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 COPYRIGHT DEPOStH 
 
MODERN 
 
 AMERICAN AND BRITISH 
 
 POETRY "T£3 
 
 ^7 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 LOUIS UNTERMEYER 
 
 Author of " Challenge," " The New Adam," " The New 
 Era in American Poetry, " etc. 
 
 92 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 

 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY 
 
 THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY 
 
 RAHWAY. N. J. 
 
 APR 2! 1922 
 g)C!.A659696 
 
^t 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 For permission to reprint most of the material in this 
 volume, the editor wishes to thank not only the poets 
 whose cooperation has been of such assistance, but also 
 the publishers, all of whom are holders of the copyright. 
 The indebtedness is alphabetically acknowledged to: 
 
 Richard G. Badger — for the poem from Sun and Saddle 
 
 Leather by Badger Clark. 
 Bobbs-Merrill Company — for two poems from The Complete 
 
 Works of James Whitcomb Riley. 
 Brentano's — for the poem from Chanteys and Ballads by 
 
 Harry Kemp. 
 Nicholas L. Brown — for the poem from Blood of Things by 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg. 
 The Century Company — for the selections from Merchants 
 
 from Cathay by William Rose Benet and War and Laughter 
 
 by James Oppenheim. 
 The Century Magazine — for "Lake Song" by Jean Starr 
 
 Untermeyer. 
 Dodd, Mead & Company — for the poem from Lyrics of Lowly 
 
 Life and Lyrics of Love and Laughter by Paul Laurence 
 
 Dunbar. 
 George H. Doran Company — for the selections from Moons of 
 
 Grandeur by William Rose Benet, Vigils and Candles That 
 
 Burn by Aline Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems by Joyce 
 
 Kilmer. 
 Doubleday, Page & Company — for the selections from The 
 
 Man with the Hoe and Lincoln and Other Poems by Edwin 
 
 Markham. Thanks also are due Mr. Rudyard Kipling as 
 
 well as A. P. Watt and Son for "The Return" from The 
 
 Five Nations and "An Astrologer's Song" from Rewards 
 
 and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. 
 E. P. Dutton & Company— for the selections from The Vale of 
 
 iii 
 
iv Acknowledgments 
 
 Tempe by Madison Cawein, and the poems from The Old 
 Huntsman, Counter- Attack and Picture Show by Siegfried 
 Sassoon. 
 
 Four Seas Company — for the quotations from The Charnel Rose 
 and The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken, for the poem from 
 War and Love by Richard Aldington. 
 
 Harcourt, Brace & Company — for the selections from A Mis- 
 cellany of American Poetry — 1920; Canzoni and Carmina by 
 T. A. Daly, Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, Challenge 
 and The New Adam by Louis Untermeyer, Cross Currents 
 by Margaret Widdemer, Nets to Catch the Wind by 
 Elinor Wylie, The Contemplative Quarry by Anna Wickham. 
 
 Harper & Brothers — for the selection from Fables for the 
 Frivolous by Guy Wetmore Carryl. 
 
 Harr Wagner Publishing Co. — for the selections from The 
 Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller. 
 
 Henry Holt & Company — for the selections from Wilderness 
 Songs by Grace Hazard Conkling, Peacock Pie and The 
 Listeners by Walter de la Mare, A Boy's Will, North of 
 Boston, and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost, Chicago 
 Poems and Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg, Poems by Edward 
 Thomas, These Times by Louis Untermeyer, and Factories by 
 Margaret Widdemer. 
 
 The selections from The Complete Poems of Thomas Bailey 
 Aldrich, The Complete Works of Bret Harte, The Shoes 
 That Danced by Anna Hempstead Branch, Davy and the 
 Goblin by Charles E. Carryl, Grimm Tales Made Gay by 
 Guy Wetmore Carryl, Poems 1908-1919 by John Drinkwater, 
 Riders of the Stars and Songs of the Trail by Harry Herbert 
 Knibbs, Poems and Poetic Dramas by William Vaughn 
 Moody, Lyrics of Joy by Frank Dempster Sherman, Poems 
 by Edward Rowland Sill, Sea Garden by "H. D.," and the 
 quotations from Some Imagist Poets — 1916 and Some Imagist 
 Poets — 1917 are used by permission of, and by special arrange- 
 ment with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized pub- 
 lishers. 
 
 B. W. Huebsch — for the selections from Poems by Wilfred 
 Owen, Amores and New Poems by D. H. Lawrence, 
 The Ghetto and Sun-Up by Lola Ridge, Optimos by Horace 
 Traubel, Growing Pains and Dreams out of Darkness by 
 Jean Starr Untermeyer. 
 
Acknowledgments v 
 
 Alfred A. Knopf — for the selections from A Canticle of Pan 
 by Witter Bynner, Collected Poems by W. H. Davies, Fairies 
 and Fusiliers and Country Sentiment by Robert Graves, 
 Poems: First Series by J. C. Squire, Colors of Life by Max 
 Eastman, Asphalt and Other Poems by Orrick Johns, Mush- 
 rooms by Alfred Kreymborg, Songs for the New Age, by 
 James Oppenheim, Lustra by Ezra Pound, Profiles from China 
 by Eunice Tietjens. 
 
 John Lane Company — for the selections from Poems by G. K. 
 Chesterton, Ballads and Songs by John Davidson, The Col- 
 lected Poems of Rupert Brooke, Admirals All by Henry New- 
 bolt, Lyrics and Dramas by Stephen Phillips, The Hope of 
 the World and Other Poems by William Watson. 
 
 Little, Brown & Company — for the selections from Poems and 
 Poems — Third Series by Emily Dickinson. 
 
 The Macmillan Company — for the selections from The Congo 
 and Other Poems and The Chinese Nightingale by Vachel 
 Lindsay, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed and Pictures of the 
 Floating World by Amy Lowell, Spoon River Anthology by 
 Edgar Lee Masters, The Quest by John G. Neihardt, The 
 Man Against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Love 
 Songs and Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale, Fires and 
 Borderlands by W. W. Gibson, Poems by Ralph Hodgson, 
 Good Friday and Other Poems and the passage from "Dauber" 
 in The Story of A Round-House by John Masefield. 
 
 The Manas Press — for the selections from Verse by Adelaide 
 Crapsey. 
 
 Thomas B. Mosher — for the selections from A Quiet Road and 
 A Wayside Lute by Lizette Woodworth Reese. 
 
 The New Republic — for the poem by Ridgeley Torrence. 
 
 Pagan Publishing Company — for two poems from Minna and 
 Myself by Maxwell Bodenheim. 
 
 The Poetry Bookshop (England) — for the excerpts from 
 Strange Meetings and Children of Love by Harold Monro, 
 The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew and the poems re- 
 printed from the biennial anthologies, Georgian Poetry. 
 
 G. P. Putman's Sons — for the title-poem from In Flanders 
 Fields by John McCrae. 
 
 A. M. Robertson — for the sonnet from The House of Orchids 
 by George Sterling. 
 
 Charles Scribner's Sons — for the selections from Poems by 
 
vi Acknowledgments 
 
 Henry Cuyler Bunner, Poems by Eugene Field, Poems by 
 William Ernest Henley, Poems of Sidney Lanier, The 
 Children of the Night and The Town Down the River by 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Poems by Alan Seeger. 
 
 Frank Shay — for the quotation from Figs from Thistles by 
 Edna St. Vincent Millay. 
 
 Sherman, French & Company — for the two poems from The 
 Human Fantasy and Love and Liberation, by John Hall 
 Wheelock. 
 
 Small, Maynard & Company — for the selections from Ballads 
 of Lost Haven by Bliss Carman, Along the Trail by Richard 
 Hovey, Songs from Vagabondia and More Songs from Vaga- 
 bondia by Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. 
 
 F. A. Stokes Company — for the selections from War Is Kind 
 by Stephen Crane, Grenstone Poems by Witter Bynner, and 
 Poems by a Little Girl by Hilda Conkling. 
 
 Sturgis & Walton Company — for the poem from Monday 
 Morning by James Oppenheim. 
 
 The Yale Review— for "The Onset" by Robert Frost and "Two 
 Songs for Solitude" by Sara Teasdale. 
 
 The Yale University Press — for selections from Young Ad- 
 venture by Stephen Vincent Benet and The Burglar of the 
 Zodiac by William Rose Benet. 
 
A FOREWORD 
 
 "Modern" is, perhaps, the most misleading adjective 
 in the dictionary. There is no term in any language 
 that is more fluctuant and elusive, that shifts its meanings 
 with greater rapidity, that turns its back so quickly upon 
 those ardent champions who defended it most stubbornly. 
 The present merges so swiftly into the past that today's 
 definition of modernity may seem, after the shortest of 
 intervals, an impertinent apology for some safely en- 
 shrined classicism. Numberless critics have been haunted 
 by the knowledge that the outrageous heresy of to-day 
 is often the orthodox dogma of to-morrow. 
 
 And yet, though one should not use hard and fast 
 rules when measuring so fluid a thing as time, one must 
 at least be arbitrary about the years when making an 
 anthology. A "modern" compilation is no exception. 
 Although it is difficult to draw a line between periods of 
 literary activity — and particularly of poetry — the task 
 is made somewhat easier by the advent of Walt Whitman 
 in America and the close of the Victorian Era in Eng- 
 land. It would have been pleasant to divide the poetry 
 of this dual collection into groups and distinct tendencies. 
 Unfortunately, such a scheme would give the reader a 
 series of impressions that would be contradictory and, in 
 the final effect, false. One should not attempt to ticket 
 contemporary writers (on whom the chief emphasis is 
 placed in this volume) with conclusive labels, especially 
 since so many of the writers are still developing. One 
 cannot give a true picture of a period in the state of flux 
 
 vii 
 
viii A Foreword 
 
 except by showing its fluid character. It has been the 
 editor's aim to reflect this very flux and diversity. 
 
 Since the chronological arrangement is, in spite of cer- 
 tain disadvantages, the only logical one, an arbitrary 
 boundary has been fixed. Conceiving modern British 
 poetry to begin after the fertile Tennyson-Browning- 
 Rossetti-Swinburne epoch, the year 1840 is made to 
 act as dividing-line; any poet born before that date is 
 ruthlessly excluded. In the case of American poetry, 
 the line has been moved back ten years. Thus, by includ- 
 ing work of poets born in this country as early as 1830, 
 a richer background has been given the poetry of our 
 times; and, although some of the interval poets like Aid- 
 rich and Lanier could scarcely be considered "modern," 
 it is curious to see how wide and how completely the 
 circle has swung since Walt Whitman startled the world 
 with Leaves of Grass. The first part of this collection 
 might well be called, "American Poetry since Whitman" 
 for the poet who has often been called the godfather of 
 the new generation ended one period and began another. 
 
 It is a happy circumstance that this volume should 
 begin with the poetry of Emily Dickinson (born 1 830) 
 whose work, printed for the first time after her death, 
 was unknown as late as 1890 and unnoticed until several 
 years later. For hers was a forerunner of the new spirit 
 — free in expression, unhampered in choice of subject, 
 keen in psychology — to which a countryful of writers 
 has responded. No longer confined to London, Boston 
 or New York as literary centers, the impulse to create 
 is everywhere. There is scarcely a state, barely a town- 
 ship that has not produced its local laureate. 
 
 The notes preceding the poems are intended to support 
 and amplify this geographical as well as biographical 
 range. It is instructive as well as interesting to see what 
 
A Foreword ix 
 
 effect, if any, climate and conditions exert on the creator's 
 expression: how much the gaunt and quiet hills of New 
 Hampshire manifest themselves in the New England 
 soliloquies of Robert Frost or how the noisy energy of 
 the Middle West booms and rattles through the high- 
 pitched syllables of Vachel Lindsay. The notes, with their 
 brief critical as well as bibliographical data, have also been 
 prepared on the theory that poet and person have a defi- 
 nite relation to each other and the enjoyment of the one 
 is enhanced by an acquaintance with the other. 
 
 While emphasis has avowedly been placed upon the con- 
 tribution of living writers, practically no stress has been 
 laid upon the controversial subject of Form. Teachers no 
 less than students are intent upon discovering the kernel 
 rather than analyzing the shell that covers it. It is the 
 matter which concerns us, not the manner. J'ers libre, 
 that bugaboo of many of our otherwise liberal critics, 
 has produced an incalculable quantity of trivial and tire- 
 some exhibitions. But so, the vers librists might reply, 
 has the sonnet. Any form, in the hands of the genuine 
 artist, not only justifies but dignifies itself. Free verse 
 (a misnomer, by the bye, for free verse instead of being 
 "free" obeys certain well-known though flexible laws 
 of rhythm, balance, return and cadence) is capable of 
 many exquisite and unique effects impossible of achieve- 
 ment in a strict, metrical pattern. Nor is free verse as 
 one-dimensional or as much of a piece as is often charged. 
 Its variety is as great as its exponents. It can be as 
 vigorous as the unrhymed "voluntaries" of Henley or 
 as delicately chiselled as the frail but firm precision of 
 H. D.'s imagiste lines. We find it in various tones and 
 textures: rough-hewn and massive as in the iron solidity 
 of Carl Sandburg, brilliantly glazed and riotously color- 
 ful as in the enamelled pictures of Amy Lowell, restrained 
 
x A Foreword 
 
 and biblical as in the sonorous strophes of James Oppen- 
 heim. But though vers libre has been the subject of 
 much curious debate, it is only one feature of the surface 
 resemblances as well as the wide differences of modern 
 poets on both sides of the Atlantic. A sweeping inclusive- 
 ness distinguishes their dissimilar verse; it embraces all 
 themes, irrespective of technique; it employs old forms 
 and new departures with impartiality and equal skill. 
 
 There is this outstanding difference between latter-day 
 American and British poets. Broadly speaking, modern 
 British verse is smoother, more matured and, molded by 
 centuries of literature, richer in associations and surer 
 in artistry. American poetry, no longer imitative and 
 colonial, is sharper, more vigorously experimental; pro- 
 vocative with youth and youth's occasional — and natural 
 — crudities. Where the English product is formulated, 
 precise and (in spite of a few fluctuations) true to its 
 past, the American expression is far more varied and, 
 being the reflection of partly indigenous, partly naturalized 
 and largely unassimilated ideas, temperaments and races, 
 is characteristically uncoordinated. English poetry may 
 be compared to a broad and luxuriating river with a series 
 of tributaries contributing to the now thinning, now 
 widening channel. American poetry might be described 
 as a sudden rush of unconnected mountain torrents, valley 
 streams and city sluices; instead of one placidly moving 
 body, there are a dozen rushing currents. It is as if 
 here, in the last fifteen years, submerged springs had 
 burst through stubborn ground. 
 
 For this reason, I have included in both sections, not 
 only the often quoted poems by those poets who are 
 accepted everywhere as outstanding figures, but examples 
 of lesser known singers who are also representative of 
 their age. The same spirit has impelled me to reprint a 
 
A Foreword xi 
 
 liberal portion of that species which stands midway be- 
 tween light verse and authentic poetry. The Eugene 
 Fields, the J. W. Rileys, the Anthony Deanes may not 
 occupy the same high plane as the Masefields and Frosts, 
 but there is scarcely a person that will not be attracted 
 to them and thus be drawn on to deeper notes and larger 
 themes. In the dialect verses of Irwin Russell, Paul 
 Laurence Dunbar and T. A. Daly there is dignity be- 
 neath the humor; their very broken syllables reveal how 
 America has become a melting-pot in a poetic as well as 
 an ethnic sense. 
 
 With the realization that this gathering is not so much 
 a complete summary as an introduction to modern poetry, 
 it is hoped that the collection, in spite of its obvious 
 limitations, w^ill move the young reader to a closer in- 
 spection of the poets here included. The purpose of 
 such an anthology must always be to rouse and stimulate 
 an interest rather than to satisfy a curiosity. Such, at 
 least, is the hope and aim of one editor. 
 
 L. U. 
 
 January, 1922. 
 New York City. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Foreword vii 
 
 MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 
 
 Preface 3 
 
 Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 
 
 Chartless 26 
 
 Indian Summer 26 
 
 Suspense 27 
 
 A Cemetery 27 
 
 Beclouded 27 
 
 Pedigree 28 
 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836- 1907) 
 
 Memory 29 
 
 "Enamored Architect of Airy Rhyme" . . 29 
 
 John Hay (1838-1905) 
 
 Jim Bludso 30 
 
 Bret Harte (1839-1902) 
 
 "Jim" ........ 33 
 
 Plain Language from Truthful James . . 35 
 
 Joaquin Miller (1841-1913) 
 
 From "Byron" 38 
 
 Columbus 38 
 
 Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887) 
 
 Opportunity 40 
 
 Sidney Lanier (1842-1881) 
 
 Song of the Chattahoochee . . . . 41 
 Charles Edw t ard Carryl (1842-1920) 
 
 Robinson Crusoe's Story 43 
 
 xiii 
 
xiv Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) 
 
 "When the Frost is on the Punkin" . 46 
 
 A Parting Guest 48 
 
 Eugene Field (1850-1895) 
 
 Little Boy Blue . . . . . . .49 
 
 Seein' Things 50 
 
 Edwin Markham (1852- ) 
 
 The Man with the Hoe 52 
 
 Preparedness 54 
 
 Lincoln, The Man of the People ... 54 
 
 Irwin Russell (1853-1879) 
 
 De Fust Banjo 56 
 
 Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856- ) 
 
 Tears . . . . . . . .59 
 
 Spicewood . . 60 
 
 Frank Dempster Sherman (1860-1917) 
 
 At Midnight 61 
 
 Bacchus 61 
 
 Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) 
 
 The Wild Ride 62 
 
 Bliss Carman (1861- ) 
 
 A Vagabond Song . ... . . 64 
 
 Hem and Haw . . . . . . .65 
 
 Daisies 66 
 
 Richard Burton (1861- ) 
 
 Black Sheep . . . . . . .66 
 
 Richard Hovey (1864-1900) 
 
 At the Crossroads 68 
 
 Unmanifest Destiny . . • * . . 70 
 
 A Stein Song 71 
 
 Madison Cawein (1865-1914) 
 
 Snow 7 2 
 
 Deserted . . 73 
 
 William Vaughn Moody (1869-1910) 
 
 On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines , . 74 
 
Contents XV 
 
 PAGE 
 
 George Sterling (1869- ) 
 
 The Black Vulture 75 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869- ) 
 
 Miniver Cheevy 77 
 
 The Master 78 
 
 An Old Story 80 
 
 The Dark Hills 81 
 
 Richard Cory 81 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters (1869- ) 
 
 Petit, the Poet 83 
 
 Lucinda Matlock 83 
 
 Anne Rutledge 84 
 
 Stephen Crane (1871-1900) 
 
 I Saw a Man 85 
 
 The Wayfarer . 86 
 
 The Blades of Grass 86 
 
 T. A. Daly (1871- ^ ) 
 
 The Song of the Thrush 87 
 
 Mia Carlotta 88 
 
 Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) 
 
 The Turning of the Babies in the Bed . . 90 
 
 A Coquette Conquered 91 
 
 Guy Wetmore Carryl (1873-1904) 
 
 The Sycophantic Fox and the Gullible Raven 93 
 How Jack Found that Beans May Go Back 
 
 on a Chap 94 
 
 H. H. Knibbs (1874- ) 
 
 The Valley that God Forgot .... 97 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch 
 
 The Monk in the Kitchen .... 99 
 
 Amy Lowell (1874- ) 
 
 Solitaire 104 
 
 Meeting-House Hill 105 
 
 Wind and Silver 106 
 
 A Lady 106 
 
 A Decade 107 
 
XVI 
 
 Contents 
 
 ) 
 
 RlDGELY TORRENCE (1875- ) 
 
 The Bird and the Tree . 
 Robert Frost ( 1875- ) 
 Mending Wall . 
 The Tuft of Flowers 
 Blue-Butterfly Day . 
 Birches .... 
 
 The Onset .... 
 Carl Sandburg (1878- 
 Grass 
 
 Prayers of Steel .... 
 Cool Tombs .... 
 
 Fog 
 
 From "Smoke and Steel" . 
 Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) 
 Three Cinquains: 
 November Night . 
 
 Triad 
 
 The Warning 
 On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees 
 Grace Hazard Conkling (1878- 
 Frost on a Window . . . 
 Vachel Lindsay (1879- ) 
 
 The Eagle that is Forgotten . 
 To a Golden Haired Girl in a 
 
 Town 
 The Traveler 
 The Congo . 
 
 John G. Neihardt (1881 
 
 Cry of the People 
 
 Let Me Live Out My Years 
 Witter Bynner (1881- ) 
 
 Grass-Tops 
 
 Voices .... 
 
 A Farmer Remembers Lincoln 
 
 ) 
 
 Lou 
 
 lsiana 
 
 107 
 
 in 
 112 
 114 
 114 
 116 
 
 118 
 119 
 119 
 120 
 120 
 
 123 
 123 
 123 
 123 
 
 124 
 
 126 
 
 127 
 128 
 128 
 
 136 
 137 
 
 138 
 138 
 139 
 
Contents xvn 
 
 PAGE 
 
 James Oppenheim (1882- ) 
 
 The Slave . . 141 
 
 The Runner in the Skies 141 
 
 The Lincoln Child 142 
 
 Lola Ridge 
 
 Passages from "The Ghetto" .... 146 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg (1883- ) 
 
 Old Manuscript 148 
 
 Dawns 148 
 
 Badger Clark (1883- ) 
 
 The Glory Trail 149 
 
 Harry Kemp (1883- ) 
 
 Street Lamps 152 
 
 A Phantasy of Heaven 153 
 
 Max Eastman (1883- ) 
 
 At the Aquarium 154 
 
 Eunice Tietjens (1884- ) 
 
 The Most-Sacred Mountain . . . .155 
 
 Sara Teasdale (1884- ) 
 
 Spring Night 157 
 
 Night Song at Amalfi 158 
 
 Water Lilies 158 
 
 Two Songs for Solitude: 
 
 The Crystal Gazer 159 
 
 The Solitary 159 
 
 Ezra Pound ( 1885- ) 
 
 A Virginal 160 
 
 Ballad for Gloom 161 
 
 In a Station of the Metro . . . .162 
 
 Louis Untermeyer (1885- ) 
 
 Caliban in the Coal Mines .... 163 
 
 Summons 164 
 
 On the Birth of a Child 165 
 
 Prayer 166 
 
xviii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Jean Starr Untermeyer (1886- ) 
 
 High Tide . . 168 
 
 Autumn 168 
 
 Lake Song 170 
 
 John Gould Fletcher (1886- ) 
 
 London Nightfall 171 
 
 From "Irradiations" 172 
 
 Lincoln 172 
 
 The Skaters 175 
 
 "H. D." (1886- ) 
 
 Oread ■ . 176 
 
 Heat 177 
 
 Pear Tree ........ 177 
 
 William Rose Benet (1886- ) 
 
 Merchants from Cathay 179 
 
 How to Catch Unicorns 182 
 
 John Hall Wheelock (1886- ) 
 
 Sunday Evening in the Common . . .183 
 
 Love and Liberation 184 
 
 Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) 
 
 Trees 185 
 
 Martin . 186 
 
 Orrick Johns (1887- ) 
 
 The Interpreter 187 
 
 Alan Seeger (1888-1916) 
 
 "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" . .188 
 
 Margaret Widdemer 
 
 Factories 190 
 
 The Watcher . . . . . . .191 
 
 Aline Kilmer (1888- ) 
 
 Experience . . . . . . . .192 
 
 Things 192 
 
 Elinor Wylie 
 
 The Eagle and the Mole 194 
 
 Sea Lullaby 195 
 
Contents xix 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Coxrad Aiken (1889- ) 
 
 Miracles 196 
 
 Portrait of a Girl . 197 
 
 Morning Song from "Senlin" .... 198 
 
 Maxwell Bodenheim (1892- ) 
 
 Poet to his Love 201 
 
 Old Age 201 
 
 Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892- ) 
 
 God's World 203 
 
 Renascence 203 
 
 The Pear Tree 209 
 
 Stephen Vincent Benet (1898- ) 
 
 Portrait of a Boy 210 
 
 Leonie Adams (1899- ) 
 
 April Mortality 21 1 
 
 Home-Coming 212 
 
 Hilda Conkling (1910- ) 
 
 Water . 213 
 
 Hay-Cock 214 
 
 I Keep Wondering 214 
 
 MODERN BRITISH POETRY 
 
 Preface 217 
 
 Austin Dobson (i 840-1 921) 
 
 In After Days 227 
 
 Before Sedan 228 
 
 Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840- ) 
 
 Laughter and Death 230 
 
 Thomas Hardy (1840 ) 
 
 In Time of "The Breaking of Nations" . .231 
 
 The Darkling Thrush 231 
 
 Andrew Lang (1844- ) 
 
 Scythe Song 233 
 
 Robert Bridges (1844- ) 
 
 Winter Nightfall 234 
 
xx Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) 
 
 Ode 235 
 
 Alice Meynell (1848- ) 
 
 The Shepherdess 236 
 
 William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) 
 
 Invictus 237 
 
 The Blackbird 238 
 
 Margaritae Sorori 238 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) 
 
 Romance „ 240 
 
 Requiem 240 
 
 Fiona Macleod {William Sharp) (1855-1905) 
 
 The Valley of Silence 241 
 
 Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) 
 
 Requiescat 242 
 
 John Davidson (1857-1909) 
 
 Imagination 243 
 
 William Watson (1858- ) 
 
 Song 245 
 
 Estrangement 245 
 
 Francis Thompson (1859-1907) 
 
 Daisy . . . 246 
 
 To a Snowflake . . . . . . . 248 
 
 A. E. Housman (1859- ) 
 
 Reveille 249 
 
 When I Was One-and-Twenty . . . 250 
 To an Athlete Dying Young . . . .251 
 
 Katharine Tynan Hinkson (1861- ) 
 
 Sheep and Lambs . . . . ' . . 252 
 
 Henry Newbolt (1862- ) 
 
 Drake's Drum 253 
 
 Arthur Symons (1865- ) 
 
 In the Wood of Finvara 255 
 
 The Crying of Water 255 
 
Contents xxi 
 
 PAGE 
 
 William Butler Yeats (1865- ) 
 
 The Lake Isle of Innisfree .... 256 
 The Song of the Old Mother . . . .257 
 
 An Old Song 257 
 
 When You Are Old 258 
 
 Rudyard Kipling (1865- ) 
 
 Gunga Din 259 
 
 The Return 262 
 
 An Astrologer's Song 264 
 
 Recessional 267 
 
 Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) 
 
 Mystic and Cavalier 269 
 
 Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) 
 
 To One in Bedlam 270 
 
 "jE" (George William Russell) (1867- ) 
 
 Continuity 271 
 
 The Unknown God 272 
 
 Stephen Phillips (1868-1915) 
 
 Fragment from "Herod" 272 
 
 A Dream 273 
 
 Laurence Bin yon (1869- ) 
 
 A Song 274 
 
 The Unseen Flower 274 
 
 Anthony C. Deane (1870- ) 
 
 The Ballad of the Billycock .... 275 
 
 William H. Davies (1870- ) 
 
 Days Too Short 277 
 
 The Moon 278 
 
 The Example 278 
 
 A Greeting 279 
 
 J. M. Synge (1871-1909) 
 
 Prelude 280 
 
 A Translation from Petrarch . . . .281 
 
 Beg-Innish 281 
 
xxii Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Eva Gore-Booth (1871- ) 
 
 The Waves of Breffny 282 
 
 Moira O'Neill 
 
 A Broken Song 283 
 
 Ralph Hodgson (1871- ) 
 
 The Birdcatcher 284 
 
 Time, You Old Gipsy Man .... 285 
 
 After 286 
 
 The Mystery 286 
 
 John McCrae (1872-1918) 
 
 In Flanders Fields 287 
 
 Walter De la Mare (1873- ) 
 
 The Listeners 288 
 
 Old Susan 289 
 
 Silver 290 
 
 Nod 291 
 
 G. K. Chesterton (1874- ) 
 
 Lepanto 293 
 
 The Donkey 298 
 
 John Masefield (1874- ) 
 
 A Consecration 299 
 
 Sea-Fever . . . . . . . .301 
 
 Rounding the Horn . . . . . 301 
 
 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson (1878- ) 
 
 The Stone 304 
 
 Sight 307 
 
 Edward Thomas (1878-1917) 
 
 If I Should Ever By Chance .... 308 
 
 Tall Nettles 309 
 
 Cock-Crow 309 
 
 SeUMAS O'SuLLIVAN (1879- ) 
 
 Praise 310 
 
 Charlotte Mew 
 
 Beside the Bed 31 1 
 
 Sea Love 311 
 
Contents xxiii 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Harold Monro (1879- ) 
 
 Every Thing 312 
 
 The Nightingale Near the House . . .315 
 
 Alfred Noyes (1880 ) 
 
 The Barrel-Organ 316 
 
 Epilogue 322 
 
 Padraic Colum (1881- ) 
 
 The Plougher 323 
 
 Joseph Campbell (1881- ) 
 
 The Old Woman 325 
 
 Lascelles Abercrombie (1881- ) 
 
 From "Vashti" . . . . ' . . .326 
 
 James Stephens (1882- ) 
 
 The Shell 327 
 
 What Tomas An Buile Said In a Pub . . 328 
 
 John Drinkwater (1882- ) 
 
 Reciprocity 329 
 
 A Town Window 330 
 
 J. C. Squire (1883- ) 
 
 A House 331 
 
 Anna Wickham (1883- ) 
 
 Envoi 333 
 
 Domestic Economy 333 
 
 The Singer 333 
 
 James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915) 
 
 Stillness 334 
 
 D. H. Lawrence (1885- ) 
 
 Piano 335 
 
 Forsaken and Forlorn 336 
 
 John Freeman (1885- ) 
 
 Stone Trees 336 
 
 Shane Leslie (1885- ) 
 
 Fleet Street 338 
 
xxiv Contents 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Siegfried Sassoon (1886- ) 
 
 Dreamers 339 
 
 The Rear-Guard 340 
 
 Aftermath . . . . . . . .341 
 
 Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) 
 
 Sonnet 343 
 
 The Great Lover 343 
 
 The Soldier 346 
 
 Joseph Plunkett (1887-1916) 
 
 I See His Blood Upon the Rose . . . 347 
 
 F. W. Harvey 
 
 The Bugler 347 
 
 T. P. Cameron Wilson (1889-1918) 
 
 Sportsmen in Paradise 348 
 
 W. J. Turner (1889- ) 
 
 Romance 349 
 
 Francis Led widge (1891-1917) 
 
 An Evening in England .... . 351 
 Irene Rutherford McLeod (1891- ) 
 
 Lone Dog .351 
 
 Richard Aldington (1892- ) 
 
 Images . . . ... . . 352 
 
 Robert Nichols (1893- ) 
 
 Nearer 354 
 
 Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) 
 
 Apologia Pro Poemate Meo . . . .355 
 Anthem for Doomed Youth . . . . 357 
 
 C. H. SORLEY (1895-I915) 
 
 Two Sonnets 358 
 
 To Germany 359 
 
 Robert Graves (1895- ) 
 
 It's a Queer Time 360 
 
 Neglectful Edward 361 
 
 I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Drowned ? 362 
 
Contents xxv 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Louis Golding (1895- ) 
 
 Ploughman at the Plough 363 
 
 The Singer of High State . 364 
 
 A Reference Bibliography 367 
 
 Index of Authors 369 
 
MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE CIVIL WAR AND AFTER 
 
 The end of the Civil War marked the end of a 
 literary epoch. The New England group, containing (if 
 Poe could be added) all the great names of the ante- 
 bellum period, began to disintegrate. The poets had 
 outsung themselves ; it was a time of surrender and swan- 
 songs. Unable to respond to the new forces of political 
 nationalism and industrial reconstruction, the Brahmins 
 (that famous group of intellectuals who dominated lit- 
 erary America) withdrew into their libraries. Poets like 
 Longfellow, Bryant, Taylor, turned their eyes away from 
 the native scene, rhapsodized endlessly about Europe, or 
 left creative writing altogether and occupied themselves 
 with translations. "They had been borne into an era in 
 which they had no part," writes Fred Lewis Pattee (A 
 History of American Literature Since i8jo), "and they 
 contented themselves with reechoings of the old music." 
 
