Part 3
Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market-women, the common ear was trained to grace and melody; but how many of the country folk of to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could grasp them? Who is writing the lays of the people? One can only answer that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a song as “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” or “Come live with me and be my love,” and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the rosary of Art.
The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree, doubtless, as to the increasing separation between poetry and song, the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes; but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting theme and melody to the common ear—how many modern poets would agree upon that? There is a middle ground, however; the reaction against the highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal appeal.
And how does this pertain to Miss Reese? It pertains in that her ideal is the very return to clear, sympathetic song of which we have spoken. She would recapture the blitheness of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace, would lighten song’s wings of their heaviness and shift Care and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While the reminiscent mood is prevalent in her work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs, although “with finger at his lip, bidding adieu.” Miss Reese’s strife is toward a valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in the poem called “Laughter”:
Spirit of the gust and dew, Herrick had the last of you! Empty are the morning hills. Herrick, he whose hearty airs Still are heard in our dull squares; Herrick of the daffodils!
* * * * *
Now the pulpit and the mart Make an unquiet thing of Art, For we trade or else we preach; Even the crocus,’stead of song, Serves for text the April long; Thus we set it out of reach.
There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s distilling into the truth which is the essence of things. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion.
Having this creed of song, Miss Reese’s themes are not widely inclusive. They are, however, the universal themes,—love, beauty, reverence, remembrance, joy that has been tempered to cheer, having met pain by the way; for, as we have said, no encounter with pain—and her poems give abundant evidence of such encounter—has been able to subdue the valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at the springs of her feeling, albeit the buoyant, brimful joy has given place to acquiescent cheer.
There is a certain quality in Miss Reese’s poems, a quaintness, an elder grace, that is wholly unique. It is the union of theme, phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former have been considered, but the spirit, after all, is in the last, in that which analysis cannot reach. One selects a poem from _A Quiet Road_ illustrative of this art of correlating Then and Now, making quick the dead in memory and hope, and sets about to analyze it,—when, lo, as if one had prisoned a white butterfly, it escapes, leaving only the dust of its wing in one’s hand! Miss Reese’s poems are not to be analyzed, they are to be felt; that, too, is the creed of her song. Is it difficult to feel these delicate lines called “The Road of Remembrance”?—
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree; The tree is blossoming; Northward the road runs to the sea, And past the House of Spring.
The folk go down it unafraid; The still roofs rise before; When you were lad and I was maid, Wide open stood that door.
Now, other children crowd the stair, And hunt from room to room; Outside, under the hawthorn fair, We pluck the thorny bloom.
Out in the quiet road we stand, Shut in from wharf and mart, The old wind blowing up the land, The old thoughts at our heart.
Miss Reese’s growth, as shown in her two volumes, is so marked that while _A Handful of Lavender_ has the foreshadowing of her later work, and also some notably fine poems,—such as “That Day You Came,” “The Last Cricket,” “A Spinning Song,” and “The Old Path,”—it has not the same perfectly individual note that pervades _A Quiet Road_. The personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon nearly everything in the later collection, is frequently absent from the first. That part of _A Handful of Lavender_ first issued as _A Branch of May_ is naturally the least finished of Miss Reese’s work. It is unsure and yet indicative of that—
Oncoming hour of light and dew, Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
which shines in her later work.
“The Death Potion,” from the first collection, is a case in point: it is strong in idea, and here and there in execution, but its metre is faulty, and it departs so often from the initial measure that one who has set himself in tune with that is thrown from the key, and in adapting himself to the changed rhythm loses the pleasure of the poem.
It must be said, however, that such lack of metrical sensitiveness is very rare even in the earlier poems. In general, they are of unimpeachable rhythm; indeed, the singing note is so much Miss Reese’s natural expression that it creeps into this sonnet, “The Old Path,” and turns it in effect to a lyric:
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of you In every bough that stirs, in every bee, Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through, In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree; And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet, Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from some Fast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet, You were so near, so near, yet did not come! Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day? Have you, for me that love you, thought or word? Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way; With any breath of brier or note of bird? If this I knew, though you be quick or dead, All my sad life would I go comforted.
_A Handful of Lavender_ shows the tendency of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tendency laudable enough if one be a natural sonneteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived and well-executed sonnets, but few that are unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics. That she recognizes wherein her surest power lies is obvious from the fact that, whereas _A Handful of Lavender_ contains some thirty-two sonnets, _A Quiet Road_ contains but twelve. Those of nature predominated in the former, nature for its own sake; but in the latter there is far less accent upon nature and more upon life.
They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There are certain sonnets in _A Handful of Lavender_, such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling than the later ones and equal to them in manner; but in general the mechanism is much more apparent—one _does_ occasionally see the wires, which is never the case in the later work.
“The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets in _A Quiet Road_:
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget; Pass your closed door with not a thought of you, Of the old days, but only of these new; I sow; I reap; my house in order set. Then of a sudden doth this thing befall, By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place, That I remember naught but your dead face, And other folk forgotten, you are all. When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet! And I, thereafter, am like unto one Who from the lilac bloom and the young year Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street, Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun, For that the recompensing Spring is near!
There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said, however, one comes back to _A Quiet Road_ for the songs it holds, and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own reed, when she says:
Mine is the crocus and the call Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall; The white tumult, the rainy hush; And mine the unforgetting thrush That pours its heart-break from the wall.
For I am tears, for I am Spring, The old and immemorial thing; To me come ghosts by twos and threes, Under the swaying cherry-trees, From east and west remembering.
O elder Hour, when I am not, Gone out like smoke from road and plot, More perfect Hour of light and dew, Shall lovers turn away from you, And long for me, the Unforgot!
Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows, Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose! The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass; Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!
The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain; The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane; Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow, And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.
The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall; There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall; For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief; The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.
I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand; Along the narrow track we pass across the level land; The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees; The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.
When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door, The memory of this will come and turn us young once more; The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky; And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
Miss Reese’s work in _A Quiet Road_ is so uniformly quotable that one distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. One need hardly be told that she is of the “mystic fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization, of which a part must suffice to show the quality:
In his old gusty garden of the North, He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call; Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall— At last they drove him forth.
Now there were two rang silverly and long; And of Romance, that spirit of the sun, And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one; And one was that of Song.
Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers, The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame, These were the Shapes that all around him came,— That we let go with tears.
His was the unstinted English of the Scot, Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box, To keep it unforgot.
No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh, To see appealing things in all he knew, He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew, And would have naught of chaff.
David and Keats and all good singing men, Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son, Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone— Where you do sing again!
There! I have repented me and quoted it all, to preserve the unity.
To be rare and quaint without being fantastic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that many overlook—this is Miss Reese’s gift. You shall not go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruction of any kind, for that is contrary to her creed; but you shall go to her for truth, truth that has become personal through experience; go to her for beauty, uplift, and refreshment, and above all for the recovery of the departed mood.
III
BLISS CARMAN
THE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets of the States, needs no explanation; so identified is he with the artistic life of the younger generation on this side the border that we have come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to consider his work, most of which has been produced here, as distinctly our own. But while it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse has drawn its inspiration from nature and life as we know them, one could little spare Mr. Carman’s first book of lyrics, _Low Tide on Grand Pré_, which is purely Canadian—set in the air of the “blue North summer.”
It lacks as a collection the confident touch of his later work, but is imbued with an indefinable delicacy; it withholds the uttermost word, and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially is this true of the initial poem, a lyric with a poignant undernote calling one back thrice and again to learn its spell.
It has been Mr. Carman’s method to issue at intervals small volumes containing work of a related sort; but it is open to question whether this method of publishing, with the harmony which results from grouping each collection under a certain key, may not have a counterbalancing danger in the tendency toward monotony. As a matter of fact, Mr. Carman has a wide range of subject; but unless one be ever taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, it is likely to seem restricted, owing to the reiterance of the same note in whatever collection he chance to have in hand. A case in point is that furnished by _Ballads of Lost Haven_, one of his most characteristic and fascinating volumes, a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no fewer than four poems, succeeding one another at the close of the collection, prefiguring death under the titles of “The Shadow Boatswain,” “The Master of the Isles,” “The Last Watch,” and “Outbound.”
Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but different phrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain” contains these fine lines:
Don’t you know the sailing orders? It is time to put to sea, And the stranger in the harbor Sends a boat ashore for me.
* * * * *
That’s the Doomkeel. You may know her By her clean run aft; and then Don’t you hear the Shadow Boatswain Piping to his shadow men?
And “The Master of the Isles,” immediately following, opens in this equally picturesque, but essentially similar, manner:
There is rumor in Dark Harbor, And the folk are all astir; For a stranger in the offing Draws them down to gaze at her,
In the gray of early morning, Black against the orange streak, Making in below the ledges, With no colors at her peak.
While each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of blurring from the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it to an impalpable thing.
Judging them individually, it is doubtful if Mr. Carman has done anything more representative, more imbued with his own temperament, than these buoyant, quickening songs that freshen one as if from a plunge in the sea, and take one to themselves as intimately. The opening poem sets the key to the collection:
I was born for deep-sea faring; I was bred to put to sea; Stories of my father’s daring Filled me at my mother’s knee.
I was sired among the surges; I was cubbed beside the foam; All my heart is in its verges, And the sea wind is my home.
All my boyhood, from far vernal Bourns of being, came to me Dream-like, plangent, and eternal Memories of the plunging sea.
And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in this picture at whose faithfulness one shudders:
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old, And well his work is done. With an equal grave for lord and knave, He buries them every one.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip, He makes for the nearest shore; And God, who sent him a thousand ship, Will send him a thousand more; But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave, And shoulder them in to shore,— Shoulder them in, shoulder them in, Shoulder them in to shore.
How the swing of the lines befits the action, and how it puts on grace in this stanza,
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre Went out, and where are they? In the port they made, they are delayed With the ships of yesterday.
The remaining strophes tempt one beyond what he is able, especially this characterization,
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him Is the sexton of the town;
but we must take a glance at the ballads, at the “Nancy’s Pride,” that went out
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea, To the flap of an idle sail,
* * * * *
and
… faded down With her creaking boom a-swing, Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep, And caught her wing and wing.
* * * * *
She lifted her hull like a breasting gull Where the rolling valleys be, And dipped where the shining porpoises Put ploughshares through the sea.
* * * * *
They all may home on a sleepy tide To the sag of an idle sheet; But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride That draws men down the street.
But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon, behold this apparition:
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears, They see by the after rail An unknown schooner creeping up With mildewed spar and sail.
Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds, With the Judgment in their face; And to their mates’ “God save you!” Have never a word of grace.
Then into the gray they sheer away, On the awful polar tide; And the sailors know they have seen the wraith Of the missing Nancy’s Pride.
There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so vividly that one may almost see the
crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds With the Judgment in their face,
and watch them as
into the gray they sheer away On the awful polar tide.
The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a very simple line, as this,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled, “weather-breeder” days one knows so well.
From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and frequently a crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr. Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not the heart to destroy it.
One pardons this over-elaboration in _Ballads of Lost Haven_ because of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to the blue leagues of sea; and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s debtor.
_Behind the Arras_ has proven a stumbling-block and rock of offence to some of Mr. Carman’s readers, because of its recondite character. They regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysticism is half whimsical, and requires no superconsciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is founding no cult; it pleases him for the nonce to mask his thought in symbols, and there are, alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no use for symbols! It is a book containing many strong poems, such as “Beyond the Gamut,” “Exit Anima,” and “Hack and Hew,”—a book of spiritual enigmas through which one catches hints of the open secret, ever-alluring, ever-eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, immanent, yet undivined.
Earth one habitat of spirit merely, I must use as richly as I may,— Touch environment with every sense-tip, Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
says this sane poet who holds his gift as a tribute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny:
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours, While time endures, To acquiesce and learn! For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn, Let soul discern.
And who through the grime and in the babel still sees and hears,
Always the flawless beauty,—always the Chord Of the Overword, Dominant, pleading, sure, No truth too small to save and make endure; No good too poor!