SEAWARD
AN ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS
BY
RICHARD HOVEY
BOSTON
D. LOTHROP COMPANY
1893
Copyright, 1893,
by
Richard Hovey.
——
All rights reserved.
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.
—Emerson.
And unapproachable by any shore,
And unassailable by any band
Of storming soldiery forevermore.
—Parsons.
SEAWARD
I.
In Nova Scotia's woods they follow me,
Marshes of distant Massachusetts Bay,
Dear marshes, where the dead once loved to be!
I see them lying yellow in the sun,
And hear the mighty tremor of the sea
Beyond the dunes where blue cloud-shadows run.
II.
Secret and slow, for in my heart I feel
The silent swelling of a stress akin;
And in my vision, lo! blue glimpses steal
Across the yellow marsh-grass, where the flood,
Filling the empty channels, lifts the keel
Of one lone cat-boat bedded in the mud.
III.
It is not Minas there across the lea;
But I am standing under pilgrim shades
Far off where Scituate lapses to the sea.
And he, my elder brother in the muse,
The poet of the Charles and Italy,
Stands by my side, Song's gentle, shy recluse.
IV.
So near his ambush in the solitude
As to be witness of the holy awe
And passionate sweetness of his singing mood.
Not oft he sang, and then in ways apart,
Where foppish ignorance might not intrude
To mar the joy of his sufficing art.
V.
And unexpectant of responsive praise;
But they that loved and sought him where he hid,
Forbearing to profane his templed ways,
Went marveling if that clear voice they heard
Pass thrilling through the hushed religious maze,
Were of a spirit singing or a bird.
VI.
The air is empty of him evermore.
Alone I watch the slow kelp-gatherers bring
Their dories full of sea-moss to the shore.
No gentle eyes look out to sea with mine,
No gentle lips are uttering quaint lore,
No hand is on my shoulder for a sign.
VII.
Still, still, so still, the water in the grass!
Here on the knoll the crickets in the turf
And one bold squirrel barking, seek, alas!
To bring the swarming summer back to me.
In vain; my heart is on the salt morass
Below, that stretches to the sunlit sea.
VIII.
The ocean's solemn distances recede;
A gospel of glad color to the mind,
But for the soul a voice of sterner creed.
The sadness of unfathomable things
Calls from the waste and makes the heart give heed
With answering dirges, as a seashell sings.
IX.
Thou of the shaken hair! Far-questing Sea!
Sea of the lapsing wail of waves! O left
Of many lovers! Lone, lamenting Sea!
Desolate, prone, disheveled, lost, sublime!
Unquelled and reckless! Mad, despairing Sea!
Wail, for I wait—wail, ancient dirge of
X.
Mourn, bitter heart! mourn, fool of Fate! Again
Thy lover leaves thee; from thy pleading shore
Swept far beyond the caverns of the rain,
No phantom of him lingers on the air.
Thy foamy fingers reach for his—in vain!
In vain thy salt breath searches for his hair!
XI.
Mourn, if acceptance so serene can mourn!
Grieve, marshes, though your noonday melody
Of color thrill through sorrow like a horn
Blown far in Elfland! Mourn, free-wandering dunes!
For he has left you of his voice forlorn,
Who sang your slopes full of an hundred Junes.
XII.
Sea-wolf of Fate, marauder of the shore!
Storm-reveler, to what carousal grim
Hast thou compelled him? Hark! through the Sea's roar
Heroic laughter mocking us afar!
There will no answer come forevermore,
Though for his sake Song beacon to a star.
XIII.
Mourn, where thy vinelands watch the day depart!
Mourn for him, where thy sunsets interfuse,
Who loved thy beauty with no alien heart,
And sang it in his not all alien line!
Muse of the passionate thought and austere art!
O Dante's Muse! lament his son and thine.
XIV.
A double loss has left thee desolate;
Two rooms are vacant in thy House of Speech,
Two ghosts have vanished through the open gate,
The Attic spirit, epicure of light,
The Doric heart, strong, simple, passionate,
Thy priest of Beauty, and thy priest of Right.
XV.
Is gentler for its memories, they rest.
Mourn, goddess, come apart and mourn awhile.
Come with thy sons, lithe Song-Queen of the West—
The poet Friend of Poets, the great throng
Of seekers on the long elusive quest,
And the lone voice of Arizonian song.
XVI.
My young companions in Art's wildwood ways;
She whose swift verse speaks words that smite and bruise
With scarlet suddenness of flaming phrase,
Virginia's hawk of Song; and he who sings
Alike his people's homely rustic lays
And his fine spirit's high imaginings.
XVII.
Quaint, humorous, full of quirks and wanton whims,
Full-throated, with imagination kissed;
With these, two pilgrims from auroral streams,
The Greek revealer of Canadian skies
And thy close darling, voyager of dreams,
Carman, the sweetest, strangest voice that cries.
XVIII.
Near to the dead, not with the poet's bay
Brow-bound but eminent with kindred fronds,
Paint us some picture of the summer day
For his memorial—the distant dune,
The marshes stretching palpitant away
And blue sea fervid with the stress of noon.
XIX.
Nor only heard the rumor of his fame;
This house beside the sea the sacred place
Where first with thee to clasp his hand I came—
Art's knight of courtesy, well-pleased to commend
Who to my youth accorded the dear name
Of poet, and the dearer name of friend.
XX.
We drank together! I remember too
How carefully he placed it where the shine
Of the warm sun might pierce it through and through—
Wise in all gentle, hospitable arts—
And there was sunshine in it when we drew
The cork and drank, and
XXI.
I watch you where you move, I see you all;
Unmarked I glide among you like a ghost,
And on the portico, in room and hall,
Lay visionary fingers on your hair.
You do not feel their unsubstantial fall
Nor hear my silent tread, but I am there.
XXII.
To set the air a-vibrate with a word.
Alas! dumb, ineffectual, remote,
I murmur, but my solace is not heard;
Nor, could I reach you, would your grief abate.
What sorrow ever was with speech deterred?
What power has Song against the hand of Fate?...
XXIII.
Myself am served, at least. A secure calm
Soars in my soul with wings that will not swerve,
And on my brow I feel a ministering palm.
Even in the effort for another's peace
I have achieved mine own. I hear a psalm
Of angels, and the grim forebodings cease.
XXIV.
To truce and parley with the doubts of sense.
My certainty of vision goes a-field,
Wide-ranging, fearless, into the immense;
And finds no terror there, no ghost nor ghoul,
Not to be dazzled back to impotence,
Confronted with the indomitable soul.
XXV.
To start at shadows? Things fantastic slay
The imperishable spirit in whose ken
Their only birth is? Blaze one solar ray
Across the grisly darkness that appals,
And where the gloom was murkiest, the bright Day
Laughs with a light of blosmy coronals.
XXVI.
Stretch ample, marshes, in serene delight!
Proclaiming faith past tempest to destroy,
With silent confidence of conscious might!
Glad of the blue sky, knowing nor wind nor rain
Can do your large indifference despite,
Nor lightning mar your tolerant disdain!
XXVII.
Assaults the air with jubilant foray;
The intolerable exigence of glee
Shouts to the sun and leaps in radiant spray;
The laughter of the breakers on the shore
Shakes like the mirth of Titans heard at play,
With thunders of tumultuous uproar.
XXVIII.
Fellow of Fate and Death! Exultant Sea!
Thou strong companion of the Sun, make room!
Let me make one with you, rough comrade Sea!
Sea of the boisterous sport of wind and spray!
Sea of the lion mirth! Sonorous Sea!
I hear thy shout, I know what thou wouldst say.
XXIX.
O Queen that laughest Time and Fear to scorn,
Death, like a bridegroom, tosses in thine arms.
The rapture of your fellowship is borne
Like music on the wind. I hear the blare,
The calling of the undesisting horn,
And tremors as of trumpets on the air.
XXX.
Death, Master of a thousand ships, each prow
That sets against the thunders of the main
Is lyric with thy mirth. I know thee now,
O Death, I shout back to thy hearty hail,
Thou of the great heart and the cavernous brow,
Strong Seaman at whose look the north winds quail.
XXXI.
Of mighty seas with one that never failed
To make the havens of the further shore.
Beyond that vaster Ocean thou hast sailed
What old immortal world of beauty lies!
What land where light for matter has prevailed!
What strange Atlantid dream of Paradise!
XXXII.
The mild historian of the Sudbury Inn,
Welcoming thee to that long-wished-for home?
What talk of comrades old didst thou begin?
What dear inquiry lingered on his tongue
Of the Sicilian, ere he led thee in
To the eternal company of Song?
XXXIII.
Hailed thee as courtly hosts some noble guest—
Poe, disengloomed with the celestial years,
Calm Bryant, Emerson of the antique zest
And modern vision, Lowell all a-bloom
At last, unwintered of his mind's unrest,
And Walt, old Walt, with the old superb aplomb.
XXXIV.
From Georgian live-oaks to Acadian firs,
Walks with his friend as once at Cedarcroft.
And many more I see of speech diverse;
From whom a band aloof and separate,
Landor and Meleager in converse,
And lonely Collins, for thy greeting wait.
XXXV.
Emerges, seeing whose sacred laureate hair
Thou startest forward trembling through the glades,
Advancing upturned palms of filial prayer?
Long hast thou served him; now, of lineament
Not stern but strenuous still, thy pious care
He comes to guerdon. Art thou not content?
XXXVI.
What tenderer meetings, what more secret joys!
Lift not the veil of heavenly privacies!
Suffice it that nought unfulfilled alloys
The pure gold of the rapture of his rest,
Save that some linger where the jarring noise
Of earth afflicts, whom living he caressed.
XXXVII.
Are in the City of the Living God.
Beside the eternal sources of the days
He dwells, his thoughts with timeless lightnings shod;
His hours are exaltations and desires,
The soul itself its only period,
And life unmeasured save as it aspires.
XXXVIII.
Above his head, and from the shaken boughs
Æonian music falls; but he receives
Its endless changes in alert repose,
Nor drifts unconscious as a dead leaf blown
On with the wind and senseless that it blows,
But hears the chords like armies marching on.
XXXIX.
Whose motion is like music but more sweet;
The centuries for him their gates unbar;
He hears the stars their Glorias repeat;
And in high moments when the fervid soul
Burns white with love, lo! on his gaze replete
The Vision of the Godhead shall unroll—
XL.
Distinct, innumerable, inseparate,
And never ending what was ne'er begun,
Within Himself his Freedom and his Fate,
All dreams, all harmonies, all Forms of light
In his Infinity intrinsecate—
Until the soul no more can bear the sight.
XLI.
Knowing all this, why hast thou held thy peace?
Master of Silence, thou wilt waste no breath
On weaklings, nor to stiffen nerveless knees
Deny strong men the conquest of one qualm—
And they, thy dauntless comrades, are at ease,
And need no speech, and greet thee calm for calm.
XLII.
Or bid them follow into Hell, they dare;
So are they worthy of their thrones of light.
O that great tranquil rapture they shall share!
That life compact of adamantine fire!
My soul goes out across the eastern air
To that far country with a wild desire!...
XLIII.
Returns upon their silence, there to brood
Till the significance of earth is brought
I turn my eyes toward the distance dim,
And in the purple far infinitude
Watch the white ships sink under the sea-rim;
XLIV.
Some for Bermuda bound, or Baltimore;
Others, perchance, for further Orient seas,
Sumatra and the straits of Singapore,
Or antique cities of remote Cathay,
Or past Gibraltar and the Libyan shore,
Through Bab-el-mandeb eastward to Bombay;
XLV.
And the Great Captive's ocean-prison speak,
Then on beyond the demon-haunted cliff,
By Madagascar's palms and Mozambique,
Till in some sudden tropic dawn afar
The Sultan sees the colors at her peak
Salute the minarets of Zanzibar.
