EDWIN MARKHAM'S POEMS

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N Edwin Markham's book, The Man
With the Hoe and Other Poems, many

of the "other poems are excellent, some are great. If asked to name the most poetic-not, if you please, the "loftiest" or most "purposeful"-I think I should choose "The Wharf of Dreams." venture to quote it:

Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep;
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
Flashes a signal fire across the night;

Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
Their way without a star upon the deep;

And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news,

While cargoes pile the piers a moon-white heap-
Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,

Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man's Land.

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Really, one does not every year meet with

a finer blending of imagination and fancy than this; and I know not where to put a finger on two better lines in recent work than these:

And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news.

The reader to whom these strange lines do not give an actual physical thrill may rightly boast himself impregnable to poetic emotion and indocible to the meaning of it.

Mr. Markham has said of Poetry-and said greatly:

She comes like the hush and beauty of the night,
And sees too deep for laughter;

Her touch is a vibration and a light

From worlds before and after.

But she comes not always so. Sometimes she comes with a burst of music, sometimes with a roll of thunder, a clash of weapons, a roar of winds or a beating of billow against the rock. Sometimes with a noise of revelry, and again with the wailing of a dirge. Like Nature, she "speaks a various language." Mr. Markham, no longer content, as once he seemed to be, with interpreting her

fluting and warbling and sweet jargoning," learned to heed her profounder notes, which stir the stones of the temple like the bass of a great organ.

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In his "Ode to a Grecian Urn" Keats has supplied the greatest-almost the only truly great instance of a genuine poetic inspiration derived from art instead of nature. In his poems on pictures Mr. Markham shows an increasingly desperate determination to achieve success, coupled with a lessening ability to merit it. It is all very melancholy, the perversion of this man's high powers to the service of a foolish dream by artificial and impossible means. Each effort is more ineffectual than the one that went before. less he can be persuaded to desist-to cease interpreting art and again interpret nature, and turn also from the murmurs of "Labor" to the music of the spheres-the "surge and thunder" of the universe-the end of his good literary repute is in sight. He knowsdoes he know?-the bitter truth which he might have learned otherwise than by experience: that the plaudits of "industrial discontent," even when strengthened by scholars' commendations of a few great lines in the poem that evoked it, are not fame. He

should know, and if he live long will know, that when one begins to be a "labor leader" one ceases to be a poet.

In saying to Mr. Markham, "Thou ailest here and here," Mrs. Atherton has shown herself better at diagnosis than he is himself in telling us what is the matter with the rich. Why," she asks him, "waste a beautiful gift in groveling for popularity with the mob? Striving to please the common mind has a fatal commonizing effect on the writing faculty." It is even so-nothing truer could be said, and Mr. Markham is the best proof of its truth. His early work, when he was known to only a small circle of admirers, was so good that I predicted for him the foremost place among contemporaneous American poets. He sang because he "could not choose but sing," and his singing grew greater and greater. Every year he took wider outlooks from "the peaks of song "—had already got well above the fools' paradise of flowers and song-birds and bees and women and had invaded the "thrilling region" of the cliff, the eagle and the cloud, whence one looks down upon man and out upon the world. Then he had the mischance to publish "The Man with the Hoe," a poem with some noble

lines, but an ignoble poem. In the first place, it is, in structure, stiff, inelastic, monotonous. One line is very like another. The cæsural pauses fall almost uniformly in the same places; the full stops always at the finals. Comparison of the versification with Milton's blank will reveal the difference of method in all its significance. It is a difference analogous to that between painting on ivory and painting on canvas-between the dead, flat tints of the one and the lively, changing ones due to inequalities of surface in the other. If it seem a little exacting to compare Mr. Markham's blank with that of the only poet who has ever mastered that medium in English, I can only say that the noble simplicity and elevation of Mr. Markham's work are such as hardly to justify his admeasurement by any standard lower than the highest that we have.

My chief objection relates to the sentiment of the piece, the thought that the work carries; for although thought is no part of the poetry conveying it, and, indeed, is almost altogether absent from some of the most precious pieces (lyrical, of course) in our language, no elevated composition has the right to be called great if the message that it de