Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB
[blocks in formation]

1 A threefold sorrow has here found for itself a single expression. Part of the poem was written in 1850, after the death of Lowell's third daughter, Rose, only six months and a half old. I shall never forget,' he said at this time, the feeling I had when little Blanche's coffin was brought into the house. It was refreshed again lately. But for Rose I would have no funeral.. She was a lovely child — we think the loveliest of our three. She was more like Blanche than Mabel. Her illness lasted a week, but I never had any hope, so that she died to me the first day the doctor came. She was very beautiful-fair, with large dark-gray eyes and fine features. . . . Dear little child! she had never spoken, only smiled.' There follow, in Lowell's letter, six stanzas of this poem, in an earlier form. Into it is interwoven the memory of his oldest child, Blanche, especially perhaps in the last stanza. After Blanche was buried' says Scudder in his Life of Lowell, her father took her tiny shoes, the only ones she had ever worn, and hung them in his chamber. There they stayed till his own death.' But it was the death of Lowell's wife that gave to the poem its real intensity. The second to fourth stanzas, and the seventh to twelfth, were written in a mood which made Lowell say later: Something broke my life in two, and I cannot piece it together again. I hope you may never have reason to like "After the Burial" better than you do.'

The same interweaving is found in 'Under the Willows,' of which Lowell says: Something more than half of it was written more than twenty years ago, on the death of our eldest daughter; but when I came to complete it, that other death, which broke my life in two, would come in against my will.'

Lowell said of this poem later, 'A living verse can only be made of a living experience and that our own. One of my most personal poems, "After the Burial,"

has roused strange echoes in men who assured me they were generally insensible to poetry. After all, the only stuff a solitary man has to spin is himself.' (The extracts from Lowell's Letters are quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

[merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

It is pagan; but wait till you feel it, —

That jar of our earth, that dull shock When the ploughshare of deeper passion Tears down to our primitive rock.

Communion in spirit! Forgive me,

40

But I, who am earthly and weak, Would give all my incomes from dreamland

For a touch of her hand on my cheek.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Not where thou art, but where thou wast, Sweet beckoner, more fleet than wind! I haunt the pine-dark solitudes,

With soft brown silence carpeted, And plot to snare thee in the woods:

Peace I o'ertake, but thou art fled ! I find the rock where thou didst rest, The moss thy skimming foot hath prest; 10 All Nature with thy parting thrills, Like branches after birds new-flown; Thy passage hill and hollow fills With hints of virtue not their own; In dimples still the water slips Where thou has dipt thy finger-tips; Just, just beyond, forever burn Gleams of a grace without return; Upon thy shade I plant my foot,

And through my frame strange raptures

shoot;

All of thee but thyself I grasp;

I seem to fold thy luring shape,
And vague air to my bosom clasp,
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape!

One mask and then another drops,
And thou art secret as before:

Sometimes with flooded ear I list,
And hear thee, wondrous organist,
From mighty continental stops
A thunder of new music pour;
Through pipes of earth and air and stone
Thy inspiration deep is blown;

20

30

Through mountains, forests, open downs,
Lakes, railroads, prairies, states, and towns,
Thy gathering fugue goes rolling on
From Maine to utmost Oregon;
The factory-wheels in cadence hum,
From brawling parties concords come;
All this I hear, or seem to hear,
But when, enchanted, I draw near
To mate with words the various theme,
Life seems a whiff of kitchen steam,
History an organ-grinder's thrum,

For thou hast slipt from it and me
And all thine organ-pipes left dumb,
Most mutable Perversity!

Not weary yet, I still must seek,
And hope for luck next day, next week;
I go to see the great man ride,
Shiplike, the swelling human tide
That floods to bear him into port,
Trophied from Senate-hall and Court;
Thy magnetism, I feel it there,

Thy rhythmic presence fleet and rare,

40

50

Making the Mob a moment fine
With glimpses of their own Divine,
As in their demigod they see

Their cramped ideal soaring free;
"T was thou didst bear the fire about,
That, like the springing of a mine,
Sent up to heaven the street-long shout;
Full well I know that thou wast here,
It was thy breath that brushed my ear;
But vainly in the stress and whirl
I dive for thee, the moment's pearl.

Through every shape thou well canst run,
Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun,
Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine
As where Milan's pale Duomo lies
A stranded glacier on the plain,

Its peaks and pinnacles of ice
Melted in many a quaint device,
And sees, above the city's din,
Afar its silent Alpine kin:

60

70

I track thee over carpets deep To wealth's and beauty's inmost keep; Across the sand of bar-room floors 'Mid the stale reek of boosing boors; Where browse the hay-field's fragrant heats,

Or the flail-heart of Autumn beats;

I dog thee through the market's throngs
To where the sea with myriad tongues
Laps the green edges of the pier,
And the tall ships that eastward steer,
Curtsy their farewells to the town,
O'er the curved distance lessening down,
I follow allwhere for thy sake,

Touch thy robe's hem, but ne'er o'ertake,
Find where, scarce yet unmoving, lies,
Warm from thy limbs, thy last disguise; 9
But thou another shape hast donned,
And lurest still just, just beyond!

