and cheer dominate them; in short, they are good to know; and while it
is not vitally necessary to remember all they contain, one would be
distinctly the loser should he forget such poems as “Non Omnis Moriar”
or “The Deserted Inn” from _The Last Songs_.
The collection of Memorabilia, _By the Aurelian Wall_, takes its title
from the burial-place of Keats, and includes “A Seamark,” the fine
threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of Phillips Brooks; a
spiritual, poetic visioning of Shelley under the symbol of “The White
Gull;” a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and other things equally
well-wrought. Some of them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in
particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point—but what haunting
sweetness it carries with it! To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and
Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void
his luminous wings in vain,” has come to dominate the popular fancy in
regard to him. Mr. Carman’s poem, though touched with this mood, is
not set to it, and he has several stanzas which have in them the
essence of Shelley’s spirit,—the real Shelley, the passionate
idealist, the spent runner who, falling, handed on the torch.
The Stevenson threnody is probably the best of the elegies, as Mr.
Carman is by temperament one of the Stevenson brotherhood, and no
subject could better command him. That “intimate and magic name,” a
password to fellowship, conjures many a picture of him—
Whose courage lights the dark’ning port
Where every sea-worn sail must come.
Mr. Carman has singular power to visualize a scene; one becomes an
eye-witness of it as of this:
But I have wander-biddings now.
Far down the latitudes of sun,
An island mountain of the sea,
Piercing the green and rosy zone,
Goes up into the wondrous day.
And there the brown-limbed island men
Are bearing up for burial,
Within the sun’s departing ken,
The master of the roving kind.
And there where time will set no mark
For his irrevocable rest,
Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented stars
About him, they have laid him down
Above the crumbling of the sea,
Beyond the turmoil of renown.
This island procession to the mountain, leaving the master to his
“irrevocable rest,”
Under the spacious melting dark,
With all the nomad tented stars
About him,
is an artist’s picture not easily forgotten.
Mr. Carman’s three volumes in the projected “Pipes of Pan” series,
including thus far _The Book of the Myths_, _The Green Book of the
Bards_, and _The Sea Children_, make new disclosures of his talent,
and the title poem “Pipes of Pan,” is a bit of anointed vision that
would waken the dullest eyes from lethargy as to the world around
them. There is necromancy in Mr. Carman’s words when the outer world
is his theme; something of the thrill, the expectancy in the heart of
growing things, the elation of life, comes upon one as he reads the
“Pipes of Pan.” It is a nobler vision than illumined Vagabondia days,
revealing
Power out of hurt and stain
To bring beauty back again,
and showing the
Scope and purpose, hint and plan
Lurking in the Pipes of Pan,
as well as the sheer delight that we noted in Vagabondia.
It seems that every mood of every creature has been divined and
uttered, uttered with deep love, with a human relatedness that melts
the barriers between life and life, whether in man or in
All the bright, gay-colored things
Buoyed in air on balanced wings.
This relatedness, and all the molding influences of nature leading us
on from beauty to strength, are developed in Mr. Carman’s poem until
they become to us religion. We realize that at heart we are all
pantheists, and that revelation antedates the Book; that the law is
written on the leaves of roses as well as on tables of stone,—a
testament both new and old, given for our learning that we might have
hope.
The remaining poems of _The Book of the Myths_ are not the best things
Mr. Carman has done, though renewals of classic verse-forms in the
Sapphic and other metres, and often picturesque in story. “The Lost
Dryad” is the most attractive, “The Dead Faun” the least so, to my
ears; but perhaps from lack of sympathy with the subject-matter I
cannot think the collection, with the exception of the poem “Pipes of
Pan,” is of especial value. It is not to be named, still excepting the
above poem, with its companion volume, _The Green Book of the Bards_,
which contains some of the strongest work of Mr. Carman’s pen as to
subject and thought, but which has one pronounced limitation,—its
monotony of form.
The entire volume, with a sole exception, and that not marked, is
written in the conventional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr.
Carman’s work of late has been cast. Within this compass, the
accomplishment is as varied as to theme and diction, as that of his
other work; but when one sings on and on in the same numbers, it
induces a state of mental indolence in the reader, and presupposes a
similar state in the writer. The verse goes purling musically along,
until, as running water exercises an hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized
by the mere melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness to find
that he has no notion what they are about, and must re-read them to
find out. To be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, and will make new
disclosures whenever one returns to them; but had they greater variety
as to manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the mind would be
startled to perception by unexpectedness, instead of lulled by the
same note in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that Mr. Carman
has a principle at stake in this,—it may indeed be a reactionary
measure against over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire for
simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the first canons of art, but
variety in metre and form is another canon by no means annulling the
first. One may have variety to the superlative degree, and never
depart from the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity.
