EMERSON'S POEMS.
The following "Prefatory Note" by Mr. Cabot introduces the ninth volume
of the series of Emerson's collected works:--
"This volume contains nearly all the pieces included in the POEMS
and MAY-DAY of former editions. In 1876 Mr. Emerson published a
selection from his poems, adding six new ones, and omitting many.
Of those omitted, several are now restored, in accordance with the
expressed wishes of many readers and lovers of them. Also some
pieces never before published are here given in an Appendix, on
various grounds. Some of them appear to have had Emerson's approval,
but to have been withheld because they were unfinished. These it
seemed best not to suppress, now that they can never receive their
completion. Others, mostly of an early date, remained unpublished
doubtless because of their personal and private nature. Some of
these seem to have an autobiographic interest sufficient to justify
their publication. Others again, often mere fragments, have been
admitted as characteristic, or as expressing in poetic form thoughts
found in the Essays.
"In coming to a decision in these cases, it seemed on the whole
preferable to take the risk of including too much rather than the
opposite, and to leave the task of further winnowing to the hands of
time.
"As was stated in the Preface to the first volume of this edition of
Mr. Emerson's writings, the readings adopted by him in the "Selected
Poems" have not always been followed here, but in some cases
preference has been given to corrections made by him when he was in
fuller strength than at the time of the last revision.
"A change in the arrangement of the stanzas of "May-Day," in the
part representative of the march of Spring, received his sanction as
bringing them more nearly in accordance with the events in Nature."
Emerson's verse has been a fertile source of discussion. Some have
called him a poet and nothing but a poet, and some have made so much of
the palpable defects of his verse that they have forgotten to recognize
its true claims. His prose is often highly poetical, but his verse is
something more than the most imaginative and rhetorical passages of his
prose. An illustration presently to be given will make this point clear.
Poetry is to prose what the so-called full dress of the ball-room is to
the plainer garments of the household and the street. Full dress, as
we call it, is so full of beauty that it cannot hold it all, and the
redundancy of nature overflows the narrowed margin of satin or velvet.
It reconciles us to its approach to nudity by the richness of its
drapery and ornaments. A pearl or diamond necklace or a blushing bouquet
excuses the liberal allowance of undisguised nature. We expect from the
fine lady in her brocades and laces a generosity of display which we
should reprimand with the virtuous severity of Tartuffe if ventured upon
by the waiting-maid in her calicoes. So the poet reveals himself under
the protection of his imaginative and melodious phrases,--the flowers
and jewels of his vocabulary.
Here is a prose sentence from Emerson's "Works and Days:"--
"The days are ever divine as to the first Aryans. They come and go
like muffled and veiled figures, sent from a distant friendly party;
but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring,
they carry them as silently away."
Now see this thought in full dress, and then ask what is the difference
between prose and poetry:--
"DAYS.
"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdom, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachéd garden watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I too late
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn."
--Cinderella at the fireside, and Cinderella at the prince's ball! The
full dress version of the thought is glittering with new images like
bracelets and brooches and ear-rings, and fringed with fresh adjectives
like edges of embroidery. That one word _pleachéd,_ an heir-loom from
Queen Elizabeth's day, gives to the noble sonnet an antique dignity and
charm like the effect of an ancestral jewel. But mark that now the
poet reveals himself as he could not in the prosaic form of the first
extract. It is his own neglect of his great opportunity of which he
now speaks, and not merely the indolent indifference of others. It
is himself who is the object of scorn. Self-revelation of beauty
embellished by ornaments is the privilege of full dress; self-revelation
in the florid costume of verse is the divine right of the poet. Passion
that must express itself longs always for the freedom of rhythmic
utterance. And in spite of the exaggeration and extravagance which
shield themselves under the claim of poetic license, I venture to affirm
that "_In_ vino _veritas_" is not truer than _In_ carmine _veritas_.
As a further illustration of what has just been said of the
self-revelations to be looked for in verse, and in Emerson's verse more
especially, let the reader observe how freely he talks about his bodily
presence and infirmities in his poetry,--subjects he never referred to
in prose, except incidentally, in private letters.
