Richard Hovey
Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.
His first volume, The Laurel: An Ode (1889), betrayed the overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss Carman—the three volumes of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman, begins:
I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.
I have need of the sky.
I have business with the grass.
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
I will get me away to the waters that glass
The clouds as they pass....”
Hovey’s attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than his own words concerning the poet: “It is not his mission,” wrote Hovey in the Dartmouth Magazine, “to write elegant canzonettas for the delectation of the dilettanti, but to comfort the sorrowful and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart of man—all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of it.” This almost too conscious awareness of the poet’s “mission” often marred Hovey’s work; in responding to his program, he frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death is significant; Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas is magnificent in its restrained vitality.
Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the best known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). This volume contains “Spring” and the stirring “Comrades” in full as well as the best of his vivid fragments.
Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.
At the Crossroads
You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever—
And it well may be for a day and a night,
And it well may be forever.
But whether we meet or whether we part
(For our ways are past our knowing),
A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart
On the ways we all are going!
Here’s luck!
For we know not where we are going.
Whether we win or whether we lose
With the hands that life is dealing,
It is not we nor the ways we choose
But the fall of the cards that’s sealing.
There’s a fate in love and a fate in fight,
And the best of us all go under—
And whether we’re wrong or whether we’re right,
We win, sometimes, to our wonder.
Here’s luck!
That we may not yet go under!
With a steady swing and an open brow
We have tramped the ways together,
But we’re clasping hands at the crossroads now
In the Fiend’s own night for weather;
And whether we bleed or whether we smile
In the leagues that lie before us
The ways of life are many a mile
And the dark of Fate is o’er us.
Here’s luck!
And a cheer for the dark before us!
You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever,
And it well may be for a day and a night
And it well may be forever!
But whether we live or whether we die
(For the end is past our knowing),
Here’s two frank hearts and the open sky,
Be a fair or an ill wind blowing!
Here’s luck!
In the teeth of all winds blowing.
Unmanifest Destiny
To what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star
Compelled to what unchosen end,
Across the sea that knows no beach,
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!
The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that God was planning then
The trumpet word of Jefferson
To bugle forth the rights of men.
To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,
What was it but despair and shame?
Who saw behind the cloud the sun?
Who knew that God was in the flame?
Had not defeat upon defeat,
Disaster on disaster come,
The slave’s emancipated feet
Had never marched behind the drum.
There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned;
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves It’s dark command.
I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall be high,
I only know it shall be great.
Love in the Winds
When I am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray.
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight.
Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,—
No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew,
But hale and hardy as the highland heather,
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.
A Stein Song
(From “Spring”)
Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime
For a life that knows no fear!
Turn night-time into daytime
With the sunlight of good cheer!
For it’s always fair weather
When good fellows get together,
With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.
When the wind comes up from Cuba,
And the birds are on the wing,
And our hearts are patting juba
To the banjo of the spring,
Then it’s no wonder whether
The boys will get together,
With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything.
For we’re all frank-and-twenty
When the spring is in the air;
And we’ve faith and hope a-plenty,
And we’ve life and love to spare:
And it’s birds of a feather
When we all get together,
With a stein on the table and a heart without a care.
For we know the world is glorious,
And the goal a golden thing,
And that God is not censorious
When his children have their fling;
And life slips its tether
When the boys get together,
With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring.