Today’s Poem: Without and Within

Remembering to think about James Russell Lowell

Floris Arntzenius (1874-1925), Coaches and Coachmen in the Snow (Wikimedia Commons)

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Without and Within

by James Russell Lowell

My coachman, in the moonlight there,
Looks through the sidelight of the door;
I hear him with his brethren swear,
As I could do — but only more.

Flattening his nose against the pane,
He envies me my brilliant lot,
Breathes on his aching fist in vain,
And dooms me to a place more hot.

He sees me into supper go,
A silken wonder at my side,
Bare arms, bare shoulders, and a row
Of flounces, for the door too wide.

He thinks how happy is my arm,
’Neath its white-gloved and jeweled load;
And wishes me some dreadful harm,
Hearing the merry corks explode.

Meanwhile I inly curse the bore
Of hunting still the same old coon,
And envy him, outside the door,
The golden quiet of the moon.

The winter wind is not so cold
As the bright smile he sees me win,
Nor the host’s oldest wine so old
As our poor gabble, sour and thin.

I envy him the rugged prance
By which his freezing feet he warms,
And drag my lady’s chains and dance,
The galley-slave of dreary forms.

Oh, could he have my share of din,
And I his quiet — past a doubt
’Twould still be one man bored within,
And just another bored without.
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On Tuesday, Joseph Bottum noted that here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we’re drawn again and again to the poems of Edward Thomas. An observant reader might conclude that we feel a similar, though more collective, draw to the American Fireside Poets of the nineteenth century: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom we’ve featured twice now, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Fireside Poets’ long-lived Transcendentalist forerunner and overlapper, William Cullen Bryant, appeared here as well, just a week ago. 

Our fascination with Edward Thomas is easy to explain. Aside from the pathos of his biography (which turns up as well when we give our attention to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”), the poems he managed to produce in three short years at the end of his life are, poem by poem, master classes in how to write a certain kind of verse: economical, formally controlled, rooted in the material realities of this world (even to its smells), which are frequently beautiful, while looking death in the eye. 

Thomas speaks to us, too, as a poets’ poet. Quite simply — though nothing about him is really ever simple — he wrote the kind of poem that a poet today might still want to write. A century later, his voice never sounds mannered. Nothing in his lines gives itself away as artifice or archaism. Like his friend Robert Frost, he might just have stopped talking five minutes ago. 

The Fireside poets, and our interest in them, are a different matter. We keep returning to them at least in part because we feel we ought to. If the nineteenth century found them edifying, then who are we to dismiss them? If, in our own twenty-first-century view, they are eclipsed in greatness by their then-obscure contemporary, Emily Dickinson, then doesn’t it behoove us to consider that for Dickinson herself, these poets — near, living presences in her lifetime — largely composed the artistic and intellectual world in which her own mind secretly flourished? 

The Fireside Poets haven’t survived in our cultural imagination as great artists. Our own perhaps more ambiguous sensibilities recoil from their frequently didactic tone. If they turn up in anthologies for children — and they still do, particularly in texts compiled for home-education curricula — it’s because parents, now as then, often feel that literature should be edifying and prescriptive, and that committing to memory the expression of worthy sentiments is essential to the formation of character. 

The Fireside Poets (Wikimedia Commons)

But for Dickinson and the culture she inhabited, the Fireside Poets were the day’s Great Men. They were the exemplars of a post-Puritan, post-Transcendentalist, New-England-abolitionist-flavored America: significant as orators and essayists, editors, academics, and diplomats, as well as poets. Also, and perhaps most interestingly, at least to us, they were America’s first serious response to the explicitly British tradition in English-language poetry. Longfellow, who had met Tennyson in the course of becoming a media sensation in England and Europe in 1868, was the first non-British writer to be commemorated with a bust in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. In her letters, her diction shifting from her own voice to passages from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the English poets of her day, Dickinson also alludes to these influential American poets, clearly so ubiquitous that she could drop a phrase or a line of poetry into her own sentence and expect her reader to catch the reference. 

So the Fireside Poets should, and do, interest us as elements in a developing, vigorous, distinctively American culture whose ideas, and distillations of ideas, have shaped who we are, for better or worse. They interest us as elements in a developing, vigorous, distinctively American literary culture, which has also shaped who we are, for better or worse. And they interest us because, as much as we admire enduring, transcendent greatness, we also nurture an instinctive, even reflexive, sympathy for the overlooked. 

It’s quite possible that in objective terms, James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) isn’t any more overlooked than the rest of them. But when we try to remember the list of Fireside-Poet names, his is the one that consistently eludes us. Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, and . . . I know there’s one other guy. When we mention a poet named Lowell, we generally mean Robert Lowell (1917–1977), of the famous family that speak only to Cabots (or else only to God).

Yet in his day, this eighth-generation Lowell — founder of the short-lived early-1840s literary magazine the Pioneer, publisher of Edgar Allan Poe, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard, and American Minister to the Court of Spain — was hardly a nobody. The drama and pathos of his life, which his undergraduate career as a campus troublemaker at Harvard, his embarking on a contrarian lecture series designed to wreak “revenge” on the English poets “for the injuries received by one whom the public won’t allow among the living,” and early deaths of both his wives and all but one of his children, invite our notice and sympathy.

Today’s Poem, “Without and Within,” in fairly regular tetrameter quatrains, rhymed abab, exemplifies the Fireside bent for narrative as a poetic mode. But unlike, say, Longfellow’s “Evangeline” or Whittier’s “Snow-bound,” this is a comic poem. It treats envy of another person’s position with a light, ironic, self-deprecating touch uncommon among both the Fireside Poets and poets of our own era. It resists any impulse to wade too far into its own mind and get stuck there, moralizing in circles; instead, it simply tells a story, comparing the man without the house to the man within, and concluding that even if they could trade places, neither would be the happier for it.

The awkward inversion in line 12, the sort of archaism that would result, now, in an automatic rejection by a poetry editor at any current literary magazine, seems deliberate here. It’s part of the joky voice, meant to signal to the reader not to take anything, even the human condition, too seriously. And while we might not aspire, today, to write a poem exactly like this one, still it may instruct and interest us.  

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