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Less
than this my lone path is:
a deermouse track in winter's
snow --
less than any mark of hare or crow.
--
August Derleth, "Man Track Here"
August
Derleth was a prolific poet throughout his entire writing
career. He published literally hundreds of poems in
as many magazines. And he collected some of them into
over 20 volumes of verse, from Hawk on the Wind (1938)
to The Landscape of the Heart (1970).
Undoubtedly
Derleth wrote too much poetry. This was another symptom
of his obsessive need to record everything, to remember
everything. Yet Derleth's deliberate and minute setting-down
of a mood, a scene, an impression, a bird or animal
-- these all add up to a unique body of work that allows
more aspects of his world to have an incredibly lived-in
feel about it: to become a home away from home.
Derleth's
poetry output falls into several categories: nature,
love, death, memory, "of this world", Sac
Prairie people, homage to his literary heroes, and poems
written mainly for teenagers.
The
nature poems are full of outdoor imagery -- summer days
and winter nights, hawks against the blue, windy days
in the hills. Derleth shows his usual keen eye for detail,
and reveals the seasons and the years wheeling through
their courses.
The
earlier nature poems were influenced by Robert Frost.
They are generally short, rhymed pieces, ending in an
obvious but striking couplet that sums up the poet's
line of thought:
It
makes a man think, going past,
how
soon first things are last.
In
his novel The Shield of the Valiant, Derleth's
alter-ego character Steve Grendon muses on his romanticisation
of women. And Derleth does this to a great extent in
his love poetry. To the end of his life he wrote poems
to his lovers, both female and male.
Most
of the love poems fall into loose cycles, chronicling
the course of a love-affair from the first glimpse,
the deepening into wild passion and ecstasy, and
down into the inevitable end with its aftermath of grief
and regret.
The
later books, especially from This Wound (1962)
onwards, are refreshingly frank and honest, free from
cliche and sentimentality. Derleth confronts his love
for two very different people, a young man and a young
woman. In This Wound and The Only Place We
Live Derleth's object is "Mara". In Caitlin
and The Landscape of The Heart it was "Caitlin".
The poems in these collections are almost as painful
as they are exhilarating -- Derleth hides no feeling,
no experience of the sexual heights, no despair at his
lover's absence.
One
last kiss, Lady,
we
are done for a little while
with
love's pains and laughter,
and
turn to face the tasks
of
yet another day --
one
kiss, Love,
before
we rise again
to
put on our masks.
In
his late poetry, as Derleth lived through his last decade,
the masks were well and truly removed -- as far as it
was possible for them to be.
Historical
and current affairs claimed a significant part of Derleth's
output. He wrote pieces to show his concern about the
effects of World War II on personal liberty, and the
changes that the conquerors of North and South America
brought on their original inhabitants.
For
the centenary of the founding of Sauk City, Derleth
wrote one of his finest long poems, "Ode to the
Sac Prairie Dead", as a choral recitation.
In six pages he summed up the Sac Prairie Saga, the
ceaseless struggles of the pioneers and the vast land,
the panorama of Wisconsin history as he wished to remember
it:
....their
sons' sons' feet
shall
follow -- home
in
the deep dust, sweet earth
that
gives through them, their ancient age,
new
brightness birth,
an
old race, new, new days.
In
contrast (but not as much as might be thought) to the
rest of Derleth's work were the contents of A
Boy's Way and It's a Boy's World, two collections
of poetry about being a teenage boy in the rural Midwest --
the fun, the introspective moments, the first stirrings
of love.
Taken
as a whole, Derleth's poetry makes a small part of America,
and thus the world, live vividly in the mind. The poems
add a valuable extra dimension to Derleth's other Sac
Prairie work, as well as allowing a window into his
innermost feelings:
The
country calms me.
My
only thought is how
to
live in peace with love.
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