Chapter XVIII: Arthur Upson 325 (5)

This, however, is airy imagination as compared with the naturalist fidelity of much of Mr. Cawein’s work in _Weeds by the Wall_, _A Voice on the Wind_, and in _Kentucky Poems_,—to which Mr. Edmund Gosse contributes a sympathetic introduction,—books chiefly upon nature, occasionally reverting to the mythological or more imaginative phase of the subject, but in the main set to reveal the fact, with its aura of beauty; for it is never the purely elemental side of a nature-manifestation that presents itself to Mr. Cawein, but always the fact haloed by its poetic penumbra. Indeed, the limitation of his earlier work lay in the excess of fancy over reflection and art; but his growth has been away from the romantic toward the realistic and individual, and upon this side its best assurance for the future is given. Mr. Cawein has yet far too facile a pen not to be betrayed by it into excesses both of production and fancy. He writes too much to keep to the standard set in his best work of the past two or three years, and lacks still to a great degree the self-scrutiny which would reject much that he includes; but granting all this, it must be apparent to any reader of his work that he is not a singer making verse for diversion, but one to whom poetry is the very breath of his spirit, one who lives by this air, and can by no other; and while it is one thing to be driven through vision-haunted days by beauty’s urgence and unrest, and another to body forth the vision in the calm; one thing to have had the mystery whispered by a thousand wordless voices, and another to communicate it in terms of revealing truth—it is notable in Mr. Cawein’s verse that he is teaching his hand to obey him more surely each year, and is producing work that quickens one’s perception of the world without, and adds to his sum of beauty. It is serious work, work with purpose, and while its fancy still runs at times to the fantastic, it shows so marked a growth in technique and spirit from year to year that one may well let to-morrow take care of to-morrow with a poet who brings to his art the ideal which inspires Mr. Cawein.

To return, then, to his distinctive field, Kentucky, and his characteristic note of nature, one observes that a hand-book of the flora of his state could doubtless be compiled from his poems, so do they leave the beaten path in their range of observation; but it would be a botany plus imagination and sympathy, analysts keener than microscopes, and in it would be recorded the habits of the bluet, the jewel-weed, the celandine, the black-cohosh, the bell-flower, the lobelia, the elecampane, the oxalis, the touch-me-not, the Indian-pipe, and many another unused to hear its name rehearsed in song.

One follows the feet of September to the forest

Windowed wide with azure, doored with green,
Through which rich glimmers of her robe were seen—
Now, like some deep marsh-mallow, rosy gold;
Now like the great Joe-Pye-weed, fold on fold
Of heavy mauve; and now, like the intense
Massed iron-weed, a purple opulence;

or wanders under the Hunter’s Moon to watch the frost spirits

… with fine fingers, phantom-cold,
Splitting the wahoo’s pods of rose, and thin
The bittersweet’s balls o’ gold
To show the coal-red berries packed within.

Autumn is apparently, however, little to his liking, and in his attitude toward it he reveals the Southerner; for it is not only Kentucky flora and fauna, but Kentucky climate which Mr. Cawein celebrates, treating Autumn not with the buoyancy that to a Northerner renders it a season of lusty infection, but almost wholly in its aspect of sadness. In his volume called _Undertones_ he has a group of poems upon the withdrawing year, sounding only this note, which is the prevalent one when touching upon the same theme in his other volumes. He glimpses

… the Fall
Like some lone woman in a ruined hall
Dreaming of desolation and the shroud;
Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed,
Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl;

and speaks elsewhere of

… the days gray-huddled in the haze;
Whose foggy footsteps drip.

Winter is encountered with far scantier cheer, and rarely receives the grace of salutation, as its face appears dire and malevolent to this lover of the sun. To follow Mr. Cawein’s work with such a purpose in view would be to present an interesting study in climatic psychology, for though no mention were made of the section in which he writes, the internal evidence is sufficient to localize the poems. Not alone the gracious side of the Southern summer is presented, but the fearful time of drouth when

The hot sunflowers by the glaring pike
Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops,
Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike
Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse
Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops,
The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat
Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,—
Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream,—
An empty wagon rattles through the heat.

This is vivid picturing and a fine touch of realism fused with imagination which compares the team rolled in dust to

“Some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream.”

Immediately following the poem upon “Drouth,” of which there are several stanzas sketched with minuteness, occurs one entitled “Before the Rain,” opening with these pictorial lines:

Before the rain, low in the obscure east,
Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray;
Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased,
Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay
Like some white spider hungry for its prey.
Vindictive looked the scowling firmament,
In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray,
Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.

The moon caught in its creased web of storm mists is another well-visioned image. Mr. Cawein carries the record on to a third poem, picturing the “Broken Drouth;” all are notable for the infusion of atmosphere,—climatic atmosphere, in this case; and indeed of this palpable sort there is plenty, infused into words that fairly parch the page in such poems as “Heat,” or “To the Locust,” which give abundant evidence that Mr. Cawein knows whereof he speaks and is not supposing a case. The stanzas to “The Grasshopper” will deepen this conviction when one looks them up in the volume called _Weeds by the Wall_.

Mr. Cawein has poems in celebration of many other of the creatures whom he links in fellowship with man in his keenly observant verse. “The Twilight Moth,” “The Leaf Cricket,” “The Tree Toad,” “The Chipmunk,” and even the despised “Screech-Owl,” are observed and celebrated with impartial sympathy and love. He shelters in the wood during a summer rain to learn where each tiny fellow of the earth and air bestows himself, and notes that the “lichen-colored moths” are pressed “like knots against the trunks of trees;” that the bees are wedged like “clots of pollen” in hollow blooms, and that the “mantis, long-clawed, furtive, lean,” and the dragonfly are housed together beneath the wild-grape’s leaves and gourds. Each creature’s haunt, ’neath rock or root, or frail roof-bloom, is determined as a naturalist might lie in wait during the summer storm to record for Science’s sake each detail of this forest tenantry. Imagination has, however, touched it to beauty, while losing none of the fidelity.

To the “Twilight Moth,” “gnome wrought of moonbeam fluff and gossamer,” he addresses in another poem these delicate lines:

Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on her state
Of gold and purple in the marbled west,
Thou comest forth like some embodied trait,
Or dim conceit, a lily-bud confessed;
Or, of a rose, the visible wish; that, white,
Goes softly messengering through the night,
Whom each expectant flower makes its guest.

All day the primroses have thought of thee,
Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat;
All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly
Veiled snowy faces,—that no bee might greet
Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;—
Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last,
Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet.

Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day’s
Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks
The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays
Nocturnes of fragrance, thy winged shadow links
In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith;
O bearer of their order’s shibboleth,
Like some pale symbol fluttering o’er these pinks.

The final line of this stanza has a certain thinness, and in that above, the ending which turns “sweet” to a noun is too evidently a matter of expediency; but with these exceptions the stanzas are charming, as are the unquoted ones following them. Before turning to other phases of Mr. Cawein’s work, here is a glimpse of the “Tree Toad,” pictured with quaint delicacy and fancy:

Secluded, solitary on some underbough,
Or cradled in a leaf, ’mid glimmering light,
Like Puck thou crouchest: haply watching how
The slow toad stool comes bulging, moony white,
Through loosening loam; or how, against the night,
The glow-worm gathers silver to endow
The darkness with; or how the dew conspires
To hang at dusk with lamps of chilly fires
Each blade that shrivels now.

* * * * *

Minstrel of moisture! silent when high noon
Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover
And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune
Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over.
Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover
Of all cool things! admitted comrade boon
Of twilight’s hush, and little intimate
Of eve’s first fluttering star and delicate
Round rim of rainy moon!

Art trumpeter of Dwarfland? does thy horn
Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour
When they may gambol under haw and thorn,
Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower?
Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower
The liriodendron is? from whence is borne
The elfin music of thy bell’s deep bass
To summon fairies to their starlit maze,
To summon them or warn.

What a happy bit of realism is that of the toadstool “bulging, moony white, through loosening loam”! The second of the stanzas may be too Keats-like in atmosphere to have been achieved with unconsciousness of the fact, be that as it may, it is a bit of sheer beauty, as the last is of dainty fancy.

But nature, either realistically or romantically, is not all that Mr. Cawein writes of, though it must be said that his verse upon other themes is so largely tinctured with his nature passion that one rarely comes upon a poem whose illustrations are not drawn more or less from this source, making it difficult to find lyrics wholly upon other themes. Because of his opulent metrical variety, Mr. Cawein is less lyrical than as if he sang in simpler measures. His lyrics, indeed, are in the main his least distinguished work, having frequently, if highly musical, too slight a motive; or if more consequent in motive, not being sufficiently musical; or the melody may be unimpeachable and the theme too romantic to have convincing value, as “Mignon,” “Helen,” “The Quest,” “Floridian,” etc. Indeed, Mr. Cawein sounds the troubadour note all too frequently in his lyrical love poems, which are not without a lightsome grace of phrase and fancy, as becomes this style of verse; but it is likely to be a superficial note, heard but to be forgotten. He can, however, strike a deeper chord, as in the poem called “The End of All,” or in that from an earlier volume, bringing a poignant undertone in its strong, calm utterance, beginning

Go your own ways. Who shall persuade me now
To seek with high face for a star of hope?

and ending,

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea,
Night lie before me and behind me night,
And God within far Heaven refuse to light
The consolation of the dawn for me,—
Between the shadowy bourns of Heaven and Hell,
It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell
With memory.

In such notes as these controlled by the Vox Humana stop, Mr. Cawein best reveals himself; another, coming from the heart rather than the fancy, is “Nightshade,” from the volume called _Intimations of the Beautiful_, a record of life’s bringing to judgment the late-proffered love, unyielded when desired.

“A Wild Iris” is in the later and finer manner, but although love is the spirit of the song, it is embodied chiefly in terms of nature, and would not reveal a different phase of his work from that already shown. This, too, is the case with the two lighter lyrics, “Love In A Day” and “In The Lane,” each with a most taking measure; the second a rural song lilting into this note:

When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock,
And the brown bee drones i’ the rose,
And the west is a red-streaked four-o’-clock,
And summer is near its close—
It’s—Oh, for the gate and the locust lane
And dusk and dew and home again!

Mr. Cawein has frequent poems in celebration of the farm, not only its picturesque cheer, but its dignity and finer idealism. “A Song For Labor” is one of the best; also “Old Homes,” an idyllic picture of the Southern plantation, with its gentle haze of reminiscence:

Old homes among the hills! I love their gardens,
Their old rock-fences, that our day inherits;
Their doors, ’round which the great trees stand like wardens;
Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits;
Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens.

I see them gray among their ancient acres,
Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled,—
Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers,
Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled,—
Serene among their memory-hallowed acres.

Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies—
Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers—
Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies,
And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers,
And all the hours are toilless as the lilies.

* * * * *

Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter;
Like love they touch me, through the years that sever,
With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after
The dreamy patience that is theirs forever.

Mr. Cawein blends the mood and the picture in the simple tenderness of these lines, with their unstriving felicity. Kentucky’s more strenuous side also finds a chronicler in his verse: the tragedies of its mountains are told in one of the earlier volumes in such poems as “The Moonshiner,” “The Raid,” and “Dead Man’s Run;” and in _Weeds by the Wall_, in that graphic poem “Feud,” sketching with the pencil of a realist the road to the spot

… where all the land
Seems burdened with some curse,

and where, sunk in obliterative growth of briers, burrs, and ragweed, stands the

… huddled house
Where men have murdered men,

and where a terrified silence still broods, for

The place seems thinking of that time of fear
And dares not breathe a sound.

Mr. Howells, in an appreciation of Mr. Cawein’s work, after the appearance of _Weeds by the Wall_, spoke of this poem declaring that “What makes one think he will go far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as ‘Feud.’ Civilization may not be quite the word for the condition of things suggested here, but there can be no doubt of the dramatic and the graphic power that suggests it, and that imparts a personal sense of the tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn wickedness of it all.” His poem “Ku Klux,” in a volume published some time ago, is no less dramatic in touch and theme. Mr. Cawein knows how to set his picture; the ominous portent of the night in which the dark deed is done would be understood from these three lines alone:

The clouds blow heavy towards the moon.
The edge of the storm will reach it soon.
The kildee cries and the lonesome loon.

It may be said of Mr. Cawein’s work in general that it shows him to be alert to impression, and gives abundant evidence that life presents itself to him abrim with suggestion. Occasionally, as mentioned above, he wanders too far into the romantic, or yields to the rhyming impulse in a fallow time of thought; but when he throws this facile poetizing by, and betakes himself to nature and life in the capacity of observer and analyst, he produces work notable for its strength, fidelity, and beauty. Metrically, in his earlier work he was influenced by various poets he had read too well. “Intimations of the Beautiful,” occupying a part of the volume bearing that name, would be one of his best efforts, in thought and imaginative charm, were it not written in a form developed from “In Memoriam,” so that one is haunted by the metrical echo. The poem is devoted to interpretations of life and the spirit, through nature; and has not a division without some revelation from that book of the earth which Mr. Cawein has made his gospel. Its observations, while couched in imagery that now and again tends to the over-fanciful, are in the main consistent and artistic.

In his recent books, however, he adventures upon his way, seeing wholly by the light of his own eyes, and portraying by the skill of his own hand, so that his work has taken on personality and individuality with each succeeding volume.

Its breath from the bourns of meadow and woodland brings with it a stimulating fragrance, and one closes a book by Mr. Cawein, feeling that he has been in some charmed spot under Southern skies where

Of honey and heat and weed and wheat
The day had made perfume.

X

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

“For he who standeth in the whole world’s hope
Is as a magnet; he shall draw all hearts
To be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.”

THESE words by Mr. George E. Woodberry sound the keynote to his art, for he has set himself to disclose the immanence of beauty, of strength; to mould the real to the ideal; and whether he fashions a god, as in “Agathon,” or a patriot, as in “My Country,” he is concerned only with the development of the spiritual potentialities.