Were _The Green Book of the Bards_ relieved by contrasts of form, it
would rank with the finest work of Mr. Carman’s pen, as the individual
poems have strong basic ideas,—such as the “Creature Catechism,” full
of pregnant thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word as to the
mystic union of the creative Soul with the creatures of feather and
fin and fleece. The marked evolution of Mr. Carman’s philosophy of
life, as influenced by his growing identity with nature, comes out so
strongly in the “Pipes of Pan” series, and in _The Word at Saint
Kavin’s_, as almost to reveal a new individuality. He had gone out in
the light-foot, light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with the
woods and winds; glad to be quit of the gyves, to drink from the
wayside spring, eat of the forest fruit, sleep ’neath the tent of
night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He had sought nature in a
mood of pagan joy; but the wayside spring had excited a thirst it
could not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it could not allay,
and the blithe seeker of freedom and delight became at length the
anointed votary, and lingered to watch the God at work shaping life
from death, and expressing His yearning in beauty.
The mere objective delight of the earlier time has grown steadily into
the subjective identity with every manifestation of the Force that
operates within this world of wonder and beauty, from the soul of man,
shaping his ideals and creating his environment, to the butterfly
whose sun-painted wings, set afloat in the buoyant air, are upheld by
the breath of God. Coming into the finer knowledge, through long
intimacy with the earth and its multitudinous life, fulfilling itself
in joy,—Mr. Carman has come at length to
readjust
The logic of the dust,
and to shape from it a creed and law for his following, which he has
put into the mouth of Saint Kavin for expounding. The opening stanzas
of the volume give the setting and note:
Once at St. Kavin’s door
I rested. No sigh more
Of discontent escaped me from that day.
For there I overheard
A Brother of the Word
Expound the grace of poverty, and say:
Thank God for poverty
That makes and keeps us free,
And lets us go our unobtrusive way,
Glad of the sun and rain,
Upright, serene, humane,
Contented with the fortune of a day.
The poem follows simple, but no less picturesque phrase, as becomes
Saint Kavin, and is, from the technical side, quaint and artistic. On
the philosophical, it develops at first the initial thought that one
shall “keep his soul”
Joyous and sane and whole
by obeying the word
That bade the earth take form, the sea subside,
and that
When we have laid aside
Our truculence and pride,
Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will,—
we shall have found the boon of our ultimate striving,—room to live
and let our spirits grow, and give of their growth and higher gain to
another. Here is the giving that turns to one’s own enrichment:
And if I share my crust,
As common manhood must,
With one whose need is greater than my own,
Shall I not also give
His soul, that it may live,
Of the abundant pleasures I have known?
And so, if I have wrought,
Amassed or conceived aught
Of beauty, or intelligence or power,
It is not mine to hoard;
It stands there to afford
Its generous service simply as a flower.
The poem then broadens into a dissertation upon the complexities of
life, one’s servitude to custom and “vested wrong,” the lack of
individual courage to
Live by the truth each one of us believes,
and turns, for illustration of the nobler development and poise, back
to nature, and the evolutionary round of life through which one traces
his course and kinship. These stanzas are among the finest spoken by
the wise Brother of the Word. After citing the strength and serenity
of the fir-trees, and what a travesty upon man’s ascent it were, did
one bear himself less royally than they, he adverts to the creature
kin-fellows whose lot we have borne:
I, too, in polar night
Have hungered, gaunt and white,
Alone amid the awful silences;
And fled on gaudy fin,
When the blue tides came in,
Through coral gardens under tropic seas.
And wheresoe’er I strove,
The greater law was love,
A faith too fine to falter or mistrust;
There was no wanton greed,
Depravity of breed,
Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust.
Nay, not till I was man,
Learned I to scheme and plan
The blackest depredation on my kind,
Converting to my gain
My fellow’s need and pain
In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined.
Therefore, my friends, I say
Back to the fair sweet way
Our Mother Nature taught us long ago,—
The large primeval mood,
Leisure and amplitude,
The dignity of patience strong and slow.
Let us go in once more
By some blue mountain door,
And hold communion with the forest leaves;
Where long ago we trod
The Ghost House of the God,
Through orange dawns and amethystine eves!
Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements of this place of
return, a more thoughtful one of its requitals, and the infinitude of
care bestowed upon every task to which the Master Craftsman sets his
hand, and orbs into a vision of the soul enlarged by breathing the
freer air and by regaining therefrom her “primal ecstasy and poise.”
It traces also the soul’s commission,
To fill her purport in the ampler plan.
Altogether the Word is admirably expounded by Saint Kavin, and one is
distinctly the gainer for having rested at his door to learn not only
the grace of joyousness, but the means to that grace.
