Part 11

Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling spray, Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept day, Or the white fog ribbons o’er them, the strong ship holds her way

These are pictures in strong color, freehand records with pigment, of which Mr. Woodberry’s sea-verse contains many duplicates. He paints the sea as an impressionist, catching her evanescent moods. Aside from the pictorial art of the poem from which the lines above are taken, it thrills with the gladness that abides with one coming

Home from the lonely cities, time’s wreck, and the naked woe, Home through the clean great waters where freemen’s pennants blow, Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go.

Mr. Woodberry is an American, and ever an American, whatever tribute he may pay at longer dedicated shrines. His ode to “My Country” is an impassioned utterance, full of ideality, and pride in things as they are, not lacking, however, in the prophetic vision of what they shall be. He trusts his country without reservation, recognizes her greater commission in what has terrified many poets,—the absorption of the Eastern isles,—and bids her be swift to yield her benefits:

O, whisper to thy clustered isles If any rosy promise round them smiles; O, call to every seaward promontory If one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory.

In technique the ode has a fine sweep and movement; it thrills with flights of feeling, as in these lines near the close,—

And never greater love salutes thy brow Than his, who seeks thee now. Alien the sea and salt the foam Where’er it bears him from his home; And when he leaps to land, A lover treads the strand.

The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, and now and again by the declamatory impulse getting the better of the creative; but granting this it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the time to those who think the days are evil, and more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric gives way to the pensive note,

I lay the singing laurels down Upon the silent grave,

and grows from this into a glimpsing of Emerson’s most characteristic thought, to which Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. This philosophical résumé has value as critical interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet’s merit, and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal his weakness in writing of this sort, neither does he to any marked degree reveal his strength. It is work of conventional creditability, reaching occasionally some flight of pure poetry, but pervaded in general by the perfunctory note that results from coercing the muse; and here one may interpolate the wish that all poems-for-occasion might be “put upon the list,” for it is certain, not only that the majority of them “never would be missed,” but that poetry would rebound from a most inert weight if lightened of them; nor is this in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose “Emerson Ode” is a far stronger piece of work than are most compositions of a similar nature. In the “Player’s Elegy,” in the ode written for the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter Academy, and in the several poems addressed to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, and the high motive of all must not be lost sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of the individuality of his work.

It is on the spiritually philosophical side of his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth that

The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes And every one divine.

When he interprets the mystery of love, or turns to the world without, it is the immanence of the divine that haunts him:

Over the grey leagues of ocean The infinite yearneth alone; The forests with wandering emotion The thing they know not intone.

He is, indeed, the spirit’s votary, and the ultimate purport of his message is the recognition of one’s own spirit force. His poem, “Nay, Soul,” rebukes the weakness that looks on every side for that which is within; the nature that, seeking props, falls by the way; or, craving understanding, loses the strength that comes of being misunderstood. It subtly divides the legitimate gifts of sympathy from those which weakness demands, and reveals the impossibility of coercing life, or love, or any good to which one’s nature is not so magnetized that it comes to him unentreated. These are potent lines:—

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear! Between the earth and sky Was never man could buy The bread of life with prayer, Not though his brother there Saw him with hunger die.

His life a man may give, But, not for deepest ruth, Beauty, nor love, nor truth Whereby himself doth live. Come home, poor fugitive! Art thou so poor, forsooth?

* * * * *

Thy heart—look thou aright! Fear not the wild untrod, Nor birth, nor burial sod! Look, and in native light, Bare as to Christ’s own sight, Living shalt thou see God.

The dramatic poem, “Agathon,” which is builded upon the philosophy of Plato, is perhaps the most thoughtful and thought-inciting work in the newly collected volume. It is in no sense of the word dramatic, but doubtless cast in this form from its wider adaptability to the contrasts of thought. The poem is too lengthy to follow an analysis of its philosophy, which is wrought out with subtle elaboration, smacking too much at times of a logical demonstration, but in the main leavened with imaginative phrase. Its poetic climax is in the apostrophe which follows the statement that

The sweetest roamer is a boy’s young heart.

