Chapter XVIII: Arthur Upson 325 (1)

BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 347

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

RICHARD HOVEY _Frontispiece_

LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE _Facing page_ 28

BLISS CARMAN “ “ 48

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY “ “ 76

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY “ “ 112

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS “ “ 134

MADISON CAWEIN “ “ 178

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY “ “ 198

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES “ “ 214

ALICE BROWN “ “ 236

RICHARD BURTON “ “ 250

CLINTON SCOLLARD “ “ 270

MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA “ “ 292

RIDGELY TORRENCE “ “ 300

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!