 Suddenly the break came. America developed a na- 
 tional consciousness ; the West discovered itself, and the 
 East discovered the West. Grudgingly at first, the aris- 
 tocratic leaders made way for a new expression; crude, 
 jangling, vigorously democratic. The old order was 
 changing with a vengeance. All the preceding writers 
 — poets like Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Longfellow, 
 Holmes — were not only products of the New England 
 colleges, but typically "Boston gentlemen of the early 
 Renaissance." To them, the new men must have seemed 
 like a regiment recruited from the ranks of vulgarity. 
 
 3 
 
4 Preface 
 
 Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, John Hay, 
 Joaquin Miller, Joel Chandler Harris, James Whitcomb 
 Riley — these were men who had graduated from the 
 farm, the frontier, the mine, the pilot-house, the printer's 
 shop! For a while, the movement seemed of little con- 
 sequence ; the impact of Whitman and the Westerners 
 was averted. The poets of the transition, with a delib- 
 erate art, ignored the surge of a spontaneous national 
 expression. They were even successful in holding it back. 
 But it was gathering force. 
 
 THE "POST-MORTEM" PERIOD 
 
 The nineteenth century, up to its last quarter, had 
 been a period of new vistas and revolts: a period of pro- 
 test and iconoclasm — the era of Shelley and Byron, the 
 prophets of "liberty, equality and fraternity." It left 
 no immediate heirs. In England, its successors by de- 
 fault were the lesser Victorians. In America, the inten- 
 sity and power of men like Emerson and Whittier gave 
 way to the pale romanticism and polite banter of the 
 transition or, what might even more fittingly be called, 
 the "post-mortem" poets. For these interim lyrists were 
 frankly the singers of reaction, reminiscently digging 
 among the bones of a long-dead past. They burrowed 
 and borrowed, half archaeologists, half artisans; impelled 
 not so much by the need of creating poetry as the desire 
 to write it. 
 
 From 1866 to 1880 the United States was in a chaotic 
 and frankly materialistic condition ; it was full of political 
 scandals, panics, frauds. The moral fiber was flabby ; the 
 country was apathetic, corrupt and contented. As in all 
 such periods of national unconcern, the artists turned 
 from life altogether, preoccupying themselves with the 
 by-products of art: with method and technique, with 
 
Preface 5 
 
 elaborate and artificial conceits, with facile ideas rather 
 than fundamental ideals. Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry 
 Stoddard, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
 — all of these authors, in an effort to escape a reality they 
 could not express and did not even wish to understand, 
 fled to a more congenial realm of fantasy. They took 
 the easiest routes to a prim and academic Arcadia, to a 
 cloying and devitalized Orient or a mildly sensuous and 
 treacle-dripping Greece. In their desperate preoccupa- 
 tion with lures and legends overseas, they were not, except 
 for the accident of birth, American at all; all of them 
 owed much more to old England than to New England. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN 
 
 Whitman, who was to influence future generations so 
 profoundly in Europe as well as in America, had already 
 appeared. The third edition of that stupendous volume, 
 Leaves of Grass, had been printed in i860. Almost im- 
 mediately after, the publisher failed and the book passed 
 out of public notice. But Whitman, broken in health 
 and cheated by his exploiters, lived to see not only a 
 seventh edition of his great work published in 1881, but 
 a complete collection printed in his seventy-third year 
 (1892) in which the twelve poems of the experimental 
 first edition had grown to nearly four hundred. 
 
 The influence of Whitman can scarcely be over- 
 estimated. It has touched every shore of letters, quick- 
 ened every current of art. Whitman has been acclaimed 
 by a great and growing public, not only here but in Eng- 
 land, Germany, Italy and France. He has been hailed as 
 prophet, as pioneer, as rebel, as the fiery humanist and, 
 most frequently, as liberator. In spite of the rhetorical 
 flourish, he may well be called the Lincoln of our litera- 
 ture. The whole scheme of Leaves of Grass is inclusive 
 
6 Preface 
 
 rather than exclusive; its form is elemental, dynamic, 
 free. 
 
 Nor was it only in the relatively minor matter of form 
 that Whitman became our great poetic emancipator. He 
 led the way toward a wider aspect of democracy ; he took 
 his readers out of fusty, lamp-lit libraries into the sharp 
 sunlight and the buoyant air. He was, as Burroughs 
 wrote, preeminently the poet of vista; his work had the 
 power "to open doors and windows, to let down bars 
 rather than to put them up, to dissolve forms, to escape 
 narrow boundaries, to plant the reader on a hill rather 
 than in a corner." He could do this because, first of all, 
 be believed implicitly in life — in its physical as well as 
 its spiritual manifestations; he sought to grasp existence 
 as a whole, not rejecting the things that, to other minds, 
 had seemed trivial or tawdry. The cosmic and the com- 
 monplace were synonymous to him; he declared he was 
 part of the most elemental, primitive things and con- 
 stantly identified himself with them. 
 
 It was this breadth, this jubilant acceptance that made 
 Whitman so keen a lover of casual and ordinary things; 
 he was the first of our poets to reveal "the glory of the 
 commonplace." He transmuted, by the intensity of his 
 emotion, material which had been hitherto regarded as 
 too unpoetic for poetry. His long poem "Song of My- 
 self" is an excellent example. Here his "barbaric 
 yawp," sounded "over the roofs of the world," is 
 softened, time and again, to express a lyric ecstasy and 
 naif wonder. 
 
 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the 
 
 stars, 
 And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and 
 
 the egg of the wren, 
 And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre of the highest, 
 
Preface 7 
 
 And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, 
 And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, 
 And the cow, crunching with depressed head, surpasses any 
 
 statue, 
 And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels! 
 
 It is this large naturalism, this affection for all that 
 is homely and of the soil, that sets Whitman apart from 
 his fellow craftsmen as our first American poet. This 
 blend of familiarity and grandeur animates all his work. 
 It swings with the tremendous vigor through "Crossing 
 Brooklyn Ferry"; it sharpens the sturdy rhythms (and 
 occasional rhymes) of the "Song of the Broad-Axe" ; it 
 beats sonorously through "Drum-Taps"; it whispers im- 
 mortally through the "Memories of President Lincoln" 
 (particularly that magnificent threnody "When Lilacs 
 Last in the Dooryard Bloomed") and lifts with a 
 biblical solemnity in his most famous "Out of the Cradle 
 Endlessly Rocking." 
 
 Whitman did not scorn the past; no one was quicker 
 than he to see its wealth and glories. But most of the 
 older formulas belonged to their own era; they were 
 foreign to our country. What was original with many 
 transatlantic poets was being merely aped by facile and 
 unoriginal bards in these states; concerned only with the 
 myths of other and older countries, they were blind to 
 the living legends of their own. In his "Song of the 
 Exposition" Whitman not only wrote his own credo, he 
 uttered the manifesto of the new generation — especially 
 in such lines: 
 
 Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia. 
 Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts; 
 That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas*, 
 Odysseus' wanderings; 
 
8 '•• Preface 
 
 Placard "Removefl£! and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy 
 
 Parnassus. . . '*. 
 For know that a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wider, untried 
 
 domain awaits, demands you. 
 
 THE AWAKENING OF THE WEST 
 
 By 1870 the public had been surfeited with sugared 
 conceits and fine-spun delicacies. For almost twelve years, 
 Whitman had stormed at the affectations of the period 
 but comparatively few had listened. Yet an instinctive 
 distaste for the prevailing superficialities had been grow- 
 ing, and when the West began to express itself in the 
 raw accents of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the people 
 turned to the new men with enthusiasm and relief. Mark 
 Twain, a prose Whitman, revealed the romantic Missis- 
 sippi and the vast Mid-West; Bret Harte, beginning a 
 new American fiction in 1868, ushered in the wild humor 
 and wilder poetry of California. It is still a question 
 whether Bret Harte or John Hay first discovered the 
 literary importance of Pike County narratives. Twain 
 was positive that Hay was the pioneer; documentary 
 evidence points to Harte. But it is indisputable that 
 Harte developed — and even overdeveloped — the pos- 
 sibilities of his backgrounds, whereas Hay after a few 
 brilliant ballads, reverted to his early poetic ideals and 
 turned to the production of studied, polished and undis- 
 tinguished verse. 
 
 To the loose swagger of the West, two other men 
 added their diverse contributions. Edward Rowland 
 Sill, cut short just as his work was gaining headway and 
 strength, brought to it a gentle radicalism, a calm and 
 cultured honesty; Joaquin Miller, rushing to the other 
 extreme, theatricalized and exaggerated all he touched. 
 He shouted platitudes at the top of his voice; his lines 
 
Preface 
 
 boomed with the pomposity of a brass band; floods, fires, 
 hurricanes, extravagantly blazing sunsets, Amazonian 
 women, the thunder of a herd of buffaloes — all were un- 
 mercifully piled on. And yet, even in its most blatant 
 fortissimoSj Miller's poetry occasionally captured the 
 lavish grandeur of his surroundings, the splendor of the 
 Sierras, the surge and spirit of the Western world. 
 
 Now that the leadership of letters had passed from 
 the East, all parts of the country began to try their 
 voices. The West continued to hold its tuneful su- 
 premacy; the tradition of Harte and Hay was followed 
 (softened and sentimentalized) by Eugene Field and 
 James Whitcomb Riley. In the South, Irwin Russell 
 was pioneering in negro dialect (1875) and Sidney 
 Lanier fashioned his intricate harmonies (1879). A few 
 years later (in 1888) Irwin Russell brought out his 
 faithfully rendered Dialect Poems and the first phase of 
 the American renascence had passed. 
 
 REACTION AND REVOLT IN THE ^OS 
 
 The reaction set in at the beginning of the last decade 
 of the nineteenth century. The passionate urge had 
 spent itself, and in its place there remained nothing but 
 that minor form of art which concerns itself less with 
 creation than with re-creation. These re-creators wrote 
 verse that was precise, scholarly and patently reproduc- 
 tive of their predecessors. "In 1890," writes Percy H. 
 Boynton, "the poetry-reading w r orld was chiefly conscious 
 of the passing of its leading singers for the last half- 
 century." The poetry of this period (whether it is the 
 hard, chiseled verse of John B. Tabb or the ornate 
 delicacy of Richard Watson Gilder) breathes a kind of 
 dying resignation. But those who regarded poetry chiefly 
 as a not too energetic indoor-exercise were not to rule 
 
io Preface 
 
 unchallenged. Restlessness was in the air and revolt 
 openly declared itself with the publication of Songs from 
 Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia 
 (1896) and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900). No 
 one could have been more surprised at the tremendous 
 popularity of these care-free celebrations (the first of 
 the three collections went through seven rapid editions) 
 than the young authors, Richard Hovey and Bliss Car- 
 man. In the very first poem, Hovey voices their mani- 
 festo : 
 
 Off with the fetters 
 That chafe and restrain! 
 Off with the chain! 
 Here Art and Letters, 
 Music and Wine 
 And Myrtle and Wanda, 
 The winsome witches, 
 Blithely combine. 
 Here is Golconda, 
 Here are the Indies, 
 Here we are free — 
 Free as the wind is, 
 Free as the sea, 
 Free ! 
 
 The new insurgence triumphed. It was the heartiness, 
 the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits that conquered. 
 Readers of the Vagabondia books were captivated, though 
 they were swept along by the speed of this poetry rather 
 than by its philosophy. 
 
 The enthusiastic acceptance of these new apostles of 
 outdoor vigor was, however, not as much of an accident 
 as it seemed. On one side, the world of art, the public 
 was wearied by barren philosophizing set to tinkling 
 music; on the other, the world of action, it was faced 
 by a staggering growth of materialism which it feared. 
 
Preface 1 1 
 
 Hovey, Carman and their imitators offered a swift and 
 stirring way out. But it was neither an effectual nor 
 a lasting escape. The war with Spain, the industrial 
 turmoil, the growth of social consciousness and new ideas 
 of responsibility made America look for fresh valuations, 
 more searching songs. Hovey began to go deeper into 
 himself and his age; in the Mid-West, William Vaughn 
 Moody grappled with the problems of his times only to 
 have his work cut short by death in 19 10. But these two 
 were exceptions; in the main, it was another interval — 
 two decades of appraisal and expectancy, of pause and 
 preparation. 
 
 interim — 1 89019 12 
 
 This interval of about twenty years was notable for 
 its effort to treat the spirit of the times with a cheerful 
 evasiveness, a humorous unconcern ; its most representa- 
 tive craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers 
 of light verse. These four exceptions were Richard 
 Hovey, Bliss Carman, William Vaughn Moody and Ed- 
 win Markham. Both Hovey and Carman saw wider 
 horizons and tuned their instruments to a larger music. 
 
 Moody's power was still greater. In "An Ode in 
 Time of Hesitation, " he protested against turning the 
 "new-world victories into gain" and painted America 
 on a majestic canvas. In "The Quarry" he celebrated 
 America's part in preventing the breaking-up of China 
 by the greedy empires of Europe (an act accomplished 
 by John Hay, poet and diplomat). In "On a Soldier 
 Fallen in the Philippines," a dirge wrenched from the 
 depths of his nature, Moody cried out against our own 
 grasping imperialists. It was the fulfilment of this earlier 
 poem which found its fierce climax in the lengthy Ode, 
 with lines like: 
 
12 Preface 
 
 Was it for this our fathers kept the law? 
 
 This crown shall crown their struggle and their truth? 
 
 Are we the eagle nation Milton saw 
 
 Mewing its mighty youth? . . . 
 
 .... O ye who lead 
 
 Take heed ! 
 
 Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite. 
 
 Early in 1899, the name of Edwin Markham flashed 
 across the land when, out of San Francisco, rose the 
 sonorous challenge of "The Man with the Hoe." This 
 poem, which has been ecstatically called "the battle-cry 
 of the next thousand years" (Joaquin Miller declared it 
 contained "The whole Yosemite — the thunder, the might, 
 the majesty"), caught up, with a prophetic vibrancy, the 
 passion for social justice that was waiting to be intensi- 
 fied in poetry. Markham summed up and spiritualized 
 the unrest that was in the air; in the figure of one man 
 with a hoe, he drew a picture of men in the mines, men 
 in the sweat-shop, men working without joy, without 
 hope. To social consciousness he added social conscience. 
 In a ringing blank verse, Markham crystallized the ex- 
 pression of outrage, the heated ferment of the period. His 
 was a vision of a new order, austere in beauty but deriv- 
 ing its life-blood from the millions struggling in the 
 depths. 
 
 Inspiring as these examples were, they did not generate 
 others of their kind; the field lay fallow for more than 
 a decade. The lull was pronounced, the gathering storm 
 remained inaudible. 
 
 RENASCENCE — 1913 
 
 Suddenly the "new" poetry burst upon us with unex- 
 pected vigor and extraordinary variety. October, 19 12, 
 saw the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, a 
 
Preface 13 
 
 monthly that was to introduce the work of hitherto un- 
 known poets and to herald the various groups, schools and 
 "movements." The magazine came at the very moment 
 before the breaking of the stcrm. Flashes and rumblings 
 had already been troubling the literary heavens; a few 
 months later — the deluge! ... By 1917, the "new" 
 poetry was ranked as "America's first national art"; its 
 success was sweeping, its sales unprecedented. People 
 who never before had read verse, turned to it and found 
 they could not only read but relish it. They discovered 
 that for the enjoyment of poetry it was not necessary to 
 have at their elbows a dictionary of rare words and 
 classical references; they no longer were required to be 
 acquainted with Latin legendry and the minor love-affairs 
 of the major Greek divinities. Life was their glossary, 
 not literature. The new product spoke to them in their 
 own language. And it did more: it spoke to them of 
 what they scarcely ever had heard expressed ; it was not 
 only closer to their soil but nearer to their souls. 
 
 ROBINSON AND MASTERS 
 
 One reason why the new poetry achieved so sudden a 
 success was its freedom from the traditionally stilted 
 "poetic diction." Revolting strongly against the assump- 
 tion that poetry must have a vocabulary of its own, the 
 poets of the new era spoke in the oldest and most stirring 
 tongue; they used a language that was the language not 
 of the poetasters but of the people. In the tones of ordi- 
 nary speech they rediscovered the strength, the dignity, 
 the divine core of the commonplace. 
 
 E. A. Robinson had already been employing the sharp 
 epithet, the direct and clarifying utterance which was to 
 become part of our present technique. As early as 1897, 
 in The Children of the Night, Robinson anticipated the 
 
14 Preface 
 
 brief characterizations and the etched outlines of Mas- 
 ters's Spoon River Anthology. His sympathetic studies 
 of men whose lives were, from a worldly standpoint, 
 failures were a sharp reaction to the current high valua- 
 tion on financial achievements, ruthless efficiency and 
 success at any cost. 
 
 Masters's most famous book will rank as one of the 
 landmarks of American literature. In it, he has synthe- 
 sized the small towns of the Mid-West with a background 
 that is unmistakably local and implications that are uni- 
 versal. This amazing volume, in its curiosity and compre- 
 hensiveness, is a broad cross-section of whole communities. 
 Beneath its surface tales and dramas, its condensation of 
 grocery-store gossip, Spoon River Anthology is a great 
 part of America in microcosm. The success of the 
 volume was sensational. It was actually one of the sea- 
 son's "best sellers ,, ; in a few months, it went into edi- 
 tion after edition. People forgot Masters's revelation of 
 the sordid cheats and hypocrisies, in their interest at see- 
 ing their neighbors so pitilessly exposed. Yet had Masters 
 dwelt only on the drab disillusion of the village, had he 
 (as he was constantly in danger of doing) overemphasized 
 the morbid episodes, he would have left only a spectacular 
 and poorly-balanced work. But the book ascends to 
 buoyant exaltation and ends on a plane of victorious 
 idealism. In its wide gamut, Spoon River, rising from 
 its narrow origins, reaches epical proportions. Indigenous 
 to its roots, it is stark, unflinching, unforgettable. 
 
 FROST AND SANDBURG 
 
 The same year that brought forth Spoon River An- 
 thology saw the American edition of Frost's North of 
 Boston. It was evident at once that the true poet of 
 New England had arrived. Unlike his predecessors, Frost 
 
Preface 15 
 
 was never a poetic provincial — never parochial in the sense 
 that America was still a literary parish of England. He 
 is as native as the lonely farmhouses, the dusty blue- 
 berries, the isolated people, the dried-up brooks and moun- 
 tain intervals that he describes. Loving, above everything 
 else, the beauty of the Fact, he shares, with Robinson and 
 Masters, the determination to tell not merely the actual 
 but the factual truth. But Frost, a less disillusioned 
 though a more saddened poet, w r ears his rue and his 
 realism with a difference. Where Robinson is down- 
 right and definite, Frost diverges, going roundabout and, 
 in his speculative w r andering, covering a wider territory 
 of thought. Where Masters is violent and hotly scorn- 
 ful, Frost is reticent and quietly sympathetic. Where 
 Robinson, in his reticent disclosures and reminiscent 
 moods, often reflects New England, Frost is New Eng- 
 land. 
 
 North of Boston is well described by the poet's own 
 sub-title: "a book of people." In it one not only sees 
 a countryside of people, one catches them thinking out 
 loud, one can hear the very tones of their voices. Here 
 we have speech so arranged and translated that the 
 speaker is heard on the printed page; any reader will 
 be led by the kind and color of these words into repro- 
 ducing the changing accents in which they are supposed 
 to be uttered. It is this insistence that "all poetry is the 
 reproduction of the tones of actual speech, " that gives 
 these poems, as well as the later ones, a quickly-communi- 
 cated emotional appeal. 
 
 Frost is by no means the dark naturalist that many 
 suspect. Behind the mask of "grimness" which many 
 of his critics have fastened upon him, there is a continual 
 elfin pucker; a whimsical smile, a half-disclosed raillery 
 glints beneath his most somber monologues. His most 
 
1 6 Preface 
 
 concrete facts are symbols of spiritual values; through his 
 very reticence one hears more than the voice of New 
 England. 
 
 Just so, the great Mid- West, that vast region of steel 
 mills and slaughter-houses, of cornfields and prairies, of 
 crowded cities and empty skies, speaks through Carl Sand- 
 burg. In Sandburg, industrial America has at last found 
 its voice: Chicago Poems (1916), Cornhuskers (1918), 
 Smoke and Steel ( 1 920) vibrate with the immense purring 
 of dynamos, the swishing rhythms of threshing arms, the 
 gossip and laughter of construction gangs, the gigantic 
 and tireless energy of the modern machine. Frankly 
 indebted to Whitman, Sandburg's poems are less sweeping 
 but more varied; musically his lines mark a real ad- 
 vance. He sounds the extremes of the gamut: there are 
 few poems in our language more violent than "To a 
 Contemporary Bunkshooter," few lyrics as hushed and 
 tender as "Cool Tombs." 
 
 When Chicago Poems first appeared, it was received 
 with a disfavor ranging from hesitant patronization to 
 the scornful jeers of the academicians. Sandburg was 
 accused of verbal anarchy; of a failure to distinguish 
 prose matter from poetic material; of uncouthness, vul- 
 garity, of assaults on the English language and a score 
 of other crimes. In the face of those who still see only 
 a coarseness and distorted veritism in Sandburg, it can- 
 not be said too often that he is brutal only when dealing 
 with brutal things; that his "vulgarity" springs from 
 an immense love of life, not from a merely decorative 
 part of it; that his bitterest invectives are the result of 
 a healthy disgust of shams; that, behind the force of his 
 projectile-phrases, there burns the greater flame of his 
 pity; that the strength of his hatred is exceeded only by 
 the mystic challenge of his love. 
 
Preface 17 
 
 THE IM AGISTS AND AMY LOWELL 
 
 Sandburg established himself as the most daring user 
 of American words — rude words ranging from the racy 
 metaphors of the soil to the slang of the street. But even 
 before this, the possibilities of a new vocabulary were 
 being tested. As early as 1865, Whitman was saying, 
 "We must have new words, new potentialities of speech 
 — an American range of self-expression. . . . The 
 new times, the new people need a tongue according, yes, 
 and what is more, they will have such a tongue — will 
 not be satisfied until it is evolved." 
 
 It is curious to think that one of the most effective 
 agents to fulfil Whitman's prophecy and free modern 
 poetry from its mouldering diction was that little band 
 of preoccupied specialists, the Imagists. Ezra Pound 
 was the first to gather the insurgents into a definite 
 group. During the winter of 1913, he collected a number 
 of poems illustrating the Imagist point of view and had 
 them printed in a volume: Des Imagistes (1914). A 
 little later, Pound withdrew from the clan. The rather 
 queerly assorted group began to disintegrate and Amy 
 Lowell, then in England, brought the best of the younger 
 members together in three yearly anthologies {Some Ima- 
 gist Poets) which appeared in 1915, 1916 and 1917. 
 There were, in Miss Lowell's new grouping, three Eng- 
 lishmen (D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, F. S. 
 Flint), three Americans (H. D., John Gould Fletcher, 
 Amy Lowell), and their creed, summed up in six articles 
 of faith, was as follows: 
 
 1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ 
 always the exact word, not the merely decorative word. 
 
 2. To create new rhythms — as the expression of new moods. 
 We do not insist upon ''free-verse" as the only method of 
 
1 8 Preface 
 
 writing poetry. . . . We do believe that the individuality of 
 a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than, in 
 conventional forms. 
 
 3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject. 
 
 4. To present an image (hence the name: "Imagist"). We 
 are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should 
 render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, 
 however magnificent and sonorous. 
 
 5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred 
 or indefinite. 
 
 6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very 
 essence of poetry. 
 
 It does not seem possible that these six obvious and 
 almost platitudinous principles, which the Imagists so 
 often neglected in their poetry, could have evoked the 
 storm of argument and fury that broke as soon as the 
 militant Amy Lowell began to champion them. Far 
 from being revolutionary, these principles were not new; 
 they were not even thought so by their sponsors. The 
 Imagists themselves realized they were merely restating 
 ideals which had fallen into desuetude, and declared, 
 "They are the essentials of all great poetry, indeed of all 
 great literature. " And yet many conservative critics, joined 
 by the one hundred per cent reactionaries, rushed wildly 
 to combat these "heresies"! They forgot that, in trying 
 to protect the future from such lawlessness as "using 
 the exact word," from allowing "freedom in the choice 
 of subject," from the importance of "concentration," 
 they were actually attacking the highest traditions of 
 their enshrined past. 
 
 The controversy succeeded in doing even more than 
 the work of the Imagists themselves. Miss Lowell was 
 left to carry on the battle single-handed; to defend the 
 theories which, in practice, she was beginning to violate 
 brilliantly. By all odds, the most energetic and unflagging 
 
Preface 19 
 
 experimenter, Miss Lowell's versatility became amazing. 
 She has written Chaucerian stanzas, polyphonic prose, 
 monologs in her native New England dialect, irregular 
 vers libre, conservative couplets, echoes from the Japanese, 
 translations from the Chinese, even primitve re-creations 
 of Indian folk-lore! 
 
 The work of the Imagists was done. Its members 
 began to develop themselves by themselves. They had 
 helped to swell the tide of realistic and romantic nat- 
 uralism — a tide of which their contribution was merely 
 one wave, a high breaker that carried its impact far 
 inshore. ^ ^Jfi^^ 
 
 THE NEW FOLK-POETRY 
 
 In a country that has not been mellowed by antiquity, 
 that has not possessed songs for its peasantry or tradi- 
 tions for its singers, one cannot look for a wealth of folk 
 stuff. In such a country — the United States, to be 
 specific — what folk-poetry there is, has followed the path 
 of the pioneer. At first these homely songs were merely 
 adaptations and localized versions of English ballads and 
 border minstrelsy, of which the "Lonesome Tunes" dis- 
 covered in the Kentucky mountains by Howard Brockway 
 and Loraine Wyman are excellent examples. But later, 
 a more definitely native spirit found expression in the 
 various sections of these states. 
 
 In the West today there is a revival of interest in 
 backwoods melodies and folk-created verse. John A. 
 Lomax has published two volumes of cowboy songs — 
 most of them anonymous — full of tang, wild fancy and 
 robust humor. Mary Austin, Natalie Curtis Burlin and 
 Lew Sarett are chief among those who have attempted 
 to bring the spirit of Indian tunes and chants into our 
 poetry. The tradition of Harte and Hay is being 
 
20 Preface 
 
 carried on by such racy interpreters as Harry Herbert 
 Knibbs, Badger Clark and Edwin Ford Piper. But, of 
 all contemporaries who approximate the spirit of folk- 
 poetry, none has made more striking or more indubitably 
 American contributions than Vachel Lindsay of Spring- 
 field, Illinois. 
 
 LINDSAY AND OPPENHEIM 
 
 Lindsay is essentially a people's poet. He does not 
 hesitate to express himself in terms of the lowest com- 
 mon denominator; his fingers are alternately on his pen 
 and the public pulse. Living near enough the South to 
 appreciate the negro, Lindsay has been tremendously 
 influenced by the colorful suggestions, the fantastic super- 
 stitions, the revivalistic gusto and, above all, by the 
 curiously syncopated music that characterize the black 
 man in America. In "The Congo" the words roll with 
 the solemnity of an exhortation, dance with a grotesque 
 fervor or snap, wink, crackle and leap with all the 
 humorous rhythms of a piece of "ragtime." Lindsay 
 catches the burly color and boisterous music of camp- 
 meetings, minstrel shows, revival jubilees. 
 
 And Lindsay does more. He carries his democratic 
 determinations further than any of his compatriots. His 
 dream is of the great communal Art; he preaches the 
 gospel that all villages should be centers of beauty, all its 
 citizens, artists. At heart a missionary even more than 
 a minstrel, Lindsay often loses himself in his own 
 evangelism; worse, he frequently cheapens himself and 
 caricatures his own gift by pandering to the vaudeville 
 instinct that insists on putting a noisy "punch" into 
 everything, regardless of taste, artistry or a sense of pro- 
 portion. He is most impressive when he is least frenzied, 
 when he is purely fantastic or when a greater theme and 
 
Preface 21 
 
 a finer restraint (as in "The Eagle That Is Forgotten") 
 unite to create a preaching that does not cease to be 
 poetry. 
 
 Something of the same blend of prophet and poet is 
 found in the work of James Oppenheim. Oppenheim is 
 a throwback to the ancient Hebrew singers; the music of 
 the Psalms rolls through his lines, the fire of Isaiah 
 kindles his spirit. This poetry, with its obvious re- 
 minders of Whitman, is biblical in its inflection, Ori- 
 ental in its heat. It runs through forgotten centuries 
 and brings buried Asia to busy America; it carries to 
 the Western world the color of the East. In books like 
 War and Laughter and Songs for the New Age, the 
 race of god-breakers and god-makers speaks with a new 
 voice; here, with analytic intensity, the old iconoclasm 
 and still older worship are again united. 
 
 SUMMARY THE NEW SPIRIT 
 
 Most of the poets represented in these pages have found 
 a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and 
 often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their 
 times; not only have their views changed, their vision 
 has been widened to include things unknown to the poet 
 of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real 
 beauty from mere prettiness; to wring loveliness out of 
 squalor; to find wonder in neglected places. 
 
 And with the use of the material of everyday life, 
 there has come a further simplification: the use of the 
 language of everyday speech. The stilted and mouth- 
 filling phrases have been practically discarded in favor 
 of words that are part of our daily vocabulary. It would 
 be hard at present to find a representative poet employing 
 such awkward and outworn contractions as 'twixt, 
 'mongst, ope' ; such evidences of poor padding as adown, 
 
22 Preface 
 
 did go, doth smile; such dull rubber-stamps {cliches is 
 the French term) as heavenly blue, roseate glow, golden 
 hope, girlish grace, gentle breeze, etc. The per adven- 
 tures, forsooths and mayhaps have disappeared. And, as 
 the speech of the modern poet has grown less elaborate, 
 so have the patterns that embody it. Not necessarily dis- 
 carding rhyme, regular rhythm or any of the musical 
 assets of the older poets, the forms have grown more 
 flexible; the intricate versification has given way to 
 simpler diction, direct vision and lines that reflect and 
 suggest the tones of animated or exalted speech. The 
 result of this has been a great gain both in sincerity and 
 intensity; it has enabled the poet of today to put greater 
 emphasis on his emotion rather than on the cloak that 
 covers it. 
 
 One could go into minute particulars concerning the 
 growth of an American spirit in our literature and point 
 out how many of the latter-day poets have responded to 
 native forces larger than their backgrounds. Such a 
 course would be endless and unprofitable. It is pertinent, 
 however, to observe that, young as this nation is, it is 
 already being supplied with the stuff of legends, ballads 
 and even epics. The modern singer has turned to cele- 
 brate his own folk-tales. It is particularly interesting to 
 observe how the figure of Lincoln has been treated by 
 the best of our living poets. I have, accordingly, included 
 six poems by six writers, each differing in manner, 
 technique and point of view. 
 
 To those who still complain that this modern poetry 
 lacks the clear, simple beauty found in the ripe literature 
 of the past, it may be answered that this is a complex, 
 unripe and experimental age. It is only when we under- 
 stand our "new" American writing to be part of a 
 literature of protest — protest against ugliness, machine- 
 
Preface 23 
 
 made progress, standardized "success" — that we can under- 
 stand and appreciate its quality. As The Literary Review 
 (N. Y. Post) said, in an editorial in January, 1922: 
 "We could not go on with sentimental novels and spine- 
 less lyrics forever. The artists had to refocus the instru- 
 ment and look at reality again. And what the honest 
 saw was not beautiful as Tennyson knew beauty, not 
 grand, not even very pleasant. It is their task to make 
 beauty out of it, beauty of a new kind probably, because 
 it will accompany new truth; but they must have time. 
 The 'new' literature deserves criticism, but it also deserves 
 respect." 
 
 For the rest, I leave the casual reader, as well as the 
 student, to discover the awakened vigor and energy in 
 this, one of the few great poetic periods in native litera- 
 ture. 
 