He comes to life, to poetry, enriched by a scholar’s culture, but limited by his enrichment on the creative side of his art. He is too well possessed of the immortal melodies to trust the spontaneous notes of his own voice, and hence his verse on its technical side lacks variety and freedom of movement. It has all the cultivated, classical freedom, it flows ever in pure and true numbers; but the masters sing in its overtones, and one catches himself hearkening to them as to Mr. Woodberry himself. In other words, those innovations of form which strongly creative thoughts usually bring with them, are not to be found in Mr. Woodberry’s work. He has a highly developed sense of rhythm and tone, and very rarely is any metrical canon violated; but the strange new music, the wild free note, that showers down as if from upper air, and sets one’s heart a-tingling, is seldom voiced through him. The bird is caged; and while its song is true and beautiful, one comes soon to know its notes and the range of its melody.

Mr. Woodberry has, however, something to say; and if he says it rather with grace and cultivation as to form, than with any startling surprises of artistic effect, his work in its essence, in its spirit, is none the less creative, and upon this side its strength lies. It is ethical and intellectual, rather than emotional, poetry. Though rising often to an impassioned height, it is a passion of the brain, pure and cold as a flood of moonlight. Even the songs of “Wild Eden,” and others dealing with love, remain an abstraction; one does not get the sense of personality, except in one or two of them, such as the lyric, “O, Inexpressible As Sweet,” and in these few lines called “Divine Awe”:

To tremble when I touch her hands,
With awe that no man understands;
To feel soft reverence arise
When, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes;
To see her beauty grow and shine
When most I feel this awe divine,—
Whate’er befall me, this is mine;
And where about the room she moves,
My spirit follows her, and loves.

But although one misses the sense of reality in the songs of love, the ideality is for that reason the more apparent. Love that has sublimated, taken on the rarer part, that has made a mystic interchange with nature and with God, is celebrated in the fervid poem, “He Ate The Laurel And Is Mad,” which marks one of the strongest achievements in Mr. Woodberry’s work, and especially in a lyric it contains, vibrating with a fine, compulsive melody. The lines preceding the lyric relate the coming of Love into the heart of nature:

And instant back his longing runs
Through bud and billow, through drift and blaze,
Through thought, through prayer, the thousand ways
The spirit journeys from despair;
He sees all things that they are fair,
But feels them as the daisied sod,—
This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room,
The chrysalis and broken tomb
He cleaveth on his way to God.

Then the poem breaks into this pæan, whose music outsings its thought when pushed to analysis; this is one of Mr. Woodberry’s metrical exceptions that prove the rule. Here is sheer music making fine but not extraordinary thought seem great, whereas in the majority of his work it is the thought to which one listens rather than the melody; but to the lyric,

I shall go singing over-seas;
“The million years of the planets increase;
All pangs of death, all cries of birth,
Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”

I shall go singing by tower and town:
“The thousand cities of men that crown
Empire slow-rising from horde and clan,
Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”

I shall go singing by flower and brier:
“The multitudinous stars of fire,
And man made infinite under the sod,
Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”

I shall go singing by ice and snow:
“Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow,
Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above,
Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”

Of his recent volume in which he gathers his most representative work, “The North Shore Watch,” a threnody published some years ago, remains one of the truest poems in sincerity and sympathy of expression,—not only an idyl of remembered comradeship, but of the sea in its many moods; and here one may note that of Mr. Woodberry’s references to nature, those of the sea are incomparably the finest, and exhale an invigorating savor of the brine. They are scattered through “The North Shore Watch,” but because of the stately sadness of the verse are less representative of his characteristic note than are these buoyant lines which open the poem “Seaward”:

I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea’s infinite foam;
I will bathe in the winds of heaven; I will nest where the white
birds home;
Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of snow,
In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready and go;
Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is rolled,
I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of gold;
Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the sunset bar,
And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the morning star;
And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as they,
Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day.

These lines have the bracing ozone of the east wind; it is good to fill one’s lungs with their freshening breath. In another sea-song, “Homeward Bound,” an exultant, grateful hymn, Mr. Woodberry speaks of steering

“Through the weird, red-billowing sunset”

and of falling asleep in the “rocking dark,” and with the dawn,

Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling spray,
Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept day,
Or the white fog ribbons o’er them, the strong ship holds her way

These are pictures in strong color, freehand records with pigment, of which Mr. Woodberry’s sea-verse contains many duplicates. He paints the sea as an impressionist, catching her evanescent moods. Aside from the pictorial art of the poem from which the lines above are taken, it thrills with the gladness that abides with one coming

Home from the lonely cities, time’s wreck, and the naked woe,
Home through the clean great waters where freemen’s pennants blow,
Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.

