Sill's Poetry

THE appearance of the Poems of Edward Rowland Sill as one of the Limited Editions of the Riverside Press draws attention to a poetic reputation singularly gradual and persistent in its growth. It is nearly thirty-five years since the first slender volume of Sill’s work came from the press of Leypoldt & Holt in New York. It was followed at long intervals by four other thin books, of which the later issues were in part reprints, and now, fifteen years after the poet’s death, the first collection approximating completeness is ready.

The causes for the slow growth of Sill’s fame are not difficult to find. He was notably unconcerned for his reputation. Most of his poems appeared unsigned or over a nom de plume, and his poetry was of the undramatic, reflective order that lends itself but indifferently to wide republication or quotation. It was, moreover, peculiarly personal in its appeal. The secret of Longfellow’s popularity as a poet, it has been remarked, is that he “expresses a universal sentiment in the simplest and most melodious manner. ” Sill had no such secret. He had not the secret of form: he never approached Longfellow’s mastery of melody. He had even less the secret of matter. The sentiments he dealt with were not universal, but markedly individual. He did not voice the general mood, but the tingling personal thought that was stirring in his own mind. He once made the distinction in one of his charming bits of prose between the uses of prose and verse, — that prose is the language of one’s profession, verse the language of one’s heart. Content with giving expression to his own moods, reflections, and sentiments, he was not concerned for the effect upon the public, and he has been sought not by the general throng of readers, but by the constantly growing number who have found their experience reflected in his, who have found themselves in sympathy with the struggle, the doubt, the hope that are voiced in his verses.

Sill was, as the late Mr. H. E. Scudder admirably put it in reviewing the little volume called Poems in the Atlantic fifteen years ago, a “battling spirit.” Such his inheritance, his temperament, and his environment united to make him. He was born of New England stock, and joined the two strains of preacher and of doctor, which in other times were conceived to possess a subtle opposition, as standing for rival devotions, to body and to spirit. His father and grandfather were physicians, but his mother’s father and grandfather were ministers, and the antinomy which we may imagine dimly suggested in his ancestry was more fully realized by his lack of health, which kept him on the verge of invalidism all his life, and made him sadly familiar with the unending feud of sense and soul. He was born, too, into an environment of moral and spiritual struggle. His youth was passed in the time of preparation for the Civil War. He was an undergraduate at Yale when Darwin’s Origin of Species appeared to open a strife of opinions hardly less significant in the world of thought than the great war was in the world of affairs.

What share each of the elements of strife had in Sill’s life it is not easy to say, but together they gave its prevailing tone of unrest that classed him among the Stoics of his time, and made him, with Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, a poet of doubt and spiritual struggle. His best known poem is a prayer; the one which most nearly shares that place is a song of the battlefield; the most musical and equable of his longer poems, The Venus of Milo, is of the strife between the higher and the lower love ; the most frequently recurring note in his lyrics is that of desire, of a soul disquieted, of longing and aspiration. This turmoil of spirit was a true reflection of Sill’s inner state. For years he was in doubt what he was to do. He had expected, while an undergraduate, to enter the ministry, but left college out of heart for it; after six years in the West he returned to Cambridge still undetermined. This long uncertainty, which closed in the realization that he could not find his place in the profession of his choice, gets frequent voice in his poems. The experience of religious doubt which to sensitive and devout souls comes with mortal pangs has had few more touching and wistful expressions than he gave it in the last stanza of Spring Twilight. In another poem, The Thrush, there is added to the note of wistfulness and sympathy a somewhat pathetic touch of regret, as if he questioned whether the price in capacity for pain that marks the scale of rank in nature were not too high a price to pay for man’s difference from the bird.

Sill’s intense sensibility to the pain and ache of the world, and to the pathos of human fate, came to utterance in the plaintive verses, A Foolish Wish, with their poignant refrain “ Before I go, ” voicing the world-old shrinking from death like a thin echo from Omar’s

but made more touching by their chiding of self and their sense of larger issues: —

So his refined consciousness of the discords of life and its ceaseless contest drove him to ask the old, unanswered questions, — of the nature of things and men, and the constitution of the universe. He did not find the world as Browning found it, subject to man’s control, but perceived that,

And as to man’s place in it, he wrote, with at least a touch of scorn, in The Hermitage, —

And in a briefer poem, Five Lives, he makes a parable of the utter ephemeralness of human life, its pitiful triviality, the folly of its ambitions, the futility of its aims, the emptiness of its honors. A community of Infusoria in a drop of water is the figure under which he presents human society, and the end of it is

But this merely scornful rendering of Yanitas Vanitatum could satisfy no one, least of all so earnest a soul as Sill. It serves only to express a mood and sheds no light on the deeper aspects of life. Far profounder is the poem, The Fool’s Prayer, of which Professor Royce has made such impressive use in the final chapter of his Spirit of Modern Philosophy. In this there is sadness but no scorn. It touches on the lack of dramatic cohesion in the universe, the apparent triviality of the causes of sorrow, in some respects the most perplexing element in life: —

