CHARLES SPRAGUE, “The Winged Worshippers,” in Samuell Kettell, Ed., Specimens of American Poetry with Critical and Biographical Notices, Boston: S.G. Goodrich et al., 1829

CHARLES SPRAGUE, “The Winged Worshippers,” in Samuel Kettell, Ed., Specimens of American Poetry with Critical and Biographical Notices, Boston: S. G. Goodrich et al., 1829

In this early collection of poems by American authors, 22 pages are devoted to Charles Sprague—more than to most of the other poets represented. In the biographical and critical introduction, the editor praises Sprague for writing against the popular preference for “diffuse, feeble, irregular, and pointless” verse and predicts that his reputation will last:

Those, who like ourselves regard the taste in poetry that reigns now over a large portion of readers, as an illusion destined soon to pass away, can have no difficulty in foreseeing the perpetuity of such reputation as that which belongs to the author under review.

Edgar Allan Poe liked this particular poem enough to serve up a snarky compliment about it:  “’Winged Worshippers’ [is] beautiful … but … [Sprague] has written nothing else that could be called so.” The poem is a religious meditation on a specific event. After two swallows fly into a church during a service, the speaker playfully considers what this might mean about the union of God and Nature. Ideas like this, already in flight in the 1820s, contributed to the rise of the transcendentalist movement.

Boston Public Library, Research Library

CHARLES SPRAGUE, “The Winged Worshippers,” in Samuel Kettell, Ed., Specimens of American Poetry with Critical and Biographical Notices, Boston: S. G. Goodrich et al., 1829

       GAY, guiltless pair,
What seek ye from the fields of heaven?
     Ye have no need of prayer,
Ye have no sins to be forgiven.

     Why perch ye here.
Where mortals to their Maker bend?
   Can your pure spirits fear
The God ye never could offend?

      Ye never knew
The crimes for which we come to weep.
    Penance is not for you,
Blessed wanderers of the upper deep.

      To you ‘t is given
To wake sweet Nature’s untaught lays,
    Beneath the arch of heaven
To chirp away a life of praise.

      Then spread each wing,
Far, far above, o’er lakes and lands,
    And join the choirs that sing
In yon blue dome not reared with hands.

        Or, if ye stay,
To note the consecrated hour,
    Teach me the airy way.
And let me try your envied power.

      Above the crowd,
On upward wings could I but fly,
    I’d bathe in yon bright cloud,
And seek the stars that gem the sky.

        ‘T were Heaven indeed
Through fields of trackless light to soar.
   On nature’s charms to feed,
And Nature’s own great God adore.