Bag-Pipes at Sea

Description

A poem about the sea bag-pipes bringing rhythm of cheer and cry. A piper is playing from the deck of his ship in the gloom of the night like his poorly lit shape. He is as if an odd mythical god of melody and catastrophe. As he was singing harmoniously, the darkness turns to light and love suddenly came into sight and the golden stars brightened. He kept on playing until he arrived at his highland home.

Clinton Scollard was an American poet and author. He was an English Professor at Hamilton College, and co-author and husband of Jessie Belle Rittenhouse.

He was born at Clinton, New York on the 28th of September 1860, to his parents, James Isaac and Mary Elizabeth Stevens Scollard. He finished studying at Hamilton College in 1881, and afterwards went at Harvard University, where his friends such as poets Bliss Carman and Frank Dempster Sherman also attended. At Hamilton, where he was affiliated with the Chi Psi fraternity, he was a varsity baseball player and was recognized to introduce the curveball to college baseball.

After some time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he enrolled for a year at the University of Cambridge in England. He then became an Associate English Professor at Hamilton College in 1888, where he continued teaching until 1896. Apart from a longer year in the English Department at Hamilton College in 1911, he dedicated most of his life in writing poetry and fiction. Hamilton College accorded him an honorary L.H.D. in 1906.

Clinton Scollard has been exemplified as a minor poet but a skilled artist, one critic quoted him as “He knew himself to be a fine craftsman, able to fashion delicate lyrics that forbear contemplative weight for perfection in form. His verse delights in the natural world, in small incidents that are honed to perfection. It is easy to view him as a Frost without the philosophy.”
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