Part 5

In rocky hollows cool and deep, The bees our boyhood hunted sleep; The early moon from Ida’s steep Comes to the empty wrestling-ring, (Alas, alas, The one inexorable thing!)

Upon the widowed wind recede No echoes of the shepherd’s reed, And children without laughter lead The war-horse to the watering. (Alas, alas, The one inexorable thing!)

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon! What to the loveliest hast thou done, That ne’er with him a maid may run Across the marigolds in spring? (Alas, alas, The one inexorable thing!)

* * * * *

The world to me has nothing dear Beyond the namesake river here: O Simois is wild and clear! And to his brink my heart I bring; (Alas, alas, The one inexorable thing!)

The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear; there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it, which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, the white light which she throws upon her words when clarity and simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.

The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics, as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and measure:

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while, Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile, Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams, They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams, And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall, It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still; But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!

It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it:

’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch, The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch, And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves; And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall, And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.

* * * * *

’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad, The lark has a music to drive a lover mad; The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise, Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes, And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.

The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss Guiney has managed to infuse into these lines is fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what elation and buoyancy of returning life vitalizes the first! While on this phase of her work there is another poem as magnetically charged, and full of ozone, but its objective side incidental to a subjective query which nature and science force to the lips:

The spur is red upon the briar, The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; The wind shakes out the colored fire From lamps a-row on the sycamore; The tanager with flitting note Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat; The mink is busy; herds again Go hillward in the honeyed rain; The midges meet. I cry to Thee Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me.

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride; Along an edge of marshy ground, The shad-bush enters like a bride. Yon little clouds are washed of care That climb the blue New England air, And almost merrily withal The tree-frog plays at evenfall His oboe in a mossy tree. So, too, Am I not Thine? Arise, undo This fear Thou hast forgotten me.

From the nature side these lines are pictures, taken each by each they are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for illustration, in the words,

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride,

and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without, as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection upon the surface of the water.

The subjective touch in the above poem:

I cry to Thee, Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me!—

articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitude that writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand:

As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap! lest aye inoperative Here in the Pit my strength shall be: And still, Help me endure the Pit until Thou wilt not have forgotten me.

There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous emprise. Not a man of them who can meet fate in a braver joust than she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but enters the field again for the

“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”

There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this marching order:

So much to me is imminent: To leave Revolt that is my tent, And Failure, chosen for my bride,

And into life’s highway be gone Ere yet Creation marches on, Obedient, jocund, glorified:

And, last of things afoot, to know How to be free is still to go With glad concession, grave accord,

Nor longer, bond and imbecile, Stand out against the Gradual Will, The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.

And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest,

O give my youth, my faith, my sword, Choice of the heart’s desire: A short life in the saddle, Lord! Not long life by the fire,—

sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding lines:

I fear no breathing bowman, But only, east and west, The awful other foeman Impowered in my breast. The outer fray in the sun shall be, The inner beneath the moon; And may Our Lady lend to me Sight of the dragon soon.

At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and vibrant lines:

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses; All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle, Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion, With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses; There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us: What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses; All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind; We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil, Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!

“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the personality of her expression.

A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot.

To test Miss Guiney’s marksmanship with words, one may separate her at once from the class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, for she concentrates, instead of diffusing, and has, at the outset, a definite point in view. She works upon the arrow principle, but now and again glances from the mark. In such a poem as “The Recruit,” in “The Wild Ride,” or the “Saint George” quoted from, in her stirring poem “Sanctuary,” beginning,

High above Hate I dwell, O storms! farewell,

and in many others, she cleaves straight to her aim with no deflection. The same may be said of many of her lighter poems, the charming “Lilac Song,” or this delicately wrought love-song, speeding to the heart:

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar; Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken, On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!) Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see, While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.

In poems of this kind and in deeper ones from the spiritual side of her nature, as well as in those of valor and daring, she uses such words as are tipped with a penetrative point; but in some of her sonnets, such as “The Chantry,” in a narrative poem, such as “The Vigil in Tyrone,” though not without picturesque quality, in “The Squall,” despite its frequently fine imagery, and often in the dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” the words are too much weighted to carry to the mark; they suggest undue care in selection which interposes between the motive of the poem and the sympathy of the reader. One pauses to consider the words; and the initial impulse, like a spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney’s diction is, in the main, peculiarly crisp and apposite; but she does not always hold to the directness of appeal that distinguishes her truest work, but withdraws herself into subtleties, often beautiful, but too remote. “A Martyr’s Idyl” is a dramatically conceived incident, well wrought as to scene and character, and having many passages of great beauty; but the effort to keep the expression to the manner of the time results in a lack of flexibility in the style that is now and then cumbrous. On the whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort that Miss Guiney best reveals herself, but in such inspirations as she has taken—

Neither from sires nor sons, Nor the delivered ones, Holy, invoked with awe.

