Chapter XVIII: Arthur Upson 325 (2)

Miss Reese’s work in _A Quiet Road_ is so uniformly quotable that one distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. One need hardly be told that she is of the “mystic fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization, of which a part must suffice to show the quality:

In his old gusty garden of the North,
He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;
Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—
At last they drove him forth.

Now there were two rang silverly and long;
And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,
And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;
And one was that of Song.

Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,
The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,
These were the Shapes that all around him came,—
That we let go with tears.

His was the unstinted English of the Scot,
Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox
Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,
To keep it unforgot.

No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,
To see appealing things in all he knew,
He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,
And would have naught of chaff.

David and Keats and all good singing men,
Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,
Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—
Where you do sing again!

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

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

III

BLISS CARMAN

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

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

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

Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but different phrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain” contains these fine lines:

Don’t you know the sailing orders?
It is time to put to sea,
And the stranger in the harbor
Sends a boat ashore for me.

* * * * *

That’s the Doomkeel. You may know her
By her clean run aft; and then
Don’t you hear the Shadow Boatswain
Piping to his shadow men?

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

There is rumor in Dark Harbor,
And the folk are all astir;
For a stranger in the offing
Draws them down to gaze at her,

In the gray of early morning,
Black against the orange streak,
Making in below the ledges,
With no colors at her peak.

While each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of blurring from the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it to an impalpable thing.

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

I was born for deep-sea faring;
I was bred to put to sea;
Stories of my father’s daring
Filled me at my mother’s knee.

I was sired among the surges;
I was cubbed beside the foam;
All my heart is in its verges,
And the sea wind is my home.

All my boyhood, from far vernal
Bourns of being, came to me
Dream-like, plangent, and eternal
Memories of the plunging sea.

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

Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.

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

Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre
Went out, and where are they?
In the port they made, they are delayed
With the ships of yesterday.

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

Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him
Is the sexton of the town;

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

On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,
To the flap of an idle sail,

* * * * *

and

… faded down
With her creaking boom a-swing,
Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,
And caught her wing and wing.

* * * * *

She lifted her hull like a breasting gull
Where the rolling valleys be,
And dipped where the shining porpoises
Put ploughshares through the sea.

* * * * *

They all may home on a sleepy tide
To the sag of an idle sheet;
But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride
That draws men down the street.

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

When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,
They see by the after rail
An unknown schooner creeping up
With mildewed spar and sail.

Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,
With the Judgment in their face;
And to their mates’ “God save you!”
Have never a word of grace.

Then into the gray they sheer away,
On the awful polar tide;
And the sailors know they have seen the wraith
Of the missing Nancy’s Pride.

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

crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds
With the Judgment in their face,

and watch them as

into the gray they sheer away
On the awful polar tide.

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

With her creaking boom a-swing,

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

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

One pardons this over-elaboration in _Ballads of Lost Haven_ because of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to the blue leagues of sea; and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s debtor.

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

Earth one habitat of spirit merely,
I must use as richly as I may,—
Touch environment with every sense-tip,
Drink the well and pass my wander way,—

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

O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,
While time endures,
To acquiesce and learn!
For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,
Let soul discern.

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

Always the flawless beauty,—always the Chord
Of the Overword,
Dominant, pleading, sure,
No truth too small to save and make endure;
No good too poor!

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

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

Mr. Carman’s sensitiveness to values of rhythm keeps his verse free from lapses in that direction. He never, to my memory, makes use of the sonnet, which shows critical judgment, as the lyric is his temperamental medium. The apogee of his art is in his diction, which has a predestined fitness, and above all a personal quality. To quote Pater again, he has “begotten a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit,” and one cannot mistake even a fragment of his verse. Now and again one comes upon an archaic expression, as “A _weird_ is in their song,” using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaningless solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as “illumining this _quench_ of clay,” but in general Mr. Carman does not find it necessary to go outside the established limits of the language for variety and force in diction. He has a genius for imagery, and conjures the most unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. The Vagabondia books are abrim with them, and while there are idle lines and padded stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not strike true flashes here and there, few that miss of justification, while their gay and rollicking note heartens one and bids him up and join in the revel.

