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JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY , THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT HOME

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY
THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT
by Thomas Earl Williams with primary illustrations by Katherine Kuonen and the great assistance of Robert Tinsley with Riley artifacts, Copyright, 1997, Thomas Earl Williams

Part 14

BOOKMARK FOR A POETRY OF FRONTIER SONG AND DOGGEREL WOVEN AND WARPED IN CADENCED MYSTERY.

SPRAIVOLL • 401

ing the years of Riley's work and carried the weight of authority. Riley's poetry and lectures can be seen in fundamental opposition to the idea of America based on "tooth and claw" society. The Hoosier Deutsch child who never grew up spoke a poetic voice softly and innocently stating otherwise.

Here was all the answer to Darwinism that was necessary. The Pauline insistence that God became Incarnated in the man, Jesus of Nazareth, did not subject God to the forces of Darwinism, but rather were the product of a mind which valued humility and service to others. McLeod Campbell, a the­ologian who was deposed from a Presbyterian ministry in Scotland in the 1830's for a kenotic Christology, published a mature statement of his thought, THE NATURE OF THE ATONEMENT (1856) which became a standard text in American Protestant Seminaries. Beautifully written, it is still reckoned to be a kenotic theological classic and a harbinger of modern thinking on the subject. Although kenotic theology was generally con­demned by the established church, which continued to hold out that Jesus of Nazareth was a figure in glory and Godlike stature, kenotic thought grew. Its advocates included many of the newly German trained theologians in the Union Theological Seminary in New York City where young ministry can­didates learned from their German professors of kenotic theologies in the 1870's and 1880's.

There is a long list of ministering friends and counselors who constitute a very special group of people who seem to be Spraivoll's support group.

Perhaps they started out with Riley's own grandmother, Margaret Riley. During the adolescent years and later until his alcoholism became so ram­pant, they seem to be few in number. Possibly the most important step into Spraivoll's kenotic poetry came from fellow alcoholic, Luther Benson. Then they seem to descend upon Riley with great kenotic influence. Among the first was Reverend George C. Harding, owner and editor of the Indianapolis Saturday HERALD, one of Indiana's most distinguished editors. He pub­lished many of Riley's poems and "The Flying Islands of the Night" and took a great interest in Riley's literary bent. Myron Reed was perhaps the most important. Riley met him when delivering a Decoration Day poem at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis and Reed became an important friend to Spraivoll until his death.

It was men of God who took over Riley's life and cast it within the anchoring song of the Philippian's "Christ Hymn." Friends felt Myron Reed was one of the most unusual of Riley's friends. Although two very dif­ferent types of men, they united into a friendship very close. They were

402 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

often seen together. They went abroad together into the Burns county in Scotland. Riley wrote "Our Kind of a Man" upon Reed's departure from Indianapolis for a pulpit in Denver, Colorado as a tribute.

OUR KIND OF MAN (1884)

I

The kind of man for you and me!

He faces the world unflinchingly,

And smites, as long as the wrong resists, With a knuckled faith and force like fists; He lives the life he is preaching of:

And loves where most is the need of love; His voice is clear to the deaf man's ears,

And his face sublime through the blind man's tears; The light shines out where the clouds were dim. And the widow's prayer goes up for him; The latch is clicked at the hovel door And the sick man sees the sun once more, And out o'er the barren fields he sees Springing blossoms and waving trees, Feeling as only the dying may,

That God's own servant has come that way, Smoothing the path as it still winds on

Through the golden gate where his love have gone.

The kind of a man for me and you! However little of worth we do

He credits full, and abides in trust

That time will teach as how more is just. He walks abroad, and he meets all kinds Of querulous and uneasy minds,

And, sympathizing, he shares the pain

Of the doubts that rack us, heart and brain; And, knowing this, as we grasp his hand, We are surely coming to understand! He looks on sin with pitying eyes -E'en as the Lord, since Paradise, -

Myron Reed from portrait by T.C. Steele.

SPRAIVOLL • 403

Else, should we read, Though our sins should glow As scarlet, they shall be white as snow? ‑

And, feeling still, with a grief half glad,

That the bad are as good as the good are bad, He strikes straight out for the Right - and he Is the kind of a man for you and me!

Riley once said, "He was eternally seeing and reading the book of life as it was opened before him. He had a rare gift of discernment." Myron Reed was described by Meredith Nicholson in OLD FAMILIAR FACES as "a tall, dark Indian-like man quietly holding his horse in Circle Park." Reed had been a Captain in the Cavalry in the Civil War.

An acquaintance of both Riley and Reed recounts an evening of the two on January 25th in the early 1880's. Both were on a program of the Indianapolis Caledonian Society designed to commemorate the birthday of Robert Burns. An address by Myron Reed and a poem by Riley were the main entertainment while songs. instrumental music, recitations, dances in Scottish costume were additions. During one point in the program, young ladies came for­ward to sing "Bonny Doon."

After the program, Reed, Riley and the acquaintance (whose memoir is signed only as Senex Contrib.), left, with Riley steering the way. The talk was of Burns, his sympathy with all suffering, his hatred of oppression, the

Robert Burns. 1759-1796. Riley was
events of his life, etc. The account continues,: often considered the "Hoosier Poet" just
was considered the " National

"At the corner of Washington and Pennsylvania as Burns

Poet" of Scotland. Burns was the son of

streets there was in those days a popular cafe a poor nurseryman and was himself a

small farmer and a revenue officer. He

where, among other things, they served oysters shared Riley's "weakness." Painting by in all styles. Riley proposed that we go down - Alexander Nasmyth from the Scottish

Naitonal Portrait Gallery.

it was in a basement - and continue the talk over

a hot oyster stew; the snow, the cold and the wind seconded the motion, so we went down. The writer had met Reed in company on several occasions; he now saw and heard him at close range in a time of relaxation and found the high opinion he had formed of his qualities of mind were quite equaled

404 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

by those of his heart.

He says, "The oppressed and downtrodden could always find an advo­cate in him; distress and suffering challenged a sympathetic hearing and help from him, nor was he straitened in his exhibition of these, for, like Goldsmith's village preacher who ‑

Please with his guests the good man learned to glow

And quite forget their vices in their woe. his broad charity took in human­ity in all its aspects and suffering and distress in all living things... when Riley told some droll stories, accentuated and set off by his impersonations and Reed had laughed heartily at them, one of them reminded him of a com­rade in the civil war, whose freakish behavior was an unfailing source of amusement to him, although it did not affect all his comrades thus. Reed stated, "On the march, he pushed his cap up on the back of his head, stretched his long neck, lengthened his step, and did everything he could to evince an eagerness to get forward; at night when we went into camp, he would call out, 'Captain, how many miles did we march today?' Then in a gruff tone he would answer himself, 'Fifteen.^—Fifteen?"Why that's no march: we must do better than that! The big show can't start til I get there, and we'll never get there at this rate!' He assumed the part of a veteran of all the wars his country had waged, and some foreign ones; and that his cam­paigns had converted his body into steel and leather, punctured by many scars received in battle. In that character, he would pull himself rigidly erect, his blouse tightly about him and cap down, till the bill touched his nose, nearly obscuring his rolling eyes, and speak gruff tones.

Once, overhearing a comrade complaining of the long toilsome march they had had that day and how his feet were almost blistered, he turned upon him, saying, 'Son, did you think that this was a school picnic with fans? Why this is just the a.b.c. You would have had reason to cuss had you been with us on our march through the wilderness to Quebec, or when we marched with Doniphon from St. Jo across the Santa Fe after cleaning up the Mexicans and adding two more territories to the Union; cut loose and marched 600 miles into old Mexico joining old 'Rough and Ready' at Buena Vista. Talk about the march of the Ten Thousand, it was just a walk before breakfast compared with ours.'...

Another time, when one found fault with the rations, 'Vet,' as we called him, looked at the complainer in indignant astonishment. 'Say, son, when you drew your rations? Sowbelly and hard-tack are the grub for soldiers.' After a year or two of this diet you can eat whetstones with relish. When

SPRAIVOLL • 405

your teeth wear out you can smash your hard-tack with a rock before eating it.' Here he gave a demonstration, smashing his hard-tack and devouring it with the meat, with assumed gusto..."

Eventually, Reed stopped and looking thoughtful for a moment, said, "God alone knows. 'Vet' may have been a reincarnation of some old war­rior who was wandering about seeking visibility and companionship."

"Riley and I saw Reed home at about 11.-

As Reed was dying and just before his death on January 30, 1899, he repeated the word, "Riley," over and over.

A POETRY OF FRONTIER SONG AND DOGGEREL WOVEN AND WARPED IN CADENCED MYSTERY.

Let us now turn to the subject of where Spraivoll's poetry came from.

Riley's poetry was founded on frontier song and doggerel cadenced in the scoring and intervals of music. Like music, Riley's poetry carried affective energy. This was intentional. Music empowered Riley's poet­ry. Since this is so, we need to enquire - what is the root of music?

