Songs of the Sierras
By
Boston:
Roberts Brothers.
MR. MILLER'S poetry, which has been called a new creation, — the phrase is novel and happy, — has not quite freed itself of all the traits of the parent chaos ; and vast tracts of water and very dry land are still wrapped in the dimness of more or less forgotten intention, though here and there a lonely height or favored valley is touched with the light of
“ The consecration and the poet’s dream.”
One poem he has written, as we must believe in spite of the foolish praises lavished upon all his work, —an imperfect and now and then ludicrously faulty poem, but still a poem. This is the “Arizonian,” a moving story, vividly told, with passages of peculiar beauty and force. The passage following the quarrel of the Arizonian and his brown Indian love is one of these : —
“ ' She turn’d from the door and down to the river,
And mirror’d her face in the whimsical tide ;
Then threw back her hair, as if throwing a quiver,
As an Indian throws it back far from his side
And free from his hands, swinging fast to the shoulder,
When rushing to battle ; and, rising, she sigh’d
And shook, and shiver’d as aspens shiver.
Then a great green snake slid into the river,
Glistening, green, and with eyes of fire ;
Quick, double-handed she seized a boulder,
And cast it with all the fury of passion,
As with lifted head it went curving across,
Swift darting its tongue like a fierce desire,
Curving and curving, lifting higher and higher,
Bent and beautiful as a river moss ;
Then, smitten, it turn’d, bent, broken, and doubled,
And lick’d, red-tongued, like a forkéd fire,
And sank, and the troubled waters bubbled,
And then swept on in their old swift fashion.’ ”
And mirror’d her face in the whimsical tide ;
Then threw back her hair, as if throwing a quiver,
As an Indian throws it back far from his side
And free from his hands, swinging fast to the shoulder,
When rushing to battle ; and, rising, she sigh’d
And shook, and shiver’d as aspens shiver.
Then a great green snake slid into the river,
Glistening, green, and with eyes of fire ;
Quick, double-handed she seized a boulder,
And cast it with all the fury of passion,
As with lifted head it went curving across,
Swift darting its tongue like a fierce desire,
Curving and curving, lifting higher and higher,
Bent and beautiful as a river moss ;
Then, smitten, it turn’d, bent, broken, and doubled,
And lick’d, red-tongued, like a forkéd fire,
And sank, and the troubled waters bubbled,
And then swept on in their old swift fashion.’ ”
A sudden Arizonian tempest destroys her, and the miner goes home to find the fair early love, some reminiscence of whom had roused the jealous fury of the Indian ; but he finds instead her daughter, woman grown. The scene where he comes into the village “ in the fringe of the night ” (we object to the phrase), and mistakes the daughter for the mother, is well painted ; and the poem is often excellently dramatic, told as it is by the Arizonian himself, with his half-crazed sense of his own blame, and his half-conscious struggle to justify his part, and his groping sorrow and trouble in it all. But the rude strength of his figure is sadly marred by the scraps of Old-World tinsel with which he is decorated. It is so difficult, in speaking of Mr. Miller’s verse, not to take cognizance of the clamor about him, that we may forgive ourselves for suggesting that these ornaments seetn to have been lent him by his English friends for the embellishment of Lis hero. When we find, for example, in the possession of the Arizonian, such phraseology as this,
“ As the wave sang strophes in the broken reeds,”
we suspect an ill-timed generosity on the part of the classic Mr. Swinburne ; and when the much-untravelled miner speaks of
“ That beautiful bronze with its soul of fire,”
are we not to imagine a like error of the head, but not of the heart, in the medieval Mr. Rossetti ?
We are trying to say, in an ungracious fashion, that it is rather a ruinous thing to be a phenomenon anywhere, and that Mr. Miller is the worse poet for his English triumph ; but our consolation is that he will never believe us. In “ With Walker in Nicaragua ” he shows a deepening consciousness, and a high resolution to be surprisingly untamed, unkempt, top-booted and long-spurred, and lariated and scraped. “ He was a brick,” he says of Walker at the outset.
“ And brave as Yuba’s grizzlies are,
Yet gentle as a panther is,
Mouthing her young in her first fierce kiss,”
Yet gentle as a panther is,
Mouthing her young in her first fierce kiss,”
in which figurative beast of prey we fear that we detect again the taint of a decrepit civilization ; she is a heroine of modern cockney mediæval and classical poetry, who is always fierce in her affections, and kisses in just that way. When Mr. Miller will consent to forget himself and admirers, he can paint a striking picture; and in this poem are several very striking ones. Here is a glimpse of a march through a tropic wood, which is very brilliant in color ; how true we do not know : —
“ And snakes, long, lithe, and beautiful
As green and graceful-bough’d bamboo,
Did twist and twine them through and through
The boughs that hung red-fruited full.
One, monster-sized, above me hung.
Close eyed me with his bright pink eyes,
Then raised his folds, and sway’d and swung.
