Recent Poetry

ACCORDING to their predilections, readers will be pleased, or the reverse, with Mr. Edwin Arnold, for having given to his new book of Eastern rhymes a title which implies that Islam is a belief at least deserving the same respect which we pay to Christianity.¹ But the intention is not serious ; it is only that the book may have an attractive name, and one in consonance with the author’s attempt to present the religious convictions of Mussulmans from their own point of view. The plan which he has adopted is to supply some piece of verse — a rhythmic maxim, a short hymn, or a legend (generally involving some miracle)—to illustrate the meaning of each attributive name applied to God by the Moslems, and represented by the beads in their threestringed chaplets, that have thirty-three beads on every string. We are presented, by consequence, with ninety-nine brief compositions, some of which suffer from the necessity under which Mr. Arnold placed himself at the start, by “ taking a contract ” to produce a few lines in every instance, whether or no the mood should favor. What, for example, could exceed in vapidity this stanza, which forms the entire “ comment in verse ” on the name Wâhid (The " One ”) ? —

As a statement of one point in Mahometan belief, put into prose, this would have its use for a student of comparative theology ; but it is impossible, by any stretch of terms, to make it poetry, and its value as a comment is perhaps open to question. Each piece in the series is preceded and followed by a couplet, emphasizing or echoing the particular phase of definition therein given to the divine principle. These, however, are at best intrusions, and in one instance the closing couplet quite destroys the effect of a fine fancy by repetition. The quatrain under the head of AI-’Hali ends: —

Whereupon, the keen touch of that similitude upon the mind is instantly blurred by an inferior restatement, as follows : —

Sundry of the verses are inspired by texts from the Koran ; others are little fables inculcating the wisdom of charity, toleration, and like virtues. These have point and subtilty, as the anecdotes in Saadi’s Gulistan have, and in fact all similar Oriental tales ; but they grow monotonous, because the scenery is in most cases the same, and the reward of virtue is brought on so promptly and without fail by angelic intervention, as to make them untruthful. There are lines, stanzas, and single passages of considerable merit scattered through them, and in the blank-verse account of King Sheddâd’s Paradise an opportunity for opulent description, and the depiction of a sudden, petrific doom, has been improved ; but it is impossible not to be conscious that these iambic parables are too often strictly imitative, being modeled on Leigh Hunt’s Abouben-Adhem, which, by constant copying and unwearied travesty, stamps upon everything that resembles it an impression as faint and worn as that of an old stereotype plate. Among the isolated felicities that one may pick out, are measures like this : —

or the alto rilievo in which Nimrûd stands out, where

In Muhammad’s Journey to Heaven, there is a strong climax sustained by a splendid image. The Prophet, passing up through the several heavens, reached at last the highest, and there

But, when all is said, it must be admitted that — excepting King Sheddâd’s Paradise — the volume does not contain a single poem, in any adequate sense of the word. We cannot except the muchadmired Message from the Dead, —

which has been published before: its proportioning is defective, its movement mechanical, and it contains this exceedingly poor rhyme, —

where it is necessary to pronounce the last word, Scotticé, “ gun.” There are many imperfect rhymes and other evidences of haste and shallowness in the collection. Mr. Arnold explains that it was “ composed amid Scotch mountains, during a brief summer rest from politics.” But if he thought the design worth carrying out, why did he not devote two brief vacations to it, instead of one, and make his workmanship better? When an author seeks to acquire a factitious repute for his work as something thrown off in haste, from the exuberance of power, it often happens that people forget it in haste; and readers of The Light of Asia, who take up this book with anticipations aroused by that strong and persuasive poem, will be disappointed.

Mr. Boyesen has wisely named his book of poems with reference to the most characteristic of the contents;² and in so far as these answer to the title, they have a freshness and a distinctive interest which give the modest volume a separate place. Brier-Rose, Hilda’s Little Hood, and Thora are charming pastoral love stories, vigorous, youthful, sweet with the vernal breath of the northern forest, and told in melodious verse, the shaping of which somehow connects itself with the graceful curves of vine-tendrils; for the writer, in his less formal moods, responds with impulsive alacrity to his theme, and apprehends delicate analogies which at once find facile expression, giving the lines naturalness and finish together. “ Trim and graceful like a clipper ” is one of his rather untamed heroines; and in another place he says, —