But here a voice, I know not whence,
Thrills clearly through my inward sense,
Saying: 'See where she sits at home
While thou in search of her dost roam!
All summer long her ancient wheel
Whirls humming by the open door,
Or, when the hickory's social zeal

Sets the wide chimney in a roar,
Close-nestled by the tinkling hearth,
It modulates the household mirth
With that sweet serious undertone
Of duty, music all her own;
Still as of old she sits and spins
Our hopes, our sorrows, and our sins;

80

100

[blocks in formation]

130

'Harass her not: thy heat and stir
But greater coyness breed in her;
Yet thou mayst find, ere Age's frost,
Thy long apprenticeship not lost,
Learning at last that Stygian Fate
Unbends to him that knows to wait.
The Muse is womanish, nor deigns
Her love to him that pules and plains;
With proud, averted face she stands
To him that wooes with empty hands.
Make thyself free of Manhood's guild;
Pull down thy barns and greater build;
The wood, the mountain, and the plain
Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain;
Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold,
Glean from the heavens and ocean old; 140
From fireside lone and trampling street
Let thy life garner daily wheat;
The epic of a man rehearse,
Be something better than thy verse;
Make thyself rich, and then the Muse
Shall court thy precious interviews,
Shall take thy head upon her knee,
And such enchantment lilt to thee,
That thou shalt hear the life-blood flow
From farthest stars to grass-blades low, 150
And find the Listener's science still
Transcends the Singer's deepest skill!'

1855?

For Raphael and for Angelo,
With secrets deeper than his own,
Then shrank into the dark again,
And died, we know not how or when.

The shadows deepened, and I turned
Half sadly from the fresco grand;
'And is this,' mused I, 'all ye earned,
High-vaulted brain and cunning hand,
That ye to greater men could teach
The skill yourselves could never reach ?'

And who were they,' I mused, 'that wrought

Through pathless wilds, with labor long, The highways of our daily thought? Who reared those towers of earliest song That lift us from the crowd to peace Remote in sunny silences?'

[blocks in formation]

1860.

WHEN wise Minerva still was young And just the least romantic,

MASACCIO

IN THE BRANCACCI CHAPEL

He came to Florence long ago,

And painted here these walls, that shone

Soon after from Jove's head she flung That preternatural antic,

"T is said, to keep from idleness

Or flirting, those twin curses,

She spent her leisure, more or less,

In writing po, no, verses.

[blocks in formation]

sung!

At the first pause Zeus said, 'Well
I mean - ask Phoebus, he knows."
Says Phoebus, Zounds! a wolf's among
Admetus's merinos!

Fine very fine! but I must go;

They stand in need of me there; Excuse me!' snatched his stick, and so Plunged down the gladdened ether.

With the next gap, Mars said, 'For me
Don't wait, -naught could be finer,
But I'm engaged at half past three,
A fight in Asia Minor!

Then Venus lisped, 'I'm sorely tried,
These duty-calls are vip'rous;
But I must go; I have a bride
To see about in Cyprus.'

[blocks in formation]

20

30

His words woke Hermes. Ah!' he said, 'I so love moral theses!'

Then winked at Hebe, who turned red,
And smoothed her apron's creases.

[blocks in formation]

40

50

Zeus snored, o'er startled Greece there flew

The many-volumed thunder.
Some augurs counted nine, some, ten;
Some said 't was war, some, famine,
And all, that other-minded men
Would get a precious-

Proud Pallas sighed, 'It will not do;
Against the Muse I've sinned, oh!'
And her torn rhymes sent flying through
Olympus's back window.

Then, packing up a peplus clean,
She took the shortest path thence,
And opened, with a mind serene,

A Sunday-school in Athens.

The verses? Some in ocean swilled,
Killed every fish that bit to 'em;
Some Galen caught, and, when distilled,
Found morphine the residuum;
But some that rotted on the earth
Sprang up again in copies,
And gave two strong narcotics birth,
Didactic verse and poppies.

Years after, when a poet asked

The Goddess's opinion,

As one whose soul its wings had tasked
In Art's clear-aired dominion,
'Discriminate,' she said, 'betimes;
The Muse is unforgiving;

Put all your beauty in your rhymes,
Your morals in your living.'

THE DEAD HOUSE 2

60

70

80

1857. 1

HERE once my step was quickened,
Here beckoned the opening door,
And welcome thrilled from the threshold
To the foot it had known before.

1 In the first number of the Atlantic Monthly, of which Lowell was editor.

2 I have a notion that the inmates of a house should never be changed. When the first occupants go out it should be burned, and a stone set up with Sacred to the memory of a HOME' on it. Suppose the body were eternal, and that when one spirit went out another took the lease. How frightful the strange expression of the eyes would be! I fancy sometimes that the look in the eyes of a familiar house changes when aliens have come into it. For certainly a dwelling adapts itself to its occupants. The front door of a hospitable man opens easily and looks broad, and you can read Welcome! on every step that leads to it. (Lowell's Letters, vol. i, pp. 283, 284. Quoted by permission of Messrs. Harper and Brothers.)

For the first form of the poem, see Scudder's Life of Lowell, vol. i, pp. 435-437.

[blocks in formation]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »