Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
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Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Essays; Literature -- History and criticism; Periodicals
"The Bonnet" is a characteristic bit of Jacksonian delicacy and
originality. We here behold a sustained metaphor of that striking type
which the author so frequently creates; a metaphor which draws on all
Nature and the unseen world for its basis, and whose analogies are just
the ones which please us most, yet which our own minds are never finely
attuned enough to conceive unaided. The swain in the poem tells of his
intention to make a bonnet for his chosen nymph to wear. He will fashion
it with "golden thimble, scissors, needle, thread"; taking velvet from
the April sky as a groundwork, stars for trimming, moonlight for
banding, and a web of dreams for lining. He will scent it with the
perfume of "the reddest rose that the singing wind finds sweetest where
it farthest blows," and "will take it at the twilight for his love to
wear." Here we have nothing of the bizarre or the conspicuous, yet in
the six little stanzas of quaintly regular metre there is suggested all
of that world of faery beauty which the eye can glimpse beyond the
leaden clouds of reality; a world which exists because it can be dreamed
of. The poem is "different" in the truest way; it is original because it
conveys beauty originally in an inconspicuous and harmonious vehicle.
But turn now to "Ellsworth to Great Pond" and marvel! True, we still
find the vivid delineation of human feelings, but what a distance we
have travelled! Gone is the young dreamer with his world of moonshine,
for here roars the Maine lumberjack with all the uncouth vigour and rude
natural expressiveness of the living satyr. It is life; primal,
uncovered, and unpolished--the ebullient, shouting vitality of healthy
animalism.
"Drink hard cider, swig hard cider,
Swill hard cider, Boys!
Throw yer spikers, throw yer peavies,
Beller out yer noise!"
We have drifted from the aether of Keats to the earth of Fielding, yet
under the guidance of the same author. Greater proof of Miss Jackson's
absolute objectivity and marvellous imagination could not be produced or
asked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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