Since the teachings of Plato and Aristotle, music has been considered a primary actor of human behavior. A listener becomes involved with music involuntarily. Plato's theory of

"ethos" proposed that music was behavioral expression. It evoked response toward the good or the bad. Music and poetry of its genesis pass judgment. Frontiersmen may not have known of a theoretical basis for their "likes," but they did strongly seek after the thematics of musical expression. The affec‑

Riley set to music by two of America's composers of his era, Hoagy Carmichael (who grew up near Riley's Lockerbie Street home) and John Philip Sousa. The "Messiah of Nations" was Riley's poem "America" which he wrote on the day after the assassination of President William McKinley of Indiana's neighbor state Ohio. It was also sung by great choruses of voic­es in Riley's era. One such use was when a chorus of hundreds sang it when the Indianapolis Soldiers and Sailors Monument was dedicated. The lyric was the only sheet music in history that could not be purchased. Riley's publisher, the Bowen-Merrill Co., gave it away to all who wished it.

406 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

tive agent of music has never been fully identified. Plotinus, a Neo-Platonist, argued that music influenced the soul. Music bears spiritu­ality and touches such values, a con­cept which was adopted into church

music theory. During one "dark" period in a time of

ignorance,                the

church examined music to probe whether its enchant‑

ment might be a matter of sorcery. Riley was dealing with a very powerful medium. He used it forcefully. Thousands of Americans in his time could recite his poetry. Front pages of every American newspaper carried it. The Nineteenth Century in America heard much singing and the songs taught much. Riley sang his share.

In the Hoosier lyric tradition, poems were similar to songs and not nec­essarily written with musical annotation. An example is a Baptist hymnal published in Riley's hometown of Greenfield, Indiana in 1887 by D.H. Goble. It is a hymnal without music. The little book contains 321 poems for use as hymns. Many Middle West Christians of the Nineteenth Century objected to musical scoring since the Bible contained none even in its Psalms. Other frontier Protestant church congregations banned choirs or refused to hire paid ministers or those with seminary training. Song on the frontiers of Nineteenth Century America might invoke strict biblical and religious discipline as a way of life and Godly emotion. Much poetry in Hoosier newspapers was basically "hymn without music." Protestant fron­tiersmen believed in carrying Godly music in their hearts, and poetic expres­sion of it on their lips. Meter, as Riley used in his poetry, was learned in the churches by all congregants. Unscored hymns carried notations such as sm (short meter) etc. behind the name of the poem to be sung. Another exam‑

as                      MUST                                                                                                         37

Bow full of truth? how full of grace! When they' his flesh the God-bead

(shone 6 Bright angels leave their high abode

To learn new mysteries here, end tell The love of our descending God,

Thu glories of Immanuel

33 (242-153-0) 1,. Y.                     Waits

ESUS, our Savior, and our God, Arrayed in majesty and blood ; Thou art our tile; our emits iu thee Possess n full felicity.

2 All our immortal hopes am laid

In thee. OUT Surety turd our Bead ; Thy cross, thy coolie, end thy throne, Are big with glories vet unknown

3 Let atheists scoff and .dews blaspheme TI' eternal life and Joao.' mune; A weird of thy almighty breath DOOMs the rebellious world to death.

4 But let my soul forever lie

Beneath the blessing. of thine eye; 'Tis hens'', on earth, 'tin betiv'n above To am thy face and taste thy love.

L=4      Drawn out in living diameters.

INCARNATION OF CHRIST

34 (254-160-0) c.                           Watts

-                 TOY to the world ! the tont is come I a) Let mirth receive bee King ;

Let cv 'ry heart prepare him room,
And heav'n awl nature sing

11::=1  2 Joy to the earth ! the Sat ior reigns !

Let men their longs employ, [plains,

While fields and Goole, rucks, bills, and

Repeat the sounding joy.

-             3 No more let inns end aorrowe grow. Nor thorns infest the ground;

fie comes to make bin bleseinge How Fur en the curse la found.

4 Ile mks the world with truth end gram,
And makes the tuitions prove

The glories of Ids righteousneea,

And wonders of Ids love

tr.:7J 35 (255-165-0)              M.                cram. Y dear Redeemer and ray Lord, I read my dilly to thy word ;

But in thy life Lilo use appears,

Pages from a "Hoosier" Baptist Hymnal of 1887. The music of the hymns is "understood" and referenced by number. Standard hymn tunes were numbered and the poems were sung to them. This hymnal was published in the poet's hometown of Greenfield, Indiana, by the D.H. Goble Printing Co. Riley's poetry similarly car­ried the music of frontier song and popularly known meter.

SPRAIVOLL • 407

ple of meter is found in numerical metrical designation. For example, "Guide Me 0 Thou Great Jehovah" was listed in the Goble hymn book as being for "8's", "7's", and "4's." This meant that the poem could be sung to three different tunes depending upon the one begun by the initiator. Poetry, hymns and song were composed in a very strong oral tradition at the time of the writing of James Whitcomb Riley's poetry. The medium of song was poetry.

Music carried Riley's spirit. He once told fellow author Meredith Nicholson, "To throw your legs over the tail of a band wagon and thump away - there's nothing like it!" He played a bass drum in a band. Music carried him through the sadness of his adolescence. Riley was noted for playing the violin and guitar in particular. Music was the rhythm of Riley's expression just as surely as music was the well­spring he tapped to speak a com­mon language in the same way the hymns of all peoples do.

At 18 James Whitcomb Riley started taking up fiddling and banjo. He sang tenor. One day

Riley bought an old violin, on the bottom saying Paolo Albani, Botzen, 1650. Working on farm in late teenage years. Riley loved to play it while his father demanded he help with hoeing instead of going with friends. When given the choice, Riley chopped a few weeds, then flung his hoe into the next lot, jumped over a fence and took off to town with curses. He came back an hour later to apologize. He simply was not going to give up music.

Music was how Riley expressed himself and told his love to his married friend, Nellie Cooley. Jim and Nellie were always together. They were a team. When a local merchant, John Ward Walker, bought a piano for his new imposing home built in 1871 near a huge wooded hill known as "Walker's Hill" on State Street in Greenfield, Jim and Nellie came to enter­tain with it according to a newspaper account of the event. Jim Riley played

Instruments played by Riley included this banjo and guitar on display at the Riley birthplace, Greenfield, Indiana. The flute was the instrument played by John Riley. the poet's brother.

408 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

his violin and Nellie played the new piano at the first social event of many which were held at the Walker home. This residence became an entertain­ment location for many groups particularly for local Greenfield Methodist Episcopal Church functions. When Nellie came to play the piano, Jim Riley accompanied her with his violin with the secret of their attachment heavy in their hearts. Their love grew on the wings of music.

Riley turned the musical rhythms of his life with Nellie into his writings.

What is frontier song and doggerel? Examples may help. Doggerel is "occasional" poetry. It is poetry that makes no pretence of dignity and strikes for common emotion. Some call it "burlesque" or "bastard" verse. Its poetic feet are irregular and the unlearned often compose it. An example from an epitaph for a deceased horse follows:

JOHNNY KONGAPOD

Here lies Johnny Kongapod

Have mercy on him Gracious God As he would on you if he were God And you were Johnny Kongapod.

While there is much subtlety in the writing of James Whitcomb Riley, it should not be supposed that his verse derived from anything other than fron­tier American song and doggerel. In this, his poetry was not so different than other poetry of the time. Poetry was a much different medium in Riley's day on the American frontier than in modern times. A vestige of the type poetry Riley wrote survives as lyric of popular music. This is not to say that Riley did not study the poetry of others within English and American traditions and use his wits to craft poetry of great complexity of thought. Nevertheless, to the end of his life, Riley wrote as he had learned from frontier song and doggerel and simply could not imagine poetry outside the context of this framework.

His poetry was set to music with ease. Among Riley's poetry set to music or recorded are approximately one hundred fifty titles. Some of the poems have attracted multiple composers as did "A Life Lesson," "The Prayer Perfect" and "Little Orphant Annie" which appear to be the most often reduced to musical scores.

Riley's poems set to music include "America" (also known as "The Messiah of Nations" with music by John Phillip Sousa -other composers

