Perhaps once he did give way. In 1878 a Boston firm published an anthology titled A Masque of Poets, its contributors all anonymous. Publication in disguise was the rage—it might have seemed, from the four-columned three-page list of pseudonyms published in the Literary World that year, that more authors than not were appearing incognito. A Masque was published in the “No Name” series (there was a rival called the “Round-Robin” series), which otherwise consisted of novels “written by eminent authors,” according to the publisher, the “authorship of the work … to remain an inviolable secret.” Advertisements for A Masque of Poets teased the prospective reader by suggesting that Christina Rossetti and William Morris might be among the masked crowd. Though the latter did not appear, there were poems by Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Sidney Lanier, Austin Dobson, and James Russell Lowell. The anthology is now remembered (and rendered hugely expensive in the rare-book trade) because of a single poem by Emily Dickinson, one of the handful published before her death. The disguises proved successful—the reviewer in the Literary World guessed at the authors of a dozen poems and was wrong all but once. Indeed, he thought the Dickinson poem had been written by Emerson.
At the end of the volume, taking up almost half the whole, was a “novelette in verse” called Guy Vernon, dashingly Byronic in character, the tale of a marriage conceived in haste, full of secrets, with a fair damsel tempted to betray her vows. The poem opens:
He was as fair a bachelor as ever
Resolved to take a wife at forty-five.
Indeed, how one so amiable and clever,
Good-looking, rich, et cetera, could contrive
Till the high noon of manhood not to wive,
Was a vexed theme, and long remained a mystery
To those who did not know his early history.
And none knew that among his bride’s relations.
At Saratoga, where you meet all grades
Of well-dressed people spending short vacations,
Manoeuvring mothers, marriageable maids,
And fortune-hunters on their annual raids,
He saw her waltz, and spite of every barrier
Of years or influence, inly vowed, “I ’ll marry her!”
The swaggering confidence here is quite unlike the plowed-up lines Trowbridge usually favored. The rhyme royal dragged something spirited from him, a something evident particularly in the three-syllable rhymes that close these stanzas—barrier and I ’ll marry her honors the wilder shores of Byron’s rhyme, which included intellectual / henpecked you all and that horrid one / pastor Corydon. (To a modern ear, wive and inly sound archaic; but they were apt to the period—Byron used wive in Beppo and Emerson inly in one of his poems.)
Guy Vernon may well announce to himself that he will marry the girl, whose name is Florinda; but there is an impediment on each side—in him, the puzzle of his having remained a bachelor; in her, another lover, one rather younger:
Rob Lorne, a journalist, and sort of poet;
A fellow so unthrifty and so witty,
That honest people said it was a pity
A needle of such point should have a head
Too fine to take a strong and useful thread.
Florinda! Rob Lorne! We are in the land of comic pastoral. (Poor Lorne, whose name is twice lorn.) Trowbridge was considered a fair hand at plot (much of his later career was spent writing juvenile novels, which could be said to depend on little else), and his other poems at times show a mordant wit that suited narrative more than lyric. Soon the younger suitor unselfishly withdraws his suit, though not without tears; and the mismatched lovers are betrothed—she church-mouse poor, he handsome, rich, but … et cetera.
For though the bride was penniless, and brought him
Her beauty for sole dower (that proud array
Of lace and diamonds was his gift, they say),
A multitude of friends conspired to render
The wedding feast a perfect blaze of splendor.
She did not know, before, she had so many
Rich and enthusiastic friends: the snob,
Who never would have sacrificed a penny
In bridal gifts for one who married Rob,
Made haste to join the fashionable mob,
Since Vernon was the man, and would have given his
Last dime to buy her something nice at Tiffany’s.
These “friends” appear here and there through Guy Vernon, eager to approve whatever fashion approves, eager to disdain what propriety disdains—they’re a Greek chorus composed of harpies. Yet who would not applaud a gorgeous young woman decked in Tiffany’s finest? (Founded in 1837, the firm was well established.) The preposterousness of the rhyme is reason enough to delight—it would have charmed Byron, not just for its own sake, but because he was himself not at all shy about product placement: as he says in Don Juan, “In virtues nothing earthly could surpass her, / Save thine ‘incomparable oil,’ Macassar.”
The plot of Guy Vernon is a mock-heroic mixture of speed and lassitude: the poet lingers over small events, while large ones race by in a stanza or two. The disappointed young journalist-poet is dispatched to foreign climes, a traveler “writing verses for the magazines, / Newspaper sketches, stories, correspondence, he / Struggled with his hotel-bills and despondency.” The new couple, against all odds, prove deliriously happy:
The wedded pair went off to Louisiana,
Where Vernon owned a very large plantation,
And wintered in New Orleans and Havana,—
A season of delightful dissipation,
Sight-seeing, dining, driving, conversation,
And—best of all—the infinite variety
Found in each other’s ever-fresh society.
