FAMOUS SINGLE POEMS
ONE-POEM MEN
One swallow may not make a summer, but one poem makes a poet. Immortality may be—and often has been—won with a single song. Nothing is known of Louisa Crawford except that she wrote “Kathleen Mavourneen;” William Douglas would have been forgotten many decades since save for “Annie Laurie;” William Shenstone’s name is kept alive only by his careless lines written at an inn at Henley. These are not, it will be observed, in any sense great poems; but they have one quality in common, that vein of pensive sentiment which, as W. P. Trent puts it, “finds an echo in the universal human heart”—an echo which Time seems powerless to diminish.
Not infrequently, out of a lifetime of metrical composition, out of thousands of lines produced with fearful labor, only a dozen or so survive. (To survive, be it understood, is to keep on living; and no poem can be said to live unless it is read and loved and quoted.) Blanco White’s sonnet, “To Night,” was considered by Coleridge the finest in the language,—and it represents the sum of White’s poetic achievement. Francis William Bourdillon has covered many reams of paper during the course of a long life, but a single sheet, the one on which he wrote the eight lines beginning, “The night has a thousand eyes,” is worth all the rest. “The Burial of Sir John Moore” lives on, but everything else which Charles Wolfe wrote has long since lapsed into obscurity. Two lovely quatrains, “A Death-Bed,” worthy to rank with the immortal two in which Landor laments Rose Aylmer, are all that survive from the pen of James Aldrich.
From the citation of such examples, which might be prolonged indefinitely, one is tempted to proceed to a consideration of how infrequently even the greatest poets write great poetry, or to an enumeration of the poets who wrote none at all—this last to console certain one-poem men who bitterly resent being called such. But this, however instructive and amusing, would be to wander outside the purpose of these papers and must be left to another time.
Robert Graves, in his little book, On English Poetry, evolves an ingenious theory about one-poem men. He believes that true poetry is the result of a sort of brain-storm, in which the poet, in a state of self-hypnosis, produces something quite beyond the capacities of his normal waking state—a diamond in the rough, as it were, with a heart of flame, but full of surface faults which require the patient craftsmanship of his waking state to remove. The professional poet, by long practice and quick recognition of the preliminary symptoms, grows adept in inducing in himself this trance-like condition, and learns how to invite it and how to yield himself to it—how, in a word, to “go under.” Also long practice has given him the skill needed to cut and polish the diamond thus produced.
But one-poem men are either born poets tortured by a life-long mental conflict to which only once in their whole lives are they able completely to yield themselves, or they are not naturally poets at all, but men who, just once, are driven by some force beyond themselves to express in verse a sudden intolerable clamor in the brain. And of course since they are not skilled craftsmen, their diamonds usually show many flaws.
This theory is well enough as applied to those rare flashes of genius which are recognized as great poetry, but it fails to explain one-poem men, because very few of them ever wrote great poetry. It is not altogether astonishing that a masterpiece should live; but, by some curious quirk, a mere jingle which possesses no possible claim to inspiration, often proves more immortal than an epic. “Bo-Peep” outlives “Paradise Regained,” and grave and scholarly men, after a lifetime of labor in their chosen fields, have been astounded and chagrined to find that their sole claim to public remembrance rested upon a bit of careless rhyme written in a moment of relaxation. William Allan Butler was a distinguished lawyer, but to-day he is remembered only by some lines of society verse. Clement Clarke Moore was a learned professor of Oriental literature and the compiler of a Hebrew lexicon, but his name has been kept alive by a nursery jingle.
Poets have always been the special sport of Fortune, which delights to play with them, to whirl them aloft and to cast them down, to torment them with fleeting glimpses of happiness in the midst of long nightmares of despair, and especially to condemn their favorite children to swift oblivion and to raise up some despised and rejected outcast for the admiration of mankind. Nobody—poets least of all!—has yet discovered the formula which will assure immortality to a poem. Mere size will not do it—the most ambitious edifices are usually the first to crumble. Neither polished diction nor lofty thought will do it—most deathless songs are written in words of one syllable on the simplest of themes. Indeed, it would almost seem that the surest way is to waste no time in laboring and sweating over the fabrication of a masterpiece, but to wander idly along the pleasant places of the world, seeking love and laughter, writing a song when the spirit moves, and tossing it into the air for the wind to blow where it listeth!
Whether the song survives is largely a matter of chance. Many people cherish the comfortable belief that a great work of art never perishes, that it holds within itself, in some mysterious way, the seed of deathlessness. But this is nonsense. The dust we tread is compounded of great works of art, and many lovely songs have passed into darkness along with the lovely women who inspired them. That some few live on is due largely to the “Reliques” and “Pastorals” and “Garlands” put together by the loving hand of the anthologist, who, industrious and undiscouraged, is continually assaying huge masses of very low-grade ore in the hope of discovering a grain of gold. Needless to say, many such grains escape him, and are carried down to oblivion by the sheer weight of the uninspired mass in which they are embedded. Sometimes, in turning over the old material, one of them is found, but many have been lost forever.
The poems dealt with in the following pages have no claim to greatness. They are, for the most part, curiosities, literary orphans which have flitted through the columns of the press, their parentage uncertain. They have been mutilated by brutal scissors, debased by stupid compositors and marred by careless proofreaders, into mere pitiful shadows of their proper selves. To rescue them, to cleanse their wounds and heal their bruises, and finally to trace their parentage, is all that is attempted here.
It is the fate of almost every fugitive poem, as soon as it gains a certain celebrity, to be claimed by many people, with the most amusing and astonishing results. The question of authorship is one (among many) which the anthologist must decide, and the material upon which these articles are based was accumulated during the compilation of The Home Book of Verse. It has seemed worth while to gather it together in the hope that it will settle certain historic and more or less heated controversies once for all.