It is a snowflake, which is like a star, Which slides the whole length of a lilac leaf. . . This is not you? These symbols are not you? Not snowflake, cobweb, raindrop? . . . Woman, woman, You are too literal, too strict with me. What would you have? Some simple copper coin I love you, you are lovely, I adore you? Or (better still) dumb silence, and a look? No, no, this will not do; I am not one It is a star which might be thought a snowflake, Shrouded with silver brightness; it is a leaf That makes the pure throat of the iris pure. Yet you ... would have me say your hair is Helen's,— Your gait angelic; while I turn from these To the vast pages of that manuscript On which the stars are stars, the world a world; CLOISTER So, in the evening, to the simple cloister: What ferns of thought are these, the cool and green What spring is this, that bubbles the cold sand, ... Now in the evening, in the simple cloister, In which the gone and coming are at peace. What bird is this, whose silence fills the trees With rich delight? What leaves and boughs are these, What lizard, and what snake? . . . The bird is gone: And while you wait, another comes and goes,Another and another; yet your eye, Although it has not moved, can scarcely say If birds have come and gone, so quick, so brief,— Or if the thrush who waits there is the same. Yet are the same. . . . And all these things are you. Thus, in the evening, in the simple cloister, . James Whaler AMES WHALER was born May 5, 1889, in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents came J from Maryland and Pennsylvania with no city backgrounds anywhere until the family reached Wilmington. Whaler attended the Wilmington Friends' School and graduated from Princeton University, from which he received a doctor's degree for a work on Miltonic simile. Paying hard for his education, he worked in many capacities until he became head of a Nature Study class at the Minnesota State Teachers' College and then Instructor of English at Goucher College, Baltimore. His first impulse to write poetry came when he found himself in the depths of the Maine woods in 1922, but Whaler was thirty-eight before his first book, Hale's Pond (1927), was published. The volume attracted little notice; beyond two or three perfunctory reviews, there was no critical consideration of the six long narratives comprising this strange work. But though few copies of the book were sold, rumors of its quality seemed to spread by grapevine telegraph; here a surprised critic and there an unprofessional enthusiast spoke up for the coiled vigor of "Runaway," "Jordan," "Monsieur Pipereau." This was New England with a difference. Purporting to be the poetry of the Maine woods, it was the very antithesis of the plein-air-afootthrough-the-great-outdoors sort of verse to which the Wanderlust school had accustomed us. Instead of pedestrian platitudes, here were ideas as novel as their idiom; instead of dilutions of sentiment, here were emotional and verbal richness. This luxuriance, at first commendable, is Whaler's chief handicap, for it leads him to pile figure upon figure, pack word against word until his line becomes congested. So, too, his utterance, strained to its emotional capacity, tends to be pitched an octave too high. But Whaler might well be calling attention to a kind of Yankee we have forgotten. Understatement is characteristic of one type of New Englander; there is another and as genuine a type-who, when he speaks, speaks too loudly with the abrupt release of long suppressions. The very knots and congestions, as well as the intense key of Whaler's verse, result from an endeavor to express the person who, when he talks, cries out his thought and who, when a poet, is likely to forget restraint. Whaler's faults are the faults of excess, not those of insufficiency, and, though here and there he shows the danger of knowing the woods too well, his men and women come first. He can-and does-draw the fine line between the incidental and the inevitable. In varying degrees, all the long poems exhibit this power to seize on the significant trivial, none better than "Monsieur Pipereau." In some ways this poem is the author's chief triumph, for here, without preamble or apology, Whaler calmly rewrites one of the world's most popular poems. "Monsieur Pipereau" is, plot for plot, detail for detail, Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin" translated to a lumber-camp in Maine. But instead of being overcome by the comparison, the reader forgets the American's audacity, even-after the first page or two-forgets the original. Green River (1931) is a long poem centering about Constantine Rafinesque, the great botanist and nature-lover, who came to America when he was seventeen, crossed the Alleghenies on foot, floated down the Ohio, and became a professor at Transylvania College, in Lexington, Kentucky. Green River is a headlong narrative distinguished by its strange evocativeness. It is the talk of a man who has been less persuaded than jarred into speech, jarred beyond the pattern of realism. THE POND (from "Runaway") Shadowed in midnight green, Wedging her belly down a wide ravine, No moon to bathe her eyes And wake her, warn her that a storm would rise, Hale's Pond I felt before me in an hour By thick black scents of fish and fern and flower. I rested on the "Dock" Two split logs slapping at a foundered rock Where lichen-paint dripped into lily-wire; Here often had I dived through June's wet fire, Here often had I crawled a chill ooze-bed, With frog-palms, trout-eyes, chest ribbed round with lead. For Father, when he had a cider-bout, And in the shame of it, would send me out To weed-then dive instead, and shout and swim Till sun-slope and the black cows' milking-hymn! Silk fish to nibble at me, toe to chin; And once, while I was floating like a mink, Straight in my face a doe looked down to drink! I caught her breath above a pickerel-bloom: MONSIEUR PIPEREAU The worst camp-life man ever lived? That season Up near Seboomook. Couldn't been worse. The reason? RATS! Big enough rats to circumcise wildcats, Sociable, devastating democrats, Under the bunkhouse, up above the ceiling, And once I even saw him make his mare Rogers, the foreman, had them send us traps From Bangor: cages with invisible snaps And flaps to hold a dozen, traps of steel Whose center-plates would crash at a grasshopper's heel: Traps built to serve mankind and to inspire,- First day, caught ten-the deaf and dumb and blind; "Five cents per head!" Rogers announced that night. Lord! we'd have paid him ten per head to do it! Now Rogers and his wife, and Mrs. Grove |