Mr. William Vaughn Moody's Poems

THE dear tradition of a savage world lying in wait to pounce upon young poets and crunch their bones was never so visibly contrary to the fact, and therefore never so firmly intrenched in popular belief, as at the present day. In reality, national pride feeds itself more and more upon the glories of national literature, and hence it is increasingly necessary, if a rising poet does not exist, to invent him. When he does appear, the cakes and ale are all for him. Rostand and Stephen Phillips are living proofs of the sure welcome which awaits a rebirth of poetry. It is, in fact, this general eagerness of a waiting and lenient world to catch up Clough’s cry, “ Come, Poet, come ! ” and to think a spirit has, in truth, come from the vasty deep simply because it has been called, which makes one take perhaps undue critical alarm, and not look out the window as soon as, it may be, one should at every “ Lo, here ! lo, there ! ” But Mr. William Vaughn Moody has qualities which enable him to conquer even the prejudice aroused by lavish praise. On his first volume of verse, A Masque of Judgment, the verdict of the judicious could not well be other than (in adaptation of Schubert’s epitaph) “ a rich treasure, but still fairer hopes,” and in his latest collection of poems we surely get an installment of the fruition of those hopes.

Of his political poems — An Ode in Time of Hesitation, and On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines — there is no need to speak at length in the pages in which they first appeared and which they adorned. Enough to say, disputed policies aside, that they show Mr. Moody to have that essential gift of the true poet, the capacity to feel with his native land and to be one with his kind. When we add that he has also that “ strain of rareness ” which prompts him to convey rebuke under the guise of moving appeal for a return to temporarily abandoned ideals, and to be a pleading lover rather than a scourging prophet, we see how fine is the equipment of his spirit for patriotic verse. And the high idealism, the pathos and aspiration, of these poems of his which take up large and agitated questions of the day, and which come, even to those in opposite political camps, with the refreshing sense of “ making their meaning clear in verse,” unite to produce, with their distinction of workmanship, an effect for which we should not know to what other to look. But Mr. Moody has followed a sure instinct in giving the place of honor in his volume to a poem, Gloucester Moors, which affords a fairer because broader test of his powers. It shows him, by so much, to have — in addition to the technical mastery of his craft — imagination, sympathy, ability to see the large in the little and the universal in the particular, and originality combined with fidelity to the great poetical tradition. All these are revealed in Gloucester Moors. From copse and cliff the poet’s eye ranges easily to the fishing fleets, and thence to that gallant ship, the old earth, a “ vast outbound ship of souls : ” —

It is all finely imagined, sympathetically rendered, with frequent flash and charm of phrase ; and, at the end, Mr. Moody shows how true a son of our best poets he is by rising to a strain of religious fervor, even if the religion be only that of humanity : —

From Bryant’s Waterfowl down, that solemn finale has been the clear note of our noblest poets, and in it Mr. Moody is true to type. He is also true to the thought and doubt of his time, to the sense of " social compunction ” which fills so many hearts, when he substitutes for Bryant’s organ tone of assurance that man’s steps would be led aright the passionate inquiry and implication of selfreproach which are themselves the promise of ultimate betterment.

It is a delight to find a young poet so enamored of simplicity. This extends to diction. Mr. Moody betrays only the slightest fondness for Swinburnian archaisms. He has, to be sure, “ blooth ” and “ tean ” (teen ?), but in general he finds the common old words good enough for him, as they were for Tennyson, provided he may, by delicate setting, by subtle interfusions, give them new suggestiveness and beauty. An example is from The Bracelet of Grass, —

where every word is ordinary, and only “ harm ” unhappy ; yet what a sense of novelty, of vivid picturing! In his themes, too, Mr. Moody seems to reveal no straining for the fantastic or extraordinary. He deserves the praise that Adelaide Procter, in writing to Hayward, bestowed upon the first numbers of Vanity Fair, in which, she said, Thackeray displayed a “ total absence of affectation ” in describing “ what is simple and true.”

Not that Mr. Moody is simply a wayside poet. He has traveled, he has read, he has thought, and cultivation breathes in all his work. His Dialogue in Purgatory is an acknowledged debt to Dante, and one wonders if Faded Pictures, in which “ only two patient eyes ” were left, —

one wonders if this was not a distinct reminiscence of the “ occhi belli ” of Beatrice : —

There are eyes once more —

in The Daguerreotype, the last poem of the volume, and one which is in some respects the most original and powerfully conceived of them all. But of this, and of the two other longer poems before unpublished, Until the Troubling of the Waters, and Jetsam, we have not left ourselves room to speak. Yet we trust that our impression of Mr. Moody’s rare quality has been sufficiently conveyed. That there is crude execution here and there in his volume we are not concerned to deny; but it would be a very curmudgeon of a critic who did not find pleasure in signalizing the rise of so bright a star upon our poetical horizon.