A good specimen of this natural aptness occurs in the ballad of Earl Sigurd’s Christmas Eve : —

though it is to be remarked that if “their” had been substituted for “ with,” in the first line, we should not have had the awkward spectacle of the bards sweeping their entire persons over the strings. Another delightfully fit characterization is that of the voices of the elf-maidens as being “ delicious, languid, vague, like a poppy’s breath in sound.” There is no great profundity in the numerous happy turns of Mr. Boyesen’s ballads; but we need not demand profundity in the dewdrop or the budding leaf, which, apart from the meaning they take on as microcosmic phenomena, in our minds, are simple and refreshing things. It is more profitable to enjoy the obvious excellences in Mr. Boyesen, among which must be reckoned the candid and boyish humor that occasionally peeps out. Here is an instance : —

at a pair of young lovers on the seabeach. In the same ballad (Thora) is this rustic touch : —

These idyllic narratives are not without blemishes. To speak of maidens “ With ribbons in their sunny hair, and milkpails on their heads,” makes an unfortunate confusion of plural and singular ; and it is a somewhat prosaic explanation of the young swain’s, who has chased the object of his affections until she has dropped in exhaustion : —

The Norwegian method of courtship, by the way, appears to be peculiar, according to the ballads under notice : The young man gets a glimpse of the young woman, and on the first convenient occasion gives chase to her through the woods or along the sands. When she is fairly run down, she confesses that she loves him. Little Sigrid, Earl Sigurd, and The Elf-Maidens have the spirit of ancient balladry in them, and in some degree the form; they strike with no uncertain hand the chords of old warrior life, of superstition, terror, and pathos. The final stanza of the poem on Norway likewise carries with it a legendary reverberation : —

It is when we pass to the other pieces which the author has bound up with his Norse sheaf that we doubt his judgment of his own successes. The first six poems would have been better omitted.

The last number in the collection is Calpurnia, a mournful but elevating episode in the early history of the Christians at Rome, the narration of which is admirably sustained, in hexameters of much clearness and beauty. Still, we hardly think there is warrant in it for ranking Mr. Boyesen as anything more than a receptive mind, possessed of a true but not original poetic tendency, serving art with reverent hands and conscientiously. The claim to something higher would have to rest, if at all, on the live sonnets upon Evolution, — the best things in the book, except the poems of Norway, — in which he has gathered up and remoulded with deep, imaginative grasp the scientific views of the day, and given them a purely poetic and ideal scope. That is a superb opening of one of them, where he exclaims, —

When one singer has struck this note, it seems natural enough that another should decide to make Monte Rosa the central figure of an epic;³ but in truth Mr. Nichols’s epic is such in name only, since it possesses neither the form nor the motive of an epic poem, properly so called. Consisting of ten divisions, in two books, it is confined to a mappingout and construction of the mountain as an object of thought, and to the description of an ascent and descent of the peak, together with reflections that arise incidentally during that perilous operation. Neither has it the epic drift and tone; there is very little action, and there is a great deal of reflection. Avalanches, lights and shadows, the legion beams of the morning sun, the winds and frosts and lightning that took part in the first rearing of the mountain, and “ the stealthy depredations of gray rain,” — these we must accept as the characters ; and their action is necessarily somewhat vague and general. A passage concerning the glacier may be quoted, to show the mode of treatment: —

But matter and force are heroic only as we attribute to them something personal ; and therefore their movement in Mr. Nichols’s poem is not so much action of theirs as a fanciful description by him. Geologic growth, the place of man, and cosmic development of course have a large function to fulfill, in the working out of his design, and for a time it seems as if the elements and the sun, which the author calls “ the Lord of lords,” are going to have it all their own way ; but at length, on the pinnacle of the arête, he reaches the climax of his thought : —

