Born in Salem, Mass., 28 Aug., 1813; died there, 8 May, 1880. He made voyages with his father, a cultivated sea-captain, and had schooling in Salem and New Orleans. A graduate of Harvard in 1836, he taught Greek there for two years. His first volume of essays and poems appeared in 1839. In 1843 the Cambridge Association licensed him to preach, but he was never ordained. He was the intimate friend of Emerson and Channing, and a frequent contributor to “The Christian Register” and other Unitarian journals. His friend James Freeman Clarke edited a complete posthumous edition of his poems and essays. In 1883 Very’s “Poems” were reëdited by William P. Andrews, with a memoir. The sonnet, somewhat on the Shakesperean model, was the form of expression most natural to him.
Personal
Jones Very came hither two days since. His position accuses society as much as society names that false and morbid. And much of his discourse concerning society, church and college was absolutely just. He says it is with him a day of hate: that he discerns the bad element in every person whom he meets, which repels him: he even shrinks a little to give the hand, that sign of receiving. The institutions, the cities which men have built the world over, look to him like a huge ink-blot. His only guard in going to see men is, that he goes to do them good, else they would injure him spiritually. He lives in the sight that He who made him, made the things he sees. He would as soon embrace a black Egyptian mummy as Socrates. He would obey,—obey. He is not disposed to attack religions or charities, though false. The bruisëd reed he would not break, smoking flax not quench…. He had the manners of a man,—one, that is, to whom life was more than meat. He felt it, he said, an honour to wash his face, being, as it was, the temple of the spirit. I ought not to omit to record the astonishment which seized all the company when our brave Saint the other day fronted the presiding Preacher. The preacher began to tower and dogmatise with many words. Then I foresaw that his doom was fixed; and, as soon as he had ceased speaking, the Saint set him right, and blew away all his words in an instant,—unhorsed him, I may say, and tumbled him along the ground in utter dismay, like my angel of Heliodorus; never was discomfiture more complete. In tones of genuine pathos, he bid him wonder at the Love which suffered him to speak there in his chair of things he knew nothing of; one might expect to see the book taken from his hands and him thrust out of the room, and yet he was allowed to sit and talk, whilst every word he spoke was a step of departure from the truth; and of this he commanded himself to bear witness.
He was good as goodness itself, true as truth. With his knowledge and wisdom he was as simple as a child—transparent and artless. He was the extremest possible distance from pomposity or pretension, and when he believed that poetry, which came to him like the breath of heaven, did actually come from heaven, it was so naturally and simply said one felt it was his profoundest conviction. It was a sacred idea—a divine reality.
In college, as in school, he was too sedate to be widely and generally popular, but all who knew him reverenced the lofty purity of his character, and he soon gathered around him a small circle of warmly attached friends. He was sensitive and reserved, but the cordiality of his tone and the sweet naturalness of his smile of welcome at once attracted whoever made his acquaintance, though the uniform gravity of his daily walk and conversation prevented the many from approaching him as an intimate…. “Men in General,” said Dr. Channing, “have lost or never found this higher mind, their insanity is profound, Mr. Very’s is only superficial. To hear him talk was like looking into the purely spiritual world, into truth itself. He had nothing of self-exaggeration, but seemed to have attained self-annihilation and become an oracle of God.” Dr. Channing repeated that he had “not lost his reason,” and quoted some of his sayings, identical with many parts of his sonnets, as proofs of the “iron sequence of his thoughts.”
General
His essays entitled “Epic Poetry,” “Shakespere,” and “Hamlet,” are fine specimens of learned and sympathetic criticism; and his sonnets, and other pieces of verse, are chaste, simple, and poetical, though they have little range of subjects and illusion. They are religious, and some of them are mystical, but they will be recognised by the true poet as the overflowings of a brother’s soul.
Jones Very has written some of the best sonnets in our language.
Jones Very has always piped the sweet, sad notes of religious melancholy.
His verse is characterized by a remarkable purity and delicacy of thought, and great ease and simplicity of style, while it breathes the spirit of a sweet and loving trust, and is pervaded by a fine, subtle sense of the enduring realities. In very many of his poems there is the unmistakable element or master-touch that belongs to the higher order of genius.
Among the minds stirred about half a century ago by the impulse of Transcendentalism, one of the least conspicuous, and since that time one of the least known, was one which now fairly promises to be foremost in the poetic interpretation of the movement…. Jones Very, for forty years past one of the most reserved, modest, retiring, and unknown of literary men, now slowly comes to the front, while many of the brilliant and attractive men and women who were in the group in which Emerson, Alcott, and Margaret Fuller were the principal figures, begin to fade away, and, dying, leave scarcely a sign to indicate the secret of their charming influence…. Natural genius and the finest classical culture had given him unerring good taste and command of the Shakspearean sonnet as a means of communicating his thought to the world, and the uninstructed reader would never suspect that he was reading the words of a man “beside himself” according to the standard of what we call “common sense.” His was uncommon sense as Channing thought, a higher mood of sanity, to which few men ever attained.
“Essays and Poems,” by Jones Very,—a little volume, the work of an exquisite spirit. Some of the poems it contains are as if written by a George Herbert who had studied Shakespeare, read Wordsworth, and lived in America.
The sort of inspiration which gleams through the best of the sonnets is in the prose almost wholly lacking. Literary skill he had little or none, though, at his best, he had something far better than literary skill…. In all these poems we find a strenuous insistence on submission of the will to God,—submission in itself inevitable, but, if made voluntarily, a source of the highest joy…. Emerson exhorts, encourages, instructs; but the attitude of Very is different. There is a certain sternness in his verse, a flavor of absolutism, which carries one back a thousand, two thousand years out of modern skepticism and doubt. Emerson compares him to David and Isaiah. On this point, the comparison is just. By his passionate and wholly modern sensibility to Nature, by his broad and spiritual view of God, he stands apart from them; but he shares, if in a far less degree, their tone of austere judgment and command. He has in common with them a sense of wrath and scorn at the meanness and pettiness of men around him, a feeling of isolation in the midst of a people who have fallen off from God…. Jones Very is not and never can be one of the great figures of literature. His breadth is too slight in proportion to his depth. Moreover, the outward form of current religious phraseology, in which he clothed his profound spiritual life, is in a certain degree repellent to many men of this generation; and, on the other hand, his passionate idealism does not altogether please the average religious mind. With our material civilization and our democratic habit he has little in common. But that which makes the soul and inspiration of his verse—his love of Nature, with his tender mysticism—must give him a place permanent at least, if not prominent in our literature.
Jones Very, a sort of Unitarian monk and mystic, packed into many a sonnet or meditative hymn rich and weighty words of reverence and consecration, which he deemed inspired by ghostly power from above, and which he wrote in implicit obedience to the spiritual voice within. Some of these poems are harmed by a semi-Buddhistic Christian Quietism, as though Molinos had been incarnated anew in the Salem streets; others display the serene sure beauty of church-yard lilies.
Was a sort of slender American shadow of William Blake, with the masculine strength and the painter’s genius left out; he was a mystic and a spiritist, and wrote some deep and delicate little poems under what he believed to be direct spirit guidance.
Very has received a rarer and nobler recognition than popularity; men of genius have concurred in praising him. In respect to his poems and the voice that speaks in them, Bryant, Emerson, and Hawthorne have each paid positive tribute. The mind from which Very’s poetry came was of an unusual order, and one that cannot be judged without special study, though the poetry of that mind may be enjoyed. He was one of those few Americans (perhaps the only American) for whom religious contemplation is everything; and one of those mortals to whom above others is, in spiritual things, granted the clearest vision. Such a man, as we know with regard to oriental mystics, with whom conditions are more favorable for solitary, rapt meditation than in America, naturally and rightly regards himself as a teacher of divine truth, and an exposer of worldly pretension and sin; in America less naturally but not less rightly, this was the case with Very.
His sympathy with nature is profound, but his methods of expression not varied. This and the frequent repetition of his subject give his writings an impression of monotony fatal to an extended reading. He is seldom trite, though his reflections are often drawn from the commonest objects. Close to ourselves lie the wonders of nature, is the keynote of his poetry. The wind-flower, the columbine, and the snowdrop were to him as eloquent as a forest, a mountain, or an ocean. He was one of the most original as well as most unreadable of our poets. All his poems are infused with the sweetness of his own anemones and columbines, of too subtle an essence to suit the general taste.
Had in him an eccentric streak amounting almost to insanity; but his “Poems and Essays” (1839) reveal an original and intensely spiritual nature, and an unusual gift of terse, fresh, direct expression within a limited field.
