My discovery of James Whitcomb Riley

I once paid tuition dollars to learn that 19^th 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 19^th 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.