Richard Hovey

“ It is the poet's function to show that this is a mere accident, and that the essential reality still throbs as ever with a lyric rapture; that
"in the mud and scum of things
There's something ever, ever sings."
Few poets, indeed, have been completely catholic of insight, nor do they necessarily lose their title of interpreters because they are not universal interpreters, and limit themselves to the field or fields for which they have a spontaneous sympathy. Parsons, even when he rationally approved, had no spontaneous sympathy for the present, its attitude or its tendencies. ”

“ Homers must have their Agamemnons as well as Agamemnons their Homers; and to-day was not heroic to Parsons. To him the railway suggested nothing but
"The dead sleepers of the vulgar track,"
and commercial greatness smacked ever of the Philistine. He would probably have been as uncomfortable in Athens as in Boston; and while he could love Venice dead, Venice living (where, as so often in history, Trade and Art went out hand in hand, conquering and to conquer) would have been as distasteful as Chicago. ”

“ But on that very account they have frequently given more thought to the purely artistic side of their work than more copious writers. Such men were Collins and Gray, and afterward Landor; men whom we admire more for the classic beauty of their style and for other technical qualities than for the scope of their imagination or the penetration of their insight. Of this class of poets, and with no mean rank among them, was Thomas William Parsons. ”

“ The other class of phenomena in which an original and its translation must always differ is not acoustic, but linguistic. As I have had occasion to say elsewhere, "words differ in what, for lack of a better word, we must call color. With the possible exception of Volapük, in which, for this very reason, no one but a statistician would ever think of writing poetry, there is no language in existence in which the words are merely conventional symbols of the ideas for which they stand. Every word we speak has a pedigree that goes back to Adam. ”

“ It is true that the traders of Athens and the Adriatic braved great personal dangers, and brought back from their voyages strange and gorgeous fabrics, "barbaric pearl and gold," and tales of incredible adventure in the unknown world. Our modern conquests, in commerce as in science, with some notable exceptions, are of a more impalpable kind, and make no such sensuous appeal to the imagination. ”

“ Prose translations of what in the original was verse vary, of course, from that original in even more respects, since they deliberately sacrifice an entire group of expressional devices which formed an important part of the poet's intention. An argument may be made for the use of prose in translating the poetry of the ancients, for their versification differed from ours in a radical manner. But there can be no excuse for an English prose version of a poem written in any modern European language, if it be intended for more than an assistance in the study of the original. ”

“ But the poet must learn his human lesson at first hand; he must find the essential realities of life where he can see them with his own eyes, under the transitory garments which they wear in his day; and to do this he must be interested in his day.
There have been now and again, however, certain poets who seem to have been born out of due time. They have not been opposed to their age so much as apart from it. The Hamlets of verse, for them the time has been out of joint, and they have not had the intensity or the resolution to strive to set it right. ”

“ The man who speaks too consciously a message to his own time is apt to have none for any other. Parsons wrought from first to last in the true artistic spirit, and it is not unlikely that his chief claims to the recognition of the future will be found in qualities of form and style. ”

“ Inversion, the vice of stilted poets, becomes with him an excellence, and old forms and accents are rehandled and charged with life anew. It is to be regretted that Dr. Parsons has not used his gift more freely. He has been a poet for poets, rather than for the people; but many types are required to fill out the hemicycle of a nation's literature."
—Stedman's Poets of America.
"The study of a great man is an education. Dr. Parsons has been an unwearied student of Dante for thirty years [1869] , and has reaped commensurate benefits from the familiarity. ”

“ Beginning to write contemporaneously with the earliest American poets, at a time when only the veriest doggerel had yet been perpetrated in this country, he felt keenly the sense of isolation which it was the lot of men of letters in those days to experience—an isolation the reality of which the younger generation finds it difficult to appreciate. ”

“ Parsons's briefer poems often are models, but occasionally show a trace of that stiffness which too little employment gives even the hand of daintier sense. 'Lines on a Bust of Dante,' in structure, diction, loftiness of thought, is the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. ”

“ The heart was master in the world of man."
I have referred to the "Paradisi Gloria." This poem, with one unwisely altered line restored to its original reading, is one of the few faultless lyrics in the language; and the following stanza, with which it begins, is, I submit, as felicitous as anything Gray ever wrote, and more imaginative;
"There is a city builded by no hand,
And unapproachable by sea or shore,
And unassailable by any band
Of storming soldiery forevermore."
Less fine, perhaps, but still very beautiful is the touching "Dirge:"
"What shall we do now, Mary being dead? ”

“ The manner of the others often suggests the contemporaries of Dante, rather than Dante himself.
There remain for consideration and comparison the two renderings into blank verse. These are the most widely known of the various translations, and one of them, Cary's, is the form in which Dante is most generally read by English-speaking readers. Longfellow's version, though occasionally it transfers a line more successfully than any of the others, is in the main perfunctory, and its literalness is carried so far that it frequently degenerates into a "crib" pure and simple. ”

“ He died at Scituate, Mass., September 3, 1892.
"Dr. Parsons holds a place of his own. He is one of those rare poets whose infrequent work is so beautiful as to make us wish for more. In quality, at least, it is of a kind with Landor's; his touch is sure, and has at command the choicer modes of lyrical art—those which, although fashion may overslaugh them, return again, and enable a true poet to be quite as original as when hunting devices previously unessayed. His independence on the other hand, is exhibited in his free renderings of Dante.... ”

“ The risk and the imagination involved in modern achievement are enormous, and even the element of personal danger is by no means eliminated; and if there were vulgar things in the conquest of California, I doubt not there were also vulgar things, more nearly of the same kind than we are apt to think, in the conquest of Gaul. ”

“ NOTES THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.
The subject of this elegy was born at Boston in 1819, and educated at the Boston Latin School. While yet a young man he visited England and Italy, with which latter country and its literature his life was to be so largely occupied. From early youth he was a devoted student of Dante, to the translation of whose "Divine Comedy" he chiefly applied his scholarship and poetic genius. In 1854 he published a volume of original poems, among which were the famous verses, "On a Bust of Dante," which found their way at once into all the anthologies. ”

“ Peray," another bacchanalian lyric, has found its way, like the "Lines on a Bust on Dante," into the anthologies, and may be passed by here with a mere reference.
"Count Ernst von Mansfeldt, the Protestant," if three rather weak and quite unnecessary stanzas could be removed from it, would be, perhaps, the strongest poem Parsons ever wrote. It is certainly the most objective, and one of the most manly and vigorous. ”

“ Thrown back upon themselves by an environment which was distasteful to them, but which they lacked either the force or the inclination to wrestle with and overcome, they have necessarily had little to say. ”

“ Scituate, where the poet died, is a village lying midway between Boston and Plymouth on that part of the coast of Massachusetts which is known as the South Shore. The country is of a gently undulating character, and the view seaward is across salt marshes broken here and there with low hillocks of a sandy formation.
STANZA XIV.
"A double loss." ”

“ He occupies some such place in American poetry as Gray or Collins does in English poetry, not having written much, but extremely well. The poet is not living in the country who could have written a stronger, grander poem than that on the 'Bust of Dante,' beginning ”