Book of the East, and Other Poems

By RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

WE like best the larger half of this volume preceding the “ Persian Songs,” “Arab Songs,” and “ Chinese Songs,” which give its title; though we are not sure but our grief with these is because of the kind more than the defect of any one poem. Many of them afford a pleasure not to be marred by the reader’s sense of the unreality of the poet’s attitude, and the intended fantasticality and cold-blooded hyperbole of Occidental achievement in Oriental poetry. Such a one is this little winesong:-

Leigh Hunt himself could not have wrought out this delightful conceit with a more delicate and sufficient simplicity; and we are almost ready, having tasted its fine quality, to recant our profession concerning the Book of the East as a whole. The jarring Western touch (as an allusion to the muses in one place) is sometimes felt; but there is ever so much of grace and daintiness and sweetness in the thought and music. Yet after all, though the poet’s work here is all very well, he lives in other things.

The pieces called “ In Memoriam ” are not without faults ; in fact, they have several; there are some offences against taste, and some passages that lose force through their violence ; but nevertheless they deserve to be classed with a few surpassing efforts in which the poet and his reader stand heart to heart. It is a lament for the death of a little boy ; and its power is not to be spoken, but felt − it is sorrow’s self. The twelfth poem of the series is the very passion of loss ; and we do not know where the sympathy of bereavement has been more tenderly and finely expressed than here : −

It is not a question whether Mr. Stoddard is a poet ; if it had been before he wrote “In Memoriam,” it could not be now. But he long ago answered that question, as every writer is apt to do, without much help or harm from the critics. His brief, sweet poems show an art akin to that of the early English lyrists, but have borrowed no trick or mere quaintness from them. It is real simplicity in Mr. Stoddard’s thought, as well as the musical movement of his verse, which distinguishes him, though he does not always escape that prosaic bareness to which simplicity tends. Here and there, too, is a crudity of style or expression which contrasts oddly enough with the perfection of the best passages. Mr. Stoddard seems for a poet of our time, when nearly all verse is flavored with sweet Tennysonian syrups, and made to taste of the common chemical base, to have kept an unusually large share of the savors of nature. Not but that he can be artificial too, if he likes; there are as tiresome bits of unreality in this little book as an enemy could wish to find ; but the characteristic traits are a habit of original feeling, a clearness of utterance, and a lyrical touch. Some of the pieces are pure songs : expressions of mood and emotion. not vexing with deep meaning, but versing the inarticulate momentary regrets and longings; others like the following are of subtler and deeper thought, and with equal music, mark the difference between a song to be sung and a poem to be read.

We always liked, with some slight reservations, Mr. Stoddard’s poem “ Adsum, ” on Thackeray’s death, which we find here ; the ode on Abraham Lincoln is good, too, and the “Cæsar.” A very striking poem is “ Why stand ye gazing up into heaven ? ” which is none the less remarkable because it attempts no certain answer to the unanswerable.