Mr. Woodberry is an American, and ever an American, whatever tribute he may pay at longer dedicated shrines. His ode to “My Country” is an impassioned utterance, full of ideality, and pride in things as they are, not lacking, however, in the prophetic vision of what they shall be. He trusts his country without reservation, recognizes her greater commission in what has terrified many poets,—the absorption of the Eastern isles,—and bids her be swift to yield her benefits:

O, whisper to thy clustered isles
If any rosy promise round them smiles;
O, call to every seaward promontory
If one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory.

In technique the ode has a fine sweep and movement; it thrills with flights of feeling, as in these lines near the close,—

And never greater love salutes thy brow
Than his, who seeks thee now.
Alien the sea and salt the foam
Where’er it bears him from his home;
And when he leaps to land,
A lover treads the strand.

The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, and now and again by the declamatory impulse getting the better of the creative; but granting this it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the time to those who think the days are evil, and more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric gives way to the pensive note,

I lay the singing laurels down
Upon the silent grave,

and grows from this into a glimpsing of Emerson’s most characteristic thought, to which Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. This philosophical résumé has value as critical interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet’s merit, and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal his weakness in writing of this sort, neither does he to any marked degree reveal his strength. It is work of conventional creditability, reaching occasionally some flight of pure poetry, but pervaded in general by the perfunctory note that results from coercing the muse; and here one may interpolate the wish that all poems-for-occasion might be “put upon the list,” for it is certain, not only that the majority of them “never would be missed,” but that poetry would rebound from a most inert weight if lightened of them; nor is this in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose “Emerson Ode” is a far stronger piece of work than are most compositions of a similar nature. In the “Player’s Elegy,” in the ode written for the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the several poems addressed to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, and the high motive of all must not be lost sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of the individuality of his work.

It is on the spiritually philosophical side of his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth that

The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes
And every one divine.

When he interprets the mystery of love, or turns to the world without, it is the immanence of the divine that haunts him:

Over the grey leagues of ocean
The infinite yearneth alone;
The forests with wandering emotion
The thing they know not intone.

He is, indeed, the spirit’s votary, and the ultimate purport of his message is the recognition of one’s own spirit force. His poem, “Nay, Soul,” rebukes the weakness that looks on every side for that which is within; the nature that, seeking props, falls by the way; or, craving understanding, loses the strength that comes of being misunderstood. It subtly divides the legitimate gifts of sympathy from those which weakness demands, and reveals the impossibility of coercing life, or love, or any good to which one’s nature is not so magnetized that it comes to him unentreated. These are potent lines:—

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear!
Between the earth and sky
Was never man could buy
The bread of life with prayer,
Not though his brother there
Saw him with hunger die.

His life a man may give,
But, not for deepest ruth,
Beauty, nor love, nor truth
Whereby himself doth live.
Come home, poor fugitive!
Art thou so poor, forsooth?

* * * * *

Thy heart—look thou aright!
Fear not the wild untrod,
Nor birth, nor burial sod!
Look, and in native light,
Bare as to Christ’s own sight,
Living shalt thou see God.

The dramatic poem, “Agathon,” which is builded upon the philosophy of Plato, is perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-inciting work in the newly collected volume. It is in no sense of the word dramatic, but doubtless cast in this form from its wider adaptability to the contrasts of thought. The poem is too lengthy to follow an analysis of its philosophy, which is wrought out with subtle elaboration, smacking too much at times of a logical demonstration, but in the main leavened with imaginative phrase. Its poetic climax is in the apostrophe which follows the statement that

The sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.

The lines form a blank-verse lyric with a rich cadence and movement:

O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day,
White Hesper folded in the rose of eve;
The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps;
The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor;
And mute the bird’s throat swells with slumber now;
And now the wild winds to their eyries cling.

* * * * *

O youngest Roamer, wonderful is joy,
The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs;
The lily folded to the wave of life,
The lotus on the stream’s dark passion borne.

* * * * *

Ah, fortunate he roams who roameth here,
Who finds the happy covert and lies down,
And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount,
And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs.
No more he roams, he roams no more, no more.

These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Princess” in their metrical note, particularly in the final couplet of the first stanza, with the “dying fall” of the cadence, bringing to mind:

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Mr. Woodberry’s poetic affiliation with Tennyson comes out unmistakably in various other poems, leaving no doubt as to one of the masters who sing in his over-tones. Here, for illustration, is a transfusion with Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” One stanza of the flawless lyric reads:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

And Mr. Woodberry says:

O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawns
The warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns;
O tender as the faint sea-changes are,
When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star;
So strange, so tender, to a maid is love.

