"The darting swallows soar and sing;"--
which would leave him no room to describe the lark, if the lark had
been about. Bryant comes nearer the mark this time:--
"There are notes of joy from the
hang-bird and wren,
And the gossip of swallows through all
the sky;"
so does Tennyson when he makes his swallow
"Cheep and twitter twenty million
loves;"
also Lowell again in this line:--
"The thin-winged swallow skating on
the air;"
and Virgil:--
"Swallows twitter on the chimney
tops."
Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his dealings with
nature than any of his compeers, although he has written some fine
naturalistic poems, as his "Rain in Summer," and others. When his
fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this so? Is this
true? as when he applies the Spanish proverb, "There are no birds
in last year's nests," to the nests beneath the eaves; for these
are just the last year's nests that do contain birds in May. The
cliff swallow and the barn swallow always reoccupy their old nests,
when they are found intact; so do some other birds. Again, the
hawthorn, or whitethorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more
than to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crimsoned, but a
purplish brown. "The ash her purple drops forgivingly," says Lowell
in his "Indian-Summer Reverie." Flax is not golden, lilacs are
purple or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the law to
go trouting in November. The pelican is not a wader any more than a
goose or a duck is, and the golden robin or oriole is not a bird of
autumn. This stanza from "The Skeleton in Armor" is a striking
one:--
"As with his wings aslant,
Sails the fierce cormorant,
Seeking some rocky haunt,
With his prey laden,
So toward the open main,
Beating to sea again,
Through the wild hurricane,
Bore I the maiden."
But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it
is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver,
and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them.
Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:--
"When crying cormorants forsake the
sea
And, stretching to the covert, wing
their way."
But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large
rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the
picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his
burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because
he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre
are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless,
that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden
with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross-
question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true
poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like
an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The
burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look
sharply.
Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He
comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood's wild
and curious lore, with
"Knowledge never learned of schools,
Of the wild bee's morning chase,
Of the wild flower's time and place,
Flight of fowl and habitude
Of the tenants of the wood;
How the tortoise bears his shell,
How the woodchuck digs his cell,
And the ground-mole sinks his well;
How the robin feeds her young;
How the oriole's nest is hung;
Where the whitest lilies blow,
Where the freshest berries grow,
Where the ground-nut trails its vine,
Where the wood-grape's clusters
shine;
Of the black wasp's cunning way,
Mason of his walls of clay,
And the architectural plans
Of gray hornet artisans!"
The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet
"painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the
least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of
"Wind-flower and violet, amber and
white,"
as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of
Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the
winter like the muskrat:--
"The fox his hillside cell forsakes,
The muskrat leaves his nook,
The bluebird in the meadow brakes
Is singing with the brook."
The only one of these incidents that is characteristic of a January
thaw in the latitude of New England is the appearance of the
muskrat. The fox is never in his cell in winter, except he is
driven there by the hound, or by soft or wet weather, and the
bluebird does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year. A
severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off the mountains
into the low, sheltered woods and fields, and a thaw will send them
back again. In the winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock
or stone wall, or upon a snowbank, where he can command all the
approaches, or else prowls stealthily through the woods.
But there is seldom a false note in any of Whittier's descriptions
of rural sights and sounds. What a characteristic touch is that in
one of his "Mountain Pictures:"--
"The pasture bars that clattered as
they fell."
It is the only strictly native, original, and typical sound he
reports on that occasion. The bleating of sheep, the barking of
dogs, the lowing of cattle, the splash of the bucket in the well,
"the pastoral curfew of the cowbell," etc., are sounds we have
heard before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture bars is
American; one can almost see the waiting, ruminating cows slowly
stir at the signal, and start for home in anticipation of the
summons. Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the
clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and
breadth of the land.
"Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter
that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is
this of the morning after the storm:--
"We looked upon a world unknown,
On nothing we could call our own.
Around the glistening wonder bent
The blue walls of the firmament,
No cloud above, no earth below,--
A universe of sky and snow!"
In his little poem on the mayflower, Mr. Stedman catches and puts
in a single line a feature of our landscape in spring that I have
never before seen alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line
of this stanza:--
"Fresh blows the breeze through
hemlock-trees,
The fields are edged with green
below,
And naught but youth, and hope, and
love
We know or care to know!"
It is characteristic of our Northern and New England fields that
they are "edged with green" in spring long before the emerald tint
has entirely overspread them. Along the fences, especially along
the stone walls, the grass starts early; the land is fatter there
from the deeper snows and from other causes, the fence absorbs the
heat, and shelters the ground from the winds, and the sward quickly
responds to the touch of the spring sun.
Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the only one I recall
by any of our well-known poets upon the much-loved mayflower or
arbutus. There is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown
author that also has the right flavor. I recall but one stanza:--
"Oft have I walked these woodland
ways,
Without the blest foreknowing,
That underneath the withered leaves
The fairest flowers were blowing."
Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered by closest
fidelity to her. Listen and look intently, and catch the exact
effect as nearly as you can. It seems as if Lowell had done this
more than most of his brother poets. In reading his poems, one
wishes for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of course,
to his serious poems; his humorous ones are just what they should
be), yet the student of nature will find many close-fitting phrases
and keen observations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and
at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the only writer I
know of who has noticed the fact that the roots of trees do not
look supple and muscular like their boughs, but have a stiffened,
congealed look, as of a liquid hardened.
"Their roots, like molten metal cooled
in flowing,
Stiffened in coils and runnels down
the bank."
This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when
uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminishing
streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in
contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it,
and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One
principal office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast
the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of
surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively
smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and
crevices like metal into a mould.
Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own
country. In his "Indian-Summer Reverie" we catch a glimpse of the
hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead
"With watchful, measuring eye,"
the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,
"On the shingly shagbark's bough."
I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" in poetry before, or
that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in
the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of
New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by
"The wide-ranked mowers wading to
the knee,"
as the mowers do not wade in the grass they are cutting, though
they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass;
perhaps this is the explanation of the line.
But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young
begins to weigh upon him:--
"Meanwhile that devil-may-care,
the bobolink,
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver
stops
Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's
tremulous brink,
And 'twixt the winrows most
demurely drops."
I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my
part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but
that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his
helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.