Recent Poetry

Is there a mood in which one should read poetry ? Possibly, if the poetry be the expression of a mood. The wiser answer looks to a mood created by the poetry which one reads, and requires that poetry itself should issue from a state of thought and feeling which is beyond the power of caprice. A fine example of a mood passing into a state, and being thus rid of mere caprice, is in Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence. Certainly, the test of poetry which is to stand all weathers is in its power to recall one to that which is permanent in human experience ; in its answer not to temporary, fitful gusts of feeling, but to those elemental movements of our nature which lie open to inspiration. The sifting of the older verse is after this silent fashion. Men drop the accidental and hold to the incidental, to that which belongs to poetry rather than to the poet and his times. They do not by this discard the personal, but they require that the personal shall have the essential attributes of personality, and not the mere dress of the period.

It is here that the difficulty comes in reading the newest poetry. We who read are not quite sure that we bring to the reading minds unembarrassed by the mere fashion and show of things. Yet we have this advantage, — and it is one with the poets themselves, — that there exists a permanent body of poetry which is beyond the chances and changes of mortal life. This body of poetry may be added to: we look eagerly in each generation for such additions. It may be departed from in form; but it remains substantially intact, imperishable, new to each generation of men, because its age is the sign of its eternal youth. It furnishes a standard not only for the comparison of new poetry, but for the measure of theology and philosophy. The consensus of poets is really the final tribunal of human thought.

There is a perceptible restlessness nowadays at the absence of new and notable poetry ; a half-expressed doubt if poetry has not folded its wings and flown to other spheres, perhaps remaining behind to touch secretly the heart of the novelist, but lingering in an atmosphere inapt for poetic breath. We have no fears. Poetry is not an accidental visitor in this world of ours. If we fancy that agnosticism, for example, must have a new form of expression, or that science has an expulsory power, we shall be wise to wait a bit. Poetry is to decide whether these forms of intellectual life are to abide ; they are not the judges. Agnosticism is trying its hand at verse. The most cheerful gnostic could ask no better test of the permanence of the mood.

It is thus of little consequence that when one gathers the fall harvest of poetry in this country he surveys his gains with a compassionate smile. It is true that the gleaner may yet find some golden grain, unobserved by the critical reaper ; but taking the field as most see it, the poetic yield is noticeably slight. To change the figure, here is but a halfpenny worth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread. Yet as a thimbleful of lachryma christi outweighs a gallon of New England cider, one need not be wholly in despair because the quantity is so meagre.

To help us in our measure of recent poetry, we are fortunate in having a new draught of the old. For a long time to come new poetry in America will be read by those who have been bred on Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Lowell: it will not necessarily be written in the supposition of these poets, but whoever comes before the public will find that a standard of poetry exists which they have formed. The prolongation of notes from the elder poets is one of the most delightful pleasures which the ear already attuned can receive ; and since no imitation, however close, can have the same charm, we care less at this moment for any poet who may be a disciple of Mr. Whittier than we do for Mr. Whittier himself.

The little volume ¹ which bears the name of its first poem is to the lovers of this poet a reminiscence of all that they enjoy in his verse. Here is the story in which the sea seems almost one of the actors ; the harrowing tale of Puritan ferocity with the antithesis of a gentler, purer Christianity ; the landscape of mountain and storm ; the version of an Israelite legend ; the playful, tender thought of friends; the parable ; the large, patriotic, prophetic psalm of the country; the wistful, trusting look into the future; the mellow memory ; and the quiet revelation of the poet’s own personal aspect of life. The verse shows no new essays, but the poet has struck the notes familiar to him, and the reader has a grateful sense of the ease and firmness of the touch.

One renews his admiration for the power with which Mr. Whittier reproduces color and movement in his poems. Our readers will recall the Storm on Lake Asquam,² which is included in this volume, and if they read it again will mark the vigorous imagination which records a great moment in nature, and at once lifts it into personality : the rise of the storm, its fury and its decline to a peaceful end, are given with a definiteness of art which a painter could scarcely make more bright to the eye.

It is, however, in the history of human faith and love that this poet finds his best inspiration. He rarely surprises one, for it is not the novel but the common experience which most quickly finds him ; his simple power of repeating in melodious form a sentiment which needs no singular interpretation is a rare poetic gift, accepted naturally by listeners, and only wondered at when compared with the commonplace which is its easy imitation. Thus he has turned the association of Mr. Longfellow’s last birthday with the observance of it by public school children into a lovely poem. The thought was in everybody’s mind; it was a poetic thought, which arose easily, and had become a commonplace, so to speak, before Mr. Whittier touched it. What has he done, then, in casting it in poetic form ? He has enshrined it. He has also, unconsciously we think, imparted something of the charm of Mr. Longfellow’s own manner, so that in reading it we are affected as if the dead poet were himself reciting the lines.