These are the deeper notes of Sill’s message, and to some measure color all his work. Yet they do not justify the impression that the poems are predominantly sombre. Though the mood never rises to serenity, it does partake of that Wordsworthian calm based on

As Sill wrote a friend in one of his later years, he came in time to feel, “how life is a pretty fair general thing after all, and how happiness evidently is n’t the only thing the gods consider good for man.” For the most part the poems are bright-spirited, cheerful with a soft of deliberate cheerfulness; for Sill resembled Stevenson in this, that he took the “ great task of happiness ” as a true obligation. More contemplative by nature, more given to seeking the springs of motive, Sill lacked the merry daring, the unquenchable high spirits of his fellow invalid and craftsman. Closer kin in spirit to Arnold and Amiel than to Stevenson, he turned like them to nature, and found in the vast calm and sublimity of the Western mountains, as they in the Alps, soothing for his spirit. He has nowhere put this better than in the lines On a Picture of Mt. Shasta by Keith: —

With the process of the years there came to Sill other consolation than that of nature. The ministry of calm, impersonal, and exterior forces was supplemented by a growing mellowness within. His doubt lost its bitterness and softened into a not unkindly irony ; his perplexity took on some coloring of faith and trust. The poem entitled Roland may be a true forecast of the port he might have made, as it was a true account of the course he was on. The last stanza of this poem, —

and the concluding lines of A Morning Thought, —

are admirable expressions of the cautious wistful faith, more hopeful than secure, that is typical of our time.

We have given close attention to the personal aspects of Sill’s poetry, its self-revelatory character, — not that it is in any close sense autobiographical, but there are correspondences deeper far than those of time and place, — because Sill was essentially a poet of personality, and could reach the general heart only in the measure that he faithfully interpreted his own. This preoccupation with the inner life had important consequences for his work. It made him vastly more concerned for the substance than the form of his poems. We miss in his work some familiar graces, — sensuous charm of language, warmth and breadth of feeling. Though here and there we come upon lines of simple native beauty, — of minutely appropriate words, like

from The Venus of Milo; the line

from The Hermitage, and

from The Singer’s Confession, —we miss the perfect union of music and truth that delights us in the masters of poetry, finding no Spenserian delight in melodious sounds, nor yet the quieter Wordsworthian richness and depth of harmony.

The robuster side of life was in fact hidden from Sill. With all his zest for life, his eager, flashing interest in the thousand facets of existence, he lacked that deeper appetency, that gusto which marks the large, vigorous nature, and gives rise to that high form of courage which we call humor. This Sill, in common with Arnold and Clough, lacked, and though he possessed irony, which is humor at a lower stage, — humor on the defensive, — there remained an apparent void. Sure as we may be that if Sill had lived he would have arrived at greater mastery of form, increased grace and flexibility of phrase, we must consider this lack beyond remedy. It was a limitation he shared with Arnold and Clough, and may account in all of them for a certain narrowness of range. But in coming from the work of the two elder poets to Sill’s we feel a sense of contraction. There is about their poetry an ampler air. It is not alone that Sill’s poems are more personal, more lyrical, but they show, perhaps because they have taken rise upon a soil less cultivated, less opulent of historical and literary associations, a more confined aspect. In spite of a similar temper and a common heritage of unrest, they possess less amplitude and poise of power. No poem of Sill’s voices the perplexity and confusion of human fate in tones so impersonal and sure as Arnold’s Dover Beach. It is the same note as Sill has sounded in The Fool’s Prayer, and in the passage which we have quoted from The Hermitage, but beside Arnold’s fuller tone how slender seems this pipe. Similarly on the side of hope, though Sill went farther than Clough, he came to no such clear-voiced utterance of faith as that in Say not the Struggle naught Availeth.

With all his limitations — and they suffice to determine his rank among the minor poets even of his own time — Sill holds a secure place in the hearts of his readers because of his uncompromising idealism. His clear devotion to the ideal gives the key to which most of his songs are set, and explains, in spite of the often sombre nature of their subjects, the general luminous effect of his poems, which is like that of sunlit spaces, of shining surfaces. No doubt the brevity of the poems, the pellucid quality of the thought, and the finish of detail have much to do with it, but we feel in such a poem as The Things that will not Die a passion for perfection that is a sufficient source of illumination, and is the thing that must suffice, if anything can, to keep Sill’s fame alive: —

In this fine strain of ardor and aspiration, with its minor chords of the sadness attending all beauty and the passing of all living, Sill has beaten his music out. This is his native song. Yet even here his kinship to Clough is apparent. It is the note the elder poet sounded in, “I have seen holier things than these.” Sill’s spiritual affinity to Clough is in fact too close to be concealed. They were much alike in their outward lives as well as in their inner moods. Both were of infirm health; both found their lifework in teaching; both died before their lives or their tasks seemed near completion. And what Lowell wrote of Clough might, with some modifications of time and place, be applied to Sill: “We have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his art, will be thought, a hundred years hence, to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled convictions, of the period in which he lived.”

W. B. P.