Books: The Writings of John Burroughs
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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 "woodpecker:"--
"He saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous
beds,
The slight Linnæa 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 woodcock's evening
hymn;
He found the tawny thrushes' broods;
And the shy hawk did wait for him."
His "Titmouse" 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,
sassafras,
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 shells, 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 shell. 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 shell 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 horny growth "pips"
the shell. 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 shell 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 snowbird 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 attitude:--
"The bluebird, shifting 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 hit 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 attitude and sings for the mere song's sake. But the
poets are perhaps to be allowed this latitude, 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;"
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 shell,
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 clusters
shine;
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 latitude 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 snowbank, 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 anticipation 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 grass 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 diminishing
streams of liquid metal, taking the form of whatever they come in
contact with, parting around a stone and uniting again beyond it,
and pushing their way along with many a pause and devious turn. One
principal 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 shingly shagbark's bough."
I do not remember to have met the "shagbark" 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 grass they are cutting, though
they might appear to do so when viewed athwart the standing grass;
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-bush!
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 latitude, the pledge of May. It
comes when the grass 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 buttercup and the clover:--
"The dandelions and buttercups
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 grass 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 buttercup and the clover.
These bloom in June in New England and New York, and are
contemporaries of the daisy. In the meadows and lawns, the
dandelion drops its flower and holds aloft its sphere of down,
touching the green surface as with a light frost, long before the
clover and the buttercup have formed their buds. In "Al Fresco" our
poet is literally in clover, he is reveling in the height of the
season, the full tide of summer is sweeping around him, and he has
riches enough without robbing May of her dandelions. Let him say,--
"The daisies and the buttercups
Gild all the lawn."
I smile as I note that the woodpecker proves a refractory bird to
Lowell, as well as to Emerson:--
Emerson rhymes it with bear,
Lowell rhymes it with hear,
One makes it woodpeckair,
The other, woodpeckear.
But its hammer is a musical one, and the poets do well to note it.
Our most pleasing drummer upon dry limbs among the woodpeckers is
the yellow-bellied. His measured, deliberate tap, heard in the
stillness of the primitive woods, produces an effect that no bird-
song is capable of.
Tennyson is said to have very poor eyes, but there seems to be no
defect in the vision with which he sees nature, while he often hits
the nail on the head in a way that would indicate the surest sight.
True, he makes the swallow hunt the bee, which, for aught I know,
the swallow may do in England. Our purple martin has been accused
of catching the honey-bee, but I doubt his guilt. But those of our
swallows that correspond to the British species, the barn swallow,
the cliff swallow, and the bank swallow, subsist upon very small
insects. But what a clear-cut picture is that in the same poem
("The Poet's Song"):--
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