Six Books of Verse

IF Matthew Arnold’s definition of poetry as the "criticism of life ” be accepted, the act of writing about poetry must be indeed a remote occupation, — the criticism of the criticism of life. Few things could draw the writer farther afield from life itself. In defense of the practice, it might be urged that without an occasional squaring of accounts with life the criticism of life would soon lose its own vitality, and that in this work of an accountant the duty of the critic lies. But admit the worst of him, grant that his energies need no supply of the red blood of living. What wonder, then, if his writing — especially if he be a person with a certain tendency towards sermonizing — takes, in spite of himself, the outward form of that manner of composition which has had the name of being the most lifeless of all performances of the pen, and turns out a discourse embracing a “ firstly ” and a sixthly,” if six, as in the present instance, happens to be the number of heads under which his remarks naturally fall ? There are six new books of verse before us at this moment, and, in looking at them one by one, it seems to us that each in turn suggests a separate "screed of doctrine ” upon contemporary verse in general. Yet our intentions of avoiding too palpable a sermon are the best in the world, and, besides noting the nature and value of what the books contain, we shall endeavor to restrain ourselves to comment, not too didactic, upon what they suggest.

By undoubted right of precedence the Last Poems of James Russell Lowell¹ stands first upon our list. One is so used to hear the last work of the greater writers compared to its disadvantage with what has gone before it that it requires no effort of the imagination to conjure up the gusto with which the remark will be made in some quarters that the little book adds nothing to Lowell’s fame. There are always enough and to spare of men ready with such utterances, delivered with a glibness sufficient to deceive the unwary into thinking them the result of a careful comparison between the earlier and later periods of a writer’s work. If these judges do not actually give a name and a place to the last pages of a man’s “ complete works ” corresponding to his Juvenilia at the beginning, they imply that they would like to entitle them Senilia. It may be that the present volume will not engage their powers. Certainly. its pages are as little deserving of their fashion of criticism as any poems of a true singer’s later years well could be. Though one might readily admit that Lowell would be Lowell still without them, the same breath should add, Lowell is still Lowell in them. One does not ask for a book all Cathedrals and Commemoration Odes ; and a modest wish is amply rewarded by finding in these Last Poems a bountiful gift of the good things which gave Lowell his separate place amongst our poets. In all the fields of verse, grace without much strength of thought is easily discoverable ; thought, though more rarely, can be found without grace. In this book grace is abundant; its themes, half of them of the sort that may be called personal, lend themselves especially to a playful felicity of phrase ; but in the lightest of them there is a sober sincerity and truth of thought which lifts them above the level of “ familiar verse.” The most completely serious poem of the small collection, On a Bust of General Grant, has in it lines of characterization not unfit to be placed by the side of the lines in the great Ode describing Lincoln. It has seemed that no epithets could be quite so well chosen as those which called “ our Martyr Chief ”

yet Grant may be no less vividly remembered by a single rugged line : —

After all, it needs no line or separate poem to recall to us what Lowell was, and the true significance of the book appears, not in any fuller revelation of the poet, but in the emphasis it lays upon the fact that he was of an age and of a class which have passed away. There are brave singers abroad in the land, but we fancy the masters would say their voices are hardly so well rounded as these voices of the old school. There are head-tones which may come from thinking a song more than feeling it, and there are thin sounds now and then which probably may be traced to a weakness of foundation. It is here that the old school has the advantage of us. It went to school itself to the best masters, and the training of youth showed itself to the end in a sureness of touch and a breadth of sympathy, a sane knowledge of the world. It is not only that the older writers are disappearing, but their better spirit is not always replaced by the younger ones who hurry in their footsteps. Perhaps it is too much to hope that all the traditions of dignity and scholarship can be carried on ; perhaps in the end it were better to have left some things, though not these, behind ; but surely it were well if the new company could catch from the old some of the spirit which enabled them to look upon the sadness of the world without calling it bitterness and wrong, to accept even a few disagreeable truths without open rebellion and railing. It is in this truer wisdom of the world that Lowell, up to the very last, stands forth as a master skilled to teach.

