Chapter II: The Mortal Coil (2)

For it has begun to occur to poets that it may not have been merely anuntoward accident that several of their loftiest brethren were reared in London. In the romantic period even London-bred Keats said, as a matter of course,

The coy muse, with me she would not live In this dark city, [Footnote: _Epistle to George Felton Mathew_. Wordsworth's sonnet, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," seems to have been unique at this time.]

and the American romanticist, Emerson, said of the poet,

In cities he was low and mean;
The mountain waters washed him clean.
[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

But Lowell protested against such a statement, avowing of the muse,

She can find a nobler theme for song
In the most loathsome man that blasts the sight
Than in the broad expanse of sea and shore.
[Footnote: _L'Envoi_.]

A number of the Victorians acknowledged that they lived from choice in London. Christina Rossetti admitted frankly that she preferred London to the country, and defended herself with Bacon's statement, "The souls of the living are the beauty of the world." [Footnote: See E. L. Gary, _The Rossettis_, p. 236.] Mrs. Browning made Aurora outgrow pastoral verse, and not only reside in London, but find her inspiration there. Francis Thompson and William Henley were not ashamed to admit that they were inspired by London. James Thomson, B.V., belongs with them in this regard, for though he depicted the horror of visions conjured up in the city streets in a way unparalleled in English verse, [Footnote: See _The City of Dreadful Night_.] this is not the same thing as the romantic poet's repudiation of the city as an unimaginative environment.

Coming to more recent verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: See _On London Stones_.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious about his city poets. [Footnote: See _Fleet Street Eclogues_.] But as landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more and more at home there, until our contemporary poets scarcely stop to take their residence in the city otherwise than as a matter of course. Alan Seeger cries out for Paris as the ideal habitat of the singer. [Footnote: See _Paris_.] Even New York and Chicago [Footnote: See Carl Sandburg, _Chicago Poems_; Edgar Lee Masters, _The Loop_; William Griffith, _City Pastorals_; Charles H. Towne, _The City_.] are beginning to serve as backgrounds for the poet figure. A poem called _A Winter Night_ reveals Sara Teasdale as thoroughly at home in Manhattan as the most bucolic shepherd among his flocks.

To poets' minds the only unaesthetic habitat nowadays seems to be the country town. Although Edgar Lee Masters writes what he calls poetry inspired by it, the reader of the _Spoon River Anthology_ is still disposed to sympathize with Benjamin Fraser of Spoon River, the artist whose genius was crushed by his ghastly environment.

So manifold, in fact, are the attractions of the world to the modern poet, that the vagabond singer has come into special favor lately. Of course he has appeared in English song ever since the time of minstrels, but usually, as in the Old English poem, _The Wanderer_, he has been unhappy in his roving life. Even so modern a poet as Scott was in the habit of portraying his minstrels as old and homesick. [Footnote: See _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_.] But Byron set the fashion among poets of desiring "a world to roam through," [Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.] and the poet who is a wanderer from choice has not been unknown since Byron's day. [Footnote: Alfred Dommett and George Borrow are notable.] The poet vagabond of to-day, as he is portrayed in Maurice Hewlitt's autobiographical novels, _Rest Harrow_ and _Open Country_, and William H. Davies' tramp poetry, looks upon his condition in life as ideal. [Footnote: See also Francis Carlin, _Denby the Rhymer_ (1918); Henry Herbert Knibbs, _Songs of the Trail_ (1920)] Alan Seeger, too, concurred in the view, declaring,

Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart.
[Footnote: _Sonnet to Sidney_.]

"Poor of purse!" The words recall us to another of the poet's quarrels with the world in which he is imprisoned. Should the philanthropist, as has often been suggested, endow the poet with an independent income? What a long and glorious tradition would then be broken! From Chaucer's _Complaint to His Empty Purse_, onward, English poetry has borne the record of its maker's poverty. The verse of our period is filled with names from the past that offer our poets a noble precedent for their destitution,--Homer, Cervantes, Camoeens, Spenser, Dryden, Butler, Johnson, Otway, Collins, Chatterton, Burns,--all these have their want exposed in nineteeth and twentieth century verse.

The wary philanthropist, before launching into relief schemes, may well inquire into the cause of such wretchedness. The obvious answer is, of course, that instead of earning a livelihood the poet has spent his time on a vocation that makes no pecuniary return. Poets like to tell us, also, that their pride, and a fine sense of honour, hold them back from illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. But tradition has it that there are other contributing causes. Edmund C. Stedman's _Bohemia_ reveals the fact that the artist has most impractical ideas about the disposal of his income. He reasons that, since the more guests he has, the smaller the cost per person, then if he can only entertain extensively enough, the cost _per caput_ will be _nil_. Not only so, but the poet is likely to lose sight completely of tomorrow's needs, once he has a little ready cash on hand. A few years ago, Philistines derived a good deal of contemptuous amusement from a poet's statement,

Had I two loaves of bread--ay, ay!
One would I sell and daffodils buy
To feed my soul.
[Footnote: _Beauty_, Theodore Harding Rand.]

What is to be done with such people? Charity officers are continually asking.

What relief measure can poets themselves suggest? When they are speaking of older poets, they are apt to offer no constructive criticism, but only denunciation of society. Their general tone is that of Burns' lines _Written Under the Portrait of Ferguson:_

Curse on ungrateful man that can be pleased
And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.

Occasionally the imaginary poet who appears in their verse is quite as bitter. Alexander Smith's hero protests against being "dungeoned in poverty." One of Richard Gilder's poets warns the public,

You need not weep for and sigh for and saint me
After you've starved me and driven me dead.
Friends, do you hear? What I want is bread.
[Footnote: _The Young Poet_.]

Through the thin veneer of the fictitious poet in Joaquin Miller's _Ina_, the author himself appears, raving,

A poet! a poet forsooth! Fool! hungry fool!
Would you know what it means to be a poet?
It is to want a friend, to want a home,
A country, money,--aye, to want a meal.
[Footnote: See also John Savage, _He Writes for Bread_.]

But in autobiographical verse, the tone changes, and the poet refuses to pose as a candidate for charity. Rather, he parades an ostentatious horror of filthy lucre, only paralleled by his distaste for food. Mrs. Browning boasts,

The Devil himself scarce trusts his patented
Gold-making art to any who makes rhymes,
But culls his Faustus from philosophers
And not from poets.
[Footnote: _Aurora Leigh_.]

A poet who can make ends meet is practically convicted of being no true artist. Shakespeare is so solitary an exception to this rule, that his mercenary aspect is a pure absurdity to his comrades, as Edwin Arlington Robinson conceives of them. [Footnote: See _Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford_.] In the eighteenth century indifference to remuneration was not so marked, and in poetic epistles, forgers of the couplet sometimes concerned themselves over the returns, [Footnote: See _Advice to Mr. Pope_, John Hughes; _Economy, The Poet and the Dun_, Shenstone.] but since the romantic movement began, such thought has been held unworthy. [Footnote: See _To a Poet Abandoning His Art_, Barry Cornwall; and _Poets and Poets_, T. E. Browne. On the other hand, see Sebastian Evans, _Religio Poetae_.] In fact, even in these days, we are comparatively safe from a poet's strike.

Usually the poet declares that as for himself, he is indifferent to his financial condition. Praed speaks fairly for his brethren, when in _A Ballad Teaching How Poetry Is Best Paid For_, he represents their terms as very easy to meet. Even the melancholy Bowles takes on this subject, for once, a cheerful attitude, telling his visionary boy,

Nor fear, if grim before thine eyes
Pale worldly want, a spectre lowers;
What is a world of vanities
To a world as fair as ours?

In the same spirit Burns belittles his poverty, saying, in _An Epistle to Davie, Fellow Poet_:

To lie in kilns and barns at e'en
When bones are crazed, and blind is thin
Is doubtless great distress,
Yet then content would make us blest.

Shelley, too, eschews wealth, declaring, in _Epipsychidion_,

Our simple life wants little, and true taste
Hires not the pale drudge luxury to waste
The scene it would adorn.

Later poetry is likely to take an even exuberant attitude toward poverty. [Footnote: See especially verse on the Mermaid group, as _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_, Alfred Noyes. See also Josephine Preston Peabody, _The Golden Shoes_; Richard Le Gallienne, _Faery Gold_; J. G. Saxe, _The Poet to his Garret_; W. W. Gibson, _The Empty Purse_; C. G. Halpine, _To a Wealthy Amateur Critic_; Simon Kerl, _Ode to Debt, A Leaf of Autobiography_; Thomas Gordon Hake, _The Poet's Feast_; Dana Burnet, _In a Garret_; Henry Aylett Sampson, _Stephen Phillips Bankrupt_.] The poet's wealth of song is so great that he leaves coin to those who wish it. Indeed he often has a superstitious fear of wealth, lest it take away his delight in song. In Markham's _The Shoes of Happiness_, only the poet who is too poor to buy shoes possesses the secret of joy. With a touching trust in providence, another poet cries,

Starving, still I smile,
Laugh at want and wrong,
He is fed and clothed
To whom God giveth song.
[Footnote: Anne Reeve Aldrich, _A Crowned Poet_.]

It is doubtful indeed that the poet would have his fate averted. Pope's satirical coupling of want and song, as cause and effect,

One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye,
The cave of Poverty and Poetry.
Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess,
Emblem of music caused by emptiness,
[Footnote: _Dunciad_.]

is accepted quite literally by later writers. Emerson's theory of compensations applies delightfully here as everywhere, and he meditates on the poet,

The Muse gave special charge
His learning should be deep and large,--
* * * * *
His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
Every maxim of dreadful need.
* * * * *
By want and pain God screeneth him
Till his appointed hour.
[Footnote: _The Poet_.]

It may appear doubtful to us whether the poet has painted ideal conditions for the nurture of genius in his picture of the poet's physical frame, his environment, and his material endowment, inasmuch as the death rate among young bards,--imaginary ones, at least, is appalling. What can account for it?

In a large percentage of cases, the poet's natural frailty of constitution is to blame for his early death, of course, but another popular explanation is that the very keenness of the poet's flame causes it to burn out the quicker. Byron finds an early death fitting to him,

For I had the share of life that might have filled a century,
Before its fourth in time had passed me by.
[Footnote: _Epistle to Augusta_.]

A fictitious poet looks back upon the same sort of life, and reflects,

... For my thirty years,
Dashed with sun and splashed with tears,
Wan with revel, red with wine,
Other wiser happier men
Take the full three score and ten.
[Footnote: Alfred Noyes, _Tales of the Mermaid Inn_.]

this richness of experience is not inevitably bound up with recklessness, poets feel. The quality is in such a poet even as Emily Bronte, of whom it is written:

They live not long of thy pure fire composed;
Earth asks but mud of those that will endure.
[Footnote: Stephen Phillips. _Emily Bronte_.]

Another cause of the poet's early death is certainly his fearlessness. Shelley prophesies that his daring spirit will meet death

Far from the trembling throng
Whose souls are never to the tempest given.
[Footnote: _Adonais_.]

With the deaths of Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Joyce Kilmer, and Francis Ledwidge, this element in the poet's disposition has been brought home to the public. Joyce Kilmer wrote back from the trenches, "It is wrong for a poet ... to be listening to elevated trains when there are screaming shells to hear ... and the bright face of danger to dream about." [Footnote: Letter to his wife, March 12, 1918.] And in his article on Joyce Kilmer in _The Bookman_, Richard LeGallienne speaks of young poets "touched with the ringer of a moonlight that has written 'fated' upon their brows," adding, "Probably our feeling is nothing more than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild-winged."

It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his attitude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.

More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic muses,

He died--'twas shrewd:
And came with all his youth and unblown hopes
On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.

In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_:

I have seen more glory in sunrise
Than in the deepening of azure noon,

or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:

I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time,
In predecease of his just-sickening song,
Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme,
Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.

Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the Goddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, _From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_:

Youth rambles on life's arid mount,
And strikes the rock and finds the vein,
And brings the water from the fount.
The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labor chops
For the bright stream a channel grand,
And sees not that the sacred drops
Ran off and vanished out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh
And feebly rakes among the stones;
The mount is mute, the channel dry,
And down he lays his weary bones.

But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there. For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W. Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C. MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we have a flood of complimentary verses, assuring the great poets of their unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P. H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, _To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, _J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating the writer's attitude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was hoary, may have had a genuine influence on younger writers.

Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is equivocal, as Landor's

Dull is my verse: not even thou
Who movest many cares away
From this lone breast and weary brow
Canst make, as once, its fountains play;
No, nor those gentle words that now
Support my heart to hear thee say,
The bird upon the lonely bough
Sings sweetest at the close of day.

It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding convention, frankly asserts the desirability of long life for his race. Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for his belief in

The last of life for which the first was made,

as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by their longevity.

But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition. [Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them. The poet in Campbell's poem explains,

'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.

Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares,

I count it strange and hard to understand
That nearly all young poets should write old.
... It may be perhaps
Such have not settled long and deep enough
In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still
The memory mixes with the vision, spoils
And works it turbid. Or perhaps again
In order to discover the Muse Sphinx
The melancholy desert must sweep around
Behind you as before.

Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She sighs, remembering her own youth,

Alas, near all the birds
Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take
The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment:
... Many men are poets in their youth,
But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong
Even through all age the indomitable song.
[Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.]

Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of song comes with age.

It is doubtless natural that the passionate romantic poets insisted upon the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at thirty, asserting,

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come from an Augustan period. As for the attitude toward age of our own day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See _There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, [Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his attitude at thirty. Compare his juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and passion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection,

White-bearded and with eyes that look afar
From their still region of perpetual snow,
Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men.
[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.]