SPRAIVOLL • 409

will not hereafter be listed), Baby Bye, Babyhood, The Bee-Bag, Billy and His Drum, Billy Goodin, The Boy Patriot, The Brook song, Childhood, A Christmas Glee, Christine's Song, Coffee Like His Mother Used to Make, Cradle Song, The Daring Prince, The Days Gone By, The Dead Lover, The Dead Wife, Dearth, the Diners in the Kitchen, Don't Cry, A Dream of Autumn, Dwainie- A Sprite Song, Ever a Song Somewhere, Extremes, The First Bluebird, Fool Younguns, The Funny Little Fellow, The Gobble-Uns'll Git You Ef You Don't Watch Out!, Good-By Er Howdy-Do, Granny's Come to Our House, Griggsby's Station, Heigh-Ho! Babyhood, Her Beautiful Eyes, Her Beautiful Hands, A Humble Singer, I Want to Be a Soldier, I Will Walk With You, My Lad, If I Knew What Poet's Know, An Impetuous Resolve, In the Orchard Where the Children Used to Play, It, The Jolly Miller, The Kingdom of a Child, Last Night and This, A Leave-Taking, Leonainie, A Life-Lesson, Light of Love, Little Girly-Girl, Little Orphant Annie, The Little Red Apple Tree, The Little Red Ribbon, The Little Tiny Kickshaw, Lockerbie Street, The Lost Lover, Lullaby, Make Me a Song, The Man in the Moon, Max and Jim, Maymie's Story of Red­Riding-Hood, Ms. Hammond's Parable, A Mother Song, My Fiddle, My Mary, 0 Heart of Mine, 0, I Will Walk with You, My Lad, An Old Sweetheart of Mine, The Old Trundle Bed, Our Own - A Chant, Out to Old Aunt Mary's, Pansies, Parental Christmas Presents, A Pet of Uncle Sidney's. The Pixy People, The Prayer Perfect, A Primrose, The Raggedy Man, The Ribbon, The Ring and the Rose, A Riley-Album, Say Farewell and Let Me Go, A Scrawl, A Sea Song from the Shore, She "Displains" It, The Silver Lining, Some Scattering Remarks of Bub's, A Song, A Song and a Smile, A Song of the Road, There Is Ever A Song Somewhere, There, Little Girl, Don't Cry, The Tree Toad, Uncle Sidney, Uncle Sidney Says, Uncle Sidney's Logic, A Very Youthful Affair, The Weather, When Evening shadows Fall, When Our Baby Died, When She Comes How Again, when the Frost Is On the Punkin, Where Shall We Land, Wind of the Sea, and the Winky-Tooden Song. This listing of titles was made in the early 1940's. No listing of more current titles is available that I am aware of. The listings do not include Riley in collections of music. Nor does it include the Riley phonograph albums made toward the end of Riley's life when such items became technologically possible.

Since Riley believe poetry to be connected to music he hated the free verse of Walt Whitman, a contemporary poet for whom Riley had nothing but contempt. When asked, Riley condemned him saying he walked around

4 1 0 ^v THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

with his shirt unbuttoned. Riley's frontier American mentality could not rec­ognize Whitman's poetry as having musical genesis. Whitman's poetry sim­ply could not be sung within the metered stanzas of pioneer Hoosier song and Riley did not conceive Whitman's work to be poetry.

The American poetry of Riley exists within a tradition that goes back to the time of Homer whose Iliad and Oddysey were sung by traveling folk artists. Song, in folk traditions, seems to often be the basis of poetic expres­sion over the history of humanity.

It is not without meaning that Riley chose to call the poetic Riley in "The Flying Islands of the Night," the "tune- fool." Frontier songs were the basis of Riley's meter. Riley understood the thirst-quenching water of poetry to come from this well.

Riley recognized his musical and poetic nature to be combined as his self who wrote poetry in his autobiographical poem, "The Flying Islands of the Night." We find the following dialogue therein:

WHO IS SPRAIVOLL UNLESS CADENCED MYSTERY?

I. A purlieu refers to land on the border of a forest where a serf in medieval times had the right to hunt without permission of a sovereign's forest laws or their punishment for unau­thorized hunting. Figuratively, it is a place where one can range or a safe place to haunt or wander. Crestillomeem

And who is Spraivoll, and what song Is that besung so blinding exquisite Of cadenced mystery?

What did writing within such a definition of poetry mean'.

Riley's was a poetry he described as "cadenced mystery."

The form caused Riley's poems to immediately prove pleasurable to hear and familiar to grasp. They also thus had a form which could bear Godly encouragement in a desperate time-the kenotic themes which I feel gave Riley's works particular value. Frontier songs did this as one finds

SPRAIVOLL • 4 1 1

in doggerels.

It should not be supposed there is no discipline in doggerel poetry. Doggerel can be honed as any other more formal form of poetry. Although Riley achieved great national fame as a poet and his poetry was known, in part, by thousands of people, his public poetry never strove to escape the doggerel metrical theories of frontier song. I have to qualify this by saying that the "personal Riley" was quite capable of using other verse as when Riley chose the Chatterton pentameter for his autobiographical poem, "Flying Islands of the Night." Riley not only composed his poetry from song rhythms but he also disciplined himself through doggerel poetry. One finds this particularly in his advertising poetry. Here are examples from his Anderson "Democrat" days:

ADVERTISING DOGGEREL

The farmer sat in his easy chair Smoking his pipe of clay.

While his hale old wife with a sprightly air

Was clearing her throat to say, "Read aloud," to the child that sat

On his grandfather's knee with the Democrat.

