Part 4 (2/2)
”While smoking d.i.c.k doth boil the sap.”
I was thinking of _Spring Gladness_, and _The Coming of Phoebe_,
”When buckets s.h.i.+ne 'gainst maple trees And drop by drop the sap doth flow, When days are warm, but nights do freeze, And deep in woods lie drifts of snow, When cattle low and fret in stall, Then morning brings the phoebe's call, 'Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe'.”
As we came down to the roadway that leads from the old farm to Woodchuck Lodge, Mr. Burroughs pointed out to us a junco's nest just outside the road. This nest had afforded him much pleasure during his present stay up at Roxbury, as he saw it two or four times a day, as he pa.s.sed by on his way to his brother's home for milk. On the crest of the hill between the two houses--the old home and Woodchuck Lodge--I stopped and looked for several moments at the place of the naturalist's birth, and at the farm, with all the beautiful meadows and pastures, for I knew that I would not see them again soon. When it was told me that all these meadows and woods and stone walls, look now as they did sixty and more years ago, I could understand how a country lad, born and reared among such scenes, could grow into a great naturalist. I could now enjoy and understand some of the qualities of his literary productions. The country was a new one to me and altogether unlike any I had seen, but having tasted of it through the medium of good literature, I was prepared to make the best of my opportunity to study it. What particularly impressed me, and what was so different from the scenes of my childhood, was the buckwheat fields dotting the meadows here and yonder, and the long straight stone fences marking the meadows and hillsides. ”These walls were built by a generation of men that had ginger,” Mr. Burroughs said, ”a quality so much lacking these days.”
No words could express the happiness that had come to me during the week that I was rambling through the Catskills. While going down through the meadow in front of Woodchuck Lodge, on my way to the railroad station, I seemed to be flooded with memories of a happy experience. These memories still haunt me and may they continue to do so even unto the end of time.
I had learned better than I ever knew, that ”this brown, sun-tanned, sin-stained earth is a sister to the morning and the evening star,” and that it has more of beauty and love written on it than has ever been read by all the poets in the distant ages past; that there are still left volumes for the interpreter. I had taken a little journey in the divine s.h.i.+p as it sailed over the divine sea. I had heard one talk of the moral of the solar system,--of its harmony, its balance, its compensation, and I thought that there is no deeper lesson to be learned.
JOHN BURROUGHS AS POET
A few years ago Herr Brandes, the great French critic, in commenting upon the method of criticism used by Saint Beuve, sounded a pretty harsh note to the old school of critics, on method and material in poetry, which in a measure explains what I am about to say of the poetry of John Burroughs. ”At the beginning of the century,” he says, ”imagination was considered the essential quality in poetry. It was his capacity of invention which made the poet a poet; he was not tied down to nature and reality, but was as much at home in the supernatural as in the actual world. But as romanticism, by degrees, developed into realism, creative literature, by degrees, gave up its fantastic excursions into s.p.a.ce....
It exerted itself even more to understand than to invent.”
An observer cannot fail to see in modern poetry a tendency to beautify objects of nature, and facts of science. Past ages were taken up with the heroic, the legendary in poetry. Legends were creations of the mind and in turn subjects for all poetic effort. Some moral and spiritual lesson or truth, must be taught by the introduction of ideals drawn purely from imagination. Such an ideal was many times created for the special lesson at hand. The Homeric poems, Virgil's Aeneid, Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost, are all poems of this character. They are founded on the unknown and the unknowable, yet they bring to us suggestions that inspire us and make us better for having read them. Milton never knew how Paradise was lost, nor even that it ever was lost. Dante did not know the history of the departed soul, nor did Homer and Virgil know what part the G.o.ds and heroes played in the fall of the city of Troy, nor has the riddle of the origin of the Latin and Greek races ever been written. Yet such themes give us pleasure when they come from the great poets, who actually believed what they were writing to be true, and the poems themselves will live forever.
We have reached a new order of things in the present era of the world's history, and we must look to something else for poetic inspiration, as well as to interpret the origin of things in the light of the last word on evolution. The minor poets have about worn these old themes threadbare, and the public mind is beginning to look to something else for entertainment. People are now seeking the poetic interpretation of facts of science and of nature, and the poet of the future will have the peculiar task of giving us new eyes with which to see truth, instead of leading us into fields of fancy.
John Burroughs is an interpreter of this latter kind. He has gone to nature with the poet's eye, and has needed no fiction to get us interested in what he is trying to tell us. The facts need only to be seen with the poet's eyes to make them beautiful, and he has translated them in terms of the human soul, without having to create beings of fancy to interest us while he tells the message. This is what differentiates his prose and poetry from the poetry of the past. It is true, he ranges from the commonplace to the sublime, but in it all with unfaltering devotion to truth, which should be the aim of every poet and is the aim of every true poet, despite the claims of some that literature is only to entertain, and should never be taken seriously. If it is not serious, it is not literature, and if it is serious, it will always have, as its entering wedge, some fundamental truth. The whole aim of Burroughs is to lead humanity into the proper method of interpreting the truths of nature, and if all his poetry is not the best, he has sacrificed poetry rather than truth and owns up to it like a man. He says: ”My poetry is not the free channel of myself that my prose is. I, myself, do not think that my poetry takes rank with my prose.” His best poetry takes rank with his or any body's prose.
Replying to some questions with reference to _Mid-summer in the Catskills_, Mr. Burroughs says: ”It was an attempt to paint faithfully, characteristic mid-summer scenes of that locality. I do not think it ranks high as poetry, but it is true. The genesis of such a poem, or of any poem, is hidden in the author's subconsciousness.” Perched on a mountain top that overlooked the beautiful valleys amid the Catskill mountains, and seeing the many activities of farm life in August, Mr.
Burroughs saw the beauty and simplicity of the situation, and could not forego his duty of telling it to the world.
”The strident hum of sickle-bar, Like giant insect heard afar, Is on the air again; I see the mower where he rides Above the level gra.s.sy tides That flood the meadow plain.”
From beginning to end the poem paints the rural life amid the Catskills in its busiest season, and a.s.sociates with it all the best in Nature. It is literally a poet's vision of his own country, after many years absence from the fields he paints. How many times he himself has gone.
”Above the level gra.s.sy tides, That flood the meadow plain,”
but perhaps without seeing the beauty that the scene now brings to him.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE SUMMIT OF THE OLD CLUMP, LOOKING IN THE VALLEY BELOW ”WHERE SWEATING FORMS AND BRONZED ARMS REAP IN THE LAND'S INCREASE”]
Far different from this is his first poetry, which is the expression of a youth groping in the dark for some unknown G.o.d, with his only guide that of faith in the world, faith in himself and faith in his fellowman.
He says of his early poem: ”Waiting was written in 1862, during a rather gloomy and doubtful period of my life. I was poor, was in doubt as to my career, did not seem to be able to get hold of myself, nor to bring myself to bear upon the problems before me. Yet underneath all was this abiding faith that I should get what belonged to me; that sooner or later I should find my own. The poem was first printed in the old Knickerbocker Magazine of New York, in the fall of 1862. I received nothing for it. I builded better than I knew. It has proved a true prophesy of my life.”
”Serene I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst Time or Fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.
”I stay my haste, I make delays, For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face.
”Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me; No wind can drive my bark astray, Nor change the tide of destiny.
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