Emily Dickinson 
 
 Emily Dickinson, whose work is one of the most original 
 contributions to recent poetry, was born in Amherst, Massa- 
 chusetts, December 10, 1830. She was a physical as well as a 
 spiritual hermit, actually spending most of her life without 
 setting foot beyond her doorstep. She wrote her short, intro- 
 spective verses without thought of publication, and it was not 
 until 1890, four years after her death, that the first volume 
 of her posthumous poetry appeared with an introduction by 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. 
 
 "She habitually concealed her mind, like her person, from 
 all but a very few friends," writes Higginson, "and it was 
 with great difficulty that she was persuaded to print, during her 
 lifetime, three or four poems." Yet she wrote almost five hun- 
 dred of these direct and spontaneous illuminations, sending 
 many of them in letters to friends, or (written on chance slips 
 of paper and delivered without further comment) to her sister 
 Sue. Slowly the peculiar, Blake-like quality of her thought 
 won a widening circle of readers; Poems (1890) was followed 
 by Poems — Second Series (1892) and Poems — Third Series 
 (1896), the contents being collected and edited by her two 
 friends, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. 
 Several years later, a further generous volume was assembled 
 by her niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, entitled The Single 
 Hound (1914). 
 
 The sharp quality of her work, with its cool precision and 
 clear imagery, makes her akin, at least in technique, to the 
 later Imagists. (See Preface.) But a passionate and almost 
 mystical warmth brings her closer to the great ones of her 
 time. "An epigrammatic Walt Whitman," some one has called 
 her, a characterization which, while enthusiastic to the point of 
 exaggeration, expresses the direction if not the execution of her 
 art. Technically, Emily Dickinson's work is strikingly uneven; 
 many of her poems are no more than rough sketches, awkwardly 
 filled in; even some of her finest lines are marred by the in- 
 trusion of merely trivial conceits or forced "thought-rhymes." 
 
 25 
 
26 Emily Dickinson 
 
 But the best of her work is incomparable in its strange cadence 
 and quiet intensity. Her verses are like a box of many jewels, 
 sparkling with an unexpected brilliancy. 
 
 Emily Dickinson died, in the same place she was born, at 
 Amherst, May 15, 1886. 
 
 CHARTLESS 
 
 I never saw a moor, 
 
 I never saw the sea; 
 
 Yet now I know how the heather looks, 
 
 And what a wave must be. 
 
 I never spoke with God, 
 Nor visited in Heaven; 
 Yet certain am I of the spot 
 As if the chart were given. 
 
 INDIAN SUMMER 
 
 These are the days when birds come back, 
 A very few, a bird or two, 
 To take a backward look. 
 
 These are the days when skies put on 
 The old, old sophistries of June, — 
 A blue and gold mistake. 
 
 Oh, fraud that can not cheat the bee, 
 Almost thy plausibility 
 Induces my belief, 
 
 Till ranks of seeds their witness bear, 
 And softly through the altered air 
 Hurries a timid leaf! 
 
Emily Dickinson 27 
 
 Oh, sacrament of summer days, 
 Oh, last communion in the haze, 
 Permit a child to join, 
 
 Thy sacred emblems to partake, 
 Thy consecrated bread to break, 
 Taste thine immortal wine! 
 
 SUSPENSE 
 
 Elysium is as far as to 
 
 The very nearest room, 
 
 If in that room a friend await 
 
 Felicity or doom. 
 
 What fortitude the soul contains, 
 That it can so endure 
 The accent of a coming foot, 
 The opening of a door. 
 
 A CEMETERY 
 
 This quiet Dust was Gentlemen and Ladies, 
 
 And Lads and Girls; 
 Was laughter and ability and sighing, 
 
 And frocks and curls. 
 This passive place a Summer's nimble mansion, 
 
 Where Bloom and Bees 
 Fulfilled their Oriental Circuit, 
 
 Then ceased like these. 
 
 BECLOUDED 
 
 The sky is low, the clouds are mean, 
 A travelling flake of snow 
 
Emily Dickinson 
 
 Across a barn or through a rut 
 Debates if it will go. 
 
 A narrow wind complains all day- 
 How some one treated him; 
 Nature, like us, is sometimes caught 
 Without her diadem. 
 
 PEDIGREE 
 
 The pedigree of honey 
 Does not concern the bee; 
 
 A clover, any time, to him 
 Is aristocracy. 
 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in 1836 at Portsmouth, New 
 Hampshire, where he spent most of the sixteen years which he 
 has recorded in that delightful memoir, The Story of a Bad 
 Boy (1869). From 1855 to 1866 he held various journalistic 
 positions, associating himself with the leading metropolitan 
 literati. A few years later he became editor of the famous 
 Atlantic Monthly, holding that position from 1881 to 1890. 
 
 Aldrich's work falls into two sharply-divided classes. The 
 first half is full of overloaded phrase-making, fervid extrava- 
 gances. The reader sinks beneath clouds of damask, azure, 
 emerald, pearl and gold; he is drowned in a sea of musk, aloes, 
 tiger-lilies, spice, soft music, orchids, attar-breathing dusks. 
 Too often, Aldrich dwelt in a literary Orientalism; his Cloth 
 of Gold was suffused with "vanilla-flavored adjectives and 
 patchouli-scented participles" (to quote Holmes), laboring hard 
 to create an exotic atmosphere by a wearisome profusion of 
 lotus blossoms, sandalwood, spikenard, blown roses, diaphanous 
 gauzes, etc. 
 
 The second phase of Aldrich's art is more human in appeal 
 as it is surer in artistry. "In the little steel engravings that 
 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich 29 
 
 are the best expressions of his peculiar talent," writes Percy H. 
 Boynton, "there is a fine simplicity; but it is the simplicity of 
 an accomplished woman of the world rather than of a village 
 maid." Although Aldrich bitterly resented the charge that he 
 was a maker of tiny perfections, a carver of cherry-stones, 
 those poems of his which have the best chance of permanence 
 are the short lyrics and a few of the sonnets, exquisite in design. 
 The best of Aldrich's diffuse poetry has been collected in an 
 inclusive Household Edition, published by Houghton, Mifflin 
 and Company. He died in 1907. 
 
 MEMORY 
 
 My mind lets go a thousand things, 
 Like dates of wars and deaths of kings, 
 And yet recalls the very hour — 
 'Twas noon by yonder village tower, 
 And on the last blue noon in May — 
 The wind came briskly up this way, 
 Crisping the brook beside the road; 
 Then, pausing here, set down its load 
 Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly 
 Two petals from that wild-rose tree. 
 
 "ENAMORED ARCHITECT OF AIRY RHYME" 
 
 Enamored architect of airy rhyme, 
 
 Build as thou wilt, heed not what each man says. 
 
 Good souls, but innocent of dreamers' ways, 
 
 Will come, and marvel why thou wastest time; 
 
 Others, beholding how thy turrets climb 
 
 'Twixt theirs and heaven, will hate thee all thy days; 
 
 But most beware of those w r ho come to praise. 
 
 O Wondersmith, O worker in sublime 
 
30 Thomas Bailey Aldrich 
 
 And heaven-sent dreams, let art be all in all; 
 Build as thou wilt, unspoiled by praise or blame, 
 Build as thou wilt, and as thy light is given; 
 Then, if at last the airy structure fall, 
 Dissolve, and vanish — take thyself no shame. 
 They fail, and they alone, who have not striven. 
 
 John Hay 
 
 John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated 
 from Brown University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois 
 bar a few years later. He became private secretary to Lin- 
 coln, then major and assistant adjutant-general under General 
 Gilmore, then secretary of the Legation at Paris, charge 
 d'affaires at Vienna and secretary of legation at Madrid. 
 
 His few vivid Pike County Ballads came more as a happy 
 accident than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay re- 
 turned from Spain in 1870, bringing with him his Castilian 
 Days, he had visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. 
 But he found everyone reading Bret Harte's short stories and 
 the new expression of the rude West. (See Preface.) He specu- 
 lated upon the possibility of doing something similar, translating 
 the characters into poetry. The result was the six racy ballads 
 in a vein utterly different from everything Hay wrote before or 
 after. 
 
 Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as 
 one of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has 
 ever had. He died in 1905. 
 
 JIM BLUDSO, 
 
 OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE 
 
 Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives, 
 Becase he don't live, you see ; 
 
 Leastways, he's got out of the habit 
 Of livin' like you and me. 
 
John Hay 31 
 
 Whar have you been for the last three year 
 
 That you haven't heard folks tell 
 How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks 
 
 The night of the Prairie Belle? 
 
 He warn't no saint, — them engineers 
 
 Is all pretty much alike, — 
 One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill 
 
 And another one here, in Pike; 
 A keerless man in his talk was Jim, 
 
 And an awkward hand in a row, 
 But he never flunked, and he never lied, — 
 
 I reckon he never knowed how. 
 
 And this w T as all the religion he had : 
 
 To treat his engine well; 
 Never be passed on the river; 
 
 To mind the pilot's bell ; 
 And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire, 
 
 A thousand times he swore, 
 He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank 
 
 Till the last soul got ashore. 
 
 All boats has their day on the Mississip, 
 
 And her day come at last, — 
 The Movastar was a better boat, 
 
 But the Belle she wouldn't be passed. 
 And so she came tearin' along that night — 
 
 The oldest craft on the line — 
 With a nigger squat on her safety-valve, 
 
 And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine. 
 
 The fire bust out as she clar'd the bar, 
 
 And burnt a hole in the night, 
 And quick as a flash she turned and made 
 
 For that wilier-bank on the right. 
 
32 John Hay 
 
 Thar was runnirv and cussing but Jim yelled out, 
 
 Over all the infernal roar, 
 "I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank 
 
 Till the last galoot's ashore." 
 
 Through the hot, black breath of the burnin' boat 
 
 Jim Bludso's voice was heard, 
 And they all had trust in his cussedness, 
 
 And knowed he would keep his word. 
 And, sure's you're born, they all got off 
 
 Afore the smokestacks fell, — 
 And Bludso's ghost went up alone 
 
 In the «smoke of the Prairie Belle. 
 
 He warn't no saint, — but at jedgement 
 
 I'd run my chance with Jim, 
 'Longside of some pious gentlemen 
 
 That wouldn't shook hands with him. 
 He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing, — 
 
 And went for it thar and then; 
 And Christ ain't a goin' to be too hard 
 
 On a man that died for men. 
 
 Bret Harte 
 
 (Francis) Bret Harte was born August 25, 1839, at Albany, 
 New York. His childhood was spent in various cities of the 
 East. Late in 1853, his widowed mother went to California 
 with a party of relatives, and two months later, when he was 
 fifteen, Bret Harte and his sister followed. 
 
 Harte's fame came suddenly. Late in the sixties, he had 
 written a burlesque in rhyme of two Western gamblers trying 
 to fleece a guileless Chinaman who claimed to know nothing 
 about cards but who, it turned out, was scarcely as innocent 
 as he appeared. Harte, in the midst of writing serious poetry, 
 had put the verses aside as too crude and trifling for publica- 
 tion. Some time later, just as The Overland Monthly was 
 
Bret Harte 33 
 
 going to press, it was discovered that the form was one page 
 short. Having nothing else on hand, Harte had these rhymes 
 set up. Instead of passing unnoticed, the poem was quoted 
 everywhere; it swept the West and captivated the East. When 
 his volume The Luck of Roaring Camp followed, Harte be- 
 came not only a national but an international figure. 
 
 In 1872 Harte, encouraged by his success, returned to his 
 native East; in 1878 he went to Germany as consul. Two years 
 later he was transferred to Scotland and, after five years there, 
 went to London, where he remained the rest of his life. 
 Harte's later period remains mysteriously shrouded. He never 
 came back to America, not even for a visit; he separated him- 
 self from all the most intimate associations of his early life. 
 He died, suddenly, at Camberley, England, May 6, 1902. 
 
 "JIM" 
 
 Say there! PVaps 
 Some on you chaps 
 
 Might know Jim Wild? 
 Well, — no offense: 
 Thar ain't no sense 
 
 In gittin' riled! 
 
 Jim was my chum 
 
 Up on the Bar: 
 That's why I come 
 
 Down from up yar, 
 Lookin' for Jim. 
 Thank ye, sir! You 
 Ain't of that crew, — 
 
 Blest if you are! 
 
 Money? Not much: 
 That ain't my kind ; 
 
 I ain't no such. 
 
 Rum? I don't mind, 
 
 Seem' it's you. 
 
34 Bret Harte 
 
 Well, this yer Jim, — 
 Did you know him ? 
 Jes' 'bout your size; 
 Same kind of eyes; — 
 Well, that is strange: 
 Why, it's two year 
 Since he came here, 
 Sick, for a change. 
 
 Well, here's to us: 
 
 Eh? 
 The h you say ! 
 
 Dead? 
 That little cuss? 
 
 What makes you star', 
 You over thar? 
 Can't a man drop 
 's glass in yer shop 
 But you must r'ar? 
 It wouldn't take 
 
 D d much to break 
 
 You and your bar. 
 
 Dead! 
 Poor — little — Jim ! 
 Why, thar was me, 
 Jones, and Bob Lee, 
 Harry and Ben, — 
 No-account men: 
 Then to take him I 
 
 Well, thar — Good-bye. 
 No more, sir — I — 
 Eh? 
 
Bret Harte 35 
 
 What's that you say? 
 Why, dern it! — sho! — 
 No? Yes! By Joe! 
 
 Sold! 
 Sold! Why, you limb, 
 You ornery, 
 
 Derned, old, 
 Long-legged Jim. 
 
 PLAIN LANGUAGE FROM TRUTHFUL JAMES 
 
 {Table Mountain, 1870) 
 
 Which I wish to remark 
 
 And my language is plain, 
 That for ways that are dark 
 
 And for tricks that are vain, 
 The heathen Chinee is peculiar, 
 
 Which the same I would rise to explain. 
 
 Ah Sin was his name; 
 
 And I shall not deny, 
 In regard to the same, 
 
 What that name might imply; 
 But his smile, it was pensive and childlike, 
 
 As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye. 
 
 It was August the third, 
 
 And quite soft w r as the skies; 
 Which it might be inferred 
 
 That Ah Sin was likewise; 
 Yet he played it that day upon William 
 
 And me in a way I despise. 
 
36 Bret Harte 
 
 Which we had a small game, 
 
 And Ah Sin took a hand: 
 It was Euchre. The same 
 
 He did not understand; 
 But he smiled as he sat by the table, 
 
 With a smile that was childlike and bland. 
 
 Yet the cards they were stocked 
 
 In a way that I grieve, 
 And my feelings were 'shocked 
 
 At the state of Nye's sleeve, 
 Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, 
 
 And the same with intent to deceive; 
 
 But the hands that were played 
 
 By that heathen Chinee, 
 And the points that he made, 
 
 Were quite frightful to see, — 
 Till at last he put down a right bower 
 
 Which the same Nye had dealt unto me! 
 
 Then I looked up at Nye, 
 
 And he gazed upon me; 
 And he rose with a sigh, 
 
 And said, "Can this be? 
 We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor," — 
 
 And he went for that heathen Chinee. 
 
 In the scene that ensued 
 
 I did not take a hand, 
 But the floor it was strewed 
 
 Like the leaves on the strand 
 With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding, 
 
 In the game "he did not understand." 
 
Bret Harte 37 
 
 In his sleeves, which were long, 
 
 .He had twenty-four packs, — 
 Which was coming it strong, 
 
 Yet I state but the facts; 
 And we found on his nails, which were taper, 
 
 What is frequent in tapers, — that's wax. 
 
 Which is why I remark, 
 
 And my language is plain, 
 That for ways that are dark 
 
 And for tricks that are vain, 
 The heathen Chinee is peculiar, — 
 
 Which the same I am free to maintain. 
 
 Joaquin Miller 
 
 Cincinnatus (Heine) Miller, or, to give him the name he 
 adopted, Joaquin Miller, was born in 1841 of immigrant 
 parents. As he himself writes, "My cradle was a covered 
 wagon, pointed west. I was born in a covered wagon, I am 
 told, at or about the time it crossed the line dividing Indiana 
 from Ohio." 
 
 At fifteen we find Miller living with the Indians as one of 
 them; in 1859 ( at tne a g e of eighteen) he attends a mission- 
 school "college" in Eugene, Oregon; between i860 and 1865 
 he is express-messenger, editor of a pacifist newspaper that is 
 suppressed for opposing the Civil War, lawyer and, occasion- 
 ally, a poet. He holds a minor judgeship from 1866 to 1870. 
 
 His first book {Specimens) appears in 1868, his second 
 {Joaquin et al., from which he took his name) in 1869. No 
 response — not even from "the bards of San Francisco Bay" to 
 whom he has dedicated the latter volume. He is chagrined, 
 discouraged, angry. He shakes the dust of America from his 
 feet; goes to London; publishes a volume {Pacific Poems) at 
 his own expense and — overnight — becomes a sensation ! 
 
 His dramatic success in England is easily explained. He 
 brought to the calm air of literary London, a breath of the 
 
38 Joaquin Miller 
 
 great winds of the plain. The more he exaggerated his 
 crashing effects, the better the English public liked it. When 
 he entered Victorian parlors in his velvet jacket, hip-boots and 
 flowing hair, childhood visions of the "wild and woolly West- 
 erner" were realized and the very bombast of his work was 
 glorified as "typically American." 
 
 From 1872 to 1886, Miller traveled about the Continent. 
 In 1887 ne returned to California, dwelling on the Heights, 
 helping to found an experimental Greek academy for aspiring 
 writers. He died there, after a determinedly picturesque life, 
 in sight of the Golden Gate, in 1913. 
 
 FROM "BYRON" 
 
 In men whom men condemn as ill 
 
 I find so much of goodness still, 
 
 In men whom men pronounce divine 
 
 I find so much of sin and blot, 
 
 I do not dare to draw a line 
 
 Between the two, where God has not. 
 
 COLUMBUS 1 
 
 Behind him lay the gray Azores, 
 
 Behind the Gates of Hercules; 
 Before him not the ghost of shores, 
 
 Before him only shoreless seas. 
 The good mate said: "Now must we pray, 
 
 For lo! the very stars are gone. 
 Brave Admiral, speak, what shall I say?" 
 
 "Why, say 'Sail on ! sail on ! and on !' ' 
 
 1 Permission to reprint this poem was granted by the Harr 
 Wagner Publishing Co., San Francisco, California, publishers of 
 Joaquin Miller's Complete Poetical Works. 
 
Joaquin Miller 39 
 
 "My men grow mutinous day by day; 
 
 My men grow ghastly wan and weak." 
 The stout mate thought of home ; a spray 
 
 Of salt wave washed his swarthy cheek. 
 "What shall I say, brave Admiral, say, 
 
 If we sight naught but seas at dawn?" 
 "Why, you shall say at break of day, 
 
 'Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!' ' 
 
 They sailed and sailed, as winds might blow, 
 
 Until at last the blanched mate said, 
 "Why, now not even God would know 
 
 Should I and all my men fall dead. 
 These very winds forget their way, 
 
 For God from these dread seas is gone. 
 Now speak, brave Admiral, speak and say" — 
 
 He said: "Sail on! sail on! and on!" 
 
 They sailed. They sailed. Then spake the mate: 
 
 "This mad sea shows his teeth to-night. 
 He curls his lip, he lies in wait, 
 
 With lifted teeth, as if to bite! 
 Brave Admiral, say but one good word : 
 
 What shall we do when hope is gone?" 
 The words leapt like a leaping sword : 
 
 "Sail on! sail on! sail on! and on!" 
 
 Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck, 
 
 And peered through darkness. Ah, that night 
 Of all dark nights ! And then a speck — 
 
 A light! a light! a light! a light! 
 It grew, a starlit flag unfurled ! 
 
 It grew to be Time's burst of dawn. 
 He gained a world; he gave that world 
 
 Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!" 
 
4-0 Edward Rowland Sill 
 
 Edward Rowland Sill was born at Windsor, Connecticut, in 
 1841. In 1861 he was graduated from Yale and shortly there- 
 after his poor health compelled him West. After various un- 
 successful experiments, he drifted into teaching, first in the high 
 schools in Ohio, later in the English department of the Uni- 
 versity of California. 
 
 The Hermitage, his first volume, was published in 1867, a 
 later edition (including later poems) appearing in 1889. His 
 two posthumous books are Poems (1887) an d Hermione and 
 Other Poems (1899). 
 
 Sill died, after bringing something of the Eastern culture to 
 the West, in 1887. 
 
 OPPORTUNITY 
 
 This I beheld, or dreamed it in a dream: — 
 
 There spread a cloud of dust along a plain; 
 
 And underneath the cloud, or in it, raged 
 
 A furious battle, and men yelled, and -swords 
 
 Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner 
 
 Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. 
 
 A craven hung along the battle's edge, 
 
 And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel — 
 
 That blue blade that the king's son bears, — but this 
 
 Blunt thing — !" he snapt and flung it from his hand, 
 
 And lowering crept away and left the field. 
 
 Then came the king's son, wounded, 'sore bestead, 
 
 And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, 
 
 Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, 
 
 And ran and snatched it, and with battle-shout 
 
 Lifted afresh he hewed his enemy down, 
 
 And saved a great cause that heroic day. 
 
 Sidney Lanier 
 
 Sidney Lanier was born at Macon, Georgia, February 3, 1842. 
 His was a family of musicians (Lanier himself was a skilful 
 
Sidney Lanier 41 
 
 performer on various instruments), and it is not surprising that 
 his verse emphasizes — even overstresses — the influence of music 
 on poetry. He attended Oglethorpe College, graduating at the 
 age of eighteen (i860), and, a year later, volunteered as a 
 private in the Confederate army. After several months' im- 
 prisonment (he had been captured while acting as signal officer 
 on a blockade-runner), Lanier was released in February, 1865. 
 
 After studying and abandoning the practise of law, he be- 
 came a flute-player in the Peabody Symphony Orchestra in 1873 
 in Baltimore, where he had free access to the music and litera- 
 ture he craved. Here he wrote all of his best poetry. In 1879, 
 he was made lecturer on English in Johns Hopkins University, 
 and it was for his courses there that he wrote his chief prose 
 work, a brilliant if not conclusive study, The Science of English 
 Verse. Besides his poetry, he wrote several books for boys, 
 the two most popular being The Boy's Froissart (1878) and 
 The Boy's King Arthur (1880). 
 
 Lanier ranks high among our minor poets. Such a vigor- 
 ous ballad as "The Song of the Chattahoochee," lyrics like 
 "The Stirrup Cup" and parts of the symphonic "Hymns of the 
 Marshes" are sure of a place in American literature. 
 
 Lanier died, a victim of tuberculosis in the mountains of 
 North Carolina, September 7, 1881. 
 
 SONG OF THE CHATTAHOOCHEE x 
 
 Out of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Down the valleys of Hall, 
 I hurry amain to reach the plain, 
 Run the rapid and leap the fall, 
 Split at the rock and together again, 
 Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, 
 And flee from folly on every side 
 With a lover $ pain to attain the plain 
 
 Far from the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Far from the valleys of Hall. 
 
 1 From Poems of Sidney Lanier. Copyright, 1884, 1891, 1916, 
 by Mary D. Lanier; published by Charles Scribner's Sons. By 
 permission of the publishers. 
 
42 Sidney Lanier 
 
 All down the hills of Habersham, 
 All through the valleys of Hall, 
 The rushes cried Abide, abide, 
 The willful waterweeds held me thrall, 
 The laving laurel turned my tide, 
 The ferns and the fondling grass said Stay, 
 The dewberry dipped for to work delay, 
 And the little reeds sighed Abide, abide, 
 Here in the hills of Habersham, 
 Here in the valleys of Hall. 
 
 High o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Veiling the valleys of Hall, 
 The hickory told me manifold 
 Fair tales of shade, the poplar tall 
 Wrought me her shadowy self to hold, 
 The chestnut, the oak, the walnut, the pine, 
 Overleaning, with flickering meaning and sign, 
 Said, Pass not, so cold, these manifold 
 
 Deep shades of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 These glades in the valleys of Hall. 
 
 And oft in the hills of Habersham, 
 
 And oft in the valleys of Hall, 
 The white quartz shone, and the smooth brook-stone 
 Did bar me of passage with friendly brawl, 
 And many a luminous jewel lone 
 — Crystals clear or acloud with mist, 
 Ruby, garnet and amethyst — 
 Made lures with the lights of streaming stone 
 
 In the clefts of the hills of Habersham, 
 
 In the beds of the valleys of Hall. 
 
Sidney Lanier 43 
 
 But oh, not the hills of Habersham, 
 
 And oh, not the valleys of Hall 
 Avail: I am fain for to water the plain. 
 Downward the voices of Duty call — 
 Downward, to toil and be mixed with the main, 
 The dry fields burn, and the mills are to turn, 
 And a myriad flowers mortally yearn, 
 And the lordly main from beyond the plain 
 
 Calls o'er the hills of Habersham, 
 
 Calls through the valleys of Hall. 
 
 Charles Edward Carryl 
 
 Charles Edward Carryl, father of the gifted Guy Wet- 
 more Carryl (see page 92), was born in New York City, 
 December 30, 184.2. He was an officer and director in various 
 railroads but found leisure to write two of the few worthy 
 rivals of the immortal Alice in W onderland. These two, Davy 
 and the Goblin (1884), and The Admiral's Caravan (1891), 
 contain many lively and diverting ballads as well as inspired 
 nonsense verses in the manner of his famous model. 
 
 C. E. Carryl lived the greater part of his life in New York 
 but, on retiring from business, removed to Boston and lived there 
 until his death, which occurred in the summer of 1920. 
 
 ROBINSON CRUSOE'S STORY 
 
 The night was thick and hazy 
 
 When the "Piccadilly Daisy" 
 Carried down the crew and captain in the sea; 
 
 And I think the water drowned 'em 
 
 For they never, never found 'em 
 And I know they didn't come ashore with me. 
 
44 Charles Edward Carryl 
 
 Oh! 'twas very sad and lonely 
 
 When I found myself the only 
 Population on this cultivated shore; 
 
 But I've made a little tavern 
 
 In a rocky little cavern, 
 And I sit and watch for people at the door. 
 
 I spent no time in looking 
 
 For a girl to do my cooking, 
 As I'm quite a clever hand at making stews; 
 
 But I had that fellow Friday, 
 
 Just to keep the tavern tidy, 
 And to put a Sunday polish on my shoes. 
 
 I have a little garden 
 
 That Fm cultivating lard in, 
 As the things I eat are rather tough and dry; 
 
 For I live on toasted lizards, 
 
 Prickly pears, and parrot gizzards, 
 And I'm really very fond of beetle-pie. 
 
 The clothes I had were furry, 
 And it made me fret and worry 
 
 When I found the moths were eating off the hair; 
 And I had to scrape and sand 'em 
 And I boiled 'em and I tanned 'em, 
 
 Till I got the fine morocco suit I wear. 
 
 I sometimes seek diversion 
 
 In a family excursion 
 With the few domestic animals you see; 
 
 And we take along a carrot 
 
 As refreshment for the parrot 
 And a little can of jungleberry tea. 
 
Charles Edward Carryl 45 
 
 Then we gather as we travel, 
 
 Bits of moss and dirty gravel, 
 And we chip off little specimens of stone; 
 
 And we carry home as prizes 
 
 Funny bugs, of handy sizes, 
 Just to give the day a scientific tone. 
 
 If the roads are wet and muddy 
 
 We remain at home and study, — 
 For the Goat is very clever at a sum, — 
 
 And the Dog, instead of fighting, 
 
 Studies ornamental writing, 
 While the Cat is taking lessons on the drum. 
 
 We retire at eleven, 
 
 And we rise again at seven ; 
 And I wish to call attention, as I close, 
 
 To the fact that all the scholars 
 
 Are correct about their collars, 
 And particular in turning out their toes. 
 
 James Whit comb Riley 
 
 James Whitcomb Riley, who was possibly the most widely 
 read native poet of his day, was born October 7, 1849, m 
 Greenfield, Indiana, a small town twenty miles from Indian- 
 apolis, where he spent his later years. Contrary to the popular 
 belief, Riley was not, as many have gathered from his bucolic 
 dialect poems, a struggling child of the soil; his father was a 
 lawyer in comfortable circumstances and Riley was not only 
 given a good education but was prepared for the law. How- 
 ever, his temperament was restless; it made him try sign-paint- 
 ing, circus advertising, journalism. 
 
 In 1882, when he was on the staff of the Indianapolis Journal, 
 he began the series of dialect poems which he claimed were by 
 a rude and unlettered farmer, one "Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone, 
 
46 James White omb Riley 
 
 the Hoosier poet" — printing long extracts from "Boone's" un- 
 grammatical and badly-spelt letters to prove his find. A collec- 
 tion of these rustic verses appeared, in 1883, as The Ole 
 Swimmin' Hole; and Riley leaped into widespread popularity. 
 
 Other collections followed rapidly: Afterwhiles (1887), Old- 
 Fashioned Roses (1888), Rhymes of Childhood (1890). All met 
 an instant response; Riley endeared himself, by his homely 
 idiom and his ingenuity, to a countryful of readers, adolescent 
 and adult. 
 
 That work of his which may endure, will survive because of 
 the personal flavor that Riley often poured into it. Such poems 
 as "When the Frost is on the Punkin," and "The Raggedy 
 Man" are a part of American folk literature; "Little Orphant 
 Annie" is read wherever there is a schoolhouse or, for that 
 matter, a nursery. 
 
 Riley died in his little house in Lockerbie Street, Indianapolis, 
 July 22, 1916. 
 
 "WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUNKIN" 1 
 
 When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 
 
 shock, 
 And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' 
 
 turkey-cock, 
 And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the 
 
 hens, 
 And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; 
 O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best, 
 With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful 
 
 rest, 
 As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed 
 
 the stock, 
 When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 
 
 shock. 
 
 1 From the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of 
 James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright, 1913. Used by special per- 
 mission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 
 
James Whit comb Riley ^rj 
 
 They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere 
 When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is 
 
 here — 
 Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the 
 
 trees, 
 And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of 
 
 the bees; 
 But the air's so appetizin' ; and the landscape through the 
 
 haze 
 Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days 
 Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock — 
 When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 
 
 shock. 
 
 The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn, 
 And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the 
 
 morn ; 
 The stubble in the furries — kindo' lonesome-like, but still 
 A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill ; 
 The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed ; 
 The hosses in theyr stalls below — the clover overhead! — 
 O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock 
 When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 
 
 shock. 
 
 Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller 
 
 keeps 
 Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps; 
 And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks 
 
 is through 
 With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and 
 
 sausage too! . . . 
 I don't know how to tell it — but ef such a thing could be 
 As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around 
 
 on me — 
 
48 James Whitcomb Riley 
 
 I'd want to 'commodate 'em — all the whole-indui'in* 
 
 flock- 
 When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the 
 
 shock. 
 
 A PARTING GUEST 1 
 
 What delightful hosts are they — 
 
 Life and Love! 
 Lingeringly I turn away, 
 
 This late hour, yet glad enough 
 They have not withheld from me 
 
 Their high hospitality. 
 So, with face lit with delight 
 
 And all gratitude, I stay 
 
 Yet to press their hands and say, 
 "Thanks. — So fine a time! Good night." 
 
 1 From the Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of 
 James Whitcomb Riley. Copyright, 1913. Used by special per- 
 mission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 
 
 Eugene Field 
 
 Although born (September 3, 1850) in St. Louis, Missouri, 
 Eugene Field belongs to the literature of the far West. Colo- 
 rado and the Rocky Mountain region claimed him as their own 
 and Field never repudiated the allegiance; he even called most 
 of his poetry "Western Verse." 
 
 Field's area of education embraced New England, Missouri, 
 and what European territory he could cover in six months. 
 At twenty-three he became a reporter on the St. Louis Evening 
 Journal, the rest of his life being given to journalism. 
 
 Though Field may be overrated in some quarters, there 
 is little doubt that certain of his child lyrics, his homely phi- 
 losophic ballads (in the vein which Harte and Riley popu- 
 larized) and his brilliant burlesques will occupy a niche in 
 
Eugene Field 49 
 
 American letters. Readers of all tastes will find much to de- 
 light them in the complete one-volume edition of his verse 
 which was issued in 1910. 
 
