"The landscape winking thro' the
heat"--
or to gather this image:--
"He has a solid base of temperament;
But as the water-lily starts and slides
Upon the level in little puffs of wind,
Though anchor'd to the bottom, such
is he;"
or this:--
"Arms on which the standing muscle
sloped,
As slopes a wild brook o'er a little
stone,
Running too vehemently to break
upon it,"--
and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and
cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution
and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A
lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when
they came to a spring that bubbled up through shifting sands in a
very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the
spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long
time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how
intently a great poet studies nature.
Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that
would express or suggest that evening call of the robin. How
absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon
this descriptive phrase:--
"The vitreous pour of the full moon
just tinged with blue;"
how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made
this poem:--
"The tongue of his fore-plane whistles
its wild ascending lisp;"
or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have
turned it into words in "A Word out of the Sea "! Indeed, no poet
has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is
more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!--
"Behold the daybreak!
The little light fades the immense
and diaphanous shadows!"
"The comet that came unannounced
Out of the north, flaring in
heaven."
"The fan-shaped explosion."
"The slender and jagged threads of
lightning, as sudden and fast amid
the din they chased each other
across the sky."
"Where the heifers browse--where
geese nip their food with short
jerks;
Where sundown shadows lengthen
over the limitless and lonesome
prairie;
Where herds of buffalo make a
crawling spread of the square miles
far and near;
Where the hummingbird shimmers--
where the neck of the long-lived
swan is curving and winding;
Where the laughing-gull scoots by the
shore when she laughs her near
human laugh;
Where band-neck'd partridges roost
in a ring on the ground with their
heads out."
Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to
the West. But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in
characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a
single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North,
East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits
and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not
dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up
by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and
movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history
here and there,--the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk
swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron,
the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese,
the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit,"
etc.,--to help locate and define his position. Everywhere in
nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire
consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues
his very seas and woods with passion, more than the old hamadryads
or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead
material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why
Addington Symonds, the young Hellenic scholar of England, finds him
more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.
Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country,
is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been
touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably
associated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and
with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,--as
the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued
spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and
long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming,
with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most
characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch,
circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating
flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each
opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive
brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo-
bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the
livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo,
like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods
from May to September:--
"Pretty green worm, where are you?
Dusky-winged moth, how fare you,
When wind and rain are in the tree?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee,
Shadow and sun one are to me.
Mosquito and gnat, beware you,
Saucy chipmunk, how dare you
Climb to my nest in the maple-tree,
And dig up the corn
At noon and at morn?
Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."
Or the phbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under
the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown
thrasher--mocking thrush--calling half furtively, half archly from
the treetop back in the bushy pastures: "Croquet, croquet, hit it,
hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you're out,
you're out," with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling
the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty
little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or
suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical
strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest
and military bearing,--these and many others should be full of
suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the
robin's song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier
than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in "A Masque of
Poets:"--
"When the willows gleam along the
brooks,
And the grass grows green in sunny
nooks,
In the sunshine and the rain
I hear the robin in the lane
Singing, 'Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'
"But the snow is still
Along the walls and on the hill.
The days are cold, the nights forlorn,
For one is here and one is gone.
'Tut, tut. Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.'
"When spring hopes seem to wane,
I hear the joyful strain--
A song at night, a song at morn,
A lesson deep to me is borne,
Hearing, 'Cheerily,
Cheer up, cheer up;
Cheerily, cheerily,
Cheer up.' "
The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a
convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry
has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the
other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is
nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor
interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the
instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod
until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with
your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the
conditions, and are what you make them. Did Shelley interpret the
song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They
interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet
is always to idealize nature,--to see it subjectively. You cannot
find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's
heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored glass, sees it
truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of
the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden
meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet
shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly,
because the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not
Coleridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emerson's bumblebee
is not Lowell's; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto
does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all
men. "We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we
find without." The same idea is daintily expressed in these
tripping verses of Bryant's:--
"Yet these sweet sounds of the early
season
And these fair sights of its early
days,
Are only sweet when we fondly listen,
And only fair when we fondly gaze.
"There is no glory in star or blossom,
Till looked upon by a loving eye;
There is no fragrance in April breezes,
Till breathed with joy as they
wander by;"
and in these lines of Lowell:--
"What we call Nature, all outside
ourselves,
Is but our own conceit of what we see,
Our own reaction upon what we feel."
"I find my own complexion
everywhere."