The Writings of John Burroughs Part 6

so does Tennyson when he makes his swallow

"Cheep and twitter twenty million loves;"

also Lowell again in this line:--

"The thin-winged swallow skating on the air;"

and Virgil:--

"Swallows twitter on the chimney tops."

Longfellow is perhaps less close and exact in his dealings with nature than any of his compeers, although he has written some fine naturalistic poems, as his "Rain in Summer," and others. When his fancy is taken, he does not always stop to ask, Is this so? Is this true? as when he applies the Spanish proverb, "There are no birds in last year's nests," to the nests beneath the eaves; for these are just the last year's nests that do contain birds in May. The cliff swallow and the barn swallow always reoccupy their old nests, when they are found intact; so do some other birds. Again, the hawthorn, or whitethorn, field-fares, belong to English poetry more than to American. The ash in autumn is not deep crimsoned, but a purplish brown. "The ash her purple drops forgivingly," says Lowell in his "Indian-Summer Reverie." Flax is not golden, lilacs are purple or white and not flame-colored, and it is against the law to go trouting in November. The pelican is not a wader any more than a goose or a duck is, and the golden robin or oriole is not a bird of autumn. This stanza from "The Skeleton in Armor" is a striking one:--

"As with his wings aslant, Sails the fierce cormorant, Seeking some rocky haunt, With his prey laden, So toward the open main, Beating to sea again, Through the wild hurricane, Bore I the maiden."

But unfortunately the cormorant never does anything of the kind; it is not a bird of prey: it is web-footed, a rapid swimmer and diver, and lives upon fish, which it usually swallows as it catches them.

Virgil is nearer to fact when he says:--

"When crying cormorants forsake the sea And, stretching to the covert, wing their way."

But cormorant with Longfellow may stand for any of the large rapacious birds, as the eagle or the condor. True, and yet the picture is a purely fanciful one, as no bird of prey SAILS with his burden; on the contrary, he flaps heavily and laboriously, because he is always obliged to mount. The stress of the rhyme and metre are of course in this case very great, and it is they, doubtless, that drove the poet into this false picture of a bird of prey laden with his quarry. It is an ungracious task, however, to cross- question the gentle Muse of Longfellow in this manner. He is a true poet if there ever was one, and the slips I point out are only like an obscure feather or two in the dove carelessly preened. The burnished plumage and the bright hues hide them unless we look sharply.

Whittier gets closer to the bone of the New England nature. He comes from the farm, and his memory is stored with boyhood's wild and curious lore, with

"Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude Of the tenants of the wood; How the tortoise bears his sh.e.l.l, How the woodchuck digs his cell, And the ground-mole sinks his well; How the robin feeds her young; How the oriole's nest is hung; Where the whitest lilies blow, Where the freshest berries grow, Where the ground-nut trails its vine, Where the wood-grape's cl.u.s.ters s.h.i.+ne; Of the black wasp's cunning way, Mason of his walls of clay, And the architectural plans Of gray hornet artisans!"

The poet is not as exact as usual when he applies the epithet "painted" to the autumn beeches, as the foliage of the beech is the least painty of all our trees; nor when he speaks of

"Wind-flower and violet, amber and white,"

as neither of the flowers named is amber-colored. From "A Dream of Summer" the reader might infer that the fox shut up house in the winter like the muskrat:--

"The fox his hillside cell forsakes, The muskrat leaves his nook, The bluebird in the meadow brakes Is singing with the brook."

The only one of these incidents that is characteristic of a January thaw in the lat.i.tude of New England is the appearance of the muskrat. The fox is never in his cell in winter, except he is driven there by the hound, or by soft or wet weather, and the bluebird does not sing in the brakes at any time of the year. A severe stress of weather will drive the foxes off the mountains into the low, sheltered woods and fields, and a thaw will send them back again. In the winter the fox sleeps during the day upon a rock or stone wall, or upon a s...o...b..nk, where he can command all the approaches, or else prowls stealthily through the woods.

But there is seldom a false note in any of Whittier's descriptions of rural sights and sounds. What a characteristic touch is that in one of his "Mountain Pictures:"--

"The pasture bars that clattered as they fell."

It is the only strictly native, original, and typical sound he reports on that occasion. The bleating of sheep, the barking of dogs, the lowing of cattle, the splash of the bucket in the well, "the pastoral curfew of the cowbell," etc., are sounds we have heard before in poetry, but that clatter of the pasture bars is American; one can almost see the waiting, ruminating cows slowly stir at the signal, and start for home in antic.i.p.ation of the summons. Every summer day, as the sun is shading the hills, the clatter of those pasture bars is heard throughout the length and breadth of the land.

"Snow-Bound" is the most faithful picture of our Northern winter that has yet been put into poetry. What an exact description is this of the morning after the storm:--

"We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own.

Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,-- A universe of sky and snow!"

In his little poem on the mayflower, Mr. Stedman catches and puts in a single line a feature of our landscape in spring that I have never before seen alluded to in poetry. I refer to the second line of this stanza:--

"Fresh blows the breeze through hemlock-trees, The fields are edged with green below, And naught but youth, and hope, and love We know or care to know!"

It is characteristic of our Northern and New England fields that they are "edged with green" in spring long before the emerald tint has entirely overspread them. Along the fences, especially along the stone walls, the gra.s.s starts early; the land is fatter there from the deeper snows and from other causes, the fence absorbs the heat, and shelters the ground from the winds, and the sward quickly responds to the touch of the spring sun.

Stedman's poem is worthy of his theme, and is the only one I recall by any of our well-known poets upon the much-loved mayflower or arbutus. There is a little poem upon this subject by an unknown author that also has the right flavor. I recall but one stanza:--

"Oft have I walked these woodland ways, Without the blest foreknowing, That underneath the withered leaves The fairest flowers were blowing."

Nature's strong and striking effects are best rendered by closest fidelity to her. Listen and look intently, and catch the exact effect as nearly as you can. It seems as if Lowell had done this more than most of his brother poets. In reading his poems, one wishes for a little more of the poetic unction (I refer, of course, to his serious poems; his humorous ones are just what they should be), yet the student of nature will find many close-fitting phrases and keen observations in his pages, and lines that are exactly, and at the same time poetically, descriptive. He is the only writer I know of who has noticed the fact that the roots of trees do not look supple and muscular like their boughs, but have a stiffened, congealed look, as of a liquid hardened.

"Their roots, like molten metal cooled in flowing, Stiffened in coils and runnels down the bank."

This is exactly the appearance the roots of most trees, when uncovered, present; they flow out from the trunk like diminis.h.i.+ng streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it, and pus.h.i.+ng their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One princ.i.p.al office of the roots of a tree is to gripe, to hold fast the earth: hence they feel for and lay hold of every inequality of surface; they will fit themselves to the top of a comparatively smooth rock, so as to adhere amazingly, and flow into the seams and crevices like metal into a mould.

Lowell is singularly true to the natural history of his own country. In his "Indian-Summer Reverie" we catch a glimpse of the hen-hawk, silently sailing overhead

"With watchful, measuring eye,"

the robin feeding on cedar berries, and the squirrel,

"On the s.h.i.+ngly s.h.a.gbark's bough."

I do not remember to have met the "s.h.a.gbark" in poetry before, or that gray lichen-covered stone wall which occurs farther along in the same poem, and which is so characteristic of the older farms of New York and New England. I hardly know what the poet means by

"The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee,"

as the mowers do not wade in the gra.s.s they are cutting, though they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing gra.s.s; perhaps this is the explanation of the line.

But this is just what the bobolink does when the care of his young begins to weigh upon him:--

"Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops."

I do not vouch for that dropping between the windrows, as in my part of the country the bobolinks flee before the hay-makers, but that sudden stopping on the brink of rapture, as if thoughts of his helpless young had extinguished his joy, is characteristic.

Another carefully studied description of Lowell's is this:--

"The robin sings as of old from the limb!

The catbird croons in the lilac-bus.h.!.+

Through the dim arbor, himself more dun, Silently hops the hermit thrush."

Among trees Lowell has celebrated the oak, the pine, the birch; and among flowers; the violet and the dandelion. The last, I think, is the most pleasing of these poems:--

"Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May."

The dandelion is indeed, in our lat.i.tude, the pledge of May. It comes when the gra.s.s is short, and the fresh turf sets off its "ring of gold" with admirable effect; hence we know the poet is a month or more out of the season when, in "Al Fresco," he makes it bloom with the b.u.t.tercup and the clover:--

"The dandelions and b.u.t.tercups Gild all the lawn; the drowsy bee Stumbles among the clover-tops, And summer sweetens all but me."

Of course the dandelion blooms occasionally throughout the whole summer, especially where the gra.s.s is kept short, but its proper season, when it "gilds all the lawn," is, in every part of the country, some weeks earlier than the tall b.u.t.tercup and the clover.