 Field died in Chicago, Illinois, November 4, 1895. 
 
 LITTLE BOY BLUE 1 
 
 The little toy dog is covered with dust, 
 
 But sturdy and staunch he stands; 
 The little toy soldier is red with rust, 
 
 And his musket moulds in his hands. 
 Time was when the little toy dog was new, 
 
 And the soldier was passing fair; 
 And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue 
 
 Kissed them and put them there. 
 
 "Now don't you go till I come," he said, 
 
 "And don't you make any noise!" 
 So, toddling off to his trundle bed, 
 
 He dreamt of the pretty toys; 
 And, as he was dreaming, an angel song 
 
 Awakened our Little Boy Blue — 
 Oh! the years are many, the years are long, 
 
 But the little toy friends are true! 
 
 Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand, 
 
 Each in the same old place, 
 Awaiting the touch of a little hand, 
 
 The smile of a little face; 
 And they wonder, as waiting the long years through 
 
 In the dust of that little chair, 
 What has become of our Little Boy Blue, 
 
 Since he kissed them and put them there. 
 
 1 Reprinted from The Complete Works of Eugene Field by 
 permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, holders of the copyright. 
 
^O Eugene Field 
 
 SEEIN' THINGS 1 
 
 I ain't afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or 
 
 mice, 
 An' things 'at girls are skeered uv I think are awful nice ! 
 I'm pretty brave I guess; an' yet I hate to go to bed, 
 For, when I'm tucked up warm an' snug an' when my 
 
 prayers are said, 
 Mother tells me "Happy Dreams" an' takes away the 
 
 light, 
 An' leaves me lyin' all alone an' seem' things at night ! 
 
 Sometimes they're in the corner, sometimes they're by the 
 
 door, 
 Sometimes they're all a-standin' in the middle uv the 
 
 floor; 
 Sometimes they are a-sittin' down, sometimes they're 
 
 walkin' round 
 So softly and so creepy-like they never make a sound! 
 Sometimes they are as black as ink, an' other times 
 
 they're white — 
 But color ain't no difference when you see things at night! 
 
 Once, when I licked a feller 'at had just moved on our 
 
 street, 
 An' father sent me up to bed without a bite to eat, 
 I woke up in the dark an' saw things standin' in a row, 
 A-lookin' at me cross-eyed an' p'intin' at me — so! 
 Oh, my! I wuz so skeered 'at time I never slep' a mite — 
 It's almost alluz when I'm bad I see things at night! 
 
 1 Reprinted from The Complete Works of Eugene Field by 
 permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, holders of the copyright 
 
Eugene Field 51 
 
 Lucky thing I ain't a girl or I'd be skeered to death! 
 Bein' I'm a boy, I duck my head an' hold my breath. 
 An' I am, oh so sorry I'm a naughty boy, an' then 
 I promise to be better an' I say my prayers again! 
 Gran'ma tells me that's the only way to make it right 
 When a feller has been wicked an' sees things at night! 
 
 An* so when other naughty boys would coax me into sin, 
 I try to 'skwush the Tempter's voice 'at urges me within ; 
 An' when they's pie for supper, or cakes 'at's big an' nice, 
 I want to — but I do not pass my plate f'r them things 
 
 twice! 
 No, ruther let Starvation wnpe me slowly out o' sight 
 Then I should keep a-livin' on an' seein' things at 
 
 night ! 
 
 Edwin Markham 
 
 Edwin Markham was born in Oregon City, Oregon, April 23, 
 1852, the youngest son of pioneer parents. His father died 
 before the boy reached his fifth year and in 1857 he was taken 
 by his mother to a wild valley in the Suisun Hills in central 
 California. Here he grew to young manhood; farming, 
 broncho-riding, laboring on a cattle ranch, educating himself in 
 the primitive country schools and supplementing his studies 
 with whatever books he could procure. 
 
 In 1899, a new force surged through him; a sense of outrage 
 at the inequality of human struggle voiced itself in the sweep- 
 ing and sonorous poem, "The Man with the Hoe." (See 
 Preface.) Inspired by Millet's painting, Markham made the 
 bowed, broken French peasant a symbol of the poverty-stricken 
 toiler in all lands — his was a protest not against labor but the 
 drudgery, the soul-destroying exploitation of labor. 
 
 The success of the poem upon its appearance in the San 
 Francisco Examiner (January 15, 1899) was instantaneous and 
 universal. The lines appeared in every part of the globe; it 
 was quoted and copied in every walk of life, in the literary 
 
52 Edwin Markham 
 
 world, the leisure world, the labor world. It was incorporated 
 in Markham's first volume The Man with the Hoe, and Other 
 Poems (1899). 
 
 The same passion that fired Markham to champion the great 
 common workers equipped him to write fittingly of the Great 
 Commoner in Lincoln, and Other Poems (1901). 
 
 Markham came East in 1901, making his home on Staten 
 Island, New York. 
 
 THE MAN WITH THE HOE 1 
 
 Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans 
 
 Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, 
 
 The emptiness of ages in his face, 
 
 And on his back the burden of the world. 
 
 Who made him dead to rapture and despair, 
 
 A thing that grieves not and that never hopes, 
 
 Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox? 
 
 Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw? 
 
 Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow? 
 
 Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ? 
 
 Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave 
 
 To have dominion over sea and land ; 
 
 To trace the stars and search the heavens for power; 
 
 To feel the passion of Eternity? 
 
 Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns 
 
 And marked their ways upon the ancient deep? 
 
 Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf 
 
 There is no shape more terrible than this — 
 
 1 Revised version, 1920. Copyright by Edwin Markham. 
 
Edwin Markham 53 
 
 More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed — 
 More filled with signs and portents for the soul — 
 More packt with danger to the universe. 
 
 What gulfs between him and the seraphim! 
 Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him 
 Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? 
 What the long reaches of the peaks of song, 
 The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? 
 Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; 
 Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop ; 
 Through this dread shape humanity betrayed, 
 Plundered, profaned, and disinherited, 
 Cries protest to the Judges of the World, 
 A protest that is also prophecy. 
 
 O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
 
 Is this the handiwork you give to God, 
 
 This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched? 
 
 How will you ever straighten up this shape ; 
 
 Touch it again with immortality; 
 
 Give back the upward looking and the light; 
 
 Rebuild in it the music and the dream; 
 
 Make right the immemorial infamies, 
 
 Perfidious w r rongs, immedicable woes? 
 
 O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, 
 How will the Future reckon with this man? 
 How answer his brute question in that hour 
 When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores? 
 How will it be with kingdoms and with kings — 
 With those who shaped him to the thing he is — 
 When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world, 
 After the silence of the centuries? 
 
54 Edwin Markham 
 
 PREPAREDNESS 
 
 For all your days prepare, 
 And meet them ever alike: 
 
 When you are the anvil, bear — 
 When you are the hammer, strike. 
 
 LINCOLN, THE MAN OF THE PEOPLE 1 
 
 When the Norn Mother saw the Whirlwind Hour 
 Greatening and darkening as it hurried on, 
 She left the Heaven of Heroes and came down 
 To make a man to meet the mortal need. 
 She took the tried clay of the common road — 
 Clay warm yet with the genial heat of earth, 
 Dasht through it all a strain of prophecy; 
 Tempered the heap with thrill of human tears; 
 Then mixt a laughter with the serious stuff. 
 Into the shape she breathed a flame to light 
 That tender, tragic, ever-changing face; 
 And laid on him a sense of mystic powers, 
 Moving — all husht — behind the mortal vail. 
 Here was a man to hold against the world, 
 A man to match the mountains and the sea. 
 
 The color of the ground was in him, the red earth ; 
 
 The smack and tang of elemental things: 
 
 The rectitude and patience of the cliff; 
 
 The good-will of the rain that loves all leaves; 
 
 The friendly welcome of the wayside well; 
 
 The courage of the bird that dares the sea; 
 
 1 See pages 78, 84, 139, 142, 172. 
 
Edwin Markham $$ 
 
 The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn; 
 The pity of the snow that hides all scars; 
 The secrecy of streams that make their w T ay 
 Under the mountain to the rifted rock; 
 The tolerance and equity of light 
 That gives as freely to the shrinking flower 
 As to the great oak flaring to the wind — 
 To the grave's low hill as to the Matterhorn 
 That shoulders out the sky. Sprung from the West, 
 He drank the valorous youth of a new world. 
 The strength of virgin forests braced his mind, 
 The hush of spacious prairies stilled his soul. 
 His words were oaks in acorns; and his thoughts 
 Were roots that firmly gript the granite truth. 
 
 Up from log cabin to the Capitol, 
 
 One fire was on his spirit, one resolve — 
 
 To send the keen ax to the root of wrong, 
 
 Clearing a free way for the feet of God, 
 
 The eyes of conscience testing every stroke, 
 
 To make his deed the measure of a man. 
 
 He built the rail-pile as he built the State, 
 
 Pouring his splendid strength through every blow: 
 
 The grip that swung the ax in Illinois 
 
 Was on the pen that set a people free. 
 
 So came the Captain with the mighty heart ; 
 And when the judgment thunders split the house, 
 Wrenching the rafters from their ancient rest, 
 He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again 
 The rafters of the Home. He held his place — 
 Held the long purpose like a growing tree — 
 Held on through blame and faltered not at praise. 
 And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down 
 
56 Edwin Markham 
 
 As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs, 
 Goes down with a great shout upon the hills, 
 And leaves a lonesome place against the sky. 
 
 Irwin Russell 
 
 Irwin Russell was born, June 3, 1853, at Port Gibson, Mis- 
 sissippi, where he studied law and was admitted to the bar. 
 His restless nature and wayward disposition drove him from 
 one place to another, from a not too rugged health to an utter 
 breakdown. 
 
 Although Russell did not take his poetry seriously and though 
 the bulk of it is small, its influence has been large. Thomas 
 Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris have acknowledged 
 their indebtedness to him; the creator of Uncle Remus writing, 
 "Irwin Russell was among the first — if not the very first — of 
 Southern writers to appreciate the literary possibilities of the 
 negro character." He entered their life, appreciated their fresh 
 turns of thought, saw things with that peculiar mixture of 
 reverence and unconscious humor that is so integral a part of 
 negro songs and spirituals. 
 
 "De Fust Banjo" (from Russell's operetta Christmas- 
 Night in the Quarters, possibly his best known work) is a 
 faithful rendering of the mind of the old-fashioned, simple 
 and sententious child of the plantation. In this poem the old 
 story of Noah is told, with delightful additions, from the color- 
 ful angle of the darky, local in its setting, diverting in its 
 modern details and revealing in its quaint psychology. 
 
 Russell died, in an obscure boarding house in New Orleans, 
 December 23, 1879. 
 
 DE FUST BANJO 
 
 Go 'way, fiddle! folks is tired o' hearin' you a-squawkin'. 
 Keep silence fur yo' betters! don't you heah de banjo 
 talkin'? 
 
Irwin Russell 57 
 
 About de 'possum's tail she's gwine to lecter — ladies, 
 
 listen ! 
 About de ha'r whut isn't dar, an' why de ha'r is missin' : 
 
 "Dar's gwine to be a' oberflow," said Noah, lookin' 
 
 solemn — 
 Fur Noah tuk de "Herald," an' he read de ribber 
 
 column — 
 An' so he sot his hands to wuk a-clarin' timber-patches, 
 An' 'lowed he's gwine to build a boat to beat de steamah 
 
 Natchez, 
 
 Ol' Noah kep' a-nailin' an' a-chippin' an' a-sawin'; 
 An' all de wicked neighbors kep' a-laughin' an' a-pshawin' ; 
 But Noah didn't min' 'em, knowin' whut wuz gwine to 
 
 happen : 
 An' forty days an' forty nights de rain it kep' a-drappin'. 
 
 Now, Noah had done cotched a lot ob ebry sort o' 
 beas'es — 
 
 Ob all de shows a-trabbelin', it beat 'em all to pieces! 
 
 He had a Morgan colt an' sebral head o' Jarsey cattle — 
 
 An' druv 'em 'board de Ark as soon's he heered de thun- 
 der rattle. 
 
 Den sech anoder fall ob rain! It come so awful hebby, 
 
 De ribber riz immejitly, an' busted troo de lebbee; 
 
 De people all wuz drownded out — 'cep' Noah an' de 
 
 critters, 
 An' men he'd hired to wuk de boat — an' one to mix de 
 
 bitters. 
 
 De Ark she kep' a-sailin' an' a-sailin' an a-sailin' ; 
 De lion got his dander up, an' like to bruk de palin' ; 
 
58 Irwin Russell 
 
 De sarpints hissed; de painters yelled; tel', whut wid 
 
 all de fussing 
 You cVdn't hardly heah de mate a-bossin' roun , an* 
 
 cussin , . 
 
 Now Ham, de only nigger whut wuz runnin' on de 
 packet, 
 
 Got lonesome in de barber-shop, an' c'u'dn't stan' de 
 racket ; 
 
 An' so, fur to amuse he-se'f, he steamed some wood an' 
 bent it, 
 
 An' soon he had a banjo made — de fust dat wuz in- 
 vented. 
 
 He wet de ledder, stretched it on; made bridge an' 
 
 screws an' aprin ; 
 An' fitted in a proper neck — 'twuz berry long an' tap- 
 
 rin' ; 
 He tuk some tin, an' twisted him a thimble fur to ring 
 
 it: 
 An' den de mighty question riz: how wuz he gwine to 
 
 string it? 
 
 De 'possum had as fine a tail as dis dat I's a-singin' ; 
 De ha'r's so long an' thick an' strong, — des fit fur banjo- 
 
 stringin' ; 
 Dat nigger shaved 'em off as short as washday-dinner 
 
 graces : 
 An' sorted ob 'em by de size — f'om little E's to basses. 
 
 He strung her, tuned her, struck a jig, — 'twas "Nebber 
 
 miri de wedder/' — 
 She soun' like forty-lebben bands a-playin' all toged- 
 
 der: 
 
Irwin Russell 59 
 
 Some went to pattin' ; some to dancin' : Noah called de 
 
 figgers ; 
 An' Ham he sot an' knocked de tune, de happiest ob 
 
 niggers ! 
 
 Now, sence dat time — it's mighty strange — dere's not de 
 
 slightes' showin' 
 Ob any ha'r at all upon the 'possum's tail a-growin' ; 
 An' curi's, too, dat nigger's ways — his people nebber 
 
 los' 'em — 
 Fur whar you finds de nigger — dar's de banjo an' de 
 
 'possum ! 
 
 Lizette Woodworth Reese 
 
 Lizette Woodworth Reese was born January 9, 1856, at Balti- 
 more, Maryland, where she has lived ever since. After an 
 education obtained chiefly in private schools, she taught English 
 in the Western High School at Baltimore. 
 
 A Handful of Lavender (1891), A Quiet Road (1896) and 
 A JV ay side Lute (1909) embody an artistry which, in spite of 
 its old-fashioned contours, is as true as it is tender. A host 
 of the younger lyricists owe much of their technique to her 
 admirable models, and few modern sonneteers have equaled 
 the blended music and symbolism of "Tears." 
 
 TEARS 
 
 When I consider Life and its few years — 
 
 A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun ; 
 
 A call to battle, and the battle done 
 
 Ere the last echo dies within our ears; 
 
 A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears; 
 
 The gusts that past a darkening shore do beat ; 
 
 The burst of music down an unlistening street, — 
 
 I wonder at the idleness of tears. 
 
60 Lizette Woodworth Reese 
 
 Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight, 
 Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep, 
 By every cup of sorrow that you had, 
 Loose me from tears, and make me see aright 
 How each hath back what once he stayed to weep : 
 Homer his sight, David his little lad ! 
 
 SPICEWOOD 
 
 The spicewood burns along the gray, spent sky, 
 In moist unchimneyed places, in a wind, 
 That whips it all before, and all behind, 
 Into one thick, rude flame, now low, now high. 
 It is the first, the homeliest thing of all — 
 At sight of it, that lad that by it fares, 
 Whistles afresh his foolish, town-caught airs — 
 A thing so honey-colored and so tall ! 
 
 It is as though the young Year, ere he pass, 
 To the white riot of the cherry tree, 
 Would fain accustom us, or here, or there, 
 To his new sudden ways with bough and grass, 
 So starts with what is humble, plain to see, 
 And all familiar as a cup, a chair. 
 
 Frank Dempster Sherman 
 
 Frank Dempster Sherman was born at Peekskill, New York, 
 May 6, i860. He entered Columbia University in 1879, where, 
 after graduation and a subsequent instructorship, he was made 
 adjunct professor in 1891 and Professor of Graphics in 1904. 
 He held the latter position until his death, which occurred 
 September 19, 1916. 
 
 Sherman never wearied of the little lyric; even the titles 
 
Frank Dempster Sherman 61 
 
 of his volumes are instances of his fondness for the brief 
 melody, the sudden snatch of song: Madrigals and Catches 
 (1887), Lyrics for a Lute (1890), Little-Folk Lyrics (1892), 
 Lyrics of Joy (1904). A sumptuous, collected edition of his 
 poems was published, with an Introduction by Clinton Scollard, 
 in 1917. 
 
 AT MIDNIGHT 
 
 See, yonder, the belfry tower 
 
 That gleams in the moon's pale light- 
 Or is it a ghostly flower 
 
 That dreams in the silent night? 
 
 I listen and hear the chime 
 Go quavering over the town, 
 
 And out of this flower of Time 
 Twelve petals are wafted down. 
 
 BACCHUS 
 
 Listen to the tawny thief, 
 Hid beneath the waxen leaf, 
 Growling at his fairy host, 
 Bidding her with angry boast 
 Fill his cup with wine distilled 
 From the dew the dawn has spilled: 
 Stored away in golden casks 
 Is the precious draught he asks. 
 
 Who, — who makes this mimic din 
 In this mimic meadow inn, 
 Sings in such a drowsy note, 
 Wears a golden-belted coat; 
 
62 Frank Dempster Sherman 
 
 Loiters in the dainty room 
 Of this tavern of perfume; 
 Dares to linger at the cup 
 Till the yellow sun is up? 
 
 Bacchus 'tis, come back again 
 To the busy haunts of men ; 
 Garlanded and gaily dressed, 
 Bands of gold about his breast; 
 Straying from his paradise, 
 Having pinions angel-wise, — 
 'Tis the honey-bee, who goes 
 Reveling within a rose! 
 
 Louise Imogen Guiney 
 
 Louise Imogen Guiney was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 
 1861. Although she attended Elmhurst Academy in Providence, 
 most of her studying was with private tutors. In 1901 she went 
 to England, where she lived until her death. 
 
 Traditional in form and feeling, Miss Guiney's work has a 
 distinctly personal vigor; even her earliest collection, The White 
 Sail and Other Poems (1887), is not without individuality. 
 Her two most characteristic volumes are A Roadside Harp 
 (1893) and Patrins (1897). 
 
 Miss Guiney died at Chirping-Camden, England, November 
 3, 1920. 
 
 THE WILD RIDE 
 
 / hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, 
 All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, 
 All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and 
 neighing. 
 
Louise Imogen Guiney 63 
 
 Let cowards and laggards fall back! But alert to the 
 
 saddle 
 Weatherworn and abreast, go men of our galloping 
 
 legion, 
 With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves 
 
 him. 
 
 The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and 
 
 morasses ; 
 There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal 
 
 or entice us: 
 What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are 
 
 vowed to the riding. 
 
 Thought's self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, 
 And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam : 
 Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing. 
 
 A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, 
 A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty; 
 We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers. 
 
 / hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses. 
 All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, 
 All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and 
 neighing. 
 
 We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind ; 
 We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil. 
 Thou leadest, O God! All's well with Thy troopers 
 
 that follow. 
 
 Bliss Carman 
 
 (William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New 
 Brunswick, Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United 
 Empire Loyalists who withdrew from Connecticut at the time 
 
6 4 
 
 Bliss Carman 
 
 of the Revolutionary War. Carman was educated at '.he Uni- 
 versity of New Brunswick (1879-81), at Edinburgh (1082-3) 
 and Harvard (1886-8). He took up his residence in the 
 United States about 1889 ana \ with the exception of short so- 
 journs in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since. 
 
 In 1893, Carman issued his first book, Low Tide on Grand 
 Pre: A Book of Lyrics, It was immediately successful, running 
 quickly into a second edition. A vivid buoyancy, new to 
 American literature, made his worship of Nature frankly pagan 
 as contrasted to the moralizing tributes of most of his prede- 
 cessors. This freshness and irresponsible whimsy made Carman 
 the natural collaborator for Richard Hovey, and when their 
 first joint Songs from Vagabondia appeared in 1894, Carman's 
 fame was established. (See Preface.) 
 
 Although the three Vagabondia collections contain Carman's 
 best known poems, several of his other volumes (he has pub- 
 lished almost twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing 
 pulse. An almost physical radiance rises from Ballads of Lost 
 Haven (1897), From the Book of Myths (1902) and Songs of 
 the Sea Children (1904.). 
 
 A VAGABOND SONG 
 
 There is something in the autumn that is native to my 
 
 blood — 
 Touch of manner, hint of mood ; 
 And my heart is like a rhyme, 
 With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping 
 
 time. 
 
 The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry 
 
 Of bugles going by. 
 
 And my lonely spirit thrills 
 
 To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. 
 
 There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir; 
 
 We must rise and follow her, 
 
 When from every hill of flame 
 
 She calls and calls each vagabond by name. 
 
Bliss Carman 65 
 
 HEM AND HAW 
 
 Hem and Haw were the sons of sin, 
 Created to shally and shirk; 
 Hem lay 'round and Haw looked on 
 While God did all the work. 
 
 Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig, 
 For both had the dull, dull mind ; 
 And whenever they found a thing to do, 
 They yammered and went it blind. 
 
 Hem was the father of bigots and bores; 
 As the sands of the sea were they. 
 And Haw was the father of all the tribe 
 Who criticize to-day. 
 
 But God was an artist from the first, 
 And knew what he was about; 
 While over his shoulder sneered these two, 
 And advised him to rub it out. 
 
 They prophesied ruin ere man was made; 
 "Such folly must surely fail!" 
 And when he was done, "Do you think, my Lord, 
 He's better without a tail?" 
 
 And still in the honest working world, 
 With posture and hint and smirk, 
 These sons of the devil are standing by 
 While man does all the work. 
 
 They balk endeavor and baffle reform, 
 In the sacred name of law; 
 And over the quavering voice of Hem 
 Is the droning voice of Haw. 
 
66 Bliss Carman 
 
 DAISIES 
 
 Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune 
 I saw the white daisies go down to the sea, 
 A host in the sunshine, an army in June, 
 The people God sends us to set our hearts free. 
 
 The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell, 
 The orioles whistled them out of the wood; 
 And all of their singing was, "Earth, it is well! ,, 
 And all of their dancing was, "Life, thou art good!" 
 
 Richard Burton 
 
 Richard (Eugene) Burton was born at Hartford, Connecticut, 
 March 14, 1861. He has taught English at various colleges 
 and universities since 1888, and has been head of the English 
 department of the University of Minnesota since 1906. 
 
 His first book Dumb in June (1895), is, in many ways, his best. 
 It contains a buoyant lyricism, a more conscious use of the strain 
 developed in Carman and Hovey's Songs from Vagabondia. 
 The succeeding Lyrics of Brotherhood (1899) has a wider 
 vision if a more limited music; several of the poems in this 
 collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung melodies 
 of the dumb and defeated multitudes. 
 
 BLACK SHEEP 
 
 From their folded mates they wander far, 
 Their ways seem harsh and wild; 
 
 They follow the beck of a baleful star, 
 Their paths are dream-beguiled. 
 
Richard Burton 67 
 
 Vet haply they sought but a wider range, 
 
 Some loftier mountain-slope, 
 And little recked of the country strange 
 
 Beyond the gates of hope. 
 
 And haply a bell with a luring call 
 
 Summoned their feet to tread 
 Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall 
 
 And the lurking snare are spread. 
 
 Maybe, in spite of their tameless days 
 
 Of outcast liberty, 
 They're sick at heart for the homely ways 
 
 Where their gathered brothers be. 
 
 And oft at night, when the plains fall dark 
 
 And the hills loom large and dim, 
 For the Shepherd's voice they mutely hark, 
 
 And their souls go out to him. 
 
 Meanwhile, "Black sheep! Black sheep!" we cry, 
 
 Safe in the inner fold; 
 And maybe they hear, and wonder why, 
 
 And marvel, out in the cold. 
 
 Richard Hovey 
 
 Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and 
 graduated from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he 
 became, in rapid succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, 
 a lecturer, a professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet 
 and a dramatist. 
 
 His exuberant virility found its outlet in the series of poems 
 published in collaboration with Bliss Carman — the three volumes 
 of Songs from Vagabondia (1894, 1896, 1900). Here he let 
 
68 Richard Hovey 
 
 himself go completely; nothing remained sober or static. His 
 lines fling themselves across the page ; shout with a wild 
 irresponsibility; leap, laugh, carouse and carry off the reader 
 in a gale of high spirits. 
 
 "At the Crossroads" is a vivid example of this gipsy-like 
 spirit which could (as in "Unmanifest Destiny," written on the 
 outbreak of the Spanish-American War) sound deeper notes 
 with equal strength. The famous Stein Song is but an interlude 
 in the midst of a far finer and even more rousing poem that, 
 with its flavor of Whitman, begins: 
 
 I said in my heart, "I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. 
 
 I have need of the sky. 
 
 I have business with the grass. 
 
 I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, 
 
 Lone and high, 
 
 And the slow clouds go by. 
 
 I will get me away to the waters that glass 
 
 The clouds as they pass. ..." 
 
 Although the varied lyrics in Songs from Vagabondia are the 
 best known examples of Hovey, a representative collection of 
 his riper work may be found in Along the Trail (1898). 
 
 Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900. 
 
 AT THE CROSSROADS 
 
 You to the left and I to the right, 
 
 For the ways of men must sever — 
 
 And it well may be for a day and a night, 
 
 And it well may be forever. 
 
 But whether we meet or whether we part 
 
 (For our ways are past our knowing), 
 
 A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart 
 
 On the ways we all are going! 
 
 Here's luck! 
 
 For we know not where we are going. 
 
Richard Hovey 69 
 
 Whether we win or whether we lose 
 
 With the hands that life is dealing, 
 
 It is not we nor the ways we choose 
 
 But the fall of the cards that's sealing. 
 
 There's a fate in love and a fate in fight, 
 
 And the best of us all go under — 
 
 And whether we're wrong or whether we're right, 
 
 We win, sometimes, to our wonder. 
 
 Here's luck! 
 
 That we may not yet go under! 
 
 With a steady swing and an open brow 
 
 We have tramped the ways together, 
 
 But we're clasping hands at the crossroads now 
 
 In the Fiend's own night for weather; 
 
 And whether we bleed or whether we smile 
 
 In the leagues that lie before us 
 
 The ways of life are many a mile 
 
 And the dark of Fate is o'er us. 
 
 Here's luck! 
 
 And a cheer for the dark before us! 
 
 You to the left and I to the right, 
 
 For the ways of men must sever, 
 
 And it well may be for a day and a night 
 
 And it well may be forever! 
 
 But whether we live or whether we die 
 
 (For the end is past our knowing), 
 
 Here's two frank hearts and the open sky, 
 
 Be a fair or an ill wind blowing! 
 
 Here's luck! 
 
 In the teeth of all winds blowing. 
 
JO Richard Hovey 
 
 UNMANIFEST DESTINY 
 
 To what new fates, my country, far 
 And unforeseen of foe or friend, 
 
 Beneath what unexpected star 
 
 Compelled to what unchosen end, 
 
 Across the sea that knows no beach, 
 The Admiral of Nations guides 
 
 Thy blind obedient keels to reach 
 The harbor where thy future rides! 
 
 The guns that spoke at Lexington 
 
 Knew not that God was planning then 
 
 The trumpet word of Jefferson 
 To bugle forth the rights of men. 
 
 To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, 
 What was it but despair and shame? 
 
 Who saw behind the cloud the sun? 
 Who knew that God was in the flame? 
 
 Had not defeat upon defeat, 
 
 Disaster on disaster come, 
 The slaved emancipated feet 
 
 Had never marched behind the drum. 
 
 There is a Hand that bends our deeds 
 To mightier issues than we planned; 
 
 Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, 
 My country, serves It's dark command. 
 
 I do not know beneath what sky 
 Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; 
 
 I only know it shall be high, 
 I only know it shall be great. 
 
Richard Hovey 71 
 
 A STEIN SONG 
 
 (From "Spring") 
 
 Give a rouse, then, in the A I ay time 
 
 For a life that knows no fear! 
 Turn night-time into daytime 
 With the sunlight of good cheer! 
 For it's always fair weather 
 When good fellows get together, 
 With a stein on the table and a good song 
 ringing clear. 
 
 When the wind comes up from Cuba, 
 
 And the birds are on the wing, 
 And our hearts are patting juba 
 To the banjo of the spring, 
 
 Then it's no wonder whether 
 The boys will get together, 
 With a stein on the table and a cheer for 
 everything. 
 
 For we're all frank-and-twenty 
 When the spriri^-4s-ifrtrie air; 
 And we've faith and hope a-plenty, 
 And we've life and love to spare : 
 And it's birds of a feather 
 When we all get together, 
 With a stein on the table and a heart with- 
 out a care. 
 
 For we know the world is glorious, 
 
 And the goal a golden thing, 
 And that God is not censorious 
 
 When his children have their fling; 
 
72 Richard Hovey 
 
 And life slips its tether 
 When the boys get together, 
 With a stein on the table in the fellowship 
 of spring. 
 
 Madison Cawein 
 
 Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, 
 in 1865, and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He 
 wrote an enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than 
 twenty volumes of pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom 
 distinguished poetry. Lyrics and Idyls (1890) and Vale of 
 Tempe (1905) contain his most characteristic stanzas, packed 
 with an adjectival love of Nature that led certain of his 
 admirers to call him (and, one must admit, the alliteration 
 was tempting) "the Keats of Kentucky. ,, 
 
 Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914. 
 
 SNOW 
 
 The moon, like a round device 
 On a shadowy shield of war, 
 Hangs white in a heaven of ice 
 With a solitary star. 
 
 The wind has sunk to a sigh, 
 And the waters are stern with frost; 
 And gray, in the eastern sky, 
 The last snow-cloud is lost. 
 
 White fields, that are winter-starved, 
 Black woods, that are winter-fraught, 
 Cold, harsh, as a face death-carved, 
 With the iron of some black thought. 
 
Madison C awe in 73 
 
 DESERTED 
 
 The old house leans upon a tree 
 Like some old man upon a staff: 
 
 The night wind in its ancient porch 
 Sounds like a hollow laugh. 
 
 The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds 
 As grandeur cloaks itself in gray: 
 
 The starlight flitting in and out, 
 Glints like a lanthorn ray. 
 
 The dark is full of whispers. Now 
 
 A fox-hound howls: and through the night, 
 
 Like some old ghost from out its grave, 
 The moon comes misty white. 
 
 William Vaughn Moody 
 
 William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 
 1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he 
 spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and in- 
 tensive study — he taught, for eight years, at the University of 
 Chicago — his death coming at the very height of his creative 
 power. 
 
 The Masque of Judgment, his first work, was published in 
 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the 
 year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling 
 of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes 
 more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his 
 career, particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating 
 "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" Moody successfully 
 achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. A complete 
 edition of The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn 
 Moody was published in 1912 in two volumes. 
 
74 William Vaughn Moody 
 
 In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness 
 from which he never recovered. He died in October, 1910. 
 
 ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES 
 
 Streets of the roaring town, 
 
 Hush for him ; hush, be still ! 
 
 He comes, who was stricken down 
 
 Doing the word of our will. 
 
 Hush! Let him have his state. 
 
 Give him his soldiers crown, 
 
 The grists of trade can wait 
 
 Thefr grinding at the mill. 
 But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has 
 
 been blown. 
 Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on 
 his breast of stone. 
 
 Toll! Let the great bells toll 
 
 Till the clashing air is dim, 
 
 Did we wrong this parted soul? 
 
