The Writings of John Burroughs Part 7

These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down, touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the clover and the b.u.t.tercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--

"The daisies and the b.u.t.tercups Gild all the lawn."

I smile as I note that the woodp.e.c.k.e.r proves a refractory bird to Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--

Emerson rhymes it with bear, Lowell rhymes it with hear, One makes it woodpeckair, The other, woodpeckear.

But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it.

Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodp.e.c.k.e.rs is the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird- song is capable of.

Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight.

True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know, the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow, the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem ("The Poet's Song"):--

"The wild hawk stood, with the down on his beak, And stared, with his foot on the prey."

It takes a sure eye, too, to see

"The landscape winking thro' the heat"--

or to gather this image:--

"He has a solid base of temperament; But as the water-lily starts and slides Upon the level in little puffs of wind, Though anchor'd to the bottom, such is he;"

or this:--

"Arms on which the standing muscle sloped, As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, Running too vehemently to break upon it,"--

and many other gems that abound in his poems. He does not cut and cover in a single line, so far as I have observed. Great caution and exact knowledge underlie his most rapid and daring flights. A lady told me that she was once walking with him in the fields, when they came to a spring that bubbled up through s.h.i.+fting sands in a very pretty manner, and Tennyson, in order to see exactly how the spring behaved, got down on his hands and knees and peered a long time into the water. The incident is worth repeating as showing how intently a great poet studies nature.

Walt Whitman says he has been trying for years to find a word that would express or suggest that evening call of the robin. How absorbingly this poet must have studied the moonlight to hit upon this descriptive phrase:--

"The vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged with blue;"

how long have looked upon the carpenter at his bench to have made this poem:--

"The tongue of his fore-plane whistles its wild ascending lisp;"

or how lovingly listened to the nocturne of the mockingbird to have turned it into words in "A Word out of the Sea "! Indeed, no poet has studied American nature more closely than Whitman has, or is more cautious in his uses of it. How easy are his descriptions!--

"Behold the daybreak!

The little light fades the immense and diaphanous shadows!"

"The comet that came unannounced Out of the north, flaring in heaven."

"The fan-shaped explosion."

"The slender and jagged threads of lightning, as sudden and fast amid the din they chased each other across the sky."

"Where the heifers browse--where geese nip their food with short jerks; Where sundown shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie; Where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near; Where the hummingbird s.h.i.+mmers-- where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding; Where the laughing-gull scoots by the sh.o.r.e when she laughs her near human laugh; Where band-neck'd partridges roost in a ring on the ground with their heads out."

Whitman is less local than the New England poets, and faces more to the West. But he makes himself at home everywhere, and puts in characteristic scenes and incidents, generally compressed into a single line, from all trades and doings and occupations, North, East, South, West, and identifies himself with man in all straits and conditions on the continent. Like the old poets, he does not dwell upon nature, except occasionally through the vistas opened up by the great sciences, as astronomy and geology, but upon life and movement and personality, and puts in a shred of natural history here and there,--the "twittering redstart," the spotted hawk swooping by, the oscillating sea-gulls, the yellow-crowned heron, the razor-billed auk, the lone wood duck, the migrating geese, the sharp-hoofed moose, the mockingbird "the thrush, the hermit,"

etc.,--to help locate and define his position. Everywhere in nature Whitman finds human relations, human responsions. In entire consistence with botany, geology, science, or what not, he endues his very seas and woods with pa.s.sion, more than the old hamadryads or tritons. His fields, his rocks, his trees, are not dead material, but living companions. This is doubtless one reason why Addington Symonds, the young h.e.l.lenic scholar of England, finds him more thoroughly Greek than any other man of modern times.

Our natural history, and indeed all phases of life in this country, is rich in materials for the poet that have yet hardly been touched. Many of our most familiar birds, which are inseparably a.s.sociated with one's walks and recreations in the open air, and with the changes of the seasons, are yet awaiting their poet,--as the high-hole, with his golden-shafted quills and loud continued spring call; the meadowlark, with her crescent-marked breast and long-drawn, piercing, yet tender April and May summons forming, with that of the high-hole, one of the three or four most characteristic field sounds of our spring; the happy goldfinch, circling round and round in midsummer with that peculiar undulating flight and calling PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, PER-CHICK'-O-PEE, at each opening and shutting of the wings, or later leading her plaintive brood among the thistle-heads by the roadside; the little indigo- bird, facing the torrid sun of August and singing through all the livelong summer day; the contented musical soliloquy of the vireo, like the whistle of a boy at his work, heard through all our woods from May to September:--

"Pretty green worm, where are you?

Dusky-winged moth, how fare you, When wind and rain are in the tree?

Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee, Shadow and sun one are to me.

