A few years ago Herr Brandes, the great French critic, in commenting
upon the method of criticism used by Saint Beuve, sounded a pretty harsh
note to the old school of critics, on method and material in poetry,
which in a measure explains what I am about to say of the poetry of John
Burroughs. "At the beginning of the century," he says, "imagination was
considered the essential quality in poetry. It was his capacity of
invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and
reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual
world. But as romanticism, by degrees, developed into realism, creative
literature, by degrees, gave up its fantastic excursions into space....
It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent."
An observer cannot fail to see in modern poetry a tendency to beautify
objects of nature, and facts of science. Past ages were taken up with
the heroic, the legendary in poetry. Legends were creations of the mind
and in turn subjects for all poetic effort. Some moral and spiritual
lesson or truth, must be taught by the introduction of ideals drawn
purely from imagination. Such an ideal was many times created for the
special lesson at hand. The Homeric poems, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's
Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, are all poems of this
character. They are founded on the unknown and the unknowable, yet they
bring to us suggestions that inspire us and make us better for having
read them. Milton never knew how Paradise was lost, nor even that it
ever was lost. Dante did not know the history of the departed soul, nor
did Homer and Virgil know what part the gods and heroes played in the
fall of the city of Troy, nor has the riddle of the origin of the Latin
and Greek races ever been written. Yet such themes give us pleasure when
they come from the great poets, who actually believed what they were
writing to be true, and the poems themselves will live forever.
We have reached a new order of things in the present era of the world's
history, and we must look to something else for poetic inspiration, as
well as to interpret the origin of things in the light of the last word
on evolution. The minor poets have about worn these old themes
threadbare, and the public mind is beginning to look to something else
for entertainment. People are now seeking the poetic interpretation of
facts of science and of nature, and the poet of the future will have the
peculiar task of giving us new eyes with which to see truth, instead of
leading us into fields of fancy.
John Burroughs is an interpreter of this latter kind. He has gone to
nature with the poet's eye, and has needed no fiction to get us
interested in what he is trying to tell us. The facts need only to be
seen with the poet's eyes to make them beautiful, and he has translated
them in terms of the human soul, without having to create beings of
fancy to interest us while he tells the message. This is what
differentiates his prose and poetry from the poetry of the past. It is
true, he ranges from the commonplace to the sublime, but in it all with
unfaltering devotion to truth, which should be the aim of every poet and
is the aim of every true poet, despite the claims of some that
literature is only to entertain, and should never be taken seriously. If
it is not serious, it is not literature, and if it is serious, it will
always have, as its entering wedge, some fundamental truth. The whole
aim of Burroughs is to lead humanity into the proper method of
interpreting the truths of nature, and if all his poetry is not the
best, he has sacrificed poetry rather than truth and owns up to it like
a man. He says: "My poetry is not the free channel of myself that my
prose is. I, myself, do not think that my poetry takes rank with my
prose." His best poetry takes rank with his or any body's prose.
Replying to some questions with reference to _Mid-summer in the
Catskills_, Mr. Burroughs says: "It was an attempt to paint faithfully,
characteristic mid-summer scenes of that locality. I do not think it
ranks high as poetry, but it is true. The genesis of such a poem, or of
any poem, is hidden in the author's subconsciousness." Perched on a
mountain top that overlooked the beautiful valleys amid the Catskill
mountains, and seeing the many activities of farm life in August, Mr.
Burroughs saw the beauty and simplicity of the situation, and could not
forego his duty of telling it to the world.
"The strident hum of sickle-bar,
Like giant insect heard afar,
Is on the air again;
I see the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain."
From beginning to end the poem paints the rural life amid the Catskills
in its busiest season, and associates with it all the best in Nature. It
is literally a poet's vision of his own country, after many years
absence from the fields he paints. How many times he himself has gone.
"Above the level grassy tides,
That flood the meadow plain,"
but perhaps without seeing the beauty that the scene now brings to him.
[Illustration: ON THE SUMMIT OF THE OLD CLUMP, LOOKING IN THE VALLEY
BELOW "WHERE SWEATING FORMS AND BRONZED ARMS REAP IN THE LAND'S
INCREASE"]
Far different from this is his first poetry, which is the expression of
a youth groping in the dark for some unknown god, with his only guide
that of faith in the world, faith in himself and faith in his fellowman.