 We will make it up to him. 
 
 Toll! Let him never guess 
 
 What work we sent him to. 
 
 Laurel, laurel, yes. 
 
 He did what we bade him do. 
 Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he 
 
 fought was good ; 
 Never a word that the blood on his sword was his coun- 
 try's own heart's-blood. 
 
 A flag for a soldier's bier 
 
 Who dies that his land may live ; 
 
 O banners, banners here, 
 
 That he doubt not nor misgive! 
 
William Vaughn Moody 75 
 
 That he heed not from the tomb 
 The evil days draw near 
 When the nation robed in gloom 
 With its faithless past shall strive. 
 Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide 
 
 of its island mark, 
 Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled 
 and sinned in the dark. 
 
 George Sterling 
 
 George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, De- 
 cember 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the 
 Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and has 
 lived in California ever since. 
 
 Of Sterling's ten volumes of poetry, A Wine of Wizardry 
 (1908) and The House of Orchids and Other Poems (1911) 
 are the most characteristic. 
 
 THE BLACK VULTURE 
 
 Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome, 
 
 He holds unshared the silence of the sky. 
 
 Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry 
 The eagle's empire and the falcon's home — 
 Far down, the galleons of sunset roam ; 
 
 His hazards on the sea of morning lie; 
 
 Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh 
 Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam. 
 
 And least of all he holds the human swarm — 
 Unwitting now that envious men prepare 
 To make their dream and its fulfillment one, 
 When, poised above the caldrons of the storm, 
 Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare 
 His roads between the thunder and the sun. 
 
j6 Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in 
 the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, 
 the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, 
 which figures prominently in Robinson's poetry as "Tilbury 
 Town." In 1891 he entered Harvard College. A little col- 
 lection of verse was privately printed in 1896 and the follow- 
 ing year marked the appearance of his first representative work, 
 The Children of the Night (1897). 
 
 Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities 
 to make a living in New York, five years passing before the 
 publication of Captain Craig. In 1910, he published a series 
 of short poems, The Town Down the River. The Man Against 
 the Sky, Robinson's fullest and most penetrating work, appeared 
 in 1916. (See Preface.) 
 
 In all of these books there is manifest that searching for 
 truth; the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere 
 acceptance. As the work of a native portrait painter, nothing, 
 with the exception of some of Frost's pictures, has been pro- 
 duced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, 
 half-mystical etchings like "Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard 
 Cory" — lines where Robinson's irony is inextricably mixed with 
 tenderness — his art is at its height. His splendid "The Master," 
 one of the finest evocations of Lincoln, is, at the same time, a 
 bitter^ commentary on the commercialism of the times and the 
 "shopman's test of age and worth." 
 
 Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude 
 toward life, Robinson's philosophy is essentially positive; a 
 dogged if never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater 
 light is his. It is a philosophy expressed in Captain Craig: 
 
 . . . Take on yourself 
 But your sincerity, and you take on 
 Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth 
 And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, 
 No laughter to vex down your loyalty. 
 
 A one-volume edition of Robinson's Collected Poems appeared 
 in 1 921, revealing his vigorous intellect and chaste economy 
 of speech, his delicate intuition and dramatic characterizations. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson *JJ 
 
 MINIVER CHEEVY 1 
 
 Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, 
 
 Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; 
 
 He wept that he was ever born, 
 And he had reasons. 
 
 Miniver loved the days of old 
 
 When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; 
 The vision of a warrior bold 
 
 Would set him dancing. 
 
 Miniver sighed for what was not, 
 
 And dreamed, and rested from his labors; 
 
 He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, 
 And Priam's neighbors. 
 
 Miniver mourned the ripe renown 
 
 That made so many a name so fragrant ; 
 
 He mourned Romance, now on the town, 
 And Art, a vagrant. 
 
 Miniver loved the Medici, 
 
 Albeit he had never seen one; 
 He would have sinned incessantly 
 
 Could he have been one. 
 
 Miniver cursed the commonplace 
 
 And eyed a khaki suit with loathing ; 
 He missed the mediaeval grace 
 
 Of iron clothing. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
 Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. 
 
yS Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 Miniver scorned the gold he sought, 
 But sore annoyed was he without it; 
 
 Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, 
 And thought about it. 
 
 Miniver Cheevy, born too late, 
 
 Scratched his head and kept on thinking; 
 
 Miniver coughed, and called it fate, 
 And kept on drinking. 
 
 THE MASTER* 1 
 
 {Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries, 
 shortly after the Civil War) 
 
 A flying word from here and there 
 Had sown the name at which we sneered, 
 But soon the name was everywhere, 
 To be reviled and then revered: 
 A presence to be loved and feared, 
 We cannot hide it, or deny 
 That we, the gentlemen who jeered, 
 May be forgotten by and by. 
 
 He came when days were perilous 
 
 And hearts of men were sore beguiled; 
 
 And having made his note of us, 
 
 He pondered and was reconciled. 
 
 Was ever master yet so mild 
 
 As he, and so untamable? 
 
 We doubted, even when he smiled, 
 
 Not knowing what he knew so well. 
 
 * See pages 54, 84, 139, 142, 172. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
 Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 79 
 
 He knew that undeceiving fate 
 
 Would shame us whom he served unsought; 
 
 He knew that he must wince and wait — 
 
 The jest of those for whom he fought; 
 
 He knew devoutly what he thought 
 
 Of us and of our ridicule; 
 
 He knew that we must all be taught 
 
 Like little children in a school. 
 
 We gave a glamour to the task 
 
 That he encountered and saw through, 
 
 But little of us did he ask, 
 
 And little did we ever do. 
 
 And what appears if we review 
 
 The season when we railed and chaffed ? 
 
 It is the face of one who knew 
 
 That we were learning while we laughed. 
 
 The face that in our vision feels 
 Again the venom that we flung, 
 Transfigured to the world reveals 
 The vigilance to which we clung. 
 Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among 
 The mysteries that are untold, 
 The face we see was never young, 
 Nor could it ever have been old. 
 
 For he, to whom we have applied 
 Our shopman's test of age and worth, 
 Was elemental when he died, 
 As he was ancient at his birth : 
 The saddest among kings of earth, 
 Bowed with a galling crown, this man 
 Met rancor with a cryptic mirth, 
 Laconic — and Olympian. 
 
80 Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 The love, the grandeur, and the fame 
 Are bounded by the world alone; 
 The calm, the smouldering, and the flame 
 Of awful patience were his own: 
 With him they are forever flown 
 Past all our fond self-shadowings, 
 Wherewith we cumber the Unknown 
 As with inept Icarian wings. 
 
 For we were not as other men : 
 'Twas ours to soar and his to see. 
 But we are coming down again, 
 And we shall come down pleasantly; 
 Nor shall we longer disagree 
 On what it is to be sublime, 
 But flourish in our perigee 
 And have one Titan at a time. 
 
 AN OLD STORY 1 
 
 Strange that I did not know him then, 
 
 That friend of mine! 
 I did not even show him then 
 
 One friendly sign; 
 
 But cursed him for the ways he had 
 
 To make me see 
 My envy of the praise he had 
 
 For praising me. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
 Sons, from The Children of the Night, 
 
Edwin Arlington Robinson 8l 
 
 I would have rid the earth of him 
 
 Once, in my pride! . . . 
 I never knew the worth of him 
 
 Until he died. 
 
 THE DARK HILLS 
 
 Dark hills at evening in the west, 
 Where sunset hovers like a sound 
 Of golden horns that sang to rest 
 Old bones of warriors under ground, 
 Far now from all the bannered ways 
 Where flash the legions of the sun, 
 You fade — as if the last of days 
 Were fading, and all wars were done. 
 
 RICHARD CORY x 
 
 Whenever Richard Cory went down town, 
 We people on the pavement looked at him: 
 
 He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 
 Clean favored, and imperially slim. 
 
 And he was always quietly arrayed, 
 
 And he was always human when he talked ; 
 
 But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 
 
 "Good-morning," and he glittered when he 
 walked. 
 
 And he was rich — yes, richer than a king, 
 And admirably schooled in every grace : 
 
 In fine, we thought that he was everything 
 To make us wish that we were in his place. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's 
 Sons, from The Children of the Night. 
 
82 Edwin Arlington Robinson 
 
 So on we worked, and waited for the light, 
 And went without the meat, and cursed the 
 bread ; 
 
 And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 
 Went home and put a bullet through his head. 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters 
 
 Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 
 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still 
 a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory 
 schooling, he studied law in his father's office at Lewiston. 
 For a year he practised with his father and then went to 
 Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney. 
 
 Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quan- 
 tity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional 
 themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about 
 four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and 
 betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. 
 His work, previous to the publication of Spoon River Anthology, 
 was derivative and undistinguished. 
 
 Taking as his model The Greek Anthology, which his friend 
 William Marion Reedy had pressed upon him, in 1914 Masters 
 evolved Spoon River Anthology, that astonishing assemblage of 
 over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead 
 of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the 
 truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, 
 many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; 
 it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, 
 hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The 
 monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, 
 the struggle toward higher goals — all is synthesized in these 
 crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard 
 here — even Masters's, who explains the reason for his medium 
 and the selection of his form through "Petit, the Poet." 
 
 Starved Rock (1919), Domesday Book (1920) and The Open 
 Sea (1921) are, like all Masters's later books, queerly assembled 
 mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all 
 of this poet's borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, 
 
Edgar Lee Masters 83 
 
 Masters's work is a continual searching for some key to the 
 mystery of truth, the mastery of life. 
 
 PETIT, THE POET 1 
 
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel — 
 
 Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens — 
 
 But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. 
 
 Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 
 
 Ballades by the score with the same old thought: 
 
 The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished ; 
 
 And what is love but a rose that fades? 
 
 Life all around me here in the village : 
 
 Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, 
 
 Courage, constancy, heroism, failure — 
 
 All in the loom, and, oh, what patterns! 
 
 Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers — 
 
 Blind to all of it all my life long. 
 
 Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, 
 
 Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, 
 
 Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, 
 
 While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines! 
 
 LUCINDA MATLOCK 1 
 
 I went to the dances at Chandlerville, 
 
 And played snap-out at Winchester. 
 
 One time we changed partners, 
 
 Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, 
 
 1 Reprinted by permicsion of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 
 
84 Edgar Lee Masters 
 
 And then I found Davis. 
 
 We were married and lived together for seventy years, 
 
 Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children, 
 
 Eight of whom we lost 
 
 Ere I had reached the age of sixty. 
 
 I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, 
 
 I made the garden, and for holiday 
 
 Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, 
 
 And by Spoon River gathering many a shell, 
 
 And many a flower and medicinal weed — 
 
 Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. 
 
 At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all, 
 
 And passed to a sweet repose. 
 
 What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, 
 
 Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? 
 
 Degenerate sons and daughters, 
 
 Life is too strong for you — 
 
 It takes life to love Life. 
 
 ANNE RUTLEDGE * * 
 
 Out of me unworthy and unknown 
 
 The vibrations of deathless music; 
 
 "With malice toward none, with charity for all." 
 
 Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, 
 
 And the beneficent face of a nation 
 
 Shining with justice and truth. 
 
 I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, 
 
 Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln, 
 
 Wedded to him, not through union, 
 
 *See pages 54, 78, 139, 142, 172. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 
 
Edgar Lee Masters 85 
 
 But through separation. 
 Bloom forever, O Republic, 
 From the dust of my bosom! 
 
 Stephen Crane 
 
 Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most 
 meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, 
 November i, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette 
 College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of 
 his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. 
 When he died, at the age of thirty, he had produced ten 
 printed volumes (one of which, The Red Badge of Courage, is 
 a classic among descriptive novels), two more announced for 
 publication and two others which were appearing serially. 
 
 At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented 
 in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines for 
 his acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in 
 two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and 
 War Is Kind (1899) ; lines that anticipated the Imagists and 
 the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. 
 
 It is more than probable that his feverish energy of pro- 
 duction aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He 
 reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the 
 journey's end, June 5, 1900. 
 
 I SAW A MAN 
 
 I saw a man pursuing the horizon; 
 
 Round and round they sped. 
 
 I was disturbed at this; 
 
 I accosted the man. 
 
 "It is futile," I said, 
 
 "You can never" — 
 
 "You lie," he cried, 
 And ran on. 
 
86 Stephen Crane 
 
 THE WAYFARER 
 
 The wayfarer, 
 
 Perceiving the pathway to truth, 
 
 Was struck with astonishment. 
 
 It was thickly grown w T ith weeds. 
 
 "Ha," he said, 
 
 "I see that no one has passed here 
 
 In a long time." 
 
 Later he saw that each weed. 
 
 Was a singular knife. 
 
 "Well," he mumbled at last, 
 
 "Doubtless there are other roads." 
 
 THE BLADES OF GRASS 
 
 In Heaven, 
 
 Some little blades of grass 
 
 Stood before God. 
 
 "What did you do?" 
 
 Then all save one of the little blades 
 
 Began eagerly to relate 
 
 The merits of their lives. 
 
 This one stayed a small way behind, 
 
 Ashamed. 
 
 Presently, God said, 
 
 "And what did you do?" 
 
 The little blade answered, "Oh, my Lord, 
 
 Memory is bitter to me, 
 
 For, if I did good deeds, 
 
 I know not of them." 
 
 Then God, in all his splendor, 
 
 Arose from his throne. 
 
 "Oh, best little blade of grass!" he said. 
 
T. A. Daly 87 
 
 Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Penn- 
 sylvania, May 28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and 
 Fordham University (1889), leaving there at the end of his 
 sophomore year to become a newspaper man. 
 
 Canzoni (1906) and Carmina (1909) contain the best-known 
 of Daly's varied dialect verses. Although he has written in 
 half a dozen different idioms including "straight'' English 
 {vide Songs of Wedlock, 1916), his half-humorous, half- 
 pathetic interpretations of the Irish and Italian immigrants are 
 his forte. 
 
 THE SONG OF THE THRUSH 
 
 Ah ! the May was grand this mornin , ! 
 
 Shure, how could I feel forlorn in 
 
 Such a land, when tree and flower tossed 
 
 their kisses to the breeze? 
 Could an Irish heart be quiet 
 While the Spring was runnin' riot, 
 
 An' the birds of free America were singin' in the trees? 
 In the songs that they were singin' # 
 
 No familiar note was ringing 
 
 But I strove to imitate them an' I whistled like a la5. 
 Oh, my heart was warm to love them 
 For the very newness of them — 
 
 For the ould songs that they helped me to forget — an' 
 I w T as glad. 
 
 So I mocked the feathered choir 
 
 To my hungry heart's desire, 
 
 An' I gloried in the comradeship that made 
 
 their joy my own. 
 Till a new note sounded, stillin' 
 All the rest. A thrush was trillin' ! 
 
88 T. A. Daly 
 
 Ah! the thrush I left behind me in the fields about 
 Athlone ! 
 Where, upon the whitethorn swayin', 
 He was minstrel of the Mayin', 
 In my days of love an' laughter that the years have laid 
 at rest ; 
 Here again his notes were ringm' ! 
 But I'd lost the heart for singin' — 
 Ah! the song I could not answer was the one I knew 
 the best. 
 
 MIA CARLOTTA 
 
 Giuseppe, da barber, ees greata for "mash," 
 
 He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache, 
 
 Good clo'es an' good styla an' playnta good cash. 
 
 W'enevra Giuseppe ees walk on da street, 
 Da peopla dey talka, "how nobby! how neat! 
 How softa da handa, how smalla da feet." 
 
 He raisa hees hat an' he shaka hees curls, 
 An' smila weeth teetha so shiny like pearls; 
 O ! many da heart of da seelly young girls 
 
 He gotta — 
 Yes, playnta he gotta — 
 
 But notta 
 
 Carlotta ! 
 
 Giuseppe, da barber, he maka da eye, 
 An' lika da steam engine puffa an' sigh, 
 For catcha Carlotta w'en she ees go by. 
 
T. A. Daly 89 
 
 Carlotta she walka weeth nose in da air, 
 
 An' look through Giuseppe weeth far-away stare, 
 
 As eef she no see dere ees som'body dere. 
 
 Giuseppe, da barber, he gotta da cash, 
 He gotta da clo'es an' da bigga mustache, 
 He gotta da seelly young girls for da "mash," 
 
 But notta — 
 You bat my life, notta — 
 
 Carlotta. 
 
 I gotta! 
 
 Paul Laurence Dunbar 
 
 Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 at Dayton, Ohio, 
 the son of negro slaves. He was, before and after he began 
 to write his interpretative verse, an elevator-boy. He tried 
 newspaper work unsuccessfully and, in 1899, was given a 
 minor position in the Library of Congress at Washington, D. C. 
 
 Dunbar's first collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), contains 
 many of his most characteristic poems. In an introduction, in 
 which mention was made of the octoroon Dumas and the great 
 Russian poet Pushkin, who was a mulatto, William Dean 
 Howells wrote, "So far as I can remember, Paul Dunbar was 
 the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization 
 to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. . . . 
 His brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the 
 American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he 
 found him." Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899) and Lyrics of 
 Love and Laughter (1903) are two other volumes full of folk- 
 stuff. 
 
 Dunbar died in the city of his birth, Dayton, Ohio, February 
 10, 1906. 
 
^t- 
 
 90 Paul Laurence Dunbar 
 
 THE TURNING OF THE BABIES IN THE BED 1 
 
 Woman's sho' a cur'ous critter, an' dey ain't no doubtin' 
 
 dat. 
 She's a mess o' funny capahs f om huh slippahs to huh 
 
 hat. 
 Ef yo' tries to un'erstan' huh, an' yo' fails, des' up an' 
 
 say: 
 "D' ain't a bit o' use to try to un'erstan' a woman's way." 
 
 I don' mean to be complainin', but I's jes' a-settin' down 
 Some o' my own obserwations, w'en I cas' my eye eroun'. 
 Ef yo' ax me fu' to prove it, I ken do it mighty fine, 
 Fu' dey ain't no bettah 'zample den dis ve'y wife o' mine. 
 
 In de ve'y hea't o' midnight, w'en I's sleepin' good an* 
 
 soun', 
 I kin hyeah a so't o' rustlin' an' somebody movin' 'roun'. 
 An' I say, "Lize, whut yo' doin'?" But she frown an' 
 
 shek huh haid, 
 "Hesh yo' mouf, I's only tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed. 
 
 "Don' yo' know a chile gits restless, layin' all de night 
 
 one way? 
 An' yo' got to kind o' 'range him sev'al times befo' de 
 
 day? 
 So de little necks won't worry, an' de little backs won't 
 
 break; 
 Don' yo' t'ink 'cause chillun's chillun dey haint got no 
 
 pain an' ache." 
 
 1 From Lyrics of Love and Laughter. Copyright, 1903, by 
 Dodd, Mead & Company. 
 
Paul Laurence Dunbar 91 
 
 So she shakes 'em, an' she twists 'em, an' she tu'ns 'em 
 
 'roun' erbout, 
 'Twell I don' see how de chillun evah keeps f ' om hollahin' 
 
 out. 
 Den she lif s 'em up head down'ards, so's dey won't git 
 
 livah-growm, 
 But dey snoozes des' ez peaceful ez a liza'd on a stone. 
 
 Wen hit's mos' nigh time fu' wakin' on de dawn 0" 
 
 jedgement day, 
 Seems lak I kin hyeah ol' Gab'iel lay his trumpet down 
 
 an' say, 
 "Who dat w r alkin' 'roun' so easy, down on earf ermong 
 
 de dead?"— 
 'T will be Lizy up a-tu'nin' of de chillun in de bed. 
 
 A COQUETTE CONQUERED » 
 
 '• 
 
 Yes, my ha't's ez ha'd ez stone — 
 Go 'way, Sam, an' lemme 'lone. 
 No ; I ain't gwine change my min' ; 
 Ain't gwine ma'y you — nuffin' de kin\ 
 
 Phiny loves you true an' deah? 
 Go ma'y Phiny; whut I keer? 
 Oh, you needn't mou'n an' cry — 
 I don't keer how soon you die. 
 
 Got a present! Whut yo' got? 
 Somef'n fu' de pan er pot! 
 Huh! Yo' sass do sholy beat — 
 Think I don't git 'nough to eat? 
 
 1 From Lyrics of Lowly Life. Copyright, 1896, by Dodd, 
 Mead & Company. 
 
92 Paul Laurence Dunbar 
 
 Whut's dat un'neaf yo' coat? 
 Looks des lak a little shoat. 
 'Tain't no possum? Bless de Lamb! 
 Yes, it is, you rascal, Sam! 
 
 Gin it to me; whut you say? 
 Ain't you sma't now! Oh, go 'way! 
 Possum do look mighty nice; 
 But you ax too big a price. 
 
 Tell me, is you talkin' true, 
 
 Dat's de gal's whut ma'ies you? 
 
 Come back, Sam; now whah's you gwine? 
 
 Co'se you knows dat possum's mine! 
 
 Guy Wetmore Carryl 
 
 Guy Wetmore Carryl, son of Charles Edward Carryl (see 
 page 43), was born in New York City, March 4, 1873. He 
 graduated from Columbia University in 1895, was editor of 
 Munsey's Magazine, 1895-6, and, during the time he lived 
 abroad (from 1897 to 1902), was the foreign representative 
 of various American publications. 
 
 Inheriting a remarkable technical gift from his father, young 
 Carryl soon surpassed him as well as all other rivals in the 
 held of brilliantly rhymed, brilliantly turned burlesques. Al- 
 though he wrote several serious poems (the best of which have 
 been collected in the posthumously published The Garden of 
 Years, 1904), Carryl's most characteristic work is to be found 
 in his perversions of the parables of y£sop, Fables for the Frivo- 
 lous (1898), the topsy-turvy interpretations of old nursery 
 rhymes, Mother Goose for Grownups (1900) and his fantastic 
 variations on the fairy tales in Griwm Tales Made Gay (1903) 
 — all of them with a surprising (and punning) Moral attached. 
 
 This extraordinary versifier died, before reaching the height 
 of his power, at the age of thirty-one, in the summer of 1904. 
 
\ 
 
 Guy Wetmore Carryl 93 
 
 THE SYCOPHANTIC FOX AND THE 
 GULLIBLE RAVEN 
 
 A raven sat upon a tree, 
 
 And not a word he spoke, for 
 Hfs beak contained a piece of Brie, 
 Or, maybe, it was Roquefort. 
 
 We'll make it any kind you please — 
 At all events it was a cheese. 
 
 Beneath the tree's umbrageous limb 
 
 A hungry fox sat smiling; 
 He saw the raven watching him, 
 And spoke in words beguiling: 
 
 "J'admire" said he, "ton beau plumage,' 9 
 (The which was simply persiflage.) 
 
 Two things there are, no doubt you know, 
 
 To which a fox is used: 
 A rooster that is bound to crow, 
 A crow that's bound to roost; 
 And whichsoever he espies 
 He tells the most unblushing lies. 
 
 "Sweet fowl," he said, "I understand 
 
 You're more than merely natty, 
 I hear you sing to beat the band 
 And Adelina Patti. 
 
 Pray render with your liquid tongue 
 A bit from 'Gotterdammerung.' " 
 
 This subtle speech was aimed to please 
 
 The crow, and it succeeded ; 
 He thought no bird in all the trees 
 
 Could sing as well as he did. 
 
94 Guy Wetmore Carryl 
 
 In flattery completely doused, 
 
 He gave the "Jewel Song" from "Faust." 
 
 But gravitation's law, of course, 
 
 As Isaac Newton showed it, 
 Exerted on the cheese its force, 
 
 And elsewhere soon bestowed it. 
 In fact, there is no need to tell 
 What happened when to earth it fell. 
 
 I blush to add that when the bird 
 
 Took in the situation 
 He said one brief, emphatic word, 
 Unfit for publication. 
 
 The fox was greatly startled, but 
 He only sighed and answered "Tut." 
 
 The Moral is : A fox is bound 
 To be a shameless sinner. 
 And also: When the cheese comes round 
 You know it's after dinner. 
 
 But (what is only known to few) 
 The fox is after dinner, too. 
 
 HOW JACK FOUND THAT BEANS MAY GO 
 BACK ON A CHAP 
 
 Without the slightest basis 
 For hypochondriasis, 
 
 A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her 
 flung, 
 And with expression cynical 
 For half the day a clinical 
 
 Thermometer she held beneath her tongue. 
 
Guy Wetmore Carryl 95 
 
 Whene'er she read the papers 
 She suffered from the vapors, 
 
 At every tale of malady or accident she'd groan; 
 In every new and smart disease, 
 From housemaid's knee to heart disease, 
 
 She recognized the symptoms as her own! 
 
 She had a yearning chronic 
 To try each novel tonic, 
 
 Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm; 
 And from a homeopathist 
 Would change to an hydropathist, 
 
 And back again, with stupefying calm! 
 
 She was nervous, cataleptic, 
 And anemic, and dyspeptic: 
 
 Though not convinced of apoplexy, yet she had her 
 fears. 
 She dwelt with force fanatical, 
 Upon a twinge rheumatical, 
 
 And said she had a buzzing in her ears! 
 
 Now all of this bemoaning 
 
 And this grumbling and this groaning 
 
 The mind of Jack, her son and heir, unconscionably 
 bored. 
 His heart completely hardening, 
 He gave his time to gardening, 
 
 For raising beans was something he adored. 
 
 Each hour in accents morbid 
 This limp maternal bore bid 
 
 Her callous son affectionate and lachrymose good-bys. 
 She never granted Jack a day 
 Without some long "Alackaday!" 
 
 Accompanied by rolling of the eyes. 
 
96 Guy Wetmore Carryl 
 
 But Jack, no panic showing, 
 
 Just watched his beanstalk growing, 
 
 And twined with tender fingers the tendrils up the 
 pole. 
 At all her words funereal 
 He smiled a smile ethereal, 
 
 Or sighed an absent-minded "Bless my soul!" 
 
 That hollow-hearted creature 
 Would never change a feature: 
 
 No tear bedimmed his eye, however touching was her 
 talk. 
 She never fussed or flurried him, 
 The only thing that worried him 
 
 Was when no bean-pods grew upon the stalk! 
 
 But then he wabbled loosely 
 His head, and wept profusely, 
 
 And, taking out his handkerchief to mop away his 
 tears, 
 Exclaimed: "It hasn't got any!" 
 He found this blow to botany 
 
 Was sadder than were all his mother's fears. 
 
 The Moral is that gardeners pine 
 Whene'er no pods adorn the vine. 
 Of all sad words experience gleans 
 The saddest are: "It might have beans. 1 
 ( I did not make this up myself : 
 'Twas in a book upon my shelf. 
 It's witty, but I don't deny 
 It's rather Whittier than I!) 
 
H. H. Knibbs 97 
 
 Harry Herbert Knibbs was born at Niagara Falls, October 24, 
 1874. After a desultory schooling, he actended Harvard for 
 three years when he was thirty-four. '"Somebody said I took 
 honors in English," says Knibbs, "but I never saw them." He 
 wrote his first book, Lost Farm Camp, a novel, as a class 
 exercise. In 1911, Knibbs settled in Los Angeles, California, 
 where he has lived ever since. 
 
 In Riders of the Stars (191 6) and Songs of the Trail (1920), 
 Knibbs carries on the tradition of Bret Harte and the Pike 
 County Ballads. High-hearted verse this is, with more than 
 an occasional flash of poetry. To the typical Western breezi- 
 ness, Knibbs adds a wider whimsicality, a rough-shod but 
 nimble imagination. 
 
 THE VALLEY THAT GOD FORGOT 
 
 Out in the desert spaces, edged by a hazy blue, 
 Davison sought the faces of the long-lost friends he 
 knew: 
 
 They were there, in the distance dreaming 
 
 Their dreams that were worn and old ; 
 
 They were there, to his frenzied seeming, 
 
 Still burrowing down for gold. 
 
 Davison's face was leather; his mouth was a swollen 
 
 blot, 
 His mind was a floating feather, in The Valley That 
 God Forgot; 
 Wild as a dog gone loco, 
 Or sullen or meek, by turns, 
 He mumbled a "Poco! Poco!" 
 And whispered of pools and ferns. 
 Gold! Why his, for the finding! But water was never 
 
 found, 
 Save in deep caverns winding miles through the under- 
 ground : 
 
98 H. H. Knibbs 
 
 Cool, far, shadowy places 
 Edged by the mirrored trees, 
 When — Davison saw the faces! 
 And fear let loose his knees. 
 
 There was Shorty who owed him money, and Billing 
 
 who bossed the crowd ; 
 And Steve whom the boys called "Sunny," and Collins 
 who talked so loud: 
 Miguel with the handsome daughter, 
 And the rustler, Ed McCray; 
 Five — and they begged for water, 
 And offered him gold, in pay. 
 
 Gold? It was never cheaper. And Davison shook his 
 
 head: 
 "The price of a drink is steeper out here than in town," 
 he said. 
 He laughed as they mouthed and muttered 
 Through lips that were cracked and dried; 
 The pulse in his ear-drum fluttered: 
 "I'm through with the game!" he cried. 
 
 "I'm through!" And he knelt and fumbled the cap of 
 
 his dry canteen 
 Then, rising, he swayed and stumbled into a black 
 ravine : 
 His ghostly comrades followed, 
 For Davison's end was near, 
 And a shallow grave they hollowed, 
 When up from it, cool and clear 
 
 Bubbled the water — hidden a pick-stroke beneath the 
 
 sand ; 
 Davison, phantom-ridden, scooped with a shaking 
 
 hand . . . 
 
H. H. Knibbs 99 
 
 Davison swears they made it, 
 The Well where we drank today. 
 Davison's game? He played it 
 And won — so the town-folk say: 
 
 Called it, The Morning-Glory — near those abandoned 
 
 stamps, 
 And Davison's crazy story was told in a hundred camps: 
 
 Time and the times have tamed it, 
 
 His yarn — and this desert spot, 
 
 But I'm strong for the man who named it, 
 
 The Valley That God Forgot. 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch 
 
 Anna Hempstead Branch was born at New London, Con- 
 necticut. She graduated from Smith College in 1897 an d nas 
 devoted herself to literature ever since. 
 
 Her two chief volumes, The Shoes That Danced (1905) and 
 Rose of the Wind (1910), show a singer who is less fanciful 
 than philosophic. Her lines are admirably condensed, rich in 
 personal value as well as poetic revelation; they maintain a 
 high and austere level. A typical poem, ''The Monk in the 
 Kitchen," with its spiritual loveliness and verbal felicity, is 
 a celebration of cleanness that gives order an almost mystical 
 nobility. 
 
 THE MONK IN THE KITCHEN 
 
 Order is a lovely thing; 
 On disarray it lays its wing, 
 Teaching simplicity to sing. 
 It has a meek and lowly grace, 
 
ioo Anna Hempstead Branch 
 
 Quiet as a nun's face. 
 
 Lo — I will have thee in this place! 
 
 Tranquil well of deep delight, 
 
 All things that shine through thee appear 
 
 As stones through water, sweetly clear. 
 
 Thou clarity, 
 
 That with angelic charity 
 
 Revealest beauty where thou art, 
 
 Spread thyself like a clean pool. 
 
 Then all the things that in thee are, 
 
 Shall seem more spiritual and fair, 
 
 Reflection from serener air — 
 
 Sunken shapes of many a star 
 
 In the high heavens set afar. 
 
 II 
 
 Ye stolid, homely, visible things, 
 Above you all brood glorious wings 
 Of your deep entities, set high, 
 Like slow moons in a hidden sky. 
 But you, their likenesses, are spent 
 Upon another element. 
 Truly ye are but seemings — 
 The shadowy cast-off gleamings 
 Of bright solidities. Ye seem 
 Soft as water, vague as dream ; 
 Image, cast in a shifting stream. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What are ye? 
 
 I know not. 
 
 Brazen pan and iron pot, 
 
Anna Hempstead Branch 101 
 
 Yellow brick and gray flag-stone . 
 
 That my feet have trod upon — 
 
 Ye seem to me 
 
 Vessels of bright mystery. 
 
 For ye do bear a shape, and so 
 
 Though ye were made by man, I know 
 
 An inner Spirit also made, 
 
 And ye his breathings have obeyed. 
 