Emerson is so essentially a poet that whole pages of his are like so
many litanies of alternating chants and recitations. His thoughts slip
on and off their light rhythmic robes just as the mood takes him, as was
shown in the passage I have quoted in prose and in verse. Many of the
metrical preludes to his lectures are a versified and condensed abstract
of the leading doctrine of the discourse. They are a curious instance of
survival; the lecturer, once a preacher, still wants his text; and finds
his scriptural motto in his own rhythmic inspiration.
Shall we rank Emerson among the great poets or not?
"The great poets are judged by the frame of mind they induce; and to
them, of all men, the severest criticism is due."
These are Emerson's words in the Preface to "Parnassus."
His own poems will stand this test as well as any in the language. They
lift the reader into a higher region of thought and feeling. This seems
to me a better test to apply to them than the one which Mr. Arnold cited
from Milton. The passage containing this must be taken, not alone, but
with the context. Milton had been speaking of "Logic" and of "Rhetoric,"
and spoke of poetry "as being less subtile and fine, but more simple,
sensuous, and passionate." This relative statement, it must not be
forgotten, is conditioned by what went before. If the terms are used
absolutely, and not comparatively, as Milton used them, they must be
very elastic if they would stretch widely enough to include all the
poems which the world recognizes as masterpieces, nay, to include some
of the best of Milton's own.
In spite of what he said about himself in his letter to Carlyle, Emerson
was not only a poet, but a very remarkable one. Whether a great poet
or not will depend on the scale we use and the meaning we affix to the
term. The heat at eighty degrees of Fahrenheit is one thing and the heat
at eighty degrees of Réaumur is a very different matter. The rank of
poets is a point of very unstable equilibrium. From the days of Homer to
our own, critics have been disputing about the place to be assigned to
this or that member of the poetic hierarchy. It is not the most popular
poet who is necessarily the greatest; Wordsworth never had half the
popularity of Scott or Moore. It is not the multitude of remembered
passages which settles the rank of a metrical composition as poetry.
Gray's "Elegy," it is true, is full of lines we all remember, and is a
great poem, if that term can be applied to any piece of verse of that
length. But what shall we say to the "Ars Poetica" of Horace? It is
crowded with lines worn smooth as old sesterces by constant quotation.
And yet we should rather call it a versified criticism than a poem in
the full sense of that word. And what shall we do with Pope's "Essay on
Man," which has furnished more familiar lines than "Paradise Lost" and
"Paradise Regained" both together? For all that, we know there is a
school of writers who will not allow that Pope deserves the name of
poet.
It takes a generation or two to find out what are the passages in
a great writer which are to become commonplaces in literature and
conversation. It is to be remembered that Emerson is one of those
authors whose popularity must diffuse itself from above downwards. And
after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is
greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode
to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so
often quoted as
"To point a moral or adorn a tale."
We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry
with Emerson's own self-estimate. He says in a fit of humility, writing
to Carlyle:--
"I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low department of
literature, the reporters, suburban men."
But Miss Peabody writes to Mr. Ireland:--
"He once said to me, 'I am not a great poet--but whatever is of me
_is a poet_.'"
These opposite feelings were the offspring of different moods and
different periods.
Here is a fragment, written at the age of twenty-eight, in which his
self-distrust and his consciousness of the "vision," if not "the
faculty, divine," are revealed with the brave nudity of the rhythmic
confessional:--
"A dull uncertain brain,
But gifted yet to know
That God has cherubim who go
Singing an immortal strain,
Immortal here below.
I know the mighty bards,
I listen while they sing,
And now I know
The secret store
Which these explore
When they with torch of genius pierce
The tenfold clouds that cover
The riches of the universe
From God's adoring lover.
And if to me it is not given
To fetch one ingot thence
Of that unfading gold of Heaven
His merchants may dispense,
Yet well I know the royal mine
And know the sparkle of its ore,
Know Heaven's truth from lies that shine,--
Explored, they teach us to explore."
These lines are from "The Poet," a series of fragments given in the
"Appendix," which, with his first volume, "Poems," his second, "May-Day,
and other Pieces," form the complete ninth volume of the new series.
These fragments contain some of the loftiest and noblest passages to be
found in his poetical works, and if the reader should doubt which of
Emerson's self-estimates in his two different moods spoken of above had
most truth in it, he could question no longer after reading "The Poet."
Emerson has the most exalted ideas of the true poetic function, as this
passage from "Merlin" sufficiently shows:--
"Thy trivial harp will never please
Or fill my craving ear;
Its chords should ring as blows the breeze,
Free, peremptory, clear.
No jingling serenader's art
Nor tinkling of piano-strings
Can make the wild blood start
In its mystic springs;
The kingly bard
Must smite the chords rudely and hard,
As with hammer or with mace;
That they may render back
Artful thunder, which conveys
Secrets of the solar track,
Sparks of the supersolar blaze.
* * * * *
Great is the art,
Great be the manners of the bard.
He shall not his brain encumber
With the coil of rhythm and number;
But leaving rule and pale forethought
He shall aye climb
For his rhyme.
'Pass in, pass in,' the angels say,
'In to the upper doors,
Nor count compartments of the floors,
But mount to paradise
By the stairway of surprise.'"
And here is another passage from "The Poet," mentioned in the quotation
before the last, in which the bard is spoken of as performing greater
miracles than those ascribed to Orpheus:--
"A Brother of the world, his song
Sounded like a tempest strong
Which tore from oaks their branches broad,
And stars from the ecliptic road.
Time wore he as his clothing-weeds,
He sowed the sun and moon for seeds.
As melts the iceberg in the seas,
As clouds give rain to the eastern breeze,
As snow-banks thaw in April's beam,
The solid kingdoms like a dream
Resist in vain his motive strain,
They totter now and float amain.
For the Muse gave special charge
His learning should be deep and large,
And his training should not scant
The deepest lore of wealth or want:
His flesh should feel, his eyes should read
Every maxim of dreadful Need;
In its fulness he should taste
Life's honeycomb, but not too fast;
Full fed, but not intoxicated;
He should be loved; he should be hated;
A blooming child to children dear,
His heart should palpitate with fear."
We look naturally to see what poets were Emerson's chief favorites. In
his poems "The Test" and "The Solution," we find that the five whom
he recognizes as defying the powers of destruction are Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Goethe.
Here are a few of his poetical characterizations from "The Harp:"--
"And this at least I dare affirm,
Since genius too has bound and term,
There is no bard in all the choir,
Not Homer's self, the poet-sire,
Wise Milton's odes of pensive pleasure,
Or Shakespeare whom no mind can measure,
Nor Collins' verse of tender pain,
Nor Byron's clarion of disdain,
Scott, the delight of generous boys,
Or Wordsworth, Pan's recording voice,--
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring."--
In the notice of "Parnassus" some of his preferences have been already
mentioned.
Comparisons between men of genius for the sake of aggrandizing the
one at the expense of the other are the staple of the meaner kinds of
criticism. No lover of art will clash a Venetian goblet against a Roman
amphora to see which is strongest; no lover of nature undervalues a
violet because it is not a rose. But comparisons used in the way of
description are not odious.
The difference between Emerson's poetry and that of the contemporaries
with whom he would naturally be compared is that of algebra and
arithmetic. He deals largely in general symbols, abstractions, and
infinite series. He is always seeing the universal in the particular.