He says of his early poem: "Waiting was written in 1862, during a rather
gloomy and doubtful period of my life. I was poor, was in doubt as to my
career, did not seem to be able to get hold of myself, nor to bring
myself to bear upon the problems before me. Yet underneath all was this
abiding faith that I should get what belonged to me; that sooner or
later I should find my own. The poem was first printed in the old
Knickerbocker Magazine of New York, in the fall of 1862. I received
nothing for it. I builded better than I knew. It has proved a true
prophesy of my life."
"Serene I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
"I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
"Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.
"What matter if I stand alone?
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it hath sown,
And garner up its fruits of tears.
"The waters know their own, and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
"The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me."
It is this willingness to wait the results of his efforts without
fretting or worrying, to which Mr. Burroughs owes his success. This I
think, is what has toned and sweetened his prose and poetry, and makes
him so readable. He looks for truth and finds it, and lets it ripen into
expression in his mind, and we get the good after the smelting process
has completed its work, and the dross all worked off. The above poem has
been a true prophesy of his life. His own has come to him, and he is now
experiencing the richest reward for his long years of waiting and
patience. If too much success comes to us in the beginning of any
career, the career is most likely to suffer, or possibly better, we are
likely to develop a little vain glory and never return to the proper
attitude to truth and service. Mr. Burroughs in his plain simple way has
been 'still achieving, still pursuing,' and has long since learned 'to
labor and to wait.' His attitude toward his work is almost as pleasant
as the work itself. Never in a hurry--though he always manages to get
much done. The melancholy days have been 'few and far between' with him,
though we do see some few sad but wholesome lines in his poetry. These
almost sound like some homesick visitor in a foreign land. The following
from the poem, "In Blooming Orchards," is a good illustration of this:
"My thoughts go homeward with the bees;
I dream of youth and happier days--
Of orchards where amid the trees
I loitered free from time's decrees,
And loved the birds and learned their ways.
"Oh, orchard thoughts and orchard sighs,
Ye, too, are born of life's regrets!
The apple bloom I see with eyes
That have grown sad in growing wise,
Through Mays that manhood ne'er forgets."
"The Return" is another of his poems in which this longing for the days
of his youth crops out:
"O sad, sad hills! O cold, cold hearth!
In sorrow he learned this truth--
One may go back to the place of his birth,
He cannot go back to his youth."
Again in "Snow Birds" he says:
"Thy voice brings back dear boyhood days
When we were gay together."
His contact with out-door life and his habits of observation are
unmistakably those of a poet. "In the rugged trail through the woods or
along the beach we shall now and then get a whiff of natural air, or a
glimpse of something to
"Make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs."
Burroughs says himself, 'the very idea of a bird is a symbol and a
suggestion to the poet. How many suggestions to the poet in their flight
and song! Indeed, is not the bird the original type and teacher of the
poet, and do we not demand of the human thrush or lark that he shake out
his carols in the same free manner as his winged prototype?... The best
lyric pieces, how like they are to certain bird-songs!--clear, ringing,
ecstatic, and suggesting that challenge and triumph which the outpouring
of the male bird contains.' Again he says 'Keats and Shelly have
pre-eminently the sharp semi-tones of the sparrows and larks.'
But what shall we say of Burroughs? His poetry is somewhat
matter-of-fact, like the songs of the Indigo bunting and the Thrushes,
and we cannot help but feel that the songs of these birds had the effect
on him that Burns speaks of in one of his letters: "I never hear the
loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild,
mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning,
without feeling an elevation of the soul like the enthusiasm of devotion
or poetry." Verily he has achieved his purpose. 'He has brought home the
bough with the bird he heard singing upon it. His verse is full of the
spirit of the woods and fields; the winds of heaven blow through it;
there is the rustle of leaves, the glint of sunlight; the voices of the
feathered folk are present. One finds himself in touch with out-doors in
every line.' O, what a blessing when one can drink from the great
fountain of Nature! When one can be so inured with the larger and more
wholesome truths of the universe that he forgets to fret and to make
records of the negative forces of the world! This we claim is
pre-eminently true of Burroughs. He tells truths about Nature in his
simple, musical verse, and almost vindicates Wordsworth's definition of
poetry: "The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge," or "The
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science." I
would almost say of him what Dryden said of Chaucer: "He is a perpetual
fountain of good sense." Perhaps Mr. Dowden, in speaking of Coleridge's
poetry, comes nearer than any one else to the truth about Burroughs'
poetry. "These poems contemplate and describe Nature in a resting and
meditative temper. There is no passionate feeling in their delight. The
joy he has in the beauty of the world is the joy of dreaming, often only
a recollected joy in what he has seen. He found in poetry, paths of his
imagination. The pensiveness, the dying fall, the self-loving
melancholy, are harmonized by him with Nature." Thoreau says in one of
his books: "Very few men can speak of Nature with any truth. They
overstep her modesty somehow or other, and confer no favor." The richest
flavor in the poetry of John Burroughs is the flavor of truth, and
'beauty is truth, truth beauty.' Unlike Thoreau, he never forgets his
fellowmen, nor has he ever failed to find beauty in man as well as in
Nature.