 IV 
 
 Shape, the strong and awful Spirit, 
 
 Laid his ancient hand on you. 
 
 He waste chaos doth inherit; 
 
 He can alter and subdue. 
 
 Verily, he doth lift up 
 
 Matter, like a sacred cup. 
 
 Into deep substance he reached, and lo 
 
 Where ye were not, ye were; and so 
 
 Out of useless nothing, ye 
 
 Groaned and laughed and came to be. 
 
 And I use you, as I can, 
 
 Wonderful uses, made for man, 
 
 Iron pot and brazen pan. 
 
 What are ye? 
 
 I know not: 
 
 Nor what I really do 
 
 When I move and govern you. 
 
 There is no small work unto God. 
 
 He required of us greatness; 
 
102 Anna Hempstead Branch 
 
 Of his least creature 
 
 A high angelic nature, 
 
 Stature superb and bright completeness. 
 
 He sets to us no humble duty. 
 
 Each act that he would have us do 
 
 Is haloed round with strangest beauty; 
 
 Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks 
 
 Of his plainest child he asks. 
 
 When I polish the brazen pan 
 
 I hear a creature laugh afar 
 
 In the gardens of a star, 
 
 And from his burning presence run 
 
 Flaming wheels of many a sun. 
 
 Whoever makes a thing more bright, 
 
 He is an angel of all light. 
 
 When I cleanse this earthen floor 
 
 My spirit leaps to see 
 
 Bright garments trailing over it, 
 
 A cleanness made by me. 
 
 Purger of all men's thoughts and ways, 
 
 With labor do I sound Thy praise, 
 
 My work is done for Thee. 
 
 Whoever makes a thing more bright, 
 
 He is an angel of all light. 
 
 Therefore let me spread abroad 
 
 The beautiful cleanness of my God. 
 
 VI 
 
 One time in the cool of dawn 
 Angels came and worked with me. 
 The air was soft with many a wing. 
 They laughed amid my solitude 
 And cast bright looks on everything. 
 
Anna Hempstead Branch 103 
 
 Sweetly of me did they ask 
 
 That they might do my common task. 
 
 And all were beautiful — but one 
 
 With garments whiter than the sun 
 
 Had such a face 
 
 Of deep, remembered grace; 
 
 That when I saw I cried — "Thou art 
 
 The great Blood-Brother of my heart. 
 
 Where have I seen thee?" — And he said, 
 
 "When w r e are dancing round God's throne, 
 
 How often thou art there. 
 
 Beauties from thy hands have flown 
 
 Like white doves wheeling in mid air. 
 
 Nay — thy soul remembers not? 
 
 Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot." 
 
 VII 
 
 What are we ? I know not. 
 
 Amy Lowell 
 
 Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 
 9, 1874, °f a l° n g hne of noted publicists and poets, the first 
 colonist (a Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. 
 James Russell Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott 
 Lawrence, her mother's father, was minister to England; and 
 Abbott Lawrence Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard 
 University. 
 
 Her first volume, A Dome of Many-colored Glass (1912), was 
 a strangely unpromising book. The subjects were as conven- 
 tional as the treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Ten- 
 nyson was evident; the tone was soft and almost without a 
 trace of personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid 
 Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914) and Men, Women and 
 Ghosts (1916), which marked not only an extraordinary ad- 
 
104 Amy Lowell 
 
 vance but a totally new individuality. These two volumes 
 contained many distinctive poems written in the usual forms, 
 a score of pictorial pieces illustrating Miss Lowell's identifica- 
 tion with the Imagists (see Preface) and the first appearance 
 in English of "polyphonic prose." 
 
 It was because of such experiments in form and technique 
 that Miss Lowell first attracted attention and is still best 
 known. But, beneath her preoccupation with theories and nov- 
 elty of utterance, one can observe and appreciate the designer 
 of arabesques, the poet of the external world, the dynamic 
 artificer who (vide such poems as "A Lady," "Vintage" and 
 the epical "Bronze Horses") revivifies history with a creative 
 excitement. 
 
 Can Grande's Castle (1918), like the later Legends (1921), 
 reveals Miss Lowell as the gifted narrator, the teller of 
 bizarre and brilliant stories. The feverish agitation is less 
 prominent in her quieter and more personal Pictures of the 
 Floating World (1919), a no less distinctive volume. 
 
 Besides Miss Lowell's original poetry, she has made many 
 studies in Japanese and Chinese poetry, reflecting, even in her 
 own work, their Oriental colors and contours. She has also 
 written two volumes of critical essays: Six French Poets (191 5) 
 and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917), both of 
 them invaluable aids to the student of contemporary literature* 
 
 SOLITAIRE x 
 
 When night drifts along the streets of the city, 
 
 And sifts down between the uneven roofs, 
 
 My mind begins to peek and peer. 
 
 It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens, 
 
 And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples 
 
 Amid the broken flutings of white pillars. 
 
 It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair, 
 
 And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan 
 Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell. 
 
Amy Lowell 105 
 
 How light and laughing my mind is, 
 
 When all good folks have put out their bedroom candles, 
 
 And the city is still. 
 
 MEETING-HOUSE HILL 
 
 I must be mad, or very tired, 
 
 When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track 
 
 Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of 
 
 a tune, 
 And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a 
 
 city square 
 Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon. 
 Clear, reticent, superbly final, 
 With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious 
 
 elegance, 
 It dominates the weak trees, 
 And the shot of its spire 
 Is cool and candid, 
 Rising into an unresisting sky. 
 Strange meeting-house 
 
 Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top. 
 I watch the spire sweeping the sky, 
 I am dizzy with the movement of the sky; 
 I might be watching a mast 
 With its royals set full 
 Straining before a two-reef breeze. 
 I might be sighting a tea-clipper, 
 Tacking into the blue bay, 
 Just back from Canton 
 
 With her hold full of green and blue porcelain 
 And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail 
 Gazing at the white spire 
 With dull, sea-spent eyes. 
 
106 Amy Lowell 
 
 WIND AND SILVER 
 
 Greatly shining, 
 
 The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky ; 
 
 And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their 
 
 dragon scales 
 As she passes over them. 
 
 A LADY » 
 
 You are beautiful and faded, 
 
 Like an old opera tune 
 
 Played upon a harpsichord; 
 
 Or like the sun-flooded silks 
 
 Of an eighteenth-century boudoir. 
 
 In your eyes 
 
 Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes, 
 
 And the perfume of your soul 
 
 Is vague and suffusing 
 
 With the pungence of sealed spice-jars. 
 
 Your half-tones delight me, 
 
 And I grow mad with gazing 
 
 At your blent colors. 
 
 My vigor is a new-minted penny, 
 Which I cast at your feet. 
 Gather it up from the dust 
 That its sparkle may amuse you. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan 
 Company, from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell. 
 
Amy Lowell 107 
 
 A DECADE 1 
 
 When you came, you were like red wine and honey, 
 
 And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness 
 
 Now you are like morning bread, 
 
 Smooth and pleasant. 
 
 I hardly taste you at all, for I know your savour; 
 
 But I am completely nourished. 
 
 Ridgely Torrence 
 
 > 
 
 (Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, 
 November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton 
 University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor 
 Library in New York City (1897-1901) and has been on several 
 editorial staffs since then. 
 
 His first volume, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), 
 bears the grave subtitle "A Psalm of Experience after Reading 
 a Couplet of Bidpai" and is a half-whimsical, half-searching 
 mixture of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. 
 
 Torrence's subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper 
 force, a more concentrated fire. In "The Bird and the Tree" 
 and "Eye-Witness, " he has caught something more than the 
 colors of certain localities — particularly of the dark race. 
 
 THE BIRD AND THE TREE 
 
 Blackbird, blackbird in the cage, 
 There's something wrong tonight. 
 Far off the sheriff's footfall dies, 
 The minutes crawl like last year's flies 
 Between the bars, and like an age 
 The hours are long tonight. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell. 
 
108 Ridgely Torrence 
 
 The sky is like a heavy lid 
 
 Out here beyond the door tonight. 
 
 What's that ? A mutter down the street. 
 
 What's that? The sound of yells and feet. 
 
 For what you didn't do or did 
 
 You'll pay the score tonight. 
 
 No use to reek with reddened sweat, 
 No use to whimper and to sweat. 
 They've got the rope; they've got the guns, 
 They've got the courage and the guns; 
 An' that's the reason why tonight 
 No use to ask them any more. 
 They'll fire the answer through the door — 
 You're out to die tonight. 
 
 There where the lonely cross-road lies, 
 There is no place to make replies ; 
 But silence, inch by inch, is there, 
 And the right limb for a lynch is there ; 
 And a lean daw waits for both your eyes, 
 Blackbird. 
 
 Perhaps you'll meet again some place. 
 Look for the mask upon the face; 
 That's the way you'll know them there — 
 A white mask to hide the face. 
 And you can halt and show them there 
 The things that they are deaf to now, 
 And they can tell you what they meant — 
 To wash the blood with blood. But how 
 If you are innocent? 
 
Ridgely Torrence 109 
 
 Blackbird singer, blackbird mute, 
 
 They choked the seed you might have found. 
 
 Out of a thorny field you go — 
 
 For you it may be better so — 
 
 And leave the sowers of the ground 
 
 To eat the harvest of the fruit, 
 
 Blackbird. 
 
 Robert Frost 
 
 Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New 
 England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, Cali- 
 fornia, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the 
 towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers 
 had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, 
 Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where 
 he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too 
 much for him and, determined to keep his mind free for creative 
 work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in 
 one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write 
 poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in The Independent. 
 But the strange, soil-flavored quality which even then distin- 
 guished his lines was not relished by the editors, and for twenty 
 years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in 
 spite of the discouraging apathy. 
 
 After another unsuccessful attempt to achieve culture via 
 college (Harvard 1897), Frost engaged in industry. For about 
 three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly 
 paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. 
 During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living 
 from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness 
 claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a 
 living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his 
 existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a 
 few years' teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, 
 sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for 
 England in September, 1912. 
 
 A few months later, A Boy's Will (1913), his first collection, 
 
no Robert Frost 
 
 was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the 
 few authentic voices of modern poetry. In the spring of the 
 same year, North of Boston (1914), one of the most intensely 
 American books ever printed, was published in England. (See 
 Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a "book of people." 
 And it is more than that — it is a book of backgrounds as living 
 and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a 
 stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a for- 
 gotten wood-pile left 
 
 To warm the frozen swamp as best it could 
 With the slow, smokeless burning of decay. 
 
 North of Boston, like its successor, contains much of the finest 
 poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual 
 values, every line moves with the double force of observation 
 and implication. The poet's colors and characters are close 
 to their soil ; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is 
 never a photographic realist. "There are," he once said, "two 
 types of realist — the one who offers a good deal of dirt with 
 his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is 
 satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I'm inclined to be the 
 second kind. . . . To me, the thing that art does for life is 
 to strip it to form." 
 
 Sounds, the delicate accents of speech, find their most sympa- 
 thetic recorder here. Frost's lines disclose the subtle shades of 
 emphasis and expression in words, in the rhythms and tones 
 that call to life a whole scene by presenting only a significant 
 detail. "If I must be classified as a poet," Frost once said, 
 with the suspicion of a twinkle, "I might be called a Synecdo- 
 chist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry — that figure of 
 speech in which we use a part for the whole." 
 
 In March, 191 5, Frost came back to America — to a hill outside 
 of Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. North of Boston 
 had been published in the United States and its author, who 
 had left the country an unknown writer, returned to find himself 
 famous. Mountain Interval, containing some of Frost's most 
 beautiful poems ("Birches," "An Old Man's Winter Night," 
 "The Hill Wife"), appeared in 191 6. The idiom is the same 
 as in the earlier volumes, but the notes are more varied, the 
 convictions are stronger. The essential things are unchanged. 
 The first poem in Frost's first book sums it up: 
 
Robert Frost in 
 
 They would not find me changed from him they knew — 
 Only more sure of all I thought was true. 
 
 The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this 
 poet, has made his grimness far less "gray" than some of his 
 critics are willing to admit. 
 
 In 1920, after teaching at Amherst College (1916-19), Frost 
 bought a few acres in Vermont and devoted himself once more 
 to the double labors of farmer and poet. Through his lyrics 
 as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered (and is voicing) 
 some of the deepest and richest notes in American Poetry. 
 
 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 a 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, 
 
112 Robert Frost 
 
 One on a side. It comes to little more: 
 
 He is all pine and I am apple-orchard. 
 
 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." 
 
 THE TUFT OF FLOWERS 
 
 I went to turn the grass once after one 
 Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. 
 
 The dew was gone that made his blade so keen 
 Before I came to view the levelled scene. 
 
 I looked for him behind an isle of trees; 
 I listened for his whetstone on the breeze. 
 
Robert Frost 113 
 
 But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, 
 And I must be, as he had been, — alone, 
 
 "As all must be," I said within my heart, 
 "Whether they work together or apart." 
 
 But as I said it, swift there passed me by 
 On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly, 
 
 Seeking with memories grown dim over night 
 Some resting flower of yesterday's delight. 
 
 And once I marked his flight go round and round, 
 As where some flower lay withering on the ground. 
 
 And then he flew as far as eye could see, 
 
 And then on tremulous wing came back to me. 
 
 I thought of questions that have no reply, 
 
 And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; 
 
 But he turned first, and led my eye to look 
 At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, 
 
 A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared 
 Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. 
 
 I left my place to know them by their name, 
 Finding them butterfly-weed when I came. 
 
 The mower in the dew had loved them thus, 
 By leaving them to flourish, not for us, 
 
 Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him, 
 But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. 
 
 The butterfly and I had lit upon, 
 Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, 
 
114 Robert Frost 
 
 That made me hear the wakening birds around, 
 And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground, 
 
 And feel a spirit kindred to my own; 
 
 So that henceforth I worked no more alone; 
 
 But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, 
 And weary, sought at noon with him the shade; 
 
 And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech 
 With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. 
 
 "Men work together, ,, I told him from the heart, 
 "Whether they work together or apart." 
 
 BLUE-BUTTERFLY DAY 
 
 It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, 
 
 And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry, 
 
 There is more unmixed color on the wing 
 
 Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. 
 
 But these are flowers that fly and all but sing; 
 And now from having ridden out desire, 
 They lie closed over in the wind and cling 
 Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire. 
 
 BIRCHES 
 
 When I see birches bend to left and right 
 
 Across the line of straighter darker trees, 
 
 I like to think some boy's been swinging them. 
 
 But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay. 
 
 Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them 
 
 Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 
 
Robert Frost 115 
 
 After a rain. They click upon themselves 
 
 As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored 
 
 As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. 
 
 Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells 
 
 Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust — 
 
 Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away 
 
 You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. 
 
 They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, 
 
 And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 
 
 So low for long, they never right themselves: 
 
 You may see their trunks arching in the woods 
 
 Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground 
 
 Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair 
 
 Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 
 
 But I was going to say when Truth broke in 
 
 With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm, 
 
 I should prefer to have some boy bend them 
 
 As he went out and in to fetch the cows — 
 
 Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 
 
 Whose only play was what he found himself, 
 
 Summer or winter, and could play alone. 
 
 One by one he subdued his father's trees 
 
 By riding them down over and over again 
 
 Until he took the stiffness out of them, 
 
 And not one but hung limp, not one was left 
 
 For him to conquer. He learned all there was 
 
 To learn about not launching out too soon 
 
 And so not carrying the tree away 
 
 Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 
 
 To the top branches, climbing carefully 
 
 With the same pains you use to fill a cup 
 
 Up to the brim, and even above the brim. 
 
 Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, 
 
 Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 
 
1 16 Robert Frost 
 
 So was I once myself a swinger of birches; 
 
 And so I dream of going back to be. 
 
 It's when I'm weary of considerations, 
 
 And life is too much like a pathless wood 
 
 Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 
 
 Broken across it, and one eye is weeping 
 
 From a twig's having lashed across it open. 
 
 Td like to get away from earth awhile 
 
 And then come back to it and begin over. 
 
 May no fate wilfully misunderstand me 
 
 And half grant what I wish and snatch me away 
 
 Not to return. Earth's the right place for love: 
 
 I don't know where it's likely to go better. 
 
 I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree, 
 
 And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 
 
 Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more, 
 
 But dipped its top and set me down again. 
 
 That would be good both going and coming back. 
 
 One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. 
 
 THE ONSET 
 
 Always the same when on a fated night 
 At last the gathered snow lets down as white 
 As may be in dark woods and with a song 
 It shall not make again all winter long — 
 Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, — 
 I almost stumble looking up and round, 
 As one who, overtaken by the end, 
 Gives up his errand and lets death descend 
 Upon him where he is, with nothing done 
 To evil, no important triumph won 
 More than if life had never been begun. 
 
Robert Frost 0^7^) 
 
 Yet all the precedent is on my side: 
 
 I know that winter-death has never tried 
 
 The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap 
 
 In long storms an undrifted four feet deep 
 
 As measured against maple, birch and oak; 
 
 It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak; 
 
 And I shall see the snow all go down hill 
 
 In water of a slender April rill 
 
 That flashes tail through last year's withered brake 
 
 And dead weeds like a disappearing snake. 
 
 Nothing will be left white but here a birch 
 
 And there a clump of houses with a church. 
 
 Carl Sandburg 
 
 Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at 
 Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was hap- 
 hazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During 
 the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber 
 shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brick- 
 yard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver 
 and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These 
 tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, 
 to be the laureate of industrial America. 
 
 In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial "slender sheaf"; 
 a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but 
 strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. 
 It was twelve years later before the poet became known to 
 the public. The vigor which lay at the heart of American toil 
 found its outlet at last. 
 
 Chicago Poems (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a 
 direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an 
 almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg's 
 speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and 
 beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue 
 of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of pro- 
 test were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work 
 
1 1 8 Carl Sandburg 
 
 ugly and distorted; his language unrefined, unfit for poetry. 
 His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when 
 dealing with brutality; that, beneath his toughness, he was one 
 of the tenderest of living poets. 
 
 Cornhuskers (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as 
 sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain 
 in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a 
 magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something 
 of the surge of a Norse saga; Cornhuskers is keen with a rude 
 fervor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in 
 Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of 
 mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate 
 perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that 
 Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, roughneck sort of poetry. 
 "Cool Tombs," one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, 
 moves with a new music; "Grass" whispers as quietly as the 
 earlier "Fog" stole in on stealthy, cat-like feet. 
 
 Smoke and Steel (1920) which won a prize awarded to the 
 most distinctive poetry of the year, is the sublimation of its 
 predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has 
 fused mood, accent and image in a fresh intensity. It is a fit 
 setting for the title poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical 
 accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are 
 here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are 
 titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence 
 is here — the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked corn- 
 fields. Slabs of the Sunburnt West, an amplification of this 
 strain, appeared in 1922. 
 
 What makes all this work so vital is Sandburg's own spirit: 
 a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the 
 variety and wonder of life. 
 
 GRASS 
 
 Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. 
 Shovel them under and let me work — 
 
 I am the grass; I cover all. 
 
 And pile them high at Gettysburg 
 
 And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 
 
Carl Sandburg 1 19 
 
 Shovel them under and let me work. 
 
 Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: 
 
 What place is this? 
 
 Where are we now? 
 
 I am the grass. 
 Let me work. 
 
 PRAYERS OF STEEL 
 
 Lay me on an anvil, O God. 
 
 Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. 
 
 Let me pry loose old walls; 
 
 Let me lift and loosen old foundations. 
 
 Lay me on an anvil, O God. 
 Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. 
 Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. 
 Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. 
 Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through 
 blue nights into white stars. 
 
 COOL TOMBS 
 
 When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he 
 forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the 
 dust, in the cool tombs. 
 
 And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall 
 Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the 
 dust, in the cool tombs. 
 
120 Carl Sandburg 
 
 Pocahontas , body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw 
 in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? 
 does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool 
 tombs ? 
 
 Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, 
 cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin 
 horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell 
 me if any get more than the lovers ... in the 
 dust ... in the cool tombs. 
 
 FOG 
 
 The fog comes 
 on little cat feet. 
 
 It sits looking 
 over harbor and city 
 on silent haunches 
 and then moves on. 
 
 FROM "SMOKE AND STEEL" 
 
 Smoke of the fields in spring is one, 
 
 Smoke of the leaves in autumn another. 
 
 Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel, 
 
 They all go up in a line .with the smokestack, 
 
 Or they twist ... in the slow twist ... of the wind. 
 
 If the north wind comes they run to the south. 
 If the west wind comes they run to the east. 
 
 By this sign 
 
 all smokes 
 
 know each other. 
 
Carl Sandburg 121 
 
 Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn, 
 
 Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue, 
 
 By the oath of work they swear: "I know you." 
 
 Hunted and pissed from the center 
 Deep down long ago when God made us over, 
 Deep down are the cinders we came from — 
 You and I and our heads of smoke. 
 
 Some of the smokes God dropped on the job 
 Cross on the sky and count our years 
 And sing in the secrets of our numbers; 
 Sing their dawns and sing their evenings, 
 Sing an old log-fire song: 
 
 You may put the damper up, 
 
 You may put the damper down, 
 
 The smoke goes up the chimney just the same. 
 
 Smoke of a city sunset skyline, 
 Smoke of a country dust horizon — 
 
 They cross on the sky and count our years. 
 
 A bar of steel — it is only 
 Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. 
 A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, 
 And left smoke and the blood of a man 
 And the finished steel, chilled and blue. 
 
 So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again, 
 And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel, 
 A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky; 
 And always dark in the heart and through it, 
 Smoke and the blood of a man. 
 
122 Carl Sandburg 
 
 Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary — they make their steel 
 with men. 
 
 In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys 
 
 The smoke nights write their oaths: 
 
 Smoke into steel and blood into steel; 
 
 Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel 
 
 with men. 
 Smoke and blood is the mix of steel. 
 
 The birdmen drone 
 In the blue; it is steel 
 a motor sings and zooms. 
 
 Steel barb-wire around The Works. 
 
 Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of 
 
 The Works. 
 Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by 
 
 steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung 
 
 on its way by the clanking clam-shells. 
 The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig 
 
 and clutch and haul; they hoist their 
 
 automatic knuckles from job to job; they are 
 
 steel making steel. 
 Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is 
 
 timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are 
 
 dumped : 
 Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel 
 
 in the sea, climbing steel in the sky. 
 
 Adelaide Crapsey 
 
 Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, 
 New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar 
 
Adelaide Crapsey 1 23 
 
 College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. In 1905 
 she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her re- 
 turn she essayed to teach, but her failing health compelled her 
 to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at 
 Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her. 
 
 In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief 
 lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and 
 poignant. She was particularly happy in her "Cinquains," a 
 form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest 
 possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, 
 eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the 
 Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her 
 own fragile loveliness. 
 
 She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. 
 Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of an 
 unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published 
 in 1918. 
 
 THREE CINQUAINS 
 
 NOVEMBER NIGHT 
 
 Listen . . . 
 
 With faint dry sound, 
 
 Like steps of passing ghosts, 
 
 The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees 
 
 And fall. 
 
 TRIAD 
 
 These be 
 
 Three silent things: 
 
 The falling snow . . . the hour 
 
 Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one 
 
 Just dead. 
 
124 Adelaide Craps ey 
 
 THE WARNING 
 
 Just now, 
 
 Out of the strange 
 
 Still dusk ... as strange, as still . . . 
 
 A white moth flew. Why am I grown 
 
 So cold? 
 
 ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES 
 
 Is it as plainly in our living shown, 
 
 By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown? 
 
 Grace Hazard Conkling 
 
 Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. 
 After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music 
 at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). 
 Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, 
 where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry. 
 
 Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness 
 Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that seldom grows 
 cloying. There is fragrant whimsicality, a child-like freshness 
 in poems like "The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks," and 
 "Frost on a Window," which remind one of the manner of 
 her daughter, Hilda, (see page 213). 
 
 FROST ON A WINDOW 
 
 This forest looks the way 
 Nightingales sound. 
 Tall larches lilt and sway 
 Above the glittering ground: 
 The wild white cherry spray 
 Scatters radiance round. 
 
Grace Hazard Conkling 125 
 
 The chuckle of the nightingale 
 
 Is like this elfin wood. 
 
 Even as his gleaming trills assail 
 
 The spirit's solitude, 
 
 These leaves of light, these branches frail 
 
 Are music's very mood. 
 
 The song of these fantastic trees, 
 The plumes of frost they wear, 
 Are for the poet's whim who sees 
 Through a deceptive air, 
 And has an ear for melodies 
 When never a sound is there. 
 
 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 -V^- 
 
 (Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he 
 still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home 
 is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; 
 from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he 
 saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred 
 John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest 
 poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, at- 
 tended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute 
 at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). 
 After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the 
 first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and 
 the Carolinas, preaching "the gospel of beauty," and formulat- 
 ing his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) 
 
 Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he 
 met a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited 
 and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet en- 
 titled "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." But the great audiences 
 he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though 
 his collection General Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) struck 
 many a loud and racy note. 
 
 Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the 
 
126 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 following year, published his The Congo and Other Poems 
 (1914), an infectious blend of Lindsay's three R's: Rhyme, 
 Religion and Ragtime. In the title-poem and, in a lesser degree, 
 the three companion chants, Lindsay struck his most powerful 
 — and most popular — vein. These gave people (particularly 
 when intoned aloud) that primitive joy in syncopated sound 
 which is at the very base of song. The Chinese Nightingale 
 (1917) begins with one of the most whimsical pieces Lindsay 
 has ever devised. And if the subsequent The Golden Whales 
 of California (1920) is less distinctive, it is principally be- 
 cause the author has written too much and too speedily to be 
 self-critical. It is his peculiar appraisal of loveliness, the 
 rollicking high spirits joined to a stubborn evangelism, that 
 makes Lindsay so representative a product of his environment. 
 
 Besides his original poetry, Lindsay has embodied his ex- 
 periences and meditations on the road in two prose volumes, 
 A Handy Guide for Beggars (191 6) and Adventures While 
 Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), as well as a prophetic 
 study of the "silent drama," The Art of the Moving Picture 
 (1915). 
 
 THE EAGLE THAT IS FORGOTTEN » 
 
 [John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; 
 died March 12, iqo2~\ 
 
 Sleep softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the 
 
 stone, 
 Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its 
 
 own. 
 "We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in 
 
 secret rejoiced. 
 They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred 
 
 unvoiced. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company from General William Booth Enters into Heaven and 
 Other Poems by Vachel Lindsay. 
 

 
 Vachel Lindsay 127 
 
 They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, 
 
 day after day, 
 Now you were ended. They praised you, . . . and laid 
 
 you away. 
 
 The others that mourned you in silence and terror and 
 
 truth, 
 The widow bereft of her pittance, the boy without youth, 
 The mocked and the scorned and the wounded, the lame 
 
 and the poor 
 That should have remembered forever, . . . remember 
 
 no more. 
 
 Where are those lovers of yours, on what name do they 
 
 call 
 The lost, that in armies wept over your funeral pall? 
 They call on the names of a hundred high-valiant ones, 
 A hundred white eagles have risen, the sons of your sons, 
 The zeal in their wings is a zeal that your dreaming 
 
 began, 
 The valor that wore out your soul in the service of man. 
 
 Sleep softly, . . . eagle forgotten, . . . under the stone, 
 Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own. 
 Sleep on, O brave hearted, O wise man, that kindled 
 
 the flame — 
 To live in mankind is far more than to live in a name, 
 To live in mankind, far, far more . . . than to live 
 
 in a name. 
 
 TO A GOLDEN HAIRED GIRL IN A 
 LOUISIANA TOWN 
 
 You are a sunrise, 
 
 If a star should rise instead of the sun. 
 
 You are a moonrise, 
 
128 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 If a star should come in the place of the moon. 
 
 You are the Spring, 
 
 If a face should bloom instead of an apple-bough. 
 
 You are my love, 
 
 If your heart is as kind 
 
 As your young eyes now. 
 
 THE TRAVELLER 
 
 The moon's a devil jester 
 Who makes himself too free. 
 The rascal is not always 
 Where he appears to be. 
 Sometimes he is in my heart — 
 Sometimes he is in the sea; 
 Then tides are in my heart, 
 And tides are in the sea. 
 
 O traveller, abiding not 
 Where he pretends to be! 
 
 THE CONGO * 
 
 {A Study of the Negro Race) 
 
 I. Their Basic Savagery 
 
 Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, 
 Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable, 
 Sagged and reeled and pounded on the $ as * eep rolling 
 table, 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from The Congo and Other Poems by Vachel 
 Lindsay. 
 
Vachel Lindsay 129 
 
 Pounded on the table, 
 
 Beat an empty barrel with the handle of 
 
 a broom, 
 Hard as they were able, 
 Boom, boom, Boom, 
 With a silk umbrella and the handle of a 
 
 broom, 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom. 
 
 Then I had religion, Then I had a 
 vision. 
 
 I could not turn from their revel in de- 
 rision. 
 
 THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING More deliberate. 
 
 * Solemnly 
 
 THROUGH THE BLACK, chanted. 
 
 Cutting through the jungle with 
 
 a golden track. 
 Then along that riverbank 
 A thousand miles 
 Tattooed cannibals danced in files; 
 Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust 
 
 song 
 And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan £,r a P idl ,y 
 
 ° or- piling climax 
 
 gong. of speed and 
 
 And "Blood" screamed the whistles and 
 
 the fifes of the warriors, 
 "Blood" screamed the skull-faced, lean 
 
 witch-doctors, 
 "Whirl ye the deadly voodoo rattle, 
 Harry the uplands, 
 Steal all the cattle, 
 Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, 
 Bing! 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, Boom," 
 
130 
 
 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 A roaring, epic, rag-time tune 
 
 From the mouth of the Congo 
 
 To the Mountains of the Moon. 
 
 Death is an Elephant, 
 
 Torch-eyed and horrible, 
 
 Foam-flanked and terrible. 
 
 Boom., steal the pygmies, 
 
 Boom, kill the Arabs, 
 
 Boom, kill the white men, 
 
 Hoo, Hoo, Hoo. 
 
 Listen to the yell of Leopold's ghost 
 
 Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host. 
 
 Hear how the demons chuckle and yell. 
 
 Cutting his hands off, down in Hell. 
 
 Listen to the creepy proclamation, 
 
 Blown through the lairs of the forest- 
 nation, 
 
 Blown past the white-ants' hill of clay, 
 
 Blown past the marsh where the butter- 
 flies play: — 
 
 "Be careful what you do, 
 
 Or Mumbo- Jumbo, God of the Congo, 
 
 And all of the other 
 
 Gods of the Congo, 
 
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, 
 
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, 
 
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you." 
 
 With a philo- 
 sophic pause. 
 
 Shrilly and 
 with a heavily 
 accented 
 meter. 
 
 Like the wind 
 in the chimney. 
 
 All the o sounds 
 very golden. 
 Heavy accents 
 very heavy. 
 Light accents 
 very light. Last 
 line whispered. 
 
 II. Their Irrepressible High Spirits 
 
 Wild crap-shooters with a whoop and a call ^ he ^ hrUl 
 Danced the juba in their gambling-hall 
 
Vachel Lindsay 131 
 
 And laughed fit to kill, and shook the town, 
 And guyed the policemen and laughed them 
 
 down 
 With a boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, 
 
 Boom. . . , 
 
 Then- I saw the Congo, creeping ? ea J f* ac ]p as 
 
 ' in first section. 
 
 through the black, 
 Cutting through the jungle with 
 
 A GOLDEN TRACK. 
 
 A negro fairyland swung into view, o^the^etfcat 
 
 A minstrel river ideas. Keep as 
 
 TTT1 . light-footed as 
 
 Where dreams come true. possible. 
 
 The ebony palace soared on high 
 
 Through the blossoming trees to the eve- 
 ning sky. 
 
 The inlaid porches and casement shone 
 
 With gold and ivory and elephant-bone. 
 
 And the black crowd laughed till their 
 sides were sore 
 
 At the baboon butler in the agate door, 
 
 And the well-known tunes of the parrot 
 band 
 
 That trilled on the bushes of that magic 
 land. 
 
 A troupe of skull-faced witch-men came With pomposity. 
 
 Through the agate doorway in suits of 
 flame, 
 
 Yea, long-tailed coats w T ith a gold-leaf crust 
 
 And hats that were covered with diamond- 
 dust. 
 
132 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 And the crowd in the court gave a whoop 
 
 and a call 
 And danced the juba from wall to wall. 
 But the witch-men suddenly stilled the 
 
 throng With a great 
 
 -, Tr . ! ill i 11 deliberation and 
 
 With a stern cold glare, and a stern old ghostiiness. 
 
 song : — 
 "Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you." . . . 
 Just then from the doorway, as fat as 
 
 SJlOteS, With overwhelm- 
 
 Came the cake-walk princes in their long ^/^^ c % nd 
 red coats, P° m P- 
 
 Shoes with a patent leather shine, 
 
 And tall silk hats that were red as wine. 
 
 And they pranced with their butterfly 
 
 partners there, mth gr0 wing 
 
 Coal-black maidens with pearls in their %Z d piy n marked 
 
 hair dance-rhythm. 
 
 Knee-skirts trimmed with the jessamine 
 
 sweet, 
 And bells on their ankles and little black 
 
 feet. 
 And the couples railed at the chant and 
 
 the frown 
 Of the witch-men lean, and laughed them 
 
 down. 
 (O rare was the revel and well worth 
 
 while 
 That made those glowering witch-men 
 
 smile.) 
 
 The cake-walk royalty then began 
 
 To walk for a cake that was tall as a man 
 
 To the tune of "Boomlay, boomlay, Boom," 
 
Vachel Lindsay 133 
 
 While the witch-men laughed with a 
 
 siniQt-pr air With a touch °f 
 
 sinister air, ^ negr0 dialect> 
 
 And sang with the scalawags prancing and ... 
 
 te ° r ° as rapidly as 
 
 there I possible toward 
 
 "Walk with care, walk with care, 
 
 Or Mumbo- Jumbo, God of the Congo, 
 
 And all of the other 
 
 Gods of the Congo, 
 
 Mumbo- Jumbo will hoo-doo you. 
 
 Beware, beware, walk with care, 
 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom. 
 
 Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, boom, 
 
 Boomlay, boomlav, boomlay, 
 
 Boom." 
 
 Oh, rare was the revel, and well worth Sl °™. P hil f- 
 
 ' # ' sophxc calm. 
 
 w^hile 
 That made those glowering witch-men 
 smile. 
 
 III. The Hope of their Religion 
 A good old negro in the slums of the town 2?5* ba J s - . 
 
 T* 1 , • With a literal 
 
 Preached at a sister for her velvet gown, imitation of 
 
 tt i 1 11 c 1 • 1 1 camp-mecting 
 
 Howled at a brother for his low-down racket, and 
 
 trance. 
 
 ways, 
 His prowling, guzzling, sneak-thief days. 
 Beat on the Bible till he wore it out, 
 Starting the jubilee revival shout. 
 And some had visions, as they stood on 
 
 chairs, 
 And sang of Jacob, and the golden stairs, 
 And they all repented, a thousand strong, 
 From their stupor and savagery and sin 
 
 and wrong 
 
134 Vachel Lindsay 
 
 And slammed their hymn books till they 
 
 shook the room 
 With "Glory, glory, glory," 
 And "Boom, boom, Boom/' 
 
 Then I saw the Congo/ creeping f™f r y st a s s ec Hon. 
 
 through the black, 
 Cutting through the jungle with 
 
 a golden track. 
 And the gray sky opened like a new-rent 
 
 veil 
 And showed the apostles with their coats 
 
 of mail. 
 In bright white steel they were seated 
 
 round 
 And their fire-eyes watched where the 
 
 Congo wound. 
 And the twelve apostles, from their thrones 
 
 on high, 
 Thrilled all the forest with their heavenly 
 
 cry: — 
 
 Sung to the 
 
 tune of "Hark, 
 
 "Mumbo- Jumbo will die in the jungle; ten thous p d 
 Never again will he hoo-doo you, voices." 
 
 Never again will he hoo-doo you." 
 
 Then along that river-bank, a thousand With growing 
 
 ° 3 deliberation 
 
 miles, and joy. 
 
 The vine-snared trees fell down in files. 
 
 Pioneer angels cleared the way 
 
 For a Congo paradise, for babes at play, 
 
 For sacred capitals, for temples clean. 
 
 Gone were the skull-faced witch-men lean. 
 
 There, where the wild ghost-gods had j n a rat h er 
 
 wailed hi 8 h key—™ 
 
 7f lieQ u delicately as 
 
 A million boats of the angels sailed possible. 
 
Vachel Lindsay 135 
 
 With oars of silver, and prows of blue 
 And silken pennants that the sun shone 
 
 through. 
 'Twas a land transfigured, 'twas a new 
 
 creation, 
 Oh, a singing wind swept the negro nation ; 
 And on through the backwoods clearing 
 
 flew: — 
 "M umbo- Jumbo is dead in the jungle. To the tune of 
 
 Never again will he hoo-doo you. 'itoZand'larps 
 
 Never again will he hoo-doo you." and voices." 
 
 Redeemed were the forests, the beasts and 
 
 the men, 
 And only the vulture dared again 
 By the far, lone mountains of the moon 
 To cry, in the silence, the Congo tune : — 
 "Mumbo- Jumbo will hoo-doo you. P?* n * °f 
 
 Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, trating, 
 
 Mumbo . . . Jumbo . . . will . . . whisper. 
 
 hoo-doo . . . you." 
 
 John G. Neihardt 
 
 John Gneisenau Neihardt was born at Sharpsburg, Illinois, 
 January 8, 1881. He completed a scientific course at Nebraska 
 Normal College in 1897 and lived among the Omaha Indians for 
 six years (1901-7), studying their customs, characteristics and 
 legends. 
 
 Although he had already published two books, A Bundle of 
 Myrrh (1908) was his first volume to attract notice. It was 
 full of spirit, enthusiasm and an insistent virility — qualities 
 which were extended (and overemphasized) in Man-Song 
 (1909). Neihardt found a richer note and a new restraint in 
 The Stranger at the Gate (1911), the best of the lyrics from 
 these three volumes appearing in The Quest (1916). 
 
136 
 
 John G. Neihardt 
 
 Neihardt meanwhile had been going deeper into folk-lore, 
 the results of which appeared in The Song of Hugh Glass 
 (1915) and The Song of Three Friends (1919). The latter, 
 in 1920, divided the annual prize offered by the Poetry Society, 
 halving the honors with Gladys Cromwell's Poems. These two 
 books of Neihardt's are detailed long poems, part of a projected 
 epic series celebrating the winning of the West by the pioneers. 
 
 CRY OF THE PEOPLE x 
 
 Tremble before thy chattels, 
 Lords of the scheme of things! 
 Fighters of all earths battles, 
 Ours is the might of kings! 
 Guided by seers and sages, 
 The world's heart-beat for a drum, 
 Snapping the chains of ages, 
 Out of the night we come! 
 
 Lend us no ear that pities! 
 Offer no almoner's hand! 
 Alms for the builders of cities! 
 When will you understand? 
 Down with your pride of birth 
 And your golden gods of trade! 
 A man is worth to his mother, Earth, 
 All that a man has made! 
 
 We are the workers and makers. 
 We are no longer dumb! 
 Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! 
 Sweeping the earth — we come! 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from The Quest by John G. Neihardt. 
 
John G. Neihardt 137 
 
 Ranked in the world-wide dawn, 
 Marching into the day! 
 The night is gone and the sword is drawn 
 And the scabbard is thrown away! 
 
 LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS 1 
 
 Let me live out my years in heat of blood ! 
 Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine! 
 Let me not see this soul-house built of mud 
 Go toppling to the dust — a vacant shrine. 
 
 Let me go quickly, like a candle light 
 Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow. 
 Give me high noon — and let it then be night! 
 Thus would I go. 
 
 And grant that when I face the grisly Thing, 
 My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps. 
 Let me be as a tune-swept flddlestring 
 That feels the Master Melody — and snaps! 
 
 Witter By nner 
 
 Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 
 1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been 
 assistant editor of various periodicals as well as adviser to 
 publishers. Recently, he has spent much of his time lecturing 
 on poetry and travelling in the Orient. 
 
 Young Harvard (1907), the first of Bynner's volumes, was, 
 as the name implies, a celebration of his Alma Mater. The New 
 World (1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from The Quest by John G. Neihardt, 
 
138 Witter Bynner 
 
 In this extended poem, Bynner sought — almost too determinedly 
 — to translate the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of 
 these volumes displays its author's gifts at their best, for 
 Bynner is, first of all, a lyric poet. Grenstone Poems (1917) 
 and A Canticle of Pan (1920) reveal a more natural singing 
 voice. Bynner harmonizes in many keys; transposing, modu- 
 lating and shifting from one tonality to another. 
 
 Under the pseudonym "Emanuel Morgan," Bynner was co- 
 author with Arthur Davison Ficke (writing under the name of 
 "Anne Knish") of Spectra (1916). Spectra was a serious 
 burlesque of some of the extreme manifestations of modern 
 poetic tendencies — a remarkable hoax that deceived many of 
 the radical propagandists as well as most of the conservative 
 critics. 
 
 GRASS-TOPS 
 
 What bird are you in the grass-tops? 
 Your poise is enough of an answer, 
 With your wing-tips like up-curving fingers 
 Of the slow-moving hands of a dancer . . . 
 
 And what is so nameless as beauty, 
 Which poets, who give it a name, 
 Are only unnaming forever? — 
 Content, though it go, that it came. 
 
 VOICES 
 
 O, there were lights and laughter 
 And the motions to and fro 
 
 Of people as they enter 
 
 And people as they go . . . 
 
 And there were many voices 
 
 Vying at the feast, 
 But mostly I remember 
 
 Yours — who spoke the least. 
 
Witter Bynner 139 
 
 A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN •* 
 
 "Lincoln?— 
 
 Well, I was in the old Second Maine, 
 
 The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree 
 
 State. 
 Of course I didn't get the butt of the clip; 
 We was there for guardin' Washington — 
 We was all green. 
 
 "I ain't never ben to the theayter in my life — 
 
 I didn't know how to behave. 
 
 I ain't never ben since. 
 
 I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in 
 
 When he was shot. 
 
 I can tell you, sir, there was a panic 
 
 When we found our President was in the shape he was in ! 
 
 Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him. 
 
 "Yes, sir. His looks was kind o' hard to forget. 
 
 He was a spare man, 
 
 An old farmer. 
 
 Everything was all right, you know, 
 
 But he wasn't a smooth-appearin' man at all — 
 
 Not in no ways; 
 
 Thin-faced, long-necked, 
 
 And a swellin' kind of a thick lip like. 
 
 "And he was a jolly old fellow — always cheerful; 
 He wasn't so high but the boys could talk to him their 
 own ways. 
 
 *See pages 54, 78, 84,^142, 172. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission from Grenstone Poems by Witter 
 Bynner. Copyright, 191 7, by Frederick A. Stokes Company. 
 
140 Witter By nner 
 
 While I was servin' at the Hospital 
 
 He'd come in and say, 'You look nice in here/ 
 
 Praise us up, you know. 
 
 And he'd bend over and talk to the boys — 
 
 And he'd talk so good to 'em — so close — 
 
 That's why I call him a farmer. 
 
 I don't mean that everything about him wasn't all right, 
 
 you understand, 
 It's just — well, I was a farmer — 
 And he was my neighbor, anybody's neighbor. 
 I guess even you young folks would 'a' liked him." 
 
 James Oppenheim 
 
 James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 
 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, 
 where he has lived ever since. After a public school educa- 
 tion, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) 
 and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of 
 assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and 
 superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls 
 (1904-7). 
 
 Oppenheim's initial venture as a poet, Monday Morning and 
 Other Poems (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, 
 half experimental. In spite of its spiritual indebtedness to 
 Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular 
 (though ragged) rhyme. 
 
 In Songs for the New Age (1914) and War and Laughter 
 (1916) the notes are much fuller; we listen to a speech that, 
 echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is 
 strangely Biblical and yet local. (See Preface.) This volume, 
 like all of Oppenheim's subsequent work {The Book of Self, 
 1917, The Mystic Warrior, 1921) is analysis in terms of poetry, 
 a slow searching that attempts to diagnose the twisting soul 
 of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah 
 note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as "The 
 Slave," "Tasting the Earth"; the music and imagery of the 
 
James Oppenheim 141 
 
 Psalms are heard in "The Flocks" and "The Runner in the 
 Skies." 
 
 The Solitary (1919) is another stride forward. Its major 
 section, a long symbolic poem called "The Sea," breathes the 
 same note that was the burden of the earlier books — "We are 
 flesh on the way to godhood" — with greater strength and still 
 greater control. 
 
 THE SLAVE 
 
 They set the slave free, striking off his chains . 
 Then he was as much of a slave as ever. 
 
 He was still chained to servility, 
 
 He was still manacled to indolence and sloth, 
 
 He was still bound by fear and superstition, 
 
 By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery . . . 
 
 His slavery was not in the chains, 
 
 But in himself. . . . 
 
 They can only set free men free . . . 
 And there is no need of that: 
 Free men set themselves free. 
 
 THE RUNNER IN THE SKIES 
 
 Who is the runner in the skies, 
 With her blowing scarf of stars, 
 And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her 
 
 blossoming heart? 
 Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep, 
 Her eyes are nebulous and veiled ; 
 She hurries through the night to a far lover . , , 
 
142 James Oppenheim 
 
 THE LINCOLN CHILD * 
 
 Clearing in the forest, 
 
 In the wild Kentucky forest, 
 
 And the stars, wintry stars, strewn above ! 
 
 O Night that is the starriest 
 
 Since Earth began to roll — 
 
 For a Soul 
 
 Is born out of Love! 
 
 Mother love, father love, love of eternal God — 
 
 Stars have pushed aside to let him through — 
 
 Through heaven's sun-sown deeps 
 
 One sparkling ray of God 
 
 Strikes the clod — 
 
 (And while an angel-host through wood and clearing 
 sweeps ! ) 
 
 Born in the wild 
 
 The Child- 
 Naked, ruddy, new, 
 
 Wakes with the piteous human cry and at the mother- 
 heart sleeps. 
 
 To the mother wild berries and honey, 
 
 To the father awe without end, 
 
 To the child a swaddling of flannel — 
 
 And a dawn rolls sharp and sunny 
 
 And the skies of winter bend 
 
 To see the first sweet word penned 
 
 In the godliest human annal. 
 
 1 See pages 54, 78, 84, 139, 172. 
 
James Oppenheim 143 
 
 Soon in the wide wilderness, 
 
 On a branch blown over a creek, 
 
 Up a trail of the wild coon, 
 
 In a lair of the wild bee, 
 
 The rugged boy, by dangers stress, 
 
 Learnt the speech the wild things speak, 
 
 Learnt the Earth's eternal tune 
 
 Of strife-engendered harmony — 
 
 Went to school where Life itself was master, 
 
 Went to church where Earth was minister — 
 
 And in Danger and Disaster 
 
 Felt his future manhood stir! 
 
 And lo, as he grew ugly, gaunt, 
 
 And gnarled his way into a man, 
 
 What wisdom came to feed his want, 
 
 What worlds came near to let him scan! 
 
 And as he fathomed through and through 
 
 Our dark and sorry human scheme, 
 
 He knew what Shakespeare never knew, 
 
 What Dante never dared to dream — 
 
 That Men are one 
 
 Beneath the sun, 
 
 And before God are equal souls — 
 
 This truth was his, 
 
 And this it is 
 
 That round him such a glory rolls. 
 
 For not alone he knew it as a truth, 
 
 He made it of his blood, and of his brain — 
 
 He crowned it on the day when piteous Booth 
 
 Sent a whole land to weeping with world pain — 
 
144 James Oppenheim 
 
 When a black cloud blotted out the sun 
 And men stopped in the streets to sob, 
 To think Old Abe was dead. 
 Dead, and the day's work still undone, 
 Dead, and war's ruining heart athrob, 
 And earth with fields of carnage freshly spread. 
 Millions died fighting; 
 But in this man we mourned 
 Those millions, and one other — 
 And the States today uniting, 
 North and South, 
 East and West, 
 Speak with a people's mouth 
 A rhapsody of rest 
 To him our beloved best, 
 Our big, gaunt, homely brother — 
 Our huge Atlantic coast-storm in a shawl, 
 Our cyclone in a smile — our President, 
 Who knew and loved us all 
 With love more eloquent 
 
 Than his own words — with Love that in real deeds was 
 spent. . . . 
 
 Oh, to pour love through deeds — 
 
 To be as Lincoln was! — 
 
 That all the land might fill its daily needs 
 
 Glorified by a human Cause! 
 
 Then were America a vast World-Torch 
 
 Flaming a faith across the dying Earth, 
 
 Proclaiming from the Atlantic's rocky porch, 
 
 That a New World was struggling at the birth! 
 
 O living God, O Thou who living art 
 
James Oppenheim 145 
 
 And real, and near, draw, as at that babe's birth, 
 
 Into our souls and sanctify our Earth — 
 
 Let down thy strength that we endure 
 
 Mighty and pure 
 
 As mothers and fathers of our own Lincoln-child. . . . 
 
 O Child, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, 
 
 Soul torn from out our Soul! 
 
 May you be great, and pure, and beautiful — 
 
 A Soul to search this world 
 
 To be a father, brother, comrade, son, 
 
 A toiler powerful; 
 
 A man whose toil is done 
 
 One with God's Law above: 
 
 Work wrought through Love! 
 
 Lola Ridge 
 
 Lola Ridge was born in Dublin, Ireland, leaving there in 
 infancy and spending her childhood in Sydney, Australia. 
 After living some years in New Zealand, she returned to Aus- 
 tralia to study art. In 1907, she came to the United States, 
 earning her living as organizer, as advertisement writer, as 
 illustrator, artist's model, factory-worker, etc. In 1918, The 
 New Republic published her long poem The Ghetto and Miss 
 Ridge, until then totally unknown, became the "discovery" 
 of the year. 
 
 Her volume The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918) contains 
 one poem that is brilliant, several that are powerful and none 
 that is mediocre. The title-poem is its pinnacle; in it Miss 
 Ridge touches strange heights. It is essentially a poem of the 
 city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden beauties. 
 
 Sun-Up (1920) is less integrated, more frankly experimental. 
 But the same vibrancy and restrained power that distinguished 
 her preceding book are manifest here. 
 
146 Lola Ridge 
 
 PASSAGES FROM "THE GHETTO" 
 
 Old Sodos no longer makes saddles. 
 
 He has forgotten how . . . 
 
 Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain, 
 
 And night by night 
 
 I see the love-gesture of his arm 
 
 In its green-greasy coat-sleeve 
 
 Circling the Book, 
 
 And the candles gleaming starkly 
 
 On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face, 
 
 Like a miswritten psalm . . . 
 
 Night by night 
 
 I hear his lifted praise, 
 
 Like a broken whinnying 
 
 Before the Lord's shut gate. 
 
 Lights go out 
 
 And the stark trunks of the factories 
 
 Melt into the drawn darkness, 
 
 Sheathing like a seamless garment. 
 
 And mothers take home their babies, 
 
 Waxen and delicately curled, 
 
 Like little potted flowers closed under the stars. . , 
 
 Lights go out . . . 
 
 And colors rush together, 
 
 Fusing and floating away. 
 
 Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels . . . 
 
 Mauve, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples, 
 
 And burning spires in aureoles of light 
 
 Like shimmering auras. 
 
Lola Ridge 147 
 
 They are covering up the pushcarts . . . 
 
 Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors — 
 
 Little oval mirrors like tiny pools. 
 
 He shuffles up a darkened street 
 
 And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like 
 
 phosphorus. • . . 
 The moon like a skull, 
 Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling 
 
 home the pushcarts. 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg 
 
 Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most daring of the younger 
 insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. 
 His education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent be- 
 neath the roar of the elevated trains. At ten he was an ex- 
 pert chess player, supporting himself, from the ages of seven- 
 teen to twenty-five, by teaching and playing exhibition games. 
 His passion, however, was not mathematics but music. At 
 thirty, he began to turn to the theater as a medium. 
 
 In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which, 
 half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself "Others." (He 
 edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 
 1917 and 1919.) 
 
 Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was 
 an attempt to strip poetry of its frequent wordiness and rhe- 
 torical non-essentials. Mushrooms (1916) was the first col- 
 lection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for 
 simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an 
 almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, at- 
 taining nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated 
 simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between 
 what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish. 
 
 Kreymborg's most ambitious volume of poetry, Blood of 
 Things (1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not 
 only of an ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Here, 
 in spite of what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, 
 is a rich and sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as 
 it is quick-witted. 
 
148 Alfred Kreymborg 
 
 OLD MANUSCRIPT 
 
 The sky 
 
 is that beautiful old parchment 
 
 in which the sun 
 
 and the moon 
 
 keep their diary. 
 
 To read it all, 
 
 one must be a linguist 
 
 more learned than Father Wisdom 
 
 and a visionary 
 
 more clairvoyant than Mother Dream. 
 
 But to feel it, 
 
 one must be an apostle: 
 
 one who is more than intimate 
 
 in having been, always, 
 
 the only confidant — 
 
 like the earth 
 
 or the sea. 
 
 DAWNS 
 
 I have come 
 
 from pride 
 
 all the way up to humility 
 
 this day-to-night. 
 
 The hill 
 
 was more terrible 
 
 than ever before. 
 
 This is the top; 
 
 there is the tall, slim tree. 
 
 It isn't bent; it doesn't lean; 
 
Alfred Kreymborg 149 
 
 It is only looking back. 
 
 At dawn, 
 
 under that tree, 
 
 still another me of mine 
 
 was buried. 
 
 Waiting for me to come again, 
 
 humorously solicitous 
 
 of what I bring next, 
 
 it looks down. 
 
 Badger Clark 
 
 Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved 
 to Dakota Territory at the age of three months and now lives 
 in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 
 
 Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their 
 work become part of folk-lore, many of his songs having 
 been adapted and paraphrased by the cowboys who have made 
 them their own. 
 
 Sun and Saddle Leather (1915) and Grass-Grown Trails 
 (1917) are the expression of a native singer; happy, spon- 
 taneous and seldom "literary." There is wind in these songs; 
 the smell of camp-smoke and the colors of prairie sunsets rise 
 from them. Free, for the most part, from affectations, Clark 
 achieves an unusual ease in his use of the local vernacular. 
 
 THE GLORY TRAIL ' 
 
 'Way high up the Mogollons, 
 
 Among the mountain tops, 
 A lion cleaned a yearlin's bones 
 
 And licked his thankful chops, 
 
 1 From Sun and Saddle Leather by Badger Clark. Copy- 
 right, 1 91 5. Richard G. Badger, Publisher. 
 
150 Badger Clark 
 
 When on the picture who should ride, 
 
 A-trippin' down a slope, 
 But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride 
 
 And mav'rick-hungry rope. 
 
 "Oh, glory be to me," says he 
 "And james unfadin flowers! 
 
 All meddlin hands are jar away; 
 
 I ride my good top-hawse today 
 
 And I'm top-rope of the Lazy J — 
 Hi! kitty cat, you re ours!" 
 
 That lion licked his paw so brown 
 
 And dreamed soft dreams of veal — 
 And then the circlin' loop sung down 
 
 And roped him 'round his meal. 
 He yowled quick fury to the world 
 
 Till all the hills yelled back; 
 The top-hawse gave a snort and whirled 
 
 And Bob caught up the slack. 
 
 "Oh, glory be to me" laughs he. 
 
 "We've hit the glory trail. 
 No human man as I have read 
 Darst loop a rag in lions head, 
 Nor ever hawse could drag one dead 
 
 Until we've told the tale." 
 
 'Way high up the Mogollons 
 
 That top-hawse done his best, 
 Through whippin' brush and rattlin' stones, 
 
 From canyon-floor to crest. 
 But ever when Bob turned and hoped 
 
 A limp remains to find, 
 
Badger Clark 151 
 
 A red-eyed lion, belly roped 
 But healthy, loped behind. 
 
 "Oh, glory be to me," grunts he. 
 
 "This glory trail is rough, 
 Yet even till the Judgment Morn 
 Fll keep this dally 'round the horn, 
 For never any hero born 
 
 Could stop to holler: 'NuffJ'" 
 
 Three suns had rode their circle home 
 
 Beyond the desert's rim, 
 And turned their star-herds loose to roam 
 
 The ranges high and dim; 
 Yet up and down and 'round and 'cross 
 
 Bob pounded, weak and wan, 
 For pride still glued him to his hawse 
 
 And glory drove him on. 
 
 "Oh, glory be to me" sighs he. 
 
 "He kaint be drug to death, 
 But now I know beyond a doubt 
 Them heroes I have read about 
 Was only fools that stuck it out 
 
 To end of ?nortal breath." 
 
 'Way high up the Mogollons 
 
 A prospect man did swear 
 That moonbeams melted down his bones 
 
 And hoisted up his hair: 
 A ribby cow-hawse thundered by, 
 
 A lion trailed along, 
 A rider ga'nt but chin on high, 
 
 Yelled out a crazy song. 
 
152 Badger Clark 
 
 "Oh, glory be to me!" cries he, 
 
 "And to my noble noose! 
 Oh, stranger tell my pards below 
 I took a rampin dream in tow, 
 And if I never lay him low, 
 I'll never turn him loose!" 
 
 Harry Kemp 
 
 Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as "the tramp-poet/' was 
 born at Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East 
 at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but re- 
 turned to high school to study English. 
 
 A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his 
 high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to 
 China, from China to California, from California to the Uni- 
 versity of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he 
 crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York 
 City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theater 
 in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus. 
 
 His first collection of poems, The Cry of Youth (1914), like 
 the subsequent volume, The Passing God (1919), is full of 
 every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp 
 would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is 
 a precise and almost over-polished poetry. Chanteys and Bal- 
 lads (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are 
 more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced. 
 
 STREET LAMPS 
 
 Softly they take their being, one by one, 
 
 From the lamp-lightens hand, after the sun 
 
 Has dropped to dusk . . . like little flowers they bloom 
 
 Set in long rows amid the growing gloom. 
 
 Who he who lights them is, I do not know, 
 Except that, every eve, with footfall slow 
 
Harry Kemp 153 
 
 And regular, he passes by my room 
 
 And sets his gusty flowers of light a-bloom. 
 
 A PHANTASY OF HEAVEN 
 
 Perhaps he plays with cherubs now, 
 Those little, golden boys of God, 
 
 Bending, with them, some silver bough, 
 The while a seraph, head a-nod, 
 
 Slumbers on guard; how they will run 
 And shout, if he should wake too soon, — 
 
 As fruit more golden than the sun 
 And riper than the full-grown moon, 
 
 Conglobed in clusters, weighs them down, 
 Like Atlas heaped with starry signs; 
 
 And, if they're tripped, heel over crown, 
 By hidden coils of mighty vines, — 
 
 Perhaps the seraph, swift to pounce, 
 Will hale them, vexed, to God — and He 
 
 Will only laugh, remembering, once 
 He was a boy in Galilee ! 
 
 Max Eastman 
 
 Max Eastman was born at Canandaigua, New York, Janu- 
 ary 4, 1883. Both his father and mother had been Congre- 
 gationalist preachers, so it was natural that the son should 
 turn from scholasticism to a definitely social expression. East- 
 man had received his A.B. at Williams in 1905 ; from 1907 
 to 1911 he had been Associate in Philosophy at Columbia Uni- 
 versity. But in the latter part of 191 1, he devoted all his 
 
1^4 Max Eastman 
 
 time to writing, studying the vast problems of economic in- 
 equality and voicing the protests of the dumb millions in a 
 style that was all the firmer for being philosophic. In 1913, 
 he became editor of The Masses which, in 1917, became The 
 Liberator. 
 
 His Child of the Amazons (1913) and Colors of Life (1918) 
 reveal the quiet lover of beauty as well as the fiery hater of 
 injustice. 
 
 AT THE AQUARIUM 
 
 Serene the silver fishes glide, 
 Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed! 
 As, through the aged deeps of ocean, 
 They glide with wan and wavy motion. 
 They have no pathway where they go, 
 They flow like water to and fro, 
 They watch with never-winking eyes, 
 They watch with staring, cold surprise, 
 The level people in the air, 
 The people peering, peering there: 
 Who wander also to and fro, 
 And know not why or where they go, 
 Yet have a wonder in their eyes, 
 Sometimes a pale and cold surprise. 
 
 Eunice Tietjens 
 
 Eunice Tietjens (nee Hammond) was born in Chicago, Illi- 
 nois, July 29, 1884. She married Paul Tietjens, the composer, 
 in 1904. During 1914 and 1916 she was Associate Editor of 
 Poetry; A Magazine of Verse and went to France as war cor- 
 respondent of the Chicago Daily News (1917-18). Her second 
 marriage (to Cloyd Head, the writer) occurred in February, 
 1920. 
 
Eunice Tietjens 155 
 
 Profiles from China (1917) is a series of sketches of peo- 
 ple, scenes and incidents observed in the interior. Written in 
 a fluent free verse, the poems in this collection are alive with 
 color and personality. 
 
 THE MOST-SACRED MOUNTAIN 
 
 Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, 
 And this sharp exultation, like a cry, 
 After the slow six thousand steps of climbing! 
 This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. 
 
 Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of 
 green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the 
 floor of earth, stretches away to blue infinity. 
 
 Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their 
 slow curves against the sky, 
 
 And one black bird circles above the void. 
 
 Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; 
 
 And w r ith them broods eternity — a swift, white peace, a 
 
 presence manifest. 
 The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is 
 
 the end that has no end. 
 
 Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years be- 
 fore the Nazarene, 
 
 He stepped, with me, thus into timelessness. 
 
 The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that 
 says : 
 
 On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness 
 of the world below. 
 
 The stone grows old. 
 Eternity 
 
156 Eunice Tietjens 
 
 Is not for stones. 
 
 But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white 
 
 peace, this stinging exultation; 
 And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the 
 
 rhythm of the daily round. 
 Yet, having known, life will not press so close, 
 And always I shall feel time ravel thin about me. 
 For once I stood 
 In the white windy presence of eternity. 
 
 Sara Teasdale 
 
 Sara Teasdale was born August 8, 1884, at St. Louis, Mis- 
 souri, and educated there. After leaving school, she traveled 
 in Europe and the Near East. In 1914, she married Ernst B. 
 Filsinger, who has written several books on foreign trade, and 
 moved to New York City in 19 16. 
 
 Her first book was a slight volume, Sonnets to Duse (1907), 
 giving little promise of the rich lyricism which was to follow. 
 Helen of Troy and Other Poems (1911) contains the first hints 
 of that delicate craftsmanship and authentic loveliness which 
 this poet has brought to such a high pitch. 
 
 Rivers to the Sea (191 5) emphasizes this poet's singing in- 
 tensity as well as her epigrammatic skill. But a greater re- 
 straint is here. The new collection contains at least a dozen 
 unforgettable snatches, lyrics in which the words seem to fall 
 into place without art or effort. Seldom employing metaphor 
 or striking imagery, almost bare of ornament, these poems 
 have the sheer magic of triumphant song. Theirs is an art- 
 lessness that is more than an art. 
 
 Love Songs (1917) is a collection of Miss Teasdale's previ- 
 ous melodies for the viola d'amore together with several new 
 tunes. Flame and Shadow (1920) is, however, by far the best 
 of her books. Here the beauty is fuller and deeper; an almost 
 mystic radiance plays from these starry verses. Technically, 
 also, this volume marks Miss Teasdale's greatest advance. 
 The words are chosen with a keener sense of their actual as 
 well as their musical values; the rhythms are much more 
 subtle and varied; the line moves with a greater naturalness. 
 
Sara Teas dale 157 
 
 SPRING NIGHT x 
 
 The park is filled with night and fog, 
 The veils are drawn about the world, 
 
 The drowsy lights along the paths 
 Are dim and pearled. 
 
 Gold and gleaming the empty streets, 
 Gold and gleaming the misty lake. 
 
