The Dial/Volume 15/Number 170/Recent Books of Poetry
Recent Books of Poetry.[1]
It seems odd to begin an article upon "Recent Books of Poetry" with a paragraph devoted to "Poems by Two Brothers." That modest collection of youthful exercises in verse, now reproduced (as to title-page and arrangement) in fac-simile, is mainly useful in enabling us to realize the immense range of the conquests of Victorian Poetry. The year of its publication (1827 ) was also that of the appearance of Pollok's "Course of Time," marking the lowest ebb of the tide of dull eighteenth-century didacticism. Meanwhile, the romantic movement had swelled to its height, and its force was fast becoming spent. But who could have discerned, in the volume almost furtively put forth by three English schoolboys (for Mr. Frederick Tennyson wrote at least four of the poems), the first wave of a new tide of song, about to gather to itself the best impulses of both the didactic and romantic spirits, to unite them in one resistless surge, and destined to sweep down the century almost to its very close. Even now, when judgment can hardly avoid the influence of the accomplished fact, it is difficult to find in this volume any suggestion, much less any promise, of what was to come. Here and there we find a faintly Tennysonian phrase, such as
"Groves of undulating pine,
Upon whose heads the hoary vapours hung,"
or this:
"The thunder of the brazen prows
O'er Actium's ocean rang,"
or this:
"A wan, dull, lengthen'd sheet of swimming light
Lies the broad lake."
But what we find for the most part are the platitudes of boyish rhetoric, and echoes of Byron or Moore. It is amusing to think that any work signed by Alfred Tennyson should deserve no better description than is given by the phrase, "an echo of Moore." Four pieces not included in the original edition are now first published from manuscript. They enrich English literature by such measures as this:
"Fare thee well! for I am parting
To the realms of endless bliss;
Why is thus thy full tear starting?
There's a world more bright than this."
"Timbuctoo," the prize poem of 1829, which the publishers have also added to the collection, is a different matter. Here we can find our own Tennyson in many passages. The following has often been quoted, but is worth quoting again:
"The clear galaxy
Shorn of its hoary lustre, wonderful,
Distinct and vivid with sharp points of light,
Blaze within blaze, an unimagin'd depth
And harmony of planet-girded suns
And moon-encircled planets, wheel in wheel,
Arch'd the wan sapphire."
Indeed, the growth in power of poetic expression that is evidenced by these and many other lines of "Timbuctoo," when compared with the best of the "Poems by Two Brothers," is one of the most striking things in all the record of the development of poetical genius.
"King Poppy," a posthumous poem by the Earl of Lytton, was written nearly twenty years ago, and subjected, during the rest of the author's lifetime, to constant revision and improvement. It was the author's favorite work, and exhibits, at their highest stage of development, his considerable powers as a writer of philosophic and fanciful verse. In 1880, he wrote of the poem to this effect:
"The purpose of it, so far as it has any definite purpose, is not to prove that all is vanity, but to suggest what a poor tissue of unreality human life would be if the much despised influence of the imagination were banished from it. I think that the practical tendency of all the most popular formulas of social and political improvement is to exclude the imaginative element from the development of character and society, and to ignore its influence. . . . Holding this view, it was a relief to me to write 'King Poppy,' and a sort of whimsical enjoyment to contemplate my own image of the perfection of government conducted by a puppet. Apart from this, the more purely literary idea I had in this poem was to shape out vaguely a sort of Golden Legend from the most venerable and familiar features or fragments of the fairy tales and ballads which float about the world, and which our wise generation relegates to the nursery."
We select the following lines from the introductory "Legend," as well representing the charm of the work in its more poetical passages:
"There is a legend, the low-breathing wind
In Spring-time whispers to the trees and flowers,
That some good gift on every flower and tree
A guardian god or goddess once bestow'd.
Pan made the reed melodious: Artemis
With mystic influence fill'd the moon-fern: Zeus
The cypress, Cybelè the pine, endow'd
With solemn grace: blithe Dionysus pour'd
The strength of his indomitable mirth
Into the sweet orbs of the cluster'd vine:
Ethereal azure from Athenè's eyes
The dim veins of the violet imbued
With pensive beauty: Cythereia's kiss
Crimson'd the balmy bosom of the rose:
Leaf of unfading lustre Phœbus gave
To the green laurel: washt in Herè's milk,
White shone the immaculate lily: and the ripe corn
Demeter robed in oriental gold."