The great multitude of mankind care more for two and two, something
definite, a fixed quantity, than for _a_ + _b's_ and _x^{2's}_,--symbols
used for undetermined amounts and indefinite possibilities. Emerson is
a citizen of the universe who has taken up his residence for a few days
and nights in this travelling caravansary between the two inns that
hang out the signs of Venus and Mars. This little planet could not
provincialize such a man. The multiplication-table is for the every day
use of every day earth-people, but the symbols he deals with are
too vast, sometimes, we must own, too vague, for the unilluminated
terrestrial and arithmetical intelligence. One cannot help feeling that
he might have dropped in upon us from some remote centre of spiritual
life, where, instead of addition and subtraction, children were taught
quaternions, and where the fourth dimension of space was as familiarly
known to everybody as a foot-measure or a yard-stick is to us. Not that
he himself dealt in the higher or the lower mathematics, but he saw the
hidden spiritual meaning of things as Professor Cayley or Professor
Sylvester see the meaning of their mysterious formulae. Without using
the Rosetta-stone of Swedenborg, Emerson finds in every phenomenon of
nature a hieroglyphic. Others measure and describe the monuments,--he
reads the sacred inscriptions. How alive he makes Monadnoc! Dinocrates
undertook to "hew Mount Athos to the shape of man" in the likeness of
Alexander the Great. Without the help of tools or workmen, Emerson makes
"Cheshire's haughty hill" stand before us an impersonation of kingly
humanity, and talk with us as a god from Olympus might have talked.
This is the fascination of Emerson's poetry; it moves in a world of
universal symbolism. The sense of the infinite fills it with its
majestic presence. It shows, also, that he has a keen delight in the
every-day aspects of nature. But he looks always with the eye of a poet,
never with that of the man of science. The law of association of ideas
is wholly different in the two. The scientific man connects objects in
sequences and series, and in so doing is guided by their collective
resemblances. His aim is to classify and index all that he sees and
contemplates so as to show the relations which unite, and learn the laws
that govern, the subjects of his study. The poet links the most remote
objects together by the slender filament of wit, the flowery chain of
fancy, or the living, pulsating cord of imagination, always guided by
his instinct for the beautiful. The man of science clings to his object,
as the marsupial embryo to its teat, until he has filled himself as full
as he can hold; the poet takes a sip of his dew-drop, throws his head
up like a chick, rolls his eyes around in contemplation of the heavens
above him and the universe in general, and never thinks of asking a
Linnaean question as to the flower that furnished him his dew-drop. The
poetical and scientific natures rarely coexist; Haller and Goethe are
examples which show that such a union may occur, but as a rule the poet
is contented with the colors of the rainbow and leaves the study of
Fraunhofer's lines to the man of science.
Though far from being a man of science, Emerson was a realist in the
best sense of that word. But his realities reached to the highest
heavens: like Milton,--
"He passed the flaming bounds of place and time;
The living throne, the sapphire blaze
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
HE SAW"--
Everywhere his poetry abounds in celestial imagery. If Galileo had been
a poet as well as an astronomer, he would hardly have sowed his verse
thicker with stars than we find them in the poems of Emerson.
Not less did Emerson clothe the common aspects of life with the colors
of his imagination. He was ready to see beauty everywhere:--
"Thou can'st not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
He called upon the poet to
"Tell men what they knew before;
Paint the prospect from their door."
And his practice was like his counsel. He saw our plain New England life
with as honest New England eyes as ever looked at a huckleberry-bush or
into a milking-pail.
This noble quality of his had its dangerous side. In one of his exalted
moods he would have us
"Give to barrows, trays and pans
Grace and glimmer of romance."
But in his Lecture on "Poetry and Imagination," he says:--
"What we once admired as poetry has long since come to be a sound
of tin pans; and many of our later books we have outgrown. Perhaps
Homer and Milton will be tin pans yet."
The "grace and glimmer of romance" which was to invest the tin pan are
forgotten, and he uses it as a belittling object for comparison. He
himself was not often betrayed into the mistake of confounding the
prosaic with the poetical, but his followers, so far as the "realists"
have taken their hint from him, have done it most thoroughly. Mr.
Whitman enumerates all the objects he happens to be looking at as if
they were equally suggestive to the poetical mind, furnishing his reader
a large assortment on which he may exercise the fullest freedom of
selection. It is only giving him the same liberty that Lord Timothy
Dexter allowed his readers in the matter of punctuation, by leaving all
stops out of his sentences, and printing at the end of his book a page
of commas, semicolons, colons, periods, notes of interrogation and
exclamation, with which the reader was expected to "pepper" the pages as
he might see fit.
French realism does not stop at the tin pan, but must deal with the
slop-pail and the wash-tub as if it were literally true that
"In the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings."
Happy were it for the world if M. Zola and his tribe would stop even
there; but when they cross the borders of science into its infected
districts, leaving behind them the reserve and delicacy which the
genuine scientific observer never forgets to carry with him, they
disgust even those to whom the worst scenes they describe are too
wretchedly familiar. The true realist is such a man as Parent du
Chatelet; exploring all that most tries the senses and the sentiments,
and reporting all truthfully, but soberly, chastely, without needless
circumstance, or picturesque embellishment, for a useful end, and not
for a mere sensational effect.
What a range of subjects from "The Problem" and "Uriel" and
"Forerunners" to "The Humble-Bee" and "The Titmouse!" Nor let the reader
who thinks the poet must go far to find a fitting theme fail to read the
singularly impressive home-poem, "Hamatreya," beginning with the names
of the successive owners of a piece of land in Concord,--probably the
same he owned after the last of them:--
"Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint,"
and ending with the austere and solemn "Earth-Song."
Full of poetical feeling, and with a strong desire for poetical
expression, Emerson experienced a difficulty in the mechanical part
of metrical composition. His muse picked her way as his speech did in
conversation and in lecturing. He made desperate work now and then with
rhyme and rhythm, showing that though a born poet he was not a born
singer. Think of making "feeble" rhyme with "people," "abroad" with
"Lord," and contemplate the following couplet which one cannot make
rhyme without actual verbicide:--
"Where feeds the moose, and walks the surly bear,
And up the tall mast runs the woodpeck"-are!
And how could prose go on all-fours more unmetrically than this?
"In Adirondac lakes
At morn or noon the guide rows bare-headed."
It was surely not difficult to say--
"At morn or noon bare-headed rows the guide."
And yet while we note these blemishes, many of us will confess that we
like his uncombed verse better, oftentimes, than if it were trimmed more
neatly and disposed more nicely. When he is at his best, his lines flow
with careless ease, as a mountain stream tumbles, sometimes rough and
sometimes smooth, but all the more interesting for the rocks it runs
against and the grating of the pebbles it rolls over.
There is one trick of verse which Emerson occasionally, not very often,
indulges in. This is the crowding of a redundant syllable into a line.
It is a liberty which is not to be abused by the poet. Shakespeare, the
supreme artist, and Milton, the "mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,"
knew how to use it effectively. Shelley employed it freely. Bryant
indulged in it occasionally, and wrote an article in an early number of
the "North American Review" in defence of its use. Willis was fond of
it. As a relief to monotony it may be now and then allowed,--may even
have an agreeable effect in breaking the monotony of too formal verse.
But it may easily become a deformity and a cause of aversion. A humpback
may add picturesqueness to a procession, but if there are too many
humpbacks in line we turn away from the sight of them. Can any ear
reconcile itself to the last of these three lines of Emerson's?
"Oh, what is Heaven but the fellowship
Of minds that each can stand against the world
By its own meek and incorruptible will?"
These lines that lift their backs up in the middle--span-worm lines, we
may call them--are not to be commended for common use because some great
poets have now and then admitted them. They have invaded some of our
recent poetry as the canker-worms gather on our elms in June. Emerson
has one or two of them here and there, but they never swarm on his
leaves so as to frighten us away from their neighborhood.
As for the violently artificial rhythms and rhymes which have reappeared
of late in English and American literature, Emerson would as soon have
tried to ride three horses at once in a circus as to shut himself up in
triolets, or attempt any cat's-cradle tricks of rhyming sleight of hand.
If we allow that Emerson is not a born singer, that he is a careless
versifier and rhymer, we must still recognize that there is something
in his verse which belongs, indissolubly, sacredly, to his thought. Who
would decant the wine of his poetry from its quaint and antique-looking
_lagena_?--Read his poem to the Aeolian harp ("The Harp") and his model
betrays itself:--
"These syllables that Nature spoke,
And the thoughts that in him woke
Can adequately utter none
Save to his ear the wind-harp lone.
Therein I hear the Parcae reel
The threads of man at their humming wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain,
So sweet and mournful falls the strain.
And best can teach its Delphian chord
How Nature to the soul is moored,
If once again that silent string,
As erst it wont, would thrill and ring."
