m CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library PS 614.K92 Others for 1919 an anthology of the new 3 1924 022 030 351 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022030351 OTHERS FOR 1919 OTHERS FOR 1919 An Anthology of the New Verse Edited by Alfred Kreymborg NICHOLAS L. BROWN NEW YORK MCMXX Copyright 1920 by Nicholas L. Brown To The Others On, crusadersl Whither? 'Nowhere! The past? Sneers! Present? Snarls! Future? Snubs! Fodder? Cocoanuts! Where? In trees! How? At your heads! Do? You! On, crusaders! A.K. ACKNOWLEDGMENT For permission to reprint poems in this volume which appeared originally in the magazines and books listed below, the editor offers his grateful acknowl- edgment to the editors and publishers concerned in so fraternal a transaction. The other poems appeared originally in the magazine, Other's, or were con- tributed to the present anthology direct. Conrad Aiken : Conversation, Undertones, Youth, Poetry of Today. Witter Bynner: Group from " The Beloved Stranger," Alfred A. Knopf. Eman- uel Carnevali: Kiss, the Little Review. H. L. Davis: Primapara, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. Donald Evans : Group from " Two Deaths in the Bronx," Nicholas L. Brown. Robert Frost : Mend- ing Wall from " North of Boston," Henry Holt & Co. ; Not to Keep, the Yale Review; The Axe-Helve, the Atlantic Monthly. Arturo Giovannitti: The Walker from " Arrows in the Gale," Hillacre Book- house. Orrick Johns : Kysen from " Black Branches," Pagan Publishing Co. Vachel Lindsay: Whimseys, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. Haniel Long : Students, the New Re-public and The N. Y. Poetry Bookshop. Max Michelson: Masks, Po- etry, A Magazine of Verse. Marianne Moore: A CKNO WLEDGMENT Black Earth, The Fish, the Egoist. Lola Ridge: The Song of Iron from "The Ghetto," B. W. Huebsch. Robert Alden Sanborn: Fight Nights, the Soil. Carl Sandburg: Poems from " Chicago Poems " and " Cornhuskers," Henry Holt & Co. Evelyn Scott : Lullaby, Japanese Moon, The Naid, Night Music, the Poetry Journal. Wallace Stevens : Pecksniffiana, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. CONTENTS CONRAD AIKEN page Conversation: Undertones 1 Portrait op One Dead 4 WITTER BYNNER Veils 7 Lightning 7 Horses 8 Crystal 8 Nakedness 9 Singing 9 Dusk 10 Weariness 10 The Moon 11 Leer 11 EMANUEL CARNEVALI The Apprentice ... 12 I Chanson de Blackboule 12 II Kiss 15 III Serenade 15 H. L. DAVIS Primapara 17 Proud Riders 17 Running Vines in a Field 18 The Gypsy Girl 19 The Spirit 21 My Step-Grandfather 22 The Valley Harvest 23 ix x CONTENTS JEANNE D'ORGE page Joy 25 The Enchanted Castle 25 To a Fumbling Lover ... f ... 26 The Prayer Rug 26 Defeat 27 The Sewing Bee 28 Annabel 29 DONALD EVANS Portrait of Nancy Trevors 30 Dinner at the Hotel De La Tigresse Verte . 31 For the Hunting of Mauna 32 Body of the Queen 32 Mary Douglass Bruiting the Beauty of the Hands of Monsieur Y 33 ROBERT FROST Mending Wall 37 Not to Keep 38 The Axe-Helve 39 ARTURO GIOVANNITTI The Walker 44 WALLACE GOULD Intermezzo 52 Vigil 53 En Route 55 To a Weakling 56 Communion 57 After Tschaikowsky 58 MARSDEN HARTLEY Local Boys and Girls, Small Town Stuff . 61 Salutation to a Mouse 62 Synthesized Perfumes and Essences ... 63 CONTENTS xi PAGE Fishmonger 65 The Flatterers 65 Evening Quandary 67 ORRICK JOHNS Kysen, a Frieze 69 FENTON JOHNSON African Nights 77 Tired 77 Aunt Hannah Jackson 78 Aunt Jane Allen 78 The Barber 79 The Drunkard 79 The Banjo Player 80 The Minister 80 The Scarlet Woman 81 ALFRED KREYMBORG Dorothy 83 I Her Eyes 83 II Her Hair 84 III Her Hands 84 IV Her Body 85 Grasses 86 Dust 87 Indian Summer 87 Phallic 88 Initials 90 Poetry 91 VACHEL LINDSAY The Daniel Jazz 92 Whimseys 95 Kalamazoo 95 Davy Jones' Door-Bell 98 The Conscientious Deacon 99 xii CONTENTS PAGE The Horrid Voice of Science . . . . • 100 My Lady is Compared to a Young Tree . .100 HANIEL LONG Students 102 MINA LOY The Black Virginity 110 The Dead 112 MAX MICHELSON Masks 115 A Helen 115 Girls 116 Myrrh 117 Pain 117 A Lady Talking to a Poet 118 The Traitor 118 A Rich Gentleman 118 A Petit Bourgeois 119 La Mort De Paul Verlaine 119 Death 120 To a Woman Asleep in a Street-Car . . .120 MARIANNE MOORE Black Earth 122 The Fish 125 Dock Rats 127 England 128 Poetry 131 LOLA RIDGE The Song of Iron 133 ROBERT ALDEN SANBORN The Fight 139 CONTENTS xiii CARL SANDBURG PAGE Humdrum 143 Autumn Movement 143 Pool 144 Bones 144 WILLIAM SAPHIER Childhood Memories 146 Flamingo Dreams 147 Conscience 147 Sadness 14S Rain 148 Margrethe 149 Before Sunrise 150 , Meeting 150 The Night Shift 151 Mood 152 EVELYN SCOTT Viennese Waltz 153 The Death of Columbine 154 Pieta 154 Rainy Twilight 155 Tropic Winter 155 Lullaby 156 Japanese Moon . 156 The Naid 156 Night Music 157 Stars 157 Venus' Fly Trap 158 Monochrome 158 The Red Cross 158 Crowds 159 The Long Moment 160 Autumn Night 161 xiv CONTENTS MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT page Love Poems in Autumn 162 The Arrival 162 There's a Guest 162 They Who Dance 163 Pianissimo 164 Portrait by Zuloaga 164 Gestures 165 Veils 165 Freedom 166 Mud 167 Fools Say 167 WALLACE STEVENS Le Monocle De Mon Oncle 169 Pecksniffiana 175 Fabliau of Florida 175 Homunculus et La Belle Etoile 175 Exposition of the Contents of a Cab . . .177 Ploughing on Sunday 178 Banal Sojourn 179 Of the Surface of Things 180 The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysi- cian 180 The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage . 181 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Flowers of August 183 Daisy 183 Queenannslace 184 Healall 186 Great Mullen 187 Butterandeggs 188 Thistle 189 CONRAD AIKEN CONVERSATION: UNDERTONES What shall we talk of — Li Po ? Hokusai ? — You narrow your long dark eyes to fascinate me ; You smile a little. . . . Outside, the night goes by. I walk alone in a forest of ghostly trees. . . . Your pale hands rest palm downwards on your knees. These lines — converging — they suggest such dis- tance ! The soul is drawn away, beyond horizons, — Lured out to what? One dares not think. Sometimes — I glimpse these infinite perspectives In intimate talk ( — with such as you) and shrink. . . . 4 One feels so petty ! — One feels such — empti- ness ! — ' You mimic horror, let fall your lifted hand, And smile at me ; with brooding tenderness. . . . Alone in darkened waters I fall and rise; Slow waves above me break, faint waves of cries. 'And then, these colors . . . but who would dare describe them? This faint rose-coral pink . . . this green — pistachio? — 2 CONRAD AIKEN So insubstantial 5 Like the dim ghostly things Two lovers find in love's still twilight chambers . . . Old peacock-fans, and fragrant silks and rings. . . . ' Rings, let us say, drawn from the hapless fingers Of some great lady many centuries nameless, — Or is that too sepulchral ? — dulled with dust ; And necklaces that crumble if you touch them ; And gold brocades that breathed on, fall to rust, — ' No — I am wrong ... it is not these I sought for — Why did they come to mind? — You understand me — You know these strange vagaries of the brain ! ' — — I walk alone in a forest of ghostly trees ; Your pale hands rest palm downwards on youjr knees ; These strange vagaries of yours are all too plain. * But why perplex ourselves with tedious problems Of art or . . . such things? . . . While we sit here, living With all that's in our secret hearts to say ! ' — Hearts ? — Your pale hand softly strokes the satin. You play deep music — know well what you play. You stroke the satin with thrilling of fingertips, You smile, with faintly perfumed lips, You loose your thoughts like birds, CONRAD AIKEN 3 Brushing our dreams with soft and shadowy words. . . . We know your words are foolish, yet here we stay, I to be played on, you to play; We know our words are foolish, yet sit here bound In tremulous webs of sound. ' How beautiful is intimate talk like this ! — It is as if we dissolved grey walls between us, Stepped through the solid portals become but shadows, To hear a sudden music. . . . Our own vast shadows Lean to a giant size on the windy walls, Or dwindle away ; we hear our soft footfalls Echo forever behind us, ghostly clear. Music sings far off, flows suddenly near, And dies away like rain. . . . We walk through subterranean caves again, — Vaguely above us feeling A shadowy weight of frescoes on the ceiling, Strange half-lit things, Soundless grotesques with writhing claws and wings. . . . And here a beautiful face looks down upon us ; And someone hurries before, unseen, and sings. . . . Have we seen all, I wonder, in these chambers — Or is there yet some gorgeous vault arched low, Where sleeps an amazing beauty we do not know? . . .* 4 CONRAD AIKEN The question falls: we walk in silence together Thinking of that deep vault, and of its secret. . . . This lamp, these books, this fire Are suddenly blown away in a whistling darkness. Deep walls crash down in the whirlwind of desire. PORTRAIT OF ONE DEAD This is her house. On one side there is darkness, On one side there is light. Into the darkness you may lift your lanterns — O, any number - — it will still be night. And there are echoing stairs to lead you downward To long sonorous halls. And here is spring forever at these windows, With roses on the walls. This is her room. On one side there is music — On one side not a sound. At one step she could move from love to silence, Feel myriad darkness coiling round. And here are balconies from which she heard you, Your steady footstep on the stair. And here the glass in which she saw your shadow As she unbound her hair. Here is the room — with ghostly walls dissolving — The twilight room in which she called you ' lover ' ; CONRAD AIKEN 5 And the floorless room in which she called you ' friend.' So many times, in doubt, she ran between them! — Through windy corridors of darkening end. Here she could stand with one dim light above her And hear far music, like a sea in caverns, Beating away at hollowed walls of stone. And here, in a roofless room when it was raining, She bore the patient sorrow of rain alone. Your words were walls which suddenly froze around her. Your words were windows — large enough for moon- light, Too small to let her through. Your letters — fragrant cloisters faint with music. The music that assuaged her there was you. How many times she heard your step ascending Yet never saw your face ! She heard them turn again, ring slowly fainter, Till silence swept the place. Why had you gone? . . . The door, perhaps, mis- taken. . . . You would go elsewhere. The deep walls were shaken. A certain roseleaf — sent without intention — 6 CONRAD AIKEN Became, with time, a woven web of fire — She wore it, and was warm. A certain hurried glance, let fall at parting, Became, with time, the flashings of a storm. Yet there was nothing asked, no hint. to tell you Of secret idols carved in secret chambers From all you did and said. Nothing was done, until at last she knew you. Nothing was known till somehow she was dead. How did she die? — You say she died of poison. Simple and swift. And much to be regretted. You did not see her pass So many thousand times from light to darkness, Pausing so many times before her glass; You did not see how many times she hurried To lean from certain windows, vainly hoping, Passionate still for beauty, remembered spring. You did not know how long she clung to music, You did not hear her sing. Did she, then, make her choice, and step out bravely From sound to silence — close, herself, those windows ? Or was it true, instead, That darkness moved, — for once, — and so possessed her? . . . We^ll never know, you say, for she is dead. WITTER BYNNER VEILS This veil Of lavender and dawn Floats off Invisible, And this of purple noon Unwinds in wisdom, And this of evening Twitters, undulates, Dips, darts, And this of night Circles around me singing To the very edge and presence of the young moon • And it brushes the tip Like lips Three times. LIGHTNING There is a solitude in seeing you, Followed by your company when you are gone. You are like heaven's veins of lightning. I cannot see till afterward How beautiful you are. There is a blindness in seeing you, Followed by the sight of you when you are gone. WITTER BYNNER HORSES Words are hoops Through which to leap upon meanings, Which are horses' backs, Bare, moving. CRYSTAL Between your laughter and mine Lies the shadow of the sword of change. Yours is innocent. Mine knows. You had sat abstracted By the touch of dreaming strings Of an old guitar — When in the centre of the room A crystal dish cracked for no reason. Then you darted with j oy to the fragments, Like a fish to a crumb, And held between your thumbs and your fingers Two pieces of laughter. WITTER BYNNER NAKEDNESS Brightness of earth for the hollow of your throat They brought to you, And blossoms of death for you to throw away And many things like links of chains, To you whose wings are nakedness. But I have given your nakedness the gift of mine, And whosoever brings, from this day forth, Obeisances To the hollow of your bosom, Shall find between those hills of sun, Beloved, My shadow. . . . SINGING What is this singing I hear Of the sun behind clouds? It is not long before you shall come to me, Beloved. And that is the singing I lean to hear In my side, Where your bird is. 10 WITTER BYNNER DUSK Dusk came over the hill to me, Holding a red moon, And I danced with her, Feeling and following her starry steps, Till she turned and gave the moon To the swarthy night — And slipped away without explaining. WEARINESS There is a dear weariness of love . . . Hand relaxed in hand, Shoulder at rest upon shoulder. And to me that pool of weariness is more wonderful Than crater, cataract, Maelstrom, earthquake . . . For it is a double pool In which lie, silent, The golden fishes of sleep. WITTER BYNNER 11 THE MOON Red leaped The moon, From behind the black hill of night . . . And soon it was silver forever And there was no change . . . Until its time came . . . And its setting was as white as a corpse, Among the flowers of dawn. LEER If I might be tall negroes in procession, Carrying each of them a rib of you, And a cannibal-king bearing your collar-bones, One in my right hand, one in my left, And touching my forehead with them at slow in- tervals, Might I not be too comforted To weep? If my love had only consumed you, Not left you unconsumed, Might not the moon have silvered me with content, Oiled me like the long edges of palms ? 12 EMANUEL CARNEVALI THE APPRENTICE CHANSON DE. BLACKBOULE Just as the passing wind catches the word of the glittering leaves, I'd make your curled lips tingle with a swift kiss — should you let me. Instead, you see me bent and doubled up by silence in silence and my words are harsh, sounds of a body that breaks. You turn your wide eyes, ever bewildered, bewildered as the sun when it glances its first glance on the lake, at dawn, you see all things with newness, you see all, all but my love. Well, that's how it goes, eh, Annie? All but my clumsy, self-accursed love EMANUEL CARNEVALI 13 under my bent and folded body, body awe-full of raptures, awe-full of the tree-tops and leaves skipping, snap- ping under those clouds, — clouds that the moon is kissing over my silent head. That's how things go and that's precisely how things should go — that's how the wind presses our cheeks a moment and slips behind us away, it's how it stretches a ribbon over our eyelids and pulls it from behind, it's my heels pounding the side^walk ; it's how things go, the way they happen, the morning, the evening and night — how they come and they go and are going and linger, it's love that comes and love that does not come. I'll say no hands will know your hands as mine do, your hands that are soft as the grass is. But there's no answer coming to me, so 14, EMANUEL CARNEVALI don't worry, Annie. Don't worry, wide round eyes. Do turn around and around, wide round eyes, and soft slender hands do whisper of easy happiness and of a young motherliness, and you, dear child, do say, do say and repeat, do repeat most vigorously that you don't love me. I have today again uncovered the sky and have found it ever so cool and ever so new, under. I wait for no answer, and no thing to ask, and no thing to say, besides what you know and I know and that which to the end of days will have one and an only meaning and no meaning and all meanings and the meaning. EMANUEL CARNEVALI 15 II KISS You think you can leave the matter to your lips and they don't work right and then it's two deadmen shaking hands saying " Howdydo Sir? " III SERENADE Come on, don't be afraid you'll spoil me if you light the gas in your room and show me that you have heard my cries. Are you so poor in kisses that you're so stingy with them ; and is your heart so ravaged that you won't let me pick there one or two flowers? . . . Oh, never mind what I'll do with them ! I'm going to teach you yet what rapture is. 16 EMANUEL CARNEVALI I play my serenade beating my clenched fist on a gong and a drum. What I want is to give you the sound of what a man is. I love my eyes and lips better than yours ; besides, the dampness of the night pierces my shoes. I can be as capricious as you can be, don't worry ! Come on, open that window or I'll go home. H. L. DAVIS 17 PRIMAPARA PROUD RIDERS We rode hard, and brought the cattle from brushy springs, From heavy dying thickets, leaves wet as snow ; From high places, white-grassed, and dry in the wind; Draws where the quaken-asps were yellow and white, And the leaves spun and spun like money spinning. We poured them onto the trail, and rode for town. Men in the fields leaned forward in the wind, Stood in the stubble and watched the cattle passing. The wind bowed all, the stubble shook like a shirt. We threw the reins by the yellow and black fields, and rode, And came, riding together, into the town Which is by the grey bridge, where the alders are. The white-barked alder trees dropping big leaves Yellow and black, into the cold black water. Children, little cold boys, watched after us — The freezing wind flapped their clothes like windmill paddles. Down the flat frosty road we crowded the herd : High stepped the horses for us, proud riders in au- tumn. 18 H. L. DAVIS RUNNING VINES IN A FIELD Look up, you loose-haired women in the field, From work, and thoughtless picking at the ground. Cease for a little: pay me a little heed. It is early : the red leaves of the blackberry vines Are hoar with frosty dew, the ground's still wet, There is vapor over toward the summer fallow. And you three make a garden, being put by — Since