Poems — A Reader’s Guide

Moral Certainty and Its Discontents

The first section of Poems repeatedly asserts a clear moral framework. In “Two Lives,” one man yields to temptation and is found “all mangled in the gutter,” while the other walks “the pathway of righteousness” and reaches heaven. The poem leaves no ambiguity: sin leads to a wretched end, virtue to reunion. “Pitcher or Jug” similarly warns against drink, asking which “turns happiness to gloom.” Yet this certainty is undercut elsewhere. “Meditation” admits that even those who “delving deep in caves of knowledge” remain “blind” to life’s great features. The poem’s catalog of fleeting things—hope as a “star that lures men ever onward,” love as a “dew-drop on the rose-bush glowing”—suggests a more tentative worldview. The tension between dogmatic closure and philosophical doubt runs through the collection, unresolved.

Dialect as a Second Voice

The “Miscellaneous Verses” section shifts abruptly into rustic dialect, as if Conant were trying on a different persona. “The Dawn o’ Spring” opens with a speaker waiting “patiently to see the dawn o’ spring,” using contractions like “thet” and “sech.” “Zeeke Bullard’s Farm” introduces a farmer who “wuz a farmer of no great amount of worth” despite owning three hundred acres. These poems employ a comic, vernacular voice that contrasts sharply with the elevated diction of the first section. The note preceding them reveals Conant’s own ambivalence: he originally intended to omit them but yielded to readers’ recommendations. The dialect pieces feel like experiments in local color, perhaps influenced by the popular humor of the period, but they sit uneasily alongside the pious lyrics.

Recurring Patterns: Time, Loss, and the Natural World

Several poems return to the same motifs. “Tempus Fugit” states bluntly: “Men sleep, but time speeds on.” The poem’s short lines and repetition (“ever time speeds on”) create a sense of inexorable motion. “The Rainbow” offers consolation: “Howe’er dark the clouds may hover … Mark thou, when the storm is over, / In the heaven that beautious line!” Nature is consistently a source of moral lesson or solace. “The Fox River” and “Forest Delights” celebrate specific landscapes, while “A Little Grave” and “Faces That are Gone” dwell on loss. The collection’s structure—moving from personal lyrics to dialect sketches—mirrors a broader pattern of contrast: between high and low, serious and comic, certain and doubtful. Readers may find the volume most interesting as a record of these competing impulses.

Conant’s Poems rewards attention to its internal frictions rather than its individual successes. The juxtaposition of moralistic verse with dialect humor, and of confident assertion with meditative uncertainty, gives the collection a curious energy. Readers interested in late-nineteenth-century American poetry, especially the work of young or self-published authors, will find here a case study in the pressures and possibilities facing a writer at the margins of the literary sphere. The book is best approached not as a finished achievement but as a document of becoming.

That rainy afternoon, Conant’s earnest verses—moral weight collapsing into rustic jokes—left me restless, as if aspiration itself were a shy animal. I closed the book, then drifted, almost by accident, toward Maud, and Other Poems — Reading Companion, whose melancholy felt like the same quiet struggle, only darker, more patient, waiting out the storm beside me.