"The Eloping Angels" is entirely unworthy of Mr. Watson's talents. That the author of "Wordsworth's Grave" should have wasted his time in the composition of a skit like this is simply amazing, and that he should have been willing to give it publication is still more amazing. The piece is evidently intended to he semi-humorous, but the humor is elephantine, and the author's wit nearly always misses fire. Humor that does not warm and wit that does not illuminate, are things " most tolerable and not to be endured." The best comment upon the work is provided by its own text:
"This sort of prank, to me, is rather tame."
Mr. Watson's good work is so very good that it is doubly a pity that he should publish anything so far below the level of his better self.
Mr. T. E. Brown, the author of "Old John and Other Poems," is at least no imitator of other men's work. His manner, freakish to eccentricity, is all his own, although a superficial view might find it to resemble the manner of Browning. Much of his verse is too utterly formless to deserve serious consideration, and yet there often emerges from the seeming chaos some ethical message that is startling in its directness and its force. We also note in his work a vein of mysticism that is not without impressiveness. As an illustration of the author's more eccentric manner, we may take some very original verses from a poem which preaches upon a frequently recurring theme that of the need of man's soul to get back to nature, to escape from the coil of a complex civilization and the sophistications of art.
"The main purport of our earthly station,
Which is to permeate
One soul with fullest freight
Of constant natural forms, not factual complication.
"Else were our life both frivolous and final.
A mere skiomachy,
Not succulent of growth, not officinal
To what shall after be,
But Fortune's devilry
Of Harlequin with smirk theatro-columbinal."
"Israel and Hellas" is the title of one of the finer poems in the collection. It contrasts the two civilizations much as Matthew Arnold was wont to do, although our later poet half doubts if the contrast were as great as it appears to us. We quote four stanzas that embody the central thought of the poem.
"And was it possible for them to hold
A creed elastic in that lightsome air,
And let sweet fables droop in flexile fold
From off their shoulders bare,
Loose-fitting, jewel-clasped with fancies rare?
"For not as yet intense across the sea
Came the swart Hebrew with a fiery haste;
In long brown arms entwined Euphrosyne,
And round her snowy waist
Fast bound the Nessus-robe, that may not be displaced.
"Yes, this is true; but the whole truth is more;
This was not all the burning Orient gave;
Through purple partings of her golden door
Came gleams upon the wave,
Long shafts that search the souls of men who crave;
"And probings of the heart, and spirit-balm,
And to deep questionings the deep replies
That echo in the everlasting calm—
All this from forth those skies,
Beside Gehenna fire and worm that never dies."
There is a large philosophy of life embodied in some of Mr. Brown's pieces, the stanzas to "Pain" offering a notable illustration. They open thus:
"The man that hath great griefs I pity not;
'Tis something to be great
In any wise, and hint the larger state,
Though but in shadow of a shade, God wot!
"Moreover, while we wait the possible,
This man has touched the fact,
And probed till he has felt the core, where, packed
In pulpy folds, resides the ironic ill."
This is the close of the poem:
"But tenfold one is he, who feels all pains
Not partial, knowing them
As ripples parted from the gold-beaked stem
Wherewith God's galley onward ever strains.
"To him the sorrows are the tension-thrills
Of that serene endeavor
Which yields to God forever and forever
The joy that is more ancient than the hills."
This is the deeper optimism that we find in Browning, or in Carlyle's doctrine that not happiness but blessedness is the true aim of life. Enough has been said to show that Mr. Brown's work will repay study, that within its husks there may be found a sweet and nutritious kernel.