you are too old for love you make a garden? It is love with me, and not these dark red frosty leaves The vines of which you root for garden-space. You will be concerned, you three used up and set by : I could speak of the red vines, of pastures, of young trees ; And you would dibble at love as you do the vine- roots. It is early, but before your backs be warmed, And before all this dew be cleared and shed, I shall be half among your hearts with speech : Love, and my sorrow, the disastrous passages, So that you'll cease all gardening, dangle dark red Vines in your hands not knowing it, and whisper. They forget me for a little pride of old time. H. L. DAVIS 19 THE GYPSY GIEL One cherry tree beside the house in this low field Is yellow and bright-colored now. Several weeds Are full of brown seed, and the ground is drying out hard. What is not picked, now, in the garden, will never be picked. In this fall, by this garden of grey stems and seeds I sit in what dusty grass is left, and words Come in groups, like floss upon the pale green water. They concern the gypsy girl, fat with child, and sickly Complexioned, who, I think, made me offers. Her long black hair And yellow face above the pale green water at night- fall. The gypsy girl was sallow, as if with nightfall, Paler looking because of the necklace of red beads, And because of her rings and bracelets of heavy silver. There was a silk scarf, green and yellow, upon her hair, Her most dark and heavy hair, bound at the back in small Silver bands, all heavy ; and light-colored and green silk 20 H. L. DAVIS Was her bright dress, which was stretched with her young one So that its pattern shaped into big ungodly flowers. She came through the short willows ; she came beside me Smiling as if a crowd were watching her from the weeds. " What is not picked, now, in the garden, will never be picked," I say, before this garden. I felt her child's heart beating, And, for thinking of that heart and of her lover, The " Come, there is some good place near," and the feel of her hand, I would not answer. This which might have dis- persed The many girls who have appeared to me sleeping, I would not consent to. It was that. I say to the sand, Nevertheless, as if to one person : " Dear love, de- parted, Can some season not freshen us? I am disheartened ; Are there many like the dark girl? are there many like me? " But what is not picked now in the garden will never be picked. H. L. DAVIS 21 THE SPIRIT In the early spring, the fattening young weeds Appear, all green, their veins stretched, amongst their dead. And every sand-hill, with its bundle of willow And young green riding the sand, is my pleasant walk. The river, every rock there, and the wind Molding cold waves, have seen a spirit by day Which I would see ; and now that my heart's a poor hired one Which owns no favor or love, but did awhile, I walk my pleasant walks. Where the new dark red Willows feather in sand against the sky, I make out a spirit sitting by the new grass : The sun shines yellow on the hair, and a wind blows That would melt snow, but her face calls it on. And her hands are quiet in her red sleeves all day. " All my pleasure begins when you come to this place." " I am sorry for it, spirit, yet I most wished it ; Has my heart commanding shamed me to your eyes ?" " Never in life shall these eyes see you shamed. I half live, like a stalk, but no girl orders me." 22 H. L. DAVIS MY STEP-GRANDFATHER My step-grandfather sat during the noon spell Against the wild crabapple tree, by the vines. Flies about the high hot fern played, or fell To his beard, or upon the big vein of his hand. With their playing he seemed helpless and old, in a land Where new stumps, piles of green brush, fresh-burnt pines, Were young and stubborn. He mentioned the old times As if he thought of this : " I have marched, and run Over the old hills, old plowed land, with my gun Bumping furrows — oh, years old. But in this new place There is nothing I know. I ride a strange colt." " You know old times, and have seen some big man's face: Out of the old times, what do you remember most ? " " General Lee. Once they called us out in a cold Plowed field, to parade for him. He was old with frost. I remember our style of dress ; my dead friends last long, (I would have thought longer) ; and there were peaked women H. L. DAVIS 23 Who watched us march, and joked with us as they were trimming The green shoots of wild roses to eat. But these with me Lack what the other has — they are not so strong. And lost battles ? — I would be prouder starving in rain And beaten and running every day, with General Lee, Than fat and warm, winning under another man." Alone presently, I laid myself face down To avoid seeing the field; and thought of how the book Describes Esther ; and imagined how that queen might look, Preferred for beauty, in her old fields red and brown. " I am like my step-grandfather," I thought, " and could Follow whateVej-I love, blind and bold ; Or go hungry and in great shame, and, for a cause, be proud." And I came to work, sad to see him so old. THE VALLEY HABVEST Honey in the horn! I brought my horse from the water And from the white grove of tall alders over the spring, 24 H. L. DAVIS And brought him past a row of high hollyhocks Which flew and tore their flowers thin as his mane. And women there watched, with hair blown over their mouths ; Yet in watching the oat field they were quiet as the spring. " Are the hollyhocks full bloomed? It is harvest then. The hay falls like sand falling in a high wind When the weeds blow and fly — but steady the sand falls. It is harvest, harvest, and honey in the horn. I would like to go out, in a few days, through the stubble field, And to all the springs — yours too we have known for years — And to the bearing vines, and clean the berries from them." Call, women! — why do you stand if not for your pride's sake? But the women would neither call to me nor speak, Nor to any man not mowing during their harvest. They watched with their hair blowing, near the stalks, In the row of red hollyhocks. Quiet as the spring. What is by the spring? A bird, and a few old leaves. JEANNE D'ORGE 25 JOY He swings upon the high green boughs of life Up to the stars and down. Curious about the noisy earth He parts the leaves to look. He has the face of a child Aloof and whimsical Hearing the slow complaint Of rheumatism and old age. Mischief clears the puzzled brows He shakes the tree . . . Oh the glittering scented shower . . . Oh the enraptured quiet. . . . \THE ENCHANTED CASTLE We climbed to it by secret flights of kisses . . . When the door burst open it vanished . . . Crash . . . Bump . . . Earth again . . . " What are they saying? " " There's a baby coming . 26 JEANNE D'ORGE " He scuttled off on rat's feet ..." " The girl's in the ditch ..." " And the castle? " " You don't mean to say you believe that faery story ? " TO A FUMBLING LOVER The sea would know the way to go about it The moon has taught the tide a thousand subtle ways of mastery so that it neither lingers nor makes haste knows when to come, when to go — when to drown the rebel shores in cool sweet rapture when to leave them naked and alone. I envy colored rocks and all obliterate sands ; it would content me to be lost in a swirl of shining waters — half light — half song . . . Why are you not the sea? . . . THE PRAYER RUG It is made of silences — many colored silken threads — the purple of various deaths — red gold sacrifice — JEANNE D'ORGE 27 meditation — a delicate green stillness melting into blues of ecstasy. These are the background for one thread that follows the mystic outline of a cross — and in the centre wreathed seven red roses seven fires of silence . . . To pray is to stand upon these •with naked feet breast bare to the sun and to sing. DEFEAT The pit is lined sharply with stones : — My bones are broken too . . . This would be hard to bear if I had not plucked the feathers of dead dreams to pillow it. I shall not move for a long while — I am out with stars since that last encounter and I need no companions other than the strange slim shapes of laughter that come twisting out of tears 28 JEANNE D'ORGE and circling close to touch my wounds with rainbow breath. THE SEWING BEE On a wintry afternoon They bring their work And settle round the hearth A faint half circle of ladylike emotions Withered now and near the end They sit embroidering with fine silk of remembrance Samples of my past history. Their crackling gossip pricks like splintered glass. When I go in they flutter to me yearning and coquettish I am amused to speak in a bold voice Indelicate truths, rich in blood red oaths And when they are shocked away To sprawl alone full lengthened and masculine filling my pipe with dark strong thoughts On the emancipation of woman flesh or sprite. JEANNE D'ORGE 29 ANNABEL Annabel it is who always answers me — who keeps my house, who bears me docile children. When Annabel forgets that her smiles are mine a bolt slips — In a wild-flower garden a humming-bird woman darts and flits. To move would mean the flash of wings and silence — When she forgets that sorrow must be shared with me mist clears — A grave young man kneels at an altar. . . Her eyes burn past me ever longing, ever seeking . . . When she forgets herself and me in sleep she lies with baby-lids half open. I see a shining stretch of sea . . . fierce blue . . . a slim brown shape . . . dancing feet of rapture. This is that one whose voice I heard once in a dream. This is that one whom to possess I married Annabel. This is that one whom to escape Annabel married me. 30 . DONALD EVANS PORTRAIT OF NANCY TREVORS They sat in her drawing-room amid easeful silence in tolerant enmity. The men were three, and her husband was the third. This in its way amplified his urbanity. His suavities were of ivory. He was more irreproachable than her virginal tea- cups. She gave her lips to the moment, and her fingers nestled in a bowl of apricots. The tea was amber, and the pungent lemon and the blanched sugar Seized and caressed the eyes as each man took a prof- fered cup. It loosed the tongues, and the four were free. As four portraits on a wall come to life they stirred the silence with a babbling that gleamed. The drawing-room was draped in a wistaria mist, And the flutter of the phrases patted the cheek with an alien charm. In but a short while she had become dominant, And then she wrapped herself in the soothing nerves of excitement. DONALD EVANS 31 The three were lost in the pursuit of fragrance. Their chairs were their kingdoms, and there were no other empires. Archly then her voice dared : " Will you have another cup, my beloved ? " It was three cups that rang to her, and her hus- band's, it chanced, was the third. She smiled over her adroit and ample confession, and it was enough. She had done with the hour, And she let the uneasy hush turn to a hodden-grey. DINNER AT THE HOTEL DE LA TIGRESSE VERTE As they sat sipping their glasses in the courtyard Of the Hotel de la Tigresse Verte, With their silk-swathed ankles softly kissing, They were certain that they had forever Imprisoned fickleness in the vodka — They knew they had found the ultimate pulse of love. Story upon story, the dark windows whispered down To them from above, and over the roof's edge Danced a grey moon. 32 DONALD EVANS The woman pressed her chicken-skin fan against her breast And through her ran trepidant mutinies of desire With treacheries of emotion. Her voice vapoured : " In which room shall it be to-night, darling? " His eyes swept the broad facade, the windows, Tier upon tier, and his lips were regnant: " In every room, my beloved! " FOR THE HAUNTING OF MAUNA BODY OF THE QUEEN Suave body of the Queen, she gave me you, Misting in still, warm rains of tenderness — But kept herself, and we are each betrayed. You are her mistress, and she makes of me Another mistress ! Playthings are we both, When we thought she meant us for full sovereignty ; It was not regal, and her throne is stained. She bade you seek me, and your singing feet Ran quickly, surely ; you held out your hands. You had no fear because you felt my heart Leap as you laid your white breast under it. We had no prides to conquer as we kissed, For we knew kinship in our overthrow. Yet now she stands apart and questions us. How can she question — leave me out of it — But you, her body, her sweet source of joy , — DONALD EVANS How can she then divide herself from you, And calmly reckon what the gain may be? The hour will come when she will tire of us, And all your softness will be broken up, Your rioting lips chilled with an ashen wind. There is a hint of vileness in the air, And on the strings a dance of ironies, With love's scarecrow jigging wearily . . . Still I have you — so I am not afraid .' MARY DOUGLASS BRUITING THE BEAUTY OF THE HANDS OF MONSIEUR Y. Monsieur Y., the artist, has haunting hands — Fingers that are unforgetable. I have sat for arrested spaces, Pondering the influence of their inhibitions — Gazing at a battlefield where emotions Had been in tragic conflict. The hands are to the first glance decently formed, But they awaken curiosity rather than admiration, For the essence of their exquisiteness Is not quickly to be felt. Their beauty is draped — as all enduring beauty Must be — with indifference. Monsieur Y. has always been indulgent to me. His studio I seek as an asylum 34 DONALD EVANS From the wolves — my dear friends. He says he is not my friend, And for the whim I have believed it. One November afternoon when I knew he would be Heartily engrossed on his new canvas, And I was chilled with Broadway's ineptitudes, I sought his presence. It was even a chillier welcome I received, But there is sometimes a flame in frigidity That gives the longed-for social shock. He lit the lamp for the tea kettle, And went back to work, Leaving me to the half-shadowed intimacies of house- wifery. The tea service is simply done, So I was soon free to regard him, And his brusqueness stirred me to protest. I parried first — for I am not stupid — And asked whether he thought It was a strain of pity for the fallen Madonnas He painted so admirably that had given his hands An immaculate augustness that was smoothed away Into a catholic simplicity. That was grandiose, but it won a rejoinder. I had not whispered of the spirituality, But it was that he offered me. I had seized the nuance. " You have an insistent way," he said, DONALD EVANS 35 " But insistence has its boundaries. Yet you are a mirror, and a mirror Is sometimes a solution. It glimmers back one's futility. I like my hands more than you do, For they are the symbols Of the only triumph I shall ever know. They are the trophies of my conquering. A long time ago I was absorbed with love for a woman, Who was merely touched with fragrant pleasure Because I worshipped her. She, too, was in love, but not with me. We met often, And spent long hours together and alone, When only the sheerest intervals separated us. We luncheoned, we dined, we theatred together. We walked and talked. And we tea-cupped. She gave me of the sight of her loveliness In abundant generosity because I adored her. And all the time I had my hands. All the hours I was at her side they ached to touch, To move over her — not to grasp in bestial, impera- tive fashion, But to finger, to question the softness of her flesh, To sing as they crept over her, To give the quick, wild quivers of possession. But because of the pride of the saffron highway I never touched her ; 36 DONALD EVANS I held back through all the evasions of our com- munion. She came to like me very much, though I never Thrilled her to a fine surrender. But it has worked its way out — For she was brought to realize That because I did not make a false tempo With the hungry hands there was homage to be paid them. Now, I think it is really time for you to go. There was the secret of his perfect hands — They were still ful of yearning blood. All his desire had leaped out into them, And it remained there — The hands were two lovers, vainly waiting for their hour. ROBERT FROST 37 MENDING WALL Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun ; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing : I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbor know beyond the hill ; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance : " Stay where you are until our backs are turned ! : We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of outdoor game, One on a side. It comes to little more : There where it is we do not need the wall : He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 88 ROBERT FROST My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, " Good fences make good neighbors." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head : " Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows ? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." I could say " Elves " to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, " Good fences make good neighbors." NOT TO KEEP They sent him back to her. The letter came Saying . . . and she could have him. And before She could be sure there was no hidden ill Under the formal writing, he was in her sight — ROBERT FROST 39 Living. — They gave him back to her alive — How else ? They are not known to send the dead — And not disfigured visibly. His face? — His hands ? She had to look — to ask " What is it, dear? " And she had given all And still she had all — they had — they the lucky ! Wasn't she glad now ? Everything seemed won, And all the rest for them permissible ease. She had to ask " What was it, dear? " " Enough, Yet not enough. A bullet through and through, High in the breast. Nothing but what good care And medicine and rest — and you a week, Can cure me of to go again." The same Grim giving to do over for them both. She dared no more than ask him with her eyes How was it with him for a second trial. And with his eyes he asked her not to ask. They had given him back to her, but not to keep. THE AXE-HELVE I've known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder's roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch. This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day 40 ROBERT FROST Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already. He caught my axe expertly on the rise, When all my strength put forth was in his favor, Held it a moment where it was, to calm me, Then took it from me — and I let him take it. I didn't know him well enough to know What it was all about. There might be something He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor He might prefer to say to him disarmed. But all he had to tell me in French-English Was what he thought of — not me, but my axe ; Me only as I took my axe to heart. It was the bad axe-helve someone had sold me — ' Made on machine,' he said, ploughing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle's long-drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. ' You give her one good crack, she's snap raght off. Den whereas your hax-'ead fling t'rough de hair? ' Admitted; and yet, what was that to him? ' Come on my house and I put you one in What's las' awhile — good hick'ry what's grow crooked, De second growt' I cut myself — tough, tough ! ' ROBERT FROST 41 Something to sell? That wasn't how it sounded. ' Den when you say you come ? It's cost you noth- ing. To-naght? ' As well to-night as any night. Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove My welcome differed from no other welcome. Baptiste knew best why I was where I was. So long as he would leave enough unsaid, I shouldn't mind his being overjoyed (If overjoyed he was) at having got me Where I must judge if what he knew about an axe, That not everybody else knew, was to count For nothing in the measure of a neighbor. Hard if, though cast away for life 'mid Yankees, A Frenchman couldn't get his human rating I Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair That had as many motions as the world : One back and forward, in and out of shadow, That got her nowhere ; one more gradual, Sideways, that would have run her on the stove In time, had she not realized her danger And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, And set herself back where she started from. ' She ain't spick too much Henglish — dat's too bad.' I was afraid, in brightening first on me, 42 ROBERT FROST Then on Baptiste, as if he understood What passed between us, she was only feigning. Baptiste was anxious for her ; but no more Than for himself, so placed he couldn't hope To keep his bargain of the morning with me In time to keep me from suspecting him Of really never having meant to keep it. Needlessly soon he had his axe-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me To have the best he had, or had to spare — Not for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point me out at length To insure their not being wasted on me. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free from the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. He showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay For the hard work. He chafed its long white body From end to end with his rough hand shut round it. He tried it at the eye-hole in the axe-head. * Hahn, hahn,' he mused, ' don't need much taking down.' Baptiste knew how to make a short job long For love of it, and yet not waste time either. ROBERT FROST 43 Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge? Baptiste on his defense about the children He kept from school, or did his best to keep — Whatever school and children and our doubts Of laid-on education had to do With the curves of his axe-helves and his having Used these unscrupulously to bring me To see for once the inside of his house. Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one To leave it to, whether the right to hold Such doubts of education should depend Upon the education of those who held them? But now he brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the axe there on its horse's hoof, Erect, but not without its waves, as when. The snake stood up for evil in the Garden, — Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little — a French touch in that. Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased: * See how she's cock her head ! ' 44 ARTURO GIOVANNITTI THE WALKER I hear footsteps over my head all night, They come and they go. Again they come and they go all night. They come one eternity in four paces and they go one eternity in four paces, and between the coming and the going there is Silence and the Night and the Infinite. For infinite are the nine feet of a prison cell, and endless is the march of him who walks between the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate, thinking things that cannot be chained and cannot be locked, but that wander far away in the sunlit world, each in a wild pilgrimage after a destined goal. Throughout the restless night I hear the foot- steps over my head. Who walks ? I know not. It is the phantom of the jail, the sleepless brain, a man, the man, the Walker. One-two-three-f our : four paces and the wall. One-two-three-four: four paces and the iron gate. He has measured his space, he has measured it accurately, scrupulously, minutely, as the hangman ARTVRO GIOVANNITTI 45 measures the rope and the gravedigger the coffin — so many feet, so many inches, so many fractions of an inch for each of the four paces. One-two-three-four. Each step sounds heavy and hollow over my head, and the echo of each step sounds hollow within my head as I count them in suspense and in dread that once, perhaps, in the end- less walk, there may be five steps instead of four be- tween the yellow brick wall and the red iron gate. But he has measured the space so accurately, so scrupulously, so minutely that nothing breaks the grave rhythm of the slow, fantastic march. When all are asleep ( and who knows but I when all sleep?) three things are still awake in the night: the Walker, my heart and the old clock which has the soul of a fiend — for never, since a coarse hand with red hair on its fingers swung for the first time the pendulum in the jail, has the old clock tick-tocked a full hour of joy. Yet the old clock which marks everything, and to everything tolls the death knell, the wise old clock that knows everything, does not know the number of the footsteps of the Walker, nor the throbs of my heart. For not for the Walker, nor for my heart is there a second, a minute, an hour or anything that is in the old clock — there is nothing but the night, the sleepless night, the watchful, wistful night, and 46 ARTUBO GIOVANNJTTI footsteps that go, and footsteps that come and the wild, tumultuous beatings that trail after them for- ever. All the sounds of the living beings and inanimate things, and all the voices and all the noises of the night I have heard in my wistful vigil. I have heard the moans of him who bewails a thing that is dead and the sighs of him who tries to smother a thing that will not die ; I have heard the stifled sobs of the one who weeps with his head under the coarse blanket, and the whisp- erings of the one who prays with his forehead on the hard, cold stone of the floor ; I have heard him who laughs the shrill, sinister laugh of folly at the horror rampant on the yellow wall and at the red eyes of the nightmare glaring through the iron bars ; I have heard in the sudden icy silence him who coughs a dry, ringing cough, and wished madly that his throat would not rattle so and that he would not spit on the floor, for no sound was more atrocious than that of his sputum upon the floor ; I have heard him who swears fearsome oaths which I listen to in reverence and awe, for they are holier than the virgin's prayer ; And I have heard, most terrible of all, the si- lence of two hundred brains all possessed by one single, relentless, unforgiving, desperate thought. ARTURO GIOVANNITTI 47 All this have I heard in the watchful night, And the murmur of the wind beyond the walls, And the tolls of a distant bell, And the woeful dirge of the rain, And the remotest echoes of the sorrowful city, And the terrible beatings, wild beatings, mad beatings of the One Heart which is nearest to my heart. All this have I heard in the still night; But nothing is louder, harder, drearier, might- ier, more awful than the footsteps I hear over my head all night. Yet fearsome and terrible are all the footsteps of men upon the earth, for they either descend or climb. They descend from little mounds and high peaks and lofty altitudes, through wide roads and narrow paths, down noble marble stairs and creaky stairs of wood — and some go down to the cellar, and some to the grave, and some down to the pits of shame and infamy, and still some to the glory of an unfathomable abyss where there is nothing but the staring white, stony eyeballs of Destiny. And again other footsteps climb. They climb to life and to love, to fame, to power, to vanity, to truth, to glory and to the scaffold — to everything but Freedom and the Ideal. 48 ARTURO GJOVANNITTI And they all climb the same roads and the same stairs others go down; for never, since man began to think how to overcome and overpass man, have other roads and other stairs been found. They descend and they climb, the fearful foot- steps of men, and some limp, some drag, some speed, some trot, some run — they are quiet, slow, noisy, brisk, quick, feverish, mad, and most awful is their cadence to the ears of the one who stands still. But of all the footsteps of men that either de- scend or climb, no footsteps are so fearsome and terrible as those that go straight on the dead level of a prison floor, from a yellow stone wall to a red iron gate. All through the night he walks and he thinks. Is it more frightful because he walks and his foot- steps sound hollow over my head, or because he thinks and speaks not his thoughts? But does he think? Why should he think? Do I think? I only hear the footsteps and count them. Four steps and the wall. Four steps and the gate. But beyond? Beyond? Where goes he beyond the gate and the wall? He goes not beyond. His thought breaks there on the iron gate. Perhaps it breaks like a wave of rage, perhaps like a sudden flow of hope, but it always returns to beat the wall like a billow of help- lessness and despair. ARTURO GIOVANNITTI 49 He walks to and fro within the narrow whirl- pit of this ever storming and furious thought. Only one thought — constant, fixed, immovable, sinister, without power and without voice. A thought of madness, frenzy, agony and de- spair, a hell-brewed thought, for it is a natural thought. All things natural are things impossible while there are jails in the world — bread, work, happiness, peace, love. But he thinks not of this. As he walks he thinks of the most superhuman, the most unattain- able, the most impossible thing in the world : He thinks of a small brass key that turns just half around and throws open the red iron gate. That is all the Walker thinks, as he walks throughout the night. And that is what two hundred minds drowned in the darkness and the silence of the night think, and that is also what I think. x Wonderful is the supreme wisdom of the jail that makes all think the same thought. Marvelous is the providence of the law that equalizes all, even in mind and sentiment. Fallen is the last barrier of privilege, the aristocracy of the intellect. The democracy of reason has leveled all the two hundred minds to the common surface of the same thought. I, who have never killed, think like a murderer; I, who have never stolen, reason like a thief; 50 ARTURO GIOVANNITTI I think, reason, wish, hope, doubt, wait like the hired assassin, the embezzler, the forger, the counter- feiter, the incestuous, the raper, the drunkard, the prostitute, the pimp, I, I who used to think of love and life and flowers and song and beauty and the ideal. A little key, a little key as little as my little finger, a little key of shining brass. All my ideas, my thoughts, my dreams are con- gealed in a little key of shiny brass. All my brain, all my soul, all the suddenly surg- ing latent powers of my deepest life are in the pocket of a white-haired man dressed in blue. He is great, powerful, formidable, the man with the white hair, for he has in his pocket the mighty talisman which makes one man cry, and one man pray, and one laugh, and one cough, and one walk, and all keep awake and listen and think the same maddening thought. Greater than all men is the man with the white hair and the small brass key, for no other man in the world could compel two hundred men to think for so long the same thought. Surely when the light breaks I will write a hymn unto him which shall hail him greater than Mohammed and Arbues and Tor- quemada and Mesmer, and all the other masters of other men's thoughts. I shall call him Almighty, for he holds everything of all and of me in a little brass key in his pocket. ARTURO GIOVANNITTI 51 Everything of me he holds but the branding iron of contempt and the claymore of hatred for the monstrous cabala that can make the apostle and the murderer, the poet and the procurer, think of the same gate, the same key and the same exit on the different sunlit highways of life. My brother, do not walk any more. It is wrong to walk on a grave. It is a sac- rilege to walk four steps from the headstone to the foot and four steps from the foot to the headstone. If you stop walking, my brother, no longer will this be a grave, for you will give me back my mind that is chained to your feet and the right to think my own thoughts. I implore you, my brother, for I am weary of the long vigil, weary of counting your steps, and heavy with sleep. Stop, rest, sleep, my brother, for the dawn is well nigh and it is not the key alone that can throw open the gate. 52 WALLACE GOULD INTERMEZZO Let us have music. Play the phonograph. Put on a record of a racing jazz. Dance. Move. Sing with the crazy strain. Dance. Sing. I'm going outside to watch the moon. The moon is in the east, low in the east. The nicotiana grows beside the door. Dance, young singing people, while I am outside, watching the moon, smelling the nicotiana that grows beside the door. Far in the east, across the lake, so motionless, so black, is the bordering forest. The forest is a fringe of jet around the shimmering silk of the lake. Above the line of trees is a vast black cloud with an upper fringe of burnished gold — the gold of the rising moon. I am going outside to watch the moon and to smell the nicotiana that grows beside the door. WALLACE GOULD 53 I knew a lady who lived by night — and soft was the music of long ago — I knew a lady whose presence was the burnished gold of moonlit clouds, or the scent of nicotiana — the flower that opens only at the coming of the moon. Dance, young singing people. Dance away your singing youth. I remember the music of long ago; and, though time is as black as a moonless murk, I cannot but remember the lady who lived by night, like the burnished gold of the clouds, like the scent of nicotiana. VIGEL Again they are singing about the Christ. It is another year that is gone. Out in the streets they are singing about the Christ. Slowly the snow is descending. Silently and straightly the snowflakes descend. The snowflakes are oblivious white nuns. The night is a vast, unlighted church swarming with oblivious white nuns and resounding with songs about the Christ. The night is a vast, unlighted church. 54 WALLACE GOULD Hours ago, the many came with many bundles in their arms. They hid the bundles mysteriously and hung up holly in the windows. I, in the spirit of bringing things, brought to my cat a globe of goldfish. I hid the globe as mysteriously as the many hid their many bundles. The snowflakes are oblivious white nuns with folded arms. They are oblivious of things that are hidden away. They are oblivious of the wreaths of holly. They come to purge. They come in speechless finality. It is another year that is gone. How many years have passed since the first of our love ? How many times did we listen while they sang about the Christ? How many times have I listened alone for the carols ? This is another year that I have listened alone. At dawn, when the carols shall have ceased, the merry bells of the sleighs will begin to sound. At dawn, perhaps, there will be a merry sunlight. The wreaths of holly will glimmer. I shall bring from hiding the globe of goldfish. I shall place the globe in the sunlight. Buttons shall catch WALLACE GOULD 55 the fish for his morning meal. I shall watch them flash as they scurry before his paw. At dawn, the many will bring from hiding their many bundles. They will bring them mysteriously. At dawn, the world will be a huddle of white nuns all silent — obliviously silent, as for years we have been. EN ROUTE See the dead doe on the baggage truck. See the blood that drips from the mouth. See the protruding tongue foul with clotted blood. The tongue has tasted the tongue of a lover. Beside her lover she strolled from the woods. She came to drink. From the yellow woods to the yellow light, while the sun was low, she came to drink at the brook in the meadow. She heard no sound save that of the brook or that of the tread of her lover. 56 WALLACE GOULD Beside her lover she wandered across the plain. Beneath a morning sky of white and blue and gold, she wandered across the windy, sunny expanse of tawn. She heard no sound save that of the wind or that of the tread of her lover. She came from the wide, wild north. Somebody wanted to kill. TO A WEAKLING Do not speak of faith in me. Do not pour out your heart upon me, only to soil me with what you think I am. Do not crown me king of your limitations. Do not chatter about understandings. Do not mention lasting friendship. Do not speak. I am striving to hear each note of the swallows swooping through the door of the barn. I am striving to hear each whine of the autumn winds sidling about the eaves. WALLACE GOULD 57 I am longing to. tell you that what I am is likely to cause in you a shudder ; that what I am is likely to silence you; that I have done all things ; and that I am proud — serenely proud — of having no limitations. Fool, could I silence you by telling you these things? COMMUNION Last night I came alone across the January snows. Pausing in the soundless midnight, I looked upon the stars. The stars were flashing. Millions of stars were flash- ing in the swarthy, boundless blue — millions of miles away, millions of miles apart — and no one stood beside me, and no one beneath the stars awaited my approach. I murmured — " I am glad that no one stands at my elbow. I am glad that what I have craved is buried in the snows. I am glad that all my clamorings are as quiet as the winds. 58 WALLACE GOULD I am glad that all whom I have loved are as distant as the stars. Men bind themselves with their right hands, and, with their left hands, tug at the bonds. Men huddle together like ants that they may soar like eagles. They are buried in the snows. They are as distant as the stars." AFTER TSCHAIKOWSKY Hurry. The hardened face of the hardened year is drawn and is set by a fearful thought. The haze deceives. It is merciful. Hurry. The days shall come when the year will weep obliviously. The days of oblivious weeping will come too soon, and in those days the year shall not hear you above its sobs. Hurry. The days are approaching when nothing but memories shall be left. The passive days succeeding the days of weeping, will shimmer with ghosts of all that shall be dead, and the ghosts will wander about by the light of the helpless sun. When the long floods shall have burst, it will be too late to speak. WALLACE GOULD 59 When the passing storms shall have left the meadows torn and sallow, it will be too late for words. Hurry. The sun is already dim in the woes that are weaving in the west. It is making its last ap- peal. I wait. Except the rustle of laboring squirrels, there is no sound in the ragged woods. The birds haye gone, forgetting, singing into an- other warmth. Belated crows are flapping away through the yellow hush. The mountains are confused by the weaving woes of the skies. As the days go by, I watch the tawn creep over the hillsides. The leaves are scrawny. Like the skins of old women, the leaves are spotted with brown. The veins of the leaves are coarse. It is all over with all the flowers. They grew where they would and they are dying. They were placed by hands and they are dying. The clover has long persisted, but now it succumbs. It is withered. It adds to the tawn of the land- scape. I wait. But I do not care. Some are whispering of changes. 60 WALLACE GOULD Some are turning away their faces. Some are thinking of other things. Some are gathering what is left. I wait. The pleading sunlight is calling together th«j hilltops. It entreats them to be compassionate. At times I think you will soon return. The pure blue darkness purges the past. Every night the past is absolved at the priestly ap- proach of the pure white moon. At times I think you will never return. I wait. But I do not care. MARSDEN HARTLEY 61 LOCAL BOYS AND GIRLS SMALL TOWN STUFF A panther sprang at the feet Of the young deer in the grey wood. It was the lady who had sworn To love him, That rose, wraithlike From the flow of his blood. He swooned with her devotions. There was never one More jolly and boyish Than he was, in the great beginning. Once his slippers were fastened With domesticity, He settled down Like a worn jaguar Weary with staring through bars. The caresses that were poured Over his person Staled on him. Love had grown rancid. Have you emptied the garbage John? 62 MARSDEN HARTLEY Prometheus fire Never can worship The smell of hams and hocks Issuing from the smokehouse. The odours of the street Hold enticements That bear entertaining. There is at least The tincture of virility Present. SALUTATIONS TO A MOUSE If a mouse makes a nest Of one's written words, Is there else to do but accept The flattery? I have deemed it wise to do so. I have thanked him Sufficiently As he scurried in and out Of the room. He has faced the winter With a nest of my words. I did not suspect them Of such worth against the cold. MARSDEN HARTLEY SYNTHESIZED PERFUMES AND ESSENCES Morning comes with such rapidity, purple plum hanging on sensuous boughs over my head, sweeping my shoulders, grazing my cheek, that I wonder one ever thinks of the going of even- ing. I never talk of evening save to say of it, it is another kind of light. Dark holes called doorways are for me only as places to go into where one watches the light of night from them. Danse l J Aigle — L'homme Rouge. As we watched him swinging and descending, we saw the dew of multiple benefactions dropping from his wings. In his beak he held fragments of the morning gathered from the lips of the red cliff nearest the sun of dawn. How splendid he is, the lady from the fiord re- marked. I stroked his wings and felt the warmth of the centuries on my hands. It emphasized our infancy in point of time. It emphasized our vacuity in point of experience. There is room on the housetops for love. There is room over the housetops for the moon to rise and resume the old eloquence. 64 MARSDEN HARTLEY If there is anything for lovers in the rising of the moon, they will be welcome to the supposition. The sky has time for nothing but approval, of all things, that are trivial. Against the long thin sky of our wilfulness, there hangs the marriage pear. If brown hands wish to make a syrinx out of olive boughs, What is the objection? The wood is oiled for music. Someone will be in love with someone, despite a cer- tain prejudice. The weevil falls to dust with every suit of clothes. If the gem is hard, it is rather sure of retaining its accustomed radiance. Water running beside my bed. The brook brought to my bedside. The little pool, when the tide is out. Anemones and crabs at home. Violet and orange. Indian orange. Roseate, ashy gold. Seaweeds made of torments rolling out of brown eyes. Froth from the tossed wave. My bedlinen shall be made of it. The window nearest my bed shall be made of for- saken cusps of the moon. I shall sleep, with an orange, a lemon, and an avo- cado on a little table. MARSDEN HARTLEY 65 A silver plate with the red seeds of the pomegranate divested of their juices. A pampas plume shall wave with the breath of nightingales from a dis- tant orchard. I think I could care for such a sleep. For once, at least. FISHMONGER I have taken scales from off The cheeks of the moon. I have made fins from blue jays' wings, I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow. I have taken flushes from the peachlips in the sun. From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you, Set it swimming on a young October sky. I sit on the bank of the stream and watch The grasses in amazement As they turn to ashy gold. Are the fishes from the rainbow Still beautiful to you, For whom they are made, For whom I have set them, Swimming ? THE FLATTERERS The cactus has grown young leaves One and a half inches long 66 MARSDEN HARTLEY Since I came to live with it. Its branches are like the claws of crabs In a bed of seaweed. Young rosehued shoots are coming From the new green leaves. I have divined their desires. They would make huge boughs Of soft green for you and me To sit under, And tell each other of ourselves And of the world. II Outside the wall of this room, The young tamerisk tree waves Its feathery grey branches in the wind. It has sent its coraldust blossoms to the ground. They were like wafts of smoke from a tepee In the morning just before the sun Reaches the desert. I sat one evening in the moonlight, Under the tamerisk tree, And listened to songs from the lips Of a Mexican boy. He told me afterward in broken English The meaning of these songs. I could have told him a richer meaning. MARSDEN HARTLEY 67 I could have told him of your presence Inside the wall of this room. I told him nothing of your presence. It is enough the cactus and the tamerisk are knowing, And you, and I. EVENING QUANDARY There is water flowing From the padre's garden. There is water flowing Under the solid gate. There is water flowing From the keyhole. There is water flowing, Wat — er, Drip, drip, drip, drip, From the padre's garden. It is not raining. The stars are all laughing. There is water flowing, From the padre's garden. 68 MARSDEN HARTLEY Ten o'clock in the evening, From the keyhole. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. If it had rained today, I would say it is the patter of sky feet In the padre's garden. There is water flowing, From the padre's garden — Everywhere. OBBICK JOHNS 69 KYSEN A FRIEZE The gods have taken a child from the womb of a dead lady. The father has sacrificed five bullocks for the child in the womb during three days following the in- tense heat. Twenty stores of grain have been turned out along the roads for the poor, and forty wells have been sunk between Wul and Tanaio. The rains have fallen for a day upon the ashes of the mother, but the infant Kysen thrives upon the black breasts of a Nubian, whose first-born was thrown from the rock. II In the center of the circular pool before the house of Kysen's father, facing the alley of poplars and the little valley beyond, stands a tiny girl- child of marble holding in her hands a wounded bird. 70 ORRICK JOHNS Sometimes the sun. robes it in a transparent gown of silver, reflected from the basin at its feet. The sculptor Tamaporis modelled it from Kysen's very self, and she, who is forbidden to do so because she is stately and silent in her father's house, longs to take the child down from its pedestal and question it regarding their future. But at night she goes out from the house in her tunic of shimmery white, with the fringe of pea- cock colored silk, and wading through the pool she climbs upon the rim of the basin and kisses the little limbs and the hands, for the sake of all the things she does not wish to remember. Ill Every morning for seven mornings, Kysen has risen from her chocolate, taken behind the lat- tice of her verandah, and binding her hair in a knot over her brow and donning her double chiton of pale blue embroidered with gold and modena phoenixes, has gone among the rose- bushes to watch for the first bud. It is understood that until the labors of the Spring have borne this fruit, her lover may not return. This morning on the smallest bush three steps from the olive tree a spot of red no larger than a jewel pushed out of the green cloak, and Kysen OBRICK JOHNS 71 has gone to the East window at the top of her house, spreading her arms in welcome. At night a rocket will be sent up from the terrace. IV When Kysen awakes in the night and sees the big wings of the big window open beside her bed she shudders, for she imagines they are the arms of a monster come to carry her away. And when she hears the sound of the dry branches in the wind outside she imagines it is the voice of the monster calling her to come. Then she turns to awaken her lover. But if he is not there she throws back the purple rugs and the white covers of the bed and goes to the chamber where the paroquets hang, and lifting the black silk night-shade with the pink monogram, she chatters to them until she falls asleep in her chair. When the red cat is ill it is as though the sea has escaped through a hole in one of the continents and the maid whose business it is to care for it stands before the shrine of Ptah, trying to pull her fingers out of their sockets. 72 OBBICK JOHNS All the doors of the house close more noisily than usual and the gold-fish die before they can be eaten. But Kysen has prepared for this and in a far chamber of the house she has ordered a table to be laden with twenty kinds of fruit and the rarest wines from each province, delicate tongues from the baby calves, and the skins of quails roasted between honey. When her friends are assembled the doors are locked and Kysen feasts and makes merry until the red cat is well. VI Once a year at dawn the priest comes from the temple to the house of Kysen. He is tall and his robe is of apple-green with a yel- low band around the ankles and he has been chosen because he has the longest beard of all the young men. He walks back and forth in front of the door, watching the casement of her sleeping apart- ment. As soon as it is closed he enters and pressing his lips upon the clasps of her feet and upon her hair, he demands the name of her lover. She pouts and refuses to answer, and though she ORRICK JOHNS 73 would keep him longer pleading with her, he goes away. Kysen watches the reflection of the window upon the round pouce-box of gold upon her table, and calling the score and five of maids she orders them to bar the doors and windows, to wear soiled linen and never to admit anyone again. As for herself she has a bed of coarse sand made in her room and sleeps upon it until her skin stings with pain and is so rough that it must be embrocated for thirty-one days before her lover is allowed to return. VII On the tenth day after the birth of a child in her household Kysen prays for the things she can never have: " Father of Smiles, Forgiver, I have read in a crim- son doe-skin book with silver sprays and an orange enamel clasp, of a bird in Africa which the Tunisians call bu-habibi, meaning the bird of laughter and which eats grain from the tongue without being trained. " In the palace of the Zuwya Sheik, who is said to be always on horseback shaded by a green um- brella, bearing a falcon on a tiny cushion and followed by a greyhound, there is a shawl of 74 ORRICK JOHNS silk like sunset passing through the branches of the pine. "Give me both of these, Father, and let thy daughter have many children, but let them be born from my kisses as sound is born from the wind and let them come into the world fully clothed in tunics of blue." VIII Today there passed along the road ten men with iron collars about their necks and chains be- tween them, and either side a file of young soldiers. Kysen, without even waiting for the completion of her toilet and with her hair flowing behind her like a fan of bronze, ran out of the house and addressed the dark-skinned captain of the soldiers : " Give these men to me that I may free them! Are they barbarians or Lydians that you put iron weights upon their necks and fasten them together with chains? " And the captain answered : " Kysen of the province of Wul, each of them has committed a murder by binding the hair of a maiden about her throat." And Kysen replied : " It is a thing that has hap- pened since the beginning of the world, and men ORRICK JOHNS 75 know that none but the gods can take life, for none but they can give it. The gods have brought death to the ten maidens by making these youths their instruments.''' Hearing Kysen speak thus the soldiers nodded to each other as though they had gained a new knowledge, and the men in chains drew them- selves up and laughed. But the captain ordered the column to go on, and because she could not prevail Kysen has placed a man upon the road to herald the approach of misery caused by the law. She will hide her head beneath four thicknesses of ostrich down and fill her ears with scented gums in order not to know the sound of injustice. IX The little girl from the village whose parents gave her all the tasks to do in order that they might not lose a moment from their wine, has been brought into the house of Kysen to learn the art of laughter. When the offenses of the child, whose name is called Dikai, have filled the red sheet kept by the secretaries, Kysen goes into the chamber of porphyry in which seven candles are kept burn- ing day and night, and administers punishment 76 ORBICK JOHNS to herself for the acts of Dikai, being careful that no member of the household should see the manner of her punishment. When she has finished she gathers the tears which she has shed in a silver bowl, and pours them into the closed amphora upon which is written, " The Dowry of Dikai." Then summoning the maids she ordered forty lashes to be administered to the lintels of the great south door, and in- structs them to give the child greater freedom than before, and to obey her in all her desires. At the dance of the Cow, which is sacred to the poor, Kysen wears the calyx of a poppy inverted, and her limbs are bound with cords woven of the tongues of serpents dried upon weights and treated with oil. Her mask is made of ivory scraped thinner than the fibers of an orange, and two children carry the crystal alms-bowl, containing the figures of boys modelled in wax of Hymettus. Her hair is powdered with the ashes of young men who have died for her love. When she returns to her house, before laying the garments away she will press her lips upon all the soiled places for the sake of the gentle fingers of beggars. FENTON JOHNSON 77 AFRICAN NIGHTS TIEED I am tired of work ; I am tired of building up some- body else's civilization. Let us take a rest, M'Lissy Jane. I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon or two of gin, shoot a game or two of dice and sleep the rest of the night on one of Mike's barrels. You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people's clothes turn to dust, and the Calvary Bap- tist Church sink to the bottomless pit. You will spend your days forgetting you married me and your nights hunting the warm gin Mike serves the ladies in the rear of the Last Chance Saloon. Throw the children into the river; civilization has given us 'too many. It is better to die than it is to grow up and find out that you are colored. Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our destiny. The stars marked my destiny. I am tired of civilization. 78 FENTON JOHNSON AUNT HANNAH JACKSON Despite her sixty years Aunt Hannah Jackson rubs on other people's clothes. Time has played havoc with her eyes and turned to gray her parched hair. But her tongue is nimble as she talks to herself. All day she talks to herself about her neighbors and her friends and the man she loved. Yes, Aunt Hannah Jackson loved even as you and I and Wun Hop Sing. " He was a good man," she says, " but a fool." " So am I a fool and Mrs. Lee a fool and this Mrs. Goldstein that I work for a fool." " All of us are fools." For rubbing on other people's clothes Aunt Han- nah Jackson gets a dollar and fifty cents a day and a worn out dress on Christmas. For talking to herself Aunt Hannah Jackson gets a smile as we call her a good natured fool. AUNT JANE ALLEN State Street is lonely to-day. Aunt Jane Allen has driven her chariot to Heaven. I remember how she hobbled along, a little woman, parched of skin, brown as the leather of a satchel FENTON JOHNSON 79 and with eyes that had scanned eighty years of life. Have those who bore her dust to the last resting place buried with her the basket of aprons she went up and down State Street trying to sell? Have those who bore her dust to the last resting place buried with her the gentle word Son that she gave to each of the seed of Ethiopia? THE BARBER I wield the razor, sling hot towels and talk. My daily newspaper is the racing chart and my pastime making bets on fleet-footed horses. Whatever is left from betting I divide with my wife and a yellow woman who lives in an apartment on Wabash Avenue. (Poor Wife! She gets very little.) I love gay clothes, a good supply of Fatimas and the fire in gin and whiskey. I love life. Who doesn't? THE DRUNKARD I had a wife, but she is gone. She left me a week ago. God bless her! I married another in the rear of Mike's saloon. It was a gallon jug of the reddest liquor that ever 80 FENTON JOHNSON burned the throat of man. I will be true to my new wife. You can have the other. THE BANJO PLAYER There is music in me, the music of a peasant people. I wander through the levee, picking my banjo and singing my songs of the cabin and the field. At the Last Chance Saloon I am as welcome as the violets in March; there is always food and drink for me there, and the dimes of those who love honest music. Behind the railroad tracks the little chil- dren clap their hands and love me as they love Kris Kringle. But I fear that I am a failure. Last night a woman called me a troubadour. What is a trouba- dour? THE MINISTER I mastered pastoral theology, the Greek of the Apostles, and all the difficult subjects in a minister's curriculum. I was as learned as any in this country when the Bishop ordained me. And I went to preside over Mount Moriah, largest flock in the Conference. FENTON JOHNSON 81 I preached the Word as I felt it, I visited the sick and dying and comforted the afflicted in spirit. I loved my work because I loved my God. But I lost my charge to Sam Jenkins, who has not been to school four years in his life. I lost my charge because I could not make my congregation shout. And my dollar money was small, very small. Sam Jenkins can tear a Bible to tatters and his congregation destroys the pews with their shouting and stamping. Sam Jenkins leads in the gift of raising dollar money. Such is religion. THE SCARLET WOMAN Once I was good like the Virgin Mary and the Minister's wife. My father worked for Mr. Pullman and white people's tips ; but he died two days after his insurance expired. I had nothing, so I had to go to work. All the stock I had was a white girl's education and a face that enchanted the men of both races. Starvation danced with me. So when Big Lizzie, who kept a house for white men, came to me with tales of fortune that I could 82 FENTON JOHNSON reap from the sale of my virtue I bowed my head to Vice. Now I can drink more gin than any man for miles around. Gin is better than all the water in Lethe. ALFRED KREYMBORG 83 DOROTHY I. HER EYES Her eyes hold black whips — dart of a whip lashing, nay, flicking, nay, merely caressing the hide of a heart — and a broncho tears through canyons • walls reverberating, sluggish streams shaken to rapids and torrents, storm destroying silence and solitude! Her eyes throw black lariats — one for his head, one for his heels — and the beast lies vanquished — walls still, streams still — except for a tarn, or is it a pool, or is it a whirlpool twitching with memory? 84. ALFRED KREYMBORG II. HES HAIR Her hair is a tent held down by two pegs — ears, very likely — where two gypsies — lips, dull folk call them — read your soul away: one promising something, the other stealing it. If the pegs would let go — why is it they're hidden? and the tent blow away — drop away — like a wig — or a nest — maybe you'd escape paying coin to gypsies — maybe — in. HEB HANDS Blue veins of morning glories — blue veins of clouds — ALFRED KREYMBORG 85 blue veins bring deep-toned silence after a storm. White horns of morning glories — white flutes of clouds — sextettes hold silence fast, cup it for aye. Could I blow morning glories — could I lip clouds — I'd sound the silence her hands bring to me. Had I the yester sun — had I the morrow's — brush them like cymbals, I'd then sound the noise. IV. HER BODT Her body gleams like an altar candle — white in the dark — and modulates 86 ALFRED KBEYMBORG to voluptuous bronze — bronze of a sea — under the flame. GRASSES Who would decry instruments — when grasses, ever so fragile, provide strings stout enough for insect moods to glide up and down in glissandos of toes along wires or finger-tips on zithers- though the mere sounds be theirs, not ours — theirs, not ours, the first inspiration — discord without resolution — who would decry being loved, ALFRED KREYMBORG 87 when even such tinkling comes of the loving? DUST We are molecules — whose fate it is to quarrel — who knows why? It isn't when we're underfoot - it's when we're in the air — two of us after one air-hole! We don't do it — we like being still — it's the wind does it ! Do lovers know why? INDIAN SUMMER What was the tune you heard on the way that you must dawdle here, cut a reed, like any truant, cut crooked holes in the reed, and dabble with burbling phrases which can only tremble and halt no matter how fearfully carefully you blow? The tune you heard didn't limp? Time, you're a dunce. 88 ALFRED KREYMBORG My word on it — you could have breathed echo when the air was near — now it's a wraith beyond even tiny embodiment \ That amorphous haze, arpeggic fall of those leaves, glint of that bird — or was it a squirrel? — (had it been a rat it would have bitten you!) they ought to preach your heedlessness, no man can essay a pavanne with his phrases at variance — it is a pavanne, don't deny it ! And why propose a pavanne when nobody dances pavannes, and why ask a flute to mimic the tone of a spinet? Dear dunce — your tune begins to sound feminine — go away — the phrases are exquisite daggers — move along, move along: we have all sought the same lady twice! PHALLIC Hail, steel spike of a river, ALFRED KREYMBORG 89 bending and straightening, forcing and twisting, driving your way down the bowels of hills and mountains, bending them back on all sides, breaking them open, tearing up children, stones strewn everywhere ! — Your soft, clear look with its stone-white thought — hail, crooked grandmother, humped on a boulder, eyeing your daughters, heedless of thought from heeding their reckless, stone-smooth, shell-tinted offspring — none old enough to think as you do — hail to your look as it lights still softer on the filthy (some would say) little boys digging their way down the mud of its banks ! 90 ALFRED KREYMBORG INITIALS He goes along, in his thin flesh, narrow bones, slow blood, old hat, old clothes, old shoes, singing for love, battling for love. He will go down, in thinner flesh, narrower bones, slower blood, older hat, older clothes, older shoes, battling for love, dying for love. Hie will be put away, in a thin box, down a narrow slit of the old earth, growing for love, rising for love: his initials carved on a thin seed, narrow seed, slow seed, the carving as slow ALFRED KREYMBORG 91 as he was slow, carving his K on a song. POETRY Ijadislaw the critic is five feet six inches high, which means that his eyes are five feet two inches from the ground, which means, if you read him your poem, and his eyes lift to five feet and a trifle more than two inches, what you have done is Poetry — should his eyes remain at five feet two inches, you have perpetrated prose, and do his eyes stoop — which Heaven forbid! — the least trifle below five feet two inches, you are an unspeakable adjective, 92 VACHEL LINDSAY THE DANIEL JAZZ Inscribed to Isadora Bennett Let the singer train the audience to roar like lions, and to join in the refrain: — "Go chain the lions down," before he begins to lead them in this jazz. Darius the Mede was a king and a Beginning with a strain, of wonder. Dixie. His eye was proud, and his voice was thunder. He kept bad lions in a monstrous den. He fed up the lions on Christian men. Daniel was the chief hired man of With a touch of , , j Alexander's the land. ragtime band. He stirred up the jazz in the palace band. He whitewashed the cellar. He shovelled in the coal. And Daniel kept a-praying : — " Lord save my soul." VACHEL LINDSAY 93 Daniel kept a-praying : — " Lord save my soul." Daniel kept a-praying : — " Lord save my soul." Daniel was the butler, swagger and swell. He ran up stairs. He answered the bell. And he would let in whoever came a-calling: — Saints so holy, scamps so appalling. " Old man Ahab leaves his card. Elisha and the bears are a-waiting in the yard. Here comes Pharo and his snakes a-calling. Here comes Cain and his wife a-calling — Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego for tea. Here comes Jonah and the whale, and the sea. Here comes St. Peter and his fishing pole. Here comes Judas and his silver a-calling. Here comes old Beelzebub a-calling." And Daniel kept a-praying : — " Lord save my soul." Daniel kept a-praying: — "Lord save my soul." Daniel kept a-praying : — " Lord save my soul." His sweetheart and his mother were Christian and meek. They washed and ironed for Darius every week. One Thursday he met them at the door : — Paid them as usual, but acted sore. He said : — " Your Daniel is a dead little pigeon. He's a good hard worker, but he talks religion." 94 VACHEL LINDSAY And he showed them Daniel in the lion's cage. Daniel standing quietly, the lions in a rage. Hjs good old mother cried : — " Lord save him." And Daniel's tender sweetheart cried: — " Lord save him." And she was a golden lily in the dew. And she was as sweet as an apple on the tree. And she was as fine as a melon in the corn-field, Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea, Gliding and lovely as a ship on the sea. And she prayed to the Lord : — "Send Gabriel.' Send Gabriel." King Darius said to the lions : — " Bite Daniel. Bite Daniel. Bite him. Bite him. Bite him." Thus roared the lions : — " We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel, mere the audi- We want Daniel, Daniel, Daniel. e ™\™2 wUh Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr." And Daniel did not frown, Daniel did nofr cry. He kept on looking at the sky. the leader. VACHEL LINDSAY 95 And the Lord said to Gabriel : — " Go chain the lions down, T . he <^fjence ' sings this with Go chain the lions down. the leader, to Go chain the lions down. f^ M negro Go chain the lions down." And Gabriel chained the lions, And Gabriel chained the lions, And Gabriel chained the lions, And Daniel got out of the den, And Daniel got out of the den, And Daniel got out of the den. And Darius said : — " You're a Christian child, Darius said : — " You're a Christian child, Darius said : — " You're a Christian child," And gave him his job again, And gave him his job again, And gave him his job again. WHIMSEYS KALAMAZOO Once, in the city of Kalamazoo, The gods went walking, two and two, 96 VACHEL LINDSAY With the friendly phoenix, the stars of Orion, The speaking pony and singing lion. For in Kalamazoo in a cottage apart Lived the girl with the innocent heart. Thenceforth the city of Kalamazoo Was the envied intimate chum of the sun. He rose from a cave by the principal street. The lions sang, the dawn-horns blew, And the ponies danced on silver feet. He hurled his clouds of love around; Deathless colors of his old heart Draped the houses, dyed the ground. O shrine of the wide young Yankee land, Incense city of Kalamazoo, That held, in the midnight, the priceless sun As a jeweller holds an opal in hand! From the awkward city of Oshkosh came Love the bully, no whip shall tame, Bringing his gang of sinners bold. And I was the least of his Oshkosh men; But none were reticent, none were old. And we joined the singing Phoenix then, And shook the lilies of Kalamazoo All for one hidden butterfly. Bulls of glory, in cars of war We charged the boulevards, proud to die For her ribbon sailing there on high. VACHEL LINDSAY 97 Our blood set gutters all aflame Where the sun slept without any shame Cold rock till he must rise again. She made great poets of wolf-eyed men — The dear queen-bee of Kalamazoo, With her crystal wings, and her honey heart. We fought for her favors a year and a day. (0 the bones of the dead, the Osh'kosh dead, That were scattered along her pathway red!) And then, in her harum-scarum way, She left with a passing traveller-man — With a singing Irishman Went to Japan. Why do the lean hyenas glare Where the glory of Artemis had begun — Of Atalanta, Joan of Arc, Lorna Doone, Rosy O'Grady, And Orphant Annie, all in one? Who burned this city of Kalamazoo Till nothing was left but a ribbon or two — One scorched phoenix that mourned in the dew, Acres of ashes, a junk-man's cart, A torn-up letter, a dancing shoe, (And the bones of the valiant dead) ? Who burned this city of Kalamazoo, Love-town, Troy- town Kalamazoo? A harum-scarum innocent heart. 98 VACHEL LINDSAY DAVY JONES' DOOR-BELL A Chant for Boys with Manly Voices (Every Une sung one step deeper than the line pre- ceding) Any sky-bird sings, Ring, ring! Any church-chime rings, Dong ding! Any cannon says, Boom bang! Any whirlwind says, Whing whang! The bell-buoy hums and roars, Ding dong! And way down deep, Where fishes throng, By Davy Jones' big deep-sea door, Shaking the ocean's flowery floor, His door-bell booms Dong dong, Dong dong, Deep, deep down, Clang boom, Boom dong. VACHEL LINDSAY 99 THE CONSCIENTIOUS DEACON {A song to be syncopated as you please) Black cats, grey cats, green cats miau — Chasing the deacon who stole the cow. He runs and tumbles, he tumbles and runs. He sees big white men with dogs and guns. He falls down flat. Hje turns to stare — No cats, no dogs, and no men there. But black shadows, grey shadows, green shadows come. The wind says, " Miau ! " and the rain says, "Hum!" He goes straight home. He dreams all night. He howls. He puts his wife in a fright. Black devils, grey devils, green devils shine — Yes, by Sambo, And the fire looks fine! Cat devils, dog devils, cow devils grin — Yes, by Sambo, And the fire rolls in. 100 VACHEL LINDSAY And so, next day, to avoid the worst — He takes that cow Where he found her first. THE HORRID VOICE OF SCIENCE " There's machinery in the butterfly ; There's a mainspring to the bee ; There's hydraulics to a daisy, And contraptions to a tree. " If we could see the birdie That makes the chirping sound With x-ray, scientific eyes, We could see the wheels go round." And I hope all men Who think like this Will soon lie Underground. MY LADY IS COMPARED TO A YOUNG TREE When I see a young tree In its white beginning, With white leaves VACHEL LINDSAY 101 And white buds Barely tipped with green, In the April weather, In the weeping sunshine — Then I see my lady, My democratic queen, Standing free and equal With the youngest woodland sapling Swaying, singing in the wind, Delicate and white: Soul so near to blossom, Fragile, strong as death; A kiss from far-off Eden, A flash of Judgment's trumpet — April's breath. 102 HAN I EL LONG STUDENTS She sweeps in like the moon goddess, and she has never studied her lessons; and when I flunk her I feel that I am flunking Diana. I have great faith in this boy — he makes me think of mountains. Every now and then he looms in the rear of the room like a peak in the Andes : but how would you like to teach a peak in the Andes? There are some who turn my class-room into a morgue, and I find this hard; but he turns my class-room into a rathskeller with his face and his talk and his ways. Therefore I prize him. HANIEL LONG 103 She has a discontented face until she smiles. Perhaps she would like to smile all the time, and thinks I will not permit it. He has a certain look in his eye — a look I have seen before. All men of one idea have this look ; they go to the stake, to the torture-chamber, with this in their eye. I know what the boy's idea is, and I live in fear that others may discover it, and for it somehow crucify him. Sometimes I have nervous moments — there is a girl who looks at me strangely as much as to say, You are a young man, and I am a young woman, and what are you going to do about it? And I look at her as much as to say, 10* HANIEL LONG I am going to keep the teacher's desk between us, my dear, as long as I can. There is a smell not of the city about him, as though his pockets were stuffed with chestnuts, or apples, or as though he had been working in hay or straw; and he smells faintly of animals, too, of dogs and of horses; and there is a vague smell of gunpowder about him, and a vague smell of tobacco ; and behind all these smells is a miraculous distance of river and field and wood, all in the smell of out-doors. 8 She looks at me as though I were a stone wall between her and heaven — whereas I try to be a window for her, and a door, a gate, a ladder, an elevator — yet she will not look through, or leap through, HANIEL LONG 105 or fly through, or do anything but stare. 9 A little cherubino comes in when the class is all over, and says she is so sorry, that my class is such an inspiration, and such a queer sensation, but ten-thirty is an early hour, and the street-car service poor. And I tell her softly, that in heaven the street-car service is always poor, but the good little angels rise up early and get to school on time. And she says, " 0, thank you," so effusively. 10 The first day I didn't see her, nor the second, nor the third, and when at last I saw her, I hardly noticed her. Yet this girl has gone through a tragedy fighting those who had to be fought, and nursing those who needed nursing. And you would never guess it, except for a queer little line at her lips 106 HAN I EL LONG and her eyes, that are blue as steel, blue as a dagger, blue as a quiet lake. 11 To do one's best and to fail is disaster enough; but it is worse to remember how one might have done more. It is too late — > he has gone ; and nothing I can do will bring him back to me, will give me another chance with him, not that I think it would have mattered. 12 She needs a more exotic air to blossom in — clash of cymbals should precede her elephant down the street to school — she should be black from head to toes, wearing barbaric j ewels — and now that I think of it, why couldn't she come through my class-room window on the elephant's trunk? 13 She regards me haughtily as perhaps Mrs. Siddons regarded the third George — HANIEL LONG 107 and after all, why should she not? But I live in terror of hearing her say. In that tragical voice of hers, some day, Bid me, out, out, damned spot. 14 She says, If writing were like dancing, then I could bring my dreams. And I ask her what has lighter feet than a dancing word? and what speeds faster, what lasts longer than a dance of phrases down a page to far music? She does not answer. 15 He is the only one who ever dared sit on my sacred desk and rumple my sacred hair. Yet he is the only one who ever cared to carry my books and call me " Maestro " in public. And whenever I said a clever thing he would exclaim, " Priceless, priceless f " 16 All he sees is the dollar sign, and he suspects me of wasting his time. 108 HANI EL LONG O for some clever accountant to compute my cash value — for then I could write dollar signs across the blackboard behind me, and he would pay strict attention and make little entries in a little ledger. 17 She is hungry for dreams ; without them she will perish. But I fear she turns away from the only dream that lasts and gives her precious youth to the dreams that go in an hour. 18 We have given him a mask, we parents and teachers, and to please us he writes moral axioms in a little book and debates with himself continually whether he lives the nobler life. Nevertheless, great blood is his. He is of the kin of Rigoletto, Sancho Panza is his comrade, Touchstone his uncle; and he goes sedately down the path of pierrot arm in arm with harlequin. HANIEL LONG 109 19 When our eyes meet I go cold to my feet. Some day I shall forget my necktie, and on that day, proud and reproachful, she will point her finger at me — and the walls of my world will tumble. 110 MINA LOY THE BLACK VIRGINITY Baby Priests On green sward Yew-closed Silk beaver Rhythm of redemption Fluttering of Breviaries Fluted black silk cloaks Hung square from shoulders Troncated juvenility Uniform segration Union in severity Modulation Intimidation Pride of misapprehended preparation Ebony statues training for immobility Anaemic jawed Wise saw to one another Prettily the little ones Gesticulate benignly upon one another in the sun buzz — Finger and thumb circles postulate pulpits Profiles forsworn to Donatello MINA LOY 111 Munching tall talk vestral shop Evangelical snobs Uneasy dreaming In hermetically-sealed dormitories Not of me or you Sdster Saraminta Of no more or less Than the fit of Pope's mitres It is an old religion that put us in our places Here am I in lilac print Preposterously no less than the world flesh and devil Having no more idea what those are What I am Than Baby Priests of what " He " is or they are — Messianic mites tripping measured latin ring-a-roses Subjugated adolescence Retraces loose steps to furling of Breviaries In broiling shadows The last with apostolic lurch Tries for a high hung fruit And misses Any way it is inedible It is always thus In the Public Garden. Parallel lines An old man Eyeing a white muslin girl's school 112 MINA LOY And all this As pleasant as bewildering Would not eventually meet I am for ever bewildered Old men are often grown greedy — What nonsense It is noon And salvation's seedlings Are headed off for the refectory. THE DEAD We have flowed out of ourselves Beginning on the outside That shrivvable skin Where you leave off Of infinite elastic Walking the ceiling Our eyelashes polish stars Curled close in the youngest corpuscle Of a descendant We spit up our passions in our grand-dams Fixing the extension of your reactions Our shadow lengthens In your fear MINA LOY 113 You are so old Born in our immortality Stuck fast as Life In one impalpable Omniprevalent Dimension We are turned inside out Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs Street lights footle in our ocular darkness Having swallowed your irate hungers Satisfied before bread-breaking To your dissolution We splinter into Wholes Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow Among the refuse of your unborn centuries In our busy ashbins Stink the melodies of your So easily reducible Adolescences Our tissue is of that which escapes you Birth-Breaths and orgasms The shattering tremor of the static The far-shore of an instant The unsurpassable openness of the circle Legerdemain of God 114 MINA LOY Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves Break on our edgeless contours The mouthed echoes of what has exuded to our companionship Is horrible to the ear Of the half that is left inside them. MAX MICHELSON 115 MASKS Do birds sing for their mates? My song was for one airy and shining, Lighter than a butterfly's wings. On the way, she would half -turn and listen. She fluttered solemn, occupied, yet I never knew her airy business. Now that I sing of an earthly woman, She listens wondering. A HELEN You looked tired, For you came from afar, Perhaps from Greece. You may have been walking for ages. You stepped slowly, As though you carried Some precious wine. You stayed a moment . . . Then vanished, Wondering, As if you were some one else. 116 MAX MICHELSON GIRLS I Your family has moulded you. Marks of their tools and fingers Show about your torse and face. Your cheeks near the mouth Are half -frozen. Your soul flutters Faintly. ii Your flesh slopes like rose-petals. Like rose-petals It holds and drinks in the light. Your humid lips Remember the mother's milk. Yet there flutters about you a flame — Maturing you, withering you. in In the cafeteria the girl moved briskly In her imitation silk, sashed, hang-how-it-will dress; MAX MICHELSON 117 Yet knocked constantly against the customs — In taking her water, her sugar, her catsup. In the street too she walked briskly, The old purse dangling and the old hat moving firmly; Of a sudden she stopped, looked about, listened — Struck by the city — shot — like a flying bird. Then she took herself in hand and went on. MYEEH Your face called up a lily Glowing in the dusk, Your body the dusk-green stalk. Your lips were parched, imploring . . . As if they thirsted for the kiss behind the kiss, As if they awaited disappointment. PAIN Her lips lie tired, discarded. Her eyes are on the alert, as if for some mystic tryst. Through the white limbs where desire has leaped and pranced 118 MAX MICHELSON Now runs the invisible fire — An offering to some mysterious god. A LADY TALKING TO A POET For a moment you felt nude and shivered. Your social position hung near; You threw it about you — A garment frail and lacy. THE TRAITOR He knew the lady's half-mocking, half-regretful smile, Fluttering like one of the sweet-pea petals, Had been fertilized by the sweat and blood of her husband's vest-workers. Yet his eyes resented the intrusion Of firm matter-of-fact chins of servants. A RICH GENTLEMAN Your nostrils sniff the air, Your ears stand alert : Near you, like wolves in the forest, Lurk other people's poverty and suffering ; And though your heart is robust — Tough, like the cheek of a country girl, You dare not trust it. MAX MICHELSON 119 A PETIT BOURGEOIS Sharp nails grow out from your fat fingers ; Over your clean-shaven lip glimmers the moustache of a tom-cat. Your smiles are investments at a hundred per-cent. Yet one has only one life, one mouth, one stomach, and can take only one woman at a time ; Also, when you were younger, before you knew, You foolishly allowed suffering to reach your heart. So your face sometimes contorts wistfully — You use this sanctimoniously to deceive. LA MOUT DE PAUL VERLAINE The few rosy cloud-splotches In the bluish-white afternoon sky Shed down ruddy flowers of light — Big, capriciously shaped lilies and orchids — so thickly That some, held at the stems, stood as if growing straight from the grass. Among them he came — short, heavy, a little ragged, With eyes and lips that had laughed much with wine ; Faintly-drunk, as if wine-vapors of the past were hovering in his head; Blowing his flute and dancing, 120 MAX MICHELSON Now fast, now slow, and now stopping . . . listen- ing .. . An earth-flower among the light flowers. Tired, he dropped down on the grass. The light-flowers caressed his cheeks and his drowsy eyes with their cloud-like coolness — piling about him. Did the trees understand? The birds sang As though it were sunrise. DEATH One comes to me every day — Gentle, tactful, and of Admirable dignity. He is friendly though not wheedling, He wants me to know him. Sometimes he touches my arm, Or even presses it impulsively. TO A WOMAN ASLEEP IN A STBEET-CAR Woman sleeping in the car - — Strange, aloof and far^— MAX MICHELSON 121 Shall I shake you and tell you Who you are? Wake up and let us speak — Till our hearts are bared to the core, Till we are a man and a woman no more, Till we are empty like vases that leak, Till we droop and fall, Till we are nothing at all. 122 MARIANNE MOORE BLACK EARTH Openly, yes, With the naturalness Of the hippopotamus or the alligator When it climbs out on the bank to experience the Sun, I do these Things which I do, which please No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object In view was a Renaissance; shall I say The contrary? The sediment of the river which Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used To it, it may Remain there ; do away With it and I am myself done away with, for the Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was There to begin With. This elephant skin MARIANNE MOORE 123 Which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light Can filter — cut Into checkers by rut Upon rut of unpreventable experience — It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the Hairy toed. Black But beautiful, my back Is full of the history of power. Of power? What Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never Be cut into By a wooden spear ; through- Out childhood to the present time, the unity of Life and death has been expressed by the circum- ference Described by my Trunk ; nevertheless, I Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after All ; and I am on my guard ; external poise, it Has its centre Well nurtured — we know 124 MARIANNE MOORE Where — in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of The wind. I see And I hear, unlike the Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear, That tree trunk without Roots, accustomed to shout Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact By who knows what strange pressure of the at- mosphere ; that Spiritual Brother to the coral Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to The I of each, A kind of fretful speech Which sets a limit on itself ; the < Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that Phenomenon The above formation, MARIANNE MOORE 125 Translucent like the atmosphere — a cortex merely — That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first Time, a substance Needful as an instance Of the indestructibility of matter; it Has looked at the electricity and at the earth- Quake and is still Here; the name means thick. Will Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no Beautiful element of unreason under it? THE FISH wade through black jade. Of the crow blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps ; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan. The barnacles which encrust the side 126 MARIANNE MOORE of the wave, cannot hide there ; for the submerged shafts of the sun, split like spun glass, move themselves with spotlight swift- ness into the crevices — in and out, illuminating the turquoise sea of bodies. The water drives a wedge of iron into the edge of the cliff, whereupon the stars pink rice grains, ink bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green lilies and submarine toadstools, slide each on the other. All external marks of abuse are present on this defiant edifice — all the physical features of MARIANNE MOORE 127 ac- cident — lack of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns and hatchet strokes, these things stand out on it; the chasm side is dead. Repeated evidence has proved that it can live on what can not revive its youth. The sea grows old in it. DOCK RATS There are human beings who seem to regard the place as craftily as we do — who seem to feel that it is a good place to come home to. On what a river; wide — twinkling like a chopped sea under some of the finest shipping in the world: the square-rigged four-master, the liner, the battleship like the two-thirds submerged section of an iceberg ; the tug — strong-moving thing, dip- ping and pushing, the bell striking as it comes ; the steam yacht, lying like a new made arrow on the 128 MARIANNE MOORE stream ; the ferry-boat — a head assigned, one to each compartment, making a row of chessmen set for play. When the wind is from the east, the smell is of apples ; of hay, the aroma increased and decreased suddenly as the wind changes ; of rope ; of mountain leaves for florists. When it is from the west, it is an elixir. There is oc- casionally a parokeet arrived from Brazil, clasping and clawing; or a monkey — tail and feet in readiness for an over- ture. All palms and tail ; how delightful ! There is the sea, moving the bulkhead with its horse strength ; and the multiplicity of rudders and pro- pellors; the signals, shrill, questioning, per- emptory, diverse ; the wharf cats and the barge dogs — it is easy to overestimate the value of such things. One does not live in such a place from motives of expediency but because to one who has been ac- customed to it, shipping is the most congenial thing in the world. ENGLAND with its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral ; MARIANNE MOORE 129 with voices — one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept — the criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal shores — contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been extracted : and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions : and France, the " chrysalis of the nocturnal but- terfly " in whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from that which was the object of one's search — substance at the core : and the far East with its snails, its emotional shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, all of museum quality : and America where there is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions; the wild man's land; grass-less, links-less, language- less country — in which letters are written not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand but in plain American which cats and dogs can read ! 130 MARIANNE MOORE The letter " a " in psalm and calm, when pronounced with the sound of " a '' in candle, is very noticeable but why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness which may be mistaken for appetite, of heat which may ap- pear to be haste, no con- conclusions may be drawn. To have mk&ppre- hended the matter, is to have confessed that one has not looked far enough. The sub- limated wisdom of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic tor- rent of emotion compressed in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able to say, " I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than I do," — the flower and fruit of all that noted superi- ority — should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine that it is not there ? It has never been confined to one locality. MARIANNE MOORE 131 POETRY I, too, dislike it : there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in it after all, a place for the genuine. Hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise if it must, these things are important not be- cause a high sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are useful ; when they became so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us — that we do not admire what we cannot understand. The bat, holding on upside down or in quest of some- thing to eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base- ball fan, the statistician — case after case could be cited did 1S2 MARIANNE MOORE one wish it ; nor it is valid to discriminate against " business documents and school-books " ; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, nor till the autocrats among use can be " literalists of the imagination " — above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand, in defiance of their opinion — the raw material of poetry in all its rawness, and that which is on the other hand, genuine, then you are interested in poetry. LOLA RIDGE 133 THE SONG OF IRON Not yet hast Thou sounded Thy clangorous music, Whose strings are under the mountains . . . Not yet hast Thou spoken The blooded, implacable Word . . . But I hear in the Iron sfnging — In the triumphant roaring of the steam and pistons pounding — Thy barbaric exhortation . . . And the blood leaps in my arteries, unreproved, Answering Thy call . . . All my spirit is inundated with the tumultous passion of Thy Voice, And sings exultant with the Iron, For now I know I too am of Thy Chosen . . . Oh fashioned in fire — Needing flame for Thy ultimate word — Behold me, a cupola Poured to Thy use! Heed not my tremulous body 134. LOLA RIDGE That faints in the grip of Thy gauntlet. Break it . . . and cast it aside . . . But make of my spirit That dares and endures Thy crucible . . . Pour through my soul Thy molten, world-whelming song. . . . Here at Thy uttermost gate Like a new Mary, I wait . . . II Charge the blast furnace, workman Open the valves — Drive the fires high . . . (Night is above the gates.) How golden-hot the ore is From the cupola spurting, Tossing the flaming petals Over the silt and the furnace ash — Blown leaves, devastating, Falling about the world . . . Out of the furnace mouth — Out of the giant mouth — The raging, turgid mouth — Fall fiery blossoms LOLA RIDGE 185 Gold with the gold of buttercups In a field at sunset, Or huskier gold of dandelions, Warmed in sun-leavings, Or changing to the paler hue At the creamy hearts of primroses. Charge the converter, workman — Tired from the long night ? But the earth shall suck up darkness — The earth that holds so much . . . And out of these molten flowers, Shall shape the heavy fruit . . . Then open the valves — Drive the fires high, Your blossoms nurturing. (Day is at the gates And a young wind. . . . ) Put by your rod, comrade, And look with me, shading your eyes . . . Do you not see — Through the lucent haze Out of the converter rising — In the spirals of fire Smiting and blinding, A shadowy shape White as a flame of sacrifice, Like a lily swaying? 136 LOLA BIDGE III The ore is leaping in the crucibles, The ore communicant, Sending faint thrills along the leads . . . Fire is running along the roots of the mountains . . . I feel the long recoil of the earth As under a mighty quickening . . . (Dawn is aglow in the light of the Iron . . .) All palpitant, I wait . . . IV Here ye, Dictator — late Lords of the Iron, Shut in your council rooms, palsied, depowered — The blooded, implacable Word? Not whispered in cloture, one to the other, (Brother in fear of the fear of his brother . . .) But chanted and thundered On the brazen, articulate tongues of the Iron Babbling in flame . . . Sung to the rhythm of prisons dismantled, Manacles riven and ramparts defaced . . . (Hearts death-anointed yet hearing life calling Ankle chains bursting and gallows unbraced . . . Sung to the rhythm of arsenals burning . . . Clangor of iron smashing on iron, LOLA RIDGE 13>7 Turmoil of metal and dissonant baying Of mail-sided monsters shattered asunder . . . Hulks of black turbines all mangled and roaring, Battering egress through ramparted walls . . . Mouthing of engines, made rabid with power, Into the holocaust snorting and plunging ... Mighty converters torn from their axes, Flung to the furnaces, vomiting fire, Jumbled in white-heated masses disshapen . . . Writhing in flame-tortured levers of iron . . . Gnashing of steel serpents twisting and dying . . . Screeching of steam-glutted cauldrons rending . . . Shock of leviathans prone on each other . . . Scale flanks touching, ore entering ore . . . Steel haunches closing and grappling and swaying In the waltz of the mating locked mammoths of iron, Tasting the turbulent fury of living, Mad with a moment's exuberant living J Crash of devastating hammers despoiling . . . Hands inexorable, marring What hands had so cunningly moulded . . . Structures of steel welded, subtly tempered, Marvelous wrought of the wizards of ore, Torn into octaves discordantly clashing, Chords never final but onward progressing 138 LOLA RIDGE In monstrous fusion of sound ever smiting on sound in mad vortices whirling . . . Till the ear, tortured, shrieks for cessation Of the raving inharmonies hatefully mingling . . . The fierce obligato the steel pipes are screaming . . . The blare of the rude molten music of Iron . . . ROBERT ALDEN SANBORN 139 THE FIGHT Smoke — more smoke — thickening the air, staining the air blue-grey, rising on waves of breath, and falling, and filling the channels of breath, and red- dening eyes. Smoke — wreathing the rafters, lying in grey-blue folds over the sloping bank of men — they may be men over there, men's faces and bodies slanting down to the parapet. Smoke — fighting with the glare of the reflectors, fighting the bald splendor of the canvas-padded ring, with the fleshy faces of the seconds, bare bodies, suspender buckles, white shirt-fronts, and the referee's gold watch chain. Smoke — fight- ing and always losing. Smoke — stung with sudden victories of flame, tiny fireflies that spurt, wink, spread glowing orange over faces framed in writhing twists of blue-grey. Smoke — fighting and losing. Voices — striking down upon the ring, curving like blows around the rocking heads of the fighters, landing on my ears. 140 ROBERT ALDEN SANBORN Voices — glancing over my shoulders, rumbling through my veins. I echo them under my breath : A brave rush, Tony ! A fine left, Jack ! Smoke — more smoke — I make it myself. My eyes strain through the smother, my eyeballs push and tug at their muscles. Bang! goes the bell. There's the flash of a left, the crook of an elbow, the twist of a nude torso, a right cross darts over a shoulder, into the air above a bullet-head — a locking of arms, the thud of a glove ramming a naked side — a dashing referee cuts the locked forearms, lifts the lowered heads, slices between breasts jamming like savage bulls, and dancing out into the open, leaves a neu- tral zone behind him — now, as he whirls, before him: Hiss! a gloved left lines across the gap, a shoulder blocks the jab and launches a viperous answer into space as a cropped head shifts an inch, the short rights follow in, the lock snaps shut, again the tattoo drumming on the ribs — a muffled buzz of bated breath — and again the referee with his key parts the dovetailed fighters — once more the zone, the hissing leads, frowning looks, tense and bitter, straining for an instant's target — legs spring, feet patter, the lefts leap, the rights zig-zag, miss or glance, locked again — ROBERT ALDEN SANBORN 141 the drumming — sweltering in a fiery space, walled in smoke — Bang! goes the bell. Voices — Very scientific in his feet : sings a bored Irish voice across the hall — a laugh rolls along the tiers, sweeps into a roar — a murmur of repe- titions: What did he say? Very scientific in his feet — A spatter of belated laughs. Back to Greece — Two thousands of years ago, sev- eral hundreds, some odd months and days, to be exact, and all of Greece that could get there, watched the same thing under the olive-ripening sun on the plains of the Alpheus, at Olympia. Jack Britton was then Theagenes, a bull of a man, with mountains of muscle flanking the column of his neck — and Ted Lewis was Euthymus, eager, hopeless, and undaunted — then they wore leather thongs upon their hands — and we were Greeks, our backs to the door, and on the further side of the frail boards was black Barbarianism, crush- ing to break in upon us. So it was, and is: skill, quivering light brains, muscles flexing and snapping, lefts and rights ; and against them, the Brute, sagging with sheer grav- ity of bulk upon the candle-flame of Intelligence. Greek and Barbarian, skill and Brute, light and 142 ROBERT ALDEN SANBORN dark, over and over — victory and defeat, shuffled confusedly in the smoke. Something sighs in me when the Brute is baffled, the jeer of the crowd is my jeer — I like the knock- out too, but I like it to come as lightning comes, and when it does the triumph makes me sad — for red Brutality outwitted by grey Skill, for grey Skill stunned and reddened by dull Brutality. Which wins? The Brute, he always wins, and Science never loses. And Art sits on the sidelines and wins bets from each of them. Phidias might sign his name under that moving frieze of nakedness, gliding through areas of smoke in ten thousand instants of beauty. CARL SANDBURG 143 HUMDRUM If I had a million lives to live and a million deaths to die in a million humdrum worlds, I'd like to change my name and have a new house number to go by each and every time I died and started life all over again. I wouldn't want the same name every time and the same old house number always, dying a million deaths, dying one by one a million times : — would you? or you? or you? AUTUMN MOVEMENT I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. 144 CARL SANDBURG The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds. The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts. POOL Out of the fire Came a man sunken To less than cinders, A tea-cup of ashes or so. And I, The gold in the house, Writhed into a stiff pool. BONES Sling me under the sea. Pack me down in the salt and wet. No farmer's plow shall touch my bones. No Hamlet hold my j aws and speak How jokes are gone and empty is my mouth. Long, green-eyed scavengers shall pick my eyes, CARL SANDBURG 145 Purple fish play hide-and-seek, And I shall be song of thunder, crash of sea, Down on the floors of salt and wet. Sling me . . . under the sea. 146 WILLIAM SAPHIER CHILDHOOD MEMORIES Those years are foliage of trees, their trunks hidden by bushes ; behind them a grey haze topped with silver hides the swinging steps of my first love the Danube. On its face grave steel palaces with smoking torches, parading monasteries moved slowly to the Black Sea till the bared branches scratched the north wind. On its bed a great Leviathan waited for the ceremonies on the arrival of Messiah and bobbing small fishes snapped sun splinters for the pleasure of the monster. Along its shores red capped little hours danced with rainbow colored kites, messengers to heaven. My memory is a sigh of swallows swinging through a slow dormant summer to a timid line on the horizon. WILLIAM SAPHIER 147 FLAMINGO DREAMS A green and copper-backed frog keeps me from seeing brick-colored eucalyptus flowers dancing on an apple-green sky ; large rose-hued cotton fists with gold knuckles chase a blushing sun into a purple, lead sea : I am hungry and he is cautious. CONSCIENCE This evening more than ever, my ancient, despised Hebrew priest, warped by the hot Arabian sun, inflicted his heart-scorching sermon; burnishing with impatient feet a whisper of duty in my heart, commanding, beseeching, that I offer on his altar. And a strong white-hot wind blew my brothers' woes into my veins. 148 WILLIAM SAPHIER SADNESS It is a huge curtain, stretched at a distance around me. Aimless gypsies crawl up and over the curtain. They are my days. They neither sing nor laugh but hop over the top of my sadness. Here and there one wears a gay shirt. He is faster than the rest. Even in my sleep with closed eyes I cannot pierce this drapery. Some day I will wind a child's smile around my face and thus disguised slip through the curtain and jump . . . Where? Ah yes, where? RAIN Like crawling black monsters the big clouds tap at my window, their shooting liquid fingers slide over the staring panes and merge on the red wall. Some of the fingers pull at the hinges WILLIAM SAPHIER 149 and whisper insistently : " Let us come in, the cruel wind whips and drives us till we are sore and in despair." But I cannot harbor the big crawling black clouds, I cannot save them from the angry wind. In a tiny crevice of my aching heart there is a big storm brewing and loud clamour and constant prayer for the reflection of snow-capped mountains on a distant lake. Tired and dazed I sit on a bear skin and timidly listen to the concert of storms. MARGRETHE You are an ice covered twig with a quiet, smiling sap. The spring winds of life have tested your steel J blade soul and the harsh breath of men covered you with a frigid shell. But under the transparent ice I have seen your warm hand ready to tear the shell and grasp the love-sun's heat, and your cool morning eyes look clear and calm into the day. 150 WILLIAM SAPHIER BEFORE SUNRISE Before it was day I climbed to meet the sun half way on the side of a mountain. A high cool pond poured down over rocks to a slow dreamy valley singing of new born clouds. Facing the warm reflections on the quiet sky I bowed and kissed the dew on the young grass. But soon I felt guilty. What had I done? What is the dew on young grass? MEETING Her glance swung my body like a bell in a long forgotten church and the tingling emotions came forth like sounds summoned, at attention, WILLIAM SAPIIIER 151 grouped around an altar of a great love. Stiff like a bronze pillar I came and drank the two tears her eyes offered like raised crystals at a solemn farewell meeting. THE NIGHT SHIFT They are like pick axes, they never argue, and never smile. They tramp through the darkness to work. They tramp through the darkness home to sleep. They are like pick axes, and with solemn faces go through glass and iron and through cement. With their hard hands they kill the night. They are like pick axes, they never worry, and never think, is it wrong. If it is, they will make a good job of it. 152 WILLIAM SAPHIER They move like fate and each hides a scar, somewhere in the night, and tells the world to go to hell. MOOD The end of my wish Walks near me smiling ; With subtle fingers I loosen Little shining, sharp chips From the crystal body With its many enticing shadows. A fine silk thread Is desire, These sweet but sharp edges Its end. Shall I add one more flaw To my dream veil. EVELYN SCOTT 153 VIENNESE WALTZ Dresden china shepherdesses Whirl in the silver sunshine : Columbine stars Float in gauze petticoats of light . . . Little Columbine ghosts, wrinkled and old, Smelling of jasmine and camphor; Prim arms folded over immaculate breasts . . . The pirouetting tune dies . . . Stars and little faded faces, Waltzing, waltzing, Shoot slowing downward On tinkling music, Dusty little flowers, Sinking into oblivion . . . After the music, Quiet, The glacial period renewed, Monsters on earth, A mad conflagration of worlds on ardent nights These too vanishing . . . Silence unending. 154 EVELYN SCOTT THE DEATH OF COLUMBINE White breast beaten in sea waves, Hair tangled in foam, Lonely sky, Desolate horizon, Pale and shining clouds : All this desolate and shining sea is no place for you, My dead Columbine. And the waves will bite your breast ; And the wind that does not know death from life Will leap upon you and leer into your eyes And suck at your dead lips. Oh, my little Columbine, You go farther and farther away from me, Out where there are no ships And the solemn clouds Soar across the somber horizon. PIETA The child — Warm chubby thighs, fat brown arms, An unsurprised face — Cries for jam. The mother buys him with jam . . , EVELYN SCOTT 155 An old woman Tottering on lean leather-skinned legs Sucks with glazing eyes The crystal silken milk That flows from the death wound In a young flower-soft, jewel-soft body. RAINY TWILIGHT Dim gold faces float in the windows, Subtle as perfume, Soft as flowers. Dim gold faces and gilded arms Are clinging along the silver ladders of rain, Climbing with ivory lamps held high ; Starry lamps Over which the silver ladders Thicken into nets of twilight. TROPIC WINTER The afternoon is frozen with memories, Radiant as ice. The sun sets amidst the agued trembling of the leaves ; Sinking right down through the gold air 156 EVELYN SCOTT Into the arms of the sea. And the enameled wings of the palm trees Keep shivering, shivering, Beating the gold air thin . . . LULLABY I lean my heart against the soft bosomed night : A white globed breast, And warm and silent flowing, The milk of the moon. JAPANESE MOON Thick clustered wistaria clouds, A young girl moon in mist of almond flowers, Boughs and boughs of light ; Then a round faced ivory lady Nodding among fading chrysanthemums. THE NAID The moon rises, Glistening, Naked white, Out of her stream. Wet marble shoulders Shake star drops on the clouds. EVELYN SCOTT 157 NIGHT MUSIC Through the blue water of night Rises the white bubble of silence — Rises, And breaks : The shivered crystal bell of the moon, Dying away in star splinters. The still mists bear the sound Beyond the horizon. STARS Like naked maidens Dancing with no thought of lovers, Blinking stars with dewy silver breasts Pass through the darkness. White and eager, They glide on, Toward the grey meshed web of dawn, And the mystery of morning. Then, About me, The white cloud walls Stand as sternly as sepulchres, And from all sides, 158 EVELYN SCOTT Peer and linger the startled faces, Pale in the harshness of the sunlight. VENUS' FLY TRAP A wax bubble moon trembles on the honey-blue horizon. Softly heated by your breast Pearl wax languorously unfolds her lily lips of mist, And swells about you, Weaves you into herself through each moist pore, Absorbs you deliciously, Destroys you. MONOCHROME Grey sails, Grey sty drifting down to the sea. Old, ugly, and stern, The night lies down upon the water, And it quivers in the twilight Like a tortured belly. THE RED CROSS Antiseptic smells that corrode the nostrils Crumble me, Eat me deep, EVELYN SCOTT 159 And my garments disintegrate. First my nightgown, Leaving my naked arms and legs disjointed, Sprawled about the bed in postures meaningless to the point of obscenity. My breasts shrivel, The nipples drawn like withered plums To the eyes of the bright young nurse. I am nothing but a dull eye myself, An eye out of a socket, Bursting, Contorted with hideous wisdom. Eye to eye we fight in the death throes, Myself and the young nurse. Her firm crisp aproned breast leans toward the bed As she smoothes the rumpled pillow back With long cool fingers. CROWDS The sky along the street a gauzy yellow — The narrow lights burn tall in the twilight. The cool air sags, Heavy with the thickness of bodies. I am elated with bodies. 160 EVELYN SCOTT They have stolen me from myself. I love the way they beat me to life, Pay me for their cruelties. In the close intimacy I feel for them There is the indecency I like. I belong to them, To these whom I hate, And because we can never know each other, Or be anything to each other, Though we have been the most, I sell so much of me that could bring a better price. THE LONG MOMENT A white sigh clouds the fields Into quietness. Above the billowed snow I drift, One year, Two years, Three years. Hurt eyes mist in the blue behind me. The moon uncoils in glistening ropes And I glide downward along the dripping rays To a marble lake. EVELYN SCOTT 161 AUTUMN NIGHT The moon is as complacent as a frog. She sits in the sky like a blind white stone, And does not even see Love As she caresses his face With her contemptuous light. She reaches her long white shivering fingers into the bowels of men. Her tender superfluous probing into all that pol- lutes Is like the immodesty of the mad. She is a mad woman holding up her dress So that her white belly shines. Haughty, Impregnable, Ridiculous, Silent and white as a debauched queen, Her ecstasy is that of a cold and sensual child. She is Death enj oying Life, Innocently, Lasciviously. 162 MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT LOVE POEMS IN AUTUMN I. The Arrival Shining highways Sing to your step, Windows beckon, Doorways open a square embrace. Doors laugh gently Swinging together Behind you. II. There's A Guest There's a flag on my tower, And my windows Are orange to the night. They are set in grey stone that frowns At the black wind. Inside, there's a guest at my hearth, And a fire Painting the grey stone gold. My windows are black With the hungry night peering through them. MABJORIL ALLEN SEIFFERT 163 Blackness lurks in corners, Wind snatches the sparks, Tongs and poker jangle together Like the iron bones Of a man that was hanged. III. They Who Dance The feet of dancers Shine with laughter, Their hearts are vibrant as bells ; The air flows by them Divided, like water Before a gleaming ship. Triumphantly their bodies sing, Their eyes Are blind with music. They move through threatening ghosts, Feeling them cool as mist Against their brows. They who dance Find infinite golden floors Beneath their feet. 164 MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT IV. Pianissimo I took Night Into my arms, Night lay upon my breast. If Night had wings She would have brought me Stars for my hair. The stars laughed Lightly From far away — About my shoulders White mist curled. V. Portrait By Zuloaga Death lies in wait For those who do not know What they desire, And Hell for those who fear What they have taken. These hands are wrinkled From stretching forth, Brown From the winds Blowing upon them. MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT 165 They are strong with seizing. They do not tremble. VI. Gestures Let there be dancing figures On our wine-flask, Swastikas on our rug, Inscriptions in our rings And on our dwelling. Let us build ritual For our worship, Pledge our love With vows and holy promises. If we break oaths Let it be darkly With threatening gestures. Thus we ignore That we love and die Like insects. VII. Veils I shall punish your blindness With a veil. I shall choose words that join 166 MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT Gaily, word to word, I shall weave them flauntingly Into veil upon veil, I shall wind them defiantly Over my lips, over my eyes. You shall not see your name On my lips, You shall not see your image In my eyes! And through my veils I shall not see That you are blind. VIII. Freedom I would be free From two superstitions, Thanks and Forgiveness. So I would think of you As Flame, As Wind, As Night, To whom I have been Wind, And Flame, And Night. . . . MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT 167 Together burned and swept, Now drowned In separate darkness. IX. Mud I am dazed and weary From the shapelessness Of what I am — I am poured Among haphazard stones In meaningless patterns. Yesterday's sun dried me Between rounded cobbles, Today's deluge sweeps me Toward alien pavements, To-morrow's sun shall dry me In a new design. Better the turbid gutter Toward the open sea ! X. Fools Say — November's breath Is black in the branches of trees And under the bushes ; 168 MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT Harsh rain Whips down the rustling branch Of leaves. There is smoke In the throat of the wind, Its teeth Bite away beauty. Let fools say: " Spring Will come again ! " WALLACE STEVENS 169 LE MONOCLE DE MON ONCLE " Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill." And so I mocked her in magnificent measure. Or was it that I mocked myself alone? 1 wish that I might be a thinking stone. The sea of spuming thought foists up again The radiant bubble that she was. And then A deep up-pouring from some saltier well Within me, bursts its watery syllable. II A red bird flies across the golden floor. It is a red bird that seeks out his choir Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing. A torrent will fall from him when he finds. Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing? I am a man of fortune greeting heirs ; For it has come that thus I greet the spring. These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell. No spring can follow past meridian. 170 WALLACE STEVENS Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss To make believe a starry connaisscmce. Ill Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese Sat tittivating by their mountain pools Or in the Yangste studied out their beards? I shall not play the flat historic scale. You know how Utamaro's beauties sought The end of love in their all-speaking braids. You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath. Alas ! Have all the barbers lived in vain That not one curl in nature has survived? Why, without pity on these studious ghosts, Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep? IV This luscious and impeccable fruit of life Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth. When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet, Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air — An apple serves as well as any skull To be the book in which to read a round, And is as excellent, in that it is composed Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground. But it excels in this that as the fruit Of love, it is a book too mad to read Before one merely reads to pass the time. WALLACE STEVENS 171 In the high West there burns a furious star. It is for fiery boys that star was set And for sweet-smelling virgins close to them. The measure of the intensity of love Is measure, also, of the verve of earth. For me, the firefly's quick, electric stroke Ticks tediously the time of one more year. And you? Remember how the crickets came Out of their mother grass, like little kin . . . In the pale nights, when your first imagery Found inklings of your bond to all that dust. VI If men at forty will be painting lakes The ephemeral blues must merge for them in one, The basic slate, the universal hue. There is a substance in us that prevails. But in our amours amorists discern Such fluctuations that their scrivening Is breathless to attend each quirky turn. When amorists grow bald, then amours shrink Into the compass and curriculum Of introspective exiles, lecturing. It is a theme for Hyacinth alone. 172 WALLACE STEVENS VII The mules that angels ride come slowly down The blazing passes, from beyond the sun. Descensions of their tinkling bells arrive. These muleteers are dainty of their way. Meantime, centurions guffaw and beat Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards. This parable, in sense, amounts to this: The honey of heaven may or may not come, But that of earth both comes and goes at once. Suppose these couriers brought amid their train A damsel heightened by eternal bloom. . . . VIII Like a dull scholar, I behold, in love, An ancient aspect touching a new mind. It comes, it blooms, it bears its fruit and dies. This trival trope reveals a way of truth. Our bloom is gone. We are the fruit thereof. Two golden gourds distended on our vines, We hang like warty squashes, streaked and rayed, Into the autumn weather, splashed with frost, Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque. The laughing sky will see the two of us Washed into rinds by rotting winter rains. WALLACE STEVENS 173 IX In verses wild with motion, full of din, Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure As the deadly thought of men accomplishing Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. Most venerable heart, the lustiest conceit Is not too lusty for your broadening. I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything For the music and manner of the paladins To make oblation fit. Where shall I find Bravura adequate to this great hymn? The fops of fancy in their poems leave Memorabilia of the mystic spouts, Spontaneously watering their gritty soils. I am a yeoman, as such fellows go. I know no magic trees, no balmy boughs, No silver-ruddy, gold-vermilion fruits. But, after all, I know a tree that bears A semblance to the thing I have in mind. It stands gigantic, with a certain tip To which all birds come sometime in their time. But when they go that tip still tips "the tree. 174 WALLACE STEVENS XI If sex were all, then every trembling hand Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words. But note the unconscionable treachery of fate, That makes us weep, laugh, grunt and groan, and shout Doleful heroics, pinching gestures forth From madness or delight, without regard To that first, foremost law. Anguishing hour f Last night, we sat beside a pool of pink, Clippered with lilies, scudding the bright chromes, Keen to the point of starlight, while a frog Boomed from his very belly, odious chords. XII A blue pigeon it is, that circles the blue sky, On side-long wing, around and round and round. A white pigeon it is, that flutters to the ground, Grown tired of flight. Like a dark rabbi, I Observed, when young, the nature of mankind, In lordly study. Every day, I found Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world. Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued, And still pursue, the origin and course Of love, but until now I never knew That fluttering 'things have so distinct a shade. WALLACE STEVENS 175 PECKSNIFFIANA FABLIAU OF FLORIDA Barque of phosphor On the palmy beach, Move outward into heaven, Into the alabasters And night blues. Foam and cloud are one. Sultry moon-monsters Are dissolving. Fill your black hull With white moonlight. There will never be an end To this droning of the surf. HOMTTNCULUS ET LA BELLE ETOILE In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks The young emerald, evening star — Good light for drunkards, poets, widows, And ladies soon to be married. 176 WALLACE STEVENS By this light the salty fishes Arch in the sea like tree-branches, Going in many directions Up and down. This light conducts The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings Of widows and trembling ladies, The movements of fishes. How pleasant an existence it is That this emerald charms philosophers, Until they become thoughtlessly willing To bathe their hearts in later moonlight, Knowing that they can bring back thought In the night that is still to be silent, Reflecting this thing and that, Before they sleep. It is better that, as scholars, They should think hard in the dark cuffs Of voluminous cloaks, And shave their heads and bodies. It might well be that their mistress Is no gaunt fugitive phantom. ' She might, after all, be a wanton, Abundantly beautiful, eager. WALLACE STEVENS 177 Fecund, From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast, The innermost good of their seeking Might come in the simplest of speech. It is a good light, then, for those That know the ultimate Plato, Tranquillizing with this jewel The torments of confusion. EXPOSITION OF THE CONTENTS OF A CAB Victoria Clementina, negress, Took seven white dogs To ride in a cab. Bells of the dog chinked. Harness of the horses shuffled Like brazen shells. Oh-he-he! Fragrant puppets By the green lake-pallors, She too is flesh, And a breech-cloth might wear, Netted of topaz and ruby And savage blooms; Thridding the squawkiest jungle 178 WALLACE STEVENS In a golden sedan, White dogs at bay. What breech-cloth might you wear — Except linen, embroidered By elderly women? PLOUGHING ON SUNDAY The white cock's^ tail Tosses in the wind. The turkey-cock's tail Glitters in the sun. Water in the fields. The wind pours down. The feathers flare And bluster in the wind. Remus, blow your horn! I'm ploughing on Sunday, Ploughing North America. Blow your horn ! Tum-ti-tum, Ti-tum-tum-tum ! The turkey-cock's tail Spreads to the sun. The white cock's tail Streams to the moon. WALLACE STEVENS 179 Water in the fields. The wind pours down. BANAL SOJOURN Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps. The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black. The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air. Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom. Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew, Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries, " That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven ! " reminding of seasons, When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness. And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land. For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear? And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox? One has a malady here, a malady. One feels a malady. 180 WALLACE STEVENS OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS I In my room, the world is beyond my understanding; But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. ii From my balcony, I survey the yellow air, Reading where I have written, " The spring is like a belle undressing." in The gold tree is blue. The singer has pulled his cloak over his head. The moon is in the folds of the cloak. THE CURTAINS IN THE HOUSE OF THE METAPHYSICIAN It comes about that the drifting of these curtains Is full of long motions ; as the ponderous Deflations of distance or as clouds Inseparable from their afternoons ; Or the changing of light, the dropping Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude Of night, in which all motion Is beyond us, as the firmament, WALLACE STEVENS 181 Up-rising and down-falling, bares The last largeness, bold to see. THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE But not on a shell, she starts, Archaic, for the sea. But on the first-found weed She scuds the glitters, Noiselessly, like one more wave. She too is discontent And would have purple stuff upon her arms, Tired of the salty harbors, Eager for the brine and bellowing Of the high interiors of the sea. The wind speeds her, Blowing upon her hands And watery back. She touches the clouds, where she goes, In the circle of her traverse of the sea. Yet this is meagre play In the scurry and water-shine, As her heels foam — Not as when the goldener nude Of a later day 182 WALLACE STEVENS Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp, In an intenser calm, Scullion of fate, Across the spiek torrent, ceaselessly, Upon her irretrievable way. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 183 FLOWERS OF AUGUST DAISY The dayseye hugging the earth in August, ha J Spring is gone down in purple, weeds stand high in the corn, the rainbeaten furrow is clotted with sorrel and crabgrass, the branch is black under the heavy mass of the leaves — The sun is upon a slender green stem ribbed lengthwise. He lies on his back — it is a woman also — he regards his former majesty and round the yellow center, split and creviced and done into minute flower heads, he sends out his twenty rays — a little. 184, WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS and the wind is among them to grow cool there! One turns the thing over in his hand and looks at it from the rear: brownedged, green and pointed scales armor his yellow. But turn and turn the crisp petals remain brief, translucent, greenfastened, barely touching at the edges : blades of limpid seashell. The sun has shortened his desire to a petal's span! II ftUEENANNSLACE Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth — nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot — taking the field by force, the grass does not rise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand's span of her whiteness. Wherever WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 185 his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over — or nothing. Ill It is a small plant delicately branched and tapering conically to a point, each branch and the peak a wire for green pods, blind lanterns starting upward from the stalk each way to a pair of prickly edged blue flowerets : it is her regard, a little plant without leaves, a finished thing guarding its secret. Blue eyes — but there are twenty looks in one, alike as forty flowers on twenty stems — Blue eyes. 186 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS a little closed upon a wish achieved and half lost again, stemming back, garlanded with green sacks of satisfaction gone to seed, back to a straight stem, — if one looks into you, trumpets — ! No. It is the pale hollow of desire itself counting over and over the moneys of a stale achievement. Three small lavender imploring tips below and above them two slender colored arrows of disdain with anthers between them and at the edge of the goblet a white lip, to drink from — ! And summer lifts her look forty times over, forty times over — namelessly. IV HEALALL It is the daily love, grass high they say that will cure her. No good to reply : the sorrel never has four leaves, if the clover WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 187 may — It is the hydraheaded pulpit, but an impassioned one in this case, purple, lined with white velvet for a young priest — by what lady's hand? Agh it is no pulpit but a baying dog, a kennel of purple dogs on one leash, fangs bared — to keep away harm and never caring for the place : down the torn lane where the cows pass, under the appletree, nodding against high tide or in the lea of a pasture thistle, almost blue, never far to seek, they say it will cure her. V GEEAT MULLEN One leaves his leaves at home being a mullen and sends up a lighthouse to peer from : I will have my way, yellow — A mast with a lantern, ten fifty, a hundred, smaller and smaller as they grow more — Liar, liar, liar! You come from her ! I can smell djer-kiss on your clothes. Ha, ha you come to me, you — I am a point of dew on a grass-stem. 188 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS Why are you sending heat down on me from your lantern ? — You are cowdung, a dead stick with the bark off. She is squirting on us both. She has had her hand on you ! — Well. — She has defiled ME. — Your leaves are dull, thick and hairy. — Every hair on my body will hold you off from me. You are a dungcake, birdlime on a fencerail. — I love you, straight, yellow, finger of God pointing to — her ! Liar, broken weed, dungcake, you have — I am a cricket waving his antennae and you are high, grey and straight. Ha! VI BUTTEEANDEGGS It is a posture for two multiplied into a bouquet, a kneeling mother washing the feet of her naked infant before crossed mirrors, shoes of different pairs, a chinaman laughing at a nigger, a maple mingling leaves with an elm, it is butter and eggs : yellow slippers with orange bows to them, chickens and pigs in a barnyard, not too important — the little double favors, you and I, a shirt WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS 189 handed to a naked man by his barelegged wife, scratch my back for me, oh and empty the slopbucket when you go down — and get me that flower, I can't reach it. A low greyleaved thing growing in clusters, how else? — with a swollen head — slippers for sale, they put mirrors in those stores to make it seem — Closely packed in a bouquet but never quite succeeding to be more than — a passageway to something else. vn THISTLE They should have called the thistle — well, it is that we, we love each other. Our heads side by side have a purple flamebed over them. We are one, we love ourself. The cows do not eat us nor tread on us. It is a little like the lichen on the blackened stones, a foaming winecup with thorns on the handle. They say jackasses eat them. Yes, and reindeer eat lichen, lick them from the stones. And we would be eaten — as England ate Scotland? No. 190 WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS It is the color they must eat if they would have us. That offers itself but that alone. The rest is for asses or — forbidden. Purple ! Striped bellied flies and the black papillios are the color-led evangels. Ah but they come for the honey only. 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Translated from the Swedish. A naturalistic tragedy. Cloth, 75c. MOTHERLOVE. One of Strindberg's most effective one-act plays. Second edition. Boards, 35c. SWANWHITE. A fairy drama, translated by Francis J. Ziegler. Second edition. Cloth, 75c. THE CREDITOR. A tragic comedy. A searching psycho- logical study of the divorce question. Cloth, 75c. John Addington Symonds LAST AND FIRST. The first appearance in book form of " The New Spirit " and " Arthur Hugh Clough," the latest and the earliest essays of a great critic and humanist. Cloth, $1.50. Grover Theis NUMBERS. Five one-act plays that will be welcomed by the lover of modern drama. Boards, $1.35. Leo N. Tolstoi THE LIVING CORPSE. Translated by Anna Monossovitch Evarts, from the only authorized Russian edition based on the MSS. in the possession of Countess A. L. Tolstoi. A drama in six acts and twelve tableaux. Produced as " Re- demption " it has been one of the greatest successes on the New York stage in recent years. Cloth, $1.00. Frank Wedekind THE AWAKENING OF SPRING. A tragedy of childhood dealing with the sex question in its relationship to the education of the young. Sixth edition. Cloth, $1.25. SUCH IS LIFE. A satiric play with mediaeval background but modern significance. Second edition. Cloth, $1.25. RABBI EZRA AND THE VICTIM. Two impressive sketches full of color and action. Boards, 35c. THE GRISLEY SUITOR. A remarkable study in grim hu- mor. Boards, 35c.