The complete poetical works of Joaquin Miller

Preface

I HAVE BEEN SO biisy and bothered all my life till late years that I have had to hastily feed my corn out, weed or flower or ripe corn from the four quarters of the world, with a pitchfork, as I ran. Hence the need of this revision. And yet, even now, after all my cutting and care, I am far from satisfied, and can commend to my lovers only the few last poems in the book. True, the earlier ones have color and clime and perfume of wood or waste, and I am not ungrateful for the friends they brought me, biit I fear they fall short of the large eternal lesson which the seer is born to teach — the vision of worlds beyond. I have tried to mend this fault in my later work; to give my new poems not only body but soul.

The purpose here, outside of revising entirely and gathering into this book such poems as are to be preserved, is to blaze some trees along the trail; a note of warning here, a campfire there, the experience of a pioneer; so that those who come after may not falter or go astray in the wilderness that darkens along the foothills of Olympus. George Sand said all Americans are poets. Certainly all American writers are poets, or, as a rule, begin as such. True, many of our great lawyers began by writing poetry, like Blackstone. Perhaps our greatest poets at heart never took the M'orld into confidence at all in the maturity of power, but kept a cold and severe visage for all men, and went to their graves as practical merchants, lawyers, doctors, and so on, with only one little corner of the heart for flowers and a bird all their own. And what pleasure to write for such readers!

There are others — not in business or disposed to be — those who would or could be poets, and yet will not. Let me address myself to these, for thej' have foolish notions as to what a poet is and what it costs to be a poet, or rather what it costs to not be a poet.

A great land without a great literature, were such a thing possible, must be to the end worse than spouseless. Jerusalem was ever but a small place. You can cover her on the map of the world with a pin's head, yet is she more than all the Babylous that have been. She loved, and devoutly loved, the sublime and the beautiful. From this love was born her poets. The cedars of Lebanon, the lilies of the valley, these were the first letters of their alphabet. And as there cannot be a great land on the page of history without first a great literature, so there cannot be a great literature without first a deep, broad, devout and loving religion.

The great poet of this great land of ours, these westmost mountains and the ultimate sea bank, so like the olive-set Syrian hills, will come when we, too, have learned to love, and religiously love, the sublime and beautiful.

Why not permit the coming poet to take up his work in the morning of life where it is now laid down in the twilight of one who is going away?

To this end let us divest the prophets of all that mystery and special evil and special good with which ignorance and superstition have garmented them. They were ever plain men. They were ever human; and the more human the broader, richer, dee]3er their divine voices of the laud.

VI «»REFACE.

Is there sxich a thing as genius, inspiration? I think there is no such thing, Eather let us call it a devout and all-pervading love for the sublime, the beautiful and good, the never-questioning conviction that there is nothing in this world that is not beautiful or trying to be beautiful; that there is no man with the breath of God in his nostrils who is not good or trying in his poor, blind way as best he may to be good. "And He looked upon all He had made and behold it was very good."

Genius is love that is born of this truth, leading ever by plain and simple ways, and true toil and care, as all nature toils and cares, as God toils and cares; that is all. I write this down for those who may come after. We will have higher results from the plain sweet truth.

And when your great poet comes, as he surely will and soon, do not mock because he goes apart from folly or trade to meditate. Ever from the first the prophets went up into the mountains to pray. A poet need not be " eccentric " to turn apart from getting and getting. In truth he would be no real poet if he did not. A good poet need not be a bad man. He may not be a better man than yourself, but he is not necessarily worse for being a poet. I repeat, he is merely a plain, sincere human being in love with the beautiful world " and all that is His."

Byron, in a letter to Moore, says, "The night to me has been everything." In another he says, "I read Spenser half the time, as I write Childe Harold, in order to keep the measure and melody in my brain." Burns says, "I keep as many as half a dozen poems maturing in my mind at the same time, and write them down when matured and I find time." These and like little side lights from other great poets have done me so much good that I have decided to tell by way of foot-notes as we go forward so much of my own methods of work as may possibly light the path of some discouraged Keats of coming days. For the greater the poet the greater his sensibility, and the greater the sensibility the greater his sufferings in the somber foothill forests of Parnassus.

Also for the help and good of the poets who may take up my work where I lay it down, divested of all folly and falsehood with which it has been so cruelly garmented from the first, I shall write the story, source, purpose of my poems, so far as may be of use and interest. The photographs are put in to show that, whatever there may be in eccentricity of dress and manner, I dressed and bore myself as others and kept quietly and plainly along about my work like other men mainly.

The first thing of mine in print was the valedictory class poem, Columbia College, Eugene, Oregon, 1859. Oregon, settled by missionaries, was a great place for schools from the first. At this date, Columbia College, the germ of the University, had many students from California, and was famous as an educational center. Divest the mind at once of the idea that the schools of Oregon were in the least inferior to the best in the world. I have never since found such determined students and omniverous readers. We had all the books and none of the follies of great centers.

I had been writing, or trying to write, since a lad. My two brothers and my sister were at my side, our home with our parents, and we lived entirely to ourselves, and really often made ourselves ill from too much study. We were all school teachers when not at college. In 1861 my elder brother and I were admitted to practice law, under George H. Williams, afterwards Attorney-General undftr President Grant. Brother went at once to the war, I to the gold mines.

PREFACE. vii

My first act there came near costing my life, and cost me, through snow-blindness, the best use of my eyes from that time forth. The agony of snow-blindness is unutterable; the hurt irreparable. In those days men never murmured or admitted themselves put at disadvantage. I gave up the law for the time and laid hand to other things; but here is a paragraph from the February (1897) Oregon Teacher, telling how this calamity came about:

"The first man I met among the fevered crowd was Oregon s poet, my old schoolmate, Joaquin Miller. His blue eyes sparkled with kindly greeting, and, as I took his hand, I knew by its quickening pulse and tightened clasp that he, too, was sharing in the excitement of the gold hunter. He was then in the first flush of manhood, with buoyant spirits, untiring energy, and among a race of hardy pioneers, the bravest of the brave. He possessed more than ordinary talent and looked forward with hope to the battle of life, expecting to reap his share of its honors and rewards. For years he was foremost in every desperate enterprise — crossing snow-capped mountains, swollen rivers, and facing hostile Indians. When snow fell fifteen feet on Florence mountain, and hundreds were penned in camp withont a word from wives, children and loved ones at home, he said, 'Boys, I will bring your letters from Lewistou.' Afoot and alone, without a trail, he crossed the mountain tops, the dangerous streams, the wintry desert of Camas Prairie, fighting back the hungry mountain wolves, and returned bending beneath his load of loving messages from home. One day he was found, in defense of the weak, facing the pistol or bowie knife of the desperado; and the next day he was washing the clothes and smoothing the pillow of a sick comrade. We all loved him, but we were not men who wrote for the newspaper or magazine, and his acts of heroism and kindness were unchrouicled save in the hearts of those who knew him in those times and under those trying circumstances."

Eight into the heart of the then unknown and unnamed Idaho {Idah-ho) and Montana; gold dust was as wheat in harvest time. I, and another, born to the saddle, formed an express line and carried letters in from the Oregon river and gold dust out, gold dust by the horse load after horse load, till we earned all the gold we wanted. Such rides! and eachaloue. Indians holding the plunging horses readyfor us at relays. I had lived with and knew, trusted the red men and was never betrayed. Those matchless night rides under the stars, dashing into the Orient doors of dawn before me as the sun burst through the shining mountain pass — this brought my love of song to the surface. And now I traveled, Mexico, South America, I hadiesolved as I rode to set these unwritten lands with the banner of song.

I wrote much as I traveled but never kept my verses, once published. I thought, and still hold that under right conditions and among a right people— and these mighty American people are perhaps more nearly right than any other that have yet been — anything in literature that is worth preserving will preserve itself. As none of my verses with this following exception have come down on the river of Time it is safe to say nothing of all I wrote could serve any purpose except to feed foolish curiosity. I give the following place, written years after the college valedictory, not only because it is right in spirit but because it shows how old, how very old I was as a boy, and sad at heart over the cruelties of man to man. This was my first poem printed, after the valedictory, about 1866, and has been drifting around ever since:

VIU PREFACE.

