Chapter XV: The Later Poets (2)

His claim to remembrance comes not from lyrical inspiration, for he was not lyrically gifted. He lacked what Gilder and Woodberry lacked. Once in a while he made a stanza that approaches lyric distinction, as, perhaps, in this final one of "A Foolish Wish":

'Tis a child's longing, on the beach at play:
"Before I go,"
He begs the beckoning mother, "Let me stay
One shell to throw!"
'Tis coming night; the great sea climbs the shore--
Ah, let me toss one little pebble more,
Before I go!

But not often lines so inevitable. His power came largely from the beauty and purity of his own personality. His own conception of a poem was, that "coming from a pure and rich nature, it shall leave us purer and richer than it found us." Judged by such a standard, Sill holds a high place among the poets. Nothing that he has written but leaves us purer and richer of soul and more serious before the problems of life. Eight or ten of his lyrics for a long time undoubtedly will hold their place among the very highest pieces of American reflective poetry.

It was the opinion of Edmund Gosse that the period was notably deficient in serious verse.[148] No statement could be more wide of the mark; the period has abounded in serious poetry and its quality has been high. To consider in detail this mass of poetry, however, were to exceed our limits. We can only single out one here and there a little more notable than the others--John Boyle O'Reilly (1844-1890), for instance, with his Celtic fancy and his graphic power to depict life in the Southern Seas; Maurice Francis Egan (1852----) and Lloyd Mifflin (1846----), makers of beautiful and thoughtful sonnets; S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), a poet of rare distinction as well as a novelist; Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1916), maker of madrigals and joyous lyrics; Charles Warren Stoddard (1825-1903), whose songs have a lyric quality that is distinctive, and Abram Joseph Ryan (1839-1886), a beautiful and heroic soul, who had he written but a single lyric would occupy a high place among American poets. His "The Conquered Banner" was the voice of a people:

Furl that Banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently--it is holy--
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not--unfold it never--
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people's hopes are fled.

VI

The two most prominent younger poets of the South were Robert Burns Wilson (1850-1916) and Madison Cawein (1865-1914), both residents of Kentucky, one at Frankfort, the other at Louisville, and both contemplative Nature poets who voiced but little the spirit of their period. Of the two, Wilson undoubtedly was the most inspired singer, as Cawein was the most careful observer of Nature.

Of Wilson we may say that he was a later Thomas Buchanan Read, a devotee of art, a painter of landscapes and portraits, whose work was seen in many distinctive galleries, and in addition to this a poet--most pictorial of poets, whose stanzas seem like inscriptions for his paintings. When the lyrics "When Evening Cometh On" and "June Days" appeared in _Harper's_ in 1885, it was felt that a new singer had come. There was distinction in the lines, there was restraint, there was more than promise, there was already fulfilment. One feels a quality in a stanza like this that he may not explain:

Though all the birds be silent--though
The fettered stream's soft voice be still,
And on the leafless bough the snow
Be rested, marble-like and chill--
Yet will the fancy build from these
The transient but well-pleasing dream
Of leaf and bloom among the trees,
And sunlight glancing on the stream.

It has somehow the singing quality that may not be learned, that may not be taught. Finer still when there is joined with it graphic power that arrests and pleases the eye, and pathos that grips hard the heart, as in a lyric like this:

Such is the death the soldier dies:
He falls--the column speeds away;
Upon the dabbled grass he lies,
His brave heart following, still, the fray.

The smoke-wraiths drift among the trees,
The battle storms along the hill;
The glint of distant arms he sees;
He hears his comrades shouting still.

A glimpse of far-borne flags, that fade
And vanish in the rolling din:
He knows the sweeping charge is made,
The cheering lines are closing in.

Unmindful of his mortal wound,
He faintly calls and seeks to rise;
But weakness drags him to the ground--
Such is the death the soldier dies.

Wilson's poetic product was small, but it stands distinctive.

The work of Cawein has been far more widely trumpeted. He had the good fortune to attract the attention of Howells with his first book and to be commended by him persistently and with no uncertain voice. "There is much that is expressive of the new land," Howells wrote in "The Editor's Study," "as well as of the young life in its richly sensuous, boldly achieved pieces of color. In him one is sensible (or seems so) of something different from the beautiful as literary New England or literary New York conceived it. He is a fresh strain."[149] He deplored the gorgeous excesses of the poems and the touches for merely decorative effect, but he defended them as the natural exuberance of extreme youth. With time they would disappear: undoubtedly a great poet had arisen. Thus encouraged, Cawein began upon a poetic career that in single-hearted devotion to the lyric muse has been equaled only by Clinton Scollard. Before his death he had issued more than twenty volumes of lyrics and his collected work had been published in five thick volumes.

The final estimate of the poet cannot yet be written. It is too soon, but even now one may venture certain predictions. Cawein wrote enormously too much, and he wrote all too often with merely literary intent. He was not a lyrist born: he had little ear for music, and he blended meters and made rimes seemingly with the eye alone. One can not feel that a passage like this, for instance, sang itself spontaneously:

Seemed that she
Led me along a flower-showered lea
Trammeled with puckered pansy and the pea;
Where poppies spread great blood-red stain on stain,
So gorged with sunlight and the honied rain
Their hearts are weary; roses lavished beams
Roses, wherein were huddled little dreams
That laughed coy, sidewise merriment, like dew
Or from fair fingers fragrant kisses blew.

There is a straining constantly for the unusual in epithet, a seeking for a picturing adjective that shall give verisimilitude in an utterly new way. "The songs have all been sung," he would seem to argue, "but the picturing adjectives have not all been used and the striking conceits." One might open at random for an illustration:

Athwart a sky of brass long welts of gold;
A bullion bulk the wide Ohio lies.

Up from the glimmering east the full moon swung,
A golden bubble buoyed zenithward.

Between the pansy fire of the west,
And poppy mist of moonrise in the east,
This heartache will have ceased.

"It is as if we had another Keats," says Howells, and in saying it he touches the fatal weakness of the poet. There is lack of virility in great parts of his work, there is lack of definiteness and of vigor. He tells nothing new and he adds nothing to the old by his telling. Even Baskerville can say, "There is little or no Southern, not to say Kentucky, atmosphere in Mr. Cawein's poetry. His flowers and birds and rocks and trees do not appear to us as objects of the rich, warm Southern nature. He frequently mentions the whole register of flowers and birds in his poetry--almost, we might say, drags them into his descriptions by force--but he has not created a warm, genial, Southern poetic atmosphere in which they may thrive."[150]

Nevertheless, it is only in his Nature poetry that he is at all convincing. He can paint a summer noon, or a summer shower, and he can detail minutely the flowers and the mosses and the birds in an old fence corner or an old garden. Pictures like this have, undoubtedly, a certain kind of value:

Bubble-like the hollyhocks
Budded, burst, and flaunted wide
Gipsy beauty from their stocks;
Morning-glories, bubble-dyed,
Swung in honey-hearted flocks.

Tawny tiger-lilies flung
Doublets slashed with crimson on;
Graceful girl slaves, fair and young,
Like Circassians, in the sun
Alabaster lilies swung.

Ah, the droning of the bee
In his dusty pantaloons,
Tumbling in the fleurs-de-lis;
In the drowsy afternoons
Dreaming in the pink sweet-pea.

Always is he heavy with adjectives, profuse, gorgeous; always is he dreamy and remote. One turns page after page of the thick volumes of the collected lyrics to find some simple human bit that came hot from the heart of a poet, some stanza that compels quotation, but one gets lost at length in the maze of sweetness. If any of his poems are to outlast their generation it will be some of the Nature pieces, but landscape studies, flower songs, and pretty conceits about bees and birds are thin material of which to make enduring poetry.

VII

With Richard Hovey (1864-1900), representative of the poets of the second generation of the National period, our survey closes. Hovey was a later Lanier, excited, impetuous, possessed by poetry until it ruled all his thinking. Like Lanier, he was Gallic of temperament rather than Teutonic. He read enormously--the Elizabethans, Tennyson, Whitman, the pre-Raphaelites, Dobson, Kipling, and later, in France, Paul Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Stéphane Mallarmé, and all the later symbolists. After his college course at Dartmouth he was, at brief intervals, theological student, newspaper reporter, actor, lecturer in Alcott's Concord school of philosophy, and in his last year, like Lanier, professor of literature in one of the larger universities--Barnard College, New York--yet his one profession all his life long was poetry. His facility was marvelous. He wrote an elegy of purest Greek type and he added a canto to _Don Juan_; he wrote Arthurian masques and dramas and then rollicking Bohemian songs and _vers de société_.

His facility was his weakness. Like Lanier he was too excited, too given to improvisation and the blending of meters. His dramatic interludes like _The Quest of Merlin_ and _Taliesin_ are marvelous in their workmanship, their mastery of all the intricacies of prosody, but they come near to being void of human interest. Lanier dominated his first poem _The Laurel_ and there are echoes of Whitman and others in his later work. He matured slowly. At his death he had arrived at a point where there was promise of creative work of highest distinction. He was breaking from his Bohemianism and his excited Swinburnian music and was touching his time. His definition of poetry makes his early death seem like a tragedy. Of the poet he wrote, "It is not his mission to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the Sybaritic dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man, all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it and so a love of Him whose manifestation it is.... In the appointed work of every people, the poets have been the leaders and pioneers."[151]

His most finished work is his elegy on the death of Thomas William Parsons, _Seaward_, which at times has a lyric quality that brings it into the company even of _Adonais_ and _Thyrsis_. One is tempted to quote more than a single stanza:

Far, far, so far, the crying of the surf!
Still, still, so still, the water in the grass!
Here on the knoll the crickets in the turf
And one bold squirrel barking, seek, alas!
To bring the swarming summer back to me.
In vain; my heart is on the salt morass
Below, that stretches to the sunlit sea.

His most spontaneous and original outbursts are doubtless his Dartmouth lyrics--a series distinctive among college poetry, worthy of a place beside Dr. Holmes's Harvard lyrics--and his rollicking convivial songs that have in them the very soul of good fellowship. There is in all he wrote a Whitman-like masculinity. He could make even so conventional a thing as a sonnet a thing to stir the blood with:

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 flight.
Ho, love! I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather;
No fretful orchid hot-housed from the dew,
But hale and hearty as the highland heather,
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.

He is the singer of men--of Western men, red-blooded and free--the very opposite of Cawein. He wrote songs to be sung in barrack rooms and at college reunions--songs of comradeship and masculine joy:

Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime
For a life that knows no fear!
Turn night-time into daytime
With the sunlight of good cheer!
For it's always fair weather
When good fellows get together
With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.

And again this

Comrades, give a cheer to-night,
For the dying is with dawn!
Oh, to meet the stars together,
With the silence coming on!
Greet the end
As a friend a friend
When strong men die together.

His Launcelot and Guenevere cycle, which was to be complete in nine dramas, only four of which he lived to finish, though undoubtedly the best was yet to come, has in it enough of strength to make for itself, fragment as it is, a high place in our literature. The dramas are in different key from Tennyson's. In the _Idyls of the King_ the old legend is domesticated and the table round is turned into a tea table. Hovey in his _Marriage of Guenevere_ and _The Birth of Galahad_ puts virile power into his knights, makes of Launcelot the hero of the cycle, and gives to Guenevere a reality that is Shakespearian. Few indeed have been the poets of the younger school who have dared to plan on so grand a scale or to venture to offer something new in a field that has been so thoroughly exploited.

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