The lines form a blank-verse lyric with a rich cadence and movement:

O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day, White Hesper folded in the rose of eve; The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps; The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor; And mute the bird’s throat swells with slumber now; And now the wild winds to their eyries cling.

* * * * *

O youngest Roamer, wonderful is joy, The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs; The lily folded to the wave of life, The lotus on the stream’s dark passion borne.

* * * * *

Ah, fortunate he roams who roameth here, Who finds the happy covert and lies down, And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount, And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs. No more he roams, he roams no more, no more.

These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson’s “Princess” in their metrical note, particularly in the final couplet of the first stanza, with the “dying fall” of the cadence, bringing to mind:

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Mr. Woodberry’s poetic affiliation with Tennyson comes out unmistakably in various other poems, leaving no doubt as to one of the masters who sing in his over-tones. Here, for illustration, is a transfusion with Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears.” One stanza of the flawless lyric reads:

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awaken’d birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

And Mr. Woodberry says:

O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawns The warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns; O tender as the faint sea-changes are, When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star; So strange, so tender, to a maid is love.

The mere fact of employing the Tennyson metre, especially when rhymed, would not give the sense of over-assimilation of the other’s work were it not for the marked correspondence in the diction and atmosphere, the first line of Tennyson’s lyric being expanded into the opening couplet of Mr. Woodberry’s stanza, and the final lines of each having so similar a terminology. Shelley is a much more operative force in Mr. Woodberry’s poetry than Tennyson, but rather in temperamental kinship than in a technical way. Mr. Woodberry could scarcely fail to have a keen sympathy with the passionate art of Shelley, who lived in the ideal, subtilized and sublimated beyond all reach but that of longing, but who yet set his hand and brain to the strife about him. In his earlier work Mr. Woodberry occasionally shows the Shelley influence in technique and theme, but not in his later verse. One can scarcely understand his leaving in a definitive collection of his work the poem “Love at the Door,” whose obligations to Taylor’s “Bedouin Love Song” and Shelley’s “I arise from dreams of thee,” are about equally distributed. Most poets have their early experiments in the reshaping of forms and themes, but they should be edited out of representative collections. The poem is scarcely a creditable assimilation of the models in question, and does scant justice to Mr. Woodberry’s later poetry, making the query more inevitable why he should have left it in the volume, which is in the main so finished and ripe a work. Occasionally one comes upon poems, or passages, which a keener self-criticism would have eliminated, as the line from “Taormina,” declaring that

Front more majestic of sea-mountains nowhere is there uplifted the whole earth through,—

whose legitimate place is in a rhetorical textbook, as an exercise in redundance. Mr. Woodberry is occasionally allured by his theme until the song outruns the motive, but he rarely pads a line like this; even poetic hyperbole has a limit.

In picturesque imagery his work is finely individualized; witness the figurative beauty of the following lines:

The ocean, storming on the rocks, Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks. The soaring ether nowhere finds An eyrie for the wingéd winds; Nor has yon glittering sky a charm To hive in heaven the starry swarm; And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart, No home shall find; let them depart.

The two sonnets “At Gibraltar” represent, perhaps, as fine an achievement as distinguishes Mr. Woodberry’s work. It would, indeed, be difficult to surpass them in American literature of to-day in strength, passion, or ideality:

I

England, I stand on thy imperial ground, Not all a stranger; as thy bugles blow, I feel within my blood old battles flow— The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found. Still surging dark against the Christian bound Wide Islam presses; well its peoples know Thy heights that watch them wandering below; I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound. I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face. England, ’tis sweet to be so much thy son! I feel the conqueror in my blood and race; Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-day Gibraltar wakened; hark, thy evening gun Startles the desert over Africa!

