Part 10

This, however, is airy imagination as compared with the naturalist fidelity of much of Mr. Cawein’s work in _Weeds by the Wall_, _A Voice on the Wind_, and in _Kentucky Poems_,—to which Mr. Edmund Gosse contributes a sympathetic introduction,—books chiefly upon nature, occasionally reverting to the mythological or more imaginative phase of the subject, but in the main set to reveal the fact, with its aura of beauty; for it is never the purely elemental side of a nature-manifestation that presents itself to Mr. Cawein, but always the fact haloed by its poetic penumbra. Indeed, the limitation of his earlier work lay in the excess of fancy over reflection and art; but his growth has been away from the romantic toward the realistic and individual, and upon this side its best assurance for the future is given. Mr. Cawein has yet far too facile a pen not to be betrayed by it into excesses both of production and fancy. He writes too much to keep to the standard set in his best work of the past two or three years, and lacks still to a great degree the self-scrutiny which would reject much that he includes; but granting all this, it must be apparent to any reader of his work that he is not a singer making verse for diversion, but one to whom poetry is the very breath of his spirit, one who lives by this air, and can by no other; and while it is one thing to be driven through vision-haunted days by beauty’s urgence and unrest, and another to body forth the vision in the calm; one thing to have had the mystery whispered by a thousand wordless voices, and another to communicate it in terms of revealing truth—it is notable in Mr. Cawein’s verse that he is teaching his hand to obey him more surely each year, and is producing work that quickens one’s perception of the world without, and adds to his sum of beauty. It is serious work, work with purpose, and while its fancy still runs at times to the fantastic, it shows so marked a growth in technique and spirit from year to year that one may well let to-morrow take care of to-morrow with a poet who brings to his art the ideal which inspires Mr. Cawein.

To return, then, to his distinctive field, Kentucky, and his characteristic note of nature, one observes that a hand-book of the flora of his state could doubtless be compiled from his poems, so do they leave the beaten path in their range of observation; but it would be a botany plus imagination and sympathy, analysts keener than microscopes, and in it would be recorded the habits of the bluet, the jewel-weed, the celandine, the black-cohosh, the bell-flower, the lobelia, the elecampane, the oxalis, the touch-me-not, the Indian-pipe, and many another unused to hear its name rehearsed in song.

One follows the feet of September to the forest

Windowed wide with azure, doored with green, Through which rich glimmers of her robe were seen— Now, like some deep marsh-mallow, rosy gold; Now like the great Joe-Pye-weed, fold on fold Of heavy mauve; and now, like the intense Massed iron-weed, a purple opulence;

or wanders under the Hunter’s Moon to watch the frost spirits

… with fine fingers, phantom-cold, Splitting the wahoo’s pods of rose, and thin The bittersweet’s balls o’ gold To show the coal-red berries packed within.

Autumn is apparently, however, little to his liking, and in his attitude toward it he reveals the Southerner; for it is not only Kentucky flora and fauna, but Kentucky climate which Mr. Cawein celebrates, treating Autumn not with the buoyancy that to a Northerner renders it a season of lusty infection, but almost wholly in its aspect of sadness. In his volume called _Undertones_ he has a group of poems upon the withdrawing year, sounding only this note, which is the prevalent one when touching upon the same theme in his other volumes. He glimpses

… the Fall Like some lone woman in a ruined hall Dreaming of desolation and the shroud; Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed, Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl;

and speaks elsewhere of

… the days gray-huddled in the haze; Whose foggy footsteps drip.

Winter is encountered with far scantier cheer, and rarely receives the grace of salutation, as its face appears dire and malevolent to this lover of the sun. To follow Mr. Cawein’s work with such a purpose in view would be to present an interesting study in climatic psychology, for though no mention were made of the section in which he writes, the internal evidence is sufficient to localize the poems. Not alone the gracious side of the Southern summer is presented, but the fearful time of drouth when

The hot sunflowers by the glaring pike Lift shields of sultry brass; the teasel tops, Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse Are sick with summer: now, with breathless stops, The locusts cymbal; now grasshoppers beat Their castanets: and rolled in dust, a team,— Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream,— An empty wagon rattles through the heat.

This is vivid picturing and a fine touch of realism fused with imagination which compares the team rolled in dust to

“Some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream.”

Immediately following the poem upon “Drouth,” of which there are several stanzas sketched with minuteness, occurs one entitled “Before the Rain,” opening with these pictorial lines:

Before the rain, low in the obscure east, Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray; Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased, Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay Like some white spider hungry for its prey. Vindictive looked the scowling firmament, In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray, Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent.