Mosquito and gnat, beware you, Saucy chipmunk, how dare you Climb to my nest in the maple-tree, And dig up the corn At noon and at morn?

Cheeryo, cheerebly, chee."

Or the phbe-bird, with her sweet April call and mossy nest under the bridge or woodshed, or under the shelving rocks; or the brown thrasher--mocking thrush--calling half furtively, half archly from the treetop back in the bushy pastures: "Croquet, croquet, hit it, hit it, come to me, come to me, tight it, tight it, you're out, you're out," with many musical interludes; or the chewink, rustling the leaves and peering under the bushes at you; or the pretty little oven-bird, walking round and round you in the woods, or suddenly soaring above the treetops, and uttering its wild lyrical strain; or, farther south, the whistling redbird, with his crest and military bearing,--these and many others should be full of suggestion and inspiration to our poets. It is only lately that the robin's song has been put into poetry. Nothing could be happier than this rendering of it by a nameless singer in "A Masque of Poets:"--

"When the willows gleam along the brooks, And the gra.s.s grows green in sunny nooks, In the suns.h.i.+ne and the rain I hear the robin in the lane Singing, 'Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.'

"But the snow is still Along the walls and on the hill.

The days are cold, the nights forlorn, For one is here and one is gone.

'Tut, tut. Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.'

"When spring hopes seem to wane, I hear the joyful strain-- A song at night, a song at morn, A lesson deep to me is borne, Hearing, 'Cheerily, Cheer up, cheer up; Cheerily, cheerily, Cheer up.' "

The poetic interpretation of nature, which has come to be a convenient phrase, and about which the Oxford professor of poetry has written a book, is, of course, a myth, or is to be read the other way. It is the soul the poet interprets, not nature. There is nothing in nature but what the beholder supplies. Does the sculptor interpret the marble or his own ideal? Is the music in the instrument, or in the soul of the performer? Nature is a dead clod until you have breathed upon it with your genius. You commune with your own soul, not with woods or waters; they furnish the conditions, and are what you make them. Did Sh.e.l.ley interpret the song of the skylark, or Keats that of the nightingale? They interpreted their own wild, yearning hearts. The trick of the poet is always to idealize nature,--to see it subjectively. You cannot find what the poets find in the woods until you take the poet's heart to the woods. He sees nature through a colored gla.s.s, sees it truthfully, but with an indescribable charm added, the aureole of the spirit. A tree, a cloud, a bird, a sunset, have no hidden meaning that the art of the poet is to unlock for us. Every poet shall interpret them differently, and interpret them rightly, because the soul is infinite. Milton's nightingale is not Coleridge's; Burns's daisy is not Wordsworth's; Emerson's b.u.mblebee is not Lowell's; nor does Turner see in nature what Tintoretto does, nor Veronese what Correggio does. Nature is all things to all men. "We carry within us," says Sir Thomas Browne, "the wonders we find without." The same idea is daintily expressed in these tripping verses of Bryant's:--

"Yet these sweet sounds of the early season And these fair sights of its early days, Are only sweet when we fondly listen, And only fair when we fondly gaze.

"There is no glory in star or blossom, Till looked upon by a loving eye; There is no fragrance in April breezes, Till breathed with joy as they wander by;"

and in these lines of Lowell:--

"What we call Nature, all outside ourselves, Is but our own conceit of what we see, Our own reaction upon what we feel."

"I find my own complexion everywhere."

Before either, Coleridge had said:--

"We receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live; Ours is the wedding-garment, ours the shroud;"

and Wordsworth had spoken of

"The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet's dream."

That light that never was on sea or land is what the poet gives us, and is what we mean by the poetic interpretation of nature. The Oxford professor struggles against this view. "It is not true," he says, "that nature is a blank, or an unintelligible scroll with no meaning of its own but that which we put into it from the light of our own transient feelings." Not a blank, certainly, to the scientist, but full of definite meanings and laws, and a storehouse of powers and economies; but to the poet the meaning is what he pleases to make it, what it provokes in his own soul. To the man of science it is thus and so, and not otherwise; but the poet touches and goes, and uses nature as a garment which he puts off and on.

Hence the scientific reading or interpretation of nature is the only real one. Says the SOOTHSAYER in "Antony and Cleopatra:"--

'In Nature's infinite book of secrecy a little do I read."

This is science bowed and reverent, and speaking through a great poet. The poet himself does not so much read in nature's book-- though he does this, too--as write his own thoughts there. Nature reads him, she is the page and he the type, and she takes the impression he gives. Of course the poet uses the truths of nature also, and he establishes his right to them by bringing them home to us with a new and peculiar force,--a quickening or kindling force.

What science gives is melted in the fervent heat of the poet's pa.s.sion, and comes back to us supplemented by his quality and genius. He gives more than he takes, always.