The Poet's Poet Part 11

It is a question whether poets would expect us to condole with them or to felicitate them upon the short duration of their subjection to mortality. Even when the poet speaks of his early death solely with regard to its effect upon his earthly reputation, his att.i.tude is not wholly clear. Much elegiac verse expresses such stereotyped sorrow for a departed bard that it is not significant. In other cases, one seems to overhear the gasp of relief from a patron whom time can never force to retract his superlative claims for his protege's promise.

More significant is a different note which is sometimes heard. In Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, it is ostensibly ironic. The critic muses,

He died--'twas shrewd: And came with all his youth and unblown hopes On the world's heart, and touched it into tears.

In _Sordello_, likewise, it is the unappreciative critic who expresses this sort of pleasure in Eglamor's death. But this feeling has also been expressed with all seriousness, as in Stephen Phillip's _Keats_:

I have seen more glory in sunrise Than in the deepening of azure noon,

or in Francis Thompson's _The Cloud's Swan Song_:

I thought of Keats, that died in perfect time, In predecease of his just-sickening song, Of him that set, wrapped in his radiant rhyme, Sunlike in sea. Life longer had been life too long.

Obviously we are in the wake of the Rousseau theory, acclimatized in English poetry by Wordsworth's youth "who daily farther from the east must travel." A long array of poets testifies to the doctrine that a poet's first days are his best. [Footnote: See S. T. Coleridge, _Youth and Age_; J. G. Percival, _Poetry_; William Cullen Bryant, _I Cannot Forget with What Fervid Devotion_; Bayard Taylor, _The Return of the G.o.ddess_; Richard Watson Gilder, _To a Young Poet_, _The Poet's Secret_; George Henry Boker, _To Bayard Taylor_; Martin Farquhar Tupper, _To a Young Poet_; William E. Henley, _Something Is Dead_; Francis Thompson, _From the Night of Foreboding_; Thomas Hardy, _In the Seventies_; Lewis Morris, _On a Young Poet_; Richard Le Gallienne, _A Face in a Book_; Richard Middleton, _The Faithful Poet, The Boy Poet_; Don Marquis, _The Singer_ (1915); John Hall Wheelock, _The Man to his Dead Poet_ (1919); Cecil Roberts, _The Youth of Beauty_ (1915); J. Thorne Smith, jr., _The Lost Singer_ (1920); Edna St. Vincent Millay, _To a Poet that Died Young_.] _Optima dies_ ... _prima fugit_; the note echoes and reechoes through English poetry. Hear it in Arnold's _Progress of Poetry_:

Youth rambles on life's arid mount, And strikes the rock and finds the vein, And brings the water from the fount.

The fount which shall not flow again.

The man mature with labor chops For the bright stream a channel grand, And sees not that the sacred drops Ran off and vanished out of hand.

And then the old man totters nigh And feebly rakes among the stones; The mount is mute, the channel dry, And down he lays his weary bones.

But the strangle hold of complimentary verse upon English poetry, if nothing else, would prevent this view being unanimously expressed there.

For in the Victorian period, poets who began their literary careers by prophesying their early decease lived on and on. They themselves might bewail the loss of their gift in old age--in fact, it was usual for them to do so [Footnote: See Scott, _Farewell to the Muse_; Landor, _Dull is my Verse_; J. G. Percival, _Invocation_; Matthew Arnold, _Growing Old_; Longfellow, _My Books_; O. W. Holmes, _The Silent Melody_; C. W.

Stoddard, _The Minstrel's Harp_; P. H. Hayne, _The Broken Chords_; J. C.

MacNiel, _A Prayer_; Harvey Hubbard, _The Old Minstrel_.]--but it would never do for their disciples to concur in the sentiment. Consequently we have a flood of complimentary verses, a.s.suring the great poets of their unaltered charm.[Footnote: See Swinburne, _Age and Song, The Centenary of Landor, Statue of Victor Hugo_; O. W. Holmes, _Whittier's Eightieth Birthday, Bryant's Seventieth Birthday_; E. E. Stedman, _Ad Vatem_; P.

H. Hayne, _To Longfellow_; Richard Gilder, _Jocoseria_; M. F. Tupper, _To the Poet of Memory_; Edmund Gosse, _To Lord Tennyson on his Eightieth Birthday_; Alfred Noyes, _Ode for the Seventieth Birthday of Swinburne_; Alfred Austin, _The Poet's Eightieth Birthday_; Lucy Larcom, _J. G. Whittier_; Mary Clemmer, _To Whittier_; Percy Mackaye, _Browning to Ben Ezra_.] And of course it is all worth very little as indicating the writer's att.i.tude toward old age. Yet the fact that Landor was still singing as he "tottered on into his ninth decade,"--that Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Whittier, Holme's, and Whitman continued to feel the stir of creation when their hair was h.o.a.ry, may have had a genuine influence on younger writers.

Greater significance attaches to the fact that some of the self-revealing verse lamenting the decay of inspiration in old age is equivocal, as Landor's

Dull is my verse: not even thou Who movest many cares away From this lone breast and weary brow Canst make, as once, its fountains play; No, nor those gentle words that now Support my heart to hear thee say, The bird upon the lonely bough Sings sweetest at the close of day.

It is, of course, even more meaningful when the aged poet, disregarding convention, frankly a.s.serts the desirability of long life for his race.

Browning, despite the sadness of the poet's age recorded in _Cleon_ and the _Prologue to Aslando_, should doubtless be remembered for his belief in

The last of life for which the first was made,

as applied to poets as well as to other men. In America old age found its most enthusiastic advocate in Walt Whitman, who in lines _To Get the Final Lilt of Songs_ indicated undiminished confidence in himself at eighty. Bayard Taylor, [Footnote: See _My Prologue_.] too, and Edward Dowden, [Footnote: See _The Mage_.] were not dismayed by their longevity.

But we are most concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: _The Bard_.] and that Scott's minstrels should be old. Campbell, too, follows the Scotch tradition.

[Footnote: See _Lochiel's Warning_.] It is the prophetic power of these fictional poets, no doubt, that makes age seem essential to them.

The poet in Campbell's poem explains,

'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore.

Outside of Scotch poetry one finds, occasionally, a similar faith in the old poet. Mrs. Browning's observation tells her that maturity alone can express itself with youthful freshness. Aurora declares,

I count it strange and hard to understand That nearly all young poets should write old.

... It may be perhaps Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance to attain to clairvoyance, and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils And works it turbid. Or perhaps again In order to discover the Muse Sphinx The melancholy desert must sweep around Behind you as before.

Aurora feels, indeed, that the poet's gift is not proved till age. She sighs, remembering her own youth,

Alas, near all the birds Will sing at dawn,--and yet we do not take The chaffering swallow for the holy lark.

Coinciding with this feeling is Rossetti's sentiment: ... Many men are poets in their youth, But for one sweet-strung soul the wires prolong Even through all age the indomitable song.

[Footnote: _Genius in Beauty_.]

Alice Meynell, [Footnote: See _To any Poet_.] too, and Richard Watson Gilder [Footnote: See _Life is a Bell_.] feel that increasing power of song comes with age.

It is doubtless natural that the pa.s.sionate romantic poets insisted upon the poet's youth, while the thoughtful Victorians often thought of himas old. For one is born with nerves, and it does not take long for them to wear out; on the other hand a great deal of experience is required before one can even begin to think significantly. Accordingly one is not surprised, in the turbulent times of Elizabeth, to find Shakespeare, at thirty, a.s.serting,

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

and conversely it seems fitting that a _De Senectute_ should come from an Augustan period. As for the att.i.tude toward age of our own day,--the detestation of age expressed by Alan Seeger [Footnote: See _There Was a Youth Around Whose Early Way_.] and Rupert Brooke, [Footnote: See _The Funeral of Youth: Threnody_.]--the complaint of Francis Ledwidge, at twenty-six, that years are robbing him of his inspiration, [Footnote: See _Growing Old, Youth_.]--that, to their future readers, will only mean that they lived in days of much feeling and action, and that they died young. [Footnote: One of the war poets, Joyce Kilmer, was already changing his att.i.tude at thirty. Compare his juvenile verse, "It is not good for poets to grow old," with the later poem, _Old Poets_.] As the world subsides, after its cataclysm, into contemplative revery, it is inevitable that poets will, for a time, once more conceive as their ideal, not a singer aflame with youth and pa.s.sion, but a poet of rich experience and profound reflection,

White-bearded and with eyes that look afar From their still region of perpetual snow, Beyond the little smokes and stirs of men.

[Footnote: James Russell Lowell, _Thorwald's Lay_.]

CHAPTER III.

THE POET AS LOVER

Do the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ leave anything to be said on the relations.h.i.+p of love and poetry? In the last a.n.a.lysis, probably not. The poet, however, is not one to keep silence because of a dearth of new philosophical conceptions. As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his grat.i.tude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that love has received many encomiums before.

It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the part of the uninitiated.

Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle,

Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which a.s.sociates all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion, which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of cla.s.sic Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of the present time says much for himself.

In the first place, our non-lover may a.s.sure us, the nature of love is such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, -- 599-601; and _Phaedrus_, -- 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand.

Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former, but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before he has so covered the object of his affection with the leaf.a.ge of his fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all. The non-lover may remind us that even so ardent an advocate of love as Mrs.

Browning voices this danger, confessing, in _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, [Footnote: Sonnet XXIX.]

My thoughts do twine and bud About thee, as wild vines about a tree Put out broad leaves, and soon there's nought to see Except the straggling green that hides the wood.

The non-lover may also recall to our minds the notorious egotism and self-sufficiency of the poet, which seem incompatible with the humility and insatiable yearning of the lover. He exults in the declaration of Keats,

My solitude is sublime,--for, instead of what I have described (_i.e._, domestic bliss) there is sublimity to welcome me home; the roaring of the wind is my wife; and the stars through the windowpanes are my children; the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things, I have, stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.

[Footnote: Letter to George Keats, October 31, 1818.]

Borne aloft by his admiration for this pa.s.sage, the non-lover may himself essay to be sublime. He may picture to us the frozen heights on which genius resides, where the air is too rare for earthly affection.

He may declare that Keats' Grecian Urn is a symbol of all art, which must be

All breathing human pa.s.sion far above.