In temper, as very often in theme and suggestion, Mrs. James T. Fields’s volume, The Singing Shepherd, and Other Poems,² is at one with the books of the elder brothers, so to call the group which has vanished. The temper is that of a mind which is not out of sorts with destiny, and does not win its way so much by aggression and combat as by a gentle, gracious force. The qualities which especially give the hook its place apart from others are its feminine sensitiveness of feeling and the frequently evident influence of the classic spirit. There is present, also, to a degree not surprising to those who recall the articles of personal reminiscence which Mrs. Fields has been contributing through recent years to magazines, a true note of loyalty and love for the memory of lives which have been lived above the level commonly attained by men. The poem from which the book takes its title, The Singing Shepherd, To a Poet’s Memory, illustrates with special aptness the point we have in mind. Its charm of delicate, allusive imagination is peculiarly the charm which befits its theme. The lines in memory of Otto Dresel have in their different way the same charm, — like and unlike as music and poetry themselves are. It may he said with some confidence that the most winning beauty of the book is to be found in the poems which seem to have sprung most directly from human intercourse and the memory of it. This may he only another way of naming the verses into which the element of immediate personality has entered most strongly. The Return might he quoted to show how delicately the influences of nature have also found expression at times, yet should we make a counter-quotation in support of our belief. But we are not in court, nor under any necessity of maintaining our pros and cons. For its own sake, then, and incidentally for any light it may throw upon what has been said, let us transcribe the amply satisfying lines of “ Still in thy Love I Trust: ” —

Thus we arrive at our “thirdly,” and find in the Poems by Mrs. R. H. Stoddard ³ a book in which memory plays its part even more continually, we believe, than in the poems of Mrs. Fields, but to a different purpose ; for the printed page bears its testimony of years to which the memory has been turned with little of satisfaction. Mrs. Stoddard’s spirit has indeed the contemporaneous quality of more or less open revolt against the world and much that is therein. Loss to her is loss, and time has little power to temper the bitterness of it. The result in her verse is generally that the vigor of rebellion is more felt than the gentleness of acceptance. It is a curious circumstance, moreover, that the best expression of this intense feeling strikes one as appearing in the blank - verse poems with which the last third of the book is mainly filled. It would he natural to look for the least resisting medium for these utterances in the shorter verses, in the lyric mould, which make up the rest of the volume. This is not to say that there is not strength in the shorter poems ; such lines as October, evidently a song of war-time, would speak for themselves against any such untrue generality. Yet if the strength of a writer, unlike that of a chain, is to be tested at its best, it is to the blankverse poems of Mrs. Stoddard, reflective and descriptive, that one should turn. The sad house by the shore, to which the writer returns more than once ; the moods of nature, reflecting their brightness and hope at times as clearly as their sombre hues upon the human spirit; and the many messages of the sea to man, — these supply the themes for a series of poems of no mean power. And to have achieved any success where failure is so often met — in the production of that tempting blank verse which looks so much easier than it is — may be more than to have turned pretty songs by the score.

The Ballads of Blue Water,⁴ by James Jeffrey Roche, present a different phase of contemporaneity, — different, yet perhaps quite as typical as any. There has been widespread rejoicing over the attempt the novelists have been making to return to scenes of active and vivid life. A poetical analogue of this prose return is found in Mr. Roche’s book. Here are no unhappy searchings for the springs of private unhappiness. The sky above is clear except for the smoke of battle, the air is truly the vigorous air of the sea, and the deck of brave ships is the stage for the deeds portrayed. There are other poems, to be sure, than the sea ballads to which most of the book is devoted, but war and valor are for the most part their themes. The spirit of the book is wholly stirring, after a hearty fashion which separates it from nearly all verse of the past few years. Indeed, it recalls the War Lyrics of Henry Howard Brownell more than any volume which readily comes to mind. It has not the precise quality which Brownell’s song gained from his singing it on the very deck of battle.

says Mr. Roche, and accordingly there is in his work a little more of the polish and care which peace permits. It is surprising that so much of the fervor which might have been caught from the scene itself is also to be found. Many will recall the short poem At Sea, written at the time of the disaster to our ships at Samoa, and in the remembrance of the poet’s brother, lost with so many others, will feel that they have traced at least a part of the writer’s keen sympathy with men of the sea. We cannot help thinking that the blood of the green island of Mr. Roche’s ancestry has contributed its share of ardent fellow-feeling for our men of most adventurous action, and we are glad to recognize in the Ballads of Blue Water an artistic expression of the same impulse which gave our army its brave Irish regiments in the war. The volume preaches its own sermon to those with ears to hear it, and it were idle for us to dilate upon the refreshment that young writers might afford the world if they would turn to such themes as Mr. Roche has chosen, and persevere until some mastery of them is attained.

