Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride; Along an edge of marshy ground, The shad-bush enters like a bride. Yon little clouds are washed of care That climb the blue New England air, And almost merrily withal The tree-frog plays at evenfall His oboe in a mossy tree. So, too, Am I not Thine? Arise, undo This fear Thou hast forgotten me.
From the nature side these lines are pictures, taken each by each they are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for illustration, in the words,
Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, The lined gulls in the offing ride,
and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without, as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection upon the surface of the water.
I cry to Thee, Whose heart Remembers each of these: Thou art My God who hast forgotten me!—
articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us, noting the infinite solicitude that writes self-executing laws in the hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with the logical demand:
As to a weed, to me but give Thy sap! lest aye inoperative Here in the Pit my strength shall be: And still, Help me endure the Pit until Thou wilt not have forgotten me.
