From: Harrop V. <sle...@ne...> - 2009-08-18 06:12:59
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Which has more fancy than is common in Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's "Three years she grew in sun and shade," and both of these nameless pieces might fitly be {516} entitled--as Wordsworth's is in Mr. Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_--"The Education of Nature." Although Bryant's career is identified with New York, his poetry is all of New England. His heart was always turning back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berkshire hills. There was nothing of that urban strain in him which appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the poet of autumn, of the American October and the New England Indian Summer, that season of "dropping nuts" and "smoky light," to whose subtle analogy with the decay of the young by the New England disease, consumption, he gave such tender expression in the _Death of the Flowers_; and amid whose "bright, late quiet," he wished himself to pass away. Bryant is our poet of "the melancholy days," as Lowell is of June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with the exultant gladness of Lowell in meadows full of bobolinks, and in the summer day that is "--simply perfect from its own resource As to the bee the new campanula's Illuminate seclusion swung in air." Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of _June_, in which he speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one "Whose part in all the pomp that fills The circuit of the summer hills Is--that his grave is green." {517} Bryant is, _par excellence_, the poet of New England wild flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian--to each of which he dedicated an entire poem--the orchis and the golden rod, "the aster in the wood and the yellow sunflower by the brook." With these his name will be associated as Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, and Emerson's with the rhodora. Except when writing of nature he was apt to be commonplace, and there are not many such energetic lines in his purely reflective verse as these famous ones from the _Battle Field_: "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, And dies among his worshipers." He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing a new collection |