OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES SR. OFFERS UP HIS: ‘TO THE POETS WHO ONLY READ’

HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL. (1809-1894) American physician, professor, lecturer, poet, and author.  Uncommon Autograph Fair Copy Poem Signed “Oliver Wendell Holmes”, of his: “To The Poets Who Only Read [And Listen].” One full page, quarto.   Tiny paper loss in folds, else fine condition.   ‘June 29, 1885’ [The year of it’s publication and dated from a faint Cambridge, Massachusetts postal cancellation on verso.]  The poem is dedicated: “At the Dinner of the O.B.K. Society / To the Poets who only listen”.  It reads:

         “When evening’s shadowy fingers fold

          The flowers of every hue,

          Some shy, half-opened bud will hold

         Its drop of morning’s dew.

         Sweeter with every sunlit hour

         The trembling sphere has grown,

         Till all the fragrance of the flower

         Becomes at last its own.

         We that have sung perchance may find

         Our little need of praise,

         And round our pallid temples bind

         The wreath of fading bays.

         Ah, Poet, who hast never spent

         Thy breath in idle strains,

         For thee the dewdrop morning lent

         Still in thy heart remains;

         Unwasted, in its perfumed cell

         It waits the evening gale;

         Then to the azure whence it fell

         Its lingering sweets exhale.                             

                                                                          Oliver Wendell Holmes”.

Holmes lectured extensively on varied subjects. Traveling throughout New England, he received anywhere from $40 to $100 per lecture, but he also published a great deal during his entire life. As social attitudes began to change in the 1850’s, Holmes often found himself publicly at odds with those he called the “moral bullies”; because of mounting criticisms from the press regarding Holmes’s vocal anti-abolitionism stance [he favored compromising with the South to preserve the Union] and his ardent anti-temperance position.  By 1856 he rarely lectured publicly, but did so occasionally in later years.  Our poem was penned during one of those infrequent, later readings. 

$1250.00