THE SYLVAN CABIN

EDWARD SMYTH JONES

THE SYLVAN CABIN

A CENTENARY ODE ON
THE BIRTH OF LINCOLN

AND OTHER VERSE

BY

EDWARD SMYTH JONES

WITH INTRODUCTION BY

WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE

BOSTON

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY

1911

Copyright, 1911

Sherman, French & Company

TO

THE HON. ARTHUR P. STONE

Justice of the Third District Court

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Edward Smyth Jones
Boston, Mass.

INTRODUCTION

A poet that comes through a unique experience, as so many poets have, and very recently as the author of this volume has, arrives through his personality rather than his work at a precipitate sort of fame that may serve his talents well or serve them ill. To know that a man was sent to jail as the consequence of a passionate desire to go to college, and that that desire involved the tramping of dusty and hungry miles, adds to the interest to the man that cannot fail in some significant way to set a glamor upon the poet. Poetry is made out of experience—the experience of dreams, of action, of desires and hopes baffled on the inexplicable sea of circumstance; in these latter the dream is as the spirit, and the man whose art becomes an expression of all he has realized in living, his experiences become something more than art, they are the subtle rendering reality that is truth.

In these poems of Mr. Jones' it is that which gives them a unique value because they are in a deeply essential manner the rendering of a human document, as all poems must be, of an individual who speaks universally. I emphasize this quality first because art registers its worth by the vitality of its substance. If the substance be vital, then its embodiment is artistically successful to the degree in which the maker has felt his experiences. These poems, then, will come to many readers with a freshness, with the appeal for a certain sympathy that will compel attention. The opening poem which celebrates the centenary of Lincoln's birth, with its fine imaginative sweep, is as good as any poem I have seen which that occasion called forth. In it is poetry that ought to assure Mr. Jones' future if circumstances permit him to cultivate an art for which nature has so obviously endowed him. "The Sylvan Cabin" in spirit may be said to characterize the author's book; that upward striving toward the ideal, which taking a personal expression in his own experience, in his own hopes, has also a larger significance in voicing the aspirations of those for whom, as is shown in many other poems, he becomes a voice, a representative.

Mr. Jones' work has already won for him the approbation of many literary people, his poems having appeared from time to time in various publications; this fact not only justifies his gathering them together in this volume, but being so recognized must fill him with a certain assurance for the future. To this I can only add that, good as these are, they give us the hope for better from one who ought certainly to go on and upward.

William Stanley Braithwaite.

Boston, April 5, 1911.

CONTENTS