In his latest work, constructing from the “fragments” of Sappho lyrics
that should bear as close relation to the original as an imagination
imbued with the Sapphic traditions and a temperament sympathetically
Greek would enable him to do,—Mr. Carman undertook a daring task, but
one whose promise he has made good, as poetry, however near it may
approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost songs of the
Lesbian, which have served by their haunting beauty to keep vital her
memory through twenty-five centuries in which unnumbered names have
gone to oblivion.
Of the “Ode to Aphrodite,” the most complete Sapphic poem extant, many
translations and paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin Arnold,
John Addington Symonds, Ambrose Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among
the finest; and were there space it would be interesting to show by
comparison that Mr. Carman’s rendering of the Ode ranks well with the
standard already set.
Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no previous attempt has been
made to give an imaginative recast to so large a number of them, many
have been incorporated by Swinburne in his “Anactoria,” and fugitive
stanzas in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and others, attest
this source. To refashion them, however, after the manner, as Mr.
Roberts says in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor
restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere suggestion of a hand or
a finger,—is a work of artistic imagination demanding the finest
sympathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, as well as the poet’s
touch to shape it; and while no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of
the work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of the Sapphic metres,
together with the interpretation of the original fragment, it has
great charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain pensive beauty even
in the most impassioned stanzas, setting them to a different note from
that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as in these lines:
O heart of insatiable longing,
What spell, what enchantment allures thee,
Over the rim of the world
With the sails of the sea-going ships?
And when the rose petals are scattered
At dead of still noon on the grass-plot,
What means this passionate grief,—
This infinite ache of regret?[1]
Among the most familiar of the fragments is that of the “apple
reddening upon the topmost bough,” which Rossetti has put into
charming phrase, together with its companion verse upon the wild
hyacinth; but while these lines are of haunting charm, they do not
make a complete stanza, the comparison being unknown; whereas Mr.
Carman, in recasting the fragment, has supplied a logical complement
to the lines and symmetrized them, together with their companion
illustration, to a lyric. His rendering, too, while less musical, from
being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, each word being made to
tell as a stroke in a sketch:
Art thou the topmost apple
The gatherers could not reach,
Reddening on the bough?
Shall not I take thee?
Art thou a hyacinth blossom
The shepherds upon the hills
Have trodden into the ground?
Shall not I lift thee?
The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic play upon words
explaining that, although the gatherers did not get the coveted apple,
they
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now,
which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is hardly in keeping with
the dignity of the comparison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well
preserved.
Another fragment made familiar by adaptation is that to Hesperus,
expanded by Byron into one of the great passages of “Don Juan.” Mr.
Carman gives a more compact rendering and again brings the lines to
such a close as shall render them a complete lyric. They scarcely vie
in beauty with the Byron passage, which is one of the surest strokes
of his hand, but have their own charm and grace:
Hesperus, bringing together
All that the morning star scattered,—
Sheep to be folded in twilight,
Children for mothers to fondle,—
Me, too, will bring to the dearest,
Tenderest breast in all Lesbos.
The fragment, “I loved thee, Athis, in the long ago,” has been
expanded by Mr. Carman into a poem of reminiscent mood, the long,
slow-moving pentameter enhancing the effect of pensive meditation
which the lines convey. Many of the fragments are of a blither note,
having the variety which distinguishes the original.
Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint in his treatment of the
fragments. They are not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, and
while there is a certain atmosphere of insubstantiality about many of
them, as could scarcely fail to result from the attempt to restore, by
imagination alone, what had existence but in tradition, they justify
themselves as artistic poetry, which is the only consideration of
moment.
[1] From Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. Copyright, 1903, by
L. C. Page & Co.
IV
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
SOME critic has said of Miss Guiney’s work, that to come suddenly upon
it among other volumes of modern poetry is like coming upon a Greek
temple in an American woodland; and the comparison is an apt one,
though the temple should scarcely be Greek, for while the feeling and
structure of the work are classic in atmosphere, they are not warm
enough, sensuous enough, to be Greek. It would, indeed, be hard to say
with what race classicism Miss Guiney’s work is tinctured. Rather say
that she is a classic by temperament and has drawn to herself, as by
chemical affinity, such things as are rare and choice in the world of
books and life, and has fused them in the alembic of her own nature,
until the resultant blend is something new and strange, having a racy
tang and a flavor all its own, and yet with a hint of all the elements
that went to its compounding.
Most minds take on learning by a miscellaneous accretion that results
in information without individuality, but Miss Guiney hives in many
fields and lands the quaint, the picturesque, the beautiful, to which
her temperament calls her unerringly, and can no more be tempted to
range outside her limit of attraction than a bee to waste his precious
hours dipping into bloom that holds no nectar for him. To be sure,
Miss Guiney’s range of attraction is wide, but it enlarges its own
confines, and does not reach out to alien territory. It follows as a
corollary to this fact that unless one be in the range of attraction
with Miss Guiney, the subjects which claim her thought may be more or
less alien to him, and the restrained, wholly individual manner of her
work may be equally alien to his nature. He may require more warmth,
more abandon, more of the element of to-day and to-morrow in the theme
and mood; for Miss Guiney has little to do with the times and
conditions in which she finds herself; contemporary life is only
incidentally in her verse, and one would have difficulty from it in
declaring her day and generation. Her poetry demands that synchronism
of temperament by which one responds to her mood independent of the
time or place to which it transports him.
[Illustration: Louise Imogen Guiney]
Take, for illustration, “A Friend’s Song for Simoisius,” with its
charm of music, its beauty of expression, and its crystal clarity. Few
would be unconscious of the poetic side of it; but to how many would
the subject appeal? What’s Simoisius to them or they to Simoisius that
they should weep for him? Let, however, this feeling for the
atmosphere of myth and legend be added, and what charm do the lines
take on:
The breath of dew, and twilight’s grace,
Be on the lonely battle-place;
And to so young, so kind a face,
The long, protecting grasses cling!
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)
In rocky hollows cool and deep,
The bees our boyhood hunted sleep;
The early moon from Ida’s steep
Comes to the empty wrestling-ring,
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)
Upon the widowed wind recede
No echoes of the shepherd’s reed,
And children without laughter lead
The war-horse to the watering.
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)
Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon!
What to the loveliest hast thou done,
That ne’er with him a maid may run
Across the marigolds in spring?
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)
* * * * *
The world to me has nothing dear
Beyond the namesake river here:
O Simois is wild and clear!
And to his brink my heart I bring;
(Alas, alas,
The one inexorable thing!)
The rhyme scheme in this poem has a distinct fascination to the ear;
there is music in the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, climaxing
in each stanza, and, moreover, every stanza is a picture, with a
concrete relation to the whole. The poem illustrates several of Miss
Guiney’s characteristics: first, the compactness of her verse. It is
never pirouetting merely to show its grace; in other words, she does
not let the unity of the idea escape in a profusion of imagery. She
uses figure and symbol with an individual freshness of conception, but
always that which is structural with the thought, so that one can
rarely detach a stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems without a
loss of value. She develops the theme without over-developing it,
which is the restraint of the artist. The above poem illustrates,
also, the white light which she throws upon her words when clarity and
simplicity are demanded by the form; whereas, in sonnets, in her
dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” and in other forms of verse, her
work is sometimes lacking in that clear, swiftly communicative quality
which poetry should possess; but in her lyric inspirations, where the
form and melody condition the diction, one may note the perfect
clarity and flexibility which she attains, without loss of the rare
and picturesque word-feeling that belongs so inseparably to her.
The stanzas to “Athassal Abbey,” the “Footnote To A Famous Lyric,” the
delicate “Lilac Song,” and many others blend the finer qualities of
word and metre. With the exception of the last poem, however, they
have not the emotional warmth that imbues several other of her lyrics,
as the two “Irish Peasant Songs,” which are inspirations of sheer
beauty, especially the first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and
personal mood, left unanalyzed,—for a further hint would destroy
it,—but holding spring and tears and youth in its wistful word and
measure:
I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while,
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile,
Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all,
Why, from me that’s young, should the wild tears fall?
The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams,
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams,
And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall,
It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall.
The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill,
And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still;
But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin’s hedges call,
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!
It is not surprising that William Black should have quoted this poem
in one of his volumes, for it is certainly one of the most exquisite
and temperamental of folk-songs. The second is wholly different in
note, brimming over with the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and
fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it:
’Tis the time o’ the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch,
The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch,
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves
In little angry spray that is the under-white of leaves;
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall,
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall.
* * * * *
’Tis the time o’ the year in early light and glad,
The lark has a music to drive a lover mad;
The downs are dripping nightly, the breathéd damps arise,
Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling’s golden eyes,
And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep
Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep.
The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss Guiney has managed to infuse
into these lines is fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the
dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what elation and buoyancy
of returning life vitalizes the first! While on this phase of her work
there is another poem as magnetically charged, and full of ozone, but
its objective side incidental to a subjective query which nature and
science force to the lips:
The spur is red upon the briar,
The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore;
The wind shakes out the colored fire
From lamps a-row on the sycamore;
The tanager with flitting note
Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat;
The mink is busy; herds again
Go hillward in the honeyed rain;
The midges meet. I cry to Thee
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me.
Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride;
Along an edge of marshy ground,
The shad-bush enters like a bride.
Yon little clouds are washed of care
That climb the blue New England air,
And almost merrily withal
The tree-frog plays at evenfall
His oboe in a mossy tree.
So, too,
Am I not Thine? Arise, undo
This fear Thou hast forgotten me.