Or:

The Anderson Democrat is a

Good Little Paper

and you

Ought To Be Kind To It

It Ain't the Best Paper In The "State."

No, it

Is Simply

Good.

Frontier Hoosier songs of the first half of the Nineteenth Century were not so different from others sung on the American frontier north and south or anywhere West of the Appalachians. Among the favorites were "Skip to My Lou," "Old Sister Phoebe," and this one entitled "Thus the Farmer Sows His Seed:"

4 1 2 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

THUS THE FARMER SOWS HIS SEED

Come, my love, and go with me,

And I will take good care of thee. I am too young, I am not fit,

I cannot leave my mamma yit.

You're old enough, you are just right

I asked your mamma last Saturday night.

Frontier songs often were accompanied by dances. This one could be sung while dancing a Virginia reel:

It's left hand round your weevily wheat. It's both hands round your weevily wheat. Come down this way with your weevily wheat It's swing, oh, swing, your weevily wheat.

A patriotic song sung at nearly every Fourth of July celebration in the frontier places was as follows:

SPRAIVOLL • 413

HAIL COLUMBIA

Hail! Columbia, happy land!

Hail! ye heroes, heav'n born band,

Who fought and bled in freedom's cause, Who fought, and bled in freedom's cause.

And when the storm of war is gone, Enjoy the peace your valor won; Let independence be your boast, Ever mindful what it cost,

Ever grateful for the prize,

May its altar reach the skies.

In the decade in which Riley was born, poetry provided a form of common expression and was certainly not solely the province of poets. As an example, there is the poetry of the martyred President, Abraham Lincoln, written on the American frontier prior to the American Civil War.

THE BEAR HUNT

A wild bear chase didst never see?

Then ^past thou lived in vain ‑
Thy richest bump of glorious glee

Lies desert in thy brain.

When first my father settled here,

Twas then the frontier line;

The panther's scream filled night with fear And bears preyed on the swine.

But woe for bruin's short-lived fun
When rose the squealing cry:

Now man and horse, with dog 'and gun For vengeance at him fly.

Abraham Lincoln. "poet". Shown in Brady photograph of Feb. 9. 1864

4 1 4 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

A sound of danger strikes his ear;
He gives the breeze a snuff;

Away he bounds, with little fear, And seeks the tangled rough.

Or press his foes, and reach the ground Where's left his half-munched meal; the dogs, in circles, scent around

And find his fresh made trail

With instant cry, away they dash,

And men as fast pursue;

O'er logs, they leap, through water splash And shout the brisk halloo.

Now to elude the eager pack

Bear shuns the open ground,

Through matted vines he shapes his track, And runs it, round and round.

The tall, fleet cur, with deep-mouthed voice Now speeds him, as the wind;

While half-grown pup. and short-legged lice Are yelping far behind.

And fresh recruits are dropping in To join the merry corps;

With yelp and yell, a mingled din -The woods are in a roar -

And round, and round the chase now goes, The world's alive with fun;

Nick Carter's horse his rider throws,
And Mose Hills drops his gun.

Now, sorely pressed, bear glances back, And lolls his tired tongue,

When as, to force him from his track

SPRAIVOLL • 415

An ambush on him sprung.

Across the glade lie sweeps for flight, And fully is in view ‑

The dogs, new fired by the sight
Their cry and speed renew.

The foremost ones now reach his rear; He turns, they dash away,

And circling now the wrathful bear
They have him full at bay.

At top of speed the horsemen come,

All screaming in a row -

'Whoop!"Take him, Tiger!' 'Seize him, Drum!' Bang - bang! the rifles go!

And furious now, the dogs lie tears And crushes in his ire ‑

Wheels right and left, and upward rears. With eyes of burning fire.

But laden death is at his heart ‑

Vain all the strength he plies,
And, spouting blood from every part,

He reels, and sinks, and dies!

And now a dinsome clamor rose, ‑

'But who should have his skin?'

Who first draws blood, each hunter knows This prize must always win.

But, who did this, and how to trace

What's true from what's a lie. -Like lawyers in a murder case

They stoutly argufy.

Aforesaid fire, of blustering mood,

Bears were a constant threat to settlers and were often subjects of their poetry. From "The Crockett Almanac", 1841.

4 1 6 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

Behind, and quite forgot,

Just now emerging from the wood Arrives upon the spot,

With grinning teeth, and up-turned hair Brim full of spunk and wrath,

He growls, and seized on dead bear
And shakes for lite and death -

And swells, as if his skin would tear,

And growls, and shakes again,

And swears. as plain as dog can swear

That he has won the skin!

Conceited whelp! we laugh at thee,

No mind that not a few

Of pompous, two-legged dogs there be

Conceited quite as you.

The earliest poetry of Riley is close to being as doggerel as Abraham Lincoln's "The Bear Hunt" and has the same phrasings and metric cadences as frontier songs generally.

RILEY'S "THE SAME OLD STORY" (1870, age 20)

The same old story told again ‑

The maiden droops her head,

The ripening glow of her crimson cheek Is answering in her stead.

The pleading tone of a trembling voice Is tellin^g her the way

He loved her when his heart was young In Youth's sunshiny day;

The trembling tongue, the longing tone, Imploringly ask why

They cannot be as happy now

As in the days gone by.

SPRAIVOLL • 417

Riley with Henry Eitel interviewed at the Riley birthplace in Greenfield by Hamlin Garland. journalist and author.

And two more hearts, tumultuous With overflowing joy,

Are dancing to the music

Which the dear, provoking boy Is twanging on his bowstring, As, fluttering his wings,

He send his love-charged arrows While merrily, he sings:

"Ho! ho!, you dainty maiden, It surely can not be

You are thinking you are master Of your heart, when it is me." And another gleaming arrows Does the little god's behest, And the dainty little maiden Falls upon her lover's breast. "The same old story told again," And listened o'er and o'er,

Will still be new, and pleasing, too

Till "Time shall be no more."

Poetics had an important role to play in the Hoosier frontier with its rhymes and songs.

Song was a feature of every aspect of frontier life. Nothing was beyond its scope. The Hoosier regiments to the Mexican War in the mid-1840's sang as they went into battle. This was in the decade of the 1840's in which Riley was born. A refrain to one of the Hoosier regimental battle songs with

many verses was:

A MEXICAN WAR "HOOSIER" REGIMENTAL BATTLE SONG

Fire! Fire! how they tumble-Shout, shout for the State, Whose young bosom sent thee To war with the great!

4 1 8 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

To understand the subject matter of frontier poetry of song and dogger­el, it is necessary to look at the ground where such poetry grew.

Hamlin Garland, a fellow writer and admirer of Riley, came to Greenfield to visit him in 1892. Here is his account of the Hoosier Poet's birth town as he saw it then.

A VISIT TO RILEY IN HIS NATIVE TOWN

"In 1892 I visited Riley at his native town of Greenfield, Indiana, and the town and country gave moving evidence of the wonder-working power of the poet. To my eyes it was the most unpromising field for art, especially for the art of verse. The landscape had no hills, no lakes, no streams of any movement or beauty. Ragged fence-rows, flat and dusty roads, fields of wheat alternating with clumps of trees - these were the features of a country which to me was utterly commonplace..." (As found in a 1920 lecture read at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, entitled "Commemorative Tribute to James Whitcomb Riley.")

It seems curious that Hamlin Garland, whose formative years were spent on a family farm in Iowa, and whose best writings are about the economic troubles of Midwestern farmers, the drudgery of their existence, and the depredations practiced against them by moneylenders, would find Riley's Midwestern hometown of Greenfield such a drag.

Garland's point was that the genius of a person creates poetry and liter­ature from out of the stuff of life no matter how backwoods or ordinary it may seem to others. Again speaking of Riley, Garland continued, "...from this dusty, drab, unpromising environment Riley had been able to draw the honey of woodland poesy, a sweet in which a native fragrance as of bass­wood and buckwheat bloom mingled with hints of an English meadow and the tang of a Canada thistle."

What Hamlin Garland saw, echoed in the works of James Whitcomb Riley, was what Riley conveyed as one of the themes of what a home is. It is something plainly and unabashedly common. Since it is common, it bears with it characteristic proportionality and democratic distribution to all class­es, races and peoples. Every American is thought to deserve a home. It is something the most common of attributes to which each person has entitle­ment. In every ethical community, the most common family should be con­ceived as having a home according to James Whitcomb Riley. There is no social division which precludes this. Riley's poetry was of this teaching. It

SPRAIVOLL • 4 1 9

did not need to more specifically say so.

As Garland said, "He taught us once again the fundamental truth which we were long in learning here in America, that there is a poetry of common things, as well as of epic deeds. His immense success with the common, no-literary public is to be counted for him and not against him. either con­sciously or unconsciously his verses were wrought for the family. He never forced the erotic note. Surrounded by Americans, he wrote for Americans. To me his restraint is a fine and true distinction.

His verse sprang from a certain era of western

development. It is a humble crop gathered from the corners of rail fences, from the vines which clamber upon the porches of small villages, and from the weedy side-walks of quiet towns far away from the great markets of the world..."