THE POET AND THE CHILDREN.

H. W. L.

It is pleasant to pass from an elder to a younger poet, and find that we are not called upon to throw away what we have cared for in poetry at the demand of a singer of later fashion. Mr. Thompson is in the succession of poets ; he appears to have made no frantic effort to go off into a corner and flock all by himself, but has joined the birds whose notes are already familiar. None the less, he adds a distinct note of his own. For both these facts let us be profoundly thankful. Mr. Thompson has long been known as an ardent advocate of archery, and many of the poems in his little book³ find their occasion in his hunting. What pleases us is that he has not felt himself bound to turn any back somersaults, in his poetry, because he shoots with a bow instead of a double-barreled gun. The genuineness of his verse ought to convince people, if they had any doubt, of the genuineness of Mr. Thompson’s archery, and that he is not masquerading as the Robin Hood of Indiana. For sincerity is the finest note of this volume. One gets a little tired of the praise of outdoor verse, and inclined to charge affectation on the poets who make an imperative demand upon us to leave our books and seek a more intimate acquaintance with nature. Mr. Thompson has none of this nonsense. He has a healthy passion for the woods, and he sings at his sport. How pretty is his little poem on The Archer ! Its hint of Robin Hood is simple enough. Robin Hood is the titular saint of archers, as Izaak Walton is of fishermen. Most of the people who are enthusiastic over one or the other never read a line of the ballads, or troubled themselves as to Walton’s Angler. It is the proper thing to refer to them, but Mr. Thompson impresses us as one who has read his ballads, and has made them a part of nature. There is a faint reminder in his verse of William Barnes, the Dorsetshire poet. It is not necessary that Mr. Thompson should ever have read a line of Barnes’s Rural Poems ; it is enough that the two poets have the same unaffected love of nature in its details, and especially in its animated life, and the same simple domestic feeling, although this has a larger share in Barnes’s themes. We are sure, for instance, that Mr. Barnes would enjoy

A FLIGHT SHOT.

Mr. Thompson employs this favorite measure very felicitously in a number of poems, like that collection named In Haunts of Bass and Bream, and gives one a real sense of free air and wooded depths. It is clear that he owes his inspiration largely to the joyous sharing of nature by day and by night. Possibly he is now and then a little over-conscious of this, but he is so frank in his moods that we rather look upon his more positive praises of nature as a bit of poetic proselyting, done in the fervor of an apostle of the woods and streams. Wherever he is reporting what he has seen he is strong, simple, and often finely imaginative, as in his little poem entitled Solace. We hesitate to follow him only when he Hellenizes. There is no reason why a dweller on the Wabash should not reproduce a Greek statue as fairly as Keats a Greek vase, and the chances are in favor of the poet who gets at his perception of Greek life through a free intercourse with nature; but we suspect that Mr. Thompson has not gone straight to Helicon from the Wabash, but has taken London in the way, for there is a color about some of his Grecian themes which seems to owe a little of its warmth to the Rossetti school. About some of them, we say,— not about all; for Diana is a poem fresh from an archer’s heart, and Ceres may be found on a Western prairie.

We half grudge Englishmen the verses In Exile, in which, in a half-shy, half-confidential mood, the young poet seems to mingle a longing for our Old Home with a desire for the recognition of his verse there ; but we content ourselves by thinking that it is the England of our dreams from which he is in exile, and the England of song to which he would be united. It will go ill, but American readers shall welcome one of their own kind ; and yet we smile furtively as we think how perplexed some foreign well-wishers will be when they try to square Mr. Thompson’s light, melodious, and graceful verse with what they fancy the West ought to give them. For ourselves, we rejoice over the appearance of a genuine poet in a State which is popularly supposed to produce chiefly candidates for the presidency. We leave him after copying one more of his poems, for its quickness of life and its flashes of color : —

A MORNING SAIL.