There is no need of quoting any of the poems which have become familiar
to most true lovers of poetry. Emerson saw fit to imitate the Egyptians
by placing "The Sphinx" at the entrance of his temple of song. This poem
was not fitted to attract worshippers. It is not easy of comprehension,
not pleasing in movement. As at first written it had one verse in it
which sounded so much like a nursery rhyme that Emerson was prevailed
upon to omit it in the later versions. There are noble passages in it,
but they are for the adept and not for the beginner. A commonplace young
person taking up the volume and puzzling his or her way along will come
by and by to the verse:--
"Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?--
I would he were nobler
Than to love me."
The commonplace young person will be apt to say or think _c'est
magnifique, mais ce n'est pas_--_l'amour_.
The third poem in the volume, "The Problem," should have stood first in
order. This ranks among the finest of Emerson's poems. All his earlier
verse has a certain freshness which belongs to the first outburst
of song in a poetic nature. "Each and All," "The Humble-Bee," "The
Snow-Storm," should be read before "Uriel," "The World-Soul," or
"Mithridates." "Monadnoc" will be a good test of the reader's taste for
Emerson's poetry, and after this "Woodnotes."
In studying his poems we must not overlook the delicacy of many of their
descriptive portions. If in the flights of his imagination he is
like the strong-winged bird of passage, in his exquisite choice of
descriptive epithets he reminds me of the _tenui-rostrals._ His subtle
selective instinct penetrates the vocabulary for the one word he wants,
as the long, slender bill of those birds dives deep into the flower for
its drop of honey. Here is a passage showing admirably the two different
conditions: wings closed and the selective instinct picking out its
descriptive expressions; then suddenly wings flashing open and the
imagination in the firmament, where it is always at home. Follow the
pitiful inventory of insignificances of the forlorn being he describes
with a pathetic humor more likely to bring a sigh than a smile, and then
mark the grand hyperbole of the last two lines. The passage is from the
poem called "Destiny":--
"Alas! that one is born in blight,
Victim of perpetual slight:
When thou lookest on his face,
Thy heart saith 'Brother, go thy ways!
None shall ask thee what thou doest,
Or care a rush for what thou knowest.
Or listen when thou repliest,
Or remember where thou liest,
Or how thy supper is sodden;'
And another is born
To make the sun forgotten."
Of all Emerson's poems the "Concord Hymn" is the most nearly complete
and faultless,--but it is not distinctively Emersonian. It is such a
poem as Collins might have written,--it has the very movement and
melody of the "Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson," and of the "Dirge in
Cymbeline," with the same sweetness and tenderness of feeling. Its one
conspicuous line,
"And fired the shot heard round the world,"
must not take to itself all the praise deserved by this perfect little
poem, a model for all of its kind. Compact, expressive, serene, solemn,
musical, in four brief stanzas it tells the story of the past, records
the commemorative act of the passing day, and invokes the higher Power
that governs the future to protect the Memorial-stone sacred to Freedom
and her martyrs.
These poems of Emerson's find the readers that must listen to them and
delight in them, as the "Ancient Mariner" fastened upon the man who must
hear him. If any doubter wishes to test his fitness for reading them,
and if the poems already mentioned are not enough to settle the
question, let him read the paragraph of "May-Day," beginning,--
"I saw the bud-crowned Spring go forth,"
"Sea-shore," the fine fragments in the "Appendix" to his published
works, called, collectively, "The Poet," blocks bearing the mark of
poetic genius, but left lying round for want of the structural instinct,
and last of all, that which is, in many respects, first of all, the
"Threnody," a lament over the death of his first-born son. This poem has
the dignity of "Lycidas" without its refrigerating classicism, and with
all the tenderness of Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's
picture. It may well compare with others of the finest memorial poems in
the language,--with Shelley's "Adonais," and Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis,"
leaving out of view Tennyson's "In Memoriam" as of wider scope and
larger pattern.
Many critics will concede that there is much truth in Mr. Arnold's
remark on the want of "evolution" in Emerson's poems. One is struck
with the fact that a great number of fragments lie about his poetical
workshop: poems begun and never finished; scraps of poems, chips of
poems, paving the floor with intentions never carried out. One cannot
help remembering Coleridge with his incomplete "Christabel," and his
"Abyssinian Maid," and her dulcimer which she never got a tune out of.
We all know there was good reason why Coleridge should have been infirm
of purpose. But when we look at that great unfinished picture over which
Allston labored with the hopeless ineffectiveness of Sisyphus; when we
go through a whole gallery of pictures by an American artist in which
the backgrounds are slighted as if our midsummer heats had taken away
half the artist's life and vigor; when we walk round whole rooms full of
sketches, impressions, effects, symphonies, invisibilities, and other
apologies for honest work, it would not be strange if it should suggest
a painful course of reflections as to the possibility that there may be
something in our climatic or other conditions which tends to scholastic
and artistic anaemia and insufficiency,--the opposite of what we find
showing itself in the full-blooded verse of poets like Browning and on
the flaming canvas of painters like Henri Regnault. Life seemed lustier
in Old England than in New England to Emerson, to Hawthorne, and to
that admirable observer, Mr. John Burroughs. Perhaps we require another
century or two of acclimation.
Emerson never grappled with any considerable metrical difficulties.
He wrote by preference in what I have ventured to call the normal
respiratory measure,--octosyllabic verse, in which one common expiration
is enough and not too much for the articulation of each line. The "fatal
facility" for which this verse is noted belongs to it as recited and
also as written, and it implies the need of only a minimum of skill and
labor. I doubt if Emerson would have written a verse of poetry if he had
been obliged to use the Spenserian stanza. In the simple measures he
habitually employed he found least hindrance to his thought.
Every true poet has an atmosphere as much as every great painter. The
golden sunshine of Claude and the pearly mist of Corot belonged to their
way of looking at nature as much as the color of their eyes and hair
belonged to their personalities. So with the poets; for Wordsworth the
air is always serene and clear, for Byron the sky is uncertain between
storm and sunshine. Emerson sees all nature in the same pearly mist
that wraps the willows and the streams of Corot. Without its own
characteristic atmosphere, illuminated by
"The light that never was on sea or land,"
we may have good verse but no true poem. In his poetry there is not
merely this atmosphere, but there is always a mirage in the horizon.
Emerson's poetry is eminently subjective,--if Mr. Ruskin, who hates the
word, will pardon me for using it in connection with a reference to two
of his own chapters in his "Modern Painters." These are the chapter
on "The Pathetic Fallacy," and the one which follows it "On Classical
Landscape." In these he treats of the transfer of a writer's mental or
emotional conditions to the external nature which he contemplates. He
asks his readers to follow him in a long examination of what he calls by
the singular name mentioned, "the pathetic fallacy," because, he says,
"he will find it eminently characteristic of the modern mind; and in the
landscape, whether of literature or art, he will also find the modern
painter endeavoring to express something which he, as a living creature,
imagines in the lifeless object, while the classical and mediaeval
painters were content with expressing the unimaginary and actual
qualities of the object itself."
Illustrations of Mr. Ruskin's "pathetic fallacy" may be found almost
anywhere in Emerson's poems. Here is one which offers itself without
search:--
"Daily the bending skies solicit man,
The seasons chariot him from this exile,
The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing wheels,
The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along,
Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights
Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home."
The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with
a defect. If he had called the state of mind to which he refers the
_sympathetic illusion_, his readers might have looked upon it more
justly.
It would be a pleasant and not a difficult task to trace the
resemblances between Emerson's poetry and that of other poets. Two or
three such resemblances have been incidentally referred to, a few others
may be mentioned.
In his contemplative study of Nature he reminds us of Wordsworth, at
least in certain brief passages, but he has not the staying power of
that long-breathed, not to say long-winded, lover of landscapes. Both
are on the most intimate terms with Nature, but Emerson contemplates
himself as belonging to her, while Wordsworth feels as if she belonged
to him.
"Good-by, proud world,"
recalls Spenser and Raleigh. "The Humble-Bee" is strongly marked by the
manner and thought of Marvell. Marvell's
"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade,"
may well have suggested Emerson's
"The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass."
"The Snow-Storm" naturally enough brings to mind the descriptions of
Thomson and of Cowper, and fragment as it is, it will not suffer by
comparison with either.
"Woodnotes," one of his best poems, has passages that might have been
found in Milton's "Comus;" this, for instance:--
"All constellations of the sky
Shed their virtue through his eye.
Him Nature giveth for defence
His formidable innocence."
Of course his Persian and Indian models betray themselves in many of
his poems, some of which, called translations, sound as if they were
original.
So we follow him from page to page and find him passing through many
moods, but with one pervading spirit:--
"Melting matter into dreams,
Panoramas which I saw,
And whatever glows or seems
Into substance, into Law."
We think in reading his "Poems" of these words of Sainte-Beuve:--
"The greatest poet is not he who has done the best; it is he who
suggests the most; he, not all of whose meaning is at first obvious,
and who leaves you much to desire, to explain, to study; much to
complete in your turn."
Just what he shows himself in his prose, Emerson shows himself in his
verse. Only when he gets into rhythm and rhyme he lets us see more of
his personality, he ventures upon more audacious imagery, his flight is
higher and swifter, his brief crystalline sentences have dissolved and
pour in continuous streams. Where they came from, or whither they flow
to empty themselves, we cannot always say,--it is enough to enjoy them
as they flow by us.
Incompleteness--want of beginning, middle, and end,--is their too common
fault. His pages are too much like those artists' studios all hung round
with sketches and "bits" of scenery. "The Snow-Storm" and "Sea-Shore"
are "bits" out of a landscape that was never painted, admirable, so far
as they go, but forcing us to ask, "Where is the painting for which
these scraps are studies?" or "Out of what great picture have these
pieces been cut?"
We do not want his fragments to be made wholes,--if we did, what hand
could be found equal to the task? We do not want his rhythms and rhymes
smoothed and made more melodious. They are as honest as Chaucer's,
and we like them as they are, not modernized or manipulated by any
versifying drill-sergeant,--if we wanted them reshaped whom could we
trust to meddle with them?
His poetry is elemental; it has the rock beneath it in the eternal laws
on which it rests; the roll of deep waters in its grander harmonies; its
air is full of Aeolian strains that waken and die away as the breeze
wanders over them; and through it shines the white starlight, and
from time to time flashes a meteor that startles us with its sudden
brilliancy.
After all our criticisms, our selections, our analyses, our comparisons,
we have to recognize that there is a charm in Emerson's poems
which cannot be defined any more than the fragrance of a rose or a
hyacinth,--any more than the tone of a voice which we should know from
all others if all mankind were to pass before us, and each of its
articulating representatives should call us by name.
All our crucibles and alembics leave unaccounted for the great mystery
of _style_. "The style is of [a part of] the man himself," said Buffon,
and this saying has passed into the stronger phrase, "The style is the
man."
The "personal equation" which differentiates two observers is not
confined to the tower of the astronomer. Every human being is
individualized by a new arrangement of elements. His mind is a safe with
a lock to which only certain letters are the key. His ideas follow in
an order of their own. His words group themselves together in special
sequences, in peculiar rhythms, in unlooked-for combinations, the
total effect of which is to stamp all that he says or writes with
his individuality. We may not be able to assign the reason of the
fascination the poet we have been considering exercises over us. But
this we can say, that he lives in the highest atmosphere of thought;
that he is always in the presence of the infinite, and ennobles the
accidents of human existence so that they partake of the absolute and
eternal while he is looking at them; that he unites a royal dignity
of manner with the simplicity of primitive nature; that his words and
phrases arrange themselves, as if by an elective affinity of their own,
with a _curiosa felicitas_ which captivates and enthrals the reader who
comes fully under its influence, and that through all he sings as in all
he says for us we recognize the same serene, high, pure intelligence and
moral nature, infinitely precious to us, not only in themselves, but as
a promise of what the transplanted life, the air and soil and breeding
of this western world may yet educe from their potential virtues,
shaping themselves, at length, in a literature as much its own as the
Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi.