CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Date Di]#> Cornell University Library PS 321.R61 The younger American poets. 3 1924 022 027 209 All books are subject to recall after two weeks Olin/Kroch Library DATE DUE i '^fBf^^ ^ffls j 1 1 GAYLORD PI^INTEOINU&A. Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022027209 THE YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS i THE YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS BY JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS BOSTON LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 1904 , I ' Copyright, 1904, By Little, Brown, and Company. All rights reserved Published October, 1904 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASS. , M, B. A. To LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON WHO HAS ENRICHED AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH HER SONG, AND MY LIFE WITH HER FRIENDSHIP, THESE STUDIES OF THE YOUNGER POETS ARE INSCRIBED WITH THE WARM AFFECTION OF JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE FOREWORD TO attempt, in one volume, to cover the entire field of present-day poetry in America, will be recognized the more readily as impossible when one reflects that in Mr. Stedman's American Anthology over five hundred poets are represented, of whom the greater number are still living and singing. One may scarcely hope, then, in the space of one volume, to include more than a repre- sentative group, even when confining his study to the work of the younger poets, for within this class would fall the larger contingent named above. It has therefore been necessary to follow a general, though not arbitrary, stand- ard of chronology, of which the most feasible seemed that adopted by Mr. Archer in his ad- mirable study of the English " Poets of the Younger Generation," — the including only of such as have been born within the last half- century, and whose place is still in the making. The few remaining poets whose art has long since defined itself, such as Mr. Aldrich, Mr. via Foreword Stedman, and Mrs. Moulton, need no further interpretation ; nor does the long-acknowledged work of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, nor that of James Whitcomb Riley, whose final criticism has been pronounced in every heart and at every hearth. The work of Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet of democracy, whose fraternal songs embody many of the latter-day ideals, and that of John B. Tabb, the lapidary of modern verse, who cuts with infinite care his delicate cameos of thought, were also beyond the chronological scheme of the volume. Nor of those who fell within its scope could a selection be made that would not seem to some invidious, since it must chance among so great a number that many would be omitted who should, with equal right, have been included ; it returns, therefore, to the earlier statement, that one must confine himself to a representative group, with whose work he chance to be most familiar, and upon which he has, therefore, the truer claim to speak. It seemed, also, that the volume would have more value if it gave to a smaller number such a study as would differentiate and define their work, rather than to a larger group the passing comment of a few paragraphs. It was a great Foreword IX regret, however, that circumstances incident to the copyrights prevented me from including the admirable work of William Vaughn Moody, which reveals by its breadth, penetration, and purpose, the thinker and not the dreamer. In- deed, Mr. Moody's work, in its vitality of touch, fine imagination, and spiritual idealism, proves not only the creative poet but one to whom the nobler offices of Art have been entrusted, and the critic given to inquiring why the former times were better than these may well keep his eye upon the work of Mr. Moody. It was also a regret that those inexorable arbiters, space and time, deprived me of the privilege of including the strongly individual work of Helen Gray Cone; the artistic, thought- ful verse of Anna Hempstead Branch ; the sincere and sympathetic song of Virginia Woodward Cloud ; the spiritual verse of Lilian Whiting, with its interpretation of the higher imports ; the heartening, characteristic notes of Theodosia Garrison; and the recently issued poems of Josephine Dodge Daskam, which prove beyond peradventure that the Muses, too, were at her christening, — indeed, the "Songs of Iseult Deserted," which form a group in her volume, are lyrics worthy of any hand. X Foreword Had it been possible in the space at com- mand, I should also have had pleasure in con- sidering the work of Frank Dempster Sherman, who is not only an accomplished lyrist, but who has divined the heart of the child and set it to music; the cheer-giving songs of Frank L. Stanton, fledged with the Southland sunshine and melody ; and the verse-stories of Holman F. Day, bringing from the pines of Maine their pungent aroma of humor and pathos. Mr. Day covers an individual field, representing such phases of New England life as have been little celebrated hitherto, even by writers of fiction. He is familiar with every corner of Maine from the mountains to the sea, and writes of humanity in the concrete, sketching his types equally from the lumber camp or from the sailors and fisher- men of the shore. In his latest volume they are drawn from the " Kin o' Ktaadn," and hold their way throughout its pages with a reality provoking both laughter and tears ; indeed, one must seek far to find a keener humor, or one more infectious, than that of Mr. Day, or a more sympathetic penetration into the pathos of life. The heart is the book of his reading, and, in turn, the heart is the book of his writing. There is no attempt in these studies of the Foreword XI younger poets to group them into schools, to define them in relation to one another, or to hazard prophecies concerning them. Each is considered in his present accomplishment, whether the work be fresh from the pen, or come bringing with it the endorsement of time, since the song of yesterday may carry farther than that already borne on the wings of the years, and has equal claim to consideration in a volume devoted to the work of the younger singers ; for only by such consideration shall we learn what is being done in our own day. J. B. R. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THANKS are due to the following publishers for permission to include selections from the volumes enumerated below, published and copyrighted by them : To Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for selections from "A Roadside Harp" and "A Martyr's Idyl," by Louise Imogen Guiney; "A Handful of Lavender" and "A Quiet Road," by Lizette Woodworth Reese; "Fair Shadow Land," by Edith M. Thomas; "Marlowe" and "The Singing Leaves," by Josephine Preston Peabody; and " Songs of Sunrise Lands," by Clinton ScoUard. To Messrs. Small, Maynard & Co. for poems from "The Wayfarers " and "Fortune and Men's Eyes," by Josephine Preston Peabody; "Songs from Vagabondia," "More Songs from Vagabondia," and " Last Songs from Vaga- bondia," by Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey; "Along the Trail," "The Quest of Merlin," "The Marriage of Guenevere," "The Birth of Galahad," and "Taliesin," by Richard Hovey; "Ballads of Lost Haven," "By the Aurelian Wall," and "Behind the Arras," by Bliss Car- man; "The House of a Hundred Lights," by Ridgely Torrence ; and "The Hills of Song," by Clinton ScoUard. To Mr. John Lane for selections from "El Dorado: A Tragedy," by Ridgely Torrence. To Messrs. L. C. Page & Co, for the use of "The Green Book of the Bards," xiv Acknowledgments "The Book of Myths," and "Sappho: A Hundred Lyrics," by Bliss Carman; and "Poems. (Collected Edition) " and "The Book of the Rose," by Charles G. D. Roberts. To Mr. Edmund D. Brooks for selections from "Westwind Songs" and "Octaves in an Oxford Garden," by Arthur Upson. To Messrs. Oliver & Boyd, "The City: A Poem-Drama," by Arthur Upson. To Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, "A Winter Swallow," by Edith M. Thomas ; and "The Hermit of Carmel, and Other Poems," by George E. Santayana. To Mr. Rich- ard G. Badger, "The Dancers," by Edith M. Thomas. To Mr. Fleming H. Revell, "Ballads of Valor and Vic- tory," by Clinton ScoUard and Wallace Rice. To James Pott & Co., "The Lyric Bough," by Clinton Scollard. To Dana Estes & Co., "Love Triumphant," by Frederic Lawrence Knowles. To The Scott-Thaw Co., "The Word at St. Kavin's," by Bliss Carman. To The Lo- throp Co., "Lyrics of Brotherhood," "Dumb in June," and "Message and Melody," by Richard Burton. To Herbert S. Stone, "Sonnets and Other Poems," by George E. Santayana; and to Alfred Bartlett, "The Lutes of Morn," by Clinton Scollard. The excerpts from the writings of Mr. George E. Woodberry are from the following book, published and copyrighted by The Macmillan Co., and are used in this volume by their permission: "Poems. (Collected Edition)," by George E. Woodberry. Thanks are due to the A. N. Marquis Publishing Co. for permission to make use of data from " Who 's Who in America " (1903-5) in the Biographical Index of this volume. CONTENTS Page Foreword vii I. Richard Hovey i ^ II. LiZETTE WOODWORTH REESE ... 2/ III. Bliss Carman 46 ^ IV. Louise Imogen Guiney 75 V. George E. Santayana 94 ^ VI. Josephine Preston Peabody . . . iio VII. Charles G. D. Roberts . , . . 132 ^ VIII. Edith M. Thomas 151 IX. Madison Cawein 177 X. George E. Woodberry 196 XI. Frederic Lawrence Knowles . .212 ^ XII. Alice Brown 235 XIII. Richard Burton 248 XIV. Clinton Scollard 269 y XV. Mary McNeil Fenollosa .... 290 XVI. Ridgely Torrence 299 ^ XVII. Gertrude Hall 315 XVIII. Arthur Upson 325 Biographical Index 347 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Richard Hovey Frontispiece LizETTE WooDWORTH Reese .... Facing page 28 Bliss Carman " "48 Louise Imogen GumEv " "76 Josephine Preston Peabody .... " "112 Charles G. D. Roberts " "134 Madison Cawein " "178 George E. Woodberry " "198 Frederic Lawrence Knowles ... " "214 Alice Brown " " 236 Richard Burton " " 250 Clinton Scollard " "270 Mary McNeil Fenollosa .... " " 292 RiDGELY TorRENCE " " 3OO The Younger American Poets RICHARD HOVEY RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of con- victions rather than of fancies, in which ~ regard he overtopped many of his contemporaries who were content to be "en- amored architects of airy rhyme." Hovey was himself a skilful architect of rhyme, an im- aginative weaver of fancy ; but these were not ends, he does not stand primarily for them. He stands for comradeship ; for taking vows of one's own soul ; for alliance with the shap- ing spirit of things ; for a sane, wholesome, lusty manhood; a hearty, confident surrender to life. He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, and personal to a Whitmanesque degree, and answers to many of the qualifications laid down by Whitman for the testing of an American poet. His performance is eminently 2 The Younger American Poets of the sort to "face the open fields and the seaside ; " it does " absorb into one ; " it " ani- mates to life," and it is of the people. It answers also to the query, " Have you vivified yourself from the maternity of these States?" for Hovey was an American of the Americans, and his patriotic poems are instinct with national pride, though one may dissent from certain of his opinions upon war. Hovey, to the degree of his development when his hand was stayed, was a finely balanced man and artist. The purely romantic motives which form the entire basis, for example, of Stephen Phillips' work, and thus render him a poet of the cultured classes and not of the people, were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. He, too, was recasting in dramatic form some of beauty's imperishable traditions ; but this was only one phase of his art, it did not cause him to approach his own time with less of sympathy; and while he had not yet come deeply into the prophet gifts of song, their potency was upon him, and in the Odes, which contain some of his strongest writing, his pas- sion for brotherhood, for development through comradeship, finds splendid expression. In the best known of his odes, " Spring," occurs this stirring symbol: Richard Hovey 3 For surely in the blind deep-buried roots Of all men's souls to-day A secret quiver shoots. The darkness in us is aware Of something potent burning through the earth, Of something vital in the procreant air. It is in this ode, with the exception of his visioning of " Night " in Last Songs from Vag- abondia, that the influence of Whitman upon Hovey comes out most prominently; that is, the influence of manner. The really vital in- fluence is one much less easily demonstrated, but no less apparent to a student of both poets. It is not of the sort, however, to detract from the originality of Hovey, but rather an intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing of his powers, and is in accordance with Whit- man's declaration that " He most honors my style Who learns under it to destroy the teacher." Hovey's own nature was so individual that he rarely failed to destroy the teacher, or he was perhaps unconscious of having one; but in the opening lines of the ode in question the Whitman note is unmistakable: I said in my heart, " I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. I have need of the sky. 4 The Younger American Poets I have business with the grass. I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, Lone and high, And the slow clouds go by. Spring, like a huntsman's boy, Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods The falcon in my will. The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill That breaks in apple blooms down country roads Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away. The sap is in the boles to-day. And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads." Could volumes of conventional nature poetry- set one a-tingle like this ? The crowning ex- cellence of Hovey's nature poems is that they are never reports, they do not describe with far-sought imagery, but are as personal as a poem of love or other emotion. Such passion- ate surrender, such intimate delight as finds expression, for example, in " The Faun," could scarcely be more communicative and direct. It becomes at once our own mood, an inter- change which is the test of art: . . . And I plunge in the wood, and the swift soul cleaves Through the swirl and the flow of the leaves. As a swimmer stands with his white limbs bare to the sun For the space that a breath is held, and drops in the sea ; And the undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluct- uant, free, Richard Hovey 5 Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and the effort is done ; — There is only the glory of living, exultant to be. In such words as these one loses thought of the merely picturesque, their infection takes hold upon him, particularly in that line befit- ting the forest spirit as a garment, in which The undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free, — a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and diction are wholly at one. It is impossible for Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in any phase of his work, and when he writes of nature it is as the comrade to whom she is a mystic personality. A stanza of " The Faun " illustrates this ; still in the wood, he asks: Oh, what is it breathes in the air ? Oh, what is it touches my cheek? There 's a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches. But where ? Is it far, is it far to seek ? The first two collections of the Vagabondia books contain Hovey's most spontaneous na- ture verse ; they have also some of the lyrics by which he will be known when such a rollicking stave as " Barney McGee," at which one laughs 6 The Younger American Poets as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The quips of rhyme and fancy that enliven the pages of the earlier volumes give place, in the Last Songs, to a note of seriousness and artistic purpose which sets the collection to an entirely different key; not that the work is uniformly superior to that of the former songs, but it is more earnest in tone ; dawn is giving place to noon. From the second collection may be cited one of the lyric inspirations that sometimes came to Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned complete in a thought. It is called " A Sea Gypsy," and the first of its quatrains, though perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting charm : I am fevered with the sunset, I am fretful with the bay, For the wander-thirst is on me And my soul is in Cathay. There 's a schooner in the offing, With her topsails shot with fire, And my heart has gone aboard her For the Islands of Desire. I must forth again to-morrow ! With the sunset I must be Hull down on the trail of rapture In the wonder of the sea. Richard Hovey 7 Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, " Seaward," Hovey 's most representative work is found in his collection. Along the Trail, which opens with a group of battle-hymns inspired by the Spanish-American war. With the exception of " Unmanifest Destiny," and oc- casional trumpet notes from the poem called " Bugles," these battle-songs are more or less perfunctory, nor are they ethically the utter- ance of a prophet. There is the old assump- tion that because war has ever been, it ever will be ; that because the sword has been the instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is the divinely chosen arbiter. There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall conform ; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet " America." The jubilant note of his call of the " Bugles," however, thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey's mind was his country's altruism ; but, as a whole, the battle-songs lack the larger vision and are un- equal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace from some flight of lyric beauty. The best of them, and a worthy best, both in conception and in its dignified 8 The Younger American Poets simplicity, is " Unmanifest Destiny," which follows : To what new fates, my country, far And unforeseen of foe or friend, Beneath what unexpected star, Compelled to what unchosen end. Across the sea that knows no beach The Admiral of Nations guides Thy blind obedient keels to reach The harbor where thy future rides ! The guns that spoke at Lexington Knew not that God was planning then The trumpet word of Jefferson To bugle forth the rights of men. To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, What was it but despair and shame ? Who saw behind the cloud the sun? Who knew that God was in the flame ? Had not defeat upon defeat. Disaster on disaster come, The slave's emancipated feet Had never marched behind the drum. There is a Hand that bends our deeds To mightier issues than we planned. Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds. My country, serves Its dark command. I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate ; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great. Richard Hovey 9 Hovey's themes are widely diverse, but they ire always of the essential purports. He seems lot only integral with nature, but integral with nan in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, md the swift understanding of all that makes or achievement or defeat. He had the splen- lid nonchalance that met everything with ;onfident ease, and made his relation to life ike that of an athlete trained to prevail. Not be servile, not to be negative, not to be rague, — these are some of the notes of his ;tirring song. Even in love there is a char- Lcteristic dash and verve, a celebration of com- adeship as the keynote of the relation, that nakes it possible for him to write this sonnet, ;o refreshing and wholesome, and so far re- noved from the mawkish or effeminate : When I am standing on a mountain crest, Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, My love of you leaps foaming in my breast. Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray ; My heart bounds with the horses of the sea, And plunges in the wild ride of the night. Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight. Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you. Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather, — No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, But hale and hardy as the highland heather. lo The Younger American Poets Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills. And that other sonnet, " Faith and Fate," with its Valkyr spirit, and its words like ringing hoofbeats : To horse, my dear, and out into the night ! Stirrup and saddle and away, away ! Into the darkness, into the affright, Into the unknown on our trackless way ! And closing with one of his finest lines — East, to the dawn, or west or south or north ! Loose rein upon the neck of Fate — and forth ! What valor in that line — " Loose rein upon the neck of Fate — and forth ! " This is the typical mood, but I cannot refrain, before con- sidering the last phase of his work, the dramas, from quoting another sonnet in another mood, because of its beauty and its revelation of the spiritual side of his nature: My love for thee doth take me unaware, When most with lesser things my brain is wrought. As in some nimble interchange of thought The silence enters, and the talkers stare. Suddenly I am still and thou art there, A viewless visitant and unbesought. And all my thinking trembles into nought, And all my being opens like a prayer. Richard Hovey ii Thou art the lifted Chalice in my soul, And I a dim church at the thought of thee ; Brief be the moment, but the mass is said, The benediction like an aureole Is on my spirit, and shuddering through me A rapture like the rapture of the dead. " The Quest of Merhn," Hovey 's first incur- sion into drama, and indeed one of his earliest works, having been issued in 1891, is most illustrative of his defects and least of his dis- tinctions. It is unnecessary to the subsequent dramas, though serving as an introduction to them, and has in itself very little constructive congruity. In the songs of the fairies, the dryads, the maenads, there is often a delicate airy beauty ; but the metrical lapses throughout the drama are so frequent as to detract from one's pleasure in the verse. This criticism is much less apposite to the subsequent vi^orks of the cycle. Hovey's Arthurian dramas must be judged by the manner rather than motif, by the situa- tions through which he develops the well-known story, and the dramatic beauty and passion of the dialogue, since the theme is his only as he makes it his by the art of his adaptation. He has given us the Arthur of Malory, and not of Tennyson, the Arthur of a certain early 12 The Younger American Poets intrigue with Morgance, the Queen of Orkney, outlived in all save its effect, that of bitterness and envy cherished by her against the young Queen Guinevere, and made use of as one of the motives of the drama. While Tennyson's Arthur, until the final great scene with Guinevere in the convent, and Bedivere by the lake, has a lay-figure per- sonality, placidly correct, but unconvincing, — in these scenes, and in the general ideal of the Round Table, as developed by Tennyson, there is such profound spiritual beauty that Arthur has come to dwell in a nebulous upper air, as of the gods. It is a shock, then, to see him brought down to earth, as he is in Hovey's dramas. However, the lapses are but referred to as incidental to the plot, not occurring during its action, and Arthur becomes to us a human, magnanimous personality, commanding sym- pathy, if he does not dominate the imagination as does Tennyson's hero. The handicap under which any poet labors who makes use of these legends, even though vitalizing them with a new touch, and approaching them from a new standpoint, is that the Tennyson touch, the Tennyson standpoint, has so impressed itself upon the memory that comparison is inev- itable. Richard Hovey 13 The fateful passion of Lancelot and Guine- vere is enveloped by Tennyson in a spiritual .tmosphere ; but in the dramas of Hovey, while lelicately approached, it lacks that elevation by vhich alone it lives as a soul-tragedy, and not ,s an intrigue. There is, indeed, a strife for oyalty on the part of Lancelot, when he re- urns from a chivalrous quest and learns that he King's bride is his unknown Lady of the iills ; but it is soon overborne by Galahault's .ssurance that Arthur is to Guinevere — L mere indifferent, covenanted thing, .nd that she s as virgin of the thought of love ls winter is of flowers. Ire this declaration, Lancelot, in conflict with limself, had exclaimed : )h, Galahault, for love of my good name, 'luck out your sword and kill me, for I see ^'hate'er I do it will be violence — 'o soul or body, others or myself ! But to Galahault's subtle arguments he ipposes an ever-weakening will, and seeing the ^ueen walking in the garden, exquisite in >eauty, 14 The Younger American Poets As if a rose grew on a lily's stem, So blending passionate life and stately mien, — he is persuaded to seek ner, and, ere the close of the interview, half confessions have orbed to full acknowledgment by each. The scene is artistically handled, especially in the ingenu- ous simplicity of Guinevere. Hovey occasionally makes the mistake of robbing some vital utterance of its dramatic value by interlarding it with ornament. True emotion is not literary, and Guinevere, meeting Lancelot alone at the lodge of Galahault, for the first time after their mutual confession, hav- ing come hither disguised and by a perilous course, would scarcely have chosen these deco- rative words : Oh, do not jar with speech This perfect chord of silence ! — Nay, there needs Thy throat's deep music. Let thy lips drop words Like pearls between thy kisses ; and Lancelot, of the overmastering passion, would scarcely have babbled this reply: Thy speech breaks Against the interruption of my lips Like the low laughter of a summer brook Over perpetual pebbles. Richard Hovey 15 it when the crisis of the play is reached, len the court is rife with rumors of the leen's disloyahy, and Lancelot and Guinevere, der imminent shadow of exposure, meet by ince in the throne room, — there is drawn a al, moving picture, one whose art lies in '^ealing the swift transition from impulse impulse through which one passes when iking great decisions. First, the high light is ■own upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in :h meditative passages as these, tinged with nelancholy beauty: have had a radiant dream ; we have beheld ; trellises and temples of the South, i wandered in the vineyards of the Sun : — s morning now ; the vision fades away i we must face the barren norland hills. Lancelot. And must this be ? j-uinevere. Nay, Lancelot, it is. w shall wc stand alone against the world ? Lancelot. More lonely in it than against ! lat 's the world to us ? 'Guinevere. The place in which we live. cannot slip it from us like a garment, : it is like the air — if we should flee the remotest steppes of Tartary, Wa, or the sources of the Nile, — itill is there, nor can it be eluded e in the airless emptiness of death. id fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war. 1 6 The Younger American Poets of rending the kingdom, of violating friend- ships, of desecrating the family bond, to all of which Lancelot opposes his own desires : And I — I, too, defend it when it is a family, As I would kneel before the sacred Host When through the still aisles sounds the sacring bell ; But if a jester strutted through the forms And turned the holy Mass into a mock, Would I still kneel, or would I rise in anger And make an end of that foul mimicry? This but adds strength to Guinevere's argu- ment, Believest thou, then, the power of the Church? The Church would give our love an ugly name. Lancelot. Faith, I believe, and I do not believe. The shocks of life oft startle us to thought. Rouse us from acquiescence and reveal That what we took for credence was but custom. Guinevere. You are Arthur's friend, your love — Stands this within the honor of your friendship ? Lancelot. Mother of God — have you no pity? Guinevere. I would I could be pitiful, and yet do right. Alas, how heavy- — ^your tears move me more Than all — (what am I saying ? Dare I trust So faint a heart ? I must make turning back Impossible) ; and with a final resolve she adds : Richard Hovey 17 lut know the worst ! I jested — — God ! — I do not love you. Go ! 'T was all lockery — wanton cruelty — what you will — lechery ! — (Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. Is he draws aside the curtain of the doorway — ) Guinevere. Lancelot ! Lancelot. What does the Queen desire? Guinevere. Oh, no, I am not the Queen — I am bur wife ! 'ake me away with you 1 Let me not lie 'o you, of all — my whole life is a lie, b one, at least, let it be truth. I — I — • Lancelot, do you not understand ? love you :— Oh, I cannot let you go ! This swift change of front, this weakening, lis inconsistency, is yet so human, so subtly rue to life, under such a phase of it, that the ntire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers Dree in the declaration of Guinevere: ,ove, I will fly with thee where'er thou wilt ! nd reaches its climax in the sudden strength /ith which Lancelot meets the Queen's weak- ess. During her pleading that he should ;ave her, his selfish wish had been uppermost ; ut her weakness recalls him to himself and vokes his latent loyalty to the King: peak not of flight ; I have played him alse — the King, my friend. i8 The Younger American Poets I ne'er can wipe that smirch away. At least I will not add a second shame And blazon out the insult to the world. And Guinevere, casting about for her own justi- fication, replies: What I have given thee was ne'er another's. How has another, then, been wronged? To which Lancelot : What 's done Is done, nor right nor wrong, as help me, Heaven, Would I undo it if I could. But more I will not do. I will not be the Brutus To stab with mine own hand my dearest friend. It must suffice me that you love me, sweet. And sometime, somewhere, somehow must be mine. I know not — it may be in some dim land Beyond the shadows, where the King himself, Still calling me his friend, shall place your hand In my hand, saying, " She was always thine." No surplusage, no interposition of the merely literary, cumbers this scene, which immediately precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and the Queen are publicly accused before the King, sitting with Guinevere beside him on the throne. The opportunity for a great dramatic effect is obvious; but through the magnanimity of Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exon- Richard Hovey 19 rating from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, le effect is not of the clash and din order, in Lct, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax sing a spiritual one whose subtlety would be )st on the average audience. Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and artly to himself) : e less kingly, Arthur, r you will split my heart — not with remorse — b, not remorse, only eternal pain ! "■hy, so the damned are ! Guinevere (half apart): To the souls in hell is at least permitted to cry out. Whatever one may think of the ethical side of le play as wrought out by Hovey, there is no uestion of its human element. As a whole. The Marriage of Guenevere " leaves upon ae a more concrete and vital impression than D the other dramas of the cycle, though it as less of action and intricacy of plot than le succeeding one, " The Birth of Galahad," id would probably, for stage purposes, be less fective. The action of the latter play takes place liefly with Arthur's army occupied in the siege : Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turn- 20 The Younger American Poets ing upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen's jester, who has been sent with a letter to Lance- lot, informing him of the birth of his son, and announcing that Guinevere, having left the child with her friend, the Princess Ylen, had set out to join the army. The Romans at once conceive the plan of holding Dagonet ; cap- turing the Queen for the palace of Caesar; and giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking Arthur, placing himself at the head of the army and becoming tributary king of Britain, with Guinevere as his queen ; or of being pub- licly dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur of the incriminating letter. All of which was artfully planned, and might have been executed as artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an act of jugglery, stolen the Emperor's cloak and escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener, at- tached himself to the service of a young poet of Caesar's household. Guinevere iscaptured by the Romans,and after many unsuccessful machinations on Caesar's part to subdue her to his will, and on the part of his advisers to win Lancelot to their ends, the let- ter, which may, according to the law of Britain, bring death to the Queen and banishment to Lancelot, is given to Dagonet to copy for Caesar, and is burned by the jester with the taper given Richard Hovey 21 im to heat the waxen tablet. Then comes tt apace the sacking of Rome by Arthur ; the iking of the city; the rescue of Guinevere Y Lancelot; the slaying of Caesar and the ■owning of Arthur as Emperor of Rome ith Guinevere as Empress. The scene closes ith the entrance of a messenger with letters om Merlin, to Arthur and Guinevere, scan- ing which the Queen says apart to Lance- it: All 's well with him. hus ends the drama, again with no suspicion 1 the part of Arthur that his faith has been strayed, and with no remorse on the part of uinevere at having betrayed it, only increas- ig joy in the love of Lancelot. It is Lancelot mself who has the conflict, and in his charac- r lies the strength of the drama. It is evident that Hovey intended to create flesh-and-blood Arthur, to eliminate the sanc- otionious and retain the ideal ; but the task ■oved too difficult, and after opening the ader's eyes to the human weaknesses of the ing, thereby inflicting a shock, he returns to le other extreme, lifts him again into upper r, and leaves him abstract and unconvincing, ancelot, on the contrary, if too palpably human 22 The Younger American Poets at the start, grows into a more spiritual ideal, and when for the first time he meets Guinevere transfigured with maternal joy, he greets her with these exquisite words : Hovv great a mystery you seem to me I cannot tell. You seem to have become One with the tides and night and the unknown. My child . . . your child . . . whence come ? By What strange forge Wrought of ourselves and dreams and the great deep Into a life ? I feel as if I stood Where God had passed by, leaving all the place Aflame with him. And again he says, The strangeness is That I, who have not borne him, am aware, I, too, of intimacy with his soul. The dramas abound in quotable passages, nor are they lacking in those that make the judicious grieve. The work is unequal ; but as a whole it lives in the imagination, and remains in the memory, especially " The Marriage of Guene- vere," in that twilight of the mind where dwell all mystic shapes of hapless lovers. The last of the dramatic cycle, " The Masque of Taliesin," is regarded by most of Mr. Hovey's critics as the high-water mark of his verse, and it has certainly some of the purest song of his Richard Hovey 23 pen, and profoundest in thought and concep- tion ; but it has also passages of unresolved metaphysics, whose place, unless the poet had the patience to shape them to a finer issue, should be in a Greek philosophy. The Masque turns upon the quest of the Graal by Percival, and is in three scenes, or movements, set in the forest of Broceliande, Helicon, and the Chapel of the Graal. It intro- duces the Muses, Merlin, Apollo, Nimue, King Evelac, guardian of the Graal, and lesser mortals and deities, but chief in interest, Taliesin, a bard, through whom are spoken the finest pas- sages of the play. As the work is cast in the form of a Masque, to obviate the need of adher- ing to a strict dramatic structure, one may dis- pense with a summary of its slight plot, and look, instead, at the verse. The passages spoken by Apollo to Taliesin, in other words, Inspiration defining itself to the poet, are full of glowing thought : Greaten thyself to the end, I am he for whose breath thou art greatened ■ Perfect thy speech to a god's, I am he for whom speech is made perfect ; And my voice in the hush of thy heart is the voice of the tides of the worlds. Thou shalt know it is I when I speak, as the foot knows the rock that it treads on, 24 The Younger American Poets As the sea knows the moon, as the sap knows the place of the sun in the heavens, As the cloud knows the cloud it must meet and embrace with caresses of lightning. When thou hearest my voice, thou art one with the hurl of the stars through the void. One with the shout of the sea and the stampede of droves of the wind. One with the coursers of Time and the grip of God's hand on their harness ; And the powers of the night and the grave shall avail not to stand in thy path. Genius and its invincible assurance could scarcely be defined better than in this passage. The Masque contains a litany spoken by King Evelac, and responded to by the chor- isters at the Chapel o£ Graal, which is one of its achievements, in point of beauty, though too long to quote, and lyrics of great delicacy are scattered throughout the virork; but in the more spiritual passages, spoken chiefly by Taliesin, one gets the finer quality of the verse, as in this noble query addressed to Uriel, the angel who holds the flaming sword before the Graal : Thou who beholdest God continually. Doth not his light shine even on the blind Who feel the flood they lack the sense to see? The lark that seeks him in the summer sky Finds there the great blue mirror of his soul ; Richard Hovey 25 Winged with the dumb need of he knows not what, He finds the mute speech of he knows not whom. Is not the wide air, after the cocoon. As much God as the moth-soul can receive? Doth not God give the child within the womb Some guess to set him groping for the world. Some blurred reflection answering his desire? We, shut in this blue womb of doming sky, Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God, And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense, Strive for a sign of what it is to see. Had one space to follow Mr. Hovey's phi- losophy in the more metaphysical passages, though fashioned less artistically, the individ- uaHty of his thought in its subtler and more speculative phases would be revealed, but to trace it adequately one must needs have the volume before him, rather than such extracts as may be given in a brief study. I must there- fore, in taking leave of his work, content myself with citing the exultant lines with which the volume closes, the splendid death-song lifting one on the wave of its ecstatic feeling: Unaware as the air of the light that fills full all its girth. Yet crowds not an atom of air from its place to make way ; Growing from splendor to splendor, from birth to birth, As day to the rose of dawn from the earlier gray ; As day from the sunrise gold to the luminous mirth Of morning, and brighter and brighter, till noon shall be ; 26 The Younger American Poets Intense as the cling of the sun to the lips of the earth, And cool as the call of a wind on the still of the sea, Joy, joy, joy in the height and the deep ; Joy like the joy of a leaf that unfolds to the sun ; Joy like the joy of a child in the borders of sleep ; Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one. Stir in the dark of the stars unborn that desire Only the thrill of a wild, dumb force set free, Yearn of the burning heart of the world on fire For life and birth and battle and wind and sea, Groping of Ufe after love till the spirit aspire. Into Divinity ever transmuting the clod, Higher and higher and higher and higher and higher Out of the Nothingness world without end into God. Man from the blindness attaining the succor of sight, God from his glory descends to the shape we can see ; Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o'er forest and sea ; Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core ! Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height ! Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore ! II LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Mar- lowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding. Her first collection is aptly named, A Handful of Lavender, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffo- diled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet's solving. She is a Southern woman,? which may furnish some clew to ^he repose of herj ^gpk. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with 28 The Younger American Poets one. She has been content to pubUsh three books of verse — ahhough the first is now in- corporated with the second — in the interval in which our Northern poets would have pro- duced a half-dozen ; nor does she much con- cern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charmed winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song's wings are guided, as the carrier-doves', to their appointed goal. There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese's poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic's gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most litera- ture of to-day is produced — but, alas, the few that employ it ! " Open the throttle and let it drive ! " is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it! — work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards. Lizette Woodworth Reese 29 Miss Reese's verse shows constant affinity/ with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. Itf has the s inging mood, but n ot the buo,vant one, bemg temper ed by~something delicate and remote. The unKeard rngtodies "Within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit ''ditties of no tone." Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman's mystical words : " All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments," applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggest ion, such as Miss Reese's. Yesterday's parted'grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese 's poems, by a hne or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession./ of that vanishi ng beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain, — her lines " To A White Lilac " : I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour, Long-gone but unforgot ; Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower That one thing I have not. 30 The Younger American Poets Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather, O phantom up the lane ; For back may come that spent and lovely weather, And I be glad again ! To analyze this, would be to pluck the mysti- cal white feather that a poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of " some lone, delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot ; " but the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the disillusioned day with a mood the same — yet not the same. Miss Reese has put it in two lines in her " Song of the Lavender Woman " : Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these? So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease. In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese's susceptibility to impression from the most intangijble sources : Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone, The box dripped in the air ; Its odor through my house was blown Into the chamber there. Lizette Wood worth Reese 31 Remote and yet distinct the scent, The sole thing of the kind, As though one spoke a word half meant That left a sting behind. I knew not Grief would go from me And naught of it be plain. Except how keen the box can be After a fall of rain. Miss Reese's art is its ...apparent lack of a rt, of con scious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction between sim- plesse and simplicite ? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elim- ination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words* she employs are thrice distilled and clarified,] until they become the essence of lucidity, and I this essence in turn is crystallized into form in | her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich- dyed words of passion, they are rather the whi,te;,. delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well. In reading certain poems of Miss Reese's, 52 The Younger American Poets such as " Trust," or her lines " Writ In A Book Of EHzabethan Verse," the clarity of the lan- guage recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow's in which she exclaims : " Oh that I might wash my words in light ! " The im- pression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reese has washed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty! TakeTfor il- lustration, the much-quoted lines " Love Came Back At Fall O' Dew," and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words : Love came back at fall o' dew, Playing his old part ; But I had a word or two, That would break his heart. " He who comes at candlelight, That should come before, Must betake him to the night From a barrdd door." This the word that made us part In the fall o' dew ; This the word that brake his heart — Yet it brake mine, too ! A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose t The lines Lizette Woodworth Reese 33 called " Trust," illustrate with equal minute- ness the gift of putting into the simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they illustrate the point in question, that of a bsolut e sim- plicity without insipidity. This is not, how- ever, to be taken as advice to all poets to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve such an effect through it, when she chooses, as " Love Came Back At Fall O' Dew," does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any case. ^Song_js impulse,, not effort, and back_..Qf.Jt-is^ temperament. Miss Reese is a poet-sz'n^er; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, fitness, and individuahty of her words. Very few modern lyrics possess the sing- ^ ing quality. The term " lyric verse," as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year ; composers search almost vainly 3 34 The Younger American Poets through modern volumes of verse for lyrics that comhine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and graceTindispensable to~song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence ; something rare and strange must issue from the poet's lips, something inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity and truth, and a re- vealer of them in his art, though he reveal ofttimes but to conceal. Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market- women, the com.mon ear was trained to grace and melody ; but how many of the country folk of to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could grasp them ? Who is writing the lays of the people.? One can only answer that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a song as " Gather ye, rose- Lizette Woodworth Reese 35 buds while ye may," or " Come live with me and be my love," and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the rosary of Art. The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree, doubtless, as to the in- creasing separation between poetry and song, the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes ; but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting theme and melody to the common ear — how many modern poets would agree upon that.? There is a middle ground, however; the re- action against the highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal appeal. And how does this pertain to Miss Reese ? It pertains in that her id eal is the very return to_gk3J-a.J.YmP-atMic„jajag..,oL^ have spoken. She would recapture tha- -blitheness of Herrick . the valor of Lovelace, would lighten song's wings of their heaviness and shift Care and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While t he remin iscent mood is prevalent in her work, it is not melancKoly, but" has rather the iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs, although " with finger at his lip, bidding adieu." Miss Reese's strife is toward 36 The Younger American Poets --^-a^-iialiaflLLcJiefir, whose passing she deplores in the poem called " Laughter " : Spirit of the gust and dew, Herrick had the last of you ! Empty are the morning hUls. Herrick, he whose hearty airs Still are heard in our dull squares ; Herrick of the daffodils ! Now the pulpit and the mart Make an unquiet thing of Art, For we trade or else we preach ; Even the crocus, 'stead of song, Serves for text the April long ; Thus we set it out of reach. There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus' lesson, or many another lesson, without a hint of teach- ing it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope's didactic, sententious lines are gone ; but Keats, who never pointed a moral in his Hfe, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to beauty for its own sake ; she gives one the flower, and he may extract the nectar for him- self. The nectar is always there for one's dis- tilling into the truth which is the essence of Lizette Woodworth Reese 3; things. She does not herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion. Having this creed of song, Miss Reese's themes are not widely 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, aquaintness, 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 illus- trative 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, leav- ing only the dust of its wing in one's hand! Miss Reese's poems are not to be anal yzed, .t hey are to be felt ; that, too, is the creed of her song. 38 The Younger American Poets 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 Jhe-h-avrthoKi-feir, We pluck the, thornj_blQQm.'^ '■- - -~ 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 fre- Lizette Woodworth Reese 39 quently absent from the first. That part of A Handful of Lavejtder 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 collec- tion, 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 adapt- ing 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 unim- peachable 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 ; 40 The Younger American Poets 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 tendenc of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tend ency laudable enough if one be a natural son neteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceivee and well-executed sonnets, but few that an unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics That she recognizes wherein her surest powe: lies is obvious from the fact that, whereas A Handful of Lavender contains some thirty-tw( sonnets, A Quiet Road contains but twelve Those of nature predominated in the former nature for its own sake ; but in the latter then is far less accent upon nature and more upor life. They show in technique, also, Miss Reese'i firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. Therf are certain sonnets in A Handful of Lavendey such as " A Song of Separation," and " Renun ciation," warmer in feeling than the later onei Lizette Woodworth Reese 41 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, )'ea, 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 42 The Younger American Poets Elizabethan Verse," her own characteristics under those of the earUer singers, sounded the deHcate 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 ! Lizette Woodworth Reese 43 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 barred is the door. The memory of this will come aad 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 uni- formly 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 44 The Younger American Poets 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. Lizette Woodworth Reese 45 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 fantas- tic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns into poetry the near-by thing that many over- look — this is Miss Reese's gift. You shall not go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruc- tion 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. Ill BLISS CARMAN THE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian singer, among a group of poets of the States, needs no explanation ; so iden- tified 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 pro- duced 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 Pre, 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 indefin- able 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. Bliss Carman 47 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 counter- balancing 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 spon- taneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their magic when others of like import, but different 48 The Younger American Poets phrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illus- tration, 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 j 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. 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 blurr- Bliss Carman 49 ing 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 vol- umes 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 represen- tative, 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 bom 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. 4 so The Younger American Poets 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 '11 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 ; Bliss Carman 51 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. 52 The Younger American Poets 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 put- ting 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. Car- man'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 fre- Bliss Carman 53 quently 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-a-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 54 The Younger American Poets 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. Car- man's readers, because of its recondite char- acter. They regard it as something esoteric that only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysti- cism is half whimsical, and requires no super- consciousness 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 trib- ute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny : Bliss Carman 55 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 dis- regarding the tragic, the sombre, the inexpli- cable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. Pain has more than touched him ; it has become incorporate in him. Low Tide on Grand Pre has its poignant note; Ballads of Lost Haven, its undertone ; Behind the Arras, its overtone, its sublimation. 56 The Younger American Poets 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 dic- tion, 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 expres- Bliss Carman 57 sion, as "A weird is in their song," using the ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaning- less 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 rol- licking 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 Mor- rows;" 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 in- spiration. Within the confines of two stanzas Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of nature-verse could never say. He does not 58 The Younger American Poets analyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip through his fingers ; under his touch it subtil- izes 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 ? Bliss Carman 59 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 ! The temper of the Vagabondia books is thoroughly wholesome ; courage and cheer lominate them ; in short, they are good to