It is a far cry from so direct a book as the Ballads of Blue Water to the complexities of Mr. Francis Thompson. We were not of those who hailed him, two years ago, as the poet for whom there had been long and weary waiting. We felt, as we feel in his Sister-Songs,⁵ his wealth of imagination, his overflowing gift of language, — too often, we must think, leading him to the offhand use of words which the dictionaries mark obs., — his endowment, indeed, with many of the qualities of mind and spirit for which a poet should be thankful. But in the Sister-Songs, still more strongly than in the previous Poems, we feel that these powers have often been treated with abuse. In the Poems there were lines, like Daisy, The Dream-Tryst, and parts of The Hound of Heaven, from which it would be hard, even if one wished it, to withhold admiration. In this second volume, celebrating, if we understand it aright, the debt the poet owes to two children, there are also passages, like those of the child’s kiss and the poet’s speech, in which the suggestions of beauty and strength press close upon the achievement of these things, and in separate lines clearly attain it. It may be that our own dimness of vision holds us from seeing them more fully attained here and elsewhere. The intricacies of thought, expression, and rhyme are, we frankly admit, in the homely phrase of every day, “ too much for us.” What Mr. Thompson, in telling of a woman’s hair, calls “ the illuminous and volute redundance ” has surely entangled the poem itself.

Instead of disentangling if, we are inclined to remember that a “ fifthly ” would be in place at this point, and would raise a question which even a casual consideration of the book suggests. Where is the poet to draw the line, or must he draw it at all, between an intemperate, untrammeled indulgence in words for the gratification of every fancy of his own for sound and meaning, and their regulated use as a medium for the communication of his thought to other persons who speak his language ? If poetry is an expression of personality, and nothing more, what right has any one to object to any form it may take upon itself ? “ If you don’t like it,” the poet may fairly say, "let it alone.” On the other hand, can one let it quite alone, if it is thrust upon one at every corner where books are to be found ? Possibly the very fact that it is spread abroad between the covers of a book justifies one in asking of it a certain conformity with canons of taste which are distinct from individual likings. There is food for thought and far more searching inquiry in these considerations. It is enough that Mr. Thompson’s poems suggest them.

If the Sister-Songs are intricate, an antipodal word must be found for The Black Riders,⁶ by Stephen Crane. As completely as the one book is overlaid with ornament, the other is stripped bare of it. The strange little lines of which The Black Riders is made up are not even rhymed, and have but a faint rhythmic quality. Surpassing the college exercise in verse, to which the shrewd instructor made objection that every line began with a capital letter, these small skeletons of poetry are printed entirely in capitals, and in the modern fashion which hangs a few lines by the shoulders to the top of the page, as if more had meant to come below, but had changed its mind. The virtue of these lines, however, is that they often have enough freshness of conception to set the reader thinking, and so perhaps the blank spaces are filled. The spirit of the lines is generally rebellious and modern in the extreme, occasionally blashemous to a degree which even cleverness will not reconcile to a liberal taste. One feels that a long journey has been taken since the Last Poems of Mr. Lowell were read. But it is too much to think that the writer always takes himself seriously. Many of the lines are intentionally amusing, and the satiric note sometimes serves to mollify the profanity. The parable form into which many of the fragments are cast gives them half their effectiveness. The audacity of their conception, suggesting a mind not without kinship to Emily Dickinson’s, supplies the rest. Instead of talking more about them or discussing the possibility of their production before Tourgéniff’s Prose Poems, let us quote, without all its capital letters, this characteristic bit, which might serve either as a credo for the modern pessimist or as a felicitous epigram at his expense : —

Throughout the little book, nevertheless, there is some eating of other viands, for the sweet is mixed with the bitter. Just another parable we must transcribe, since it is thoroughly typical of Mr. Crane’s performances, and will serve as an excellent “ sixthly and lastly ” for any critic who has spoken his mind: —