Baltimore Evening Sun (7 December 1912): 6.

Poets’ Day! Normally, it should not come until late in March or early in April, but the false spring of the last few weeks seeins to have brought the minnesingers out of their caves and set them to burbling like the devil. I use the simile advisedly, for what could be more pagan and satanic than the following couplet of Miss Florence Emily Nicholson, whose book of verse bears the deceptively placid title of “The Crow’s Nest”:

O give me the rich red- wine! I thirst for the purple juice!

And beginning chromatically, Miss Florence proceeds chromatically. Her enjoyment of the grape, indeed, seems to be chiefly, if not wholly, visual, at least at the start, for thus she sings:

It clears like the stained glass, And glows as the sunset glows, For the lights that through it pass Are tinct to the deepest rose.

But the other senses, it must be admitted, also join in the merry play, one by one, and at the end the poetess confesses to a general psychic inflammation:

All through me it burns and thrills, And dancing there comes a throng Of words into tunes and trills–

And so on. These tunes and trills are not so bad. Some of Miss Florence’s songs, indeed, are of a considerable sonorousness, and she is no ill hand at the sonnet. But her Khayyamish toleration of the purple juice is bitterly counterblasted by the Hon. John A. Johnson, of Covington, Ky., in his volume of “Three Visions.” John sees, as through a bottle darkly, the sad finish of the winebibber, to wit:

Gone is the blush of his childhood’s fair morning, Gone all the brightness of youth’s glow. Gone past redemption, and gone without warning, Manhood’s proud strength and left only decay!

Gone perhaps, but certainly not “without warning.” So long as Johnson lives, august and imperishable among the lordlier bards, no dallier with the wine cup will ever be able to make the plea that its dangers were not laid before him. He has been warned. He has been cautioned. He has been helped.

Still, there are folks who are deaf to warnings, and even folks who disdain all help. The attitude of the latter is well set forth in a book of verse called “Songs Under Open Skies,” by the Hon. M. J. Flannery, of Cincinnati, Ohio. Thus:

I ask no help of any power In heaven above or hell below; ’Gainst all the baleful hosts that lower My own unaided strength I throw.

Why should I impotently cry, Or waste my breath in craven prayer? At worst I can but fighting die, And spill my spirit to the air.

Obviously, the Hon. Mr. Flannery has never had sciatica, nor has he ever tried to sit through the play of “Ben Hur.” He will grow less brave as he grows older. But all the same, he is a pretty fair pote, with a good ear for music and a number of new ideas–and his booming defiance, whatever its defects, is at least as respectable as the mushy resignationism so prevalent among our harpists. A good compromise between the two is struck by the Hon. Everard Jack Appleton, in his “The Quiet Courage”:

I have no fear. What is in store for me Shall find me ready for it, undismayed. God grant my only cowardice may be Afraid--to be afraid !

For the rest the Hon. Mr. Appleton imitates Kipling, a madness not so prevalent as it used to be, and composes bad ballads in bad dialect. A newspaper rhymster, with his moments, but an injudicious editor of his own stuff. This is the trouble, too, with the Hon. William B. Anvine, author of “Hang Up Philosophy,” for after filling a couple of dozen pages with very fair songs, he breaks the spell with such garbage as the following:

A night like this Breathes naught but bliss For loving souls on sea and land! Dost feel the pressure of my hand? Oh, answer with a kiss!

Let its hope that the lady answered with the kiss, and not with a rolling pin. For life is not all poetry, as Miss Mary Matthews Bray assures its in her “Wayside Blossoms,” viz:

Nay! Life is not all poetry! Dear friend, since that bright day, Year after year, into the silent past Has winged its unreturning way; Life lies behind me now--as then before-- And I have found or made it Dreariest prose, told o’er and o’er.

Which finishes the lyrists and brings us to the epicians. The Hon. William Henry Venable, author of “June on the Miami,” is the most respectable of them. The Hon. Mr. Venable is now the dean of Ohio poets, and such native sons as William Dean Howells and the Everard Jack Appleton before mentioned delight to do him honor. His poem is an unpretentious but very graceful pæan in praise of Ohio’s modest stream, and there is a charming, old-fashioned note in its limpid lines. The aged bard makes a conventional beginning:

I sing not Arno’s balmy dale, Nor Ister’s far-meandering vale; Sing not of Alpine streams that break From crystal cave or mountain lake And under gleaming glaciers run, Or, leaping from romantic shades, Fling out their quivering cascades Like silver banner in the sun.

And then, having announced his theme, he proceeds to his sweet crying up of the Miami:

My Vallombrosa of the West!

Not great poetry, of course, and not even passionate poetry, but still very fair. Mr. Venable knows how to write: whatever he lacks in inspiration he makes up in good taste and good sense.

The other laborers in larger forms I cannot recommend. The Hon. Thomas G. Devine, in “Madawaska,” makes minnesingers of bears, crows, snakes, wolves and beavers. Some anonymous bard, in “Surf Lines,” argues for revealed religion in 452 nine-line stanzas. And the Hon. Marshall Moreton, in “The Dance of Dinwiddie,” attempts a comic epic with songs and succeeds only in being tedious. This finishes the poets.

But stay! Here are two newspaper rhymers. One of them is Edmund Vance Cooke, with “Baseballogy,” a book of verses about the national game. They are better, it may he said, than the same author’s hymns of anti-vivisection. And the other is S. E. Kiser, our old friend Sam, with another volume of his newspaper verse, fluent, graceful and often full of beauty. A sample of his lighter stuff and the lodge will stand adjourned:

The silent grave brings peace to those who sigh, Hope lends glad brightness to the tear-dimmed eye, Faith moves the mountain whose crest cleaves the sky, So does money.