II

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seas Between the East and West, that God has built; Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt, While run thy armies true with His decrees. Law, justice, liberty—great gifts are these; Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt, Lest, mixed and sullied with his country’s guilt, The soldier’s life-stream flow, and Heaven displease! Two swords there are: one naked, apt to smite, Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, one Rejoices in the sheath, and hides from light. American I am; would wars were done! Now westward, look, my country bids good-night— Peace to the world from ports without a gun!

Whether in his travels or in the quiet of his own contemplation, the emphasis of Mr. Woodberry’s thought is upon the noble, the essential, the beautiful. Although not a strongly creative poet in form, he is a highly cultivated poet, and hands on the nobler traditions of art; and if now and then he wraps another’s “singing robe” about him, it is but an external vesture, leaving the soul of his thought unchanged.

XI

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES

MR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES is one of the younger poets about whose work there is no veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, but rather that the foundation is genuine; it reflects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. One feels back of the work the probity and directness that underlie all soundly conditioned literature; for while Mr. Knowles has the poet’s passion for the beauties of the art he essays, the primary value is always in that to be conveyed rather than in the medium of transmission.

This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles’ distinction and his danger. He is so manifestly in earnest that one feels at times in his work a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which should lighten the most serious thought; to put it in a word, there is often an over-strenuous note in his poetry; but were it put to a choice between this mood and the honeyed artificialities to which one is often treated, there would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, for

The poet is not fed on sweets; Daily his own heart he eats,—

not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.

This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond his present attainment, probably beyond his ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute standards, for the “elements of truth” are hardly to be separated from life by one magnet. They are variously polarized, and though one may possess the divining wand that shall disclose the nature and place of certain of them, there is no wand polarized for all; but it is the poet’s part to pass that magnet of truth which is his by nature over the field of life, that it may attract therefrom its range of affinities, and this Mr. Knowles is doing.

Before taking up his later work, however, we may glance at his matin songs, _On Life’s Stairway_, which have many indicative notes worthy of consideration. This volume, that called forth from John Burroughs, Richard Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, such hearty commendation, has an individuality that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes its spontaneity and the evident love of song that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh and sprightly, not having yet thought’s heavier freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to one’s own time impassioned and absolute, and the democracy and Americanism distinguishing it are of the commendable, if somewhat grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles’ work, manifest in both volumes, is that its inspiration is from life rather than nature, which is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse obtains with most of the younger poets. When, however, he comes to this theme, it is with a lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of mood that give to the few poems of this subject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated note, as in these lines:

Nature, in thy largess, grant I may be thy confidant!

* * * * *

Show me how dry branches throw Such blue shadows on the snow; Tell me how the wind can fare On his unseen feet of air; Show me how the spider’s loom Weaves the fabric from her womb; Lead me to those brooks of morn Where a woman’s laugh is born; Let me taste the sap that flows Through the blushes of a rose,— Yea, and drain the blood which runs From the heart of dying suns; Teach me how the butterfly Guessed at immortality; Let me follow up the track Of Love’s deathless zodiac Where Joy climbs among the spheres Circled by her moon of tears.

In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches some of his truest and surest notes; those in the second volume have a broader and more sympathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the confessional note which alone gives value to the subject. They are not invariably of a more inspired touch than are several in the first collection, such as “Lost Knowledge,” “A Song for Simplicity,” and “Love’s Prayer;” now and again they combine some newly minted phrase flashing with unsullied lustre, with such as have passed from hand to hand in the dulling commerce of language; but it is perhaps too much to demand that all fancies shall be newly stamped with the die of imagination. One of Mr. Knowles’ strongest poems from the group in question is entitled “Love’s World;” but for greater brevity I shall quote instead these charming lines which introduce the collection called _Love Triumphant_:

Helen’s lips are drifting dust, Ilion is consumed with rust; All the galleons of Greece Drink the ocean’s dreamless peace; Lost was Solomon’s purple show Restless centuries ago; Stately empires wax and wane— Babylon, Barbary and Spain— Only one thing, undefaced, Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste And the heavens are overturned. —Dear, how long ago we learned!