Her best work answers, by practical demonstration, her own query:

“Where shall I find my light?”

“Turn from another’s track, Whether for gain or lack, Love but thy natal right. Cease to follow withal, Though on thine upled feet Flakes of the phosphor fall. Oracles overheard Are never again for thee, Nor at a magian’s knee Under the hemlock tree, Burns the illumining word.”

The term “original” is one to be used charily and with forethought, but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss Guiney’s work. There is a distinct quality, both of treatment and conception, that is hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain classic quaintness, it has also vitality and concrete forcefulness.

Her metrical command is varied, and she employs many forms with assurance of touch. She has a group of Alexandrian songs in _A Roadside Harp_, most of them with beauty of measure and atmosphere. Here, in three lines, is a rhythmic achievement:

Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping, Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping, Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!

How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to visualize the scene.

_The Sonnets Written at Oxford_ mark, as a whole, her finest work in this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,” take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden content and gladness.

Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain, And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home, And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome, The monstrous island of the middle main; If each inheritor must sink again Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam— I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears! Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune, Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon, And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls. “God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good, the One Beauty—

O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!—

and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,”

All else for use, one only for desire; Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee: Up from the best, whereof no man need tire, Impel Thou me.

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by, Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer. Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny These three are dear,)

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed, Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys; O close my hand upon Beatitude! Not on her toys.

And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping from life:

The Ox he openeth wide the doore And from the snowe he calls her inne, And he hath seen her Smile therefore, Our Lady without sinne. Now soone from sleepe A starre shall leap, And soon arrive both King and Hinde; _Amen_, _Amen_: But O, the place co’d I but find!

The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow, And on his lovelie Neck, forspent, The Blessed lays her Browe. Around her feet Full Warme and Sweete His Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell; _Amen_, _Amen_: But sore am I with Vaine Travél!

The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall, And Host of more than onelie one, For close she gathereth withal Our Lorde, her littel Sonne: Glad Hinde and King Their Gyfte may bring, But wo’d to-night my Teares were there; _Amen_, _Amen_: Between her Bosom and His hayre!

To sum up Miss Guiney’s work, as well as one may, in a sentence,—it has no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and nerve. Were the fervor and passion which she throws into her songs of valor to be diffused throughout her verse, making its appeal more intimate and personal, she would speak more widely, but scarcely to more appreciative readers than now delight in her individuality.

V

GEORGE E. SANTAYANA

“EMOTION recollected in tranquillity,” perfectly defines the work of Mr. George Santayana. He is a musing philosopher environed by himself. He

‘shuts himself in with his soul And the shapes come eddying forth,’

shapes that have no being in the world of sense, but are rather phantasms materialized in the ether of dreams. There is no evidence in Mr. Santayana’s work that he is living in America in the twentieth century—and upon his own testimony he is not; he has withdrawn from the importunity of things:

Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled, Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—

and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the pearl with the nacre of his own spirit.

Mr. Santayana’s poet-kinsmen are not to be found in contemporary literature; he is alone in the midst of the singers as regards temperament and attitude toward life. His school is that of beauty; his time that of the gods; his faith the sanctity of loveliness; and his creed the restoration of the fair. He would shut out all the obtrusive shows of nature and life, and dwell in the Nirvana of his own contemplation:

A wall, a wall around my garden rear, And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills; Give me but one of all the mountain rills, Enough of ocean in its voice I hear. Come no profane insatiate mortal near With the contagion of his passionate ills; The smoke of battle all the valleys fills, Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—

and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, where the strife of living had merged into the poise of being, he would repeople the desolated earth and air with the forms of his imagination:

A thousand beauties that have never been Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue; The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue; The satyrs at my coming fled the green. The flitting shadows of the grove between The dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knew The wings of sacred Eros as he flew, And left me to the love of things not seen. ’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer, And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease, Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase, And heaven shines as if the gods were there. Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace Embalm the purple stretches of the air.

It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal standpoint:

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers, Our lives without remorse, as if not ours, And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—

says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of reflection.

There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him. His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit, where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action; awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.

This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday, and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for those who know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana. He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet like this to find our mood expressed: