The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Younger American Poets, by Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

THE YOUNGER AMERICAN
POETS

THE
YOUNGER AMERICAN
POETS

BY

JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS

BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1904

Copyright, 1904,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published October, 1904

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A.

To

LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON

WHO HAS ENRICHED AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH HER SONG,
AND MY LIFE WITH HER FRIENDSHIP,
THESE STUDIES OF THE YOUNGER POETS
ARE INSCRIBED
WITH THE WARM AFFECTION OF
JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE

FOREWORD

TO attempt, in one volume, to cover the entire field of present-day poetry in America, will be recognized the more readily as impossible when one reflects that in Mr. Stedman’s American Anthology over five hundred poets are represented, of whom the greater number are still living and singing.

One may scarcely hope, then, in the space of one volume, to include more than a representative group, even when confining his study to the work of the younger poets, for within this class would fall the larger contingent named above. It has therefore been necessary to follow a general, though not arbitrary, standard of chronology, of which the most feasible seemed that adopted by Mr. Archer in his admirable study of the English “Poets of the Younger Generation,”—the including only of such as have been born within the last half-century, and whose place is still in the making. The few remaining poets whose art has long since defined itself, such as Mr. Aldrich, Mr.

Stedman, and Mrs. Moulton, need no further interpretation; nor does the long-acknowledged work of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, nor that of James Whitcomb Riley, whose final criticism has been pronounced in every heart and at every hearth.

The work of Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet of democracy, whose fraternal songs embody many of the latter-day ideals, and that of John B. Tabb, the lapidary of modern verse, who cuts with infinite care his delicate cameos of thought, were also beyond the chronological scheme of the volume. Nor of those who fell within its scope could a selection be made that would not seem to some invidious, since it must chance among so great a number that many would be omitted who should, with equal right, have been included; it returns, therefore, to the earlier statement, that one must confine himself to a representative group, with whose work he chance to be most familiar, and upon which he has, therefore, the truer claim to speak.

It seemed, also, that the volume would have more value if it gave to a smaller number such a study as would differentiate and define their work, rather than to a larger group the passing comment of a few paragraphs. It was a great

regret, however, that circumstances incident to the copyrights prevented me from including the admirable work of William Vaughn Moody, which reveals by its breadth, penetration, and purpose, the thinker and not the dreamer. Indeed, Mr. Moody’s work, in its vitality of touch, fine imagination, and spiritual idealism, proves not only the creative poet but one to whom the nobler offices of Art have been entrusted, and the critic given to inquiring why the former times were better than these may well keep his eye upon the work of Mr. Moody.

It was also a regret that those inexorable arbiters, space and time, deprived me of the privilege of including the strongly individual work of Helen Gray Cone; the artistic, thoughtful verse of Anna Hempstead Branch; the sincere and sympathetic song of Virginia Woodward Cloud; the spiritual verse of Lilian Whiting, with its interpretation of the higher imports; the heartening, characteristic notes of Theodosia Garrison; and the recently issued poems of Josephine Dodge Daskam, which prove beyond peradventure that the Muses, too, were at her christening,—indeed, the “Songs of Iseult Deserted,” which form a group in her volume, are lyrics worthy of any hand.

Had it been possible in the space at command, I should also have had pleasure in considering the work of Frank Dempster Sherman, who is not only an accomplished lyrist, but who has divined the heart of the child and set it to music; the cheer-giving songs of Frank L. Stanton, fledged with the Southland sunshine and melody; and the verse-stories of Holman F. Day, bringing from the pines of Maine their pungent aroma of humor and pathos. Mr. Day covers an individual field, representing such phases of New England life as have been little celebrated hitherto, even by writers of fiction. He is familiar with every corner of Maine from the mountains to the sea, and writes of humanity in the concrete, sketching his types equally from the lumber camp or from the sailors and fishermen of the shore. In his latest volume they are drawn from the “Kin o’ Ktaadn,” and hold their way throughout its pages with a reality provoking both laughter and tears; indeed, one must seek far to find a keener humor, or one more infectious, than that of Mr. Day, or a more sympathetic penetration into the pathos of life. The heart is the book of his reading, and, in turn, the heart is the book of his writing.

There is no attempt in these studies of the

younger poets to group them into schools, to define them in relation to one another, or to hazard prophecies concerning them. Each is considered in his present accomplishment, whether the work be fresh from the pen, or come bringing with it the endorsement of time, since the song of yesterday may carry farther than that already borne on the wings of the years, and has equal claim to consideration in a volume devoted to the work of the younger singers; for only by such consideration shall we learn what is being done in our own day.

J. B. R.

The

Younger American Poets

I

RICHARD HOVEY

RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of convictions rather than of fancies, in which regard he overtopped many of his contemporaries who were content to be “enamored architects of airy rhyme.” Hovey was himself a skilful architect of rhyme, an imaginative weaver of fancy; but these were not ends, he does not stand primarily for them. He stands for comradeship; for taking vows of one’s own soul; for alliance with the shaping spirit of things; for a sane, wholesome, lusty manhood; a hearty, confident surrender to life.

He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, and personal to a Whitmanesque degree, and answers to many of the qualifications laid down by Whitman for the testing of an American poet. His performance is eminently

of the sort to “face the open fields and the seaside;” it does “absorb into one;” it “animates to life,” and it is of the people. It answers also to the query, “Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?” for Hovey was an American of the Americans, and his patriotic poems are instinct with national pride, though one may dissent from certain of his opinions upon war.

Hovey, to the degree of his development when his hand was stayed, was a finely balanced man and artist. The purely romantic motives which form the entire basis, for example, of Stephen Phillips’ work, and thus render him a poet of the cultured classes and not of the people, were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. He, too, was recasting in dramatic form some of beauty’s imperishable traditions; but this was only one phase of his art, it did not cause him to approach his own time with less of sympathy; and while he had not yet come deeply into the prophet gifts of song, their potency was upon him, and in the Odes, which contain some of his strongest writing, his passion for brotherhood, for development through comradeship, finds splendid expression. In the best known of his odes, “Spring,” occurs this stirring symbol:

For surely in the blind deep-buried roots

Of all men’s souls to-day

A secret quiver shoots.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

The darkness in us is aware

Of something potent burning through the earth,

Of something vital in the procreant air.

It is in this ode, with the exception of his visioning of “Night” in Last Songs from Vagabondia, that the influence of Whitman upon Hovey comes out most prominently; that is, the influence of manner. The really vital influence is one much less easily demonstrated, but no less apparent to a student of both poets. It is not of the sort, however, to detract from the originality of Hovey, but rather an intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing of his powers, and is in accordance with Whitman’s declaration that

“He most honors my style

Who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

Hovey’s own nature was so individual that he rarely failed to destroy the teacher, or he was perhaps unconscious of having one; but in the opening lines of the ode in question the Whitman note is unmistakable:

I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.

I have need of the sky.

I have business with the grass.

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,

Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

Spring, like a huntsman’s boy,

Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods

The falcon in my will.

The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill

That breaks in apple blooms down country roads

Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away.

The sap is in the boles to-day,

And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads.”

Could volumes of conventional nature poetry set one a-tingle like this? The crowning excellence of Hovey’s nature poems is that they are never reports, they do not describe with far-sought imagery, but are as personal as a poem of love or other emotion. Such passionate surrender, such intimate delight as finds expression, for example, in “The Faun,” could scarcely be more communicative and direct. It becomes at once our own mood, an interchange which is the test of art:

… And I plunge in the wood, and the swift soul cleaves

Through the swirl and the flow of the leaves,

As a swimmer stands with his white limbs bare to the sun

For the space that a breath is held, and drops in the sea;

And the undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free,

Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and the effort is done;—

There is only the glory of living, exultant to be.