There are others in a graver key, such as Hovey’s “At the End of the Day,” and Carman’s “The Mendicants,” and “The Marching Morrows;” and certain lyric inspirations, such as the “Sea Gypsy,” by Hovey, and the “Vagabond Song,” by Carman, that have not been bettered by either, that could not well be bettered within their limits. The former has been quoted in the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an inspiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does not analyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers; under his touch it subtilizes into atmosphere and thus communicates the incommunicable:

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

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

Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
When thy flowery hand delivers
All the mountain-prisoned rivers,
And thy great heart beats and quivers
To revive the days that were,
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!

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

The collection of Memorabilia, _By the Aurelian Wall_, takes its title from the burial-place of Keats, and includes “A Seamark,” the fine threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of Phillips Brooks; a spiritual, poetic visioning of Shelley under the symbol of “The White Gull;” a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and other things equally well-wrought. Some of them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point—but what haunting sweetness it carries with it! To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” has come to dominate the popular fancy in regard to him. Mr. Carman’s poem, though touched with this mood, is not set to it, and he has several stanzas which have in them the essence of Shelley’s spirit,—the real Shelley, the passionate idealist, the spent runner who, falling, handed on the torch.

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

Whose courage lights the dark’ning port
Where every sea-worn sail must come.

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

But I have wander-biddings now.
Far down the latitudes of sun,
An island mountain of the sea,
Piercing the green and rosy zone,

Goes up into the wondrous day.
And there the brown-limbed island men
Are bearing up for burial,
Within the sun’s departing ken,

The master of the roving kind.
And there where time will set no mark
For his irrevocable rest,
Under the spacious melting dark,

With all the nomad tented stars
About him, they have laid him down
Above the crumbling of the sea,
Beyond the turmoil of renown.

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

Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented stars
About him,

is an artist’s picture not easily forgotten.

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

Power out of hurt and stain
To bring beauty back again,

and showing the

Scope and purpose, hint and plan
Lurking in the Pipes of Pan,

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

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

All the bright, gay-colored things
Buoyed in air on balanced wings.

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

The remaining poems of _The Book of the Myths_ are not the best things Mr. Carman has done, though renewals of classic verse-forms in the Sapphic and other metres, and often picturesque in story. “The Lost Dryad” is the most attractive, “The Dead Faun” the least so, to my ears; but perhaps from lack of sympathy with the subject-matter I cannot think the collection, with the exception of the poem “Pipes of Pan,” is of especial value. It is not to be named, still excepting the above poem, with its companion volume, _The Green Book of the Bards_, which contains some of the strongest work of Mr. Carman’s pen as to subject and thought, but which has one pronounced limitation,—its monotony of form.

The entire volume, with a sole exception, and that not marked, is written in the conventional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr. Carman’s work of late has been cast. Within this compass, the accomplishment is as varied as to theme and diction, as that of his other work; but when one sings on and on in the same numbers, it induces a state of mental indolence in the reader, and presupposes a similar state in the writer. The verse goes purling musically along, until, as running water exercises an hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized by the mere melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness to find that he has no notion what they are about, and must re-read them to find out. To be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, and will make new disclosures whenever one returns to them; but had they greater variety as to manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the mind would be startled to perception by unexpectedness, instead of lulled by the same note in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that Mr. Carman has a principle at stake in this,—it may indeed be a reactionary measure against over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire for simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the first canons of art, but variety in metre and form is another canon by no means annulling the first. One may have variety to the superlative degree, and never depart from the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity.

Were _The Green Book of the Bards_ relieved by contrasts of form, it would rank with the finest work of Mr. Carman’s pen, as the individual poems have strong basic ideas,—such as the “Creature Catechism,” full of pregnant thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word as to the mystic union of the creative Soul with the creatures of feather and fin and fleece. The marked evolution of Mr. Carman’s philosophy of life, as influenced by his growing identity with nature, comes out so strongly in the “Pipes of Pan” series, and in _The Word at Saint Kavin’s_, as almost to reveal a new individuality. He had gone out in the light-foot, light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with the woods and winds; glad to be quit of the gyves, to drink from the wayside spring, eat of the forest fruit, sleep ’neath the tent of night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He had sought nature in a mood of pagan joy; but the wayside spring had excited a thirst it could not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it could not allay, and the blithe seeker of freedom and delight became at length the anointed votary, and lingered to watch the God at work shaping life from death, and expressing His yearning in beauty.

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

readjust
The logic of the dust,

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

Once at St. Kavin’s door
I rested. No sigh more
Of discontent escaped me from that day.
For there I overheard
A Brother of the Word
Expound the grace of poverty, and say:

Thank God for poverty
That makes and keeps us free,
And lets us go our unobtrusive way,
Glad of the sun and rain,
Upright, serene, humane,
Contented with the fortune of a day.

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

Joyous and sane and whole

by obeying the word

That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,

and that

When we have laid aside
Our truculence and pride,
Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—

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

And if I share my crust,
As common manhood must,
With one whose need is greater than my own,
Shall I not also give
His soul, that it may live,
Of the abundant pleasures I have known?

And so, if I have wrought,
Amassed or conceived aught
Of beauty, or intelligence or power,
It is not mine to hoard;
It stands there to afford
Its generous service simply as a flower.

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

Live by the truth each one of us believes,

and turns, for illustration of the nobler development and poise, back to nature, and the evolutionary round of life through which one traces his course and kinship. These stanzas are among the finest spoken by the wise Brother of the Word. After citing the strength and serenity of the fir-trees, and what a travesty upon man’s ascent it were, did one bear himself less royally than they, he adverts to the creature kin-fellows whose lot we have borne:

I, too, in polar night
Have hungered, gaunt and white,
Alone amid the awful silences;
And fled on gaudy fin,
When the blue tides came in,
Through coral gardens under tropic seas.

And wheresoe’er I strove,
The greater law was love,
A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;
There was no wanton greed,
Depravity of breed,
Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.

Nay, not till I was man,
Learned I to scheme and plan
The blackest depredation on my kind,
Converting to my gain
My fellow’s need and pain
In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.

Therefore, my friends, I say
Back to the fair sweet way
Our Mother Nature taught us long ago,—
The large primeval mood,
Leisure and amplitude,
The dignity of patience strong and slow.

Let us go in once more
By some blue mountain door,
And hold communion with the forest leaves;
Where long ago we trod
The Ghost House of the God,
Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!

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

To fill her purport in the ampler plan.

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

In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but one whose promise he has made good, as poetry, however near it may approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have gone to oblivion.

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

Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, as well as the poet’s touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres, together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines:

O heart of insatiable longing,
What spell, what enchantment allures thee,
Over the rim of the world
With the sails of the sea-going ships?

And when the rose petals are scattered
At dead of still noon on the grass-plot,
What means this passionate grief,—
This infinite ache of regret?[1]

Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown; whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to tell as a stroke in a sketch:

Art thou the topmost apple
The gatherers could not reach,
Reddening on the bough?
Shall not I take thee?

Art thou a hyacinth blossom
The shepherds upon the hills
Have trodden into the ground?
Shall not I lift thee?

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

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

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

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

Hesperus, bringing together
All that the morning star scattered,—

Sheep to be folded in twilight,
Children for mothers to fondle,—

Me, too, will bring to the dearest,
Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.

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

Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint in his treatment of the fragments. They are not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, and while there is a certain atmosphere of insubstantiality about many of them, as could scarcely fail to result from the attempt to restore, by imagination alone, what had existence but in tradition, they justify themselves as artistic poetry, which is the only consideration of moment.

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

IV

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

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

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

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

The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,
Be on the lonely battle-place;
And to so young, so kind a face,
The long, protecting grasses cling!
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

In rocky hollows cool and deep,
The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;
The early moon from Ida’s steep
Comes to the empty wrestling-ring,
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recede
No echoes of the shepherd’s reed,
And children without laughter lead
The war-horse to the watering.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!
What to the loveliest hast thou done,
That ne’er with him a maid may run
Across the marigolds in spring?
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

* * * * *

The world to me has nothing dear
Beyond the namesake river here:
O Simois is wild and clear!
And to his brink my heart I bring;
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)

The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon her words when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.