The past year has brought many contributions of verse to its central Columbian theme, verse that has ranged all the way from the wooden epics of Mr. Kinahan Cornwallis to the lyrical measures of Miss Monroe's "Commemoration Ode." Mr. Louis James Block is the latest contributor to this Columbian literature, and his work takes the form of a sort of versified Culturgeschichte, having the discovery of America for its main episode. In spite of a few defects—a defective line now and then or an imperfect rhyme, an archaism or a verbal license that occasionally goes beyond the limits of the admissible, a mysticism and a vagueness of pression that sometimes lapses into obscurity, in spite of these things, we think that Mr. Block has produced a very noble poem, a poem not unworthy of its great theme, and that stands in eloquent contrast to many efforts that we will not for a moment draw from kindly oblivion by naming. Mr. Block's poem is in four sections—"The Old World," "The Man," "The Deed," and "The New World"—with a dedication to the "Women of America." The first and last sections, with their poetic characterization of the supreme moments of history, show the author's work at its best, for they afford him the most opportunities for the fine philosophical generalizations towards which he is led by his natural bent. As an illustration of this, as well as of the complex structure of the whole poem, we quote the stanza which sums up the part of India in the history of ancient culture:
"Under the fervid skies, and mid the growth
Of tangled forests where the mountains vast
Circle the shaded glens, a gloomy past
Enwraps a nobler people; ever loth
To grasp the present firmly, seeing both
The worlds of earth and heaven in mist of dreams
Enrobed and mingled, they seemed bound by oath
Of high allegiance to the One who gleams
Recedingly on the gaze
Turned Himwards; by what ways
Of severence from the body, down what streams
Of anguish did they seek Him; the land teems
With monstrous shapes and visions that enthrall;
And chiefly thee, O Buddh, the foiled ones call
Savior and friend, thee clothed in contemplation's rest,
And finding loss of all and nothingness the best."
Felicitous passages abound in the poem.
"People grown strong with very sight of God,"
gives admirable expression to the ethical mission of the Hebrew.
"Freedom awoke with Greece,
And violet-crowned peace;
The soul was born and thought's first victory won,"
is both exquisite and adequate. The following fine tribute is paid to England:
"O stern-browed Heroine far across the sea,
Your daughter knows your blood within her veins,
And hearkens to the ever-ringing strains
Your voice has poured to honor liberty."
Indeed, the whole poem is a song of the conquests of liberty, and closes in a vein that seems inspired by Shelley's outburst:
"Oh, happy earth, reality of heaven!"
"One vision more!" sings the author,
"One vision more! the spiritual city lies
Beneath the sun; the all-subduing love
Inhabits there as in the realms above;
As lordly as the blue unclouded skies
Life passes, and the mighty dawn's surmise
Reaches completion, and the deeps on deeps
Of spirit which are seen alone of eyes
Whose watch is kin to power that never sleeps
Are more and more revealed;
The inmost heavens unsealed
Comfort the heart where no more anguish weeps,
And open fields which faith forever reaps."
The dramatic element, rather than the lyrical, is the characteristic component of Mr. Fawcett's "Songs of Doubt and Dream." The best of the poems are those either dramatic in form, as "Two Scenes in the Life of Beau Brummell," or in spirit, as the fine narrative of "Queen Christina and De Liar." Hence we question the propriety of specifically styling the volume a collection of songs. The spontaneous grace and melody of the true lyric are qualities rarely exhibited in Mr. Fawcett's verse, but we have instead abundant energy devoted to a wide range of themes. We are inclined to think that the author has weighted his verse with more philosophy than it will bear, or rather, perhaps, that his philosophy has not been sublimed in the proper alembic; it is often crude and merely prosaic in expression. The memorial verses to Courtlandt Palmer are excellent in thought and sympathy, yet we can hardly call poetry such lines as these:
"Ye men that bow to science as your god
Learn self-control and patience from her laws.
Remember Newton and Copernicus
Killed superstition with the sword of truth;
They did not scare it dead with rhetoric;
Hysteria never framed a syllogism,
And logic murders like a gentleman."
The "dream" of Mr. Fawcett's title, as well as the "doubt," is justified by many pieces, from which we select, as among the more successful, "A Retrospect."
"Wandering where mortals have no power to gauge
The enormity of night that space outrolls,
Floated or paused, in shadowy pilgrimage,
Two disembodied souls.