The moon caught in its creased web of storm mists is another well-visioned image. Mr. Cawein carries the record on to a third poem, picturing the “Broken Drouth;” all are notable for the infusion of atmosphere,—climatic atmosphere, in this case; and indeed of this palpable sort there is plenty, infused into words that fairly parch the page in such poems as “Heat,” or “To the Locust,” which give abundant evidence that Mr. Cawein knows whereof he speaks and is not supposing a case. The stanzas to “The Grasshopper” will deepen this conviction when one looks them up in the volume called _Weeds by the Wall_.

Mr. Cawein has poems in celebration of many other of the creatures whom he links in fellowship with man in his keenly observant verse. “The Twilight Moth,” “The Leaf Cricket,” “The Tree Toad,” “The Chipmunk,” and even the despised “Screech-Owl,” are observed and celebrated with impartial sympathy and love. He shelters in the wood during a summer rain to learn where each tiny fellow of the earth and air bestows himself, and notes that the “lichen-colored moths” are pressed “like knots against the trunks of trees;” that the bees are wedged like “clots of pollen” in hollow blooms, and that the “mantis, long-clawed, furtive, lean,” and the dragonfly are housed together beneath the wild-grape’s leaves and gourds. Each creature’s haunt, ’neath rock or root, or frail roof-bloom, is determined as a naturalist might lie in wait during the summer storm to record for Science’s sake each detail of this forest tenantry. Imagination has, however, touched it to beauty, while losing none of the fidelity.

To the “Twilight Moth,” “gnome wrought of moonbeam fluff and gossamer,” he addresses in another poem these delicate lines:

Dusk is thy dawn; when Eve puts on her state Of gold and purple in the marbled west, Thou comest forth like some embodied trait, Or dim conceit, a lily-bud confessed; Or, of a rose, the visible wish; that, white, Goes softly messengering through the night, Whom each expectant flower makes its guest.

All day the primroses have thought of thee, Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat; All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly Veiled snowy faces,—that no bee might greet Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed;— Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last, Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet.

Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day’s Too fervid kisses; every bud that drinks The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays Nocturnes of fragrance, thy winged shadow links In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith; O bearer of their order’s shibboleth, Like some pale symbol fluttering o’er these pinks.

The final line of this stanza has a certain thinness, and in that above, the ending which turns “sweet” to a noun is too evidently a matter of expediency; but with these exceptions the stanzas are charming, as are the unquoted ones following them. Before turning to other phases of Mr. Cawein’s work, here is a glimpse of the “Tree Toad,” pictured with quaint delicacy and fancy:

Secluded, solitary on some underbough, Or cradled in a leaf, ’mid glimmering light, Like Puck thou crouchest: haply watching how The slow toad stool comes bulging, moony white, Through loosening loam; or how, against the night, The glow-worm gathers silver to endow The darkness with; or how the dew conspires To hang at dusk with lamps of chilly fires Each blade that shrivels now.

* * * * *

Minstrel of moisture! silent when high noon Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over. Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover Of all cool things! admitted comrade boon Of twilight’s hush, and little intimate Of eve’s first fluttering star and delicate Round rim of rainy moon!

Art trumpeter of Dwarfland? does thy horn Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour When they may gambol under haw and thorn, Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower? Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower The liriodendron is? from whence is borne The elfin music of thy bell’s deep bass To summon fairies to their starlit maze, To summon them or warn.

What a happy bit of realism is that of the toadstool “bulging, moony white, through loosening loam”! The second of the stanzas may be too Keats-like in atmosphere to have been achieved with unconsciousness of the fact, be that as it may, it is a bit of sheer beauty, as the last is of dainty fancy.

But nature, either realistically or romantically, is not all that Mr. Cawein writes of, though it must be said that his verse upon other themes is so largely tinctured with his nature passion that one rarely comes upon a poem whose illustrations are not drawn more or less from this source, making it difficult to find lyrics wholly upon other themes. Because of his opulent metrical variety, Mr. Cawein is less lyrical than as if he sang in simpler measures. His lyrics, indeed, are in the main his least distinguished work, having frequently, if highly musical, too slight a motive; or if more consequent in motive, not being sufficiently musical; or the melody may be unimpeachable and the theme too romantic to have convincing value, as “Mignon,” “Helen,” “The Quest,” “Floridian,” etc. Indeed, Mr. Cawein sounds the troubadour note all too frequently in his lyrical love poems, which are not without a lightsome grace of phrase and fancy, as becomes this style of verse; but it is likely to be a superficial note, heard but to be forgotten. He can, however, strike a deeper chord, as in the poem called “The End of All,” or in that from an earlier volume, bringing a poignant undertone in its strong, calm utterance, beginning

Go your own ways. Who shall persuade me now To seek with high face for a star of hope?

and ending,

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, Night lie before me and behind me night, And God within far Heaven refuse to light The consolation of the dawn for me,— Between the shadowy bourns of Heaven and Hell, It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell With memory.

In such notes as these controlled by the Vox Humana stop, Mr. Cawein best reveals himself; another, coming from the heart rather than the fancy, is “Nightshade,” from the volume called _Intimations of the Beautiful_, a record of life’s bringing to judgment the late-proffered love, unyielded when desired.

“A Wild Iris” is in the later and finer manner, but although love is the spirit of the song, it is embodied chiefly in terms of nature, and would not reveal a different phase of his work from that already shown. This, too, is the case with the two lighter lyrics, “Love In A Day” and “In The Lane,” each with a most taking measure; the second a rural song lilting into this note:

When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock, And the brown bee drones i’ the rose, And the west is a red-streaked four-o’-clock, And summer is near its close— It’s—Oh, for the gate and the locust lane And dusk and dew and home again!

Mr. Cawein has frequent poems in celebration of the farm, not only its picturesque cheer, but its dignity and finer idealism. “A Song For Labor” is one of the best; also “Old Homes,” an idyllic picture of the Southern plantation, with its gentle haze of reminiscence:

Old homes among the hills! I love their gardens, Their old rock-fences, that our day inherits; Their doors, ’round which the great trees stand like wardens; Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits; Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens.

I see them gray among their ancient acres, Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled,— Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers, Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled,— Serene among their memory-hallowed acres.

Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies— Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers— Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies, And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers, And all the hours are toilless as the lilies.

* * * * *

Old homes! old hearts! Upon my soul forever Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter; Like love they touch me, through the years that sever, With simple faith; like friendship, draw me after The dreamy patience that is theirs forever.

Mr. Cawein blends the mood and the picture in the simple tenderness of these lines, with their unstriving felicity. Kentucky’s more strenuous side also finds a chronicler in his verse: the tragedies of its mountains are told in one of the earlier volumes in such poems as “The Moonshiner,” “The Raid,” and “Dead Man’s Run;” and in _Weeds by the Wall_, in that graphic poem “Feud,” sketching with the pencil of a realist the road to the spot

… where all the land Seems burdened with some curse,

and where, sunk in obliterative growth of briers, burrs, and ragweed, stands the

… huddled house Where men have murdered men,

and where a terrified silence still broods, for

The place seems thinking of that time of fear And dares not breathe a sound.

Mr. Howells, in an appreciation of Mr. Cawein’s work, after the appearance of _Weeds by the Wall_, spoke of this poem declaring that “What makes one think he will go far and long, and outlive both praise and blame, is the blending of a sense of the Kentucky civilization in such a poem as ‘Feud.’ Civilization may not be quite the word for the condition of things suggested here, but there can be no doubt of the dramatic and the graphic power that suggests it, and that imparts a personal sense of the tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn wickedness of it all.” His poem “Ku Klux,” in a volume published some time ago, is no less dramatic in touch and theme. Mr. Cawein knows how to set his picture; the ominous portent of the night in which the dark deed is done would be understood from these three lines alone:

The clouds blow heavy towards the moon. The edge of the storm will reach it soon. The kildee cries and the lonesome loon.

It may be said of Mr. Cawein’s work in general that it shows him to be alert to impression, and gives abundant evidence that life presents itself to him abrim with suggestion. Occasionally, as mentioned above, he wanders too far into the romantic, or yields to the rhyming impulse in a fallow time of thought; but when he throws this facile poetizing by, and betakes himself to nature and life in the capacity of observer and analyst, he produces work notable for its strength, fidelity, and beauty. Metrically, in his earlier work he was influenced by various poets he had read too well. “Intimations of the Beautiful,” occupying a part of the volume bearing that name, would be one of his best efforts, in thought and imaginative charm, were it not written in a form developed from “In Memoriam,” so that one is haunted by the metrical echo. The poem is devoted to interpretations of life and the spirit, through nature; and has not a division without some revelation from that book of the earth which Mr. Cawein has made his gospel. Its observations, while couched in imagery that now and again tends to the over-fanciful, are in the main consistent and artistic.

In his recent books, however, he adventures upon his way, seeing wholly by the light of his own eyes, and portraying by the skill of his own hand, so that his work has taken on personality and individuality with each succeeding volume.

Its breath from the bourns of meadow and woodland brings with it a stimulating fragrance, and one closes a book by Mr. Cawein, feeling that he has been in some charmed spot under Southern skies where

Of honey and heat and weed and wheat The day had made perfume.