Mr. Thompson, with his bow and arrows, making fresh acquaintance with nature is a peculiarly American figure, and one that we watch with the pleasure of anticipation. It is youth gone a-hunting, we say to ourselves, and the songs of fair weather which he sings have the gladness and lightness of youth. Yet Nature has other moods, and though we come back to a more conventional acquaintance with her, through the interpretation of Mr. Story,⁴ the contrast serves to heighten the effect of each poet. Mr. Story takes us into a glen, and we have our out-door poetry as he pleases ; but it is poetry out of a portfolio, read and enjoyed and commented on by the poet and a friend, two people of mature taste and highly civilized instincts. The scheme of the book is a clever and attractive one. The poet, who requires no other title than He, “ was in the habit,” Mr. Story tells us, “ of wandering alone, during the summer mornings, through the forest and along the mountain side, and one of his favorite haunts was a picturesque glen, where he often sat for hours alone with nature, lost in vague contemplation : now watching the busy insect life in the grass or in the air ; now listening to the chirming of birds in the woods, the murmuring of bees hovering about the flowers, or the welling of the clear mountain torrent, that told forever its endless tale as it wandered by mossy bowlders and rounded stones down to the valley below; now gazing idly into the sky, against which the overhanging beeches printed their leaves in tessellated light and dark, or vaguely watching the lazy clouds that trailed across the tender blue ; now noting in his portfolio some passing thought, or fancy, or feeling, that threw its gleam of light or shadow across his dreaming mind.”

This is the familiar picture, which the mind recognizes, of the poet who sketches out-of-doors, and Mr. Story’s ingenuity is in turning the figure into one of the speakers of a graceful little dialogue; for while he is thus fulfilling the poetic function, She, who also needs and has no other title, comes upon him, and conversation takes place. The conversation is between a gentleman and gentlewoman. She taxes him with having a book full of verses, and demands to hear them ; he pleads guilty and waves the matter aside, but after a little pressure consents to read a poem. The poem read, they fall to discussing it in an airy, half-bantering fashion ; and thereupon another follows, with more comment, and another, and so on, to the end of the book, when the little scene closes with a description of the glen itself in which the two have been sitting.

The scheme is a pretty one, and is carried out daintily. The comment is close enough to criticism to echo more than once the thought which leaps to the reader’s lips, and the tone is that of high breeding, delicate, not too profound, frank, courteous, and sometimes penetrating. The reader is beguiled from point to point, and the rests between the poems which the talk affords are better to him than silences. We must congratulate Mr. Story on his ingenious conceit, and on the deftness with which he elaborates it: a little more handling, and he might have tired us ; a little less, and he might have failed to keep us.

There are a score and a half of poems in the little volume, and to read them in succession, as they should be read, in their setting, is to pass an agreeable evening with two charming people, one of them a poet. The moods of the verse are various, but the subjects are chiefly of persons rather than of nature. With nature, indeed, we begin, in a poem which calls for the staying of a happy day; but we pass lightly to personal thoughts, to glimpses of the outer passions, then into deeper moods, until the poetry and the talk become quieter, more serious, and more searching. This movement of the book is artistic, and yet strikes us as half accidental, and that with a little more pains the author might have given his work a stronger effect by regarding the transition more carefully.

In the range which Mr. Story’s verse takes in this volume, one may easily please himself. If he likes the vers de société, he will find it to his mind in the very musical waltzing song, or in this Mistake, which we copy, with the beginning of the slight conversation which follows: —

“ You are so young ; while Time of me
Has made a cruel prey,
It has forgotten you, nor swept
One grace of youth away.

“ She. Ha, ha ! That was a pretty mistake; but you got out of it fairly well.

“ He. Yes ; I got the old man’s privilege, but I don’t know that that is a great consolation. A man begins to feel old, really, when the young girls are not shy of him, and let him kiss them without making any fuss about it, but almost as a matter of course. As long as they blush and draw back, he flatters himself that he is not really so old, after all. The last, worst phase is when they don’t wait for him, but come and kiss him of their own accord. Oh, that is too much. Gout is nothing to that, nor white hairs.”

If one wishes for the dramatic monologue after Browning’s manner, he will find it in the sleighing incident and in the poem called A Moment; if he would see Mr. Story at his best, let him read his Io Victis and his fancied translation from a lost ode of Horace. The description of the glen, with which the book closes, takes the poet in reverie into the Grecian thought of nature. In his reflective mood he partly echoes the feeling which drew from Mr. Thompson the impulsive words, after reading Theocritus, —

Mr. Story, in his more philosophical way, broods over the mystery of nature, and writes,—

No one can have missed the accompaniment of Greece to the Little Renaissance which we are now enjoying. So we are not surprised at coming upon a new volume⁵ of American verse, which turns quite distinctly to Greece for its inspiration ; for though Mr. Moore names his book Poems Antique and Modern, the antique themes predominate, and the modern appear to be influenced by a habit of mind formed upon a study of the antique. The most striking and significant of these poems is the first and longest, Herakles, in seven books. Mr. Moore reconstructs the myth, using for his material the incidents of the hero’s career, but making them all tell upon a certain poetic conception of Herakles, which is more or less akin to the conception of Prometheus ; that is, Herakles is taken as a figure of man conceived as a mighty physical force, unintellectual, slow, massive, capable of hate and love, but with a very elemental constitution, just as Prometheus may be taken as a figure of man, conscious of intellectual life, yet exercising his intellect through the simplest forms.

So the poem opens. The fight with the lion follows, and is finely used by the poet to signalize the awaking by Herakles to consciousness of his strength. It is but a line which notifies the reader; thrown in almost casually, yet with real significance: —

The incidents of the fight are splendidly imagined. Stripped of the investiture of imagery, they are found in an attack by Herakles, with the aid of a goring bull, upon the lion, which he topples over a cliff. Then the man and beast confront each other warily, moving in vast circles, until Herakles, missing his footing, falls into a deep ravine. He recovers himself in the night which follows, contrives a gigantic bow and arrows, and with these kills the lion.

The first book is occupied with this theme, and although a careful reading is required of one or two passages, which are so rich in decoration as to confuse the mind for a moment, the story is told with great impressiveness. One feels the mist of an early antiquity about it, in the absence of other figures than that of Herakles and the brutes, while the forms of nature have scarcely yet lost their personal realism.

To follow the course of the poem would be to follow the hero through adventures which add at each stroke new characteristics of humanity. He strives with Helios, the sun god, drives him off victoriously, and receives a visit from Keiron, who recites the incident of the strangling of serpents in his cradle. “ Come with us,” cries the centaur king, “ and be our fellow through futurity ! ” He accompanies the centaurs, and yet this first comradeship, in which he rises from the animal into a half-completed humanity, carries with it dim forebodings. It is the sense of a conflict yet to come between him and his companions, for at the feast given by Pirithous, when the centaurs are slain, Herakles is the one who is fated to slay them while aiming at their enemies. Mr. Moore has, so far as we know, invented this version of the incident, and he turns it to admirable account. It is a part of the gradual humanizing of Herakles, which inevitably leads him into destruction of the tie which binds man to the beast. The strife and the burial of the centaurs leave Herakles alone, with the words of Keiron in his ears: —

This is the prophecy of the life of Herakles, and perhaps it may be taken as the key to the conception of the character, but in the unfolding of the poem there are still fuller disclosures of the growth of the soul of man. Mr. Moore disregards the story of the labors, but takes his hero’s career up again at the quarrel with Eurytus, and so brings Omphale upon the scene, binds Herakles in her chains, and through the power of womanhood lifts him to a higher plane. Then Herakles makes a descent into hell, and finally, at the end of his life, is visited by Hermes with a promise of the life of a god. He refuses, and has a vision of life, death, immortality, in which he is left alone by men and gods, returns as it were to Nature, and ends his days in her arms.

In our hurried synopsis of the contents of the poem, we have half put our own interpretation on the poem, half followed the author’s lead. It is a poem so well worth studying that we have wished rather to hint at its richness than to attempt a full exposition. The thought, if we have discovered it, is essentially pagan, but so is the theme, and we like better the dramatic paganism of Mr. Moore than the confused mingling of modern paganism with old forms which confronts one so constantly in the work of the English school of Hellenistic poets.

We have lingered so long over Herakles that we shall dismiss the rest of the volume with no other words than such as may apply to the first poem also : namely, that Mr. Moore seems at his best in the antique; that he has a rich, powerful imagination ; that he is often reckless in his speech and careless in his measure. He does not always succeed in making his meaning clear, and he is misled by the fertility of his imagination into a prodigality which often destroys one’s pleasure in the verse. That he should sometimes recall Keats or Shelley is not strange, nor is it necessarily to his discredit. The poet who has studied models carefully is not therefore unlikely to create models in time. His book can scarcely command popularity, but it ought to excite the liveliest interest of all who are watching for the development of poetry in America.

Thus, though we were half disposed at first to join in the self-commiseration over the paucity of poetic ventures, we are not sure but the season may be called a somewhat notable one, which brings to pass the publication of four books so individually interesting and worthy as those which we have had in review. Mr. Whittier keeps in our memory the treasures we already had ; Mr. Thompson lights the horizon with a bright flush ; Mr. Story helps us to recognize the facile grace which poetry may lend to our worldly life ; and Mr. Moore comes with his large, forcible verse to show that art and poetry have not yet taken leave of imagination and surrendered themselves to the lighter chains of fancy.