Part 8

Little kindred of the grass, Like a shadow on a glass Falls the dark and falls the stillness; We must rise and pass.

We must rise and follow, wending Where the nights and days have ending,— Pass in order pale and slow, Unto sleep extending.

Little brothers of the clod, Soul of fire and seed of sod, We must fare into the silence At the knees of God.

Little comrades of the sky, Wing to wing we wander by, Going, going, going, going, Softly as a sigh.

And to make the season-cycle complete, and also to show the delicacy of imagination with which Mr. Roberts invests every changing aspect of his well-loved outer world, here are two stanzas on “The Frosted Pane”:

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned Against my window-pane. In the deep stillness of his heart convened The ghosts of all his slain.

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth, And fugitives of grass,— White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth, He drew them on the glass.

Fancies as exquisite as this bespeak the true poet. “The Trout Brook” and “The Solitary Woodsman” are other inspirations as individual.

Mr. Roberts’ fifth volume, _New York Nocturnes_, as its name implies, was a decided departure from his former work, showing his versatility, but what is more to the purpose, his recognition of the dramatic element, the human, vital poetry in the babel of the streets. One could wish that the _Nocturnes_ penetrated more profoundly into the varied phases of life in the great seething city, that, in short, they sounded other deeps than those of love; but Mr. Roberts has succeeded in conveying that sense of isolation in a throng, that heavy loneliness and reaction, throwing one back upon his own spiritual personality, which belongs to the bewildering city night, and from which the finer companionships of love arise as a refuge and need.

The _Nocturnes_ have the city’s over-soul incarnate in them; for in the last analysis, the commerce, the art, the ambition, the strife, the defeat, that one may term the city’s life, are but as hands and feet to minister to the spirit of love. The first of the _Nocturnes_ suggests this:

I walk the city square with thee, The night is loud; the pavements roar. Their eddying mirth and misery Encircle thee and me.

The street is full of lights and cries: The crowd but brings thee close to me, I only hear thy low replies; I only see thine eyes.

The “Nocturne of Consecration” is impassioned and full of spirituality; it is, however, too long to quote, which is unfortunately the case with the “Nocturne of the Honeysuckle,” another of the finer poems. “At the Station” is instinct with movement, reproducing the picture of the swiftly changing throngs, and conveying the eager expectancy of the hour of meeting. The _Nocturnes_ have also a group of miscellaneous poems, and the volume as a whole, while less virile than _The Book of the Native_, owing to the difference in theme, is distinguished by refinement of feeling and artistry.

In _The Book of the Rose_ Mr. Roberts has done some excellent work, and some, alas, that strikes a decided note of artificiality. The least real and convincing of the poems is that called “On the Upper Deck,” which opens the volume. The first stanza is subtly phrased, and also the lyric which occurs midway of the poem; but the dialogue between the lovers is honeyed poetizing rather than genuine emotion. I find few heart-throbs in it, but rather a melodramatic sentimentality from whose flights one is now and again let down to the common day with summary despatch, as in the parenthetical clause of the stanza which follows:

Let us not talk of roses. Don’t you think The engine’s pulse throbs louder now the light Has gone? The hiss of waters past our hull Is more mysterious, with a menace in it? And that pale streak above the unseen land, How ominous! a sword has just such pallor! (Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.) Never has life shown me the face of beauty But near it I have seen the face of fear.

It may be that an obtuse man upon the deck of a steamer would interrupt his sweetheart’s flight of poesy to envelop her in a shawl, but the details of the matter may well be left to the imagination. It is doubtless one of those passages which seem to a writer to give reality to a picture, but afterward smile at him sardonically from the printed page. Mr. Roberts inclines elsewhere in the same poem to be too explicit; after a most exalted declaration, he says:

No, do not move! Alone although we be I dare not touch your hand; your gown’s dear hem I will not touch lest I should break my dream And just an empty deck-chair mock my longing.

Here again it was scarcely necessary to qualify the chair, and indeed the whole passage savors of melodrama. These are, however, only such lines as show that to the one relating a matter the least incident may appear to lend reality to the setting, whereas to the reader the detail may violate taste.

The opening stanza, mentioned as one of the truly subtle bits of the poem in question, has these fine lines:

As the will of last year’s wind, As the drift of the morrow’s rain, As the goal of the falling star, As the treason sinned in vain, As the bow that shines and is gone, As the night cry heard no more,— Is the way of the woman’s meaning Beyond man’s eldest lore.

This stanza and the lyric below, which is sung as an interlude to the dialogue, go far toward redeeming the over-ripe sentiment of the poem:

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deeps The hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand sleeps, There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of the earth, Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and birth.