"He sees the mower where he rides
Above the level grassy tides
That flood the meadow plain,"
and writes a poem. He dislikes the conventional in man no less than he
dislikes the conventional in poetry, but man unaffected is as beautiful
as the Nature that surrounds him.
A few years ago when Mr. E. H. Harriman took a number of friends to
Alaska on what was known as The Harriman Alaska Expedition, John
Burroughs was selected as a purely literary man to write a narrative of
the Expedition. In addition to the story of the trip, Mr. Burroughs was
so inspired with the new scenery of those Borean Hills that the muse
seized him and the result was three of his best poems: _To the Oregon
Robin_, _To the Golden Crown Sparrow of Alaska_, and _To the Lapland
Longspur_. Since that trip in 1899, he has written no verse, I believe,
except _The Return_. Before then he was an irregular contributor of
poetry to the current magazines since the appearance of _Waiting_, in
1862. He says now that he does not seem to be in a mood for poetry, but
that he may find his muse again some day. The total number of his poems
in print amounts to only thirty-five and none of them are lengthy. The
longest of all is his very life which is to me one continuous poem. His
verses are only sparks from the life in which they grew, and never rise
to the height of the fountain head.
Perhaps one way to test a poet is to measure him by the number of single
line poems that can be found in his poetry; lines that make the real
poem of a number of verses. Pope thought that a long poem was a
contradiction of terms, and we certainly know many references in the
poets to suggestive lines that are almost poems in themselves.
Wordsworth's _Solitary Reaper_ contains one or two passages of this
kind.
"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago."
or the following from the _Ode_:
"Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence."
Another of his most exquisite lines is,
"And the stars move along the edges of the hills."
Walter Pater finds in Wordsworth's poetry an extraordinary number of
these short passage poems, which he called 'delicious morsels.'
Coleridge says of Wordsworth: "Since Milton, I know of no poet with so
many felicitous and unforgetable lines." Many critics have found these
suggestive lines in the poets, and I find Wordsworth full of them.
The lines of this kind that I find in the poetry of John Burroughs are
rather numerous for the amount of poetry he gave to the world, and some
of them are as fine as the language has.
[Illustration: LOOKING ACROSS THE PASTURE WALL IN THE DIRECTION OF THE
NATHAN CHASE FARM]
"Like mellow thunder leagues away,"
"I hear the wild bee's mellow chord,
In airs that swim above,"
"Once more the tranquil days brood o'er the hills,
And sooth earth's toiling breast,"
"The dome of day o'erbrims with sound
From humming wings on errands bound,"
"Pausing in the twilight dim,
Hear him lift his evening hymn,"
"Again from out the garden hives
The exodus of frenzied bees;
The humming cyclone onward drives,
Or finds repose amid the trees."
"Then waiting long hath recompense,
And all the world is glad with May."
"Oh, skater in the fields of air," he says of the swallow. How well
this expresses the flight of the swallow!
"The robin perched on treetop tall
Heavenward lifts his evening call."
"Forth from the hive go voyaging bees,
Cruising far each sunny hour."
There are many passages of this kind in his poems and they express the
moods of Nature, perhaps as well as it is possible for them to be put in
words. In _Arbutus Days_, he uses the following figure to paint a spring
day:
"Like mother bird upon her nest
The day broods o'er the earth."
To him the common things are all beautiful and if we only have the eyes
to see with, they are made beautiful for us by him. Recognizing the fate
of every insincere book, he declares: "Only an honest book can live;
only absolute sincerity can stand the test of time. Any selfish or
secondary motive vitiates a work of art, as it vitiates a religious
life. Indeed, I doubt if we fully appreciate the literary value of
staple, fundamental human virtues and qualities--probity, directness,
simplicity, sincerity, love." He is probably not an inspired poet, but I
shall claim for him that he is an honest singer, a sincere interpreter
of Nature, and every virtue referred to in the above quotation he has
woven into _Bird and Bough_. What he says of another we can
appropriately say of him: "This poet sees the earth as one of the orbs,
and has sought to adjust his imagination to the modern problems and
conditions, always taking care, however, to preserve an outlook into the
highest regions."