There’s a sight that blinds the sun, Sound that lives when sounds are done, Music that rebukes the birds, Language lovelier than words, Hue and scent that shame the rose, Wine no earthly vineyard knows, Silence stiller than the shore Swept by Charon’s stealthy oar, Ocean more divinely free Than Pacific’s boundless sea,— Ye who love have learned it true. —Dear, how long ago we knew!

Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, “If Love Were Jester at the Court of Death,” that Mr. Knowles’ most genuine inspiration has visited him.

The conception of the sonnet is unique, and its opening line of epigrammatic force and suggestiveness:

If Love were jester at the court of Death, And Death the king of all, still would I pray, “For me the motley and the bauble, yea, Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith, The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath!” Then would I kneel the monarch to obey, And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay; Since I have tasted love, what mattereth! But if, dear God! this heart be dry as sand, And cold as Charon’s palm holding Hell’s toll, How worse! how worse! Scorch it with sorrow’s brand! Haply, though dead to joy, ’t would feel _that_ coal; Better a cross and nails through either hand, Than Pilate’s palace and a frozen soul!

Here are originality, strength, and white heat of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic than the octave, which holds the creative beauty of the sonnet.

Of the lyrical poems in the second volume there are many clear of tone, having not only a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also color and picturesqueness, as that beginning:

With all his purple spoils upon him Creeps back the plunderer Sea,

with its succession of pictures such as these:

O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen, Raiding a thousand shores, Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchors And wave-defeated oars!

Admirable phrasing is that of “wave-defeated oars”! But before taking up the more strenuous side of his work, there is another lyric rich in melody and emotion,—a lyric in which one feels the under-current of passion. It is named, “A Song of Desire”:

Thou dreamer with the million moods, Of restless heart like me, Lay thy white hands against my breast And cool its pain, O Sea!

O wanderer of the unseen paths, Restless of heart as I, Blow hither from thy caves of blue, Wind of the healing sky!

O treader of the fiery way, With passionate heart like mine, Hold to my lips thy healthful cup Brimmed with its blood-red wine!

O countless watchers of the night, Of sleepless heart like me, Pour your white beauty in my soul, Till I grow calm as ye!

O sea, O sun, O wind and stars, (O hungry heart that longs!) Feed my starved lips with life, with love, And touch my tongue with songs!

Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, and his Whitmanesque conviction that “we tally all antecedents;” that “we are the scald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight;” that “we easily include them and more,”—finds expression in each of his volumes, in poems ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would now smile, to the noble lines of “Veritas” and other poems in the later work. There are certain subjects that hold within them percussion powder ready to explode at the touch of a thought,—subjects which, to one’s own peculiar temperament, seem to be provocative of a fulminant outburst whenever one collides with them, and this is such an one to Mr. Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up occasionally by such detonating lines as these:

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough, And ballads enough, God knows! But what we need is that cosmic stuff Whence primitive feeling glows,

Grown, organized to the needs of rhyme Through the old instinctive laws, With a meaning broad as the boughs of time And deep as the roots of cause.

It is passion and power that we need to-day, We have grace and taste full store; We need a man who will say his say With a strength unguessed before:—

* * * * *

Whose lines shall glow like molten steel From being forged in his soul, Till the very anvil shall burn to feel The breath of the quenchless coal!

Your dainty wordsters may cry “Uncouth!” As they shrink from his bellows’ glow; But the fire he fans is immortal youth, And how should the bloodless know!

One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,

A voice whose sagas shall live with God When the lyres of earth are rust,—

is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet, The song that is fit for men!

And the woodsman he shall sing it, And his axe shall mark the time; And the bearded lips of the boatman While his oarblades fall in rhyme;

And the man with his fist on the throttle, And the man with his foot on the brake, And the man who will scoff at danger And die for a comrade’s sake;

And the Hand that wrought the Vision With prairie and peak and stream Shall guide the hand of the workman And help him to trace his dream!—