inclusive. They are, however, the universal themes,—love, beauty,
reverence, remembrance, joy that has been tempered to cheer, having
met pain by the way; for, as we have said, no encounter with pain—and
her poems give abundant evidence of such encounter—has been able to
subdue the valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at the springs of
her feeling, albeit the buoyant, brimful joy has given place to
acquiescent cheer.
There is a certain quality in Miss Reese’s poems, a quaintness, an
elder grace, that is wholly unique. It is the union of theme,
phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former have been considered, but
the spirit, after all, is in the last, in that which analysis cannot
reach. One selects a poem from _A Quiet Road_ illustrative of this art
of correlating Then and Now, making quick the dead in memory and hope,
and sets about to analyze it,—when, lo, as if one had prisoned a white
butterfly, it escapes, leaving only the dust of its wing in one’s
hand! Miss Reese’s poems are not to be analyzed, they are to be felt;
that, too, is the creed of her song. Is it difficult to feel these
delicate lines called “The Road of Remembrance”?—
The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree;
The tree is blossoming;
Northward the road runs to the sea,
And past the House of Spring.
The folk go down it unafraid;
The still roofs rise before;
When you were lad and I was maid,
Wide open stood that door.
Now, other children crowd the stair,
And hunt from room to room;
Outside, under the hawthorn fair,
We pluck the thorny bloom.
Out in the quiet road we stand,
Shut in from wharf and mart,
The old wind blowing up the land,
The old thoughts at our heart.
Miss Reese’s growth, as shown in her two volumes, is so marked that
while _A Handful of Lavender_ has the foreshadowing of her later work,
and also some notably fine poems,—such as “That Day You Came,” “The
Last Cricket,” “A Spinning Song,” and “The Old Path,”—it has not the
same perfectly individual note that pervades _A Quiet Road_. The
personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon nearly everything in the
later collection, is frequently absent from the first. That part of _A
Handful of Lavender_ first issued as _A Branch of May_ is naturally
the least finished of Miss Reese’s work. It is unsure and yet
indicative of that—
Oncoming hour of light and dew,
Of heartier sun, more certain blue,
which shines in her later work.
“The Death Potion,” from the first collection, is a case in point: it
is strong in idea, and here and there in execution, but its metre is
faulty, and it departs so often from the initial measure that one who
has set himself in tune with that is thrown from the key, and in
adapting himself to the changed rhythm loses the pleasure of the poem.
It must be said, however, that such lack of metrical sensitiveness is
very rare even in the earlier poems. In general, they are of
unimpeachable rhythm; indeed, the singing note is so much Miss Reese’s
natural expression that it creeps into this sonnet, “The Old Path,”
and turns it in effect to a lyric:
O Love! O Love! this way has hints of you
In every bough that stirs, in every bee,
Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through,
In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree;
And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet,
Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from some
Fast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet,
You were so near, so near, yet did not come!
Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day?
Have you, for me that love you, thought or word?
Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way;
With any breath of brier or note of bird?
If this I knew, though you be quick or dead,
All my sad life would I go comforted.
_A Handful of Lavender_ shows the tendency of most young poets to
affect the sonnet, a tendency laudable enough if one be a natural
sonneteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived and well-executed
sonnets, but few that are unforgettably fine, as are many of her
lyrics. That she recognizes wherein her surest power lies is obvious
from the fact that, whereas _A Handful of Lavender_ contains some
thirty-two sonnets, _A Quiet Road_ contains but twelve. Those of
nature predominated in the former, nature for its own sake; but in the
latter there is far less accent upon nature and more upon life.
They show in technique, also, Miss Reese’s firmer, surer touch and
greater clarity. There are certain sonnets in _A Handful of Lavender_,
such as “A Song of Separation,” and “Renunciation,” warmer in feeling
than the later ones and equal to them in manner; but in general the
mechanism is much more apparent—one _does_ occasionally see the wires,
which is never the case in the later work.
“The Look of the Hedge,” or these lines called “Recompense,” will
illustrate the ease and lucidity of her sonnets in _A Quiet Road_:
Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget;
Pass your closed door with not a thought of you,
Of the old days, but only of these new;
I sow; I reap; my house in order set.
Then of a sudden doth this thing befall,
By a wood’s edge, or in the market-place,
That I remember naught but your dead face,
And other folk forgotten, you are all.
When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet!
And I, thereafter, am like unto one
Who from the lilac bloom and the young year
Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street,
Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun,
For that the recompensing Spring is near!
There are excellently wrought sonnets in the first volume, indeed, the
majority of them are not without fine lines or true feeling, but the
gain in command of the form has been marked. When all is said,
however, one comes back to _A Quiet Road_ for the songs it holds, and
for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has epitomized, in her lines
“Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” her own characteristics under
those of the earlier singers, sounded the delicate notes of her own
reed, when she says:
Mine is the crocus and the call
Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall;
The white tumult, the rainy hush;
And mine the unforgetting thrush
That pours its heart-break from the wall.
For I am tears, for I am Spring,
The old and immemorial thing;
To me come ghosts by twos and threes,
Under the swaying cherry-trees,
From east and west remembering.
O elder Hour, when I am not,
Gone out like smoke from road and plot,
More perfect Hour of light and dew,
Shall lovers turn away from you,
And long for me, the Unforgot!
Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps its vibrancy, and the
note to which is set the quaintness of such words as these in Miss
Reese’s poem “A Pastoral,” will not easily be forgotten:
Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows,
Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose!
The lights o’ Spring are in the sky and down among the grass;
Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers pass!
The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain;
The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane;
Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and blow,
And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can know.
The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall;
There is a leaping in the reeds; they waver and they fall;
For lo, the gusts of God are out; the April time is brief;
The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf.
I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover’s hand;
Along the narrow track we pass across the level land;
The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees;
The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees.
When we are old, when we are cold, and barréd is the door,
The memory of this will come and turn us young once more;
The lights o’ Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the sky;
And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by!
Miss Reese’s work in _A Quiet Road_ is so uniformly quotable that one
distrusts his judgment in the matter of choice, and having cited one
poem as representative comes suddenly upon another that might have
served him better; such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis
Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing Miss Reese to be a
diviner of spirits. One need hardly be told that she is of the “mystic
fellowcraft” of Stevenson, and although the very name of the valorous
one has become a sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one would
go far to find him set forth more bravely than in this characterization,
of which a part must suffice to show the quality:
In his old gusty garden of the North,
He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call;
Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall—
At last they drove him forth.
Now there were two rang silverly and long;
And of Romance, that spirit of the sun,
And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one;
And one was that of Song.
Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers,
The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame,
These were the Shapes that all around him came,—
That we let go with tears.
His was the unstinted English of the Scot,
Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox
Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box,
To keep it unforgot.
No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh,
To see appealing things in all he knew,
He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew,
And would have naught of chaff.
David and Keats and all good singing men,
Take to your hearts this Covenanter’s son,
Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone—
Where you do sing again!
There! I have repented me and quoted it all, to preserve the unity.
To be rare and quaint without being fantastic, to have
swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that
many overlook—this is Miss Reese’s gift. You shall not go to her for
ethics, philosophy, nor for instruction of any kind, for that is
contrary to her creed; but you shall go to her for truth, truth that
has become personal through experience; go to her for beauty, uplift,
and refreshment, and above all for the recovery of the departed mood.
III
BLISS CARMAN
THE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets
of the States, needs no explanation; so identified is he with the
artistic life of the younger generation on this side the border that
we have come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to consider his
work, most of which has been produced here, as distinctly our own. But
while it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse has drawn its
inspiration from nature and life as we know them, one could little
spare Mr. Carman’s first book of lyrics, _Low Tide on Grand Pré_,
which is purely Canadian—set in the air of the “blue North summer.”
It lacks as a collection the confident touch of his later work, but is
imbued with an indefinable delicacy; it withholds the uttermost word,
and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially is this true of the
initial poem, a lyric with a poignant undernote calling one back
thrice and again to learn its spell.
It has been Mr. Carman’s method to issue at intervals small volumes
containing work of a related sort; but it is open to question whether
this method of publishing, with the harmony which results from
grouping each collection under a certain key, may not have a
counterbalancing danger in the tendency toward monotony. As a matter
of fact, Mr. Carman has a wide range of subject; but unless one be
ever taking a bird’s-eye view of his work, it is likely to seem
restricted, owing to the reiterance of the same note in whatever
collection he chance to have in hand. A case in point is that
furnished by _Ballads of Lost Haven_, one of his most characteristic
and fascinating volumes, a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no
fewer than four poems, succeeding one another at the close of the
collection, prefiguring death under the titles of “The Shadow
Boatswain,” “The Master of the Isles,” “The Last Watch,” and
“Outbound.”
Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and dread; each conveys the
feeling it was meant to convey; but when the four poems of similar
motive are grouped together, their force is lost. The symbols which
seem in each to rise as spontaneously from the sea as its own foam,
lose their magic when others of like import, but different phrasing,
crowd closely upon them. For illustration, the “Shadow Boatswain”
contains these fine lines:
Don’t you know the sailing orders?
It is time to put to sea,
And the stranger in the harbor
Sends a boat ashore for me.
* * * * *
That’s the Doomkeel. You may know her
By her clean run aft; and then
Don’t you hear the Shadow Boatswain
Piping to his shadow men?
And “The Master of the Isles,” immediately following, opens in this
equally picturesque, but essentially similar, manner:
There is rumor in Dark Harbor,
And the folk are all astir;
For a stranger in the offing
Draws them down to gaze at her,
In the gray of early morning,
Black against the orange streak,
Making in below the ledges,
With no colors at her peak.
[Illustration: Bliss Carman]
While each of the poems develops differently, and taken alone has a
symbolistic beauty that would fix itself in the memory, when the two
are put together and are followed by two others cognate in theme, the
lines of relief have melted into one indistinct image. This effect of
blurring from the grouping of related poems is not so apparent in any
collection as in the sea ballads, as the subject-matter of the other
volumes is more diversified and the likelihood of employing somewhat
the same imagery is therefore removed; but while Mr. Carman has a very
witchery of phrase when singing of the sea, and his words sting one
with delight like a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason,
keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, and grudges the merging
of it into others and yet others that shall dissipate it or transform
it to an impalpable thing.
Judging them individually, it is doubtful if Mr. Carman has done
anything more representative, more imbued with his own temperament,
than these buoyant, quickening songs that freshen one as if from a
plunge in the sea, and take one to themselves as intimately. The
opening poem sets the key to the collection:
I was born for deep-sea faring;
I was bred to put to sea;
Stories of my father’s daring
Filled me at my mother’s knee.
I was sired among the surges;
I was cubbed beside the foam;
All my heart is in its verges,
And the sea wind is my home.
All my boyhood, from far vernal
Bourns of being, came to me
Dream-like, plangent, and eternal
Memories of the plunging sea.
And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in this picture at whose
faithfulness one shudders:
Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.
Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.
How the swing of the lines befits the action, and how it puts on grace
in this stanza,
Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre
Went out, and where are they?
In the port they made, they are delayed
With the ships of yesterday.
The remaining strophes tempt one beyond what he is able, especially
this characterization,
Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him
Is the sexton of the town;
but we must take a glance at the ballads, at the “Nancy’s Pride,” that
went out
On the long slow heave of a lazy sea,
To the flap of an idle sail,
* * * * *
and
… faded down
With her creaking boom a-swing,
Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep,
And caught her wing and wing.
* * * * *
She lifted her hull like a breasting gull
Where the rolling valleys be,
And dipped where the shining porpoises
Put ploughshares through the sea.
* * * * *
They all may home on a sleepy tide
To the sag of an idle sheet;
But it’s never again the Nancy’s Pride
That draws men down the street.
But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie watches of the moon,
behold this apparition:
When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears,
They see by the after rail
An unknown schooner creeping up
With mildewed spar and sail.
Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds,
With the Judgment in their face;
And to their mates’ “God save you!”
Have never a word of grace.
Then into the gray they sheer away,
On the awful polar tide;
And the sailors know they have seen the wraith
Of the missing Nancy’s Pride.
There have been spectral ships since visions were, but few conjured so
vividly that one may almost see the
crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds
With the Judgment in their face,
and watch them as
into the gray they sheer away
On the awful polar tide.
The poem illustrates Mr. Carman’s gift of putting atmosphere into his
work. A line may give the color, the setting, for an entire poem,—a
very simple line, as this,
With her creaking boom a-swing,
or, “To the sag of an idle sheet,” which fixes at once the impression
of a sultry, languorous air, one of those, half-veiled,
“weather-breeder” days one knows so well.
From a narrative standpoint the ballads are spirited, there is always
a story worth telling; but they are occasionally marred by Mr.
Carman’s prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He who can crowd so
much into a line is often lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and
frequently a crisp, telling phrase or stanza is weakened by the
accretion that gathers around it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this
accretion, but beauty that is not organic, not structurally necessary
to the theme, becomes verbiage. Walter Pater has said it all in his
fine passage: “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of
surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the
last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of
the finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michael
Angelo’s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.” It is not Mr.
Carman’s divination of the finished work to be that is at fault; one
feels that the subject is clearly visioned in his mind at the outset,
but that it proves in some cases too alluring to his fancy. His work
is not artificial; he is not fashioning poetic bric-à-brac to adorn
his verse; sincerity is writ large upon it; but his mood is so
compelling that he is carried on by the force of momentum, and
finding, when the impulse is spent, so much beauty left behind, he has
not the heart to destroy it.
One pardons this over-elaboration in _Ballads of Lost Haven_ because
of the likelihood of coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of
kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to the blue leagues of sea;
and for such a poem as “The Ships of St. John,” with no superfluous
lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly Mr. Carman’s
debtor.
_Behind the Arras_ has proven a stumbling-block and rock of offence to
some of Mr. Carman’s readers, because of its recondite character. They
regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp,
whereas its mysticism is half whimsical, and requires no
superconsciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is founding no cult; it
pleases him for the nonce to mask his thought in symbols, and there
are, alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no use for symbols!
It is a book containing many strong poems, such as “Beyond the Gamut,”
“Exit Anima,” and “Hack and Hew,”—a book of spiritual enigmas through
which one catches hints of the open secret, ever-alluring,
ever-eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, immanent, yet
undivined.
Earth one habitat of spirit merely,
I must use as richly as I may,—
Touch environment with every sense-tip,
Drink the well and pass my wander way,—
says this sane poet who holds his gift as a tribute, whose philosophy
is to affirm and not deny:
O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours,
While time endures,
To acquiesce and learn!
For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn,
Let soul discern.
And who through the grime and in the babel still sees and hears,
Always the flawless beauty,—always the Chord
Of the Overword,
Dominant, pleading, sure,
No truth too small to save and make endure;
No good too poor!
This is the vision that shall lighten our eyes, quicken our ears, and
restore our hope,—the vision which we expect the poet to see and to
communicate. He must make the detached and fragmentary beauty a
typical revelation; the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as the
moon’s arc reveals by its mystic rim the fulness to which it is
orbing. It is not by disregarding the tragic, the sombre, the
inexplicable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. Pain has more
than touched him; it has become incorporate in him. _Low Tide on Grand
Pré_ has its poignant note; _Ballads of Lost Haven_, its undertone;
_Behind the Arras_, its overtone, its sublimation.
Mr. Carman’s work is more subjective than that of many of the younger
poets without being less objective, as the Vagabondia books attest. In
one mood he is the mystic, dwelling in a speculative nebula of
thought, in another the realist concerning himself only with the
demonstrable, and hence his work discloses a wide range of affinities.
He is not a strongly constructive thinker, but intuitional in his
mental processes, and his verse demands that gift in his readers.
Without it what could one make of “The Juggler” but a poem of
delicious color and music? If its import were none other than appears
upon the face of it, it would still be admirable, but as a symbol of
the Force projecting us, it is a subtle bit of art.
Mr. Carman’s sensitiveness to values of rhythm keeps his verse free
from lapses in that direction. He never, to my memory, makes use of
the sonnet, which shows critical judgment, as the lyric is his
temperamental medium. The apogee of his art is in his diction, which
has a predestined fitness, and above all a personal quality. To quote
Pater again, he has “begotten a vocabulary faithful to the coloring of
his own spirit,” and one cannot mistake even a fragment of his verse.
Now and again one comes upon an archaic expression, as “A _weird_ is
in their song,” using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a
meaningless solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as “illumining this
_quench_ of clay,” but in general Mr. Carman does not find it
necessary to go outside the established limits of the language for
variety and force in diction. He has a genius for imagery, and
conjures the most unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. The
Vagabondia books are abrim with them, and while there are idle lines
and padded stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not strike true
flashes here and there, few that miss of justification, while their
gay and rollicking note heartens one and bids him up and join in the
revel.
There are others in a graver key, such as Hovey’s “At the End of the
Day,” and Carman’s “The Mendicants,” and “The Marching Morrows;” and
certain lyric inspirations, such as the “Sea Gypsy,” by Hovey, and the
“Vagabond Song,” by Carman, that have not been bettered by either,
that could not well be bettered within their limits. The former has
been quoted in the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an
inspiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has
suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does not
analyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers;
under his touch it subtilizes into atmosphere and thus communicates
the incommunicable:
There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.
There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.
Throwing aside all that is ephemeral in the Vagabondia books, all mere
boyish ebullition, there is a goodly residuum of nature-poetry of the
freshest and most unhackneyed sort. It is the blithe, objective type;
eyes and ears are its informers, and it enters into one’s mood with a
keen sense of refreshment. Who does not know the impulse that prompted
these lines?
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!
When thy flowery hand delivers
All the mountain-prisoned rivers,
And thy great heart beats and quivers
To revive the days that were,
Make me over, mother April,
When the sap begins to stir!