Chapter IV: Poetical Work

In 1855 Taylor published a selection from his earlier books of verse under the title _Poems of Home and Travel_. By this volume and its companion, _Poems of the Orient_, he wished, so he said at the time, to be judged. For all his other pieces he desired ‘speedy forgetfulness.’

_Poems of Home and Travel_ shows very well the range of Taylor’s art. Here are rhymed stories (‘The Soldier and the Pard’ and ‘Kubleh’), graceful settings of classic or Indian legend (‘Hylas’ and ‘Mon-da-Min’), together with a pretty fancy from Shakespeare (‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’). A deeper chord is struck in poems of human love and loss (‘The Two Visions’) and in poems expressing aspiration for the ideal (‘Love and Solitude’), or in those which voice the poet’s joy in a life of action and struggle (‘The Life of Earth’ and ‘Taurus’). There is an ode, ‘The Harp,’ lamenting the silence of song in our America where there is so much to sing. And there are yet other odes, songs, and sonnets.

_Poems of the Orient_ is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are less prominent. The flavor of _Poems of the Orient_ may be known by such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’ (an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’

_The Poet’s Journal_, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings, is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life.

_The Picture of St. John_, an Italian romance, seems made for a popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist after months of conflict with the Power that Denies--these are elements in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts.

_Lars_, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth,

I do confess
I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills,
Where winter sits, and sees the summer burn
In valleys deeper than yon cloud is high:

* * * * *

I love the frank, brave habit of the folk,
The hearts unspoiled, though fed from ruder times
And filled with angry blood.

_Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics_ contains his fine studies of Westchester County life, ‘The Quaker Widow,’ ‘John Reed,’ and ‘The Old Pennsylvania Farmer,’ together with such happily conceived poems as ‘The Sunshine of the Gods,’ ‘Notus Ignoto,’ ‘Iris,’ ‘Implora Pace,’ and ‘Canopus,’ with its richly colored lines.

Taylor wrote three dramatic poems, none of which his critics are willing to admit is a success. _The Masque of the Gods_, a lofty conception, fails (if indeed it is a failure), not through feebleness of touch, but through brevity. So vast a design needs room to expand. As it stands, the _Masque_ is a preliminary sketch of what might have become in the hands of its creator a great canvas. It is something that the poet has succeeded in awakening pity for the worn-out deities terrified because of their loss of power, terrified even more by the possibility that they have no principle of life and are only the creatures of men’s brains.

_The Prophet_ was a courageous dramatic experiment, and will always be read with curiosity if not with pleasure. But to assume that Mormonism is wholly unfitted for poetic drama is perhaps to assume too much.

_Prince Deukalion_, written under the inspiration of _Faust_, is another of those gigantic conceptions with which Taylor’s imagination loved in later life to busy itself, as if eager to try its powers to the uttermost. A theme like this, wholly removed from human interest, dealing with titanic and mythical figures, is the most dangerous in the whole range of possible subjects. Taylor rises so easily to a high level of poetic achievement that it seems as if he must presently touch some mountain peak. Yet he always leaves the impression of really having the strength to do that in which he fails. He disappoints through the very display of power.

* * * * *

His poetic work lacks idiosyncrasy, and to credit him with having given rise to a ‘school’ is to be generous rather than just. His talent fell just short of his ambition. A busy life with its multitude of cares and interests left him too little time for brooding upon the great themes he affected, and there was wanting the gift for relentless self-criticism which operates almost like the creative power. None the less his countrymen have not begun to discharge the debt of gratitude they owe him. Taylor had great virtues. It should be imputed to him for literary righteousness that he was willing to undertake the long poem. He never, so far as is known, made the excuse our poets continually offer, and which is almost infantile, that the general public does not care for long poems,--as if a poet were under any obligation to the general public.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] _The Picture of St. John_ was begun eleven years before
Worsley published his fine version of the _Odyssey_ in
Spenserian stanza.