Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A TRACER FOR J*** B********, by ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A TRACER FOR J*** B********, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Dear english cousins: we have lost
Last Line: Shall be his fee who finds him.
Subject(s): Burroughs, John (1837-1921)


I

DEAR ENGLISH COUSINS: We have lost --
And crave your help to find him --
A farmer-poet, ocean-tossed,
With no address behind him.

Yes, though of song he write no stave,
We yet will call him poet:
His lines, as wave with following wave,
Make rhythm and never know it.

His pages grow rare fruits of thought,
Rare fruits of toil his furrows;
His name? Why hide it when you've caught
The rhyme I seek? -- John Burroughs.

I doubt if in the London round
His eager feet will loiter,
While hedge and copse of Kentish ground
Are left to reconnoiter.

There he'll compare, in lulls of rain,
Your thrushes with our cat-bird,
And quiz the lads in every lane
For news of this or that bird.

Him leaners over Stratford gates
Shall mark, by Avon strolling.
A poacher? Ay, but on estates
Not near their vision rolling.

When Shakespeare tribute he has brought
Across the loyal ocean,
He'll seek some haunt that Wordsworth sought
To pay his next devotion.

His "next" -- ah! rather say his first,
Since friend is more than sovereign;
Of poets be the truth rehearsed:
To reign is not to govern.

To him the moor shall not be lone,
Nor any footstep idle
Where Nature hoards each lingering tone
Of the human voice of Rydal.

By poets led, he will not grope,
But be, from Kent to Cumberland,
At home as on his Hudson slope
Or Rip Van Winkle's slumberland.

II

How shall you know him? -- by what word,
What shibboleth, what mole-ridge? --
Him who will find an English bird
Just by a line of Coleridge?

Of outward mark the quickest test
Is that he wears the shading
That sober Autumn loves the best --
Soft gray through iron fading.

Tinged, too, are beard and hair; and keen
His eye, but warm and witty;
A rustic strength is in his mien,
Made mild by love and pity.

A man of grave, of jolly moods,
That with the world has kept tune --
You'd call him Druid in the woods,
And in the billows Neptune.

Another sign that will not fail:
Where'er he chance to tarry, --
In copse, or glen, or velvet vale,
Or where the streamlets marry,

Or on the peaks whose shadows spread
O'er Grasmere's level reaches, --
You'll note shy shakings of his head
Before his Saxon speeches.

III

AH me! by how poor facts and few
A stranger may detect us,
While friends may never find the clew,
Though keenly they inspect us.

Of things that make the man -- alack!
I've hardly even hinted;
We speak of them -- behind his back,
But here? -- this might be printed.

Still ... he'd not know the portrait his --
His modesty so blinds him --
But no! ... to learn what Burroughs is
Shall be his fee who finds him.





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