The mere fact of employing the Tennyson metre, especially when rhymed, would not give the sense of over-assimilation of the other’s work were it not for the marked correspondence in the diction and atmosphere, the first line of Tennyson’s lyric being expanded into the opening couplet of Mr. Woodberry’s stanza, and the final lines of each having so similar a terminology. Shelley is a much more operative force in Mr. Woodberry’s poetry than Tennyson, but rather in temperamental kinship than in a technical way. Mr. Woodberry could scarcely fail to have a keen sympathy with the passionate art of Shelley, who lived in the ideal, subtilized and sublimated beyond all reach but that of longing, but who yet set his hand and brain to the strife about him. In his earlier work Mr. Woodberry occasionally shows the Shelley influence in technique and theme, but not in his later verse. One can scarcely understand his leaving in a definitive collection of his work the poem “Love at the Door,” whose obligations to Taylor’s “Bedouin Love Song” and Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee,” are about equally distributed. Most poets have their early experiments in the reshaping of forms and themes, but they should be edited out of representative collections. The poem is scarcely a creditable assimilation of the models in question, and does scant justice to Mr. Woodberry’s later poetry, making the query more inevitable why he should have left it in the volume, which is in the main so finished and ripe a work. Occasionally one comes upon poems, or passages, which a keener self-criticism would have eliminated, as the line from “Taormina,” declaring that

Front more majestic of sea-mountains nowhere is there uplifted the
whole earth through,—

whose legitimate place is in a rhetorical textbook, as an exercise in redundance. Mr. Woodberry is occasionally allured by his theme until the song outruns the motive, but he rarely pads a line like this; even poetic hyperbole has a limit.

In picturesque imagery his work is finely individualized; witness the figurative beauty of the following lines:

The ocean, storming on the rocks,
Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks.
The soaring ether nowhere finds
An eyrie for the wingéd winds;
Nor has yon glittering sky a charm
To hive in heaven the starry swarm;
And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart,
No home shall find; let them depart.

The two sonnets “At Gibraltar” represent, perhaps, as fine an achievement as distinguishes Mr. Woodberry’s work. It would, indeed, be difficult to surpass them in American literature of to-day in strength, passion, or ideality:

I

England, I stand on thy imperial ground,
Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow,
I feel within my blood old battles flow—
The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found.
Still surging dark against the Christian bound
Wide Islam presses; well its peoples know
Thy heights that watch them wandering below;
I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound.
I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face.
England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son!
I feel the conqueror in my blood and race;
Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-day
Gibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gun
Startles the desert over Africa!

II

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seas
Between the East and West, that God has built;
Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt,
While run thy armies true with His decrees.
Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these;
Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt,
Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt,
The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease!
Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite,
Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, one
Rejoices in the sheath, and hides from light.
American I am; would wars were done!
Now westward, look, my country bids good-night—
Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

Whether in his travels or in the quiet of his own contemplation, the emphasis of Mr. Woodberry’s thought is upon the noble, the essential, the beautiful. Although not a strongly creative poet in form, he is a highly cultivated poet, and hands on the nobler traditions of art; and if now and then he wraps another’s “singing robe” about him, it is but an external vesture, leaving the soul of his thought unchanged.

XI

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES

MR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES is one of the younger poets about whose work there is no veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, but rather that the foundation is genuine; it reflects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. One feels back of the work the probity and directness that underlie all soundly conditioned literature; for while Mr. Knowles has the poet’s passion for the beauties of the art he essays, the primary value is always in that to be conveyed rather than in the medium of transmission.

This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles’ distinction and his danger. He is so manifestly in earnest that one feels at times in his work a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which should lighten the most serious thought; to put it in a word, there is often an over-strenuous note in his poetry; but were it put to a choice between this mood and the honeyed artificialities to which one is often treated, there would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, for

The poet is not fed on sweets;
Daily his own heart he eats,—

not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.

This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond his present attainment, probably beyond his ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute standards, for the “elements of truth” are hardly to be separated from life by one magnet. They are variously polarized, and though one may possess the divining wand that shall disclose the nature and place of certain of them, there is no wand polarized for all; but it is the poet’s part to pass that magnet of truth which is his by nature over the field of life, that it may attract therefrom its range of affinities, and this Mr. Knowles is doing.

Before taking up his later work, however, we may glance at his matin songs, _On Life’s Stairway_, which have many indicative notes worthy of consideration. This volume, that called forth from John Burroughs, Richard Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, such hearty commendation, has an individuality that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes its spontaneity and the evident love of song that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh and sprightly, not having yet thought’s heavier freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to one’s own time impassioned and absolute, and the democracy and Americanism distinguishing it are of the commendable, if somewhat grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles’ work, manifest in both volumes, is that its inspiration is from life rather than nature, which is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse obtains with most of the younger poets. When, however, he comes to this theme, it is with a lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of mood that give to the few poems of this subject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated note, as in these lines:

Nature, in thy largess, grant
I may be thy confidant!