"One towered a shape with dark wild-trailing shroud,
With face by sorrow and anger seamed and drawn;
One loomed a holy glory, as when some cloud
Swims deep in baths of dawn.
"World after world they gazed on, till beguiled
They flew toward earth, and hovering where she swept,
One with a saturnine dejection smiled,
And one with slow tears wept.
"'On that star,' said the spirit of sombre mien,
'As Dante I passed through pain's most blinding heats. . . .
'On that star,' said the spirit of look serene,
'I suffered, and was Keats.'"
There are in these lines echoes of Tennyson and Aldrich, at least, and the felicity of several words (guage, enormity, loomed, dejection) may be questioned, but the poem has merits, and is not unimpressive. We have found nothing prettier or more nearly faultless in the volume than this "Aquarelle":
"Far away westward the cattle go,
Dotting the land's dim edges;
Isled in the roseate afterglow,
Darken the long cloud-ledges.
"Burning each moment with warmer beams,
Moon, by your sweet chaste power
Lull the world into lotus-dreams,
While you hang like a lotus-flower."
On the whole, Mr. Fawcett's volume comprises the best work in verse that he has yet given us, and fairly entitles him to a place among our American poets of the second rank.
Mr. Cawein's new volume has the general characteristics of its predecessors—the cloying imagery and the verbal trickery; but we hear at times a stronger note than he has been wont to sound,—a graver, if a no less passionate, strain. There is still too much of this sort of thing:
"Fly out with flirt and fluting—
As flies a falling-star
From flaming star-beds shooting,
From where the roses are,"
but there are also verses like these:
"Once when the morning on the curling breakers,
Along the foaming sand,
Flashed expectation, by the ocean's acres,
Love took command.
"And so we sailed, Æolian music melting
Around our silken sails;
The bubbled foam our prow of sandal pelting
With rainbow gales."
Mr. Cawein's Muse, in her less exuberant moods, gives promise of excellent things.
One does not expect very much from undergraduate college verse. "Under the Scarlet and Black" is perhaps deserving of a word of mention as the first book of verse that has yet hailed from a Western college, for the collection comes to us from Grinnell, Iowa. The honors of the volume are borne off by Miss Mary Bowen and Miss Bertha Booth (both of this year's class), and, after some hesitation, we select a piece by the former writer—a sonnet "To Emily Dickinson":
"A harp Æolian on a lonely sill
Was placed to feel the subtle wind's soft touch.
Perhaps its strains were burdened overmuch
With Nature's sadness and her discords; still,
Responsive to its master's touchless thrill,
It told the clover's whisper to the breeze,
The wordless plaint of wind-swept winter trees,
With melody unknown to human skill.
So in the quiet of a life apart
From other lives, their passion and their pain,
The hand of Nature touched thy tunéd heart,
And, lo, thou utterest in simple strain
A song too thought-rich for a fettered art,
Yet bearing ever Nature's sad refrain."
Professor Newton M. Hall introduces the volume with a brief sketch of journalism in Iowa College.
We have hardly found anything as good as the above sonnet in "Cap and Gown," although Mr. J. L. Harrison, the editor, has chosen his contents from some forty college papers. Most of his pieces are love lyrics of a somewhat callow sort, written in the exotic verse-forms that seem so easy, yet in which real success is reached only by the masters. The verses to "Eleanor," by Mr. J. H. Boynton, are perhaps as successful as anything in the collection.
"I do not think she loves me yet,
Her glance meets mine direct and free;
Its very sweetness seems to set
A bar between herself and me.
"I never touched her lips with mine,
I dare not dream I ever may;
Still when I come her eyes will shine,
And soften when I go away.
"Some hours I cannot well forget,
Perhaps she may remember too.
I knew I loved her when we met,
She never seemed as others do.
"I loved to watch her flushing cheek,
Her soft hair carelessly astray,
To see her smile, to hear her speak,
And still have loved her every day.
"I do not think she loves me yet,
I dare not think she ever may;
I know I loved her when we met,
And still have loved her every day."
The binding of this volume, with its hydrangea-decorated covers, is original and exquisite enough to call for a special word of praise.
The title-page of "Under King Constantine " gives us no author's name, but we understand the authorship of the book has been acknowledged by Mrs. Spencer Trask. Mrs. Trask has undertaken the hazardous experiment of writing Arthurian idyls, and her little volume comprises three such poems—narratives expanded from hints in Malory. A passage describing the vision of the Grail will show the character of the verse:
"One night at midnight came the ray again,
And with it came a strange expectancy
Of spirit as the light waxed radiant.
The cell was filled with spicy odours sweet,
And on the midnight stillness song was borne
As sweet as heaven's harmony—the words—
The same Sir Launcelot had heard of old—
'Honour and joy be to the Father of Heaven.'
With wide eyes searching his lone cell for cause
He waited: as the ray became more clear
And more effulgent than the mid-day sun,
He trembled with that chill of mortal flesh
Beholding spiritual things. At last—
Now vaguely as though veiled by light, and then
With shining clearness, perfectly—he saw
The sight unspeakable, transcending words."
The purpose of Mrs. Trask's verse is serious and sincere, but the execution is amateurish, and an extremely qualified praise is all that can be given the volume.
Mr. Richard Hovey's "Seaward" is an elegy, in forty-five seven-line stanzas, upon the late Thomas William Parsons. It is elaborate in construction and extremely discursive in treatment. We quote one of the stanzas:
"But who is this that from the mightier shades
Emerges, seeing whose sacred laureate hair
Thou startest forward trembling through the glades,
Advancing upturned palms of filial prayer?
Long hast thou served him; now, of lineament
Not stern but strenuous still, thy pious care
He comes to guerdon. Art though not content?"
One of Mr. Hovey's notes obligingly informs us that the reference of this passage is to Dante. A study of Parsons, reprinted from "The Atlantic Monthly," serves, with the notes, to thicken the booklet into what may be called a volume.
Professor William Hyde Appleton, of Swarthmore College, has made and annotated a collection of translated passages of Greek poetry, naming the volume "Greek Poets in English Verse," and supplying an introduction of no great value. The introduction, in fact, is little more than a summary of the Homeric poems and three or four selected tragedies. It is not noticeably critical, and lapses into the style sophomoric. We may remark incidentally that "deeper than ever plummet sounded" is not a quotation from any author known to us. Mr. Appleton's volume is intended as an aid to the "classical course in English " of which overmuch is nowadays heard from university extension lecturers. The idea of such courses is an excellent one, provided only they fall into the right hands, but the attempts thus far made to give them seem to have been unfortunate. Mr. Appleton's selections include copious extracts from Homer and the four dramatists, and many short passages from the lyric and elegiac poets and the Anthology. We are aware that in any work of this sort much allowance should be made for the tastes of the compiler, and that no collector of elegant extracts (not even Mr. Palgrave) ever quite satisfied all his readers. But Mr. Appleton has missed so many of the things that ought to have gone into his book that we must venture a word of unfavorable comment. His fear "that some one of his readers may miss the very thing that he hopes to find" is only too well warranted, for is it possible that any reader should not have hoped and confidently expected to find, in the Homeric section, Lord Tennyson's "Achilles over the French"? "Language as divine almost as Homer's own," Mr. Theodore Watts calls it, and whatever else was omitted, surely that ought not to have been. Another omission as conspicuous is that of Mr. Swinburne's translation of the chorus from the "Birds." Compared with that, all other translations from Aristophanes (even Mr. Lang's version of the 'Clouds' chorus ) are simply nowhere. When we add that neither the "Agamemnon" of Browning or of Fitz Gerald is represented, and that Calverley's "Theocritus" is wholly ignored, we feel justified in asserting that Mr. Appleton's work is not done as well as it should have been.
The late John Osborne Sargent, lawyer and journalist, was a life-long lover of Horace, and a man singularly fitted by temperament to sympathize with the Horatian point of view. During the last ten years of his life, he devoted his leisure hours to the translation of his favorite poet, and the work, which includes all but a dozen or so of the odes, is now published by his daughter, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes contributing an introduction. The volume must be reckoned among the best of the many attempts to perform the alluring but difficult task of Horatian translation. Mr. Sargent commands a variety of metrical forms, and his most satisfactory work is done in the grave iambic measures chosen for the more serious of the odes. We may take as an example the "Exegi monumentum ære perennius":
"A monument more durable than brass
Of height no regal pyramids surpass,
I have achieved a work that will outlast
The waste of waters or the northern blast.