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

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,
Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,
And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,
It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,
And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;
But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

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

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

* * * * *

’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

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

The spur is red upon the briar,
The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
The wind shakes out the colored fire
From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
The tanager with flitting note
Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
The mink is busy; herds again
Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
The midges meet. I cry to Thee
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride;
Along an edge of marshy ground,
The shad-bush enters like a bride.
Yon little clouds are washed of care
That climb the blue New England air,
And almost merrily withal
The tree-frog plays at evenfall
His oboe in a mossy tree.
So, too,
Am I not Thine? Arise, undo
This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

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

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride,

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

The subjective touch in the above poem:

I cry to Thee,
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me!—

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

As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap! lest aye inoperative
Here in the Pit my strength shall be:
And still,
Help me endure the Pit until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meet fate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the

“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”

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

So much to me is imminent:
To leave Revolt that is my tent,
And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be gone
Ere yet Creation marches on,
Obedient, jocund, glorified:

And, last of things afoot, to know
How to be free is still to go
With glad concession, grave accord,

Nor longer, bond and imbecile,
Stand out against the Gradual Will,
The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.

And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest,

O give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart’s desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire,—

sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding lines:

I fear no breathing bowman,
But only, east and west,
The awful other foeman
Impowered in my breast.
The outer fray in the sun shall be,
The inner beneath the moon;
And may Our Lady lend to me
Sight of the dragon soon.

At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and vibrant lines:

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,
Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,
Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!

“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the personality of her expression.

A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot.

To test Miss Guiney’s marksmanship with words, one may separate her at once from the class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, for she concentrates, instead of diffusing, and has, at the outset, a definite point in view. She works upon the arrow principle, but now and again glances from the mark. In such a poem as “The Recruit,” in “The Wild Ride,” or the “Saint George” quoted from, in her stirring poem “Sanctuary,” beginning,

High above Hate I dwell,
O storms! farewell,

and in many others, she cleaves straight to her aim with no deflection. The same may be said of many of her lighter poems, the charming “Lilac Song,” or this delicately wrought love-song, speeding to the heart:

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,
And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar;
Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken,
On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)
Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,
While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping
The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.

In poems of this kind and in deeper ones from the spiritual side of her nature, as well as in those of valor and daring, she uses such words as are tipped with a penetrative point; but in some of her sonnets, such as “The Chantry,” in a narrative poem, such as “The Vigil in Tyrone,” though not without picturesque quality, in “The Squall,” despite its frequently fine imagery, and often in the dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” the words are too much weighted to carry to the mark; they suggest undue care in selection which interposes between the motive of the poem and the sympathy of the reader. One pauses to consider the words; and the initial impulse, like a spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney’s diction is, in the main, peculiarly crisp and apposite; but she does not always hold to the directness of appeal that distinguishes her truest work, but withdraws herself into subtleties, often beautiful, but too remote. “A Martyr’s Idyl” is a dramatically conceived incident, well wrought as to scene and character, and having many passages of great beauty; but the effort to keep the expression to the manner of the time results in a lack of flexibility in the style that is now and then cumbrous. On the whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort that Miss Guiney best reveals herself, but in such inspirations as she has taken—

Neither from sires nor sons,
Nor the delivered ones,
Holy, invoked with awe.

Her best work answers, by practical demonstration, her own query:

“Where shall I find my light?”

“Turn from another’s track,
Whether for gain or lack,
Love but thy natal right.
Cease to follow withal,
Though on thine upled feet
Flakes of the phosphor fall.
Oracles overheard
Are never again for thee,
Nor at a magian’s knee
Under the hemlock tree,
Burns the illumining word.”

The term “original” is one to be used charily and with forethought, but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss Guiney’s work. There is a distinct quality, both of treatment and conception, that is hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain classic quaintness, it has also vitality and concrete forcefulness.

Her metrical command is varied, and she employs many forms with assurance of touch. She has a group of Alexandrian songs in _A Roadside Harp_, most of them with beauty of measure and atmosphere. Here, in three lines, is a rhythmic achievement:

Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!

How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to visualize the scene.

_The Sonnets Written at Oxford_ mark, as a whole, her finest work in this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,” take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden content and gladness.