* * * * *

Show me how dry branches throw
Such blue shadows on the snow;
Tell me how the wind can fare
On his unseen feet of air;
Show me how the spider’s loom
Weaves the fabric from her womb;
Lead me to those brooks of morn
Where a woman’s laugh is born;
Let me taste the sap that flows
Through the blushes of a rose,—
Yea, and drain the blood which runs
From the heart of dying suns;
Teach me how the butterfly
Guessed at immortality;
Let me follow up the track
Of Love’s deathless zodiac
Where Joy climbs among the spheres
Circled by her moon of tears.

In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches some of his truest and surest notes; those in the second volume have a broader and more sympathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the confessional note which alone gives value to the subject. They are not invariably of a more inspired touch than are several in the first collection, such as “Lost Knowledge,” “A Song for Simplicity,” and “Love’s Prayer;” now and again they combine some newly minted phrase flashing with unsullied lustre, with such as have passed from hand to hand in the dulling commerce of language; but it is perhaps too much to demand that all fancies shall be newly stamped with the die of imagination. One of Mr. Knowles’ strongest poems from the group in question is entitled “Love’s World;” but for greater brevity I shall quote instead these charming lines which introduce the collection called _Love Triumphant_:

Helen’s lips are drifting dust,
Ilion is consumed with rust;
All the galleons of Greece
Drink the ocean’s dreamless peace;
Lost was Solomon’s purple show
Restless centuries ago;
Stately empires wax and wane—
Babylon, Barbary and Spain—
Only one thing, undefaced,
Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste
And the heavens are overturned.
—Dear, how long ago we learned!

There’s a sight that blinds the sun,
Sound that lives when sounds are done,
Music that rebukes the birds,
Language lovelier than words,
Hue and scent that shame the rose,
Wine no earthly vineyard knows,
Silence stiller than the shore
Swept by Charon’s stealthy oar,
Ocean more divinely free
Than Pacific’s boundless sea,—
Ye who love have learned it true.
—Dear, how long ago we knew!

Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, “If Love Were Jester at the Court of Death,” that Mr. Knowles’ most genuine inspiration has visited him.

The conception of the sonnet is unique, and its opening line of epigrammatic force and suggestiveness:

If Love were jester at the court of Death,
And Death the king of all, still would I pray,
“For me the motley and the bauble, yea,
Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith,
The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!”
Then would I kneel the monarch to obey,
And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay;
Since I have tasted love, what mattereth!
But if, dear God! this heart be dry as sand,
And cold as Charon’s palm holding Hell’s toll,
How worse! how worse! Scorch it with sorrow’s brand!
Haply, though dead to joy, ’t would feel _that_ coal;
Better a cross and nails through either hand,
Than Pilate’s palace and a frozen soul!

Here are originality, strength, and white heat of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic than the octave, which holds the creative beauty of the sonnet.

Of the lyrical poems in the second volume there are many clear of tone, having not only a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also color and picturesqueness, as that beginning:

With all his purple spoils upon him
Creeps back the plunderer Sea,

with its succession of pictures such as these:

O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen,
Raiding a thousand shores,
Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchors
And wave-defeated oars!

Admirable phrasing is that of “wave-defeated oars”! But before taking up the more strenuous side of his work, there is another lyric rich in melody and emotion,—a lyric in which one feels the under-current of passion. It is named, “A Song of Desire”:

Thou dreamer with the million moods,
Of restless heart like me,
Lay thy white hands against my breast
And cool its pain, O Sea!

O wanderer of the unseen paths,
Restless of heart as I,
Blow hither from thy caves of blue,
Wind of the healing sky!

O treader of the fiery way,
With passionate heart like mine,
Hold to my lips thy healthful cup
Brimmed with its blood-red wine!

O countless watchers of the night,
Of sleepless heart like me,
Pour your white beauty in my soul,
Till I grow calm as ye!

O sea, O sun, O wind and stars,
(O hungry heart that longs!)
Feed my starved lips with life, with love,
And touch my tongue with songs!

Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, and his Whitmanesque conviction that “we tally all antecedents;” that “we are the scald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight;” that “we easily include them and more,”—finds expression in each of his volumes, in poems ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would now smile, to the noble lines of “Veritas” and other poems in the later work. There are certain subjects that hold within them percussion powder ready to explode at the touch of a thought,—subjects which, to one’s own peculiar temperament, seem to be provocative of a fulminant outburst whenever one collides with them, and this is such an one to Mr. Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up occasionally by such detonating lines as these:

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough,
And ballads enough, God knows!
But what we need is that cosmic stuff
Whence primitive feeling glows,

Grown, organized to the needs of rhyme
Through the old instinctive laws,
With a meaning broad as the boughs of time
And deep as the roots of cause.