And lick’d like lightning his red tongue,
Then oped his wide mouth with surprise ;
He writhed and curved, and raised and lower'd
His folds like liftings of the tide,
And sank so low I touched his side.
As I rode by, with my broad sword.
As green and graceful-bough’d bamboo,
Did twist and twine them through and through
The boughs that hung red-fruited full.
One, monster-sized, above me hung.
Close eyed me with his bright pink eyes,
Then raised his folds, and sway’d and swung.
And lick’d like lightning his red tongue,
Then oped his wide mouth with surprise ;
He writhed and curved, and raised and lower'd
His folds like liftings of the tide,
And sank so low I touched his side.
As I rode by, with my broad sword.
“ The trees shook hands high overhead,
And bow'd and intertwined across
The narrow way, while leaves and moss
And luscious fruit, gold-hued and red,
Through all the canopy of green.
Let not one suushaft shoot between.
And bow'd and intertwined across
The narrow way, while leaves and moss
And luscious fruit, gold-hued and red,
Through all the canopy of green.
Let not one suushaft shoot between.
“ Birds hung and swung, green-robed and red.
Or droop’d in curved lines dreamily,
Rainbows reversed, from tree to tree,
Or sang low-hanging overhead, —
Sang low, as if they sang and slept,
Sang faint, like some far waterfall,
And took no note of us at all,
Though nuts that in the way were spread
Did crush and crackle as we stept. ”
Or droop’d in curved lines dreamily,
Rainbows reversed, from tree to tree,
Or sang low-hanging overhead, —
Sang low, as if they sang and slept,
Sang faint, like some far waterfall,
And took no note of us at all,
Though nuts that in the way were spread
Did crush and crackle as we stept. ”
The reader perceives the tawdriness of such lines as
“ The trees shook hands high overhead ” ;
and these are too many to be specified, though we must say that we particularly object to
“ With wild soul plashing to the sky,”
and
“ The warm sea laid his dimpled face
With every white hair smoothed in place.”
With every white hair smoothed in place.”
We wish also to express our doubts if the cockatoos do not sing too much in Mr. Miller’s tropic ; though in that zone, of course, he has most of his critics at a disadvantage.
The “ Kit Carson’s Ride ” is so outrageously bad as a poem that it need not be discussed. But its injustice to a man of simply heroic life, and, by all accounts, of generous deeds and instincts, is something that the badness of the poetry cannot repair, and ought not to pass without protest. Kit Carson is a figure of rough sublimity in the annals of the Far West; and an author who has the ear of the world — it is not so fine as it is long — has no right to give his name to a selfish, theatrical knave, fit only to ride over a green-baize prairie before a painted fire into a canvas river.
The best poem in the book, after “ Arizonian,” is “The Tale of the Tall Alcalde,” though this, like some of the worst, has the misery of a dreary unreality upon it all,
“ An agony
Of lamentation like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land where no one comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world,
Of lamentation like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land where no one comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world,
and leaves the reader unwholesomely doubtful of the existence of the Pacific slope, its Indian tribes, its borderers and renegades. Yet this poem too has noble effects, and here is a picture of an after-battle scene that has the repose aird high beauty of the best art: —
“ The calm, that cometh after all,
Look’d sweetly down at shut of day,
Where friend and foe commingled lay
Like leaves of forest as they fall.
Afar the sombre mountains frown’d,
Here tall pines wheel'd their shadows round
Like long, slim fingers of a hand
That sadly pointed out the dead.
Like some broad shield high overhead
The great white moon led on and on,
As leading to the better land.
You might have heard the cricket’s trill,
Or night-birds calling from the hill,
The place was so profoundly still.
Look’d sweetly down at shut of day,
Where friend and foe commingled lay
Like leaves of forest as they fall.
Afar the sombre mountains frown’d,
Here tall pines wheel'd their shadows round
Like long, slim fingers of a hand
That sadly pointed out the dead.
Like some broad shield high overhead
The great white moon led on and on,
As leading to the better land.
You might have heard the cricket’s trill,
Or night-birds calling from the hill,
The place was so profoundly still.
But on the other hand the poem abounds insuch insanities as this : —
“ And through the leaves the silver moon
Fell sifting down in silver bars
And play’d upon her raven hair,
And darted through like dimpled stars
That dance through all the night’s sweet noon
To echoes of an unseen choir.”
Fell sifting down in silver bars
And play’d upon her raven hair,
And darted through like dimpled stars
That dance through all the night’s sweet noon
To echoes of an unseen choir.”
And you come to the good things only after hope deferred has made the heart sick.
We will not speak of the remaining poems in Mr. Miller’s volume, for they have the same characteristics with those we have mentioned, and afford no ground for farther comment. He is a poet whom we cannot at all accept at the valuation of his panegyrists, but in whom we are glad to recognize a true dramatic and descriptive faculty amidst a dreadful prolixity and chasmal vacancies. As yet, he cannot be said to have secured any place in literature. But he has the hearing of the world and a grand opportunity.