IS IT WOETH WHILE?

Is it worth while that we jostle a brother

Bearing his load on the rough road of life?

Is it worth while that we jeer at each other

In blackness of heart ? — that we war to the knife? God pity us all in our pitiful strife.

God pity us all as we jostle each other ;

God pardon us all for the triumphs we feel When a fellow goes down; poor heart-broken brother,

Pierced to the heart ; words are keener than steel.

And mightier far for woe or for weal.

Were it not well in this brief little journey

On over the isthmus down into the tide, We give him a fish instead of a serpent,

Ere folding the hands to be and abide

For ever and aye in dust at his side?

Look at the roses saluting each other ;

Look at the herds all at peace on the plain —

Man, and man only, makes war on his brother. And dotes in his heart on his peril and pain — Shamed by the brutes that go down on the plain.

Why should you envy a moment of pleasure

Some poor fellow-mortal has wrung from it all?

Oh! could you look into his life's broken measure — Look at the dregs — at the wormwood and gall — Look at his heart hung with crape like a pall —

Look at the skeletons down by his hearthstone — Look at his cares in their merciless sway,

I know you would go and say tenderly, lowly, Brother — my brother, for aye and a day, Lo! Lethe is washing the blackness away.

Home again in Oregon I had a little newspaper in the interest of Peace, my Quaker father's creed, and opposing the " March to the Sea" and the invasion of States, the paper was suppressed for alleged treason. Poor ouce more, broken in heart and health, the gold mines again; then a campaign against an insurrection of savages; then elected Judge; and once more my face to books, night and day, as at school.

Had I melted into my surroundings, instead of reading and writing continually, life had not been so dismal; but I lived among the stars, an abstemious ghost. Then "Specimens," a thin book of verse, and some lawyers laughed, and political

PREFACE. IX

and personal foes all up and down the land derided. This made me more determined, and the next year " Joaquin e< aZ.," a book of 124 pages, resulted. Bret Harte, of the Overland, behaved bravely; but, as a rule: " Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? "

The first little book has not preserved itself to me, but from a London pirated copy of the second one I find that it makes up about half of my first book in London; the songs my heart had sung as I galloped alone under the stars of Idaho years before.

But my health and eyes had failed again; besides, everything was at sixes and sevens, and, being a "cold water man," and a sort of preacher and teacher on all political occasions, I was so unpopular that when I asked a place on the Supreme Bench at the convention, I was derisively told: "Better stick to poetry." Three months later, September 1, 1870, I was kneeling at the grave of Burns. I really expected to die there in the land of my fathers; I was so broken and ill.

May I proudly admit that I had sought a place on the Supreme Bench in order that I might the more closely stick to poetry ? I have a serious purpose in saying this. Was Lowell a bad diplomat because he was a good poet? Is Gladstone less great because of his three hundred books and pamphlets? The truth is there never was, never will be, a great general, judge, lawyer, anything, without being, at heart at least, a great poet. Then let not our conventions, presidents, governors, despise the young poet who does seek expression. We have plenty of lawyers, judges, silent great men of all sorts; yet the land is songless. Had my laudable ambition not been despised, how much better I might have sang; who shall say?

Let us qiiote a few lines from the last pages of my little book, published before setting out. They will show, not poetry perhaps, but resignation, a belief in immortality, a hope to be read in Europe, and a singularly early desire to not be formally buried, but to pass in clouds and ashes. The little book, "Joaquin et al.," from which the following lines were taken, was first published in Portland (Oregon) in 1868:

ULTIME.

Had I been content to live on the leafy borders of the scene Communing with the neglected dwellers of the fern-grown gleu.

And glorious storm-stained peaks, with cloud-knit sheen,

And sullen iron brows, and belts of boundless green, A peaceful, flowery path, content, I might have trod,

And carolled melodies that perchance might have been Read with love and a sweet delight. But I kiss the rod. I have done as best I knew. The rest is with my God.

