Nature & Animals Quote by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Originality takes a beating here, and Aldrich lands the punch with a velvet glove. His couplets move like a nursery rhyme but carry a bracing, almost chastening idea: art is inheritance, not immaculate conception. Every birdsong is an echo of an older throat; every rose is a rerun of Eden. The neatness of the rhyme does more than prettify the message - it performs it. The lines themselves feel like something already heard, which is exactly the point: even a poem warning you that nothing is new must borrow the oldest tricks in the book.

Aldrich was writing from the late-19th-century American literary world, anxious about belatedness. After the Romantics had made "genius" and the singular voice a kind of secular religion, the genteel tradition (Aldrich included) often lived under the shadow of European precedent and an increasingly industrial modernity. His Eden reference tightens the screws: the loss of origin is not just an artistic problem but a theological one. Post-Fall, creation is tainted by repetition; novelty becomes suspect, maybe even impossible.

The subtext is less despair than discipline. Aldrich is nudging poets away from the marketplace obsession with the "new" and toward craft, lineage, variation. If everything has been sung before, then the real test is not invention from nothing but arrangement, pressure, and timbre - how you make the old note cut differently in your own throat.