The only shadow over this wedded bliss is cast by Vernon’s manservant, a high-yellow mulatto and fop of the worst kind. Rumored to have been Vernon’s slave, he is now, though servant still, wealthy and insufferable. Florinda loathes him, even renaming him at whim: though he is “so superb and exquisite a dandy, / Resplendent in all sorts of gaudy things, / Florinda called him Saturn, for his rings.” (The joke is typically keen-witted—and Saturn, of course, ate his children.) Her reaction suggests that, long after the war, a northern prejudice lingered against blacks too ambitious or successful, blacks who had risen above their station—hers are not merely the resentments of good taste, though good taste is part of it:
Of all unfeathered bipeds,—Feejees, Negroes,—
In any clime, of race refined or rude;
Where crawls the crocodile, or where the tea grows;
Pale, swarthy, tawny-skinned, or copper-hued;
Turbaned or pigtailed, naked, furred, tattooed;—
The queerest yet turned out from Nature’s shop
Is your complete, unmitigated fop.
Florinda asks for the servant’s dismissal, yet her husband flatly refuses. She’s taken aback by this suddenly revealed limit to his devotion, but the author doesn’t spare her—he can be as ruthless as Pope. She bursts into tears, “and for five minutes she was broken-hearted.”
Though Vernon remains in every way attentive, thereafter she finds herself practicing her affections and concealing her hurts. Soon she notices a change in her husband—he grows moody, agitated, and when gently asked about this unhappy transformation brutely sends her to the detested servant for explanation.
He smiled, bowed, hand on waistcoat: “’Pon my honor!”—
Quirking his eyebrows, he stood leering at her,
Like some bedizened, over-civil satyr,—
“Extremely sorry—news from our attorney—
In short,—hem!—madam, we must make a journey.”
“Where?” cries Florinda.—“Back to our plantation.”
“Tell me at once! what is the dreadful news?”
“The business scarce admits of explanation;
For ladies, altogether too abstruse!”
“When do we go?”—“Ah, madam! please excuse
Necessity,— you do not go at all.”
That Dickensian pause—that “hem!”—is masterfully placed. Trowbridge excelled in versifying dialogue (there’s a touch of Browning in him), which, while never forgetting its satirical intent, here reached notes of cruelty in the hesitations and reversals meter supplies.
All Florinda’s fears—is the problem money? a duel? another woman?—are blandly dismissed by this Iago, who stands, in what is just short of a racist portrait, “Grimacing, shrugging, lynx-eyed, white-toothed, woolly.” Falls short, perhaps, until that last adjective. The simpering and insinuating character of Saturn troubles these passages. Here you begin to think that Trowbridge intended to recast the Othello story with the races of Othello and Iago reversed. As if in confirmation, only a few stanzas later, when Florinda rushes back to question her husband, he does nothing but glare at her with “strange, awful eyes. // Othello’s thus on Desdemona burned.”
Guy’s actions remain an enigma. Poor Florinda imagines the worst, and worse than the worst; in a clever figure, the poet compares her fears to the Brocken specter, that meteorological phenomenon in which the giant shadow of a mountain climber is cast upon the clouds, his head surrounded by a rainbow corona.
So Fear has oftenest but itself to fear.
But though imagined ills are still the worst,
To troubled souls this truth is never clear;
When evil lowers we deem the rule reversed,
And fancy blacker woes about to burst
Upon our heads than any yet conceived.
So now Florinda, right or wrong, believed.
This has a marked psychological point. The reviews of character are drawn with admirable economy, even if they’re in thrall to the conventions of period fiction.
Florinda and her maid are to be dispatched back to New York by ship—to be sent away by her husband without chaperone was, by the manners of the day, a great insult. As she lingers in Havana, however, she stares out the window and sees her rejected beau, Rob Lorne. This is one of those coincidences beloved by Victorian novelists, and the narrator—though himself responsible for this unexpected turn—cannot help but ridicule ideas of love. Poor Lorne, instead of remaining forever downcast by his failed romance, has become quite carefree.
He had not died of love,—that heart-disease
Which proves but seldom fatal, to my thinking.
Defeated hope, sick fancy, if you please,
Often induce a sentimental sinking,
Drive some to suicide and some to drinking,
But stop far short of any such forlorn
And dismal end, with high, brave hearts like Lorne.
He had come down at first as far as Florida,
And seen the alligator and flamingo;
Then, passing on to regions somewhat torrider,
Reached the French-negro side of San Domingo,
And learned a little of the curious lingo
The people speak there, but conceived no mighty
Love for those Black Republicans of Hayti.
Not only is it far-fetched to find Lorne in Havana, but he and Florinda happen to choose the same moment to glance at each other, she down from her window and he up from the street. Of such absurdities melodrama is made, though Trowbridge remains alive to the necessity of retarding the plot through hindrance and digression—the recognition having occurred, the author dawdles through a florid description of the city, a description not without its comic relief:
The place is picturesque with blacks and coolies,
Peasants and panniered beasts: there ’s nothing odder
Than the slow-paced, half-hidden, peering mule is,
Beneath his moving stack of fresh green fodder.
It would be better if the streets were broader,
The windows glazed,—of that, though, I’m not sure,—
The hotels better, and mosquitoes fewer.
Afterward, half afraid he will see her again, the rejected beau bolts for the interior.
Trowbridge is adept at moving the mild comedies of character through this musty drama, making of the traveler’s scene what Pope made of a card game. Though the descriptions can be lush with the evocation of tropical depths (“And flowering forests through whose wealth of blooms, / Like living fires, dart birds of gorgeous plumes”), Trowbridge had a taste for the prefabricated phrase, lazy and formulaic (ardent wooer, abject woe, billowy verdure, indolent desire)—he was often that sort of poet, given to unrolling the bolt of whole cloth and covering everything in sight with it.
What’s more remarkable is how cannily he eyes the social character and how easily he rises into a mode of model intelligence when encouraged. The light verse acted like an acid that bit into the copperplate of period manner. The light verse, and the light comedy—for Rob, trying to flee the vision of his former lover, ends up on the same steamer back to New York. Having said good-bye to the island where he had found her again, and still ignorant of her presence on shipboard, he hears a call for supper.
With excellent appetite, if one must know it,
Which at the long, well-lighted cabin table,
Crowded with hungry passengers, our poet
Was solacing as well as he was able,
When, glancing round the clattering, chattering Babel,
He paused, aghast,—a slice of tongue half swallowed,—
Seeing the Fate which, flying, he had followed!
Florinda! pale but lovely still; enrapt in
The delicate discussion of cold chicken,
And some engaging topic with the Captain.
Just then, amid loud talk and teacups clicking,
Over the wing she happened to be picking
She looked—and there was Lorne, quite dazed and pallid,
Staring at her across a dish of salad.
A slice of tongue half swallowed! The old lovers move slowly toward a rapprochement, though here and there interrupted by the author’s droll metaphysical speculations (“Evil, perhaps, being nothing more nor less / Than good in disproportion, or excess”)—indeed, it takes some dozen stanzas after that glance over the salad for them to say hello. Trowbridge lets his lovers bow to a fate wholly authorial, but that is one of the satisfactions of satire. Having reminded us of the artifice of fiction, the author also sends up the overwriting to which his poems were often devoted.
O dear, inconstant Seraph of Repose!
Wing to the homes of woe thy downy flight;
Visit the couch of wretchedness, and close
The aching sense that wearies of the night!
But when immortal Freshness and Delight
Sail with the enraptured soul the glorious deep,
What have we then to do with thee, O Sleep?
I take this as having comic intent; sometimes with Trowbridge it’s hard to tell. He loses his satirical touch in the stanzas that lead to reconciliation; but, just when you think the poem might be heading toward an overdose of sentiment, he breaks into a paean to the steamship!
When I behold this little peopled world,
Large as an asteroid, in the nether blue,
Its flashing wheels, proud decks, and flags unfurled;
Then fancy that ancestral savage who
First pushed from shore with paddle and canoe,—
I ’m forced to the Darwinian conclusion
That here ’s a masterpiece of evolution.
From the first skiff of sutured skins or bark
To the three-decker with its thundering guns,—
From Jason’s classic junk, or Noah’s ark,
To the grand steamship of five thousand tons,—
The thing developed: just as Man was once—
Well, not a monkey; that he never was—
But something less, evolved through Nature’s laws.
Allah il Allah! great is Evolution,
And Darwin eminently is its Prophet!
Out of
primeval chaos and confusion
It massed the nebulous orb, and fashioned of it
The sun and planets; one whereof it saw fit
To finish off with most attractive features,
And make the abode of curious living creatures.
To joke at Darwin’s expense, and use Islam to do it, suggests how complex a humor Trowbridge possessed—twenty years after the publication of The Origin of Species (1859), he had absorbed its lessons and was arguing dryly with it. (He himself believed, or feigned to believe, that a “vast unoutlined Presence” stood behind the “puppet-show of Evolution.”) Trowbridge was hardly the first poet to do so, but the other examples I’ve found are minor stuff.
The old lovers grow intimate on shipboard—she needs a friend and he needs whatever men need. This does seem fatally indiscreet of her, as, despite the servant’s reptilian manner, Guy Vernon’s disappearance may amount to nothing. We see here the flaw in Florinda—once her belief in her husband is shaken, she’s vulnerable to her jilted lover, though Rob Lorne in a gentle-manly way tries to convince her that her husband’s absence is meaningless. After a tremendous storm (allowing the poet to rhyme something seemed the matter as with Cape Hatteras), the steamship docks in New York.
The novelette still has a long way to travel—there is the pitching and tossing of the two lovers’ affections; the shock to her aunt and her friends when she returns without her husband; her temporizing explanations, which call forth from the author some unkind thoughts about women and truth; and then, well, a lot more plot. Florinda is feted on her homecoming to Brooklyn; but, when her husband’s absence is prolonged, doubts rise among her friends (after indiscreet remarks by her maid, some even drop her acquaintance). It takes only another 150 more stanzas for all the mysteries to stand revealed. In the end, no one is quite what he seems. Many of the best stanzas are devoted, not to the working out of the creaky drama, but to the author’s sidelong comments on manners, mores, and writers. Indeed, though Rob Lorne has gone back to a New York garret, he continues to compose his traveler’s notes:
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