"I am: how little more I know!
Whence came I? Whither do I go?
A centred self, which feels and is;
_A cry between the silences;_
A shadow-birth of clouds at strife
With sunshine on the hills of life;
A shaft from Nature's quiver cast
Into the Future from the Past;
Between the cradle and the shroud
A meteor's flight from cloud to cloud."
Then to outward Nature, to mythic tradition, to the thought, faith,
sanctity of old time he goes in quest of certitude, but returns to God
in the heart, and to the simple heroic act by which he that believes
BELIEVES.
"To Him, from wanderings long and wild,
I come, an over-wearied child,
In cool and shade His peace to find,
Like dew-fall settling on the mind.
Assured that all I know is best,
And humbly trusting for the rest,
I turn....
From Nature and her mockery, Art,
And book and speech of men apart,
To the still witness in my heart;
With reverence waiting to behold
His Avatar of love unfold,
The Eternal Beauty new and old!"
"The Panorama and other Poems," together with "Later Poems,"[13] having
the dates of 1856 and 1857, constitute the transition to his third and
consummate epoch. Much in them deserves notice, but we must hasten. And
yet, instead of hastening, we will pause, and take this opportunity to
pick a small critical quarrel with Mr. Whittier. We charge him, in the
first place, with sundry felonious assaults upon the good letter _r_. In
the "Panorama," for example, we find _law_ rhyming with _for_! You, Mr.
Poet, you, who indulge fastidious objections to the whipping of women,
to outrage that innocent preposition thus! And to select the word _law_
itself, with which to force it into this lawless connection! Secondly,
_romance_ and _allies_ are constantly written by him with the accent on
the first syllable. These be heinous offences! A poet, of all men,
should cherish the liquid consonants, and should resist the tendency of
the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we
might complain that he sometimes--rarely--writes, not by vocation of the
ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of
those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and
George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of
now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence of his special Quaker
culture.
With the "Home Ballads," published in 1863, dawns fully his final
period,--long may it last! This is the epoch of Poetic Realism. Not that
he abandons or falls away from his moral ideal. The fact is quite
contrary. He has so entirely established himself in that ideal that he
no longer needs strivingly to assert it,--any more than Nature needs to
pin upon oak-trees an affirmation that the idea of an oak dwells in her
formative thought. Nature affirms the oak-idea by oaks; the consummate
poet exhibits the same realism. He embodies. He lends a soul to forms.
The real and ideal in Art are indeed often opposed to each other as
contraries, but it is a false opposition. Let the artist represent
reality, and all that is in him, though it were the faith of seraphs,
will go into the representation. The sole condition is that he shall
_select his subject from native, spontaneous choice_,--that is, leave
his genius to make its own elections. Let one, whose genius so invites
him, paint but a thistle, and paint it as faithfully as Nature grows it;
yet, if the Ten Commandments are meantime uttering themselves in his
thought, he will make the thistle-top a Sinai.
It is this poetic realism that Whittier has now, in a high
degree, attained. Calm and sure, lofty in humility, strong in
childlikeness,--renewing the play-instinct of the true poet in his
heart,--younger now than when he sat on his mother's knee,--chastened,
not darkened, by trial, and toil, and time,--illumined, poet-like, even
by sorrow,--he lives and loves, and chants the deep, homely beauty of
his lays. He is as genuine, as wholesome and real as sweet-flag and
clover. Even when he utters pure sentiment, as in that perfect lyric,
"My Psalm," or in the intrepid, exquisite humility--healthful and sound
as the odor of new-mown hay or balsam-firs--of "Andrew Rykman's Prayer,"
he maintains the same attitude of realism. He states God and inward
experience as he would state sunshine and the growth of grass. This,
with the devout depth of his nature, makes the rare beauty of his hymns
and poems of piety and trust. He does not try to _make_ the facts by
stating them; he does not try to embellish them; he only seeks to utter,
to state them; and even in his most perfect verse they are not half so
melodious as they were in his soul.
All perfect poetry is simple statement of facts,--facts of history or of
imagination. Whoever thinks to create poetry by words, and inclose in
the verse a beauty which did not exist in his consciousness, has got
hopelessly astray.
This attitude of simple divine abiding in the present is beautifully
expressed in the opening stanzas of "My Psalm."
"I mourn no more my vanished years:
Beneath a tender rain,
An April rain of smiles and tears,
My heart is young again.
"The west winds blow, and, singing low,
I hear the glad streams run;
The windows of my soul I throw
Wide open to the sun.
"No longer forward nor behind
I look in hope and fear;
But, grateful, take the good I find,
The best of now and here.
"I plough no more a desert land,
To harvest weed and tare;
The manna dropping from God's hand
Rebukes my painful care.
"I break my pilgrim-staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at the door."
It is, however, in his ballads that Whittier exhibits, not, perhaps, a
higher, yet a rarer, power than elsewhere,--a power, in truth, which is
very rare indeed. Already in the "Panorama" volume he had brought forth
three of these,--all good, and the tender pathos of that fine ballad of
sentiment, "Maud Muller," went to the heart of the nation. In how many
an imagination does the innocent maiden, with her delicate brown ankles,
"Rake the meadow sweet with hay,"
and
"The judge ride slowly down the lane"!
But though sentiment so simple and unconscious is rare, our poet has yet
better in store for us. He has developed of late years the precious
power of creating _homely beauty_,[14]--one of the rarest powers shown
in modern literature. Homely life-scenes, homely old sanctities and
heroisms, he takes up, delineates them with intrepid fidelity to their
homeliness, and, lo! there they are, beautiful as Indian corn, or as
ploughed land under an October sun! He has thus opened an inexhaustible
mine right here under our New-England feet. What will come of it no one
knows.
These poems of his are natural growths; they have their own circulation
of vital juices, their own peculiar properties; they smack of the soil,
are racy and strong and aromatic, like ground-juniper, sweet-fern, and
the _arbor vitæ_. Set them out in the earth, and would they not sprout
and grow?--nor would need vine-shields to shelter them from the weather!
They are living and local, and lean toward the west from the pressure of
east winds that blow on our coast. "Skipper Ireson's Ride,"--can any one
tell what makes that poetry? This uncertainty is the highest praise.
This power of telling a plain matter in a plain way, and leaving it
there a symbol and harmony forever,--it is the power of Nature herself.
And again we repeat, that almost anything may be found in literature
more frequently than this pure creative simplicity. As a special
instance of it, take three lines which occur in an exquisite picture of
natural scenery,--and which we quote the more readily as it affords
opportunity for saying that Whittier's landscape-pictures alone make his
books worthy of study,--not so much those which he sets himself
deliberately to draw as those that are incidental to some other purpose
or effect.
"I see far southward, this quiet day,
The hills of Newbury rolling away,
With the many tints of the season gay,
Dreamily blending in autumn mist
Crimson and gold and amethyst.
Long and low, with dwarf trees crowned,
Plum Island lies, like a whale aground,
A stone's toss over the narrow sound.
Inland, as far as the eye can go,
The hills curve round, like a bended bow;
A silver arrow from out them sprung,
I see the shine of the Quasycung;
_And, round and round, over valley and hill,
Old roads winding, as old roads will,
Here to a ferry, and there to a mill._"
Can any one tell what magic it is that is in these concluding lines, so
that they even eclipse the rhetorical brilliancy of those immediately
preceding?
Our deep-hearted poet has fairly arrived at his poetic youth. Never was
he so strong, so ruddy and rich as to-day. Time has treated him as,
according to Swedenborg, she does the angels,--chastened indeed, but
vivified. Let him hold steadily to his true vocation as a poet, and
never fear to be thought idle, or untrue to his land. To give
imaginative and ideal depth to the life of the people,--what truer
service than that? And as for war-time,--does he know that "Barbara
Frietche" is the true sequel to the Battle of Gettysburg, is that other
victory which the nation _asked_ of Meade the soldier and obtained from
Whittier the poet?