I wrote in the last sketch but one of the villager with a literary gift
who composes the epitaphs in rhyme of his neighbours when they pass
away and are buried in the churchyard. This has served to remind me of
a kindred subject--the poetry or verse (my own included) of those who
are not poets by profession: also of an incident. Undoubtedly there is
a vast difference between the village rhymester and the true poet, and
the poetry I am now concerned with may be said to come somewhat between
these two extremes. Or to describe it in metaphor, it may be said to
come midway between the crow of the "tame villatic fowl" and the music
of the nightingale in the neighbouring copse or of the skylark singing
at heaven's gate. The impartial reader may say at the finish that the
incident was not worth relating. Are there any such readers? I doubt
it. I take it that we all, even those who appear the most
matter-of-fact in their minds and lives, have something of the root,
the elements, of poetry in their composition. How should it be
otherwise, seeing that we are all creatures of like passions, all in
some degree dreamers of dreams; and as we all possess the faculty of
memory we must at times experience emotions recollected in
tranquillity. And that, our masters have told us, is poetry.
It is hardly necessary to say that it is nothing of the sort: it is the
elements, the essence, the feeling which makes poetry if expressed. I
have a passion for music, a perpetual desire to express myself in
music, but as I can't sing and can't perform on any musical instrument,
I can't call myself a musician. The poetic feeling that is in us and
cannot be expressed remains a secret untold, a warmth in the heart, a
rapture which cannot be communicated. But it cries to be told, and in
some rare instances the desire overcomes the difficulty: in a happy
moment the unknown language is captured as by a miracle and the secret
comes out.
And, as a rule, when it has been expressed it is put in the fire, or
locked up in a desk. By-and-by the hidden poem will be taken out and
read with a blush. For how could he, a practical-minded man, with a
wholesome contempt for the small scribblers and people weak in their
intellectuals generally, have imagined himself a poet and produced this
pitiful stuff!
Then, too, there are others who blush, but with pleasure, at the
thought that, without being poets, they have written something out of
their own heads which, to them at all events, reads just like poetry.
Some of these little poems find their way into an editor's hands, to be
looked at and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally one wins a
place in some periodical, and my story relates to one of these chosen
products--or rather to three.
One summer afternoon, many years ago--but I know the exact date: July
1st, 1897--I was drinking tea on the lawn of a house at Kew, when the
maid brought the letters out to her mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard,
looking over the pile remarked that she saw the _Selborne Magazine_ had
come and she would just glance over it to see if it contained anything
to interest both of us.
After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, here is a poem by Charlie
Longman! How strange--I never suspected him of being a poet!"
She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the publisher, and it must be
explained that he was an intimate friend and connection of hers through
his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir John Evans the
antiquary, and sister of Sir Arthur Evans.
The poem was _To the Orange-tip Butterfly_.
Cardamines! Cardamines!
Thine hour is when the thrushes sing,
When gently stirs the vernal breeze,
When earth and sky proclaim the spring;
When all the fields melodious ring
With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees
Put on their green, then art thou king
Of butterflies, Cardamines.
What though thine hour be brief, for thee
The storms of winter never blow,
No autumn gales shall scorn the lea,
Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow;
But soaring high or flitting low,
Or racing with the awakening bees
For spring's first draughts of honey--so
Thy life is passed, Cardamines.
Cardamines! Cardamines!
E'en among mortal men I wot
Brief life while spring-time quickly flees
Might seem a not ungrateful lot:
For summer's rays are scorching hot
And autumn holds but summer's lees,
And swift in autumn is forgot
The winter comes, Cardamines.
So well pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud
two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day
when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a
deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back to us the vivid spring
feeling, the delight we had so often experienced on seeing again the
orange-tip, that frail delicate flutterer, the loveliest, the most
spiritual, of our butterflies.
Oddly enough, the very thing which, one supposes, would spoil a lyric
about any natural object--the use of a scientific instead of a popular
name, with the doubling and frequent repetition of it--appeared in this
instance to add a novel distinction and beauty to the verses.
The end of our talk on the subject was a suggestion I made that it
would be a nice act on her part to follow Longman's lead and write a
little nature poem for the next number of the magazine. This she said
she would do if I on my part would promise to follow her poem with one
by me, and I said I would.
Accordingly her poem, which I transcribe, made its appearance in the
next number.