Mr. Lowell's New Poems

IT is pleasant to be reassured that we have poets among us; and when their verses come in such unexpectedly generous quantity as this volume ¹ contains, it is a doubly gratifying surprise. Mr. Lowell has gathered these poems from many years ; and besides, his mind is so various and so versatile that he escapes altogether the monotony of tone which afflicts the versifiers who publish annually. One little fable is dated thirty-five years ago, and how much earlier those hexameters are which he calls A Youthful Experiment is a matter for mere guessing. Other poems belong to the sixties and seventies : some widely known, like the tribute to Agassiz ; some more narrowly, like the Harvard Commencement Verses, 1866; some kept in the poet’s drawer, like the lines to George William Curtis, 1874. The unusual variety of the volume is indicated by the method of arrangement, in accordance with which the poems are grouped under headings of Friendship, Sentiment, Fancy, Humor and Satire, and Epigrams ; but it is not realized until one begins to read. The range of the style, too, is very wide ; it sweeps from the Elizabethan cadence of —

to the briefer notes of the Victorian —

and takes in by the way the measures of the Dryden couplet, and even overlaps upon the latest modern of vers de société. So wide a reach of subject and such compass in treatment make the volume one in which the critic can wander at his will.

Naturally one looks first for the homebrew ; not because it is the best, but because it is ours. Mr. Lowell’s attachment to the soil is strong, and his pictures of old New England life are drawn with as much sympathy as definiteness. The Yankee idyl here is Fitz Adam’s Story. It was one of a projected Decameron of country tales, in which Clough, who was fond of the short tale in verse, encouraged the poet, and the literary manner of it is that long ago set apart for such narrative and practiced by foregoing generations. It is made up of a double characterization: first, of the native who has lived abroad : —

and secondly of the native who has not left his village, a type of which several illustrations are given, the principal being the inn-keeper and the deacon. The former is thus delineated in the Chaucerian way : —

The story itself we leave to the reader, who will find it, as Mr. Lowell remarks, of a piece with mediæval humor; and indeed it seems almost as far away as “ Rutebeuf and his brother Trouvères bold,” — story and setting, too. To the American to-day, to the country as a whole, the Yankee who changed a board nail for a shingle nail, to give exact weight when selling, is as distant and strange a figure as the Tennessee mountaineer or the Louisiana creole.

Mr. Lowell, in the remainder of the volume, is a poet among the choir ; a writer of sonnets, love lyrics, the compliments in verse of a high-bred society, or the fancies and philosophy of a mind that has fed on old mythology and Gothic romance. Endymion, with which our readers are familiar, stands in the first place; but it is only one of several poems in which love is either the subject or the motive. Often in these, and especially in the shorter lyrics, there is a perfect melody, real music, which has a charm apart from the meaning of the verse. Here is an example from The Broken Tryst: —

And here is another, quite as perfect in its kind, but how different in its rhythmic quality ! —

This is the “ music ” which he tells us in another poem is “ the secret.” In the sonnet form, too, he can give us remarkable purity in the flow ; and as it is our purpose mainly to illustrate in this notice, we quote again, this time the sextet of Bon Voyage addressed to Ocean:

The writer of the sonnet, however, is but half a master if he cannot achieve something in its nobler strong form, and it would be incomplete justice not to add to the preceding extract some such example as this, On being asked for an Autograph in Venice : —

This group of poems of feeling and imagination is sown with felicities to linger in the memory : such as the pines

or reflective lines like these : —

or the conclusion to Estrangement: — or the owl who wondered

or the epigram on The Boss, —

The poetic quality of the distinctly literary part of the volume may be judged of by these quotations.

In another aspect, Mr. Lowell is to be looked on also as the poet of Cambridge ; and in this collection there is an unusual quantity of familiar friendly verse, some of it light and happy with life that is vigorous still, and much of it the poetry of bereavement or of public eulogy. The long poem which leads in the volume is the well-known ode upon Agassiz, which has the characteristics of Mr. Lowell’s powers in meditative elegy. It contains a description of the Saturday Club, with portraits of Clough, Hawthorne, Emerson, Governor Andrew, and others, and readers will recall also the walk home over the bridge at night with Agassiz. Edmund Quincy is remembered in a group of sonnets, in one of which is a fine phrase : —

and parenthetically we must express our regret that there is not more of “ the citizen” in this volume, for it is this side of Mr. Lowell’s interests in life which is least adequately represented. Joseph Winlock the astronomer, Bradford the Spanish scholar, Holmes and Whittier have also their tribute of friendship; but the best of these memorials of the generation to which Mr. Lowell belongs is the Epistle to George William Curtis, which is likely to be most widely appreciated, and stands, in our judgment, in the first place of excellence. Here it is that “ the citizen ” whose absence we regretted is present, both in the feeling of the whole poem and by direct description : —

Nor is the characterization of Mr. Curtis done with less force, and it has the added grace of compliment and the kindliness of long acquaintance. These particular tributes are the pleasant literary record of the time now gathering the dignity and passing into the background of age, and are the highest form of occasional verse. For the more general feeling, and the poetic mood which is not limited by any individual memory, there is other expression; and we will not refrain from adding to our already liberal citations the following, which is one of the poems most to our liking: it is called My Portrait Gallery.

Yet with all these illustrations of the poet’s work, much of the volume has been left out of view. A collection of brief poems is hardly to be entirely included in a general notice, and in this case the extraordinary variety of the verse makes such an attempt impossible. It is enough if these extracts indicate to the reader the general character of the more important portion of the work, and give him some immediate sense of the poetry in it. The chief distinction of the volume seems to us its classical finish. Mr. Lowell concludes his address to Mr. Curtis with a postscript more recently written, in which he draws a picture of himself “ home again,” and taking up the old reed to call back its music in the haunts of the old days ; the promise involved in this makes a pleasant ending.