Under the Willows and Other Poems

ONE of the less familiar poems here given is “ The Voyage to Vinland,” in which the poet indulges the fancy, more flattering than even the hope of the future’s remembrance, that the grand and mysterious past foreboded the present, and clothed us in the poetry of its prophetic desire and wonder. Biörn, the son of Heriulf, is restless with an impulse to some great enterprise : -

and at Eric Thurlson’s Yule-tide feast it haunts him still, and takes definite shape and aim from the song of Thorwald, the Skald: —

And so Biörn, inspired by the Skald, sails from home, and finds a world : —

But before their prow

Gudrida the prophetess sang of what the new land should be in our time and in times yet to come, in certain mighty lyrics that close the poem. This has not only the clearness and fulness of thought characteristic of the poet, and that completeness of expression which he gives whatever picture rises to his mind, but we think that in subtlety and force of poetic instinct it is not to be surpassed, when it tells how the Skald sang of Fate, and of the arrows she chooses among the strong, true souls of men to hit her marks with : —

This fantastic play of a thought continued from one mind into another, this secondary effect of the creative impulse is what greatly constitutes poetry, for the poet half-exists in his reader ; and criticism, if it were as wise as it affects to be, would know some art to fix this reflex thought, and test the quality of the prime inspiration by it. But as it does not, it must go cold-bloodedly back to the book, and solicit the effect given so freely and fully at first, and substitute for the grace of sympathetic response the clumsiness of praise.

In some external aspects it is an easy enough book to review. In it the “ June Idyl,” which we imagine the readers of the magazine will have no more forgotten than the month last year celebrated by it, is christened anew, and as “Under the Willows” holds the first place. Then follow such dear and familiar poems as “ The First Snow-Fall,” “ Auf Wiedersehen,” “After the Burial,” “ In the Twilight, ’ and “ The Nightingale in the Study.” with the author’s war-poems, “ The Washers ot the Shroud,” “Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel,” “Memoriæ Positum,” “ On Board the ’76,” and the magnificent “Commemoration Ode,” which of itself could make us believe that the war had produced a literature. Besides these there are many other poems less known, but not less characteristic and fine, first among which are “The Voyage to Vinland,” “The Fountain of Youth,” “Mahmood the Image-Breaker,’ “A Winter-Eveinng Hymn to my Fire,” and “A Familiar Epistle to a Friend.” We name the poems according to our liking. They group themselves differently. The “ Familiar Epistle” belongs with “Self-Study,” “The Upland Path,” and the “Miner,” in the several expressions of the same recurrent thought “Mahmood,” “ Youssouf,” and "Dara” are of another kind by themselves, if we do not join “ Blondel,” to them, as in a kindred spirit of parable ; then there are “ Auf Wiedersehen,” “ After the Burial,”and “The Dead House,”—a group of poems as different from the rest as they are remarkable in every way. The other pieces — with the exception of the warpoems — are idyls and essays. There is nothing strictly lyrical or merely narrative in the book.

No one could read it, we think, without inferring from it the great humorist and, acute critic of letters and polity ; and we, for our part, cannot read it without the persuasion that the author is greatest of all as a poet, — as much greater as that sense of order for which we have scarcely a true name, but which we feel to be so divine that we call it creative, is greater than that exquisite sense of disorder, that humor which is his in such high degree, but we should not care to dispute with anybody on this point. As long as Mr. Lowell can delight us with either of his gifts, we shall willingly leave a decision to the useful people who have not yet determined whether we shall say the Misses Smith or the Miss Smiths. Apart from this question, there arc traits of his genius about which there can be no difference, and which are very distinctly reproduced here.

His dominant fondness for apologue is something that appears in nearly all the poems, and his consciousness, or habit of philosophizing his emotion, is equally plain. In fact, in our time, every one is conscious ; simplicity is not only difficult, but impossible ; but to here and there a man remains the nobler virtue of sincerity, which we find in this poetry, — which suffers no idle line or word, and will have first of all things always the beauty of clear thought, — and which is everywhere expressive of the poet ’s life, his creedless faith in heaven and man, his sympathy with nature, his love of country, his tenderness for home. To him, indeed, the ground he treads on in Cambridge, Mass., is dear as London was to Johnson, or Florence to Dante ; and he is akin to the past in this rather than to most Americans of modern date, who have no more local attachment than air-plants, striking their arid roots with indifference into any atmosphere, and who can be but half conscious of his thrill when he fondly praises

or again, when in the “Invitation” he sings : —

Yet they must be somehow aware of the truth of the feeling, and conjecture that the virtue is one which helps to make all his poetry of such sound growth, so sweet and solid through and through. They cannot fail, either, of the beauty of that “ Invitation " apart from this feeling, or the most felicitous delicacy of that tribute from which we have quoted. There never was sweeter succession of lines than those to H. W. L., and never did our poet’s home-thrusting genius strike the truth fairer than in them. How poor all criticism seems beside their unerring divination of him

The musicalness of the poem, delightful as it is, is the least of its delights ; and this is the fact with all the poetry here, except, perhaps, with “ The Fountain of Youth,” in which the attuned syllables warble to the sense with a sweetness that would win, even if they bore none of its fine meaning and made none of its airy pictures to the eye. Next in rhythmic beauty is “ In the Twilight,” and then, in infinitely grander and statelier wise, “ The Commemoration Ode,” many lines of which teach themselves instantly to the memory, and thence to the intelligence. We have more particularly in mind now that noble passage : —

The reader can well understand that we do not mean to hint an obscurity of expression in this or any other poem of Mr. Lowell’s ; we could as readily conceive of intellectual vagueness in him. The music of his verse seems the unsought charm of the words that could most clearly give his sense ; and the sincerity and originality of his genius are in nothing more manifest than in a diction as distinctively his own as it is inartificial and unmannered. There is almost nothing in the book to remind you of any one but himself, except, perhaps, “ The Miner,” which at first intimates Emerson ; yet on a second glance could not, it is found, have been written in Concord. There is as fresh and racy a flavor in his phrase as if he had newly plucked it from the fields, and it were part of the great life of skies and woods and seas on which, in its relation to that of man, he dwells with so true a love. “Under the Willows ” seems to us the finest rural poem in our literature. Nature, you see there, is also in love with the poet ; something like the old lost sympathy between us and earth is restored ; but we doubt, in the “ Pictures from Appledore,” whether Nature, in that savage mood of hers, reciprocated the poet’s passion. "We do not s9ty that it is not a wonderful series of studies, rendering her sad or fierce aspects with unique power and fidelity ; we merely find that we do not care to return to the poem after once reading it, while all others in the volume attract us again and again.

“ Auf Wiedersehen,” in all regards in which a critic has the right to speak of it, is the best of that group of personal poems to which it belongs. It is exquisitely artistic, and, beside its perfection, “The Dead House” and “After the Burial” appear at disadvantage, though they are both poems of a rare and passionate truth. More equal, and on the whole more characteristic, are those pieces in which the poet sings the sadness of attainment, and the charm of that “lithe, perpetual Escape” in all joys of the heart and brain which is the very incentive and reason of hoping and being. This fancy plays through “ Self-Study,” “The Miner,” “The Foot-path,” and “L' Envoi — To the Muse,” with a ceaseless grace and variety of movement, and seems the finest and sweetest part of the poet’s wisdom. The political poems, which come next in order of our liking, are like no other political poems in their wonderful imaginative strength, — a quality felt equally in the different parable of “ Two Scenes from the Life of Blondel ” and “ On Board the ’76,” but most of all in the weird allegory of " The Washers of the Shroud.” As to the “Commemoration Ode,” — shall we go on vainly to speak of it, as of the rest, leaving its essence still untouched, and its grandeur defined and limited by special praises ? Some day, it will seem as preposterous for the critic to attempt to tell in what particulars the greatness of a poet lies as it would now appear if he should tell him how to make poetry, — and the critics used to do something like this with no more misgiving than one should have in teaching another how to save his soul. The truth is, poetry is dangerously apt to turn upon criticism and judge it ; and one shudders at the thought of certain poor old combinations of adjectives, well enough for common use, being made to stand for an appreciation of this poem. There is something like warning in its superb completeness ; compliment is not for the reverence which unseals the poet’s lips in self-doubt, nor for the triumph which closes them upon those words of tender and sublime exultance, —

There is reason given for all the faith and love in the poem ; there is no appeal to mere emotion, nor the noisiness oi transport, whatever fervor ; its most exalted feeling is in an impassioned study ; what is likest rapture is the thrill of uttering divine fact ; yet with all its severe and predominant intellectual qualities, — and let us remember that he who said poetry should be “simple, sensuous, passionate,” left making such poetry, to his inferiors, — it is richer than any other poem of its kind in the delights of art, in form, in music, in grace of movement, in vivid and heroic pictures.