I once paid tuition dollars to learn that 19th century English poetry was subpar. Not all of it, of course, but one professor, while
explaining how “The Wasteland” was revolutionary for its time, constantly referred back to the following schmaltzy line from Shelly:
“I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.” That, in his estimation, was the essence
of what T.S. Eliot et al were trying to overturn in the early 20th
century.
While Eliot was my favorite poet back then,
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman (both, of course, iconoclastic in their day)
have long overtaken the author of “The Waste Land” in my heart and in the number
of minutes I spend reading poetry for pure pleasure. Eliot’s intellectualism seems
bare and ascetic compared to Dickinson’s beautiful, pithy, mysterious brilliance
or Whitman’s verbose exuberance.
But I've remained wary when it comes to 19th
century poetry collections, so when my library page daughter brought home three
century-old books of poetry, I tried to remain unimpressed with the beautiful
illustrations, inside and out, and the lovely thick paper that made the
books quite heavy for their size. They were all written by someone named James
Whitcomb Riley.
I Googled him. In a nutshell, Riley was a Hoosier who celebrated the Midwest
in his poetry. As a born and bred Midwesterner, I dove in and discovered some serious poetry chops in action, clearly displayed in the following lines from a poem titled “The Circus Parade”:
The Circus!—The
Circus!—The throb of the drums,
And the blare of the
horns, as the Band-wagon comes;
The clash and the
clang of the cymbals that beat,
As the glittering
pageant winds down the long street.
In the Circus parade
there is glory clean down
From the first
spangled horse to the mule of the Clown
With the gleam and the
glint and the glamour and glare
Of the days of
enchantment all glimmering there!
I could almost feel the excitement of a sleepy Midwestern
town jolting to life as The Greatest Show on Earth rolled in. I could
almost hear it too—Riley had some serious onomatopoeia going on, a few of the lines reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells."
He could also be funny, as seen in "At Ninety in the
Shade":
Hot weather? Yes; but
really not,
Compared with weather
twice as hot.
Find comfort, then, in
arguing thus,
And you’ll pull
through victorious!—
For instance, while
you gasp and pant
And try to cool
yourself—and can’t—
With soda, cream and
lemonade,
The heat at ninety in
the shade,--
Just calmly sit and
ponder o’er
These same degrees,
with ninety more
On top of them, and so
concede
The weather now is
cool indeed!
A painfully accurate description of a Midwestern summer! And
while, perhaps, not as sharply humorous as an Ogden Nash poem, the above lines
brought the latter immediately to mind (see “Lines to be Scribbled on Somebody
Else’s Thirtieth Milestone”).
Thirty today? Cheer up
my lad!
The good old thirties
aren’t so bad.
Life doesn’t end at
twenty nine
So come on in, the
water’s fine…
I kept reading and discovered that Riley also did pathos. He
did it well. While I knew that Americans of that period absolutely loved to drench
themselves in mawkish emotion, I couldn’t find an ounce of it in the following
poem entitled “He and I”, describing the quiet love of an elderly couple. It could
have easily turned maudlin. It didn’t, and I loved it so much I’ve included the
entire poem below:
Just drifting on
together—
He and I—
As through the balmy
weather
Of July
Drift two
thistle-tufts imbedded
Each in each—by
zephyrs wedded—
Touring upward,
giddy-headed,
For the sky.
And, veering up and
onward,
Do we seem
Forever drifting
downward
In a dream,
Where we meeting
song-birds that know us,
And the winds their
kisses blow us,
While the years flow
far below us
Like a stream.
And we are happy—very—
He and I—
Aye, even glad and
merry
Though on high
The heavens are
sometimes shrouded
By the midnight storm,
and clouded
Till the pallid moon
is crowded
From the sky
My spirit ne’er
expresses
Any choice
But to clothe him with
caresses
And rejoice;
And as he laughs, it
is in
Such a tone that
moonbeams glisten
And the stars come out
to listen
To his voice.
And so, what’er the
weather,
He and I,--
With our lives linked
thus together,
Float and fly
As two thistle-tufts
imbedded
Each in each—by
zephyrs wedded—
Touring upward,
giddy-headed,
For the sky.
I'm not sure how Riley was able to capture the quiet beauty
long-time love so perfectly since he never married. But it’s crystal clear how he
became one of the most popular American poets in his own time, even if he has
been forgotten in ours.
