The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.
A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.
_Thomas Bailey Aldrich_
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
where he spent most of the sixteen years which he has recorded in
that delightful memoir, _The Story of a Bad Boy_ (1869). After a
brief clerkship, he became junior literary critic of _The Evening
Mirror_ at nineteen, publishing his first book (_The Bells_), an
immature collection of echoes, at the same time. From 1855 to 1866
he held various journalistic positions, associating himself with the
leading metropolitan _literati_. But though Aldrich mingled with the
New York group, he was not part of it; he longed for the more
rarefied intellectual atmosphere of New England and when, in 1866,
Osgood offered him the editorship of _Every Saturday_, published in
Boston, Aldrich accepted with alacrity. A few years later he became
editor of the famous _Atlantic Monthly_, holding that position from
1881 to 1890.
Aldrich’s work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The first
half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extravagances; the
reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, emerald, pearl and
gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, tiger-lilies, spice,
soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. There is no real air in
these verses; it is Nature as conceived by a poet reading the
Arabian Nights in a hot-house. In company with Stoddard and Taylor,
he dwelt in a literary Orientalism—(Stoddard’s _Book of the East_
followed fast upon Taylor’s _Poems of the Orient_)—and Aldrich’s
_Cloth of Gold_ was suffused with similar “vanilla-flavored
adjectives and patchouli-scented participles” (to quote Holmes),
laboring hard to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome
profusion of lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses,
diaphanous gauzes, etc.
The second phase of Aldrich’s art is more human in appeal as it is
surer in artistry. He learned to sharpen his images, to fashion his
smallest lyrics with a remarkable _finesse_. “In the little steel
engravings that are the best expressions of his peculiar talent,”
writes Percy H. Boynton, “there is a fine simplicity; but it is the
simplicity of an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a
village maid.” Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he
was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, these
poems of his which have the best chance of permanence are some of
the epigrams, the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, passionless
in tone but exquisite in design.
The best of Aldrich’s diffuse poetry has been collected in an
inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin and
Company. He died in 1907.