Come forward here to me, ye who have a fear of death. Come down, far down, even to the darkjwaves' rim,

And take my hand, and feel my calm, low breath; How peaceful all! How still and sweet! The sight is dim, And dreamy as a distant sea. And melodies do swim

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Around us here as a far-off vesper's holy hymu.

This is death. With folded hands I wait and welcome him; And yet a few, some few, were kind, I would live and so be known, That their sweet deeds might be as bread on the waters thrown.

I go, I know not where, but know I will not die, And know I will be gainer going to that somewhere;

For in that hereafter, afar beyond the bended sky, Bread and butter will not figure in the bill of fare, Nor will the soul be judged by what the flesh may wear.

But with all my time my own, once in the dapple skies, I will collect my fancies now floating in the air

And arrange them, a jewel set, that in a show-case lies

And when you come will show you them in a sweet surprise.

It was my boy-ambition to be read beyond the brine. But this you know was when life looked fair and tall,

Erewhile this occidental rim was my dream's confine, And now at last I make no claim to be read at all. And write with this wild hope, and even that is small,

That when the last pick-ax lies rusting in the ravine, And its green beut hill-sides echo the shepherd's call.

Some curious wight will thumb this through, saying, "Well, I ween

He was not a poet, but yet, and yet, he might have been."

But to conclude. Do not stick me down in th6 cold wet mud,

As if I wished to hide, or was ashamed of what I had done. Or my friends believed me born of slime, with torpid blood.

No, when this the first short quarter of my life is run.

Let me ascend in clouds of smoke up to the sun. And as for these lines, they are a rough, wild-wood bouquet.

Plucked from my mountains in the dusk of life, as one Without taste or time to select, or put in good array. Grasps at once rose, leaf, briar, on the brink, and hastes away.

Fault may be found, as with Hawthorne when he gathered up his Tales, that all I have written is not here. Let me answer with him that all I wish to answer for is here. The author must be the sole judge as to what belongs to the public and what to the flames. Much that I have written has been on trial for many years. The honest, wise old world of to-day is a fairly safe jury. While it is true the poet must lead rather than be led, yet must he lead pleasantly, patiently, or he may not lead at all. So that which the world let drop out of sight as the years surged by I have, as a rule, not cared to introduce a second time.

For example take the lines written on the dead millionaire of New York. There

PREFACE. XI were perhaps a dozen verses at first, but the world found use for and kept before it only the two following:

The gold that with the sunlight lies

In bursting heaps at dawn, The silver spilling from the skies

At night to walk upon, The diamonds gleaming in the dew He never saw, he never knew.

He got some gold, dug from the mud.

Some silver, crushed from stones; But the gold was red with dead men's blood,

The silver black with groans ; And when he died he moaned aloud " They'll make no pocket in my shroud."

The antithesis of this ugly truth in poetry, the lines to Peter Cooper's memory also shared the same fate. The world did not want all I had to say of this gentle old man and kept only the three little verses:

Honor and glory forever more

To this great man gone to restj Peace on the dim Plutonian shore;

Rest in the land of the blest.

I reckon him greater than any man

That ever drew sword in war; Nobler, better than king or khan,

Better, wiser by far.

Aye, wisest he in this whole wide land,

Of hoarding till bent and gray; For all you can hold in your cold, dead hand

Is what you have given away.

May I, an old teacher, in conclusion, lay down a lesson or two for the young in letters? After the grave of Burns, then a month at Byron's tomb, then Schiller, Goethe; before battle fields. Heed this. The poet must be loj^al, loyal not only to his God and his country, but loyal, loving, to the great masters who have nourished him.

This devotion to the masters led me to first set foot in London near White Chapel, where Bayard Taylor had lived; although I went at once to the Abbey. Then I lived at Camberwell, because Browning was born there; then at Hemmingford Koad, because Tom Hood died there.

A thin little book now, called " Pacific Poems," and my watch was in pawn before

XU PREFACE.

it was out, for I could not find a publisher. One hundred were printed, bearing the name of the printer as publisher. What fortune! With the press notices in hand, I now went boldly to the most aristocratic publisher in London.

As to the disposal of our dead, except so far as it tends to the good of the living, most especially the poor, who waste so much which they can ill spare in burials, the young poet may say or do as he elects. But in the matters of resignation to the Infinite and belief in immortality, he shall have no choice. There never was a poet and there never will be a poet who disputed God, or so degraded himself as to doubt his eternal existence.

One word as to the choice of theme. First, let it be new. The world has no use for two Homers, or even a second Shakespeare, were he possible.

And now think it not intrusion if one no longer young should ask the coming poet to not waste his forces in discovering this truth: The sweetest flowers grow closest to the ground. We are all too ready to choose some lurid battle theme or exalted subject. Exalt your theme rather than ask joxir theme to exalt you. Braver and better to celebrate the lowly and forgiving grasses under foot than the stately cedars and sequoias overhead. They can speak for themselves. It has been scornfully said that all my subjects are of the low or savage. It might have been as truly said that some of my heroes and heroines, as Keil and Sophia Petrowska, died on the scaffold. But believe me, the people of heart are the unfortunate. How unfortunate that man who never knew misfortune! And thank God, the heart of the world is with the unfortunate! There never has yet been a great poem written of a rich man or gross. And I glory in the fact that I never celebrated war or warriors. Thrilling as are war themes, you will not find one, purposely, in all my books. If you would have the heart of the world with you, put heart in your work, taking care that you do not try to pass brass for gold. They are much alike to look upon, but only the ignorant can be deceived. And what is poetry without heart! In truth, were I asked to define poetry, I would answer in a single word. Heart.

A true seer will see that which is before him, and about him, in and of his own land and life. "The eyes of the fool are in the ends of the earth." The real and reasonable should best inspire us. I do not care to explore impossible hells with either dolorous Dante or majestic Milton. I do not believe there are any STich places, save as we make them in our own minds. Indeed, life would be fearful could I be made to believe that the heart of this beautiful globe is filled with human beings writhing in eternal torments under my feet. Such books can do no good; and the only excuse for any book is the pleasure it can give and the good it can do.

Let me again invoke you, be loyal to your craft, not only to your craft, but to your fellow scribes. To let envy lure you to leer at even the humblest of them is to admit yourself beaten; to admit yourself to be one of the thousand failures betraying the one success. Braver it were to knife in the back a holy man at prayer. I plead for something more than the individual here. I plead for the entire Republic. To not have a glorious literature of our own is to be another Nineveh, Babylon, Turkey. Nothing ever has paid, nothing ever will pay a nation like poetry. How many millions have we paid, are still paying, bleak and rocky little Scotland to behold the land of Burns? Byron led the world to scatter its gold through the ruins of Italy, where he had mused and sang, and Italy was rebuilt. Greece survived a

PREFACE.

XIU thousand years on the deathless melodies of her mighty dead, and now once again is the heart of the globe.

Finally, use the briefest little bits of baby Saxon words at hand. The world is waiting for ideas, not for words. Eemember Shakespeare's scorn of " words, words, words." Eemember always that it was the short Roman sword that went to the heart and conquered the world, not the longtasseled and bannered lance of the barbarian. Write this down in red and remember.

Will we ever have an American literature? Yes, when we leave sound and words to the winds. American science has swept time and space aside. American science dashes along at fifty, sixty miles an hour; but American literature still lumbers along in the old-fashioned English stage-coach at ten miles an hour; and sometimes with a red-coated outrider blowing a horn. We must leave all this behind us. We have not time for words. A man who uses a great big sounding word when a short one will do is to that extent a robber of time. A jewel that depends greatly on its setting is not a great jewel. When the Messiah of American literature comes he will come singing, so far as may be, in words of a single syllable.

To

COLLIS P. HUNTINGTON,

Who was first to lead the steel shod cavalry of conquest through the Sierras to the Sea of Seas, and who has done the greater West and South more endtcring good than any other living man, I dedicate this final revision of my complete poems.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

The Hights, Cal.,