In such words as these one loses thought of the merely picturesque, their infection takes hold upon him, particularly in that line befitting the forest spirit as a garment, in which

The undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free,—

a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and diction are wholly at one. It is impossible for Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in any phase of his work, and when he writes of nature it is as the comrade to whom she is a mystic personality. A stanza of “The Faun” illustrates this; still in the wood, he asks:

Oh, what is it breathes in the air?

Oh, what is it touches my cheek?

There’s a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches.

But where?

Is it far, is it far to seek?

The first two collections of the Vagabondia books contain Hovey’s most spontaneous nature verse; they have also some of the lyrics by which he will be known when such a rollicking stave as “Barney McGee,” at which one laughs

as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The quips of rhyme and fancy that enliven the pages of the earlier volumes give place, in the Last Songs, to a note of seriousness and artistic purpose which sets the collection to an entirely different key; not that the work is uniformly superior to that of the former songs, but it is more earnest in tone; dawn is giving place to noon.

From the second collection may be cited one of the lyric inspirations that sometimes came to Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned complete in a thought. It is called “A Sea Gypsy,” and the first of its quatrains, though perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting charm:

I am fevered with the sunset,

I am fretful with the bay,

For the wander-thirst is on me

And my soul is in Cathay.

There’s a schooner in the offing,

With her topsails shot with fire,

And my heart has gone aboard her

For the Islands of Desire.

I must forth again to-morrow!

With the sunset I must be

Hull down on the trail of rapture

In the wonder of the sea.

Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, “Seaward,” Hovey’s most representative work is found in his collection, Along the Trail, which opens with a group of battle-hymns inspired by the Spanish-American war. With the exception of “Unmanifest Destiny,” and occasional trumpet notes from the poem called “Bugles,” these battle-songs are more or less perfunctory, nor are they ethically the utterance of a prophet. There is the old assumption that because war has ever been, it ever will be; that because the sword has been the instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is the divinely chosen arbiter. There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall conform; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet “America.” The jubilant note of his call of the “Bugles,” however, thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey’s mind was his country’s altruism; but, as a whole, the battle-songs lack the larger vision and are unequal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace from some flight of lyric beauty. The best of them, and a worthy best, both in conception and in its dignified

simplicity, is “Unmanifest Destiny,” which follows:

To what new fates, my country, far

And unforeseen of foe or friend,

Beneath what unexpected star,

Compelled to what unchosen end,

Across the sea that knows no beach

The Admiral of Nations guides

Thy blind obedient keels to reach

The harbor where thy future rides!

The guns that spoke at Lexington

Knew not that God was planning then

The trumpet word of Jefferson

To bugle forth the rights of men.

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,

What was it but despair and shame?

Who saw behind the cloud the sun?

Who knew that God was in the flame?

Had not defeat upon defeat,

Disaster on disaster come,

The slave’s emancipated feet

Had never marched behind the drum.

There is a Hand that bends our deeds

To mightier issues than we planned,

Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,

My country, serves Its dark command.

I do not know beneath what sky

Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;

I only know it shall be high,

I only know it shall be great.

Hovey’s themes are widely diverse, but they are always of the essential purports. He seems not only integral with nature, but integral with man in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, and the swift understanding of all that makes for achievement or defeat. He had the splendid nonchalance that met everything with confident ease, and made his relation to life like that of an athlete trained to prevail. Not to be servile, not to be negative, not to be vague,—these are some of the notes of his stirring song. Even in love there is a characteristic dash and verve, a celebration of comradeship as the keynote of the relation, that makes it possible for him to write this sonnet, so refreshing and wholesome, and so far removed from the mawkish or effeminate:

When I am standing on a mountain crest,

Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,

My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,

Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray;

My heart bounds with the horses of the sea,

And plunges in the wild ride of the night,

Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee

That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight.

Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you,

Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,—

No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew,

But hale and hardy as the highland heather,

Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,

Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.

And that other sonnet, “Faith and Fate,” with its Valkyr spirit, and its words like ringing hoofbeats:

To horse, my dear, and out into the night!

Stirrup and saddle and away, away!

Into the darkness, into the affright,

Into the unknown on our trackless way!

And closing with one of his finest lines—

East, to the dawn, or west or south or north!

Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!

What valor in that line—“Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!” This is the typical mood, but I cannot refrain, before considering the last phase of his work, the dramas, from quoting another sonnet in another mood, because of its beauty and its revelation of the spiritual side of his nature:

My love for thee doth take me unaware,

When most with lesser things my brain is wrought,

As in some nimble interchange of thought

The silence enters, and the talkers stare.

Suddenly I am still and thou art there,

A viewless visitant and unbesought,

And all my thinking trembles into nought,

And all my being opens like a prayer.

Thou art the lifted Chalice in my soul,

And I a dim church at the thought of thee;

Brief be the moment, but the mass is said,

The benediction like an aureole

Is on my spirit, and shuddering through me

A rapture like the rapture of the dead.

“The Quest of Merlin,” Hovey’s first incursion into drama, and indeed one of his earliest works, having been issued in 1891, is most illustrative of his defects and least of his distinctions. It is unnecessary to the subsequent dramas, though serving as an introduction to them, and has in itself very little constructive congruity. In the songs of the fairies, the dryads, the maenads, there is often a delicate airy beauty; but the metrical lapses throughout the drama are so frequent as to detract from one’s pleasure in the verse. This criticism is much less apposite to the subsequent works of the cycle.

Hovey’s Arthurian dramas must be judged by the manner rather than motif, by the situations through which he develops the well-known story, and the dramatic beauty and passion of the dialogue, since the theme is his only as he makes it his by the art of his adaptation. He has given us the Arthur of Malory, and not of Tennyson, the Arthur of a certain early

intrigue with Morgance, the Queen of Orkney, outlived in all save its effect, that of bitterness and envy cherished by her against the young Queen Guinevere, and made use of as one of the motives of the drama.

While Tennyson’s Arthur, until the final great scene with Guinevere in the convent, and Bedivere by the lake, has a lay-figure personality, placidly correct, but unconvincing,—in these scenes, and in the general ideal of the Round Table, as developed by Tennyson, there is such profound spiritual beauty that Arthur has come to dwell in a nebulous upper air, as of the gods. It is a shock, then, to see him brought down to earth, as he is in Hovey’s dramas. However, the lapses are but referred to as incidental to the plot, not occurring during its action, and Arthur becomes to us a human, magnanimous personality, commanding sympathy, if he does not dominate the imagination as does Tennyson’s hero. The handicap under which any poet labors who makes use of these legends, even though vitalizing them with a new touch, and approaching them from a new standpoint, is that the Tennyson touch, the Tennyson standpoint, has so impressed itself upon the memory that comparison is inevitable.

The fateful passion of Lancelot and Guinevere is enveloped by Tennyson in a spiritual atmosphere; but in the dramas of Hovey, while delicately approached, it lacks that elevation by which alone it lives as a soul-tragedy, and not as an intrigue. There is, indeed, a strife for loyalty on the part of Lancelot, when he returns from a chivalrous quest and learns that the King’s bride is his unknown Lady of the Hills; but it is soon overborne by Galahault’s assurance that Arthur is to Guinevere—

A mere indifferent, covenanted thing,

and that she

Is as virgin of the thought of love

As winter is of flowers.

Ere this declaration, Lancelot, in conflict with himself, had exclaimed:

Oh, Galahault, for love of my good name,

Pluck out your sword and kill me, for I see

Whate’er I do it will be violence—

To soul or body, others or myself!

But to Galahault’s subtle arguments he opposes an ever-weakening will, and seeing the Queen walking in the garden, exquisite in beauty,

As if a rose grew on a lily’s stem,

So blending passionate life and stately mien,—

he is persuaded to seek her, and, ere the close of the interview, half confessions have orbed to full acknowledgment by each. The scene is artistically handled, especially in the ingenuous simplicity of Guinevere.

Hovey occasionally makes the mistake of robbing some vital utterance of its dramatic value by interlarding it with ornament. True emotion is not literary, and Guinevere, meeting Lancelot alone at the lodge of Galahault, for the first time after their mutual confession, having come hither disguised and by a perilous course, would scarcely have chosen these decorative words:

Oh, do not jar with speech

This perfect chord of silence!—Nay, there needs

Thy throat’s deep music. Let thy lips drop words

Like pearls between thy kisses;

and Lancelot, of the overmastering passion, would scarcely have babbled this reply:

Thy speech breaks

Against the interruption of my lips

Like the low laughter of a summer brook

Over perpetual pebbles.

But when the crisis of the play is reached, when the court is rife with rumors of the Queen’s disloyalty, and Lancelot and Guinevere, under imminent shadow of exposure, meet by chance in the throne room,—there is drawn a vital, moving picture, one whose art lies in revealing the swift transition from impulse to impulse through which one passes when making great decisions. First, the high light is thrown upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in such meditative passages as these, tinged with a melancholy beauty:

We have had a radiant dream; we have beheld

The trellises and temples of the South,

And wandered in the vineyards of the Sun:—

’Tis morning now; the vision fades away

And we must face the barren norland hills.

Lancelot. And must this be?

Guinevere. Nay, Lancelot, it is.

How shall we stand alone against the world?

Lancelot. More lonely in it than against!

What’s the world to us?

Guinevere. The place in which we live.

We cannot slip it from us like a garment,

For it is like the air—if we should flee

To the remotest steppes of Tartary,

Arabia, or the sources of the Nile,—

It still is there, nor can it be eluded

Save in the airless emptiness of death.

And fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war,

of rending the kingdom, of violating friendships, of desecrating the family bond, to all of which Lancelot opposes his own desires:

And I—

I, too, defend it when it is a family,

As I would kneel before the sacred Host

When through the still aisles sounds the sacring bell;

But if a jester strutted through the forms

And turned the holy Mass into a mock,

Would I still kneel, or would I rise in anger

And make an end of that foul mimicry?

This but adds strength to Guinevere’s argument,

Believest thou, then, the power of the Church?

The Church would give our love an ugly name.

Lancelot. Faith, I believe, and I do not believe.

The shocks of life oft startle us to thought,

Rouse us from acquiescence and reveal

That what we took for credence was but custom.

Guinevere. You are Arthur’s friend, your love—

Stands this within the honor of your friendship?

Lancelot. Mother of God—have you no pity?

Guinevere. I would

I could be pitiful, and yet do right.

Alas, how heavy—your tears move me more

Than all—(what am I saying? Dare I trust

So faint a heart? I must make turning back

Impossible);

and with a final resolve she adds:

But know the worst! I jested—

I—God!—I do not love you. Go! ’Twas all

Mockery—wanton cruelty—what you will—lechery!—

I—

(Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. As he draws aside the curtain of the doorway—)

Guinevere. Lancelot!

Lancelot. What does the Queen desire?

Guinevere. Oh, no, I am not the Queen—I am

Your wife!

Take me away with you! Let me not lie

To you, of all—my whole life is a lie,

To one, at least, let it be truth. I—I—

O Lancelot, do you not understand?

I love you—Oh, I cannot let you go!

This swift change of front, this weakening, this inconsistency, is yet so human, so subtly true to life, under such a phase of it, that the entire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers force in the declaration of Guinevere:

Love, I will fly with thee where’er thou wilt!

and reaches its climax in the sudden strength with which Lancelot meets the Queen’s weakness. During her pleading that he should leave her, his selfish wish had been uppermost; but her weakness recalls him to himself and evokes his latent loyalty to the King:

Speak not of flight; I have played him

False—the King, my friend.

I ne’er can wipe that smirch away.

At least I will not add a second shame

And blazon out the insult to the world.

And Guinevere, casting about for her own justification, replies:

What I have given thee was ne’er another’s.

How has another, then, been wronged?

To which Lancelot:

What’s done

Is done, nor right nor wrong, as help me, Heaven,

Would I undo it if I could. But more

I will not do. I will not be the Brutus

To stab with mine own hand my dearest friend.

It must suffice me that you love me, sweet,

And sometime, somewhere, somehow must be mine.

I know not—it may be in some dim land

Beyond the shadows, where the King himself,

Still calling me his friend, shall place your hand

In my hand, saying, “She was always thine.”

No surplusage, no interposition of the merely literary, cumbers this scene, which immediately precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and the Queen are publicly accused before the King, sitting with Guinevere beside him on the throne.

The opportunity for a great dramatic effect is obvious; but through the magnanimity of Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exonerating

from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, the effect is not of the clash and din order, in fact, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax being a spiritual one whose subtlety would be lost on the average audience.

Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and partly to himself):

Be less kingly, Arthur,

Or you will split my heart—not with remorse—

No, not remorse, only eternal pain!

Why, so the damned are!

Guinevere (half apart):

To the souls in hell

It is at least permitted to cry out.

Whatever one may think of the ethical side of the play as wrought out by Hovey, there is no question of its human element. As a whole, “The Marriage of Guenevere” leaves upon one a more concrete and vital impression than do the other dramas of the cycle, though it has less of action and intricacy of plot than the succeeding one, “The Birth of Galahad,” and would probably, for stage purposes, be less effective.

The action of the latter play takes place chiefly with Arthur’s army occupied in the siege of Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turning

upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen’s jester, who has been sent with a letter to Lancelot, informing him of the birth of his son, and announcing that Guinevere, having left the child with her friend, the Princess Ylen, had set out to join the army. The Romans at once conceive the plan of holding Dagonet; capturing the Queen for the palace of Caesar; and giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking Arthur, placing himself at the head of the army and becoming tributary king of Britain, with Guinevere as his queen; or of being publicly dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur of the incriminating letter. All of which was artfully planned, and might have been executed as artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an act of jugglery, stolen the Emperor’s cloak and escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener, attached himself to the service of a young poet of Caesar’s household.

Guinevere is captured by the Romans, and after many unsuccessful machinations on Caesar’s part to subdue her to his will, and on the part of his advisers to win Lancelot to their ends, the letter, which may, according to the law of Britain, bring death to the Queen and banishment to Lancelot, is given to Dagonet to copy for Caesar, and is burned by the jester with the taper given

him to heat the waxen tablet. Then comes on apace the sacking of Rome by Arthur; the taking of the city; the rescue of Guinevere by Lancelot; the slaying of Caesar and the crowning of Arthur as Emperor of Rome with Guinevere as Empress. The scene closes with the entrance of a messenger with letters from Merlin, to Arthur and Guinevere, scanning which the Queen says apart to Lancelot:

All’s well with him.

Thus ends the drama, again with no suspicion on the part of Arthur that his faith has been betrayed, and with no remorse on the part of Guinevere at having betrayed it, only increasing joy in the love of Lancelot. It is Lancelot himself who has the conflict, and in his character lies the strength of the drama.

