Chapter 7

"Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his shell, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young; How the oriole's nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries grow, Where the ground-nut trails its vine, Where the wood-grape's clusters shine; Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay, And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans!"

The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet "painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of

"Wind-flower and violet, amber and white,"

as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the winter like the muskrat:--

"The fox his hillside cell forsakes, The muskrat leaves his nook, The bluebird in the meadow brakes Is singing with the brook."

The only one of these incidents that is characteristic of a January thaw in the latitude of New England is the appearance of the muskrat. The fox is never in his cell in winter, except he is driven there by the hound, or by soft or wet weather, and the bluebird does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year. A severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off the mountains into the low, sheltered woods and fields, and a thaw will send them back again. In the winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock or stone wall, or upon a snowbank, where he can command all the approaches, or else prowls stealthily through the woods.

But there is seldom a false note in any of Whittier's descriptions of rural sights and sounds. What a characteristic touch is that in one of his "Mountain Pictures:"--

"The pasture bars that clattered as they fell."

It is the only strictly native, original, and typical sound he reports on that occasion. The bleating of sheep, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the splash of the bucket in the well, "the pastoral curfew of the cowbell," etc., are sounds we have heard before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture bars is American; one can almost see the waiting, ruminating cows slowly stir at the signal, and start for home in anticipation of the summons. Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and breadth of the land.

"Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is this of the morning after the storm:--

"We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,-- A universe of sky and snow!"

In his little poem on the mayflower, Mr. Stedman catches and puts in a single line a feature of our landscape in spring that I have never before seen alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line of this stanza:--

"Fresh blows the breeze through hemlock-trees, The fields are edged with green below, And naught but youth, and hope, and love We know or care to know!"

It is characteristic of our Northern and New England fields that they are "edged with green" in spring long before the emerald tint has entirely overspread them. Along the fences, especially along the stone walls, the grass starts early; the land is fatter there from the deeper snows and from other causes, the fence absorbs the heat, and shelters the ground from the winds, and the sward quickly responds to the touch of the spring sun.

Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the only one I recall by any of our well-known poets upon the much-loved mayflower or arbutus. There is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown author that also has the right flavor. I recall but one stanza:--

"Oft have I walked these woodland ways, Without the blest foreknowing, That underneath the withered leaves The fairest flowers were blowing."

Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered by closest fidelity to her. Listen and look intently, and catch the exact effect as nearly as you can. It seems as if Lowell had done this more than most of his brother poets. In reading his poems, one wishes for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of course, to his serious poems; his humorous ones are just what they should be), yet the student of nature will find many close-fitting phrases and keen observations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the only writer I know of who has noticed the fact that the roots of trees do not look supple and muscular like their boughs, but have a stiffened, congealed look, as of a liquid hardened.

"Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing, Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank."

This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminishing streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it, and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One principal office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and crevices like metal into a mould.

Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own country. In his "Indian-Summer Reverie" we catch a glimpse of the hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead

"With watchful, measuring eye,"

the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,

"On the shingly shagbark's bough."

I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" in poetry before, or that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by

"The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee,"

as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass; perhaps this is the explanation of the line.

But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young begins to weigh upon him:--

"Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops."

I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.

Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:--

"The robin sings as of old from the limb! The catbird croons in the lilac-bush! Through the dim arbor, himself more dun, Silently hops the hermit thrush."

Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is the most pleasing of these poems:--

"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May."

The dandelion is indeed, in our latitude, the pledge of May. It comes when the grass is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the buttercup and the clover:--

"The dandelions and buttercups Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee Stumbles among the clover-tops, And summer sweetens all but me."

Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole summer, especially where the grass is kept short, but its proper season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the country, some weeks earlier than the tall buttercup and the clover. These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down, touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--

"The daisies and the buttercups Gild all the lawn."

I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--

Emerson rhymes it with bear, Lowell rhymes it with hear, One makes it woodpeckair, The other, woodpeckear.

But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it. Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird- song is capable of.

Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight. True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know, the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow, the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem ("The Poet's Song"):--

"The wild hawk stood, with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey."

It takes a sure eye, too, to see

"The landscape winking thro' the heat"--

or to gather this image:--

"He has a solid base of temperament; But as the water-lily starts and slides Upon the level in little puffs of wind, Though anchor'd to the bottom, such is he;"

or this:--

"Arms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it,"--

and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when they came to a spring that bubbled up through shifting sands in a very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how intently a great poet studies nature.

Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that would express or suggest that evening call of the robin. How absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon this descriptive phrase:--

"The vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue;"

how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made this poem:--

"The tongue of his fore-plane whistles its wild ascending lisp;"

or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have turned it into words in "A Word out of the Sea "! Indeed, no poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!--

"Behold the daybreak! The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows!"

"The comet that came unannounced Out of the north, flaring in heaven."

"The fan-shaped explosion."

"The slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky."

"Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short jerks; Where sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the hummingbird shimmers-- where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding; Where the laughing-gull scoots by the shore when she laughs her near human laugh; Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out."

Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to the West. But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North, East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history here and there,--the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron, the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese, the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit," etc.,--to help locate and define his position. Everywhere in nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why Addington Symonds, the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.

Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country, is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably associated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,--as the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming, with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch, circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo- bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo, like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods from May to September:--

"Pretty green worm, where are you? Dusky-winged moth, how fare you, When wind and rain are in the tree? Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee, Shadow and sun one are to me. Mosquito and gnat, beware you, Saucy chipmunk, how dare you Climb to my nest in the maple-tree, And dig up the corn At noon and at morn? Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."

Or the phœbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown thrasher--mocking thrush--calling half furtively, half archly from the treetop back in the bushy pastures: "Croquet, croquet, hit it, hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you're out, you're out," with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest and military bearing,--these and many others should be full of suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the robin's song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in "A Masque of Poets:"--

"When the willows gleam along the brooks, And the grass grows green in sunny nooks, In the sunshine and the rain I hear the robin in the lane Singing, 'Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.'

"But the snow is still Along the walls and on the hill. The days are cold, the nights forlorn, For one is here and one is gone. 'Tut, tut. Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.'

"When spring hopes seem to wane, I hear the joyful strain-- A song at night, a song at morn, A lesson deep to me is borne, Hearing, 'Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.' "

The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet is always to idealize nature,--to see it subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly, because the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not Coleridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emerson's bumblebee is not Lowell's; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all men. "We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we find without." The same idea is daintily expressed in these tripping verses of Bryant's:--

"Yet these sweet sounds of the early season And these fair sights of its early days, Are only sweet when we fondly listen, And only fair when we fondly gaze.

"There is no glory in star or blossom, Till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes, Till breathed with joy as they wander by;"

and in these lines of Lowell:--

"What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel."

"I find my own complexion everywhere."

Before either, Coleridge had said:--

"We receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live; Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud;"

and Wordsworth had spoken of

"The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream."

That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us, and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The Oxford professor struggles against this view. "It is not true," he says, "that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of our own transient feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on. Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in "Antony and Cleopatra:"--

'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a little do I read."

This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature's book-- though he does this, too--as write his own thoughts there. Nature reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to us with a new and peculiar force,--a quickening or kindling force. What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's passion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and genius. He gives more than he takes, always.

V

NOTES BY THE WAY

A NEW NOTE IN THE WOODS