It is passion and power that we need to-day,
We have grace and taste full store;
We need a man who will say his say
With a strength unguessed before:—

* * * * *

Whose lines shall glow like molten steel
From being forged in his soul,
Till the very anvil shall burn to feel
The breath of the quenchless coal!

Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!”
As they shrink from his bellows’ glow;
But the fire he fans is immortal youth,
And how should the bloodless know!

One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,

A voice whose sagas shall live with God
When the lyres of earth are rust,—

is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet,
The song that is fit for men!

And the woodsman he shall sing it,
And his axe shall mark the time;
And the bearded lips of the boatman
While his oarblades fall in rhyme;

And the man with his fist on the throttle,
And the man with his foot on the brake,
And the man who will scoff at danger
And die for a comrade’s sake;

And the Hand that wrought the Vision
With prairie and peak and stream
Shall guide the hand of the workman
And help him to trace his dream!—

Till the rugged lines grow perfect,
And round to a faultless whole;
For the West will have found her singer
When her singer has found his soul.

These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaiming the modern ideal from Whitman to Kipling that “the song that is fit for men” must have in it some robust timbre, some resonant fibre, unheard before; that a sturdier race of bards must arise, “sprung from the toilers at the bench and plough,”—that, in fine, the new America must have a more orotund voice to sing her needs.

This has a convincing plausibility on the face of it; but do the facts bear it out,—are virility and democracy and modernity the essential elements of the “song that is fit for men”? If so, then Whitman, who is the apogee of the elemental and democratic, or Kipling, whose tunes blare in one’s ears like the horns of a band, and whose themes are aggressively of the day and hour, would be the ideal types of the new-day poet, and we should find the sturdy laborer and the common folk in general coming to these sources for refreshment, inspiration, and aid in tracing their dreams; but, on the contrary, Whitman, by a frequent paradox of letters, is a poet for the most cultivated and deeply reflective minds. Only such can understand and embrace his universality, and, on the poetic side, enjoy his splendid diction and the wave-like sweep of his rhythms. His formlessness, which was reactive that he might come the nearer to the common heart, is one of the chief barriers that prevent this contact. The unlettered nature, more than all others, demands the ordered symmetry of rhythm as a focus and aid to thought; it demands elemental beauties as well as truths, and hence not only is Whitman ruled out by his own measure, but Kipling also, for again it needs the broadly cultivated mind to take at his true and at his relative value a poet like Kipling. The common mind might be familiar with some poem of occasion, the English laborer might be found singing “Tommy Atkins;” but Kipling’s finer shadings would escape in the beat of his galloping tunes and in the touch-and-go of his subjects.

If, then, Kipling, who outmoderns the moderns in singing what is presumably a song fit for men, and if Whitman, who is as robustly, democratically American as a poet can well be, and trumpeting ever that note,—if these poets do not reach the typical man, if they are not the ones to whom the stalwart laborer comes, or the busy man of affairs, there must be a need anterior to that of which they sing; song must spell something else besides virility, democracy, achievement. It evidently is not the men who _do_, not the men who _act_, that write “the song of fact” for the laborer and the great class of our strong, sincere, common folk. They do not want the song of fact more than do we; they have no other dream to trace than have we. They want the primal things,—love, hope, beauty, the transforming ideal; they want the carbon of their daily experience turned to the crystal; and for this they go to a poet like Burns, who spoke the universal tongue, who took the common ideals and touched them simply, tenderly, not strenuously, to a new form at the will of his fancy. You shall find the boatman or the woodsman knowing his Burns, often his Shakespeare, for he is quick to grasp the human element, or his Scott, for he loves romance, when the strident cry of a Kipling, or of a modern idealist singing of democracy, or of the newer needs of the laborer himself, will be wholly lost on him; and hence this note that one is meeting so often in the recent poets seems to me to be a false and superfluous one.

The “song that is fit for men” is _any_ song that has the essence of truth and beauty in it, and no other _is_ fit for men, no matter where sung. We have not evolved a new _genus homo_ by our conquest of arms; our democracy is not changing human nature; we need virility in song, as Mr. Knowles has said in the earlier poem quoted; we need that “cosmic stuff whence primitive feeling glows,” but we need beauty and spirituality to shape it. Poetry must minister first of all to the inner life. Tennyson and Browning were not concerned with matters of empire, or the passing issues of the day; they were occupied with the essential things,—things of humanity and of the soul, that shall outlast empire, democracy, or time. Heaven forefend that our bards shall spring from a race

Unkempt, athletic, rude,
Rough as the prairies, tameless as the sea,