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THE COURIER
A NEBRASKA POET.
Mrs. Pcattie Reviews Carl Smith's New Book
For the first time in the history of Omaha a book of poema
worthy of the name has been issued from an Omaha press by an
0.naha writer. The poems are the work of Mr. Carl Smith, whose
name is known to everyone in this town. The press is that of Mr.
John Gideon a fine name, worthy of a publisher, and destined, one
hopes, for typographical honors.
I am not in the least embarrassed in reviewing Mr. Smith's verses
by the fact that we have worked together for the last five years on
the same paper. lam not influenced by any such association or
friendship to mistake bad work for good work. For I divorce my
self from all memory of that association and friendship when I take
his book to read it with the eyes of a reviewer.
With a few exceptions they are homely they do not stand for a
class and a section to so great a degree as do James Whitcomb
Riley's. But they are of the west and of the "people;" they have
the fervor and emphasis of western feeling; they have the parapher
nalia of western life. "Where the Sun Goes down" is the beautiful
title they bear, and they explain themselves on the title page as
biing "Some vagrant verses from the west-land." Many of them
have appeared previously in Harper's Weekly, The Ladies' Home
Journal, the World-Herald, and other periodical papers.
The quality in them which most commends itself to the lover of
verse is the sweet and wholesome humanness. There is not a pes
simistic nor egotistic line in the whole book. Instead there is a
flavor of simple happiness, or friendliness of a gloriously free child
hood and a manhood enriched by honest love. One is heartily proud
that the verses which emanate from this young community should
be so true and hearty, and oblivious to old sophistries, and so free
from new affectations. For, indeed, there is no mimicry in them.
They are original beyond all things, and they mirror many phases
of our western life as perfectly as a camera could have done. They
have, however, what the camera never can have, a perception of the
soul of things. Like almost all the poetic work done in America,
they lack the drama and passion, the depth and storm of great
poetry. The American poet is not yet born. But from many differ
ent parts come true and comforting strains, and it is with perfect
honesty of judgment that I place Carl Smith's poems in a very
respectable place among the writings of our living versifiers. It is
far and away the most pretentious and admirable book of the sort
ever written by a Nebraska writer.
It is the novelist and poet who endear locality to the hearts of the
people, and who make it famous and memorable. And tho writer
who preserves the picture of a new land in his verses must needs to
be one who sees with his own eyes one who creates his literature,
and who does not copy it. Mr. Smith's work is not of a descriptive
sort, yet "Desert Nevada" may give an idea of his power to condense
in a few lines, the physical qualities of a place. Anyone who knows
Nevada will lecognize the terrible truthfulness of the picture.
Away to east, brown ridges thin and bare
Notch the blue burning sky;
There is no motion in the quivering air,
No wild bird hurries by.
Stretching afar, like some great counterpane,
The withering alkali
Spreads in white reaches o'er the scorching plain,
Where all is parched and dry.
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No path to mark the early traveler's way;
No cold, respectful stones
To show where in the blazing sun decay
The grinning skeletons.
And when grim spirits come to that curs'd land
To be where wanderers fell,
They look in terror at the burning sand
And hurry back to hell.
Here is a poem of the sand hills, in the metre familiarized so in
timately by Longfellow, and seeming on that account to have a fa
miliar ring, though dealing wtth a subject with which Longfellow
was unacquainted:
The sand hills are drear in the autumn;
No blushing leaved trees tint the waste;
The road from the bridge to the bottom
By the wide-blowing drift is effaced.
The sand drives its way down the valleys
On puffs that are chilling and raw,
Till far in the lowland it rallies
And hurries back up through the draw.
The smoke rises ragged and scanty
And eddies, and circles, and shifts,
Like a spirit above the sod shanty
That cowers low there in the drifts.
There is grey where the cockle burrs wander
From the middle on over the hill;
There is grey for the creek bed down yonder ' '
All grey, and all lonely and still.
But the homesteader known no dejection,
For the fire in the sod house is bright.
And he looks away toward the third section
And waits for his next neighbor's light.
And the children look, too, and are happy,
And bright is the worn mother's cheek,
For home is sweet home yes, and pappy
Is going to "prove up" next week.
Nebraskans know just what all this means they know the strug
gle, the solitude, the sacrifice, the fight with hunger and cold, and
heat, and endurance and forbearance the pioneer must endure
they know the eagerness of "home" which has made this state, in
spite of many drawbacks, what it is. And they are sure to love the
poet who has preserved these experiences for them in easily commit
ted rhyme.
There are some verses with the blizzard for a subject that chill
the heart, and a charming compliment to the prairies, written on
the Pacific coast, where the writer turns his eyes from te palms to
dream of "gray cottonwoods uprising" and is oblivous to the glory
of green surf in longing "for the sight of sluggish river."
For bright as the sea and the ocean beach
May be when the waves are fretting.
A wandering vagrant that cannot teach
The faithless art of forgetting.
There are love lines mixed up with the description, as for example
in "Love's Longitude," where is a little tale of California and Neb
raska. It is noon and the city is throbbing
In the hour of its one breathing space;
There's a respite from grinding and robbing
And a pause in the hurrying space.
They would laugh if they knew in the street there
The time that I hold it to be;
It is twelve in the dust and the heat there,
But up here it's a quarter to three.
The hands of my watch move us slowly
As the hands of the clock on the tower,
But an influence, gentle and holy,
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