FullReads

I know of only three poets in this century who bring a large measure of thought and emotion to their task. I refer to William Vaughn Moody, to John Russell McCarthy (author of “Out-of-Doors” and “Gods and Devils”), and to Robert Loveman, best known for his felicitous “Rain Song,” a poem too well known to be quoted here. Any poet who has ever lived might have been proud to have written that poem. It goes as lightly as thistle-down, yet is freighted with thought. Its philosophy is so sublimated and so natural and easy that we are likely to forget that it has any philosophy at all. The fifty or more stanzas of his “Gates of Silence” are probably far less well known. Let me quote a few of them:

“The races rise and fall,
The nations come and go,
Time tenderly doth cover all
With violets and snow.

“The mortal tide moves on
To some immortal shore,
Past purple peaks of dusk and dawn,
Into the evermore.

* * * * *

“All the tomes of all the tribes,
All the songs of all the scribes,
All that priest and prophet say,
What is it? and what are they?

“Fancies futile, feeble, vain,
Idle dream-drift of the brain,–
As of old the mystery
Doth encompass you and me.

* * * * *

“Old and yet young, the jocund Earth
Doth speed among the spheres,
Her children of imperial birth
Are all the golden years.

“The happy orb sweeps on,
Led by some vague unrest,
Some mystic hint of joys unborn
Springing within her breast.”

What takes one in “The Gates of Silence,” which, of course, means the gates of death, are the large, sweeping views. The poet strides through time and space like a Colossus and

“flings
Out of his spendthrift hands
The whirling worlds like pebbles,
The meshed stars like sands.”

Loveman’s stanzas have not the flexibility and freedom of those of Moody and McCarthy, but they bring in full measure the largeness of thought which a true poem requires.

Some of Moody’s poems rank with the best in the literature of his time. He was deeply moved by the part we played in the Spanish-American War. It was a war of shame and plunder from the point of view of many of the noblest and most patriotic men of the country. We freed Cuba from the Spanish yoke and left her free; but we seized the Philippines and subdued the native population by killing a vast number of them–more than half of them, some say. Commercial exploitation inspired our policy. How eloquently Senator Hoar of Massachusetts inveighed against our course! We promised the Filipinos their freedom–a promise we have not yet fulfilled.

Moody’s most notable poems are “Gloucester Moors,” “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” (inspired by the Shaw Monument in Boston, the work of Saint-Gaudens), “The Brute,” “The Daguerreotype,” and “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines.” In this last poem throb and surge the mingled emotions of pride and shame which the best minds in the country felt at the time–shame at our mercenary course, and pride in the fine behavior of our soldiers. It is true we made some pretense of indemnifying Spain by paying her twenty million dollars, which was much like the course of a boy who throws another boy down and forcibly takes his jack-knife from him, then gives him a few coppers to salve his wounds. I remember giving Moody’s poem to Charles Eliot Norton (one of those who opposed the war), shortly after it appeared. He read it aloud with marked emotion. Let me quote two of its stanzas: