Four New Books of Poetry

THE business of a first book of verse is to prove the author’s right to be considered as a poet, the presumption that a new author is not a poet being so strong that, unless there are some very striking qualities in his work, the question is not even mooted, infinitely far less settled in his favor by it. The proof is usually to come afterwards, often very long afterwards. In the mean time, it is the critic’s care not to be indulgent, but to be patient, and if possible — it is a good deal — to be modest. The more fully Mr. Gilder’s critic realizes this obligation, the less decidedly will he write about him;¹ but it is amusing to think what short work the average Anglo - Saxon critic would once have made of his book; how, with his mouth half-full of thistle, he would have stamped upon all this pretty garden ground of sentiment, and beaten its leaf and blossom into the earth; how he would have brayed out his disdain of this suffusive sweetness, which one hardly knows whether to call a flavor or a perfume, this delicacy which is so bold, this incoherence which waits as confidingly upon the hearer’s close attention and intimate sympathy as childhood in its lispings. In decent places, the author has no longer this dull and cruel brute — so long the shame and terror of literature — to dread; but he has much to lose by critical hurry, indifference, and impatience.

To tell the truth, Mr. Gilder does ask a great deal. He asks no less, apparently, than that we shall put ourselves into the mood, the mental frame, of a contemporary reader of the Vita Nuova and the mystical early Italian canzonaries and sonneteers. He believes that there is perpetually in the human heart a response to such allegoried expression of passion as his songs and sonnets; that there is something to be enjoyed in poetry which is as independent of intellectual definition as color is of form in a painting. So there is, we think, but not in the degree that he be lieves. After bringing to his book the willingest mind in the world, and listening to it all with a sense not strange or alien to the faintest, least articulate whisperings of poetic revery, we must still blame him for obscurity, for leaving his reader aching for meanings that he only seems to have caught, for even triviality or a culpable insensibility to the difference between the important and the unimportant. Something more serious still might be urged against him, namely, that once or twice he gives to his feeling an overathletic, almost carnal imagery, as in the sonnets called The Riddle of Lovers, and The Dark Room. This is the more regrettable because one is always sure of the absolute purity of the poet’s thought and intent.

Some things make us think that Mr. Gilder may have learnt to like the Italian poets, whose influence he shows, through a certain modern English school; but he has avoided the excesses of that school. Here and there is a charming gesture or attitude pictured in his verse, and now and then a bit of landscape; but it is a great comfort to find that he writes from an inkstand with a pen, and not from a palette with a brush. Here, for instance, is a very beautiful little poem, which is also a fortunate illustration of our meaning: —

THE RIVER.

This is, on the whole, the most pleasing and perfect of the love-poems; it is very lovely, tender, true, and enriched with that sort of surprise which is now the costliest and rarest thing in the literature of sentiment.

When we, said it was the most satisfactory of the love-poems, we were thinking of two other poems in the book that seemed to us vastly better than all, except this; we mean The Sower, and There is Nothing New under the Sun, which are remarkably impressive for their clearness, strength, and fervency.

Especially is it comfortable, after groping from allegory to allegory, and guessing this hard saying and that, to come on the last-named poem, which is cried into you, as it were, with a mighty directness and distinctness, in words that could not have been more forcibly ordered. All the more is it a pity that the poet had to say —

the litten being a literary affectation whose limpness is intolerable just where it is.

The last line of the sonnet, I count my Times by Times that I meet thee, is one of those uncommonly good verses you come upon in poems of Mr. Gilder’s that you do not otherwise care much for. He says to his love, —

which gives, better than any other line we know, the lover’s sense of being arraigned by the divine purity of his own passion. The whole book is indeed for lovers; they will read it by the purple light which its interpretation demands, and never, we dare say, find its passionate repetitions of love, love, love, at all cloying or monotonous, as those not similarly preoccupied may. They will also see the elusive relations of the parts to each other, and will trace out in the book that form of poetic unity which we fear must remain for most people the statue in the marble block.

Mr. Lathrop’s ² poetic world is much nearer our planet than that in which Mr. Gilder has his being, but there need be no further comparison between two books of verse which may alike refresh us with their promise. The former is certainly best where he is most objective. His more introspective studies, however finely wrought, and expressed with whatever delicate clearness, do not escape an effect of being set about, deliberated, intended; though perhaps this effect is inseparable from that whole order of poetry. A man is often interesting to himself in proportion as he is unlike other men; he is always interesting to other men in proportion as he is like them; and the poet moves us most when we find ourselves in him; then he consoles and charms. But when he isolates himself in some obscure experience, or indivisible fancy, or inalienable emotion, as the subjective poet is apt to do, he aggrieves his race, and it hardens its heart against him justly. It is a tendency that the young poet especially must guard ; the older singer, who becomes in his life-time historically interesting, may less dangerously indulge it. Mr. Lathrop has felt something like this truth in the close of what we think on the whole his most beautiful poem, Fairhaven Bay. He stands by the ruin of an old farm-house, where “ the ignorant, elastic sod ” has forgotten the vanished dwellers, where even the fallen hearthstone has forgotten them, and thinks, —

The sympathy confessed here with so fine and sweet an accent is what gives its peculiarly tender charm to the longest poem in the book. Mr. Tennyson has made it difficult and even perilous to write any rustic story in blank verse, nowadays, so ready are our senses to catch his cadences in every minor strain. But we think Mr. Lathrop has faced his danger with due sense, and has made a poem which, though it cannot well escape the censure of being written since Dora and Enoch Arden, is very safely and fully his own. Indeed, a notable thing about all his poetic attitudes is how very little they are studied from those of other poets. In The Silent Tide he has imagined a touching story with American circumstance and character sufficiently discriminated, and he tells it with delicacy, courage, and simplicity. So far as we know, it is the first successful attempt to treat the common facts of our rural life in the higher poetic manner, and it is in a field from which a rich harvest may be won. We could wish at times, we own, a firmer clutch upon the manners studied and a little more sharpness in the outlines of the situations, but we are not sure, after all, that it would not lose an indefinite charm by this rigor. Where some finer instinct than mere allegiance to the facts of every-day life is requisite the poet is passionately firm and strong, as in this good passage describing the sailor’s meeting after many years with the woman whose marriage to his brother had driven him away: —

There are several matters in the poem extremely well managed, as the encounter of Grace’s son with Jerry when the boy is running away from home in Ins turn; and the miserable strife of the home from which he fied was a thing taking courage to do at all, and unusual skill to do well.

We like all parts of the poem Helen at the Loom. It is done with a solid and simple grace which is proper to the theme, and throughout is that sense of classic beauty which in the opening lines appeals to the reader like a glimpse of an antique frieze: —

Here, as elsewhere in Mr. Lathrop’s poems (and perhaps even more in Mr. Gilder’s), the reader has satisfaction in the beauty of the just-right words which the verse is built with, —not encrusted, as sometimes happens with poetry which at first gives an impression of greater richness.

We purposely pass by the pieces of Mr. Lathrop’s that seem to wear a perfunctory air, because we may be mistaken about them, and because we do not know what to say of them more than that we wish them away. They probably make their last appearance here, and they do not affect his real quality, which appears in such a subtly lovely poem as The Singing Wire, and in such proofs of a penetrating sympathy with the moods of Nature as An April Aria, and A Rune of the Rain. The last seems to us so close a study of the subject as to be almost uniquely good; at least, no poet’s nerves ever thrilled with a keener sense or more vivid intelligence than his who here reports the passion, the career, the quick pauses, the renewal, the slow passing and final vanishing of a spring tempest.

It is curious to note in Mr. Taylor’s new book³ the different sort of spirit in which an elder poet, who perhaps loves Nature as well, observes and listens to her: it is with a sort of sad impatience ; he is as fond of those familiar aspects as ever; he paints them with an affectionate touch, but in themselves they no longer suffice as they once did; they cannot console, though they can still vaguely torment with their beauty. They set him thinking, longing, almost repining,

and through the poet’s strain runs the experienced discontent of the traveler who has seen the ancient homes of art and the haunts of the fair old superstitions, the records of a moral freedom that permitted more joy to life, and who comes back to his native fields to find them echoless and irresponsive. There is probably, indeed, no well-ordered Pennsylvanian neighborhood in which Pan and his leaf-fringed followers of either sex would not be taken up for the worst sort of tramps; and we suspect that the friend of the beautiful will never find in our Sabbath-keeping civilization any toleration for beauty that has not been formally baptized, taught in the Sundayschools, and bound in wedlock by the minister or the justice of the peace to whatever art will be content to love her in a high - necked dress. Let us also bless Heaven that it is so; for after all it is not picturesqueness that is next to godliness. To tell the truth, we do not value the speculations in the poems May, August, and November, so much as the real poetic soul in them: the recognition of the loveliness and quaintness of Nature, and the capricious association or contrast of recollected scenes with the familiar landscape. Yet these speculations have their value, and once in a way it is well to have indulged them. Something of the kind all " cultivated Americans” are now thinking or feeling, or thinking they feel; they are the prey of self-inspection, self-distrust, selfdespite, and are all more or less sorry that they were not born noble, or antique, or at least foreign. Mr. Taylor gives the poetico-moral cast of a discontent that is oftener political, not only in these pastorals but in several other pieces of his new volume; it might almost be said to characterize the collection, if the collection were not more deeply characterized by the poet’s essential glad-heartedness, good sense, and singularly likable single-mindedness — his sort of German sincerity of soul. There are three Pennsylvania ballads in this book—The Holly Tree, John Reed, and The Old Pennsylvania Farmer — which are marvelously good in their way, the first showing an unerring observation of the poetic side of country manners and a charming sympathy, and the others a strong dramatic realization of special rustic character. Then how sweet and true is such a poem as The Two Homes, and how tender and kind is such a one as The Sleeper! Why does he not always write so, one wonders; and wonders again whether the secret of this poet’s failure to make, with all his skill, his industry, his good performance, his high conception of his office, any sufficiently distinct poetic impression may not be due to an ambition more various than his real impulses. We have no man of letters whose purposes and whose achievements are more honorable. In one of several ways he could he very eminent; but he seems too often betrayed by experiment, and dispersed by a manifold fair success.

In Mr. Taylor’s work there is a technical perfection which is wanting in the two younger poets we have mentioned, and is wanting in nearly all our younger poets. Their performance seems infected by that of the Morris-Rossetti school, in this respect; and they are either ignorant of the mechanical structure of verse or indifferent to rules that govern the best. It is not enough to make musical verses; that alone is like playing by ear; the verses must be correct: correctness may be stiff, but there is no true elegance without it; and the poet who ekes out the measure of his line by making two syllables of such words as heaven, even, given, and the like, and three of such as difference, mystery (except at the end of a verse), may find precedents enough, but not excuse amongst the masters of his art in times since the best usage became law. He will not find it in Tennyson, nor in any but the minor English poets; he will not find it in Lowell, or Holmes, or Longfellow, in all of whom is the support of a solid and flawless workmanship. It is a small virtue; Shakespeare could be Shakespeare without it; but if one cannot be Shakespeare (and the task becomes more difficult every day), it is well to have it.

In the volume which Mr. Longfellow ⁴ has given us, the artistry becomes a positive delight. You rest upon it, and know in behalf of even your most morbid sensibility that it cannot betray your confidence by the smallest dereliction. Secrets of melody, surprises of harmony, float from the perfect instrument which responds to a touch that now cannot err; you are enriched by the results of care which has become a joy. Men of genius we do not lack and have not lacked, but as yet we have had but one other with patience to be such a perfect artist, — Hawthorne. One may say that this patience is the gift of temperament; but that is only giving greatness another name, not changing the fact.

Hawthorne is Hawthorne almost to the paper and print; and if you take Longfellow even in the attempts which are least responsive to his genius, you cannot read a single passage without knowing his hand and heart. Throughout is that simplicity which is the most satisfying thing in poetry; for when we read poetry, we wish to be spoken with face to face, to be amused, touched, uplifted by something elemental, by a power like that which charms children —the same power matured and, as it were, grown up. Art must be there; but conscious culture, the pride of intellect, can only offer impertinences.

Pleasure unmixed with the alloy of any base gratification, this is what our poet’s verse has always given, but in his latest book it is a more pensive pleasure than he has given before. The Masque of Pandora is the only poem of the collection not more or less tinged with the vague regrets of accumulating years, which in some of the sonnets take the deeper color of a personal grief. Here is The Hanging of the Crane, a poem over which broods the sadness of life, increasing and decreasing; the beautiful Morituri Salutamus, which the poet last year addressed to his old college classmates; several reminiscences of places which his youth knew, and which are now consecrated by the loss of his youth; and then a book of sonnets, which we fancy will be read oftenest. Three of the sonnets are on friends of his who have joined the greater number, and in these he takes the world at its word, and speaks his sorrow to its sympathetic regard; nothing could be franker or more moving.

he laments ; and he asks of Felton, —

of Agassiz,

And in that supreme sonnet he addresses Sumner,—

How beautiful they all are, those sonnets; how wise, how good, how simple! Look at the wording of them: it is of the plain, small pebbles of our Saxon speech that those exquisite mosaics are formed; but the effect, in this sonnet on Chaucer, is of a rich translucence, like that of precious stones.

CHAUCER.

But there is something better still than this delightful art, namely, the fraternal heart to which the sacrifices of humanity have always been so dear and sacred.

A NAMELESS GRAVE.

We have all felt this so often that it has seemed a part of our daily talk ; it is so mere an utterance of the best in us that any one might believe himself to have said just these words; the poet has only divined what was in our hearts and on our tongues. But to surprise us with ourselves, this is the great miracle of which only the highest genius holds the secret.

The Masque of Pandora is the old story of our race’s disaster, which myth and Scripture are agreed in attributing to the first woman; only here the old story is as fresh as if newly invented. Mr. Longfellow has never done anything more graceful, and if we always find choruses of voices the bearers of mystical messages not important in due proportion to their length, we have in this case the compensation of delicately felt character in the persons of the drama. The austere, inflexible grandeur of Prometheus, the poet - soul of his brother, the fascination of Pandora, even after her calamity - working, are lightly projected upon the fancy, which, in our own case, we find most pleased with the faintly cynical humorousness of Hermes in his relation to the affair.

The Morituri Salutamus must be thought one of the most beautiful things Mr. Longfellow has written, and the key in which it is pitched is that of nearly all the other pieces. A regret which will not lose heart, and forbids itself the vulgar luxury of despair, is the prevailing note, and it wins the reader to perfect accord with its mood. After fifty years the poet confronts those with whom he parted at the threshold of manhood ; to those wrinkled brows and white heads he can only say, “ We are old, but let us not be sad ; our best is done, but let us still do our best. ” And what could be mournfuller than this? This is the burden of the Morituri Salutamus, which also is a poem perfumed with a delightful spirit of literature distilled from a long and loving acquaintance with books, and filling the sold like the breath of Nature herself. It is all very literary: the gladiators before Cæsar, Dante, Priam, Hector, the learned clerk of the mediæval legend, Cato, Sophocles, Goethe, Chaucer, these are the shapes that come and go upon the imagination, moving, warning, consoling, inciting ; for there is this difference between Longfellow’s learning and that of others, that it makes you feel constantly the intimate relation of literature and life ; it is not a tribunal before which you tremble for your ignorance, not an order with which he decorates himself and humbles you, not the badge of his separation but of his union with you. In those poems of places which lie calls Birds of Passage it is the same gracious companionship which charms. “ You remember Cadenabbia,” he seems to say; “ you slept at Monte Cassino; you noticed that old monk at Amalfi ? ” and he makes us believe him. " Yes, yes,” we are well ready to answer, " it was I, I was there; I am there now, for all I never was in Italy save in this verse of yours.” Graciousness — that is the word for this book, in all its phases; perhaps it is the best word that one could find for the poet’s spirit in all his work.

It is not his contemporaneity that makes one feel this; but how will it be hereafter about that keen pleasure we take in some turn of phrase, some image, some touch, some movement of his, simply because it is like him? Is this a thing that can last ? Will his readers of another generation rejoice for our reasons in the pensive optimism of the sonnet called A Shadow, or the solemn march of the poem on Charles Sumner, or the figure —

If not, then a joy dies with us, and we are in that degree sorry for the fine fellows to come after us.

W. D. H.