NOTES
THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
The subject of this elegy was born at Boston in 1819, and educated at the Boston Latin School. While yet a young man he visited England and Italy, with which latter country and its literature his life was to be so largely occupied. From early youth he was a devoted student of Dante, to the translation of whose "Divine Comedy" he chiefly applied his scholarship and poetic genius. In 1854 he published a volume of original poems, among which were the famous verses, "On a Bust of Dante," which found their way at once into all the anthologies. Several other volumes were privately printed, and in 1892 he published "Circum Præcordia," which contained, besides a versification of the collects of the Church as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer, about a dozen original poems of a religious nature. The translation of the first ten cantos of the "Inferno" was published in 1843, and the complete "Inferno" in 1867. The opening cantos of the "Purgatorio" were issued in 1876, and the remaining cantos were afterward completed and are now in process of publication. In 1870 Mr. Parsons was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Reale Accademia de' Fisiocritici in Siena. He died at Scituate, Mass., September 3, 1892.
"Dr. Parsons holds a place of his own. He is one of those rare poets whose infrequent work is so beautiful as to make us wish for more. In quality, at least, it is of a kind with Landor's; his touch is sure, and has at command the choicer modes of lyrical art—those which, although fashion may overslaugh them, return again, and enable a true poet to be quite as original as when hunting devices previously unessayed. His independence on the other hand, is exhibited in his free renderings of Dante....
"Parsons's briefer poems often are models, but occasionally show a trace of that stiffness which too little employment gives even the hand of daintier sense. 'Lines on a Bust of Dante,' in structure, diction, loftiness of thought, is the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. Inversion, the vice of stilted poets, becomes with him an excellence, and old forms and accents are rehandled and charged with life anew. It is to be regretted that Dr. Parsons has not used his gift more freely. He has been a poet for poets, rather than for the people; but many types are required to fill out the hemicycle of a nation's literature."
—Stedman's Poets of America.
"The study of a great man is an education. Dr. Parsons has been an unwearied student of Dante for thirty years [1869], and has reaped commensurate benefits from the familiarity. His lines to the immortal Florentine, by common consent, are ranked with the very noblest efforts of the American Muse. Among the other traits in the matchless style of Dante, are his unique conciseness and precision. His descriptions are coined rather than painted; his metaphors are not pictures, but medallions. This artistic horror of slovenly work, this conscientious finish of severe simplicity and force, the apt pupil shares with the great master."
—W. R. Alger.
"He occupies some such place in American poetry as Gray or Collins does in English poetry, not having written much, but extremely well. The poet is not living in the country who could have written a stronger, grander poem than that on the 'Bust of Dante,' beginning:
Whom Arno shall remember long,
How stern of lineament, how grim,
The father was of Tuscan song.'"
—Wm. Hayes Ward.
STANZA I.
This poem was written in Windsor, Nova Scotia, at Kingscroft, the residence of Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts, where the author was staying when the news of the poet's death reached him. Kingscroft is situated on the edge of a beautiful wood of great fir-trees on an elevation overlooking the Avon River and the Basin of Minas.
STANZA III.
Scituate, where the poet died, is a village lying midway between Boston and Plymouth on that part of the coast of Massachusetts which is known as the South Shore. The country is of a gently undulating character, and the view seaward is across salt marshes broken here and there with low hillocks of a sandy formation.
STANZA XIV.
The poet Whittier died but a few days after the death of Parsons.
STANZA XV.
Is gentler for its memories,"
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Edmund Clarence Stedman.
Whittier, in dedicating one of his volumes to Stedman, called him "Poet, and Friend of Poets."
Joaquin Miller.
STANZA XVI.
Amelie Rives Chanler.
STANZA XVII.
James Whitcomb Riley.
Charles G. D. Roberts.
STANZA XVIII.
Near to the dead,"
Thomas Buford Meteyard, the painter, a relation of Dr. Parsons.