I shall not wholly die, but much of me,
My better part shall reach posterity.
No flight of seasons shall obscure my name,
But serial ages shall increase my fame.
While to the Capitol, to Time's last day,
Pontiff and vestal tread the sacred way,
It shall be told of one of humble birth,
Now potent with the magnates of the earth—
Bred where he heard Ofanto's torrent roar,
When Daunus' subjects ploughed its arid shore—
That he first wed—to him that praise belongs—
Æolian measures to Italian songs.
With guerdon crown desert, Melpomene,
And give the Delphic laurel wreath to me."
If Mr. Sargent's versions are often inadequate, they are at least never undignified or lacking in either taste or feeling. He has fairly escaped the besetting sin of many Horatian translators—that of vulgarizing their original.
Mr. James Rhoades, whose version of books I.–VI. of the "Æneid" has just appeared, apologizes for adding another to the already numerous translations of Virgil ("Vergil" he styles the poet), and says: "It has seemed to me that, if one could produce a version of the 'Æneid' that should be in itself an English poem, and at the same time a faithful reflection of the original, neither adding to the text nor diminishing from it, such an achievement would be worth the time and labor required for the task." This is, indeed, the whole problem, and we are bound to say that Mr. Rhoades has been one of the most successful of those who have endeavored to solve it. We make a brief extract from the prophecy of the sixth book.
"Here is Cæsar, here
The whole line of Iulus, that thall pass
One day beneath the mighty pole of heaven.
This, this the man so oft foretold to thee,
Cæsar Augustus, a god's son, who shall
The golden age rebuild through Latian fields
Once ruled by Saturn, and push far his sway
O'er Garamantians and the tribes of Ind,
A land that lies beyond the stars, beyond
The year's path and the sun's, where, prop of heaven,
Atlas upon his shoulders turns the pole,
Studded with burning constellations."
This is excellent verse, and the elevation is fairly sustained throughout the translation.
Of the new edition of Coleridge, which we must dismiss with a word, the principal things to be said are that it offers a critical edition of the text altogether superior to any previously in existence, a compact and fairly exhaustive body of notes, and an introductory biography that must at once supersede all others, and remain for an indefinite period the standard authority for the life of the poet. It is difficult to accord to Mr. Campbell's labors the praise that they deserve; no previous editor of Coleridge has approached him either in knowledge or in painstaking industry. The memoir, we understand, is to be republished by itself, a compliment of which it is entirely worthy.
- ↑
- Poems by Two Brothers. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- King Poppy. By the Earl of Lytton. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.
- The Eloping Angels: A Caprice. By William Watson. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- Old John, and Other Poems. By T. E. Brown. New York: Macmillan & Co.
- El Nuevo Mundo: A Poem. By Louis James Block. Chicago: C. H. Kerr & Co.
- Songs of Doubt and Dream. By Edgar Fawcett. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co.
- Red Leaves and Roses. By Madison Cawein. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
- Under the Scarlet and Black: Poems by Undergraduates of Iowa College. Edited by Henry S. McCowan and Frank F. Everest. Grinnell: Herald Publishing Co.
- Cap and Gown: Some College Verse. Chosen by Joseph La Roy Harrison. Boston: Joseph Knight Co.
- Under King Constantine. New York: A. D. F. Randolph & Co.
- Seaward: An Elegy on the Death of Thomas William Parsons. By Richard Hovey. Boston: D. Lothrop Co.
- Greek Poets in English Verse. By Various Translators. Edited by William Hyde Appleton. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
- Horatian Echoes: Translations of the Odes of Horace. By John Osborne Sargent. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
- The Æneid of Vergil, Books I.—VI. Translated into English Verse by James Rhoades. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.
- The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by James Dykes Campbell. New York: Macmillan & Co.