O Rose, blossom of longing—the faint suspense, and the fire, The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire, The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed,— With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is fed.

The remaining poems of the volume are much more artistic than the first, with the exception of the passages last quoted. “The Rose of Life” is artistically wrought as to form and metre, and subtle in analysis; but, because of its length and that it voices somewhat the same thought as the lyric above, the former must serve to show with what delicacy of interpretation he approaches a theme so well worn, but ever new, as that of the rose. It is chiefly on the symbolistic side that Mr. Roberts considers the subject; and while one may feel that the sentiment cloys at times when a group of poems using the rose as an image are bracketed together, this is the chief criticism of the volume, as the lyrics following the opening poem, “On the Upper Deck,” have both charm and art, and one hesitates between such an one as, “O Little Rose, O Dark Rose,” and the one immediately following it, “The Rose of My Desire.” This, perhaps, has a more compelling mood, though no greater charm of touch than the other:

O wild, dark flower of woman, Deep rose of my desire, An Eastern wizard made you Of earth and stars and fire.

When the orange moon swung low Over the camphor-trees, By the silver shaft of the fountain He wrought his mysteries.

The hot, sweet mould of the garden He took from a secret place To become your glimmering body And the lure of your strange face.

From the swoon of the tropic heaven He drew down star on star, And breathed them into your soul That your soul might wander far—

On earth forever homeless, But intimate of the spheres, A pang in your mystic laughter, A portent in your tears.

From the night’s heat, hushed, electric, He summoned a shifting flame, And cherished it, and blew on it Till it burned into your name.

And he set the name in my heart For an unextinguished fire, O wild, dark flower of woman, Deep rose of my desire!

Metrically the poem jars in the line,

And breathed them into your soul,

departing as it does from the general scheme of the third lines, and rendering it necessary to make “soul” bisyllabic in order to carry the metre smoothly, and in accord with its companion verses. “Spirit” would have fitted the metrical exigency better, leaving the final unaccented syllable as in the majority of the lines, but would not have lent itself to repetition in the succeeding line as does “soul,”—so “who shall arbitrate”? Mr. Roberts rarely offends the ear in his metres, but instead his cadences are notably true.

Aside from the poems upon love, filling the first division of _The Book of the Rose_ it has a miscellaneous group, of which the two that best represent it, to my fancy, are so widely diverse that their mere mention in juxtaposition is amusing; nevertheless they are the lines “To An Omar Punch Bowl,” and the reverent Nativity Song, “When Mary, the Mother, Kissed the Child.” The haunting couplets of the former are by no means of the convivial sort, but the essence of memory and desire, the pathos of this dust that is but “wind that hurries by,”—is in them. However, to be quoted, they need their full context, as does the Nativity Song mentioned.

Mr. Roberts has a rare sympathy with childhood, and a gift of reaching the hearts of the little ones; the “Sleepy Man” and “Wake-up Song” could scarcely be improved; note the picturing in the former and the drowsihood in its falling cadences:

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes (Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies. (So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun; (Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) The stars that he loves he lets out one by one. (So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town; (Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down. (So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

* * * * *

Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane, (Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane. (So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry (Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) To Sleepy Man’s Castle by Comforting Ferry. (So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

Mr. Roberts has collected his several volumes, exclusive of _The Book of the Rose_, into one, eliminating such of the earlier work as falls short of his standard of criticism, and adding new matter showing growth and constantly broadening affinity with life. He manifests more and more the potentialities of his nature, and while all of his later work does not ring equally true, the majority of it is instinct with sincerity and high idealism, and one may go to it for unforced, unconventional song, having art without trammels, for a breath of the ozone of nature, and for suggestive thoughts upon life and the things of the spirit. Its creed is epitomized in the following lines, pregnant with suggestion to the votary of Art, the creed of the idealist, and yet the truer realist:

Said Life to Art: I love thee best Not when I find in thee My very face and form, expressed With dull fidelity.

But when in thee my longing eyes Behold continually The mystery of my memories And all I crave to be.

VIII

EDITH M. THOMAS

AN earnest idealist is Miss Edith Thomas, who commits to her song a vital word and sends it as a courier to arouse that drowsy lodge-keeper, the soul, and bid him give ear to the importunate message of life. Not by outwardly strenuous numbers, however, is this end achieved; on the contrary, Miss Thomas is a quiet singer whose thoughtful restraint is one of her chief distinctions. The spiritual tidings which she intrusts to her song are destined to be delivered in the silence of the soul; none the less are they sent to awaken it, and none the less do they bide and knock at the door of one’s spirit until one rise and open to them.

The ideality of her work has been from the outset its most informing quality; the thoughts beyond the thrall of words that pass, in Maeterlinck’s phrase, “like great white birds, across the heart,” had brushed with their unsullied wings the thoughts of every-day and left a light upon them, giving assurance, when the art was still unshapen, that the vision had been revealed. One seldom reads a poem by Miss Thomas without bringing away from it a suggestive thought or a spiritual stimulus, sometimes introduced so subtly that it breaks upon one in the after-light of memory rather than at the moment of reading; for Miss Thomas is not a homiletic singer, obtruding the moral. She is too much the artist for that. She delivers no crass counsel, does no obvious and commonplace moralizing; but she has the nature that resolves every phase of life into its spiritual elements, and, seen imaginatively, these elements are material for Art. When once they are wrought into song by Miss Thomas, they have lost none of the force of the original idea, none of the thought-giving value; but into them has been infused the spiritual value in a subtly philosophical way, by which the experience is resolved into its personal import to the soul.

Miss Thomas has written many beautiful lyrics, but her characteristic expression is too thoughtful to be set to the lighter and more purely musical rhythms. She has a finely cultivated style, inventive in form, and often employing richly cadenced measures, but one feels rather that the cadence is well tested, the form well fitted to the theme, than that the impulse created its own form and sang itself into being. One cannot, however, generalize upon such varied work as that of Miss Thomas. Because one feels back of the work the thinker, the analyst, weighing even the emotion in the balance of reflection, is not to say that the work is cold or unemotional; on the contrary, it is deeply human and sympathetic, and in such inspirations as are drawn directly from life it is often highly impassioned; but in many of the poems the motive is drawn from some classic source, such as, “At Seville,” “Ulysses at the Court of Alcinous,” “The Roses of Pieria,” “Timon to the Athenians,” “The Voice of the Laws,” being Socrates’ reply to Crito,—and while each of these poems, and particularly the last, has both beauty and strength, they naturally lack the warmth and impulse that accompany more personal themes.

As compared with the large body of Miss Thomas’ work, that for which the inspiration has been sought far afield is slight; but it is sufficient to set the mark of deliberate intent upon many of the poems and detract from the spontaneity of the work as a whole. Miss Thomas is so accomplished and ready a technician that the temptation to utilize such allusions and themes from literature as have artistic possibilities, is a strong one; nor is it one to be deprecated, except in the ultimate tendency that one shall let the inspiration from without take precedence of that within, thus quenching one’s own creative faculty. With Miss Thomas such a result is far distant, if not impossible, for life is to her the vital reality, and the majority of her themes are drawn from its passing drama; but there is also the other phase of her art, and a sufficiently prominent one to be noted. Her work falls under two distinct heads,—poetry of the intellect and poetry of the heart,—and while her most emotional verse has a fine subtlety of thought, and her most intellectual a subtlety of emotion, making them not crassly one or the other, none the less is the distinction apparent, and it is easy to put one’s hand upon the work into which her own temperament has entered and which her creative moods have shaped. Upon Art itself she has written some of her most luminous poems, holding genius to be one with that force by which

The blossom and the sod Feel the unquiet God,

and exclaiming to a doubting votary,

Despair thine art! Thou canst not hush those cries, Thou canst not blind those eyes, Thou canst not chain those feet, But they a path shall beat Forth from thine heart. Forth from thine heart! There wouldst thou dungeon him, In cell both close and dim— The key he turns on thee, And out he goeth free! Despair thine art!

In her poem, “The Compass,” she carries the reasoning farther, and declares that if one is to wait upon the Force within and give it freedom, he shall also be trusted to follow where it leads, knowing that if temporarily deflected it will adjust itself to the truth as surely as the compass, thrown momentarily out of poise, searches and finds its compelling attraction. Aside from the analogy in the lines, the dignity of their movement, the harmonious fall of the cæsura, and the fine blending of word and tone, render them highly artistic:

Touch but with gentlest finger the crystal that circles the Mariner’s Guide— To the East and the West how it drifts, and trembles, and searches on every side! But it comes to its rest, and its light lance poises only one self-same way Since ever a ship spread her marvellous sea-wings, or plunged her swan-breast through the spray— For North points the needle!

Ye look not alone for the sign of the lode-star; the lode-stone too lendeth cheer; Yet one in the heavens is established forever, and one is compelled through the sphere. What! and ye chide not the fluttering magnet that seemeth to fly its troth, Yet even now is again recording its fealty’s silent oath— As North points the needle!

Praise ye bestow that, though mobile and frail as a tremulous spheret of dew, It obeys an imperial law that ye know not (yet know that it guideth most true); So, are ye content with its fugitive guidance—ye, but the winds’ and waves’ sport!— So, are ye content to sail by your compass, and come in fair hour to your port; For North points the needle!

And now, will ye censure, because, of compulsion, the spirit that rules in this breast, To show what a poet must show, was attempered, and touched with a cureless unrest, Swift to be moved with all human mutation, to traverse passion’s whole range? Mood succeeds mood, and humor fleets humor, yet never heart’s drift can they change, For North points the needle!

Inconstant I were to that Sovereign Bidding (why or whence given unknown), Failed I to tent the entire round of motive ere sinking back to my own: The error be yours, if ye think my faith erring or deem my allegiance I fly; I follow my law and fulfil it all duly—and look! when your doubt runneth high— North points the needle!

These lines illustrate Miss Thomas’ command of accurately descriptive phrase: the compass is “mobile and frail as a tremulous spheret of dew,” and touched never so lightly, “how it drifts, and trembles, and searches on every side.” One feels that just these words, and no others, convey at once the sense of its delicacy, and the almost sentient instinct by which it seeks its attraction. Miss Thomas’ diction in general shows rather fineness of discrimination in the expressive value of words than a strenuous attempt to seek out those which are “literary” and inobvious. There is rarely a word that calls undue attention to itself; but when a passage or poem is analyzed, one cannot but note the fine sense of values in its phraseology. Her diction has elegance without conventionality, but one would scarcely say that it is highly temperamental. It is flexible, colorful, picturesque, but has not so strong a note of personality that one meeting a poem of Miss Thomas’ by chance would be able to identify it by its evidence of word and phrase, as one may often do in the work of a poet. Miss Thomas’ marked individuality is rather in the essence of her work, its motive, mood, and thought, than in its distinctive style, which is too varied to be recognized by its touch.

Now and again in her earlier work the influence of Emerson comes out unmistakably. “A Reed Shaken With the Wind,” “Child and Poet,” and “The Naturalist,” are distinctly Emersonian in manner and atmosphere—the first especially so in its consecutive, unstanzaed lines, and in the note pervading it. Whatever mannerisms of style Miss Thomas acquired from Emerson were, however, quickly cast off; but with his thought she could scarcely fail to have a continued kinship, if not a debt, so much does her own work incline to the spiritually philosophical. One may not trace influences at all definitely in her work, though felt in its general enrichment and breadth. In “Palingenesis,” from her last collection, she has done what poets before her have done,—embody in song the theory of evolution; but it has rarely been done better than in these stanzas, which seize the spiritual side of the scientific fact and fuse it with the imagination. It has been shudderingly foreboded that in this baldly practical age the poet would come singing of science; but if he invest it with the life and charm that pervade Miss Thomas’ incursion into the realm, there is no immediate cause for alarm. Indeed, a scientific truth, seen through the lens of a poet’s imagination, often takes on a beauty that no conception of fancy could duplicate, witness Whitman’s line:

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,

from a poem upon the same theme which inspires Miss Thomas’ stanzas:

I dwelt with the God, ere He fashioned the worlds with their heart of fire, Ere the vales sank down at His voice or He spake to the mountains, “Aspire!” Or ever the sea to dark heaven made moan in its hunger for light, Or the four winds were born of the morning and missioned on various flight.

In a fold of His garment I slept, without motion, or knowledge, or skill, While age upon age the thought of creation took shape at His will;

* * * * *

Part had I not in the scheme till He sent me to work on the reef. Nude, in the seafoam, to clothe it with coralline blossom and leaf. Patient I wrought—as a weaver that blindly plyeth the loom, Nor knew that the God dwelt with me, there as I wrought in the gloom.

Strength had I not till chiefdom supreme of the waters He gave; Joyous I went—tumultuous; the billows before me I drave— Myself as a surge of the sea when impelled by the driving storm; Nor knew that the God dwelt with me, there in leviathan’s form.

Lightness I had not till, decked with light plumes, He endued me with speed— Buoyant the hollow quill as the hollow stem of the reed! And I gathered my food from the ooze, and builded my home at His word; Nor knew that the God dwelt with me clothed in the garb of a bird.

I trod not the earth till on plains unmeasured He sent me to rove, To taste of the sweetness of grass and the leaves of the summer grove. For shelter He hollowed the cave; fresh springs in the rock He unsealed; But I knew not the God dwelt with me that ranged as a beast of the field. Foresight I had not, nor memory, nor vision that sweeps in the skies, Till He made me man, and bade me uplift my marvelling eyes! My hands I uplifted—my cries grew a prayer—on the green turf I knelt, And knew that the God had dwelt with me wherever of old I had dwelt!

Wild is the life of the wave, and free is the life of the air, And sweet is the life of the measureless pastures, unburdened of care; They all have been mine, I upgather them all in the being of man, Who knoweth, at last, that the God hath dwelt with him since all life began!