Text: Helen Lucile Watts, “Early Poems Which Were Not Reprinted in His Books (1841-1848),” Poe's The Life and Writings of Henry Beck Hirst of Philadelphia Story, Masters Thesis, 1925

[page 44:]

The very first poem by Henry Beck Hirst of which we have any knowledge is a sonnet addressed to “Llansdowne, the country seat of the late Sir William Bingham, Schuylkill River near Peter's Island”, and is dated by Hirst “Philadelphia, July 12th, 1841”. Since it is preserved only in manuscript(1) we quote it here in full:

The present suburb of Philadelphia, Llansdowne, was probably named for this country seat.

The sonnet is written in the three quatrains and couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet, but uses an enclosed rhyme in each quatrain, instead of Shakespeare's alternating rhyme. This rhyme-scheme (abba, cddc, effe, gg) had been used by Keats [page 45:] once, and approached in two others of his sonnets.(3)

“The social blaze”, if it was original with Hirst, is not a poor expression; but artificialities like “erst” and “Fortune's hand caressed “ and “hoping Manhood and transcendent Maid”, and so trite a phrase as “crumbling into dust” do not augur well for the future of this young poet.

Moreover, the seventh line reminds us of Keats's inestimably superior

and the eighth line of Shelley's

These lines are the beginnings of a long series of more or less obvious imitations or echoes of great poets, which continues to the last of Hirst's writings. It would be impossible, within the scope of this essay, to trace and note them all, and therefore only the most obvious ones will be mentioned.

This sonnet is of no other remarkable significance, except that it shows us that Hirst could write in this form, His next use of it, in the “Sonnets to the Poets”, is slightly more noteworthy, and his first volume includes many sonnets.

We now turn to a consideration of poems published by Hirst in magazines before the publication of his first collection of verse in 1845, and those writings published [page 46:] from 1845 through 1848 which he evidently did not consider worthy of inclusion in his second collection, The Penance of Roland, in 1849.

The number of these poems, as far as we have found them, is not great. The poems published before the appearance of his volume, The Coming of the Mammoth, and not included in it are:

Why Hirst did not include these in his volume is a mystery. It could scarcely have been because he considered them of inferior merit to the poems which were chosen for the volume — because, with one exception, they are not inferior to many of the poems which were included. Moreover, the long narrative poem with which his volume opened is of much less worth than most of these poems which he did not reprint. Perhaps Hirst was not a good critic of his own work. The small amount of revision which he did would point to this conclusion.

Nevertheless, even these early and otherwise insignificant pieces of verse do show some of the tendencies which [page 47:] are to be observed in Hirst's later writing, and are therefore worth noting here. We shall take them in the chronological order of their publication.

The “Stanzas — To My Own One!” which made their appearance under his own name in the Ladies1 Companion for May, 1842, may quite probably have been some of the impromptu verses dashed off in admiration of a young woman of whom he was temporarily enamoured.(5) His use of contracted and poetic terms (such as “deeming”, “store”, and “fore”) and very ordinary rhymes supports this idea. The poem has five stanzas of six iambic pentameter lines each, rhymed ababab.

The ideas are few — which characteristic holds true of almost all of his poetry. In this poem, he says, referring to himself., that he

The next stanza expresses his exaggerated sense of having been greatly injured by the world, which is to be found in many of his later poems. This third stanza is:

The fourth stanza returns to the idea of the first. In the fifth and last stanza there is a mixed metaphor so inexcusable that we can imagine what fun Poe must have made or it if he saw it. The stanza reads: [page 48:]

It was unpardonable carelessness to write such a metaphor in the first place, not to mention having allowed it to be printed.

The idea of winning “a deathless name” of course belongs to the high confidence of young love, but savors of Hirst's erotism as well.

“To a Favorite Oak”, printed in the same magazine in June, is a much longer poem, containing twelve stanzas ‘which are again of six lines each, but they are iambic tetrameter and are rhymed ababcc. The metre, as in most of Hirst's verse, is quite regular. In the first stanza and again in the fifth we have the rhyme of “past” with “blast” which is a favorite one with him. In the fifth stanza he attempts to rhyme “boughs” with “rose”, and in the sixth here is a rhyme of “gem” with “diadem”, which he had already used in the first stanza of “To My Own One.” Most of the expressions in this poem are trite.

The poem dwells especially on the age of this oak, and the poet muses on the changes the tree has witnessed (three stanzas open with the words, “Change thou hast seen”) through the varied seasons of the year, and the history of the country. In a note to the tenth stanza he acknowledges his indebtedness for the expression “red brick forests” to some lines from Dr. English's poem, “Sea-Side”. He concludes the poem by saying [page 49:] that the tree becomes only lovelier through the years,

This poem he dates “Philadelphia, 1840”. If this is correct, it is, with the probable exception of “The Coming of the Mammoth” the earliest of his poems which we have, and it is surely an amateur piece of verse.

The next poem, “Sophie”, is a slight piece of four stanzas in a still different form, a five-line stanza. The first one reads:

It was more than coincidence, certainly, which caused the resemblance between this stanza and the famous one of Poe's which it immediately calls to mind:

The stanza form is surely Poe's, since his poem was published in 1831, and again in 1841, and by the latter date Hirst and Poe were closely associated. Here Hirst has taken the form of the poem, the idea of addressing it to a woman., and a very similar wording in the first two lines. His poem has four stanzas as compared to Poe's three, but of course Hirst does not even approach the intense beauty of Poe's lines.

The rhyme of “continually” with “free” is used by Poe in the second stanza of his poem “To F—”:

The “meek and modest pride” which he compares to ‘”wilding violets beside A silver spring” — together with his mention of “star rays” in the second stanza — calls to mind Wordsworth's well-known stanza:

The second stanza of Hirst's poem is:

Here is also a resemblance to two lines in Poe's “The Sleeper”: —

His next poem, “Egeria”, has only two stanzas, and therefore we quote it entire:

The idea of the second stanza is somewhat reminiscent of Poe's

“On desperate seas long wont to roam” [page 51:]

in the same poem, “To Helen”, from which Hirst took the metre for “Sophie”. And the first — two lines of the second stanza may well have been suggested to Hirst by the lines,

in Poe's “To F — “ (published in 1835). The “trance” idea may have come from

in Poe's “To One in Paradise”.

The nine-line stanza is an unusual form, especially as the third line in each stanza has no rhyme. Some stanzas in ‘’Tamerlane” are more nearly like these than anything else” that Poe had published up to this time — but his stanzas which resemble this have eight lines, or ten, or more, but never nine.

The ideas in the two stanzas of the poem contradict each other. In the first Egeria's countenance moves him to see “A future full of bliss”, while in the second he says that his bark “with broken sail and mast” is sweeping towards destruction.

The poem is worth nothing except as an experiment in versification, and because its title, if it was not the real name of some actual person, show that Hirst's mind was moving towards classical subjects.

In the last months of 1843, Hirst must have written more profusely, for the January magazines brought out a large number of poems by him, including the following ones which were not reprinted in his books: “Underneath Thy Lattice, Love”;(7) [page 52:] “Night”;(8) and four “Sonnets to the Poets”.(9)

The serenade, “Underneath Thy~Lattice, Love”, is noteworthy only because its four quatrains are, as far as we know, the only words which Hirst wrote to be set to music.

The poem “Night” was signed by the pen-name, Anna Maria Hirst, probably because another poem by him called “The Coming on of Night” was printed in the same number of thez same magazine. The former poem is signed, “Philadelphia, August, 1843”, thereby preceding the “Sonnets to the Poets” which are dated “Sept., 1845”.

In this poem “Night” Hirst again uses a six-line stanza, with the same rhyme-scheme which he had used in “To a Favorite Oak”, but with pentameter instead of tetrameter lines, so that it is still another form. There are six stanzas in all. There is little in this poem which seems to come directly from Poe, though

is probably an echo of

But this leaves the word “dimpled” original with Hirst. The ideas of the “seraph on an earthward flight” and of the “city of the dead” which he uses in the second stanza, are strongly reminiscent of Poe also, and his “audible stillness” may have [page 53:] been suggested by Poe's “sound of silence”.(11)

In his fourth stanza, are the line's:

in which we find, the tendency to compose a line of a series of nouns, which is very common in Hirst's later verse, and the “Titans” of which he so often writes.

The “Sonnets to the Poets”, because they are his first published sonnets, and more because of their subject matter, deserve especial attention. The first one is addressed to William Cullen Bryant, “Author of ‘The Ages’, ‘The Fountain’, ‘The etc.”: —

Here Hirst uses again the Shakespearean sonnet form with enclosed rhyme — but repeats the first rhyme in the second quatrain, making the rhyme-scheme abba, acca, deed, ff.

The most noticeable characteristic of the form of this sonnet is its use of alliteration in lines 2, 4,7, 8, 10, 12, and 13. With “seek the sylvan scene”, and “swell with rear of solemn surging seas” the “s” sound becomes too prominent for good poetic effect. [page 54:]

The rhymes are commonplace, and the sentence:

is weak. The last words of the poems redeem the final couplet a little. The rhyme of “trod” and “God” was used by Poe in the couplet at the end of his sonnet “Silence” (1840).

Hirst evidently made a great effort to give a picture of nature in this poem, because of Bryant's interest in nature, and we can give him credit for little beyond the effort. Hirst's treatment of flowers and fruits, of animals, and of streams, And of landscape in general is almost always vague and generalized. Only about birds, of which he had definite knowledge, and sometimes about trees, is he specific and definite enough to bring a distinct image to the reader's mind. So here we find a “streamlet flowing through a flowery vale”, and a mention of the “violets” which are one of the very few kinds of flowers which he ever names specifically. He had already mentioned them in “Sophie”. What he may have meant by “the green of golden grasses” is a little difficult to picture, and we fear he was merely straining for alliteration.

The fact that he wrote a sonnet to Bryant is significant when connected with his imitation later of Bryant's “To a Waterfowl”, and his adoption of an unusual stanza used by Bryant for his Endymion.

The second of the”Sonnets to the Poets” is addressed to “James Russell Lowell, Author of ‘A Year's Life’, ‘Rosaline’, etc.” It is in the same form as the sonnet to Bryant, and also uses alliteration to a large extent, as in lines 12 and. 13: — [page 55:]

There is no summary of the thought of the sonnet, or change, in the final couplet, so that the whole seems to lack point.

He addresses Lowell in the opening line as “King of a fairy realm”, and writes throughout on that theme. He says that Lowell has the

which is rather high praise, but it is improbable that Hirst was concerned as to whether it was justified or not.

The third sonnet, to “Robert Conrad, Esq.”, returns to the rhyme-scheme used in “Llansdowne”. It is extremely artificial, and we quote it as showing Hirst at his lowest ebb: —

We have mentioned Hirst's fondness for “Titans” already; and the “Titan-like” in the last line of this sonnet is one of a series of hyphenized adjectives with “like” which he coined. In the first four lines of the sonnet to Bryant he has ‘ silver-like”, “eagle-like”, and “moth-like”.

To John Greenleaf Whittier his fourth sonnet in this-.. series is indited, and he does well to call Whittier,

He mixes his figures with not too good effect when he writes:

The lines immediately following are truer, and are better poetry: —

Again the closing of the sonnet is weak. His last words are the scarcely original statement: “God is with the Right”

Seven months later, the same magazine published a fifth sonnet in this same series, to “Robert Morris of Philadelphia”.(12)

Here we have the first mention of the “soaring” tranquil moon and the “purple” sky, which are so prominent in Endymion. Greek legend also enters with the mention of Circe, who is an important character in the third book of Kearns's “Endymion”.

The “mime” in line 4 probably comes from Poe's “The Conqueror Worm”, published in Graham's for January, 1843; “olden” [page 57:] and “golden” are favorite words of Poe's; and the first line of the sonnet may have been suggested by the words, “gentlest of all gentle names”, in Poe's “Sonnet — To Zante”.

In February, 1844, the Ladies’ Companion published a poem called “Ligeia”, by Hirst.

The title of course immediately suggests Poe's story by that name, and the free form of the verse more than suggests Poe, and chiefly his poem, “Fairy-Land”. [page 58:]

There are also significant lines in Poe's poem, “Al Aaraaf”, especially

and

The idea of the voice,

surely comes’ also from Poe's “Al Aaraaf”. The light of moon and stars is usually cold for Poe, e.g., “the cold moon” in “Al Aaraaf” (II, 1. 151). The “lyre” may have come from Poe's “Isafrel [[Israfel]]”.

The three, opening lines of the second stanza are more in the tone of Shelley than of Poe.(13)

The idea of the shell beneath the sea gazing at the star may be original with Hirst, and is very poetic.

There were four poems of Hirst's published between the publications of his books, The Coming of the Mammoth, and The Penance of Roland, which did not appear in either volume, and will therefore be considered here.

The first of these is “A Requiem”, from the annual, Leaflets of Memory, for 1846. It is in eight-line stanzas of anapaestic tetrameters, fairly well managed, but too tripling a metre for a “requiem”. It mourns the loss of an [page 59:] indefinite young woman who died “in the light of her loveliness”.

Friendship's Offering, another annual, in its issue for 1847 included “Ellen Dale. A Ballad”, two stanzas in length, which has so little value of any sort that we shall not quote it.

Another contribution to this annual was a sonnet called “Love”, with the rather unusual rhyme-scheme, abba, acca, fourth rhyme in the final couplet detracts from its force as a conclusion. The sonnet opens with the statement that —

We have Miss Clarke's account of Hirst's readiness to fall in love(14) to confirm the truth of this in Hirst's life. He ends the sonnet by declaring that “the dotard, Time” “flies to the Stygian strand”, breaks his scythe and lets “fall his sand”, being sick “At sight of what foretells the PROMISED LAND”. Hirst was wise enough not to include this piece of verse in The Penance of Roland.

In the Union Magazine for July, 1848, (before Sartain had taken the magazine over) there is a “Song” by Hirst. It is in the same anapaestic tetrameter as his “Requiem”, but has six lines to the stanza here instead of eight, and only two stanzas. There is nothing at all remarkable about the poem to set it apart from the sentimental poems which were so common in the magazines of the period. The first two lines — [page 60:]

are perhaps the best.

The parallelism of the line,

is a mannerism which he may have ‘caught’ from Poe, or Poe from him — probably the former.

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