Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/76

 58 Later Poets It is not too much to say that these are the characteristics of Sill's poetry at its best. We are the purer and richer for reading him; he rouses life in the dark, disused corners of our being as many greater poets do not. In The Fool's Prayer and Opportunity, his two best known poems, he attacks us rather too directly, in the New England didactic strain. Yet even here the "moral," though obvious, exists in solution rather than in a crystallized statement. Nearly always his instinct was to be suggestive, to reach the reader's emotion by indirection, by surprise. Always clear, he is also quietly subtle ; his meaning steals upon us like the mood of a peaceful evening. His diction is so simple that an unpracticed reader does not suspect how delicately the poet has felt the "troops of high and pure associations" that accompany his plain words. So, too, his poems are musical, frequently, with a melody that is un- heard. He was devoted to music all his life, plap'ng a number of instruments with skill if not virtuosity. He wrote about music in prose and verse. In nature, sound seemed to attract him especially, most of all the fitful surf-music of the wind, which he used in his poems repeatedly. He had, too, a pictorial sense, which gave him a command of the "lovely images " that he regarded as essential in verse. Indeed, he had all the quali- ties needed for the highest excellence in poetry except a vigor- ous creative imagination. His imagination was perhaps mainly inarticulate, for though he wrote all his life he seems to have lacked the intense eagerness or the steady, resolute progress in creation that we associate with the great artist. His over- modest mind, moreover, together with his unresolved struggle of faith and doubt, encouraged his tendency to rest in the un- recorded thought — to read widely, to feel and reflect abim- dantly, rather than to shape his conception in the concrete poem. Among his many poems that peer within to the shadowy mood and the curious speculation, there are also poems, and a larger number than one would expect, presenting the scene of that "purer world" of the Far West to which this typical New England spirit attached itself with few moments of regret, — the soaring pines filled with the sound of chanting winds, the surf with its "curdling rivulets of green, " the city of San Fran- cisco across the bay like a sea-dragon crawled upon the shore,