With fine penetration Mr. Nichols calls the wild snow-fields, “ Ancestral acres lapsed but for a time,” because they belonged peculiarly to our progenitors many a century back, and now are recovered as an inheritance by our new sense of the kinship with them that existed in those ancestors, and still remains in our blood. A dangerous accident, which comes near a fatal issue, occurs on the way down, and forms the only noticeable barrier to the volumed flow of meditation and description, from cover to cover; at the end an elegiac mood supervenes, in the contemplation of cycles of endless creation, destruction, and change. The concluding lines are weak. “ We stand,” says the poet,

in trying to imagine what future phases the earth may be going to pass through. But how can infinity have a rim, — that is, a limit ? And if matter is eternal, it were desirable to know whether Mr. Nichols considers God to be matter, or matter to be an outgrowth of everlasting spirit. In general, it may be said of the poem that it lags heavily upon its way; that the author’s expression is often rambling and vague, and his blank verse cold and difficult as Monte Rosa itself. He is guilty of a surprising number of deficient, redundant, and hobbling lines, as these few selections, made at random, unfortunately testify : —

This last is wholly trochaic ; there is not a single iambus in it.

“ Now cling by thinnest crevices, where fingers, toes,”

is an iambic hexameter, instead of a pentameter. It is strange, also, that he should have overlooked so gross a grammatical offense as “ So goeth all things,” on page 147 ; and we are not sure that the Gaelic noun scread warrants him in saying “ louder screeds the gale,” though the verb is doubtless one for which there ought to be an opening. On the other hand, Mr. Nichols at times condenses a great deal into a single sonorous verse; as where he tells how the climber may stand on the mountain-peak

The Epic of an Alp would have been improved by depletion to one half its present length ; but after all, we have read it not without profit, since, in spite of crudity and diffuseness, it leaves in the memory the large, dominant shape of Monte Rosa as a symbol of the human aspiration which has scaled the icy height, and sought to lift others to a corresponding eminence of thought and feeling.

The suspicious prejudice of scientific men, and of the public towards them, does not often allow members of their guild to give imagination freedom in poetic activity, however much that same power of imagination may be exerted in researches of the laboratory and the theories of naturalists. Dr. Holmes, luckily, did not permit his existence as a poet and a wit to be suppressed by the unemotional vacuum in which the medical professor has to work ; and now Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, whose fame as a specialist in troubles of the nerves stands high, demonstrates once more, by his delightful but slender volume of poems,⁴ how persistently the fount of Hippocrene will sometimes bubble up beneath much incumbent weight of useful dryness, percolating at last, and gurgling forth as limpid and as careless as if nothing had ever hindered its flow. It is really a charming series of lyrics and tales and Stimmungs-Gedichte that Dr. Mitchell has placed before us, beginning with the weird and misty legend of The Hill of Stones at Fontainebleau, and passing on through songs of nature, and lyrics strong with repressed vehemence, like Kearsarge and How the Cumberland Went Down, and quiet reveries over pictures in foreign galleries of art. These last we have less liking for than the pieces in which Dr. Mitchell’s quaint fancy and quick sympathy with nature assert themselves. The Shriving of Guinevere, which is a strong and tenderly conceived poem, contains four lines that have a Herrick-like quality : —

We fancy we have found another Marvell, as we read, —

But we are quite sure that, in other passages, we discover only Dr. Mitchell himself, the possessor of a skill to throw into refined and acceptable form sentiments familiar to us all, but in his hands invested with a magic that gives them new meaning. How flawless is the adaptation of an old image in these lines! —

Every one will appreciate the pleasant conceit by which the author makes a pipe-bowl " the wanderer’s only hearth,” glowing with hospitable fires, and the appropriate fancy of his allusion to stunted firs and cedars by the beach,

There is a much greater depth in the question and answer which form the theme of that curiously analytic poem called The Marsh, yet the easy and lucid utterance bring out the thought here as plainly as it does the fancies just referred to. The writer asks, —

The most original and attractive of all these short poems are, we think, the Camp-Fire Lyrics and the one on Elk County. We cannot do better than by quoting a few lines from the latter, which excite a regret that the author’s other occupations have prevented him from following out this vein of interpretation of native scenes : —

The dactylic and trochaic measure here employed Dr. Mitchell handles with much success, producing a novel and breezy effect, which has about it an aboriginal zest. In the same kind of verse is cast the After Sunset camp lyric, which we recognize as an old friend, first met in one of the magazines a few years since, where it was published over an assumed name. Although there are details of his verse that might he criticised, Dr. Mitchell is on the whole a deft and polished artificer, displaying a degree of skill somewhat rare in those who take up the composition of poetry as amateurs. One does not feel that he is an amateur, and it is ground for satisfaction that his poems should have been placed within the reach of appreciative readers.