X

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

“For he who standeth in the whole world’s hope Is as a magnet; he shall draw all hearts To be his shield, all arms to strike his blow.”

THESE words by Mr. George E. Woodberry sound the keynote to his art, for he has set himself to disclose the immanence of beauty, of strength; to mould the real to the ideal; and whether he fashions a god, as in “Agathon,” or a patriot, as in “My Country,” he is concerned only with the development of the spiritual potentialities.

He comes to life, to poetry, enriched by a scholar’s culture, but limited by his enrichment on the creative side of his art. He is too well possessed of the immortal melodies to trust the spontaneous notes of his own voice, and hence his verse on its technical side lacks variety and freedom of movement. It has all the cultivated, classical freedom, it flows ever in pure and true numbers; but the masters sing in its overtones, and one catches himself hearkening to them as to Mr. Woodberry himself. In other words, those innovations of form which strongly creative thoughts usually bring with them, are not to be found in Mr. Woodberry’s work. He has a highly developed sense of rhythm and tone, and very rarely is any metrical canon violated; but the strange new music, the wild free note, that showers down as if from upper air, and sets one’s heart a-tingling, is seldom voiced through him. The bird is caged; and while its song is true and beautiful, one comes soon to know its notes and the range of its melody.

Mr. Woodberry has, however, something to say; and if he says it rather with grace and cultivation as to form, than with any startling surprises of artistic effect, his work in its essence, in its spirit, is none the less creative, and upon this side its strength lies. It is ethical and intellectual, rather than emotional, poetry. Though rising often to an impassioned height, it is a passion of the brain, pure and cold as a flood of moonlight. Even the songs of “Wild Eden,” and others dealing with love, remain an abstraction; one does not get the sense of personality, except in one or two of them, such as the lyric, “O, Inexpressible As Sweet,” and in these few lines called “Divine Awe”:

To tremble when I touch her hands, With awe that no man understands; To feel soft reverence arise When, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes; To see her beauty grow and shine When most I feel this awe divine,— Whate’er befall me, this is mine; And where about the room she moves, My spirit follows her, and loves.

But although one misses the sense of reality in the songs of love, the ideality is for that reason the more apparent. Love that has sublimated, taken on the rarer part, that has made a mystic interchange with nature and with God, is celebrated in the fervid poem, “He Ate The Laurel And Is Mad,” which marks one of the strongest achievements in Mr. Woodberry’s work, and especially in a lyric it contains, vibrating with a fine, compulsive melody. The lines preceding the lyric relate the coming of Love into the heart of nature:

And instant back his longing runs Through bud and billow, through drift and blaze, Through thought, through prayer, the thousand ways The spirit journeys from despair; He sees all things that they are fair, But feels them as the daisied sod,— This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room, The chrysalis and broken tomb He cleaveth on his way to God.

Then the poem breaks into this pæan, whose music outsings its thought when pushed to analysis; this is one of Mr. Woodberry’s metrical exceptions that prove the rule. Here is sheer music making fine but not extraordinary thought seem great, whereas in the majority of his work it is the thought to which one listens rather than the melody; but to the lyric,

I shall go singing over-seas; “The million years of the planets increase; All pangs of death, all cries of birth, Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth.”

I shall go singing by tower and town: “The thousand cities of men that crown Empire slow-rising from horde and clan, Are clasped at one by the heart of man.”

I shall go singing by flower and brier: “The multitudinous stars of fire, And man made infinite under the sod, Are clasped at one by the heart of God.”

I shall go singing by ice and snow: “Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow, Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above, Peal, time’s last music,—‘love, love, love!’”

Of his recent volume in which he gathers his most representative work, “The North Shore Watch,” a threnody published some years ago, remains one of the truest poems in sincerity and sympathy of expression,—not only an idyl of remembered comradeship, but of the sea in its many moods; and here one may note that of Mr. Woodberry’s references to nature, those of the sea are incomparably the finest, and exhale an invigorating savor of the brine. They are scattered through “The North Shore Watch,” but because of the stately sadness of the verse are less representative of his characteristic note than are these buoyant lines which open the poem “Seaward”:

I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea’s infinite foam; I will bathe in the winds of heaven; I will nest where the white birds home; Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of snow, In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready and go; Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is rolled, I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of gold; Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the sunset bar, And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the morning star; And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as they, Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day.

These lines have the bracing ozone of the east wind; it is good to fill one’s lungs with their freshening breath. In another sea-song, “Homeward Bound,” an exultant, grateful hymn, Mr. Woodberry speaks of steering

“Through the weird, red-billowing sunset”

and of falling asleep in the “rocking dark,” and with the dawn,