Riley's poetry is a poetry of home and the home of even the most com­mon family.

On a more personal note, what impression did Riley give to Hamlin Garland in 1892? "In person Riley was as markedly individual as his verse. He was short, square-shouldered, and very blond, with a head which he was accustomed to speak of as "of the tack-hammer variety." His smoothly shaven face was large and extremely expressive, the face of a great actor. Though grim in repose it lighted up with the merriest smiles as he read or as he uttered some quaint jest. His diction when he wished it to be so was admirably clear and precise, but he loved to drop into the speech and drawl of his Hoosier characters, and to me this was a never-failing delight. I have never met a man save Mark Twain who had the same amazing flow of quaint conceits. He spoke "copy" all the time." Such was the way Riley struck a man who was not just a fellow writer but one of the foremost "realists" along with Stephen Crane in American fiction.

It would also be good to describe the Hoosier character out of which Riley's poetry flowered. The unfortunate side of Riley's poetry is brought out by this kind of analysis. Riley's characterizations are so good, his capac­ity to personify and breath life into an archetypical persona, that the charac­terizations really overshadow everything else. The benefit to Riley was that he could write over and over again and create a massive volume of poetry easily because he understood character types so very well. The problem is reaching the "meat" or substance. What is the theme of all this voluminous spewing out of character interaction?

The big picture reveals it as the individual poems do not. Riley is the poet

420 • THE POET AS FLYING ISLANDS OF THE NIGHT

who has given us to know about American life, what to expect of it, how to be fulfilled in it, and disappointed, but how to make it through life in it. This is particularly pronounced where Riley speaks with his kenotic poetic voice. Riley's prayer was to master a kenotic poetic style.

In my day in this, the late Twentieth Century, I recall Riley dismissed occasionally by literary friends and fellow authors as a "sentimentalist" because Riley wrote of humble characters, their lives and their settings in rural America where I live. Riley's poetry entered into the "heart" of such characters. He had them fighting for life and survival- feeling life's disap­pointments, having a pioneer wife die, being crippled or maimed or dead -in their humble non- notable non-adaptive existences but being transformed into heroic proportion by the fact of their very humility and vulnerability of their lives. This expresses the "splagxnon" of Riley, his inmost guts and feeling, a matter of hugely different aspect than sentimentalism.

The critics who see only "sentimentalism" in Riley's poetry miss the stem upholding the leaves. They simply do not take into account, nor understand, the late Nineteenth Century in America. Many of the very characters I have mentioned-before Riley wrote of them-were the type of American most would have dismissed as persons to be selected out or disregarded in their miserable lives because they were simply on the downside of evolutionary trends. Charles Darwin's speciation theory is the dominant scientific idea of Riley's era. Its proposals moulded thought after the American Civil War. Together with the impact of industrial development and laissez faire gov­ernment, the framework of Post Civil War American culture lacked even the slightest aspect of humanism when James Whitcomb Riley's poetry began

appearing on the front pages of American newspapers and his stories began to make their rounds in lyceum circuits. The poetry of James Whitcomb Riley and he, himself, became his epoch's great radical phenomena.

The poem, "To My Friend, William Leachman," and the other poems in Riley's first volume, THE OLD SWIMMIN' HOLE" AND 'LEVEN MORE POEMS, hit America like a bombshell. All of America began to look at their neighbors differently. Maybe people shouldn't simply be seen as ape-descendants. The advent of Incarnation Theology, though not popu­larly named as such, was at hand. Folk drew the line at the Philippian's Christ Hymn against the Robert Ingersoll's who attacked the Bible.

If there is vulnerability in life, as Riley's own alcoholism rendered him vulnerable, nevertheless the situation was within the encounter of God with humanity. No special claim to wealth or wisdom or status gave access to this

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God. Prayer was enough. God's standard of caring for humanity derived from an ethic confirmed on a cross of persecution where God too became weakened, fearful, filled with anxiety, and died.

RILEY'S PRIMARY AUDIENCE

Q: WHO ARE THE HOOSIER PEOPLE?

A: A FRONTIER HOME-SEEKING GOD-FEARING TRIBE OF HUMBLE WANDERERS.

Then we need to address the poetic audience of Riley. What is a Hoosier?

The term "Hoosier" descriptive of Riley's people of the frontier and his poetry came from a poem of great currency in the first half of the Nineteenth Century which described the people of Indiana. Poetry was very much a part of the daily lives on the American frontier. James Whitcomb Riley had his own theory where the word -Hoosier" came