A friend once wrote to me: “What do you know about a poet who signs his
name John B. Tabb, his poems are delicious?” My answer was, that I knew
nothing of his personal history, but that his poems had found their way
into my aristocratic scrap-book. Here I might pause to whisper that
the adjective aristocratic, in my sense, has nothing haughty about
it. When joined to the noun scrap-book, a good commentator—they are
scarce—would freely translate the phrase the indwelling of good poetry.
Since then my personal knowledge of the poet has grown slowly, a slight
stock and no leaves. Even that, like my old coat, is second-handed.
Such material, no matter how highly recommended by the keepers of the
golden balls, is usually found to be a poor bargain. But here it is,
keeping in mind that rags are better than no clothing, and that older
proverb—half a loaf is better than no bread.
“John B. Tabb, (I quote) was born in Virginia, when or where I know
not. Becoming a Catholic he studied for the priesthood and was
ordained.” Here my data fails me. At present he is the professor of
literature in St. Charles’ College, Maryland. It is something in his
favor, this scanty biographical fare. Where the biography is long,
laudatory, and in rounded periods, it is approached as one would a
snake in the grass, with a kind of fear that in the end you may be
bitten. “May I be skinned alive,” said that master of word-selection
and phrase-juggler, Flaubert, “before I ever turn my private feelings
to literary account.” And the reader, with the stench of recent
keyhole biography in his nostrils, shouts “bravo.” Flaubert’s phrase
might easily have hung on the pen of the retiring worshipper of the
beautiful, “the Roman Catholic priest, who drudges through a daily
round of pedagogical duties in St. Charles’ College.” This quoted
phrase may stand. Pedagogy, at best, is a dull pursuit for a poet. It
is not congenial, and I have held an odd idea that whatever was not
congenial, disguise it as you may, is drudgery. And all this by way of
propping the quoted sentence. The strange thing is that in the midst
of this daily round of drudgery the poet finds time to produce what a
recent critic well calls “verse-gems of thought.” These verse-gems,
if judged by intrinsic evidence, would argue an environment other
than a drudgery habitation. In truth, it is hard to desecrate them by
predicating of them any environment other than a spiritual one.
This brings us to write of Fr. Tabb’s poetry that it is elusive, from
a critical point of view. When you bring your preconceived literary
canons to bear upon it, they are found wanting—too clumsy to test the
delicacy, fineness of touch, and the permeated spiritualism embodied in
the verse-gem. It is well summarized in the saying that “it possesses
to the full a white estate of virginal prayerful art.” One might define
it by negatives, such as the contrary of passion poetry. The point
of view most likely to give the clearest conception would be found
in the sentence: an evocation from within by a highly spiritualized
intelligence. The poet has caught the higher music, the music of a soul
in which dwell order and method. In other words, he has assiduously
cultivated to its fullest development both the spiritual sense and the
moral sense.
It is easy to trace in Fr. Tabb’s poetry the influence of Sidney
Lanier. It has been asserted, and with much truth, that Lanier’s
influence has strangely fascinated the younger school of Southern
poets. Sladen, in his book on Younger American Poets, tells us that
“Lanier differs from the other dead poets included in his book, in that
he was not only a poet but the founder of a school of poetry.” To his
school belongs Fr. Tabb, a school following the founder whose aim is to
depict
“All gracious curves of slender wings,
Bark mottlings, fibre spiralings,
Fern wavings and leaf flickerings.
Yea, all fair forms and sounds and lights,
And warmths and mysteries and mights,
Of Nature’s utmost depths and heights.”
The defects of this school are best seen in the founder. He was a
musician before a poet, and helplessly strove to catch shades by
words that can only be rendered by music. Fr. Tabb has learned
this limitation of his school. For the glowing semi-pantheism of
Lanier he has substituted the true and no less beautiful doctrine of
Christianity. All his verse-gems are redolent of his faith. They are
religious in the sense that they are begotten by faith and breathe the
air of the sanctuary. To read them is to leave the hum and pain of
life behind, and enter the cloister where all is silent and peaceful,
where dwelleth the spirit of God. Of them it is safe to assert that
their white estate of virginal, prayerful art shall constitute their
immortality. Fr. Tabb has not, as yet, thought fit to give them a
more permanent form than they have in the current magazines. Catholic
literature, and especially poetry, is so meagre that when a true
singer touches the lyre it is not to be wondered at that those of his
household should desire to possess his songs in a more worthy dwelling
than that of an ephemeral magazine. In the absence of the coming
charming volume I quote from my scrap-book a few of the verse-gems,
thereby trusting to widen the poet’s audience and in an humble way gain
lovers for his long-promised volume.
What could illustrate the peculiar genius of our poet better than the
delicious gem that he has called
“THE WHITE JESSAMINE.”
I knew she lay above me,
Where the casement all the night
Shone, softened with a phosphor glow
Of sympathetic light,
And that her fledgling spirit pure
Was pluming fast for flight.
Each tendril throbbed and quickened
As I nightly climbed apace,
And could scarce restrain the blossoms
When, anear the destined place,
Her gentle whisper thrilled me
Ere I gazed upon her face.
I waited, darkling, till the dawn
Should touch me into bloom,
While all my being panted
To outpour its first perfume,
When, lo! a paler flower than mine
Had blossomed in the gloom!
“Content” is another gem of exquisite thought and workmanship.