CHAPTER XIII

LEARNING TO LOVE A POET

It is not uncommon to hear young people say, “I don’t like poetry at all. It is dry, horrid stuff, and I don’t understand it.” No doubt some of you will say or think this about Bryant’s poetry. It is true that he used a great many long, hard words; and his poems are sometimes rather solemn. What is more, they are not musical like Longfellow’s. It is said that Bryant had no ear for music. For this reason you cannot read his poetry as you do Longfellow’s, swinging along from line to line. Young people who read in the sing-song style will find that they cannot do that when they come to Bryant. At first you may think his poetry is, for this reason, not good poetry at all. Perhaps it would be better to call Bryant a prose poet instead of a musical poet. But when you get used to his prose-like poetry, you will like it if you have in you the least love of nature or natural beauty.

Take some one poem that you like and read it over and over again, until you have it almost if not quite by heart—for instance, that beautiful poem, “The Death of the Flowers,” written on the occasion of his sister’s death:

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit’s tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Other poems that are well worth reading many times, until you really understand and love them, are “The Waterfowl,” “Autumn Woods,” “November,” “The Gladness of Nature,” “The Past,” “To the Fringed Gentian,” “The Conqueror’s Grave,” “An Invitation to the Country,” “The Wind and the Stream,” “The Poet,” “May Evening,” “The Flood of Years,” and “Our Fellow-Worshipers.” To have mastered one of these poems is better than to have read the whole of Bryant carelessly. Take one, and read it until by very force of habit you learn to love it; and then the next poem you take up will reveal beauties which you never suspected when you first read it.

There is also a city poem of Bryant’s, “The Crowded Street,” well worth learning to love:

Let me move slowly through the street, Filled with an ever-shifting train, Amid the sound of steps that beat The murmuring walks like autumn rain.

How fast the flitting figures come! The mild, the fierce, the stony face; Some bright with thoughtless smiles, and some Where secret tears have left their trace.

And here is one more short poem, which may you all remember, long after you have forgotten that you ever read this little history of the poet’s life!

THE DEATH OF LINCOLN.

Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power, a nation’s trust!

In sorrow by thy bier we stand, Amid the awe that hushes all, And speak the anguish of a land That shook with horror at thy fall.

Thy task is done; the bond are free: We bear thee to an honored grave, Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave.

Pure was thy life; its bloody close Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noblest host of those Who perished in the cause of Right.

THE STORY OF HENRY W. LONGFELLOW

[Illustration: _HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW_]

LONGFELLOW