stinging notes against wrong and its brilliant biting to the very core of silk-dressed sham, bespoke a hearty welcome in the haunts of the poor and oppressed.
The volume was one of promise and large hope. Of it O’Reilly wrote: “Not for years has such a first book as this appeared in America.” This recognition was but a truth. The author is a true poet, not a rhyme trickster or a cherry-stone filer, that brood so thoroughly detested by O’Reilly. He has something to say, a genuine, poetical impression to give in each poem. His genius, as that of most poets of Celtic blood, is essentially dramatic. This may best be seen in that fine, man-loving poem, “Netchaieff.” Netchaieff, a Russian Nihilist, was condemned to prison for life. Deprived of writing materials, he allowed his fingernail to grow until he fashioned it into a pen. With this he wrote, in his blood, on the margin of a book, the story of his sufferings. Almost his last entry was a note that his jailer had just boarded up the solitary pane which admitted a little light into his cell. The “letter written in blood” was smuggled out of prison and published, and Netchaieff died very soon after. The poet’s opening lines, relating to the Czar, Netchaieff’s death in prison, show that the human interest of this poet swallows up all other interests. The human alone can heat his blood and rouse in impassioned verse his indignation. How finely conceived is the satire in these lines:
“Netchaieff is dead, your Majesty.
You knew him not. He was a common hind,
Who lived ten years in hell, and then he died—
To seek another hell, as we must think,
Since he was rebel to your Majesty.”
There are many startling lines in this poem, lines that would give our fairy-airy school of poets material for a dozen sonnets. “For the People” is another poem that shows the ink was not watered. It is full of truth, unpleasant to the ears of the well-fed and easy living, but truth nevertheless, painted with a bold and masterly hand. It is the critic’s way to call poems of this kind passionate unreasonableness, while an irregular ode to a cat or a ballade of the shepherdess is filled with passionate reasonableness. All which proves that these amusing gentlemen are unconsciously sitting by the volcano’s side. They have eyes and they see not; they have ears and they hear not. The prophetic voice of the poets who will sing from their inner seeing, caring not whether the age listens or hurries on, is lost on these so-called literary interpreters. The tocsin blast dies on the breeze, or speaks to a few lonely thinkers who catch its notes for future warning; the reed’s soft sensuous music is hugged and repeated by the critics and the commonplace. When the lava tumbles forth, then the singer whose songs were a part of him, passionate, conceived in the white heat of truth, may have the diviner’s crown. The critics and commonplace, in their suffering, remember the warning in these burning lines: