“The fact that poetry is not of the slightest economic or political importance, that it has no attachment to any of the powers that control the modern world, may set it free to do the only thing that in this age it can do —to keep the neglected parts of the human experience alive until the weather changes; as in some unforeseeable way it may do”~Graham Hough
Last year I did a poem survey and began posting the top 100 poems from the survey in chronological order. Then life and laziness and Cybils and Christmas intervened, and I only posted the oldest 35 of the 100 projected poems. But I am determined to use Poetry Friday as an excuse to write about the other 65 poems on list. So, today I’m back with an American poet, William Cullen Bryant.
Whither, ‘midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?
Vainly the fowler’s eye
Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong,
As, darkly painted on the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.
Seek’st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chafed ocean side?
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,–
The desert and illimitable air,–
Lone wandering, but not lost.
All day thy wings have fann’d
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere:
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.
And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon o’er thy sheltered nest.
Thou’rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form; yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.
He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
William Cullen Bryant published his first poem at age ten. As an adult, he was a lawyer, and then a journalist and assistant editor of the New York Evening Post, a Federalist, later Republican-leaning, newspaper. Bryant was an ardent abolitionist whose major disagreement with Abraham Lincoln after Lincoln’s election was over the emancipation of the slaves and the abolition of slavery in the entire country. Bryant believed that Lincoln’s delay in freeing the slaves was incomprehensible and dilatory.
About Wm. Cullen Bryant:
Critic Thomas Holley Chivers: [The] “only thing [Bryant] ever wrote that may be called Poetry is ‘Thanatopsis’, which he stole line for line from the Spanish. The fact is, that he never did anything but steal—as nothing he ever wrote is original.”
Edgar Allan Poe on the poem “June”: “The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious. The intense melancholy which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet’s cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul—while there is the truest poetic elevation in the thrill… the impression left is one of a pleasurable sadness.”
Mary Mapes Dodge: “You will admire more and more, as you grow older, the noble poems of this great and good man.
Abraham Lincoln: “It is worth a visit from Springfield, Illinois, to New York to make the acquaintance of such a man as William Cullen Bryant.”
