The Writings of John Burroughs Part 5

Only the dates are not quite right. The swallows leave their nests in July, which is nearly three months before the leaves fall. The poet is also a little unfaithful to the lore of his boyhood when he says

"The partridge beats his throbbing drum"

in midsummer. As a rule, the partridge does not drum later than June, except fitfully during the Indian summer, while April and May are his favorite months. And let me say here, for the benefit of the poets who do not go to the woods, that the partridge does not always drum upon a log; he frequently drums upon a rock or a stone wall, if a suitable log be not handy, and no ear can detect the difference. His drum is really his own proud breast, and beneath his small hollow wings gives forth the same low, mellow thunder from a rock as from a log. Bryant has recognized this fact in one of his poems.

Our poets are quite apt to get ahead or behind the season with their flowers and birds. It is not often that we catch such a poet as Emerson napping. He knows nature, and he knows the New England fields and woods, as few poets do. One may study our flora and fauna in his pages. He puts in the moose and the "surly bear," and makes the latter rhyme with "woodp.e.c.k.e.r:"--

"He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds, The slight Linnaea hang its twin-born heads.

He heard, when in the grove, at intervals, With sudden roar the aged pine-tree falls,-- One crash, the death-hymn of the perfect tree, Declares the close of its green century."

"They led me through the thicket damp, Through brake and fern, the beavers'

camp."

"He saw the partridge drum in the woods; He heard the woodc.o.c.k's evening hymn; He found the tawny thrushes' broods; And the shy hawk did wait for him."

His "t.i.tmouse" is studied in our winter woods, and his "Humble-Bee"

in our summer fields. He has seen farther into the pine-tree than any other poet; his "May-Day" is full of our spring sounds and tokens; he knows the "punctual birds," and the "herbs and simples of the wood:"--

"Rue, cinque-foil, gill, vervain, and agrimony, Blue-vetch, and trillium, hawk-weed, sa.s.safras, Milk-weeds and murky brakes, quaint pipes and sun-dew."

Here is a characteristic touch:--

"A woodland walk A quest of river-grapes, a mocking thrush, A wild rose, or rock-loving columbine, Salve my worst wounds."

That "rock-loving columbine" is better than Bryant's "columbines, in purple dressed," as our flower is not purple, but yellow and scarlet. Yet Bryant set the example to the poets that have succeeded him of closely studying Nature as she appears under our own skies.

I yield to none in my admiration of the sweetness and simplicity of his poems of nature, and in general of their correctness of observation. They are tender and heartfelt, and they touch chords that no other poet since Wordsworth has touched with so firm a hand. Yet he was not always an infallible observer; he sometimes tripped up on his facts, and at other times he deliberately moulded them, adding to, or cutting off, to suit the purposes of his verse.

I will cite here two instances in which his natural history is at fault. In his poem on the bobolink he makes the parent birds feed their young with "seeds," whereas, in fact, the young are fed exclusively upon insects and worms. The bobolink is an insectivorous bird in the North, or until its brood has flown, and a granivorous bird in the South. In his "Evening Revery" occur these lines:--

"The mother bird hath broken for her brood Their prison sh.e.l.ls, or shoved them from the nest, Plumed for their earliest flight."

It is not a fact that the mother bird aids her offspring in escaping from the sh.e.l.l. The young of all birds are armed with a small temporary horn or protuberance upon the upper mandible, and they are so placed in the sh.e.l.l that this point is in immediate contact with its inner surface; as soon as they are fully developed and begin to struggle to free themselves, the h.o.r.n.y growth "pips"

the sh.e.l.l. Their efforts then continue till their prison walls are completely sundered and the bird is free. This process is rendered the more easy by the fact that toward the last the sh.e.l.l becomes very rotten; the acids that are generated by the growing chick eat it and make it brittle, so that one can hardly touch a fully incubated bird's egg without breaking it. To help the young bird forth would insure its speedy death. It is not true, either, that the parent shoves its young from the nest when they are fully fledged, except possibly in the case of some of the swallows and of the eagle. The young of all our more common birds leave the nest of their own motion, stimulated probably by the calls of the parents, and in some cases by the withholding of food for a longer period than usual.

As an instance where Bryant warps the facts to suit his purpose, take his poems of the "Yellow Violet" and "The Fringed Gentian." Of this last flower he says:--

"Thou waitest late and com'st alone, When woods are bare and birds are flown, And frosts and shortening days portend The aged year is near his end."

The fringed gentian belongs to September, and, when the severer frosts keep away, it runs over into October. But it does not come alone, and the woods are not bare. The closed gentian comes at the same time, and the blue and purple asters are in all their glory.

Goldenrod, turtle-head, and other fall flowers also abound. When the woods are bare, which does not occur in New England till in or near November, the fringed gentian has long been dead. It is in fact killed by the first considerable frost. No, if one were to go botanizing, and take Bryant's poem for a guide, he would not bring home any fringed gentians with him. The only flower he would find would be the witch-hazel. Yet I never see this gentian without thinking of Bryant's poem, and feeling that he has brought it immensely nearer to us.

Bryant's poem of the "Yellow Violet" has all his accustomed simplicity and pensiveness, but his love for the flower carries him a little beyond the facts; he makes it sweet-scented,--

"Thy faint perfume Alone is in the virgin air;"

and he makes it the first flower of spring. I have never been able to detect any perfume in the yellow species (VIOLA ROTUNDIFOLIA).

This honor belongs alone to our two white violets, VIOLA BLANDA and VIOLA CANADENSIS.

Neither is it quite true that

"Of all her train, the hands of Spring First plant thee in the watery mould."

Now it is an interesting point which really is our first spring flower. Which comes second or third is of less consequence, but which everywhere and in all seasons comes first; and in such a case the poet must not place the honor where it does not belong. I have no hesitation in saying that, throughout the Middle and New England States, the hepatica is the first spring flower. [Footnote: excepting, of course, the skunk-cabbage.] It is some days ahead of all others. The yellow violet belongs only to the more northern sections,--to high, cold, beechen woods, where the poet rightly places it; but in these localities, if you go to the spring woods every day, you will gather the hepatica first. I have also found the claytonia and the coltsfoot first. In a poem called "The Twenty-Seventh of March," Bryant places both the hepatica and the arbutus before it:--

"Within the woods Tufts of ground-laurel, creeping underneath The leaves of the last summer, send their sweets Upon the chilly air, and by the oak, The squirrel cups, a graceful company, Hide in their bells, a soft aerial blue,"--

ground-laurel being a local name for trailing arbutus, called also mayflower, and squirrel-cups for hepatica, or liver-leaf. But the yellow violet may rightly dispute for the second place.

In "The Song of the Sower" our poet covers up part of the truth with the grain. The point and moral of the song he puts in the statement, that the wheat sown in the fall lies in the ground till spring before it germinates; when, in fact, it sprouts and grows and covers the ground with "emerald blades" in the fall:--

"Fling wide the generous grain; we fling O'er the dark mould the green of spring.

For thick the emerald blades shall grow, When first the March winds melt the snow, And to the sleeping flowers, below, The early bluebirds sing.

Brethren, the sower's task is done.

The seed is in its winter bed.

Now let the dark-brown mould be spread, To hide it from the sun, And leave it to the kindly care Of the still earth and brooding air, As when the mother, from her breast, Lays the hushed babe apart to rest, And shades its eyes and waits to see How sweet its waking smile will be.

The tempest now may smite, the sleet All night on the drowned furrow beat, And winds that, from the cloudy hold Of winter, breathe the bitter cold, Stiffen to stone the mellow mould, Yet safe shall lie the wheat; Till, out of heaven's unmeasured blue, Shall walk again the genial year, To wake with warmth and nurse with dew The germs we lay to slumber here."

Of course the poet was not writing an agricultural essay, yet one does not like to feel that he was obliged to ignore or sacrifice any part of the truth to build up his verse. One likes to see him keep within the fact without being conscious of it or hampered by it, as he does in "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," or in the "Lines to a Water-Fowl."

But there are glimpses of American scenery and climate in Bryant that are unmistakable, as in these lines from "Midsummer:"--

"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 sunstroke in the populous town."

Here is a touch of our "heated term" when the dogstar is abroad and the weather runs mad. I regret the "trout floating dead in the hot stream," because, if such a thing ever has occurred, it is entirely exceptional. The trout in such weather seek the deep water and the spring holes, and hide beneath rocks and willow banks. The following lines would be impossible in an English poem:--

"The s...o...b..rd twittered on the beechen bough, And 'neath the hemlock, whose thick branches bent Beneath its bright, cold burden, and kept dry A circle, on the earth, of withered leaves, The partridge found a shelter."

Both Bryant and Longfellow put their spring bluebird in the elm, which is a much better place for the oriole,--the elm-loving oriole. The bluebird prefers a humbler perch. Lowell puts him upon a post in the fence, which is a characteristic att.i.tude:--

"The bluebird, s.h.i.+fting his light load of song, From post to post along the cheerless fence."

Emerson calls him "April's bird," and makes him "fly before from tree to tree," which is also good. But the bluebird is not strictly a songster in the sense in which the song sparrow or the indigo-bird, or the English robin redbreast, is; nor do Bryant's lines. .h.i.t the mark:--

"The bluebird chants, from the elm's long branches, A hymn to welcome the budding year."

Lowell, again, is nearer the truth when he speaks of his "whiff of song." All his notes are call-notes, and are addressed directly to his mate. The songbirds take up a position and lift up their voices and sing. It is a deliberate musical performance, as much so as that of Nilsson or Patti. The bluebird, however, never strikes an att.i.tude and sings for the mere song's sake. But the poets are perhaps to be allowed this lat.i.tude, only their pages lose rather than gain by it. Nothing is so welcome in this field as characteristic touches, a word or a phrase that fits this case and no other. If the bluebird chants a hymn, what does the wood thrush do? Yet the bluebird's note is more pleasing than most bird- songs; if it could be reproduced in color, it would be the hue of the purest sky.

Longfellow makes the swallow sing:--

"The darting swallows soar and sing;"--

which would leave him no room to describe the lark, if the lark had been about. Bryant comes nearer the mark this time:--

"There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;"