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BRYANT.(1)
Poems by William Cullen Bryant. Fourth Edition. New York: Harper and Brothers.(2)
Mr. Bryant's poetical reputation, both at home and abroad, is greater, we presume, than that of any other American. British critics have awarded him high praise; and here, the public press have been unanimous in approbation.(3) We can call to mind no dissenting voice. Yet the nature, and, most especially the manner, of the expressed opinions in this case, should be considered as somewhat equivocal,(4) and but too frequently must have borne to the mind of the poet, doubts and dissatisfaction. The edition now before us may be supposed to embrace all such of his poems as he deems not unworthy his name. These (amounting to about one hundred) have been “carefully revised.” With the exception of some few, about which nothing could well be said, we will speak briefly of them one by one, but in such order as we may find convenient.
The Ages,(5) a didactic piece of thirty-five Spenserian stanzas, is the first and longest in the volume. It was originally printed in 1821,(6) with about half a dozen others now included in this collection. The design of the author in this poem is “from a survey [page 2:] of the past ages of the world, and of the successive advances of mankind in knowledge and virtue, to justify and confirm the hopes of the philanthropist for the future destinies of the human race.”(7) It is, indeed, an essay on the perfectibility of man, wherein, among other better arguments, some, in the very teeth of analogy, are deduced from the eternal cycles of physical nature, to sustain a hope of progression in happiness. But it is only as a poem that we wish to examine The Ages. Its commencement is impressive. The four initial lines arrest the attention at once by a quiet dignity of manner, an air of placid contemplation, and a versification combining the extremes of melody and force —
When to the common rest that crowns our days,
Called in the noon of life, the good man goes,
Or full of years, and ripe in wisdom, lays
His silver temples in their last repose — (8)
The five concluding lines of the stanza, however, are not equally effective —
When, o’er the buds of youth, the death-wind blows,
And blights the fairest; when our bitterest tears
Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close,
We think on what they were, with many fears
Lest goodness die with them, and leave the coming years.
The defects, here, are all of a metrical and of course minor nature, but are still defects. The line
When o’er the buds of youth the death-wind blows
is impeded in its flow by the final th in youth, and especially in death where w follows. The word tears cannot readily be pronounced after the final st in bitterest” and its own final consonants, rs, in like manner render an effort necessary in the utterance of stream which commences the next line. In the verse
We think on what they were, with many fears
the word many is, from its nature, too rapidly pronounced for the fulfilment of the time necessary to give weight to the foot of two syllables. All words of two syllables do not necessarily constitute a foot (we speak now of the Pentameter(9) here employed) even although the syllables be entirely distinct, as in many, very, often and the like. Such as, without effort, cannot employ in their pronunciation the time demanded by each of the preceding and succeeding feet of the verse, and occasionally of a preceding verse, will never fail to offend. It is the perception of this fact which so frequently forces the versifier of delicate ear to employ feet(10) exceeding what are unjustly called legitimate dimensions. For example. At page 21 of the volume before us we have the
following lines —
These verses are exceedingly forcible, yet, upon scanning the latter, we find a syllable too many. We shall be told possibly that there should be an elision of the e in the at the commencement. But no — this was not intended. Both the and emulous demand a perfect accentuation.(12) The verse commencing Lo!
Lo! to the smiling Arno's classic side,
has, it will be observed, a Trochee in its first foot. As is usually the case, the whole line partakes, in consequence, of a stately and emphatic enunciation, and, to equalize the time in the verse succeeding, something more is necessary than the succession of Iambuses which constitute the ordinary English Pentameter. The equalization is therefore judiciously effected by the introduction of an additional syllable. But in the lines
Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close,
We think on what they were with many fears,
lines to which the preceding observations will equally apply, this additional syllable is wanting.(13) Did the rhyme admit of the alliteration, every thing necessary could be accomplished by writing
We think on what they were with many a fear,
Lest goodness die with them and leave the coming year. [page 4:]
These remarks may be considered hypercritical — yet it is undeniable that upon a rigid attention to minutiae such as we have pointed out, any great degree of metrical success must altogether depend. We are more disposed, too, to dwell upon the particular point mentioned above, since, with regard to it, the American Monthly, in a late critique upon the poems of Mr. Willis,(14) has evidently done that gentleman injustice. The reviewer has fallen into what we conceive the error of citing, by themselves, (that is to say insulated from the context)(15) such verses as
The night-wind with a desolate moan swept by.(16)
With difficult energy and when the rod.(17)
Fell through, and with the tremulous hand of age.(18)
With supernatural whiteness loosely fell.(19)
for the purpose of animadversion. “The license” he says “of turning such words as ‘passionate’ and ‘delicate’ into two syllables could only have been taken by a pupil of the Fantastic School.”(20) We are quite sure that Mr. Willis had no purpose of turning them into words of two syllables — nor even, as may be supposed upon a careless examination, of pronouncing them in the same time which would be required for two ordinary syllables.(21) The excesses of measure are here employed (perhaps without any definite design on the part of the writer, who may have been guided solely by ear) with reference to the proper equalization, or balancing, if we may so term it, of time, throughout an entire sentence.(22) This, we confess, is a novel idea, but, we think, perfectly tenable. Any musician will understand us. Efforts for the relief of monotone will necessarily produce fluctuations in the time of any metre, which fluctuations, if not subsequently counterbalanced, affect the ear like unresolved discords in music. The deviations then of which we have(23) been speaking, from the strict rules of prosodial art, are but improvements upon the rigor of those rules, and are a merit, not a fault. It is the nicety of this species of equalization more than any other metrical merit, which elevates Pope as a versifier above the mere couplet-makers of his day; and, on the other hand, it is the extension of the principle to sentences of greater length which elevates Milton above Pope. Knowing this, it was, of course, with some surprise that we found the American Monthly (for whose opinion we still have the highest respect,) citing Pope in opposition to Mr. Willis upon the very point to which we allude.(24) A few examples will be sufficient to show that Pope not only made free use of the license referred to, but that he used it for the reasons, and under the circumstances which we have suggested. [page 6:]
Oh thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais’ easy chair.(25)
Any person will here readily perceive that the third line
Whether thou choose Cervantes’ serious air
differs in time from the usual course of the rhythm, and requires some counterbalance in the line which succeeds. It is indeed precisely such a verse as that of Mr. Bryant's upon which we have commented,
Streams, as the eyes of those that love us close,
and commences in the same manner with a Trochee. But again, from Pope we have —
Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines
Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines.(26)
——
Else all my prose and verse were much the same.
This prose on stilts, that poetry fallen lame.(27)
——
And thrice he lifted high the birth-day band
And thrice he dropped it from his quivering hand.(28)
——
Here stood her opium, here she nursed her owls,
And here she planned the imperial seat of fools.(29)
——
Here to her chosen all her works she shows
Prose swell'd to verse, verse loitering into prose.(30)
——
Rome in her Capitol saw Querno sit
Throned on seven hills, the Antichrist of wit.(31)
——
And his this drum whose hoarse heroic bass
Drowns the loud clarion of the braying Ass.(32)
——
But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise
Twelve starveling bards of these degenerate days.(33)
——
These are all taken at random from the first(34) book of the Dunciad. In the last example it will be seen that the two additional syllables are employed with a view of equalizing the time [page 8:] with that of the verse
But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise —
a verse which will be perceived to labor in its progress — and which Pope, in accordance with his favorite theory of making sound accord with sense,(35) evidently intended so to labor. It is useless to say that the words should be written with elision — starv’ling(36) and degen’rate. Their pronunciation is not thereby materially effected — and, besides, granting it to be so, it may be as well to make the elision in the case of Mr. Willis. But Pope had no such intention, nor we presume, had Mr. W. It is somewhat singular, we may remark, en passant, that the American Monthly, in a subsequent portion of the critique alluded to, quotes from Pope(37) as a line of “sonorous grandeur” and one beyond the ability of our American poet, the well known
Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel.(38)
Now this is indeed a line of “sonorous grandeur” — but it is rendered so principally if not altogether by that very excess of metre (in the word Damien(39) ) which the reviewer has condemned in Mr. Willis. The lines which we quote below from Mr. Bryant's poem of The Ages will suffice to show that the author we are now reviewing fully appreciates the force of such occasional excess, and that he has only neglected it through oversight, in the verse which suggested these observations.
Peace to the just man's memory — let it grow
Greener with years, and blossom through the flight
Of ages: let the mimic canvass show
His calm benevolent features.(40)
——
Does prodigal Autumn to our age deny
The plenty that once swelled beneath his sober eye?(41)
——
Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth In her fair page.(42)
43 Will then the merciful one who stamped our race
With his own image, and who gave them sway
O'er Earth and the glad dwellers on her face,
Now that our flourishing nations far away
Are spread, where'er the moist earth drinks the day, [page 10:]
Forget the ancient care that taught and nursed
His latest offspring?(43)
——
He who has tamed the elements shall not live
The slave of his own passions.(44)
——
—— when Liberty awoke
New-born, amid those beautiful vales.(45)
——
Oh Greece, thy flourishing cities were a spoil
Unto each other.(46)
——
And thou didst drive from thy unnatural breast
Thy just and brave.(47)
——
Yet her degenerate children sold the crown.(48)
——
Instead of the pure heart and innocent hands — (49)
——
Among thy gallant sons that guard thee well
Thou laugh'st at enemies. Who shall then declare — (50) &c.
——
Far like the comet's way thro’ infinite space.(51)
——
The full region leads New colonies forth.(52)
——
Full many a horrible worship that, of old,
Held o’er the shuddering realms unquestioned sway.(53) [page 12:]
All these instances, and some others, occur in a poem of but thirty-five stanzas — yet, in only a very few cases is the license improperly used. Before quitting this subject it may be as well to cite a striking example from Wordsworth —
There was a youth whom I had loved so long,
That when I loved him not I cannot say;
Mid the green mountains many and many a song
We two had sung like gladsome birds in May.(54)
Another specimen, and one still more to the purpose, may be given from Milton, whose accurate ear (although he cannot justly be called the best of versifiers) included and balanced without difficulty the rhythm of the longest passages.
But say, if our Deliverer up to heaven
Must re-ascend, what will betide the few
His faithful, left among the unfaithful herd
The enemies of truth? who then shall guide
His people, who defend? will they not deal
More with his followers than with him they dealt?
Be sure they will, said the Angel.(55)
The other metrical faults in The Ages are few. Mr. Bryant is not always successful in his Alexandrines. Too great care cannot be taken, we think, in so regulating this species of verse as to admit of the necessary pause at the end of the third foot — or at least as not to render a pause necessary elsewhere. We object, therefore, to such lines as
A palm like his, and catch from him the hallowed flame.(56)
The truth of heaven, and kneel to Gods that heard them not.(57)
That which concludes Stanza X, although correctly cadenced in the above respect, requires an accent on the monosyllable the, which is too unimportant to sustain it.(58) The defect is rendered the more perceptible by the introduction of a Trochee in the first foot.
The sick untended then
Languished in the damp shade, and died afar from men.(59)
We are not sure that such lines as
A boundless sea of blood and the wild air.(60)
The smile of heaven, till a new age expands.(61) [page 14:]
are in any case justifiable, and they can be easily avoided. As in the Alexandrine mentioned above, the course of the rhythm demands an accent on monosyllables too unimportant to sustain it. For this prevalent heresy in metre we are mainly indebted to Byron, who introduced it freely, with a view of imparting an abrupt energy to his verse.(62) There are, however, many better ways of relieving a monotone.
Stanza VI is, throughout, an exquisite specimen of versification, besides embracing many beauties both of thought and expression.
Look on this beautiful world and read the truth
In her fair page; see every season brings
New change, to her, of everlasting youth;
Still the green soil with joyous living things
Swarms; the wide air is full of joyous wings;
And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep
Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings
The restless surge. Eternal love doth keep
In his complacent arms the earth, the air, the deep.(63)
The cadences, here, at the words page, swarms,(64) and surge respectively, cannot be surpassed. We shall find, upon examination, comparatively few consonants in the stanza, and by their arrangement no impediment is offered to the flow of the verse. Liquids and the most melodious vowels abound. World, eternal, season, wide, change, full, air, everlasting, wings, flings, complacent, surge, gulfs, myriads, azure, ocean, soil, and joyous, are among the softest and most sonorous sounds in the language, and the partial line after the pause at surge, together with the stately march of the Alexandrine which succeeds, is one of the finest imaginable of finales —
Eternal love doth keep
In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep.
The higher beauties of the poem are not, we think, of the highest. It has unity, completeness, — a beginning, middle and end. The tone, too, of calm, hopeful, and elevated reflection, is well sustained throughout. There is an occasional quaint grace of expression, as in
Nurse of full streams, and lifter up of proud
Sky-mingling mountains that o’erlook the cloud — (65)
or of antithetical and rhythmical force combined, as in
The shock that hurled
To dust in many fragments dashed and strown
The throne whose roots were in another world
And whose far-stretching shadow awed our own.(66)
But we look in vain for something more worthy commendation. At the same time the piece is especially free from errors. Only once we meet with an unjust metonymy, where a sheet of water is said to
Cradle, in his soft embrace, a gay
Young group of grassy islands.(67) [page 15:]
We find little originality of thought, and less imagination. But in a poem essentially didactic, of course we cannot hope for the loftiest breathings of the muse.
To the Past (68) is a poem of fourteen quatrains — three feet and four(69) alternately. In the second quatrain, the lines
And glorious ages gone
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb(70) [page 16:]
are, to us, disagreeable. Such images are common, but at best, repulsive. In the present case there is not even the merit of illustration. The womb, in any just imagery, should be spoken of with a view to things future; here it is employed, in the sense of the tomb, and with a view to things past. In Stanza XI the idea is even worse. The allegorical meaning throughout the poem, although generally well sustained, is not always so. In the quatrain
Thine for a space are they —
Yet shalt thou yield thy treasures up at last;
Thy gates shall yet give way,
Thy bolts shall fall, inexorable Past!(71)
it seems that The Past, as an allegorical personification, is confounded with Death.
The Old Man's Funeral(72) is of seven stanzas, each of six lines — four Pentameters with alternates(73) rhymes, ending with a Pentameter and Alexandrine, rhyming. At the funeral of an old man who has lived out his full quota of years, another, as aged, reproves the company for weeping. The poem is nearly perfect in its way — the thoughts striking and natural — the versification singularly sweet. The third stanza embodies a fine idea, beautifully expressed.
Ye sigh not when the sun, his course fulfilled,
His glorious course rejoicing earth and sky,
In the soft evening when the winds are stilled,
Sinks where his islands of refreshment lie,
And leaves the smile of his departure spread
O'er the warm-colored heaven, and ruddy mountain head.(74)
The technical word chronic should have been avoided in the fifth line of Stanza VI —
No chronic tortures racked his aged limb.(75)
The Rivulet(76) has about ninety octo-syllabic verses.(77) They contrast the changing and perishable nature of the human frame, with the greater durability of the Rivulet. The chief merit is simplicity.(78) We should imagine the poem to be one of the earliest pieces of Mr. Bryant, and to have undergone much correction. In the first paragraph are, however, some awkward constructions. In the verses, for example
This little rill that from the springs
Of yonder grove its current brings,
Plays on the slope awhile, and then
Goes pratling into groves again,(79)
the reader is apt to suppose that rill is the nominative to plays, whereas it is the nominative only to drew in the subsequent lines,
Oft to its warbling waters drew
My little feet when life was new.
The proper verb is, of course, immediately seen upon reading these latter lines — but the ambiguity has occurred.
——— [page 17:]
The Prairies.(80) This is a poem, in blank Pentameter, of about one hundred and twenty-five lines, and possesses features which do not appear in any of the pieces above mentioned. Its descriptive beauty is of a high order. The peculiar points of interest in the Prairie are vividly shown forth, and as a local painting, the work is, altogether, excellent.(81) Here are, moreover, evidences of fine [page 18:] imagination. For example —
The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love —
A nearer vault and of a tenderer blue
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.(82)
Till twilight blushed, and lovers walked and wooed
In a forgotten language, and old tunes
From instruments of unremembered form
Gave the soft winds a voice. (83)
—— The bee
Within the hollow oak.
I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of the advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts.(84)
Breezes of the south!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers.
And pass the prairie-hawk that poised on high,
Flaps his broad wings yet moves not!(85)
There is an objectionable elipsis(86) in the expression “I behold them for the first,”(87) meaning “first time;” and either a grammatical or typographical error of moment in the fine sentence commencing
Fitting floor
For this magnificent temple of the sky —
With flowers whose glory and whose multitude
Rival the constellations!(88)
Earth,(89) a poem of similar length(90) and construction to The Prairies, embodies a noble conception. The poet represents himself as lying on the earth in a “midnight black with clouds,”(91) and giving ideal voices to the varied sounds of the coming tempest. The following passages remind us of some of the more beautiful portions of Young.(92) [page 20:]
On the breast of Earth
I lie and listen to her mighty voice:
A voice of many tones — sent up from streams
That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen,
Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air,
From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day,
And hollows of the great invisible hills,
And sands that edge the ocean stretching far
Into the night — a melancholy sound! (93)
Ha! how the murmur deepens! I perceive
And tremble at its dreadful import. Earth
Uplifts a general cry for guilt and wrong
And Heaven is listening. The forgotten graves
Of the heart broken utter forth their plaint.
The dust of her who loved and was betrayed,
And him who died neglected in his age,
The sepulchres of those who for mankind
Labored, and earned the recompense of scorn,
Ashes of martyrs for the truth, and bones
Of those who in the strife for liberty
Were beaten down, their corses given to dogs,
Their names to infamy, all find a voice!(94)
In this poem, and elsewhere occasionally throughout the volume, we meet with a species of grammatical construction, which, although it is to be found in writers of high merit, is a mere affectation, and of course objectionable. We mean the abrupt employment of a direct pronoun in place of the customary relative. For example —
Or haply dost thou grieve for those that die —
For living things that trod awhile thy face,
The love of thee and heaven, and how they sleep,
Mixed with the shapeless dust on which thy herds
Trample and graze?(95)
The note of interrogation here, renders the affectation more perceptible.
The poem To the Appenines(96) resembles, in metre, that entitled The Old Man's Funeral, except that the former has a Pentameter in place of the Alexandrine. This piece is chiefly remarkable for the force, metrical and moral, of its concluding stanza.
In you the heart that sighs for Freedom seeks
Her image; there the winds no barrier know;
Clouds come and rest, and leave your fairy peaks;
While even the immaterial Mind, below,
And Thought, her winged offspring, chained by power,
Pine silently for the redeeming hour.(97)
——
The Knight's Epitaph(98) consists of about fifty lines of blank Pentameter. This poem is well conceived and executed. Entering the Church of St. Catherine at Pisa, the poet is arrested by the image of an armed knight graven upon the lid of a sepulchre. The Epitaph consists of an imaginative portraiture of the knight, in which he is made the impersonation of the ancient Italian chivalry.
——
Seventy-Six(99) has seven stanzas of a common, but musical versification, of which these lines will afford an excellent specimen. [page 22:]
That death-stain on the vernal sword,
Hallowed to freedom all the shore —
In fragments fell the yoke abhorred —
The footsteps of a foreign lord
Profaned the soil no more.(1)
———
The Living Lost(2) has four stanzas of somewhat peculiar construction, but admirably adapted to the tone of contemplative melancholy which pervades the poem. We can call to mind few things more singularly impressive than the eight concluding verses. They combine ease with severity, and have antithetical force without effort or flippancy. The final thought has also a high ideal beauty.
But ye who for the living lost
That agony in secret bear,
Who shall with soothing words accost
The strength of your despair?
Grief for your sake is scorn for them
Whom ye lament, and all condemn,
And o'er the world of spirits lies
A gloom from which ye turn your eyes.(3)
The first stanza commences with one of those affectations which we noticed in the poem “Earth.”
Matron, the children of whose love,
Each to his grave in youth have passed,
And now the mould is heaped above
The dearest and the last.(4)
———
The Strange Lady(5) is of the fourteen syllable metre, answering to two lines, one of eight syllables, the other six. This rhythm is unmanageable, and requires great care in the rejection of harsh consonants. Little, however, has been taken, apparently, in the construction of the verses
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky.(6)
And thou shouldst chase the nobler game, and I bring down the bird.(7)
Or that strange dame so gay and fair were some mysterious foe.(8)
which are not to be pronounced without labor. The story is old — of a young gentleman who going out to hunt, is inveigled into the woods and destroyed by a fiend in the guise of a fair lady. The ballad character is nevertheless well preserved, and this, we presume, is nearly every thing intended.
———
The Hunter's Vision[[(9)]] is skilfully and sweetly told. It is the tale of a young hunter who, overcome with toil, dozes on the brink of a precipice. In this state between waking and sleeping, he fancies a spirit-land in the fogs of the valley beneath him, and sees approaching him the deceased lady of his love. Arising to meet her, he falls, with the effort, from the crag, and perishes. The state of reverie is admirably pictured in the following stanzas. The poem consists of nine such.
All dim in haze the mountains lay
With dimmer vales between; [page 23:]
And rivers glimmered on their way
By forests faintly seen;
While ever rose a murmuring sound
From brooks below and bees around
He listened till he seem to hear
A strain so soft and low
That whether in the mind or ear [page 24:]
The listener scarce might know.
With such a tone, so sweet and mild
The watching mother lulls her child.(10)
Catterskill Falls(11) is a narrative somewhat similar. Here the hero is also a hunter — but of delicate frame. He is overcome with the cold at the foot of the falls, sleeps, and is near perishing — but, being found by some woodmen, is taken care of, and recovers. As in the Hunter's Vision, the dream of the youth is the main subject of the poem. He fancies a goblin palace in the icy network of the cascade, and peoples it in his vision with ghosts. His entry into this palace is, with rich imagination on the part of the poet, made to correspond with the time of the transition from the state of reverie to that of nearly total insensibility.
They eye him not as they pass along,
But his hear stands up with dread,
When he feels that he moves with that phantom throng
Till those icy turrets are over his head,
And the torrent's roar as they enter seems
Like a drowsy murmur heard in dreams.
The glittering threshold is scarcely passed
When there gathers and wraps him round
A thick white twilight sullen and vast
In which there is neither form nor sound;
The phantom, the glory, vanish all
With the dying voice of the waterfall.(12)
There are nineteen similar stanzas. The metre is formed of Iambuses and Anapests.(13)
The Hunter of the Prairies(14) (fifty six(15) octosyllabic verses with alternate rhymes) is a vivid picture of the life of a hunter in the desert. The poet, however, is here greatly indebted to his subject.
The Damsel of Peru (16) is in the fourteen syllable metre, and has a most spirited, imaginative and musical commencement —
Where olive leaves were twinkling in every wind that blew,
There sat beneath the pleasant shade a damsel of Peru.(17)
This is also a ballad, and a very fine one — full of action, chivalry, energy and rhythm. Some passages have even a loftier merit — that of a glowing ideality. For example —
For the noon is coming on, and the sunbeams fiercely beat,
And the silent hills and forest-tops seem reeling in the heat.(18)
The Song of Pitcairn's Island(19) is a sweet, quiet, and simple poem, of a versification differing from that of any preceding piece. We subjoin a specimen. The Tahetian maiden addresses her lover.
Come talk of Europe's maids with me
Whose necks and cheeks they tell
Outshine the beauty of the sea,
White foam and crimson shell.
I'll shape like theirs my simple dress
And bind like them each jetty tress,
A sight to please thee well, [page 25:]
And for my dusky brow will braid
A bonnet like an English maid.(20)
There are seven(21) similar stanzas.
———
Rispah(22) is a scriptural theme from 2 Samuel, and we like it [page 26:] less than any poem yet mentioned. The subject, we think, derives no additional interest from its poetical dress. The metre resembling, except in the matter of rhyme, that of “Catterskill Falls,” and consisting of mingled Iambuses and Anapests, is the most positively disagreeable of any which our language admits, and, having a frisky or fidgetty rhythm, is singularly ill-adapted to the lamentation of the bereaved mother. We cannot conceive how the fine ear of Mr. Bryant could admit such verses as,
And Rispah once the loveliest of all
That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,(23)
&c.
The Indian Girl's Lament(24) and the Arctic Lover(25) have nearly all the peculiarities of the “Song of Pitcairn's Island.”
The Massacre at Scio(26) is only remarkable for inaccuracy of expression in the two concluding lines —
Till the last link of slavery's chain
Is shivered to be worn no more.(27)
What shall be worn no more?
The chain — but the link is implied.
Monument Mountain(28) is a poem of about a hundred and forty blank Pentameters, and relates the tale of an Indian maiden who loved her cousin. Such a love being deemed incestuous by the morality of her tribe, she threw herself from a precipice and perished. There is little peculiar in the story or its narration. We quote a rough verse —
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven.(29)
The use of the epithet old preceded by some other adjective, is found so frequently in this poem and elsewhere in the writings of Mr. Bryant, as to excite a smile upon each recurrence of the expression.
In all that proud old world beyond the deep — (30)
There is a tale about these gray old rocks — (31)
The wide old woods resounded with her song — (32)
— and the gray old men that passed — (33) [page 28:]
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven.(34)
We dislike too the antique use of the word affect in such sentences as
—— they deemed
Like worshippers of the elder time that God
Doth walk on the high places and affect
The earth-o’erlooking mountains.(35)
Milton, it is true, uses it — we remember it especially in Comus —
but then Milton would not use it were he writing Comus to-day.
In the Summer Wind,(37) our author has several successful attempts at making “The sound an echo to the sense.” For example —
(38) For me, I lie
Languidly in the shade,(39) where the thick turf
Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun
Retains some freshness.(38)
All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing.(40)
(41) All the green herbs
Are stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers
By the road side, and the borders of the brook (42)
Nod gaily to each other. (41)
Autumn Woods.(43) This is a poem of much sweetness and simplicity of expression, and including one or two fine thoughts, viz:
the sweet South-west at play
Flies, rustling, where the painted leaves are strown
Along the winding way.(44)
But 'neath yon crimson tree
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark within its roseate canopy
Her flush of maiden shame.(45)
———
The mountains that infold
In their wide sweep the colored landscape round,
Seem groups of giant kings in purple and gold
That guard the enchanted ground. (46) [page 30:]
All this is beautiful — the sentences italicized especially so. Happily to endow inanimate nature with sentience(47) and a capability of moral action, is one of the severest tests of the poet. Even the most unmusical ear will not fail to appreciate the rare beauty and strength of the extra syllable in the line
Seem groups of giant kings in purple and gold.
———
The Disinterred Warrior(48) has a passage we do not clearly understand. Speaking of the Indian our author says —
For he was fresher from the hand
That formed of earth the human face,
And to the elements did stand
In nearer kindred than our race.(49)
There are ten similar quatrains in the poem.(50)
———
The Greek Boy(51) consists of four spirited stanzas, nearly resembling, in metre, The Living Lost. The two concluding lines are highly ideal.
A shoot of that old vine that made
The nations silent in its shade.(52)
———
When the Firmament Quivers with Daylight's Young Beam,(53) belongs to a species of poetry which we cannot be brought to admire. Some natural phenomenon is observed, and the poet taxes his ingenuity to find a parallel in the moral world. In general, we may assume, that the more successful he is in sustaining the parallel, the farther he departs from the true province of the Muse. The title, here, is a specimen of the metre.(54) This is of a kind which we have before designated as exceedingly difficult to manage.
———
To a Musquito,(55) is droll, and has at least the merit of making, at the same time, no efforts at being sentimental. We are not inclined, however, to rank as poems, either this production or the article on New England Coal.(56)
———
The Conjunction of Jupiter and Venus57 has ninety Pentameters. One of them,
Kind influence. Lo! their orbs burn more bright,(58)
can only be read, metrically, by drawing out influence into three marked syllables, shortening the long monosyllable, Lo! and lengthening the short one, their.
June(59) is sweet and soft in its rhythm, and inexpressibly pathetic. There is an illy subdued sorrow and intense awe coming up, per force as it were, to the surface of the poet's gay sayings about his grave, which we find thrilling us to the soul.
And what if cheerful shouts, at noon,
Come, from the village sent,
Or songs of maids, beneath the moon
With fairy laughter blent? [page 31:]
And what if, in the evening light,
Betrothed lovers walk in sight
Of my low monument?
I would the lovely scene around
Might know no sadder sight nor sound.
I know, I know I should not see
The season's glorious show,
Nor would its brightness shine for me
Nor its wild music flow;
But if, around my place of sleep,
The friends I love should come to weep,
They might not haste to go.
Soft airs, and song, and light, and bloom,
Should keep them lingering by my tomb.(60)
Innocent Child and Snow-White Flower,(61) is remarkable only for the deficiency of a foot in one of its verses. [page 32:]
White as those leaves just blown apart
Are the folds of thy own young heart (62)
and for the graceful repetition in its concluding quatrain —
Throw it aside in thy weary hour,
Throw to the ground the fair white flower,
Yet as thy tender years depart
Keep that white and innocent heart.(63)
Of the seven original sonnets in the volume before us, it is somewhat difficult to speak. The sonnet demands, in a great degree, point, strength, unity, compression, and a species of completeness. Generally, Mr. Bryant has evinced more of the first and the last, than of the three mediate qualities. William Tell(64) is feeble. No forcible line ever ended with liberty, and the best of the rhymes — thee, me, free, and the like, are destitute of the necessary vigor. But for this rhythmical defect the thought in the concluding couplet —
The bitter cup they mingled strengthened thee For the great work to set thy country free — (65)
would have well ended the sonnet. Midsummer(66) is objectionable for the variety of its objects of allusion. The final lines embrace a fine thought —
As if the day of fire had dawned and sent
Its deadly breath into the firmament — (67)
but the vigor of the whole is impaired by the necessity of placing an unwonted accent on the last syllable of firmament. October(68) has little to recommend it, but the slight epigrammatism of its conclusion —
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass. Pass silently from men — as thou dost pass.(69)
The sonnet to Cole,(70) is feeble in its final lines, and is worthy of praise only in the verses —
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.(71)
Mutation,(72) a didactic sonnet, has few either of faults or beauties. November(73) is far better. The lines
And the blue Gentian flower that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last,(74)
are very happy. A single thought pervades and gives unity to the [page 34:] piece. We are glad, too, to see an Alexandrine(75) in the close.
In the whole metrical construction of his sonnets, however, Mr. Bryant has very wisely declined confining himself to the laws of the Italian poem, or even to the dicta of Capel Lofft.(76) The Alexandrine is beyond comparison the most effective finale, and we are astonished that the common Pentameter should ever be employed. The best sonnet of the seven is, we think, that To ——— ‘(77) With the exception of a harshness in the last line but one it is perfect. The finale is inimitable.
Ay, thou art for the grave; thy glances shine
Too brightly to shine long; another Spring
Shall deck her for men's eyes, but not for thine —
Sealed in a sleep which knows no wakening.
The fields for thee have no medicinal leaf,
And the vexed ore no mineral of power;
And they who love thee wait in anxious grief
Till the slow plague shall bring the fatal hour.
Glide slowly to thy rest, then; Death should come
Gently to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
Detach the delicate blossom from the tree.
Close thy sweet eyes, calmly, and without pain,
And we will trust in God to see thee yet again.(77)
To a Cloud,(78) has another instance of the affectation to which we alluded in our notice of Earth, and The Living Lost,
Whose sons at length have heard the call that comes
From the old battle fields and tombs,
And risen, and drawn the sword, and on the foe
Have dealt the swift and desperate blow,
And the Othman power is cloven, and the stroke
Has touched its chains, and they are broke.(79)
Of the Translations in the volume it is not our intention to speak in detail. Mary Magdalen,(80) from the Spanish of Bartolome Leonardo De Argensola, is the finest specimen of versification in the book. Alexis,(81) from the Spanish of Iglesias, is delightful in its exceeding delicacy, and general beauty. We cannot refrain from quoting it entire.
Alexis calls me cruel —
The rifted crags that hold
The gathered ice of winter,
He says, are not more cold. [page 36:]
When even the very blossoms
Around the fountain's brim,
And forest walks, can witness
The love I bear to him.
I would that I could utter
My feelings without shame,
And tell him how I love him
Nor wrong my virgin fame.
Alas! to seize the moment
When heart inclines to heart,
And press a suit with passion
Is not a woman's part.
If man come not to gather
The roses where they stand,
They fade among the foliage,
They cannot seek his hand.
The Waterfowl(82) is very beautiful, but still not entitled to the admiration which it has occasionally elicited. There is a fidelity and force in the picture of the fowl as brought before the eye of the mind, and a fine sense of effect in throwing its figure on the back ground of the “crimson sky,” amid “falling dew,” “while glow the heavens with the last steps of day.”(83) But the merits which possibly have had most weight in the public estimation of the poem, are the melody and strength of its versification, (which is indeed excellent) and more particularly its completeness. Its rounded and didactic termination(84) has done wonders.
—— on my heart,
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given
And shall not soon depart.
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight
In the long way that I must tread alone
Will lead my steps aright.(85)
There are, however, points of more sterling merit. We fully recognize the poet in
Thou’rt gone — the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form.
There is a power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast —
The desert, and illimitable air,
Lone, wandering, but not lost.(86)
The Forest Hymn(87) consists of about a hundred and twenty blank Pentameters, of whose great rhythmical beauty it is scarcely possible to speak too highly. With the exception of the line
The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds,(88)
no fault, in this respect, can be found, while excellences are frequent, of a rare order, and evincing the greatest delicacy of ear. We might, perhaps, suggest, that the two concluding verses, [page 37:] beautiful as they stand, would be slightly improved by transfer’ ring to the last the metrical excess of the one immediately preceding. For the appreciation of this, it is necessary to quote six or seven lines in succession.
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath [page 38:]
Of the mad unchained elements, to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate
In these calm shades thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of thy works
Learn to conform the order of our lives, (89)
There is an excess of one syllable in the first of the lines italicized.(90) If we discard this syllable here, and adopt it in the final line, the close will acquire strength, we think, in acquiring a fuller volume.(91)
Be it ours to meditate
In these calm shades thy milder majesty,
And to the perfect order of thy works
Conform, if we can, the order of our lives.
Directness, boldness, and simplicity of expression, are main features in the poem.
Oh God! when thou
Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire
The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill
With all the waters of the firmament
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods,
And drowns the villages.(92)
Here an ordinary writer would have preferred the word fright to scare, and omitted the definite article before woods and villages.(93)
To the Evening Wind(94) has been justly admired. It is the best specimen of that completeness which we have before spoken of as a characteristic feature in the poems of Mr. Bryant. It has a beginning, middle, and end, each depending upon the other, and each beautiful. Here are three lines breathing all the spirit of Shelley.
Pleasant shall be thy way, where meekly bows
The shutting flower, and darkling waters pass,
And 1twixt the o'er shadowing branches and the grass. (95)
The conclusion is admirable —
Go — but the circle of eternal change,
Which is the life of Nature, shall restore,
With sounds and scents from all thy mighty range,
Thee to thy birth-place of the deep once more;
Sweet odors in the sea air, sweet and strange,
Shall tell the home-sick mariner of the shore,
And, listening to thy murmur, he shall deem
He hears the rustling leaf and running stream.(96)
Thanatopsis(97) is somewhat more than half the length of The Forest Hymn, and of a character precisely similar. It is, however, [page 40:] the finer poem. Like The Waterfowl, it owes much to the point, force, and general beauty of its didactic conclusion. In the commencement, the lines
To him who, in the love of nature, holds
Communion with her visible forms, & &c.(98)
belong to a class of vague phrases, which, since the days of Byron, have obtained too universal a currency. The verse
Go forth under the open sky and list —
is sadly out of place amid the forcible and even Miltonic rhythm of such lines as
Take the wings
Of morning, and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregan.(99)
But these are trivial faults indeed, and the poem embodies a great degree of the most elevated beauty. Two of its passages, passages of the purest ideality, would alone render it worthy of the general commendation it has received.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. (1)
——
The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun — the vales
Stretching in pensive quietude between —
The venerable woods — rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green — and, poured round all,
Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste —
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. (2)
Oh, Fairest of the Rural Maids!(3) is a gem, of which we cannot sufficiently express our admiration. We quote it in full.
Oh, fairest of the rural maids!
Thy birth was in the forest shades;
Green boughs and glimpses of the sky
Were all that met thine infant eye.
Thy sports, thy wanderings when a child
Were ever in the sylvan wild;
And all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks, [page 42:]
Thy step is as the wind that weaves
Its playful way among the leaves.
Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene
And silent waters Heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.
The forest depths by foot impressed
Are not more sinless than thy breast;
The holy peace that fills the air
Of those calm solitudes3 is there.
A rich simplicity is a main feature in this poem — simplicity of design and execution. This is strikingly perceptible in the opening and concluding lines, and in expression throughout. But there is a far higher and more strictly ideal beauty, which it is less easy to analyze. The original conception is of the very loftiest order of true Poesy. A maiden is born in the forest —
Green boughs and glimpses of the sky
Are all which meet her infant eye —
She is not merely modelled in character by the associations of her childhood — this were the thought of an ordinary poet — an idea that we meet with every day in rhyme — but she imbibes, in her physical as well as moral being, the traits, the very features of the delicious scenery around her — its loveliness becomes a portion of her own —
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of her locks,
And all the beauty of the place
Is in her heart and on her face.
It would have been a highly poetical idea to imagine the tints in the locks of the maiden deducing a resemblance to the “twilight of the trees and rocks,” from the constancy of her associations(4) — but the spirit of Ideality is immeasurably more apparent when the “twilight” is represented as becoming identified with the shadows of the hair.
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy(5) locks,
And all the beauty of the place
Is in her heart and on her face.
Feeling thus, we did not, in copying the poem, italicize(6) the lines, although beautiful,
Thy step is as the wind that weaves
Its playful way among the leaves,
nor those which immediately follow. The two concluding verses, however, are again of the most elevated species of poetical merit.
The forest depths by foot impressed
Are not more sinless than thy breast —
The holy peace that fills the air
Of those calm solitudes, is there.
The image contained in the lines
Thine eyes are springs in whose serene
And silent waters Heaven is seen — [page 43:]
is one which, we think, for appropriateness, completeness, and every perfect beauty of which imagery is susceptible, has never been surpassed — but imagery is susceptible of no beauty like that we have designated in the sentences above. The latter idea, moreover, is not original with our poet.
In all the rhapsodies of Mr. Bryant, which have reference to the beauty or the majesty of nature, is a most audible and thrill ling tone of love and exultation. As far as he appreciates her loveliness or her augustness, no appreciation can be more ardent, more full of heart, more replete with the glowing soul of adoration. Nor, either in the moral or physical universe coming within the periphery of his vision, does he at any time fail to perceive and designate, at once, the legitimate items of the beautiful. Therefore, could we consider (as some have considered) the mere enjoyment of the beautiful when perceived, or even this enjoyment when combined with the readiest and truest perception and discrimination in regard to beauty presented, as a sufficient test of the poetical sentiment, we could have no hesitation in according to Mr. Bryant the very highest poetical rank. But something more, we have elsewhere presumed to say, is demanded. Just above, we spoke of “objects in the moral or physical universe coming within the periphery of his vision.” We now mean to say, that the relative extent of these peripheries of poetical vision must ever be a primary consideration in our classification of poets. Judging Mr. B. in this manner, and by a general estimate of the volume before us, we should, of course, pause long before assigning him a place with the spiritual Shelleys, or Coleridges, or Wordsworths, or with Keats, or even Tennyson, or Wilson,(7) or with some other burning lights of our own day, to be valued in a day to come. Yet if his poems, as a whole, will not warrant us in assigning him this [page 44:] grade, one such poem as this last upon which we have commented, is enough to assure us that he may attain it.
The writings of our author, as we find them here, are characterized by an air of calm and elevated contemplation more than by any other individual feature. In their mere didactics, however, they err essentially and primitively, inasmuch as such things are the province rather of Minerva than of the Camenae. Of imagination, we discover much — but more of its rich and certain evident ces, than of its ripened fruit. In all the minor merits Mr. Bryant is pre-eminent. His ars celare artem(8) is most efficient. Of his “completeness,” unity, and finish of style, we have already spoken. As a versifier, we know of no writer, living or dead, who can be said greatly to surpass him. A Frenchman would assuredly call him “un poete(9) des plus correctes.”
Between Cowper and Young, perhaps, (with both of whom he has many points of analogy,) would be the post assigned him by an examination at once general and superficial. Even in this view, however, he has a juster appreciation of the beautiful than the one, of the sublime than the other — a finer taste than Cowper — an equally vigorous, and far more delicate imagination than Young. In regard to his proper rank among American poets there should be no question whatever. Few — at least few who are fairly before the public, have more than very shallow claims to a rivalry with the author of Thanatopsis.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 1:]
1 Southern Literary Messenger 3:41-49, January 1837. For Poe on Bryant, see Harrison 8:1 and 10:85.
2 1836.
3 An inadvertent decasyllable. These lapses in prose rhythm are so common in Poe's essays that to footnote each decasyllable would be rather distracting than instructive.
4 Three inadvertent decasyllables.
5 Poems, pp. [13] — 27.
6 Poems, Cambridge [Mass.]: Hilliard & Metcalf, 1821, pp. [7] -24.
7 Poems, 1836, p. [269], note 13:
In this poem, written and first printed in the year 1821, the Author has endeavoured, from a survey of the past ages of the world, and of the successive advances of mankind in knowledge, virtue, and happiness, to justify and confirm the hopes of the philanthropist for the future destinies of the human race.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 3:]
8 Poems, p. [13], stanza 1:
When to the common rest that crowns our days,
Called in the noon of life, the good man goes,
Or full of years, and ripe in wisdom, lays
His silver temples in their last repose;
When, o'er the buds of youth, the death-wind blows,
And blights the fairest; when our bitterest tears
Stream, as the eyes of those that love us close,
We think on what they were, with many fears
Lest goodness die with them, and leave the coming years.
9 The use of Pentameter as a synonym for decasyllable is a licence so ineradicably established in works on English verse that {pace Saintsbury) it were well to abandon the attempt to number English metres by dipodies. To call the decasyllable an iambic trimeter brachycatalectic has (pedantry aside) one advantage: the name com* notes two bars and a half of verse followed by half a bar of silence, a clear statement of the atom of the twelve-bar blues.
10 For Bryant's view of such feet, see Appendix 1.
11 ‘The ages” Poems, p. 21, stanza 21:
Lo! to the smiling Arno's classic side
The emulous nations of the west repair.,
And kindle their quenched urns, and drink fresh spirit there.
12 Indeed, the only reasonable candidate for elision is the first u in emulous.
13 The additional mora, if needed, can be obtained by writing
Think we on what we were, with many fears
[The following footnotes appear on page 5:]
14 N[athaniel] P. Willis, Melanie and other poems, ed. Barry Cornwall [i.e. Bryan Waller Procter], London: Saunders & Otley, 1835. Reviewed (no signature or initials) in American Monthly Magazine N.S.2:[209]-224, 1836.
15 In these notes we purpose to run every quotation for one or more full sentences, so far as the eccentric punctuation in some sources permits the determination of full sentences.
16 Willis, ‘The dying alchymist” Melanie, p. 75:
The night wind with a desolate moan swept by,
And the old shutters of the turret swung
Screaming upon their hinges, and the moon,
As the torn edges of the clouds flew past,
Struggled aslant the stained and broken panes
So dimly, that the watchful eye of death
Scarcely was conscious when it went and came.
17 Ibid., pp. 75-76:
The fire beneath his crucible was low;
Yet still it burned, and ever as his thoughts
Grew insupportable, he raised himself
Upon his wasted arm, and stirred the coals
With difficult energy, and when the rod
Fell from his nerveless fingers, and his eye
Felt faint within its socket, he shrunk back
Upon his pallet, and with unclosed lips
Muttered a curse on death!
18 Willis, ‘The scholar of Thebet ben Khorat” Melanie, p. 123:
The last white grain
Fell through, and with the tremulous hand of age
The old astrologer reversed the glass;
And, as the voiceless monitor went on,
Wasting and wasting with the precious hour,
He looked upon it with a moving lip,
And, starting, turned his gaze upon the heavens,
Cursing the clouds impatiently.
19 Ibid., p. 117:
The gray hairs, struggling from his turban folds,
Played with the entering wind upon his cheeks,
And on his breast his venerable beard
With supernatural whiteness loosely fell.
20 American Monthly 2:215: ‘The license of turning such words as “passionate” and “delicate” into two syllables could only have been taken by a pupil of the “Fantastic school.” ’
21 Note that Poe's 1848 theory of the bastard iambus (p. 115) requires exactly that the three syllables be pronounced in the time of two.
22 Cf. Appendix 3, p. 204.
23 Two inadvertent decasyllables.
24 American Monthly 2:215: ‘Pope's blood would have run cold at so gross a violation of all rule.’
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 6:]
25 Pope, Dunciad 1.19-28:
O thou! whatever Title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!
Whether thou chuse Cervantes’ serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rab’lais’ easy chair,
Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind,
Or thy griev'd Country's copper chains unbind;
From thy Boeotia tho’ her Pow’r retires,
Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our Realm acquires;
Here pleas'd behold her mighty wings out-spread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of Lead.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 6, running through page 7:]
26 Dunciad 1.39-44:
Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast
Of Curl's chaste press, and Lintot's rubric post; [page 7:]
Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines,
Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines:
Sepulchral Lyes, our holy walls to grace,
And New-Year Odes, and all the Grub-street race.
27 Dunciad 1.187-190:
Some Daemon stole my pen (forgive th’offence)
And once betray'd me into common sense:
Else all my Prose and Verse were much the same;
This, prose on stilts; that, poetry fall'n lame.
28 Dunciad 1.243-248:
With that, a Tear (portentous sign of Grace!)
Stole from the Master of the sev’nfold Face:
And thrice he lifted high the Birth-day brand,
And thrice he dropt it from his quiv’ring hand;
Then lights the structure, with averted eyes:
The rowling smokes involve the sacrifice.
29 Dunciad 1.269-272:
This the Great Mother dearer held than all
The clubs of Quidnuncs, or her own Guild-hall:
Here stood her Opium, here she nurs'd her Owls,
And here she plann'd th' Imperial seat of Fools.
31 Dunciad 1.273-286:
Here to her Chosen all her works she shews;
Prose swell'd to verse, verse loit'ring into prose:
How random thoughts now meaning chance to find,
Now leave all memory of sense behind:
How Prologues into Prefaces decay,
And these to Notes are fritter'd quite away:
How Index-learning turns no student pale,
Yet holds the eel of science by the tail:
How, with less reading than makes felons scape,
Less human genius than God gives an ape,
Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece,
A past, vamp'd, future, old, reviv'd, new piece,
‘Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespear, and Corneille,
Can make a Cibber, Tibbald, or Ozell.
Dunciad 2.13-16:
Not with more glee, by hands Pontific crown'd,
With scarlet hands wide-waving circled round,
Rome in her Capitol saw Querno sit,
Thron'd on sev'n hills, the Antichrist of wit.
32 Dunciad 2.231-234:
Improve we these. Three Cat-calls be the bribe
Of him, whose chatt’ring shames the Monkey tribe:
And his this Drum, whose hoarse heroic base
Drowns the loud Clarion of the braying Ass.
33 Dunciad 2.35-40:
A Poet's form she plac'd before their eyes,
And bade the nimblest racer seize the prize;
No meagre, muse-rid mope, adust and thin,
In a dun night-gown of his own loose skin;
But such a bulk as no twelve bards could raise,
Twelve starv’ling bards of these degen’rate days.
34 sic
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 8:]
35 Essay on criticism 364-365:
‘Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 8, running through page 9:]
36 We have seen no orthoepist — not even Worcester — that supports Poe in making three syllables of starveling. Pope, moreover, originally wrote starving; so that starveling may pass as an equal substitution.
The apostrophes wherewithal eighteenth-century printers peppered [page 9:] heroic verse are most simply explained as first aid to the man attempting to read the verses aloud at sight; alerted by an apostrophe, he could run two syllables together and avoid ending the line in an inglorious jumble of false quantities.
37 The American Monthly Magazine N.S. 2:214 makes no mention of Pope.
The mind that created such a charming stanza as that above [Willis, Melanie, pp. 16-17, the stanza beginning “Yet gaily o’er Egeria's fount”], might toil in vain for years and never produce a line of such sonorous grandeur as the following. Mark the recoil!
“Luke's iron crown and Damien's bed of steel” —
38 The line is from Oliver Goldsmith's The traveller. We quote the last four lines from the edition of 1770 (London: Carnan & Newbery), p. 23; the last couplet was contributed by Samuel Johnson.
The lifted ax, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel, [sic Damien's]
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all our own.
39 The pronunciation of Damiens as an English word (with an Irish accent?) is uncertain, biographical dictionaries pronouncing it, if at all, as French only. Jones pronounces Damien in two syllables (more frequent) and three syllables (less frequent).
40 Bryant, ‘The ages” Poems, p. 14, stanza 3:
Peace to the just man's memory, — let it grow
Greener with years, and blossom through the flight
Of ages; let the mimic canvass show
His calm benevolent features; let the light
Stream on his deeds of love, that shunned the sight
Of all but heaven, and, in the book of fame,
The glorious record of his virtues write,
And hold it up to men, and bid them claim
A palm like his, and catch from him the hallowed flame.
41 Ibid., p. 15, stanza 5:
Does prodigal Autumn, to our age, deny
The plenty that once swelled beneath his sober eye?
42 Ibid., stanza 6:
Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth
In her fair page; see, every season brings
New change, to her, of everlasting youth;
Still the green soil, with joyous living things,
Swarms, the wide air is full of joyous wings,
And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep
Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings
The restless surge.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 9, running to the bottom of page 10:]
43 Ibid., stanza 7:
Will then the merciful One, who stamped our race
With his own image, and who gave them sway
O’er earth, and the glad dwellers on her face,
Now that our flourishing nations far away
Are spread, where’er the moist earth drinks the day, [page 10:]
Forget the ancient care that taught and nursed
His latest offspring?
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 10:]
44 Bryant, ‘The ages” Poems, p. 16, stanza 8:
He who has tamed the elements, shall not live
The slave of his own passions; he whose eye
Unwinds the eternal dances of the sky,
And in the abyss of brightness dares to span
The sun's broad circle, rising yet more high,
In God's magnificent works his will shall scan —
And love and peace shall make their paradise with man.
45 Ibid., pp. 18-19, stanza 15:
And virtue cannot dwell with slaves, nor reign
O’er those who cower to take a tyrant's yoke;
She left the down-tred nations in disdain,
And flew to Greece, when liberty awoke,
New-born, amid those beautiful vales, and broke
Sceptre and chain with her fair youthful hands,
As the rock shivers in the thunder-stroke.
46 Ibid., p. 19, stanza 16:
Oh, Greece” thy flourishing cities were a spoil
Unto each other; thy hard hand oppressed
And crushed the helpless; thou didst make thy soil
Drunk with the blood of those that loved thee best;
And thou didst drive, from thy unnatural breast,
Thy just and brave to die in distant climes;
Earth shuddered at thy deeds, and sighed for rest
From thine abominations; after times
That yet shall read thy tale, will tremble at thy crimes.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 20, stanza 18:
Yet her degenerate children sold the crown
Of earth's wide kingdoms to a line of slaves;
Guilt reigned, and wo with guilt, and plagues came down,
Till the north broke its floodgates, and the waves
Whelmed the degraded race, and weltered o’er their graves.
49 Ibid., p. 22, stanza 24:
The spirit of that day is still awake,
And spreads himself, and shall not sleep again;
But through the idle mesh of power shall break,
Like billows o’er the Asian monarch's chain;
Till men are filled with him, and feel how vain,
Instead of the pure heart and innocent hands,
Are all the proud and pompous modes to gain
The smile of heaven; — till a new age expands
Its white and holy wings above the peaceful lands.
50 Ibid., pp. 26-27, stanza 35:
But thou, my country, thou shalt never fall,
But with thy children — thy maternal care,
Thy lavish love, thy blessings showered on all —
These are thy fetters — seas and stormy air
Are the wide barrier of thy borders, where,
Among thy gallant sons that guard thee well,
Thou laugh'st at enemies: who shall then declare
The date of thy deep. founded strength, or tell
How happy, in thy lap, the sons of men shall dwell?
51 Ibid., p. 26, stanza 33:
Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant's unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race:
Far, like the comet's ray through infinite space,
Stretches the long untravelled path of light
Into the depths of ages: we may trace,
Distant, the brightening glory of its flight,
Till the receding rays are lost to human sight.
52 Ibid., p. 25, stanza 32:
Look now abroad — another race has filled
These populous borders — wide the wood recedes,
And towns shoot up, and fertile realms are tilled;
The land is full of harvests and green meads;
Streams numberless, that many a fountain feeds,
Shine, disembowered, and give to sun and breeze
Their virgin waters; the full region leads
New colonies forth, that toward the western seas
Spread, like a rapid flame among the autumnal trees.
53 Ibid., pp. 22-23, stanza 25:
For look again on the past years; — behold,
Flown, like the nightmare's hideous shapes, away,
Full many a horrible worship, that, of old,
Held, o’er the shuddering realms, unquestioned sway:
See crimes that feared not once the eye of day,
Rooted from men, without a name or place:
See nations blotted out from earth, to pay
The forfeit of deep guilt; — with glad embrace
The fair disburdened lands welcome a nobler race.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 12:]
54 See Appendix 5.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 12, continuing on page 13:]
55 Paradise lost 12.479-502:
But say, if our deliverer up to Heav’n
Must reascend, what will betide the few
His faithful, left among th’ unfaithful herd,
The enemies of truth; who then shall guide
His people, who defend? will they not deale
Wors with his followers then with him they dealt?
Be sure they will, said th’ Angel; but from Heav’n
The promise of the Father, who shall dwell
His Spirit within them, and the Law of Faith
Working through love, upon thir hearts shall write, [page 13:]
To guide them in all truth, and also arme
With spiritual Armour, able to resist
Satans assaults, and quench his fierie darts,
What can man do against them, not affraid,
Though to the death, against such cruelties
With inward consolations recompenc’t,
And oft supported so as shall amaze
Thir proudest persecuters; for the Spirit
Powrd first on his Apostles, whom he sends
To evangelize the Nations, then on all
Baptiz'd, shall them with wondrous gifts endue
To speak all Tongues, and do all Miracles,
As did thir Lord before them.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 13:]
56 See note 40 above.
57 Bryant, ‘The ages” Poems ‘ p. 16, stanza 9:
Sit at the foot of history — through the night
Of years the steps of virtue she shall trace,
And show the earlier ages, where her sight
Can pierce the eternal shadows o’er their face; —
When, from the genial cradle of our race,
Went forth the tribes of men, their pleasant lot
To choose, where palm-groves cooled their dwelling-place,
Or freshening rivers ran; and there forgot
The truth of heaven, and kneeled to gods that heard them not.
58 Two inadvertent decasyllables.
59 The ages” Poems ‘ p. 17, stanza 10:
The sick, untended then,
Languished in the damp shade and died afar from men.
A more natural scansion of this alexandrine is two trochees and four iambi; for the use of two consecutive trochees see p. 119, notes 75, 77.
60 Ibid., stanza 12:
A boundless sea of blood, and the wild air
Moans with the crimson surges that entomb
Cities and bannered armies; forms that wear
The kingly circlet, rise, amid the gloom,
O'er the dark wave, and straight are swallowed in its womb.
The line as Bryant printed it, with a comma after blood, we scan with three iambi, a trochee, and an iambus.
61 See note 49 above. The scansion of this line rests on the quantity of heaven. The line as Poe printed it, with a comma after heaven, we read with heaven disyllabic, and scan with three iambi, an anapaest, and an iambus. The line as Bryant printed it, where the semicolon and dash after heaven enforce a caesural pause, we read with heaven monosyllabic, and scan with two iambi, a trochee, and two iambi.
For the prosody of heaven, cf. Poe, ‘Alciphron, a poem, by Thomas Moore’, Harrison 10:69: ‘He [Moore] also frequently draws out the word Heaven into two syllables — a protraction which it never will support.’
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 15:]
62 For the usage complained of in Byron, see Appendix 4. Poe condemned this licence wherever he found it, even in the course of a favourable criticism of Tom Moore: see ‘Alciphron” cited in note 61 above.
63 Bryant, ‘The ages” Poems, p. 15:
Look on this beautiful world, and read the truth
In her fair page; see, every season brings
New change, to her, of everlasting youth;
Still the green soil, with joyous living things,
Swarms, the wide air is full of joyous wings,
And myriads, still, are happy in the sleep
Of ocean's azure gulfs, and where he flings
The restless surge. Eternal Love doth keep
In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep.
64 The enjambment at things Swarms, where Poe's punctuation is preferable to Bryant's, is very strong.
65 ‘The ages’, Poems, p. 23, stanza 27:
Late, from this western shore, that morning chased
The deep and ancient night, that threw its shroud
O’er the green land of groves, the beautiful waste,
Nurse of full streams, and lifter up of proud
Sky-mingling mountains that o’erlook the cloud.
66 Ibid., p. 22, stanza 23:
At last the earthquake came — the shock, that hurled
To dust, in many fragments, dashed and strown,
The throne, whose roots were in another world,
And whose far-stretching shadow awed our own.
67 Ibid., p. 24, stanza 28:
And where his willing waves yon bright blue bay
Sends up, to kiss his decorated brim,
And cradles, in his soft embrace, the gay
Young group of grassy islands born of him,
And crowding nigh, or in the distance dim,
Like the white throng of sails, that bear or bring
The commerce of the world; — with tawny limb,
And belt and beads in sunlight glistening,
The savage urged his skiff like wild bird on the wing.
68 Poems, pp. 28-30.
69 In fact, three feet and five.
70 To the past” Poems, p. 28:
Far in thy realm withdrawn
Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom, [page 17:]
And glorious ages gone
Lie deep within the shadow of thy womb.
71 ‘To the past” Poems, p. 29, vv. 17-20.
72 Poems, pp. 44-45.
73 sic
74 ‘The old man's funeral” Poems, p. 44:
Ye sigh not when the sun, his course fulfilled,
His glorious course, rejoicing earth and sky,
In the soft evening, when the winds are stilled,
Sinks where his islands of refreshment lie,
And leaves the smile of his departure, spread
O’er the warm-coloured heaven and ruddy mountain head.
75 Ibid., p. 45 :
No chronic tortures racked his aged limb,
For luxury and sloth had nourished none for him.
If Poe had composed these verses, he would have regaled us with a footnote explaining chronic tortures as tortures inflicted by the hand of Χρονος. Cf. the footnotes to history, music, and purification, in ‘The colloquy of Monos and Una” Harrison 4:204-205.
76 Bryant, Poems, pp. 46-49.
77 It has exactly 90 verses.
78 Cf. D.C.L. [i.e. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], The new belfry at Christ Church, Oxford, Oxford: James Parker, 1872, chapter 4, page 11. Reprinted in The Lewis Carroll picture book, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899, pp. 106-107.
79 Bryant, ‘The rivulet’, Poems, p. 46:
This little rill that, from the springs
Of yonder grove, its current brings,
Plays on the slope a while, and then
Goes prattling into groves again,
Oft to its warbling waters drew
My little feet, when life was new.
80 Poems, pp. 50-54.
81 An inadvertent decasyllable. Admire, without emulating, the mechanic art, illustrated by the commas around altogether, of punctuating a compliment into a sneer. For Poe's punctuation see Killis Campbell, ed., The poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Russell & Russell, 1962, p. xxxiii: [page 18:]
Poe is traditionally supposed to have been extremely careful about his pointing; but in reality, though he had certain mannerisms (as the use, in his early years, of the dash as a point of all work, and, in later years, of the comma for rhetorical emphasis), he was both inconsistent and at times exceedingly reckless with his pointing [two citations omitted].
Having seen Poe repunctuate Bryant with occasional effect, but with no apparent system, we split the difference between extremely careful and exceedingly reckless, and assert that Poe knew that English punctuation was a weapon of precision, but seldom availed himself of it.
82 Bryant, ‘The prairies’, Poems, p. 51, vv. 7-10:
The great heavens
Seem to stoop down upon the scene in love, —
A nearer vault, and of a tenderer hue,
Than that which bends above the eastern hills.
83 Ibid., pp. 51-52:
All day this desert murmured with their toils,
Till twilight blushed and lovers walked, and wooed [page 19:]
In a forgotten language, and old tunes, form,
From instruments of unremembered
Gave the soft winds a voice.
84 Ibid., pp. 53-54:
The bee,
A more adventurous colonist than man,
With whom he came across the eastern deep,
Fills the savannas with his murmurings,
And hides his sweets, as in the golden age,
Within the hollow oak. I listen long
To his domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts.
85 Ibid., p. 50, vv. 15-23:
Breezes of the South!
Who toss the golden and the flame-like flowers,
And pass the prairie-hawk that, poised on high,
Flaps his broad wings, yet moves not — ye have played
Among the palms of Mexico and vines
Of Texas, and have crisped the limpid brooks
That from the fountains of Sonora glide
Into the calm Pacific — have ye fanned
A nobler or a lovelier scene than this?
86 sic
87 ‘The prairies” Poems, p. 50, vv. 4-6: I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness.
88 Ibid., p. 51, vv. 4-7.
89 Poems, pp. 55-58.
90 It contains 107 decasyllables.9x Earth” Poems, p. 55:
A midnight black with clouds is in the sky;
I seem to feel, upon my limbs, the weight
Of its vast brooding shadow.
92 [Edward Young], The complaint: or, night-thoughts on life, death, & immortality, 5. ed., London: R. Dodsley, 1743. We do not conjecture what passage Poe had in mind; the diction in the following [Night the Second, pp. 42-43 of the edition cited] will bear comparison with Bryant.
Is this our Duty, Wisdom, Glory, Gain?
(These Heaven benign in vital Union binds)
And sport we like the Natives of the Bough,
When vernal Suns inspire? Amusement reigns
Man's great Demand: To trifle is to live:
And is it then a Trifle, too, to die? ——
Thou say'st I preach, Lorenzo! ‘Tis contest.
What, if for once, I preach thee quite awake?
Who wants Amusement in the Flame of Battle?
Is it not treason, to the Soul immortal,
Her Foes in Arms, Eternity the prize?
Will Toys amuse, when Med’cines cannot cure?
When Spirits ebb, when Life's inchanting Scenes [page 21:]
Their Lustre lose, and lessen in our Sight,
(As Lands, and Cities with their glitt’ring Spires,
To the poor shatter'd Bark, by sudden Storm
Thrown off to Sea, and soon to perish there)
Will Toys amuse? — No: Thrones will then be Toys,
And Earth and Skies seem Dust upon the Scale.
93 Bryant, ‘ Earth’ Poems, p. 55, vv. 8-18:
No sound of life is heard, no village hum,
Nor measured tramp of footstep in the path,
Nor rush of wing, while, on the breast of Earth,
I lie and listen to her mighty voice:
A voice of many tones — sent up from streams
That wander through the gloom, from woods unseen,
Swayed by the sweeping of the tides of air,
From rocky chasms where darkness dwells all day,
And hollows of the great invisible hills,
And sands that edge the ocean, stretching far
Into the night — a melancholy sound!
94 Ibid., p. 56, vv. 18-30:
Ha! how the murmur deepens! I perceive
And tremble at its dreadful import. Earth
Uplifts a general cry for guilt and wrong,
And Heaven is listening. The forgotten graves
Of the heart-broken utter forth their plaint.
The dust of her who loved and was betrayed,
And him who died neglected in his age;
The sepulchres of those who for mankind
Laboured, and earned the recompense of scorn;
Ashes of martyrs for the truth, and bones
Of those who, in the strife for Liberty,
Were beaten down, their corses given to dogs,
Their names to infamy, all find a voice.
95 Ibid., vv. 8-12:
Or haply dost thou grieve for those that die —
For living things that trod a while thy face,
The love of thee and heaven — and now they sleep
Mixed with the shapeless dust on which thy herds Trample and graze?
96 ‘To the Apennines” Poems, pp. 59-60.
97 Ibid., p. 60, vv. 21-26:
In you the heart that sighs for freedom seeks
Her image; there the winds no barrier know,
Clouds come and rest and leave your fairy peaks;
While even the immaterial Mind, below,
And Thought, her winged offspring, chained by power,
Pine silently for the redeeming hour.
98 Poems, pp. 61-62.
99 Poems, pp. 63-64.
1 Ibid., p. 64, vv. 11-15:
That death-stain on the vernal sward
Hallowed to freedom all the shore; [page 23:]
In fragments fell the yoke abhorred —
The footstep of a foreign lord
Profaned the soil no more.
[These footnotes appear at the bottom of page 23:]
2 Bryant, Poems, pp. 65-66.
3 Ibid., p. 6 6:
But ye, who for the living lost
That agony in secret bear,
Who shall with soothing words accost
The strength of your despair?
Grief for your sake is scorn for them
Whom ye lament and all condemn:
And o’er the world of spirits lies
A gloom from which ye turn your eyes.
4 Ibid., p. 65:
Matron! the children of whose love,
Each to his grave, in youth have passed,
And now the mould is heaped above
The dearest and the last!
5 Poems, pp. 67-69.
6 Ibid., p. 67:
The summer morn is bright and fresh, the birds are darting by,
As if they loved to breast the breeze that sweeps the cool clear sky;
Young Albert, in the forest's edge, has heard a rustling sound
An arrow slightly strikes his hand and falls upon the ground.
7 Ibid., pp. 67-68:
“Thou art a flatterer like the rest, but wouldst thou take with me
A day of hunting in the wilds, beneath the greenwood tree,
I know where most the pheasants feed, and where the red-deer herd,
And thou shouldst chase the nobler game, and I bring down the bird.”
8 Ibid., p. 69, vv. 9-12:
And whether famished evening wolves had mangled Albert so,
Or that strange dame so gay and fair were some mysterious foe,
Or whether to that forest lodge, beyond the mountains blue,
He went to dwell with her, the friends who mourned him never knew.
9 Poems, pp. 70-72.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 23, continued on page 25:]
10 Ibid., p. 70, vv. 7-18:
All dim in haze the mountains lay,
With dimmer vales between;
And rivers glimmered on their way,
By forests, faintly seen;
While ever rose a murmuring sound,
From brooks below and bees around.
He listened, till he seemed to hear
A strain, so soft and low,
That whether in the mind or ear
The listener scarce might know.
With such a tone, so sweet and mild,
The watching mother lulls her child.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 25:]
11 Bryant, Poems, pp. 7 3-7 7 ‘
12 Ibid., p. 76, vv. 15-26:
They eye him not as they pass along,
But his hair stands up with dread,
When he feels that he moves with that phantom throng,
Till those icy turrets are over his head,
And the torrent's roar as they enter seems
Like a drowsy murmur heard in dreams.
The glittering threshold is scarcely passed,
When there gathers and wraps him round
A thick white twilight, sullen and vast,
In which there is neither form nor sound;
The phantom, the glory, vanish all,
With the dying voice of the waterfall.
13 Poe spells anapest in this review; anapaest (a form more according with etymology) in later essays. The Arch Duchess Ana-Pest (“King Pest” Harrison 2:180) is so entitled paronomasias gratia.
14 Bryant, Poems, pp. 78-80.
15 sic no hyphen.
16 Poems, pp. 81-82.
17 Ibid., p. 81:
Where olive leaves were twinkling in every wind that blew,
There sat beneath the pleasant shade a damsel of Peru.
18 Ibid., p. 81, vv. 15-18:
Thou look'st in vain, sweet maiden, the sharpest sight would fail,
To spy a sign of human life abroad in all the vale;
For the noon is coming on, and the sunbeams fiercely beat,
And the silent hills and forest-tops seem reeling in the heat.
19 ‘A song of Pitcairn's Island’, Poems, pp. 83-84.
20 Ibid., p. 84, vv. 6-14:
Come talk of Europe's maids with me,
Whose necks and cheeks, they tell,
Outshine the beauty of the sea,
White foam and crimson shell.
I’ll shape like theirs my simple dress,
And bind like them each jetty tress,
A sight to please thee well:
And for my dusky brow will braid
A bonnet like an English maid.
21 There are five stanzas.
22 Rizpah” Poems ‘ pp. 85-88. Bryant prefixes, as argument, 2 Samuel 12.9-10.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 26, continuing to page 27:]
23 Bryant, ‘Rizpah’, Poems ‘ p. 85, vv. 7-14:
And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all
That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,
All wasted with watching and famine now,
And scorched by the sun her haggard brow,
Sat, mournfully guarding their corpses there,
And murmured a strange and solemn air;
The low, heart-broken, and wailing strain
Of a mother that mourns her children slain.
It is only collation of the sentence as a whole that enables us to reject the scansion in decasyllables
And Riz | pah, once | the love | liest | of all |
That bloomed | and smi | led in | the court | of Saul | [page 27:]
with smiled disyllabic. Having recognized the general flow as four-footed ChristabeI metre, we must scan
And Riz | pah, once | the love | liest of all |
That bloomed | and smiled | in the court | of Saul | .
The last four syllables | liest of all | form, in Poe's later terminology (p. 134, below) a quick iambus, a foot whose existence Poe denied, whose future he questioned, and whose utility he condemned; and, in admitting the foot to save Bryant's scansion, we acknowledge that a foot so wrenched would have shocked even Coleridge.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 27:]
24 Poems, pp. 89-91: 48 iambic verses, in length
25 Poems, pp. 92-93: 42 iambic verses, in length
26 Poems, p. [94].
27 Ibid.:
Stern rites and sad, shall Greece ordain
To keep that day, along her shore,
Till the last link of slavery's chain
Is shivered, to be worn no more.
28 Poems, pp. 102-106.
29 Ibid., p. 103, vv. 23-26:
On each side
The fields swell upward to the hills; beyond,
Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven.
30 ‘Forest hymn’, Poems, p. 41, vv. 3-9:
This mighty oak —
By whose immoveable stem I stand and seem
Almost annihilated — not a prince,
In all that proud old world beyond the deep,
E’er wore his crown as loftily as he
Wears the green coronal of leaves with which
Thy hand has graced him.
31 ‘Monument mountain” Poems, pp. 103-104:
There is a tale about these gray old rocks,
A sad tradition of unhappy love,
And sorrows borne and ended, long ago,
When over these fair vales the savage sought
His game in the thick woods.
32 Ibid., p. 104, vv. 4-6:
About her cabin door
The wide old woods resounded with her song
And fairy laughter all the summer day.
33 Ibid., vv. 12-17:
Then her eye lost its lustre, and her step
Its lightness, and the gray old men that passed
Her dwelling, wondered that they heard no more
The accustomed song and laugh of her, whose looks
Were like the cheerful smile of Spring, they said
Upon the Winter of their age.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 28:]
34 Bryant, ‘Forest hymn’, Poems, p. 39, vv. 8-16:
For his simple heart
Might not resist the sacred influences,
Which, from the stilly twilight of the place,
And from the gray old trunks that high in heaven
Mingled their mossy boughs, and from the sound
Of the invisible breath that swayed at once
All their green tops, stole over him, and bowed
His spirit with the thought of boundless power
And inaccessible majesty.
35 ‘Monument mountain’, Poems, p. 105, vv. 14-20:
About the cliffs
Lay garlands, ears of maize, and shaggy skins
Of wolf and bear, the offerings of the tribe
[The following footnotes appear on page 29:]
Here made to the Great Spirit, for they deemed,
Like worshippers, of the elder time, that God
Doth walk on the high places and affect
The earth-o’erlooking mountains.
36 Milton, Comus, vv. 384-391:
Tis most true
That musing meditation most affects
The pensive secrecy of desert cell,
Far from the cheerfull haunt of men, and herds,
And sits as safe as in a Senat house,
For who would rob a Hermit of his Weeds,
His few Books, or his Beads, or Maple Dish,
Or do his gray hairs any violence?
37 Bryant, Poems, pp. 161-162.
38 Ibid.:
For me, I lie
Languidly in the shade, where the thick turf,
Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun,
Retains some freshness, and I woo the wind
That still delays its coming.
39 Cf. p. 13, note 59.
40 “Summer wind” Poems, p. 161, vv. 5-8:
All is silent, save the faint
And interrupted murmur of the bee,
Settling on the sick flowers, and then again
Instantly on the wing.
41 Ibid., p. 162, vv. 17-23:
All the green herbs
Are stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers,
By the road-side and the borders of the brook,
Nod gaily to each other; glossy leaves
Are twinkling in the sun, as if the dew
Were on them yet, and silver waters break
Into small waves and sparkle as he comes.
42 Poe's omission of the comma after brook leads the sleepy reader to conclude that borders nod to each other.
43 Bryant, Poems,
44 Ibid., p. 163, the vv. 13-16:
My steps are not alone
In these bright walks; the sweet southwest, at play,
Flies, rustling, where the painted leaves are strown
Along the winding way.
45 Ibid. ‘ p. 164, vv. 13-16:
But ‘neath yon crimson tree,
Lover to listening maid might breathe his flame,
Nor mark, within its roseate canopy,
Her blush of maiden shame.
46 Ibid., p. 163, vv. 5-8:
The mountains that infold,
In their wide sweep, the coloured landscape round,
Seem groups of giant kings, in purple and gold,
That guard the enchanted ground.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 31:]
47 For a portentous use of vegetable sentience, see ‘The fall of the house of Usher” Harrison 3:286; for a humorous discussion, see Cyrano de Bergerac, jL’Ame du chou” Histoire comique des etat et empire de la Lune et du Soleil, Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1962, pp. 87-91.
48 Bryant, ‘The disinterred warrior” Poems, pp. 172-173.
49 Ibid., p. 172, vv. 17-20.
50 The poem is printed in five stanzas of eight lines each: but every quatrain terminates with a full stop.
51 Poems, pp. 174-175: four stanzas of eight verses, 8.6.8.6.8.8.8.8
52 Ibid., p. 175:
And Greece, decayed, destroyed, doth see
Her youth renewed in such as thee;
A shoot of that old vine that made
The nations silent in its shade.
53 Poems, p. [182].
54 The metre is familiar to all who have sung Tom Moore's By Bendef meer's stream, or his ‘Come rest in this bosom” (Harrison 14:282).
55 Bryant, Poems, pp. 187-189. The spelling of this title was too much for Harper & Bros.’ printer: the running heads on pages 188-189 are correct, but the table of contents, p. xi, reads Mosquito.
56 “A meditation on Rhode Island Coal” Poems, pp. 209-212.
57 Poems, pp. [191]-194. The conjunction alluded to is that of 1826 July 31 20h 39m.
58 See Appendix 3.
59 Poems, pp., 195-197.
60 Ibid., p. 196.
61 Poems, p. [205].
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 32:]
62 Bryant, ‘Innocent child and snow-white flower” Poems, p. [205], vv. 5-8:
White as those leaves, just blown apart,
Are the folds of thy own young heart;
Guilty passion and cankering care
Never have left their traces there.
The verse italicized by Poe is not visibly short. We scan
white as those | leaves just | blown a | part
are the | folds of thy | own young | heart | , [page 33:]
in trochaic lines of three feet and a half. Poe, to find a short line, may have ignored the sound of the couplet, wrenching it into iambic-anapaestic lines of four feet and scanning
white as | those leaves | just blown | apart | are the folds | of thy own | young heart | .
63 Ibid., vv. 13-16:
Throw it aside in thy weary hour,
Throw to the ground the fair white flower, Yet, as thy tender years depart,
Keep that white and innocent heart.
64 Poems, p. [177].
65 Ibid.:
The bitter cup they mingled, strengthened thee
For the great work to set thy country free.
66 Poems, p. [206].
67 Ibid., vv. 5-14:
Look forth upon the earth — her thousand plants
Are smitten, even the dark sun-loving maize
Faints in the field beneath the torrid blaze;
The herd beside the shaded fountain pants;
For life is driven from all the landscape brown;
The bird has sought his tree, the snake his den,
The trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men
Drop by the sun-stroke in the populous town;
As if the Day of Fire had dawned and sent
Its deadly breath into the firmament.
68 Poems, p. [207].
69 Ibid., vv. 9-14:
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.
70 ‘Sonnet — to Cole, the painter departing for Europe’, Poems, p. 217.
71 Ibid., vv. 9-12:
Fair scenes shall greet thee where thou goest — fair,
But different — everywhere the trace of men,
Paths, homes, graves, ruins, from the lowest glen
To where life shrinks from the fierce Alpine air.
72 Poems, p. 235.
73 Poems, p. [208]
74 Ibid., vv., 5-8:
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks where summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue Gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 34:]
75 Bryant, ‘November’, Poems, p. [208], vv. 13-14:
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.
76 Poems, p. 274, note 177: ‘The sonnets in this collection are rather poems in fourteen lines than sonnets.’
Capel Lofft, Laura: or an anthology of sonnets, (on the Petrarcan model,) and elegiac quatorzains: English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German; original and translated; great part never before publisht. With a preface, critical and [page 35:] biographic; notes, and index, London: B. & R. Crosby, 1814, vol. 1, pp. iii-xxviii, discourses alleged rules of the sonnet to the extent of some five thousand words. We quote his opening:
Having said thus much of the Fame [Laura] of this Publication, I wish to speak more in the Detail of that Genus of Poetry of which it is compos'd — SONNETS and QUATORZAINS.
These agree in one general Character; — that of being poems limited to fourteen lines. In every other which has respect to their Form they are essentially different.
The SONNET is a perfect LYRIC Composition: consisting of a POEMATIUM, or small Poem, of a determinate Length, divided into two SYSTEMS: the one of EIGHT, the other of SIX verses: the major System consisting of a double QUADERNARIO, or Quatrain, of two Rhimes twice repeated in each Division; the minor of a double TERZINO, Ternary, or TERZETTE, interwoven by having one line in each of its Divisions which has a correspondent line rhiming to it in the other.
77 Bryant, Poems, p. [256]:
Ay, thou art for the grave; thy glances shine
Too brightly to shine long; another Spring
Shall deck her for men's eyes, — but not for thine —
Sealed in a sleep which knows no wakening.
The fields for thee have no medicinal leaf,
And the vexed ore no mineral of power;
And they who love thee wait in anxious grief
Till the slow plague shall bring the fatal hour.
Glide slowly to thy rest then; Death should come
Gently, to one of gentle mould like thee,
As light winds wandering through groves of bloom
Detach the delicate blossom from the tree.
Close thy sweet eyes, calmly, and without pain;
And we will trust in God to see thee yet again.
78 Poems, pp. 221-222.
79 Ibid,, p. 222 :
Whose sons at length have heard the call that comes
From the old battle-fields and tombs,
And risen, and drawn the sword, and on the foe
Have dealt the swift and desperate blow,
And the Othman power is cloven, and the stroke
Has touched its chains, and they are broke.
80 Bryant's 24 lines are a free version of vv. 41-60 (beginning
‘O tu siempre dichosa pecadora’) of Leonardo's tcancion a S. Maria Magdalena’ (beginning tAquella pecadora, que solia’) in Rimas de Lupercio, i del doctor Bartolome Leonardo de Argensola, Zaragoza, 1634, pp. 389-392.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 35, and continuing at the bottom of page 37:]
81 Bryant, ‘Song (from the Spanish of Iglesias)” Poems, pp. 148-149. Translated from Josef Iglesias lacion amorosa” Poesias postumas, de la Casa, ‘ Letrilla X: Simui* Barcelona, 1820, 1:12:
|
Alexis calls me cruel; The rifted crags that hold The gathered ice of winter, He says, are not more cold. [page 37:]
When even the very blossoms Around the fountain's brim, And forest walks, can witness The love I bear to him.
I would that I could utter My feelings without shame; And tell him how I love him, Nor wrong my virgin fame.
Alas! to seize the moment When heart inclines to heart, And press a suit with passion, Is not a woman's part.
If man comes not to gather The roses where they stand, They fade among their foliage; They cannot seek his hand. |
Mi Zagal mi llama Grosera amadora; Mas fria a sus ruegos, Que la helada roca: [page 37:]
Quando hasta las flores La llama no ignoran De Amor, en que me ardo Turbada y medrosa.
Bien quisiera serie Rumana en el hora, Sin darle yo cuenta De mi aficion loca.
Mas ser atrevido, Y hallar sazon propia De veneer recatos, Solo al varon toca.
Que si él entre espinas No la busca y corta; De suyo a su mano No se ha de ir la rosa. |
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 37:]
82 Bryant, ‘To a waterfowl” Poems, pp. 266-267.
83 Ibid,, p. 266:
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way!
84 Two inadvertent decasyllables.
85 Ibid., p. 267:
Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.
He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
86 Ibid., p. 266 ‘ vv. 13-16:
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast, —
The desert and illimitable air, —
Lone wandering, but not lost.
87 “Forest hymn” Poems ‘ pp. 39-43.
88 Ibid,, p. 40, vv. 16-22 :
But thou art here — thou fill'st
The solitude. Thou art in the soft winds,
That run along the summit of these trees
In music; — thou art in the cooler breath
That from the inmost darkness of the place,
Comes, scarcely felt; — the barky trunks, the ground,
The fresh moist ground, are all instinct with thee.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 38:]
89 Bryant, ‘Forest hymn” Poems, p. 43:
Oh, from these sterner aspects of thy face
Spare me and mine, nor let us need the wrath
Of the mad unchained elements to teach
Who rules them. Be it ours to meditate
In these calm shades thy milder majesty,
And to the beautiful order of thy works,
Learn to conform the order of our lives.
90 Two inadvertent decasyllables.
91 If we scan conform as a spondee, the extra mora will balance the extra syllable in beautiful.
92 Poems, pp. 42-43:
Oh, God! when thou
Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire
The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill,
With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the woods
And drowns the villages; when, at thy call,
Uprises the great deep and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities — who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of thy power,
His pride, and lays his strifes and follies by?
93 Here Poe is attempting to score against Bryant by neglecting, like Wordsworth, the difference between verse and prose. A prose writer would surely omit the articles; a prose writer might have written fright, or more likely frighten — today the verb scare is sufficiently colloquial that fright would pass in verse — : but a prose writer would also slough Bryant's inversions and line- filling epithets. Let us attempt a prose version of these lines, while retaining the elevated diction of an apostrophe:
O God! when thou frightenest the world with tempests, inflamest the heavens with thunderbolts, or pourest the rains of heaven into the whirlwind that uproots woods and drowns villages; when the Sea, at thy call, arises, rushes upon the continent, and drowns its cities: at the sight of these awful signs of thy power, who, Lord, shall not forget his pride, and lay aside his quarrels and follies?
That is not first-rate prose; but we have no fear of any body's mistaking it for verse.
94 Bryant, Poems ‘ pp. 37-38.
95 Ibid.:
Go, rock the little wood-bird in his nest,
Curl the still waters, bright with stars, and rouse
The wide old wood from his majestic rest,
Summoning from the innumerable boughs
The strange, deep harmonies that haunt his breast;
Pleasant shall be thy way where meekly bows
The abutting flower, and darkling waters pass,
And ‘twixt the o’ershadowing branches and the grass.
96 Ibid., p. 38:
Go — but the circle of eternal change,
Which is the life of nature, shall restore,
With sounds and scents from all thy mighty range,
Thee to thy birthplace of the deep once more;
Sweet colours in the sea-air, sweet and strange,
Shall tell the home-sick mariner of the shore;
And, listening to thy murmur, he shall deem
He hears the rustling leaf and running stream.
97 Poems, pp. 31-33. It has 81 verses.
[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 40, running to page 41:]
98 Ibid., p. 31:
To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile [page 41:]
And eloquence or beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart; —
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around —
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air, —
Comes a still voice — Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was hid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image.
99 Ibid., pp. 32-33:
All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. — Take the wings
Of morning — and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregan, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings — yet — the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone.
Today when Bryant is out of print it may be worth recalling that ‘where rolls the Oregan’ has been a household word: so [Finley Peter Dunne], ‘The decline of national feeling” Mr. Dooley in the hearts of his countrymen, Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899, pp. 223-224.
1 Bryant, Poems, p. 33, vv. 20-28:
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, that moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
2 Ibid., p. 32, vv. 14-22. The italics are Poe's.
3 Poems, p. 171:
Oh fairest of the rural maids!
Thy birth was in the forest shades;
Green boughs, and glimpses of the sky,
Were all that met thy infant eye.
Thy sports, thy wanderings, when a child
Were ever in the sylvan wild;
And all the beauty of the place
Is in thy heart and on thy face.
The twilight of the trees and rocks
Is in the light shade of thy locks; [page 43:]
Thy step is as the wind, that weaves
Its playful way among the leaves.
Thine eyes are springs, in whose serene
And silent waters heaven is seen;
Their lashes are the herbs that look
On their young figures in the brook.
The forest depths, by foot impressed,
Are not more sinless than thy breast;
The holy peace, that fills the air
Of those calm solitudes, is there.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 43:]
4 Cf. Joseph Battell, Ellen, Middlebury (Vermont), 1903, 1:8-9.
5 sic
6 A prolepsis common among writers who visualize the printed page when penning their manuscript.
7 John Wilson, alias Christopher North, 1785-1854.
[The following footnotes appear at the bottom of page 44:]
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Notes:
None.
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[S:0 - JAG68, 1968] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - EAP: The Rationale of Verse — a preliminary edition (Greenwood)