It is evident that Hovey intended to create a flesh-and-blood Arthur, to eliminate the sanctimonious and retain the ideal; but the task proved too difficult, and after opening the reader’s eyes to the human weaknesses of the King, thereby inflicting a shock, he returns to the other extreme, lifts him again into upper air, and leaves him abstract and unconvincing. Lancelot, on the contrary, if too palpably human

at the start, grows into a more spiritual ideal, and when for the first time he meets Guinevere transfigured with maternal joy, he greets her with these exquisite words:

How great a mystery you seem to me

I cannot tell. You seem to have become

One with the tides and night and the unknown.

My child … your child … whence come? By

What strange forge

Wrought of ourselves and dreams and the great deep

Into a life? I feel as if I stood

Where God had passed by, leaving all the place

Aflame with him.

And again he says,

The strangeness is

That I, who have not borne him, am aware,

I, too, of intimacy with his soul.

The dramas abound in quotable passages, nor are they lacking in those that make the judicious grieve. The work is unequal; but as a whole it lives in the imagination, and remains in the memory, especially “The Marriage of Guenevere,” in that twilight of the mind where dwell all mystic shapes of hapless lovers.

The last of the dramatic cycle, “The Masque of Taliesin,” is regarded by most of Mr. Hovey’s critics as the high-water mark of his verse, and it has certainly some of the purest song of his

pen, and profoundest in thought and conception; but it has also passages of unresolved metaphysics, whose place, unless the poet had the patience to shape them to a finer issue, should be in a Greek philosophy.

The Masque turns upon the quest of the Graal by Percival, and is in three scenes, or movements, set in the forest of Broceliande, Helicon, and the Chapel of the Graal. It introduces the Muses, Merlin, Apollo, Nimue, King Evelac, guardian of the Graal, and lesser mortals and deities, but chief in interest, Taliesin, a bard, through whom are spoken the finest passages of the play. As the work is cast in the form of a Masque, to obviate the need of adhering to a strict dramatic structure, one may dispense with a summary of its slight plot, and look, instead, at the verse.

The passages spoken by Apollo to Taliesin, in other words, Inspiration defining itself to the poet, are full of glowing thought:

Greaten thyself to the end, I am he for whose breath thou art greatened;

Perfect thy speech to a god’s, I am he for whom speech is made perfect;

And my voice in the hush of thy heart is the voice of the tides of the worlds.

Thou shalt know it is I when I speak, as the foot knows the rock that it treads on,

As the sea knows the moon, as the sap knows the place of the sun in the heavens,

As the cloud knows the cloud it must meet and embrace with caresses of lightning.

When thou hearest my voice, thou art one with the hurl of the stars through the void,

One with the shout of the sea and the stampede of droves of the wind,

One with the coursers of Time and the grip of God’s hand on their harness;

And the powers of the night and the grave shall avail not to stand in thy path.

Genius and its invincible assurance could scarcely be defined better than in this passage.

The Masque contains a litany spoken by King Evelac, and responded to by the choristers at the Chapel of Graal, which is one of its achievements, in point of beauty, though too long to quote, and lyrics of great delicacy are scattered throughout the work; but in the more spiritual passages, spoken chiefly by Taliesin, one gets the finer quality of the verse, as in this noble query addressed to Uriel, the angel who holds the flaming sword before the Graal:

Thou who beholdest God continually,

Doth not his light shine even on the blind

Who feel the flood they lack the sense to see?

The lark that seeks him in the summer sky

Finds there the great blue mirror of his soul;

Winged with the dumb need of he knows not what,

He finds the mute speech of he knows not whom.

Is not the wide air, after the cocoon,

As much God as the moth-soul can receive?

Doth not God give the child within the womb

Some guess to set him groping for the world,

Some blurred reflection answering his desire?

We, shut in this blue womb of doming sky,

Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God,

And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense,

Strive for a sign of what it is to see.

Had one space to follow Mr. Hovey’s philosophy in the more metaphysical passages, though fashioned less artistically, the individuality of his thought in its subtler and more speculative phases would be revealed, but to trace it adequately one must needs have the volume before him, rather than such extracts as may be given in a brief study. I must therefore, in taking leave of his work, content myself with citing the exultant lines with which the volume closes, the splendid death-song lifting one on the wave of its ecstatic feeling:

Unaware as the air of the light that fills full all its girth,

Yet crowds not an atom of air from its place to make way;

Growing from splendor to splendor, from birth to birth,

As day to the rose of dawn from the earlier gray;

As day from the sunrise gold to the luminous mirth

Of morning, and brighter and brighter, till noon shall be;

Intense as the cling of the sun to the lips of the earth,

And cool as the call of a wind on the still of the sea,

Joy, joy, joy in the height and the deep;

Joy like the joy of a leaf that unfolds to the sun;

Joy like the joy of a child in the borders of sleep;

Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

Stir in the dark of the stars unborn that desire

Only the thrill of a wild, dumb force set free,

Yearn of the burning heart of the world on fire

For life and birth and battle and wind and sea,

Groping of life after love till the spirit aspire,

Into Divinity ever transmuting the clod,

Higher and higher and higher and higher and higher

Out of the Nothingness world without end into God.

Man from the blindness attaining the succor of sight,

God from his glory descends to the shape we can see;

Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night

Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o’er forest and sea;

Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight

Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core!

Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height!

Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore!

II

LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE

MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding.

Her first collection is aptly named, A Handful of Lavender, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with

one. She has been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal.

There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it! “Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards.

Miss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one, being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems, by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her lines “To A White Lilac”:

I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,

Long-gone but unforgot;

Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower

That one thing I have not.

Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,

O phantom up the lane;

For back may come that spent and lovely weather,

And I be glad again!

To analyze this, would be to pluck the mystical white feather that a poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of “some lone, delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot;” but the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the disillusioned day with a mood the same—yet not the same. Miss Reese has put it in two lines in her “Song of the Lavender Woman”:

Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?

So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.

In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese’s susceptibility to impression from the most intangible sources:

Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,

The box dripped in the air;

Its odor through my house was blown

Into the chamber there.

Remote and yet distinct the scent,

The sole thing of the kind,

As though one spoke a word half meant

That left a sting behind.

I knew not Grief would go from me

And naught of it be plain,

Except how keen the box can be

After a fall of rain.

Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction between simplesse and simplicité? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion, they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well.

In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s,

such as “Trust,” or her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reese has washed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words:

Love came back at fall o’ dew,

Playing his old part;

But I had a word or two,

That would break his heart.

“He who comes at candlelight,

That should come before,

Must betake him to the night

From a barréd door.”

This the word that made us part

In the fall o’ dew;

This the word that brake his heart—

Yet it brake mine, too!

A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose? The lines

called “Trust,” illustrate with equal minuteness the gift of putting into the simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they illustrate the point in question, that of absolute simplicity without insipidity. This is not, however, to be taken as advice to all poets to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve such an effect through it, when she chooses, as “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any case. Song is impulse, not effort, and back of it is temperament. Miss Reese is a poet-singer; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, fitness, and individuality of her words.

Very few modern lyrics possess the singing quality. The term “lyric verse,” as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year; composers search almost vainly

through modern volumes of verse for lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence; something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity and truth, and a revealer of them in his art, though he reveal ofttimes but to conceal.

Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market-women, the common ear was trained to grace and melody; but how many of the country folk of to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could grasp them? Who is writing the lays of the people? One can only answer that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a song as “Gather ye rosebuds

while ye may,” or “Come live with me and be my love,” and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the rosary of Art.

The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree, doubtless, as to the increasing separation between poetry and song, the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes; but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting theme and melody to the common ear—how many modern poets would agree upon that? There is a middle ground, however; the reaction against the highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal appeal.

And how does this pertain to Miss Reese? It pertains in that her ideal is the very return to clear, sympathetic song of which we have spoken. She would recapture the blitheness of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace, would lighten song’s wings of their heaviness and shift Care and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While the reminiscent mood is prevalent in her work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs, although “with finger at his lip, bidding adieu.” Miss Reese’s strife is toward

a valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in the poem called “Laughter”:

Spirit of the gust and dew,

Herrick had the last of you!

Empty are the morning hills.

Herrick, he whose hearty airs

Still are heard in our dull squares;

Herrick of the daffodils!

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

Now the pulpit and the mart

Make an unquiet thing of Art,

For we trade or else we preach;

Even the crocus,’stead of song,

Serves for text the April long;

Thus we set it out of reach.

There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s distilling into the truth which is the essence of

things. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion.

Having this creed of song, Miss Reese’s themes are not widely inclusive. They are, however, the universal themes,—love, beauty, reverence, remembrance, joy that has been tempered to cheer, having met pain by the way; for, as we have said, no encounter with pain—and her poems give abundant evidence of such encounter—has been able to subdue the valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at the springs of her feeling, albeit the buoyant, brimful joy has given place to acquiescent cheer.

There is a certain quality in Miss Reese’s poems, a quaintness, an elder grace, that is wholly unique. It is the union of theme, phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former have been considered, but the spirit, after all, is in the last, in that which analysis cannot reach. One selects a poem from A Quiet Road illustrative of this art of correlating Then and Now, making quick the dead in memory and hope, and sets about to analyze it,—when, lo, as if one had prisoned a white butterfly, it escapes, leaving only the dust of its wing in one’s hand! Miss Reese’s poems are not to be analyzed, they are to be felt; that, too, is the creed of her song.

Is it difficult to feel these delicate lines called “The Road of Remembrance”?—

The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;

The tree is blossoming;

Northward the road runs to the sea,

And past the House of Spring.

The folk go down it unafraid;

The still roofs rise before;

When you were lad and I was maid,

Wide open stood that door.

Now, other children crowd the stair,

And hunt from room to room;

Outside, under the hawthorn fair,

We pluck the thorny bloom.

Out in the quiet road we stand,

Shut in from wharf and mart,

The old wind blowing up the land,

The old thoughts at our heart.

Miss Reese’s growth, as shown in her two volumes, is so marked that while A Handful of Lavender has the foreshadowing of her later work, and also some notably fine poems,—such as “That Day You Came,” “The Last Cricket,” “A Spinning Song,” and “The Old Path,”—it has not the same perfectly individual note that pervades A Quiet Road. The personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon nearly everything in the later collection, is frequently

absent from the first. That part of A Handful of Lavender first issued as A Branch of May is naturally the least finished of Miss Reese’s work. It is unsure and yet indicative of that—

Oncoming hour of light and dew,

Of heartier sun, more certain blue,

which shines in her later work.

“The Death Potion,” from the first collection, is a case in point: it is strong in idea, and here and there in execution, but its metre is faulty, and it departs so often from the initial measure that one who has set himself in tune with that is thrown from the key, and in adapting himself to the changed rhythm loses the pleasure of the poem.

It must be said, however, that such lack of metrical sensitiveness is very rare even in the earlier poems. In general, they are of unimpeachable rhythm; indeed, the singing note is so much Miss Reese’s natural expression that it creeps into this sonnet, “The Old Path,” and turns it in effect to a lyric:

O Love! O Love! this way has hints of you

In every bough that stirs, in every bee,

Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,

In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;

And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,

Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from some

Fast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,

You were so near, so near, yet did not come!

Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?

Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?

Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;

With any breath of brier or note of bird?

If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,

All my sad life would I go comforted.

A Handful of Lavender shows the tendency of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tendency laudable enough if one be a natural sonneteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived and well-executed sonnets, but few that are unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics. That she recognizes wherein her surest power lies is obvious from the fact that, whereas A Handful of Lavender contains some thirty-two sonnets, A Quiet Road contains but twelve. Those of nature predominated in the former, nature for its own sake; but in the latter there is far less accent upon nature and more upon life.

They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There are certain sonnets in A Handful of Lavender, such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling than the later ones

and equal to them in manner; but in general the mechanism is much more apparent—one does occasionally see the wires, which is never the case in the later work.

“The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets in A Quiet Road:

Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;

Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,

Of the old days, but only of these new;

I sow; I reap; my house in order set.

Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,

By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,

That I remember naught but your dead face,

And other folk forgotten, you are all.

When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!

And I, thereafter, am like unto one

Who from the lilac bloom and the young year

Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street,

Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,

For that the recompensing Spring is near!

There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said, however, one comes back to A Quiet Road for the songs it holds, and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines “Writ In A Book Of

Elizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own reed, when she says:

Mine is the crocus and the call

Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall;

The white tumult, the rainy hush;

And mine the unforgetting thrush

That pours its heart-break from the wall.

For I am tears, for I am Spring,

The old and immemorial thing;

To me come ghosts by twos and threes,

Under the swaying cherry-trees,

From east and west remembering.

O elder Hour, when I am not,

Gone out like smoke from road and plot,

More perfect Hour of light and dew,

Shall lovers turn away from you,

And long for me, the Unforgot!

Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:

Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,

Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!

The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;

Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!

The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;

The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;

Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,

And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.

The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;

There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;

For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;

The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.

I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;

Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;

The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;

The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.

When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,

The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;

The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;

And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!

Miss Reese’s work in A Quiet Road is so uniformly quotable that one distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. One

need hardly be told that she is of the “mystic fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization, of which a part must suffice to show the quality:

In his old gusty garden of the North,

He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;

Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—

At last they drove him forth.

Now there were two rang silverly and long;

And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,

And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;

And one was that of Song.

Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,

The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,

These were the Shapes that all around him came,—

That we let go with tears.

His was the unstinted English of the Scot,

Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox

Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,

To keep it unforgot.

No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,

To see appealing things in all he knew,

He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,

And would have naught of chaff.

David and Keats and all good singing men,

Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,

Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—

Where you do sing again!

There! I have repented me and quoted it all, to preserve the unity.

To be rare and quaint without being fantastic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that many overlook—this is Miss Reese’s gift. You shall not go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruction of any kind, for that is contrary to her creed; but you shall go to her for truth, truth that has become personal through experience; go to her for beauty, uplift, and refreshment, and above all for the recovery of the departed mood.

III

BLISS CARMAN

THE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets of the States, needs no explanation; so identified is he with the artistic life of the younger generation on this side the border that we have come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to consider his work, most of which has been produced here, as distinctly our own. But while it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse has drawn its inspiration from nature and life as we know them, one could little spare Mr. Carman’s first book of lyrics, Low Tide on Grand Pré, which is purely Canadian—set in the air of the “blue North summer.”

It lacks as a collection the confident touch of his later work, but is imbued with an indefinable delicacy; it withholds the uttermost word, and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially is this true of the initial poem, a lyric with a poignant undernote calling one back thrice and again to learn its spell.

It has been Mr. Carman’s method to issue at intervals small volumes containing work of a related sort; but it is open to question whether this method of publishing, with the harmony which results from grouping each collection under a certain key, may not have a counterbalancing danger in the tendency toward monotony. As a matter of fact, Mr. Carman has a wide range of subject; but unless one be ever taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, it is likely to seem restricted, owing to the reiterance of the same note in whatever collection he chance to have in hand. A case in point is that furnished by Ballads of Lost Haven, one of his most characteristic and fascinating volumes, a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no fewer than four poems, succeeding one another at the close of the collection, prefiguring death under the titles of “The Shadow Boatswain,” “The Master of the Isles,” “The Last Watch,” and “Outbound.”

Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but different

phrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain” contains these fine lines:

Don’t you know the sailing orders?

It is time to put to sea,

And the stranger in the harbor

Sends a boat ashore for me.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

That’s the Doomkeel. You may know her

By her clean run aft; and then

Don’t you hear the Shadow Boatswain

Piping to his shadow men?

And “The Master of the Isles,” immediately following, opens in this equally picturesque, but essentially similar, manner:

There is rumor in Dark Harbor,

And the folk are all astir;

For a stranger in the offing

Draws them down to gaze at her,

In the gray of early morning,

Black against the orange streak,

Making in below the ledges,

With no colors at her peak.

While each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of blurring

from the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it to an impalpable thing.

Judging them individually, it is doubtful if Mr. Carman has done anything more representative, more imbued with his own temperament, than these buoyant, quickening songs that freshen one as if from a plunge in the sea, and take one to themselves as intimately. The opening poem sets the key to the collection:

I was born for deep-sea faring;

I was bred to put to sea;

Stories of my father’s daring

Filled me at my mother’s knee.

I was sired among the surges;

I was cubbed beside the foam;

All my heart is in its verges,

And the sea wind is my home.

All my boyhood, from far vernal

Bourns of being, came to me

Dream-like, plangent, and eternal

Memories of the plunging sea.

And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in this picture at whose faithfulness one shudders:

Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,

And well his work is done.

With an equal grave for lord and knave,

He buries them every one.

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,

He makes for the nearest shore;

And God, who sent him a thousand ship,

Will send him a thousand more;

But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,

And shoulder them in to shore,—

Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,

Shoulder them in to shore.

How the swing of the lines befits the action, and how it puts on grace in this stanza,

Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre

Went out, and where are they?

In the port they made, they are delayed

With the ships of yesterday.

The remaining strophes tempt one beyond what he is able, especially this characterization,

Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him

Is the sexton of the town;

but we must take a glance at the ballads, at the “Nancy’s Pride,” that went out

On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,

To the flap of an idle sail,

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

and

… faded down

With her creaking boom a-swing,

Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,

And caught her wing and wing.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

She lifted her hull like a breasting gull

Where the rolling valleys be,

And dipped where the shining porpoises

Put ploughshares through the sea.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

They all may home on a sleepy tide

To the sag of an idle sheet;

But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride

That draws men down the street.

But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon, behold this apparition:

When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,

They see by the after rail

An unknown schooner creeping up

With mildewed spar and sail.

Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,

With the Judgment in their face;

And to their mates’ “God save you!”

Have never a word of grace.

Then into the gray they sheer away,

On the awful polar tide;

And the sailors know they have seen the wraith

Of the missing Nancy’s Pride.

There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so vividly that one may almost see the

crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds

With the Judgment in their face,

and watch them as

into the gray they sheer away

On the awful polar tide.

The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a very simple line, as this,

With her creaking boom a-swing,

or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled, “weather-breeder” days one knows so well.

From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and frequently

a crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr. Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it.

One pardons this over-elaboration in Ballads of Lost Haven because of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to the

blue leagues of sea; and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s debtor.

Behind the Arras has proven a stumbling-block and rock of offence to some of Mr. Carman’s readers, because of its recondite character. They regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysticism is half whimsical, and requires no superconsciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is founding no cult; it pleases him for the nonce to mask his thought in symbols, and there are, alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no use for symbols! It is a book containing many strong poems, such as “Beyond the Gamut,” “Exit Anima,” and “Hack and Hew,”—a book of spiritual enigmas through which one catches hints of the open secret, ever-alluring, ever-eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, immanent, yet undivined.

Earth one habitat of spirit merely,

I must use as richly as I may,—

Touch environment with every sense-tip,

Drink the well and pass my wander way,—

says this sane poet who holds his gift as a tribute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny:

O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,

While time endures,

To acquiesce and learn!

For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,

Let soul discern.

And who through the grime and in the babel still sees and hears,

Always the flawless beauty,—always the Chord

Of the Overword,

Dominant, pleading, sure,

No truth too small to save and make endure;

No good too poor!

This is the vision that shall lighten our eyes, quicken our ears, and restore our hope,—the vision which we expect the poet to see and to communicate. He must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is orbing. It is not by disregarding the tragic, the sombre, the inexplicable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. Pain has more than touched him; it has become incorporate in him. Low Tide on Grand Pré has its poignant note; Ballads of Lost Haven, its undertone; Behind the Arras, its overtone, its sublimation.

Mr. Carman’s work is more subjective than that of many of the younger poets without being less objective, as the Vagabondia books attest. In one mood he is the mystic, dwelling in a speculative nebula of thought, in another the realist concerning himself only with the demonstrable, and hence his work discloses a wide range of affinities. He is not a strongly constructive thinker, but intuitional in his mental processes, and his verse demands that gift in his readers. Without it what could one make of “The Juggler” but a poem of delicious color and music? If its import were none other than appears upon the face of it, it would still be admirable, but as a symbol of the Force projecting us, it is a subtle bit of art.

Mr. Carman’s sensitiveness to values of rhythm keeps his verse free from lapses in that direction. He never, to my memory, makes use of the sonnet, which shows critical judgment, as the lyric is his temperamental medium. The apogee of his art is in his diction, which has a predestined fitness, and above all a personal quality. To quote Pater again, he has “begotten a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit,” and one cannot mistake even a fragment of his verse. Now and again one comes upon an archaic expression,

as “A weird is in their song,” using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaningless solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as “illumining this quench of clay,” but in general Mr. Carman does not find it necessary to go outside the established limits of the language for variety and force in diction. He has a genius for imagery, and conjures the most unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. The Vagabondia books are abrim with them, and while there are idle lines and padded stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not strike true flashes here and there, few that miss of justification, while their gay and rollicking note heartens one and bids him up and join in the revel.

There are others in a graver key, such as Hovey’s “At the End of the Day,” and Carman’s “The Mendicants,” and “The Marching Morrows;” and certain lyric inspirations, such as the “Sea Gypsy,” by Hovey, and the “Vagabond Song,” by Carman, that have not been bettered by either, that could not well be bettered within their limits. The former has been quoted in the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an inspiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does not

analyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers; under his touch it subtilizes into atmosphere and thus communicates the incommunicable:

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—

Touch of manner, hint of mood;

And my heart is like a rhyme,

With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry

Of bugles going by.

And my lonely spirit thrills

To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;

We must rise and follow her,

When from every hill of flame

She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

Throwing aside all that is ephemeral in the Vagabondia books, all mere boyish ebullition, there is a goodly residuum of nature-poetry of the freshest and most unhackneyed sort. It is the blithe, objective type; eyes and ears are its informers, and it enters into one’s mood with a keen sense of refreshment. Who does not know the impulse that prompted these lines?

Make me over, mother April,

When the sap begins to stir!

When thy flowery hand delivers

All the mountain-prisoned rivers,

And thy great heart beats and quivers

To revive the days that were,

Make me over, mother April,

When the sap begins to stir!

The temper of the Vagabondia books is thoroughly wholesome; courage and cheer dominate them; in short, they are good to know; and while it is not vitally necessary to remember all they contain, one would be distinctly the loser should he forget such poems as “Non Omnis Moriar” or “The Deserted Inn” from The Last Songs.

The collection of Memorabilia, By the Aurelian Wall, takes its title from the burial-place of Keats, and includes “A Seamark,” the fine threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of Phillips Brooks; a spiritual, poetic visioning of Shelley under the symbol of “The White Gull;” a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and other things equally well-wrought. Some of them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point—but what haunting sweetness it carries with it! To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating

in the void his luminous wings in vain,” has come to dominate the popular fancy in regard to him. Mr. Carman’s poem, though touched with this mood, is not set to it, and he has several stanzas which have in them the essence of Shelley’s spirit,—the real Shelley, the passionate idealist, the spent runner who, falling, handed on the torch.

The Stevenson threnody is probably the best of the elegies, as Mr. Carman is by temperament one of the Stevenson brotherhood, and no subject could better command him. That “intimate and magic name,” a password to fellowship, conjures many a picture of him—

Whose courage lights the dark’ning port

Where every sea-worn sail must come.

Mr. Carman has singular power to visualize a scene; one becomes an eye-witness of it as of this:

But I have wander-biddings now.

Far down the latitudes of sun,

An island mountain of the sea,

Piercing the green and rosy zone,

Goes up into the wondrous day.

And there the brown-limbed island men

Are bearing up for burial,

Within the sun’s departing ken,

The master of the roving kind.

And there where time will set no mark

For his irrevocable rest,

Under the spacious melting dark,

With all the nomad tented stars

About him, they have laid him down

Above the crumbling of the sea,

Beyond the turmoil of renown.

This island procession to the mountain, leaving the master to his “irrevocable rest,”

Under the spacious melting dark,

With all the nomad tented stars

About him,

is an artist’s picture not easily forgotten.

Mr. Carman’s three volumes in the projected “Pipes of Pan” series, including thus far The Book of the Myths, The Green Book of the Bards, and The Sea Children, make new disclosures of his talent, and the title poem “Pipes of Pan,” is a bit of anointed vision that would waken the dullest eyes from lethargy as to the world around them. There is necromancy in Mr. Carman’s words when the outer world is his theme; something of the thrill, the expectancy in the heart of growing things, the elation of life, comes upon one as he reads the “Pipes of Pan.” It is a nobler vision than illumined Vagabondia days, revealing

Power out of hurt and stain

To bring beauty back again,

and showing the

Scope and purpose, hint and plan

Lurking in the Pipes of Pan,

as well as the sheer delight that we noted in Vagabondia.

It seems that every mood of every creature has been divined and uttered, uttered with deep love, with a human relatedness that melts the barriers between life and life, whether in man or in

All the bright, gay-colored things

Buoyed in air on balanced wings.

This relatedness, and all the molding influences of nature leading us on from beauty to strength, are developed in Mr. Carman’s poem until they become to us religion. We realize that at heart we are all pantheists, and that revelation antedates the Book; that the law is written on the leaves of roses as well as on tables of stone,—a testament both new and old, given for our learning that we might have hope.

The remaining poems of The Book of the Myths are not the best things Mr. Carman has done, though renewals of classic verse-forms in the Sapphic and other metres, and often

picturesque in story. “The Lost Dryad” is the most attractive, “The Dead Faun” the least so, to my ears; but perhaps from lack of sympathy with the subject-matter I cannot think the collection, with the exception of the poem “Pipes of Pan,” is of especial value. It is not to be named, still excepting the above poem, with its companion volume, The Green Book of the Bards, which contains some of the strongest work of Mr. Carman’s pen as to subject and thought, but which has one pronounced limitation,—its monotony of form.

The entire volume, with a sole exception, and that not marked, is written in the conventional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr. Carman’s work of late has been cast. Within this compass, the accomplishment is as varied as to theme and diction, as that of his other work; but when one sings on and on in the same numbers, it induces a state of mental indolence in the reader, and presupposes a similar state in the writer. The verse goes purling musically along, until, as running water exercises an hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized by the mere melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness to find that he has no notion what they are about, and must re-read them to find out. To be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, and

will make new disclosures whenever one returns to them; but had they greater variety as to manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the mind would be startled to perception by unexpectedness, instead of lulled by the same note in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that Mr. Carman has a principle at stake in this,—it may indeed be a reactionary measure against over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire for simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the first canons of art, but variety in metre and form is another canon by no means annulling the first. One may have variety to the superlative degree, and never depart from the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity.

Were The Green Book of the Bards relieved by contrasts of form, it would rank with the finest work of Mr. Carman’s pen, as the individual poems have strong basic ideas,—such as the “Creature Catechism,” full of pregnant thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word as to the mystic union of the creative Soul with the creatures of feather and fin and fleece. The marked evolution of Mr. Carman’s philosophy of life, as influenced by his growing identity with nature, comes out so strongly in the “Pipes of Pan” series, and in The Word at Saint Kavin’s, as almost to reveal a new individuality.

He had gone out in the light-foot, light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with the woods and winds; glad to be quit of the gyves, to drink from the wayside spring, eat of the forest fruit, sleep ’neath the tent of night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He had sought nature in a mood of pagan joy; but the wayside spring had excited a thirst it could not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it could not allay, and the blithe seeker of freedom and delight became at length the anointed votary, and lingered to watch the God at work shaping life from death, and expressing His yearning in beauty.

The mere objective delight of the earlier time has grown steadily into the subjective identity with every manifestation of the Force that operates within this world of wonder and beauty, from the soul of man, shaping his ideals and creating his environment, to the butterfly whose sun-painted wings, set afloat in the buoyant air, are upheld by the breath of God. Coming into the finer knowledge, through long intimacy with the earth and its multitudinous life, fulfilling itself in joy,—Mr. Carman has come at length to

readjust

The logic of the dust,

and to shape from it a creed and law for his following, which he has put into the mouth of Saint Kavin for expounding. The opening stanzas of the volume give the setting and note:

Once at St. Kavin’s door

I rested. No sigh more

Of discontent escaped me from that day.

For there I overheard

A Brother of the Word

Expound the grace of poverty, and say:

Thank God for poverty

That makes and keeps us free,

And lets us go our unobtrusive way,

Glad of the sun and rain,

Upright, serene, humane,

Contented with the fortune of a day.

The poem follows simple, but no less picturesque phrase, as becomes Saint Kavin, and is, from the technical side, quaint and artistic. On the philosophical, it develops at first the initial thought that one shall “keep his soul”

Joyous and sane and whole

by obeying the word

That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,

and that

When we have laid aside

Our truculence and pride,

Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—

we shall have found the boon of our ultimate striving,—room to live and let our spirits grow, and give of their growth and higher gain to another. Here is the giving that turns to one’s own enrichment:

And if I share my crust,

As common manhood must,

With one whose need is greater than my own,

Shall I not also give

His soul, that it may live,

Of the abundant pleasures I have known?

And so, if I have wrought,

Amassed or conceived aught

Of beauty, or intelligence or power,

It is not mine to hoard;

It stands there to afford

Its generous service simply as a flower.

The poem then broadens into a dissertation upon the complexities of life, one’s servitude to custom and “vested wrong,” the lack of individual courage to

Live by the truth each one of us believes,

and turns, for illustration of the nobler development and poise, back to nature, and the evolutionary round of life through which one traces his course and kinship. These stanzas are among the finest spoken by the wise

Brother of the Word. After citing the strength and serenity of the fir-trees, and what a travesty upon man’s ascent it were, did one bear himself less royally than they, he adverts to the creature kin-fellows whose lot we have borne:

I, too, in polar night

Have hungered, gaunt and white,

Alone amid the awful silences;

And fled on gaudy fin,

When the blue tides came in,

Through coral gardens under tropic seas.

And wheresoe’er I strove,

The greater law was love,

A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;

There was no wanton greed,

Depravity of breed,

Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.

Nay, not till I was man,

Learned I to scheme and plan

The blackest depredation on my kind,

Converting to my gain

My fellow’s need and pain

In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.

Therefore, my friends, I say

Back to the fair sweet way

Our Mother Nature taught us long ago,—

The large primeval mood,

Leisure and amplitude,

The dignity of patience strong and slow.

Let us go in once more

By some blue mountain door,

And hold communion with the forest leaves;

Where long ago we trod

The Ghost House of the God,

Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!

Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements of this place of return, a more thoughtful one of its requitals, and the infinitude of care bestowed upon every task to which the Master Craftsman sets his hand, and orbs into a vision of the soul enlarged by breathing the freer air and by regaining therefrom her “primal ecstasy and poise.” It traces also the soul’s commission,

To fill her purport in the ampler plan.

Altogether the Word is admirably expounded by Saint Kavin, and one is distinctly the gainer for having rested at his door to learn not only the grace of joyousness, but the means to that grace.

In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but one whose promise he

has made good, as poetry, however near it may approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have gone to oblivion.

Of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” the most complete Sapphic poem extant, many translations and paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin Arnold, John Addington Symonds, Ambrose Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among the finest; and were there space it would be interesting to show by comparison that Mr. Carman’s rendering of the Ode ranks well with the standard already set.

Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, as

well as the poet’s touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres, together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines:

O heart of insatiable longing,

What spell, what enchantment allures thee,

Over the rim of the world

With the sails of the sea-going ships?

And when the rose petals are scattered

At dead of still noon on the grass-plot,

What means this passionate grief,—

This infinite ache of regret?[1]

Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown;

whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to tell as a stroke in a sketch:

Art thou the topmost apple

The gatherers could not reach,

Reddening on the bough?

Shall not I take thee?

Art thou a hyacinth blossom

The shepherds upon the hills

Have trodden into the ground?

Shall not I lift thee?

The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic play upon words explaining that, although the gatherers did not get the coveted apple, they

Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,

which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is hardly in keeping with the dignity of the comparison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well preserved.

Another fragment made familiar by adaptation is that to Hesperus, expanded by Byron

into one of the great passages of “Don Juan.” Mr. Carman gives a more compact rendering and again brings the lines to such a close as shall render them a complete lyric. They scarcely vie in beauty with the Byron passage, which is one of the surest strokes of his hand, but have their own charm and grace:

Hesperus, bringing together

All that the morning star scattered,—

Sheep to be folded in twilight,

Children for mothers to fondle,—

Me, too, will bring to the dearest,

Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.

The fragment, “I loved thee, Athis, in the long ago,” has been expanded by Mr. Carman into a poem of reminiscent mood, the long, slow-moving pentameter enhancing the effect of pensive meditation which the lines convey. Many of the fragments are of a blither note, having the variety which distinguishes the original.

Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint in his treatment of the fragments. They are not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, and while there is a certain atmosphere of insubstantiality about many of them, as could

scarcely fail to result from the attempt to restore, by imagination alone, what had existence but in tradition, they justify themselves as artistic poetry, which is the only consideration of moment.

[1] From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. Copyright, 1903, by L. C. Page & Co.

IV

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

SOME critic has said of Miss Guiney’s work, that to come suddenly upon it among other volumes of modern poetry is like coming upon a Greek temple in an American woodland; and the comparison is an apt one, though the temple should scarcely be Greek, for while the feeling and structure of the work are classic in atmosphere, they are not warm enough, sensuous enough, to be Greek. It would, indeed, be hard to say with what race classicism Miss Guiney’s work is tinctured. Rather say that she is a classic by temperament and has drawn to herself, as by chemical affinity, such things as are rare and choice in the world of books and life, and has fused them in the alembic of her own nature, until the resultant blend is something new and strange, having a racy tang and a flavor all its own, and yet with a hint of all the elements that went to its compounding.

Most minds take on learning by a miscellaneous accretion that results in information

without individuality, but Miss Guiney hives in many fields and lands the quaint, the picturesque, the beautiful, to which her temperament calls her unerringly, and can no more be tempted to range outside her limit of attraction than a bee to waste his precious hours dipping into bloom that holds no nectar for him. To be sure, Miss Guiney’s range of attraction is wide, but it enlarges its own confines, and does not reach out to alien territory. It follows as a corollary to this fact that unless one be in the range of attraction with Miss Guiney, the subjects which claim her thought may be more or less alien to him, and the restrained, wholly individual manner of her work may be equally alien to his nature. He may require more warmth, more abandon, more of the element of to-day and to-morrow in the theme and mood; for Miss Guiney has little to do with the times and conditions in which she finds herself; contemporary life is only incidentally in her verse, and one would have difficulty from it in declaring her day and generation. Her poetry demands that synchronism of temperament by which one responds to her mood independent of the time or place to which it transports him.

Take, for illustration, “A Friend’s Song for

Simoisius,” with its charm of music, its beauty of expression, and its crystal clarity. Few would be unconscious of the poetic side of it; but to how many would the subject appeal? What’s Simoisius to them or they to Simoisius that they should weep for him? Let, however, this feeling for the atmosphere of myth and legend be added, and what charm do the lines take on:

The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,

Be on the lonely battle-place;

And to so young, so kind a face,

The long, protecting grasses cling!

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,

The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;

The early moon from Ida’s steep

Comes to the empty wrestling-ring,

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recede

No echoes of the shepherd’s reed,

And children without laughter lead

The war-horse to the watering.

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!

What to the loveliest hast thou done,

That ne’er with him a maid may run

Across the marigolds in spring?

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

The world to me has nothing dear

Beyond the namesake river here:

O Simois is wild and clear!

And to his brink my heart I bring;

(Alas, alas,

The one inexorable thing!)

The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon her

words when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.

The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics, as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and measure:

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,

Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,

Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,

Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,

They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,

And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,

It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,

And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;

But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,

The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it:

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,

The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,

And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves

In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;

And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,

And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·

’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,

The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;

The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,

Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,

And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep

Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss Guiney has managed to infuse into these lines is fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what elation and buoyancy of returning life vitalizes the first! While on this phase of her work there is another poem as magnetically charged, and full of ozone, but its objective side incidental to a subjective query which nature and science force to the lips:

The spur is red upon the briar,

The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;

The wind shakes out the colored fire

From lamps a-row on the sycamore;

The tanager with flitting note

Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;

The mink is busy; herds again

Go hillward in the honeyed rain;

The midges meet. I cry to Thee

Whose heart

Remembers each of these: Thou art

My God who hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,

The lined gulls in the offing ride;

Along an edge of marshy ground,

The shad-bush enters like a bride.

Yon little clouds are washed of care

That climb the blue New England air,

And almost merrily withal

The tree-frog plays at evenfall

His oboe in a mossy tree.

So, too,

Am I not Thine? Arise, undo

This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

From the nature side these lines are pictures, taken each by each they are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for illustration, in the words,

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,

The lined gulls in the offing ride,

and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without, as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection upon the surface of the water.

The subjective touch in the above poem:

I cry to Thee,

Whose heart

Remembers each of these: Thou art

My God who hast forgotten me!—

articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitude

that writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand:

As to a weed, to me but give

Thy sap! lest aye inoperative

Here in the Pit my strength shall be:

And still,

Help me endure the Pit until

Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meet

fate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the

“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”

There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this marching order:

So much to me is imminent:

To leave Revolt that is my tent,

And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be gone

Ere yet Creation marches on,

Obedient, jocund, glorified:

And, last of things afoot, to know