 The mirrored lights like sunken swords, 
 Glimmer and shake. 
 
 Oh, is it not enough to be 
 
 Here with this beauty over me? 
 
 My throat should ache with praise, and I 
 
 Should kneel in joy beneath the sky. 
 
 O beauty, are you not enough? 
 
 Why am I crying after love 
 
 With youth, a singing voice, and eyes 
 
 To take earth's wonder with surprise? 
 
 Why have I put off my pride, 
 
 Why am I unsatisfied, — 
 
 I, for whom the pensive night 
 
 Binds her cloudy hair with light, — 
 
 I, for whom all beauty burns 
 
 Like incense in a million urns? 
 
 O beauty, are you not enough? 
 
 Why am I crying after love? 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale. 
 
158 Sara Teasdale 
 
 NIGHT SONG AT AMALFI ' 
 
 I asked the heaven of stars 
 What I should give my love — 
 
 It answered me with silence, 
 Silence above. 
 
 I asked the darkened sea 
 
 Down where the fishermen go — 
 
 It answered me with silence, 
 Silence below. 
 
 Oh, I could give him weeping, 
 Or I could give him song — 
 
 But how can I give silence 
 My whole life long? 
 
 WATER LILIES 2 
 
 If you have forgotten water-lilies floating 
 
 On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon 
 shade, 
 
 If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance, 
 Then you can return and not be afraid. 
 
 But if you remember, then turn away forever 
 
 To the plains and the prairies where pools are far 
 apart, 
 There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies, 
 And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your 
 heart. 
 
 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Love Songs by Sara Teasdale. 
 
 2 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan 
 Company, from Flame and Shadow by Sara Teasdale. 
 
Sara Teas dale 159 
 
 TWO SONGS FOR SOLITUDE 
 
 The Crystal Gazer 
 
 I shall gather myself into myself again, 
 
 I shall take my scattered selves and make them one, 
 
 I shall fuse them into a polished crystal ball 
 Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun. 
 
 I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent, 
 Watching the future come and the present go — 
 
 And the little shifting pictures of people rushing 
 In tiny self-importance to and fro. 
 
 The Solitary 
 Let them think I love them more than I do, 
 
 Let them think I care, though I go alone, 
 If it lifts their pride, what is it to me 
 
 Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone? 
 
 It is one to me that they come or go 
 
 If I have myself and the drive of my will, 
 
 And strength to climb on a summer night 
 And watch the stars swarm over the hill. 
 
 My heart has grown rich with the passing of years, 
 I have less need now than when I was young 
 
 To share myself with every comer, 
 
 Or shape my thoughts into words with my tongue. 
 
 Ezra Pound 
 
 Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 
 1885; attended Hamilton College and the University of Penn- 
 
160 Ezra Pound 
 
 sylvania and went abroad, seeking fresh material to com- 
 plete a thesis on Lope de Vega, in 1908. 
 
 It was in Venice that Pound's first book, A Lume Spento 
 (1908), was printed. The following year Pound went to Lon- 
 don and the chief poems of the little volume were incorporated 
 in Persona (1909), a small collection containing some of 
 Pound's finest work. 
 
 Although the young American was a total stranger to the 
 English literary world, his book made a definite impression on 
 critics of all shades. Edward Thomas, the English poet and 
 one of the most careful appraisers, wrote "the beauty of it is 
 the beauty of passion, sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful 
 words and suggestions. . . . The thought dominates the words 
 and is greater than they are." 
 
 Exultations (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same 
 year that saw the appearance of Persona. Too often in his 
 later work, Pound seems to be more the archaeologist than 
 the artist, digging with little energy and less enthusiasm. 
 Canzoni (1911) and Ripostes (1912) both contain much that 
 is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of desiccation 
 and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start move- 
 ments which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend 
 himself in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see 
 Preface) ; to give more and more time to translation. 
 
 Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become 
 popular, Pound's contribution to his age should not be under- 
 estimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; under his 
 leadership, the Imagists became not only a group but a protest; 
 he helped to make many of the paths which a score of un- 
 consciously influenced poets tread to-day with more ease but far 
 less grace. 
 
 A VIRGINAL 
 
 No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately. 
 I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness, 
 For my surrounding air has a new lightness; 
 Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly 
 
Ezra Pound 161 
 
 And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether; 
 
 As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness. 
 
 Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness 
 
 To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her. 
 
 No, no! Go from me. I still have the flavour, 
 
 Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers. 
 
 Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches, 
 
 As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches, 
 
 Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour: 
 
 As white their bark, so white this lady's hours. 
 
 BALLAD FOR GLOOM 
 
 For God, our God is a gallant foe 
 That playeth behind the veil. 
 
 I have loved my God as a child at heart 
 That seeketh deep bosoms for rest, 
 I have loved my God as a maid to man — 
 But lo, this thing is best: 
 
 To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the 
 
 veil; 
 To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond 
 
 Arcturus' pale. 
 
 I have played with God for a woman, 
 I have staked with my God for truth, 
 I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed — 
 
 His dice be not of ruth. 
 For I am made as a naked blade, 
 
 But hear ye this thing in sooth: 
 
1 62 Ezra Pound 
 
 Who loseth to God as man to man 
 
 Shall win at the turn of the game. 
 I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet 
 
 But the ending is the same: 
 Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose 
 
 Shall win at the end of the game. 
 
 For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind 
 
 the veil. 
 Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple 
 
 mail. 
 
 IN A STATION OF THE METRO 
 
 The apparition of these faces in the crowd ; 
 Petals on a wet, black bough. 
 
 h\ Louis Untermeyer 
 
 Louis Untermeyer was born October i, 1885, m New York 
 City, where he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine 
 and New Jersey, ever since. His education was sketchy; his 
 continued failure to comprehend algebra and geometry kept 
 him from entering college. 
 
 Untermeyer's first volume was The Younger Quire (1911), 
 a twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology ( The Younger 
 Choir). It was issued anonymously and only one hundred 
 copies were printed. Later in the same year, he published a 
 sequence of some seventy lyrics entitled First Love (1911). 
 With the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume 
 is devoid of character and, in spite of a certain technical 
 facility, wholly undistinguished. 
 
 It was with Challenge (1914) that the author first spoke 
 in his own idiom. Poems like "Summons," "Landscapes" and 
 "Caliban in the Coal Mines" show "a fresh and lyrical con- 
 cern not only with a mechanistic society but with the mod- 
 ern world." "His vision" (thus the Boston Transcript) "is a 
 
 f 
 
Louis Untermeyer 163 
 
 social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of 
 the forces of justice." 
 
 Challenge was succeeded by These Times (1917), evidently 
 an "interval" book which, lacking the concentration and unity 
 of the better known collection, sought for larger horizons. 
 The New Adam (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the 
 varied passions are fused in a new heat. 
 
 Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published three 
 
 volumes of critical parodies: "■ and Other Poets" (1917), 
 
 Including Horace (1919) and Heavens (1922). He has also 
 printed a strict metrical translation of three hundred and 
 twenty-five Poems of Heinrich Heine (1917) ; a volume of 
 prose criticism, The New Era in American Poetry (1919) ; 
 and three text-books. He was one of the Associate Editors 
 of The Seven Arts (1916-17) and has lectured at various uni- 
 versities in the Eastern and Middle Western States. 
 
 CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES 
 
 God, we don't like to complain 
 
 We know that the mine is no lark — 
 
 But — there's the pools from the rain; 
 But — there's the cold and the dark. 
 
 God, You don't know what it is — 
 You, in Your well-lighted sky — 
 
 Watching the meteors whizz; 
 Warm, with the sun always by. 
 
 God, if You had but the moon 
 Stuck in Your cap for a lamp, 
 
 Even You'd tire of it soon, 
 
 Down in the dark and the damp. 
 
 Nothing but blackness above 
 
 And nothing that moves but the cars. 
 God, if You wish for our love, 
 
 Fling us a handful of stars! 
 
164 Louis Untermeyer 
 
 SUMMONS 
 
 The eager night and the impetuous winds, 
 The hints and whispers of a thousand lures, 
 And all the swift persuasion of the Spring, 
 Surged from the stars and stones, and swept me on 
 The smell of honeysuckle, keen and clear, 
 Startled and shook me, with the sudden thrill 
 Of some well-known but half-forgotten voice. 
 A slender stream became a naked sprite, 
 Flashed around curious bends, and winked at me 
 Beyond the turns, alert and mischievous. 
 A saffron moon, dangling among the trees, 
 Seemed like a toy balloon caught in the boughs, 
 Flung there in sport by some too mirthful breeze 
 
 And as it hung there, vivid and unreal, 
 
 The whole world's lethargy was brushed away; 
 
 The night kept tugging at my torpid mood 
 
 And tore it into shreds. A warm air blew 
 
 My wintry slothfulness beyond the stars; 
 
 And over all indifference there streamed 
 
 A myriad urges in one rushing wave . . . 
 
 Touched with the lavish miracles of earth, 
 I felt the brave persistence of the grass; 
 The far desire of rivulets; the keen, 
 Unconquerable fervor of the thrush; 
 The endless labors of the patient worm; 
 The lichen's strength; the prowess of the ant; 
 The constancy of flowers; the blind belief 
 Of ivy climbing slowly toward the sun; 
 The eternal struggles and eternal deaths — 
 And yet the groping faith of every root! 
 
Louis Untermeyer 165 
 
 Out of old graves arose the cry of life; 
 Out of the dying came the deathless call. 
 And, thrilling with a new sweet restlessness, 
 The thing that was my boyhood woke in me — 
 Dear, foolish fragments made me strong again; 
 Valiant adventures, dreams of those to come, 
 And all the vague, heroic hopes of youth, 
 With fresh abandon, like a fearless laugh, 
 Leaped up to face the heaven's unconcern. . . . 
 
 And then — veil upon veil was torn aside — 
 
 Stars, like a host of merry girls and boys, 
 
 Danced gaily 'round me, plucking at my hand; 
 
 The night, scorning its stubborn mystery, 
 
 Leaned down and pressed new courage in my heart; 
 
 The hermit-thrush, throbbing with more than Song, 
 
 Sang with a happy challenge to the skies. 
 
 Love and the faces of a world of children 
 
 Swept like a conquering army through my blood. 
 
 And Beauty, rising out of all its forms, 
 
 Beauty, the passion of the universe, 
 
 Flamed with its joy, a thing too great for tears, 
 
 And, like a wine, poured itself out for me 
 
 To drink of, to be warmed with, and to go 
 
 Refreshed and strengthened to the ceaseless fight; 
 
 To meet with confidence the cynic years; 
 
 Battling in wars that never can be won, 
 
 Seeking the lost cause and the brave defeat. 
 
 ON THE BIRTH OF A CHILD 
 Lo — to the battle-ground of Life, 
 
 Child, you have come, like a conquering shout, 
 Out of a struggle — into strife; 
 Out of a darkness — into doubt. 
 
166 Louis Untermeyer 
 
 Girt with the fragile armor of Youth, 
 Child, you must ride into endless wars, 
 
 With the sword of protest, the buckler of truth, 
 And a banner of love to sweep the stars. 
 
 About you the world's despair will surge ; 
 
 Into defeat you must plunge and grope — 
 Be to the faltering, an urge; 
 
 Be to the hopeless years, a hope! 
 
 Be to the darkened world, a flame; 
 
 Be to its unconcern a blow! 
 For out of its pain and tumult you came, 
 
 And into its tumult and pain you go. 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 God, though this life is but a wraith, 
 Although we know not what w T e use, 
 
 Although we grope with little faith, 
 Give me the heart to fight — and lose. 
 
 Ever insurgent let me be, 
 
 Make me more daring than devout; 
 From sleek contentment keep me free, 
 
 And fill me with a buoyant doubt. 
 
 Open my eyes to visions girt 
 
 With beauty, and with wonder lit — 
 
 But let me always see the dirt, 
 And all that spawn and die in it. 
 
 Open my ears to music; let 
 
 Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums- 
 But never let me dare forget 
 
 The bitter ballads of the slums. 
 
Louis Untermeyer 167 
 
 From compromise and things half-done, 
 Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride ; 
 
 And when, at last, the fight is won, 
 God, keep me still unsatisfied. 
 
 Jean Starr Untermeyer 
 
 Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and 
 educated at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At 
 sixteen, she came to New York City, pursuing special studies at 
 Columbia. In 1907 she married Louis Untermeyer and, al- 
 though she had written some prose previous to the poetic 
 renascence, her first volume was published more than ten years 
 later. 
 
 Growing Pains (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, 
 the result of eight years* slow and self-critical creation. Per- 
 fection is almost a passion with her; the first poem in the book 
 declares: 
 
 I would rather work in stubborn rock 
 
 All the years of my life; 
 
 And make one strong thing 
 
 And set it in a high, clean place, 
 
 To recall the granite strength of my desire. 
 
 But it is not only her keen search for truth and an equally 
 keen eye for the exact word that make these poems distinctive. 
 A sharp color sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of 
 the ordinary in terms of the beautiful, illumine such poems as 
 "Sinfonia Domestica," "Clothes," ''Autumn." Her purely 
 pictorial poems establish a swift kinship between the most 
 romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny "Moonrise" is 
 an example; so is "High Tide," that, in one extended metaphor, 
 turns the mere fact of a physical law into an arresting and 
 noble fancy. 
 
 Dreams Out of Darkness (1921) is a ripening of this author's 
 powers with a richer musical undercurrent. This increase of 
 melody is manifest on every page, possibly most obvious iff 
 the persuasive music and symbolism of "Lake Song." 
 
:68 Jean Starr Untermeyer 
 
 HIGH TIDE 
 
 I edged back against the night. 
 
 The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore. 
 
 And the breakers, 
 
 Like young and impatient hounds, 
 
 Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand. 
 
 Sprang — but were drawn back slowly 
 
 With a long, relentless pull, 
 
 Whimpering, into the dark. 
 
 Then I saw who held them captive; 
 
 And I saw how they were bound 
 
 With a broad and quivering leash of light, 
 
 Held by the moon, 
 
 As, calm and unsmiling, 
 
 She walked the deep fields of the sky. 
 
 AUTUMN 
 
 {To My Mother) 
 
 How memory cuts away the years, 
 And how clean the picture comes 
 Of autumn days, brisk and busy; 
 Charged with keen sunshine. 
 And you, stirred with activity, 
 The spirit of those energetic days. 
 
 There was our back-yard, 
 
 So plain and stripped of green, 
 
 With even the weeds carefully pulled away 
 
 From the crooked red bricks that made the walk, 
 
 And the earth on either side so black. 
 
Jean Starr Untermeyer 169 
 
 Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air. 
 
 And winter comforts coming in like a pageant. 
 
 I shall not forget them: — 
 
 Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles, 
 
 Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, 
 
 Exhaling the pungent dill; 
 
 And in the very center of the yard, 
 
 You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, 
 
 Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down 
 
 Like jolly monks in a drunken dance. 
 
 And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by 
 the wagon-load, 
 
 Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons 
 
 Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers. 
 
 Such feathery whiteness — to come to kraut! 
 
 And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness 
 under a grey dust, 
 
 Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire; 
 
 And enamelled crab-apples that tricked w T ith their fra- 
 grance 
 
 But were bitter to taste. 
 
 And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces, 
 
 And long string beans floating in pans of clear water 
 
 Like slim, green fishes. 
 
 And there was fish itself, 
 
 Salted, silver herring from the city. . . . 
 
 And you moved among these mysteries, 
 
 Absorbed and smiling and sure; 
 
 Stirring, tasting, measuring, 
 
 With the precision of a ritual. 
 
 I like to think of you in your years of power — 
 
 You, now r so shaken and so powerless — 
 
 High priestess of your home. 
 
170 Jean Starr Untermeyer 
 
 LAKE SONG 
 
 The lapping of lake water 
 Is like the weeping of women, 
 The weeping of ancient women 
 Who grieved without rebellion. 
 
 The lake falls over the shore 
 Like tears on their curven bosoms. 
 Here is languid, luxurious wailing; 
 The wailing of kings' daughters. 
 
 So do we ever cry, 
 
 A soft, unmutinous crying, 
 
 When we know ourselves each a princess 
 
 Locked fast within her tower. 
 
 The lapping of lake water 
 Is like the weeping of women, 
 The fertile tears of women 
 That water the dreams of men. 
 
 John Gould Fletcher 
 
 John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, 
 January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy 
 (Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after 
 spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, 
 where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived 
 ever since. 
 
 In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which 
 he has referred to as "his literary wild oats," five small collec- 
 tions of experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years 
 later, Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and 
 far more arresting poet with Irradiations — Sand and Spray 
 
John Gould Fletcher 171 
 
 (1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; 
 imagination riots through it, even though it is often a bloodless 
 and bodiless imagination. 
 
 In the following book, Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Fletcher 
 carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates 
 him; the ambitious set of eleven "color symphonies" is an 
 elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is 
 summoned by color-associations, sometimes closely related, 
 sometimes far-fetched. 
 
 Meanwhile, Fletcher had been developing. After having ap- 
 peared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths 
 rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic "Lincoln," 
 his work has had a closer relation to humanity; a moving 
 mysticism speaks from The Tree of Life (1918), the more 
 native Granite and Breakers (1921) and the later uncollected 
 poems. 
 
 LONDON NIGHTFALL 
 
 I saw the shapes that stood upon the clouds: 
 And they were tiger-breasted, shot with light, 
 And all of them, lifting long trumpets together, 
 Blew over the city, for the night to come. 
 Down in the street, we floundered in the mud; 
 Above, in endless files, gold angels came 
 And stood upon the clouds, and blew their horns 
 For night. 
 
 Like a wet petal crumpled, 
 
 Twilight fell soddenly on the weary city; 
 
 The 'buses lurched and groaned, 
 
 The shops put up their doors. 
 
 But skywards, far aloft, 
 
 The angels, vanishing, waved broad plumes of gold, 
 
 Summoning spirits from a thousand hills 
 
 To pour the thick night out upon the earth. 
 
172 John Gould Fletcher 
 
 FROM "IRRADIATIONS" 
 
 The trees, like great jade elephants, 
 
 Chained, stamp and shake 'neath the gadflies of the breeze ; 
 
 The trees lunge and plunge, unruly elephants: 
 
 The clouds are their crimson howdah-canopies ; 
 
 The sunlight glints like the golden robe of a Shah. 
 
 Would I were tossed on the wrinkled backs of those trees. 
 
 LINCOLN * 
 
 Like a gaunt, scraggly pine 
 
 Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills; 
 And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence, 
 Untended and uncared for, begins to grow. 
 
 Ungainly, labouring, huge, 
 
 The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its 
 
 branches ; 
 Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds 
 
 ring the horizon, 
 A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade. 
 
 And it shall protect them all, 
 Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence; 
 Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith 
 Shall strike it in an instant down to earth. 
 
 1 See pages 54, 78, 84, 139, 142. 
 
John Gould Fletcher 173 
 
 11 
 
 There was a darkness in this man ; an immense and hol- 
 low darkness, 
 
 Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor 
 enter ; 
 
 A darkness through which strong roots stretched down- 
 wards into the earth 
 
 Towards old things; 
 
 Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and 
 spoke with God, 
 
 Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not 
 what, and found their goal at last ; 
 
 Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently 
 when all seemed lost, 
 
 Many bitter winters of defeat; 
 
 Down to the granite of patience 
 
 These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, 
 seeking, 
 
 And drew from the living rock and the living waters 
 about it 
 
 The red sap to carry upwards to the sun. 
 
 Not proud, but humble, 
 
 Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through 
 
 service ; 
 For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that 
 
 bring not forth good fruit 
 Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the 
 
 fire. 
 
 in 
 
 There is silence abroad in the land today, 
 
 And in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence; 
 
174 John Gould Fletcher 
 
 And, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly 
 
 open, 
 Those hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light. 
 
 Slowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the 
 
 endless silence 
 Like labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos 
 
 of rude clay-fields: 
 "I wetit forward as the light goes forward in early 
 
 spring, 
 But there were also many things which I left behind. 
 
 "Tombs that were quiet; 
 
 One, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the 
 
 darkness, 
 One, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long 
 
 falling, 
 One, only of a child, but it was mine. 
 
 "Have you forgot your graves? Go, question them in 
 
 anguish, 
 Listen long to their unstirred lips. From your hostages 
 
 to silence, 
 Learn there is no life without death, no dawn without 
 
 sun-setting, 
 No victory but to Him who has given all." 
 
 IV 
 
 The clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth 
 
 of the battle is silent. 
 The midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes 
 
 on afresh its bright colours. 
 But he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we 
 
 scorned and mistrusted, 
 He has descended, like a god, to his rest 
 
John Gould Fletcher 175 
 
 Over the uproar of cities, 
 
 Over the million intricate threads of life wavering and 
 crossing, 
 
 In the midst of problems we know not, tangling, per- 
 plexing, ensnaring, 
 
 Rises one white tomb alone. 
 
 Beam over it, stars. 
 
 Wrap it round, stripes — stripes red for the pain that he 
 
 bore for you — 
 Enfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired 
 
 through your anguish; 
 Long as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow 
 
 to your law. 
 
 Strew over him flowers; 
 
 Blue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink 
 
 arbutus 
 From the east, and from the west rich orange blossoms, 
 But from the heart of the land take the passion-flower. 
 
 Rayed, violet, dim, 
 
 With the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and 
 the circlet, 
 
 And beside it there, lay also one lonely snow-white mag- 
 nolia, 
 
 Bitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed. 
 
 THE SKATERS 
 
 Black swallows swooping or gliding 
 
 In a flurry of entangled loops and curves; 
 
 The skaters skim over the frozen riven 
 
176 
 
 John Gould Fletcher 
 
 And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge 
 
 upon the surface, 
 Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver. 
 
 "H. D." 
 
 Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, at Bethlehem, 
 Pennsylvania. When she was still a child, her father became 
 Director of the Flower Observatory and the family moved to 
 a suburb in the outskirts of Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle at- 
 tended a private school in West Philadelphia; entered Bryn 
 Mawr College in 1904, and went abroad, for what was in- 
 tended to be a short sojourn, in 191 1. After a visit to Italy 
 and France, she came to London, joining Ezra Pound and 
 helping to organize the Imagists. Her work (signed "H. D.") 
 began to appear in a few magazines and its unusual quality 
 was recognized at once. She married one of the most talented 
 of the English members of this group (Richard Aldington) in 
 1913 and remained in London. 
 
 Her first volume, Sea Garden, appeared in 1916; her second, 
 Hymen, an amplification of her gift, was published in 1921. 
 
 "H. D." is, by all odds, the most important of her group. 
 She is the only one who has steadfastly held to the letter as 
 well as to the spirit of its credo. She is, in fact, the only true 
 Imagist. Her poems, capturing the firm delicacy of the Greek 
 models, are like a set of Tanagra figurines. Here, at first 
 glance, the effect is chilling — beauty seems held in a frozen 
 gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emo- 
 tion that she achieves intensity. 
 
 Observe the tiny poem entitled "Heat." Here, in the fewest 
 possible words, is something beyond the description of heat — 
 here is the effect of it. In these lines one feels the very weight 
 and solidity of a midsummer afternoon. 
 
 OREAD 
 
 Whirl up, sea — 
 
 Whirl your pointed pines. 
 
H. D." 177 
 
 Splash your great pines 
 
 On our rocks. 
 
 Hurl your green over us — 
 
 Cover us with your pools of fir. 
 
 HEAT 
 
 O wind, rend open the heat, 
 cut apart the heat, 
 rend it to tatters. 
 
 Fruit cannot drop 
 through this thick air — 
 fruit cannot fall into heat 
 that presses up and blunts 
 the points of pears 
 and rounds the grapes. 
 
 Cut through the heat — 
 plough through it, 
 turning it on either side 
 of your path. 
 
 PEAR TREE 
 
 Silver dust 
 
 lifted from the earth, 
 
 higher than my arms reach, 
 
 you have mounted. 
 
 O silver, 
 
 higher than my arms reach 
 
 you front us with great mass ; 
 
178 "H. D." 
 
 no flower ever opened 
 so staunch a white leaf, 
 no flower ever parted silver 
 from such rare silver; 
 
 O white pear, 
 
 your flower-tufts, 
 
 thick on the branch, 
 
 bring summer and ripe fruits 
 
 in their purple hearts. 
 
 William Rose Benet 
 
 William Rose Benet was born at Fort Hamilton, New York 
 Harbor, February 2, 1886. He was educated at Albany Acad- 
 emy and graduated from Yale in 1907. After various experi- 
 ences as free-lance writer, publisher's reader, second lieu- 
 tenant, etc., Benet became the Associate Editor of the New 
 York Post's Literary Review in 1920. 
 
 The outstanding feature of Benet's verse is its extraordinary 
 whimsicality; an oriental imagination riots through his pages. 
 Like the title-poem of his first volume, Merchants from Cathay 
 (1913), all of Benet's volumes vibrate with a vigorous music; 
 they are full of the sonorous stuff that one rolls out crossing 
 wintry fields or tramping a road alone. 
 
 But Benet's charm is not confined to the lift and swing of 
 rollicking choruses. His The Falconer of God (1914), The 
 Great White Wall (191 6) and The Burglar of the Zodiac 
 (1918) contain decorations as bold as they are brilliant; they 
 ring with a strange and spicy music evoked from seemingly 
 casual words. 
 
 Moons of Grandeur (1920) represents the fullest development 
 of Benet's unusual gifts; a combination of Eastern phantasy and 
 Western vigor. 
 
William Rose Benet 
 
 179 
 
 How that 
 They came. 
 
 MERCHANTS FROM CATHAY 
 
 Their heels slapped their bumping mules; 
 their fat chaps glowed. 
 Glory unto Mary, each seemed to wear 
 
 Of their 
 Beasts, 
 
 And their 
 Boast, 
 
 With its 
 Burthen 
 
 a crown 
 
 Like sunset their robes were on the wide, 
 white road: 
 So we saw those mad merchants come 
 dusting into town! 
 
 Two paunchy beasts they rode on and 
 two they drove before. 
 May the Saints all help us, the tiger- 
 stripes they had! 
 And the panniers upon them swelled full 
 of stuffs and ore! 
 The square buzzed and jostled at a 
 sight so mad. 
 
 They bawled in their beards, and their 
 turbans they wried. 
 They stopped by the stalls with curvet- 
 ting and clatter. 
 As bronze as the bracken their necks and 
 faces dyed — 
 And a stave they sat singing, to tell us 
 of the matter. 
 
 "For your silks to Sugarmago! For your 
 dyes to Isfahan! 
 Weird fruits from the Isle 0' Lamaree. 
 But for magic merchandise, for 
 treasure-trove and spice, 
 
i8o 
 
 William Rose Benet 
 
 And 
 Chorus. 
 
 A iirst 
 
 Stave 
 
 Fearsome, 
 
 And a second 
 Right hard 
 To stomach 
 
 And a third, 
 Which is a 
 Laughable 
 Thing. 
 
 Here's a catch and a carol to the great, 
 grand Chan, 
 The King of all the Kings across the 
 sea! 
 
 "Here's a catch and a carol to the great, 
 
 grand Chan; 
 For we won through the deserts to his 
 
 sunset barbican; 
 And the mountains of his palace no 
 
 Titan s reach may span 
 Where he wields his seignorie! 
 
 "Red-as-blood skins of Panthers, so bright 
 against the sun 
 On the walls of the halls where his 
 pillared state is set 
 They daze with a blaze no man may look 
 upon. 
 And with conduits of beverage those 
 floors run wet. 
 
 "His wives stiff with riches, they sit be- 
 fore him there. 
 Bird and beast at his feast make song 
 and clapping cheer. 
 And jugglers and enchanters, all walking 
 on the air, 
 Make fall eclipse and thunder— make 
 moons and suns appear! 
 
 "Once the Chan, by his enemies sore- 
 prest, and sorely spent, 
 Lay, sc they say, in a thicket 'neath a 
 tree 
 
William Rose Benet 
 
 181 
 
 We gape to 
 Hear them end, 
 
 And are in 
 Terror, 
 
 And dread 
 
 it is 
 Devil's Work! 
 
 Where the howl of an owl vexed his foes 
 from their intent: 
 Then that fowl for a holy bird of rev- 
 erence made he! 
 
 "A catch and a carol to the great, grand 
 Chan I 
 
 Pastmmters of disasters, our desert cara- 
 van 
 
 Won through all peril to his sunset bar- 
 bican, 
 Where he wields his seignorie! 
 
 And crowns he gave us! We end where 
 we began: 
 
 A catch and a carol to the great, grand 
 Chan, 
 The King of all the Kings across the 
 sea! 
 
 Those mad, antic Merchants! . . . Their 
 striped beasts did beat 
 The market-square suddenly with hooves 
 of beaten gold! 
 The ground yawned gaping and flamed 
 beneath our feet! 
 They plunged to Pits Abysmal with 
 their wealth untold ! 
 
 And some say the Chan himself in anger 
 dealt the stroke — 
 
 For sharing of his secrets with silly, com- 
 mon folk: 
 
 But Holy, Blessed Maty, preserve us as 
 you may 
 
 Lest once more those mad Merchants 
 come chanting from Cathay! 
 
182 William Rose Benet 
 
 HOW TO CATCH UNICORNS 
 
 Its cloven hoofprint on the sand 
 
 Will lead you — where? 
 
 Into a phantasmagoric land — 
 
 There all the bright streams run up-hill. 
 The birds on every tree are still. 
 But from stocks and stones, clear voices come 
 That should be dumb. 
 
 If you have taken along a net, 
 
 A noose, a prod, 
 
 You'll be waiting in the forest yet . . . 
 
 Nid — nod! 
 
 In a virgin's lap the beast slept sound, 
 They say . . . but I — 
 I think (Is anyone around?) 
 That's just a lie! 
 
 If you have taken a musketoon 
 To flinders 'twill flash 'neath the wizard moon. 
 So I should take browned batter-cake, 
 Hot-buttered inside, like foam to flake. 
 
 And I should take an easy heart 
 
 And a whimsical face, 
 
 And a tied-up lunch of sandwich and tart, 
 
 And spread a cloth in the open chase. 
 
 And then I should pretend to snore . . . 
 And I'd hear a snort and I'd hear a roar, 
 
William Rose Benet 183 
 
 The wind of a mane and a tail, and four 
 Wild hoofs prancing the forest-floor. 
 And I'd open my eyes on a flashing horn — 
 And see the Unicorn! 
 
 Paladins fierce and virgins sweet . . . 
 But he's never had anything to eat! 
 Knights have tramped in their iron-mong'ry . . . 
 But nobody thought — that's all! — he's hungry! 
 
 ADDENDUM 
 
 Really hungry! Good Lord deliver us, 
 The Unicorn is not carnivorous ! 
 
 John Hall Wheelock 
 
 John Hall Wheelock was born at Far Rockaway, Long Island, 
 in 1886. He was graduated from Harvard, receiving his 
 B.A. in 1908, and finished his studies at the Universities of 
 Gottingen and Berlin, 1908-10. 
 
 Wheelock's first book is, in many respects, his best. The 
 Human Fantasy (1911) sings with the voice of youth — a youth 
 which is vibrantly in love with existence. Rhapsodic and 
 obviously influenced by Whitman and Henley, these lines beat 
 bravely. A headlong ecstasy rises from pages whose refrain 
 is "Splendid it is to live and glorious to die." 
 
 SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON 
 
 Look — on the topmost branches of the world 
 The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick; 
 Over the huddled rows of stone and brick, 
 
 A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled 
 Like ghosts, languid and sick. 
 

 
 184 John Hall Wheelock 
 
 One breathless moment now the city's moaning 
 Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim ; 
 There is no sound around the whole world's rim, 
 
 Save in the distance a small band is droning 
 Some desolate old hymn. 
 
 Van Wyck, how often have we been together 
 
 When this same moment made all mysteries clear ; 
 — The infinite stars that brood above us here, 
 
 And the gray city in the soft June weather, 
 So tawdry and so dear! 
 
 LOVE AND LIBERATION 
 
 Lift your arms to the stars 
 And give an immortal shout; 
 Not all the veils of darkness 
 Can put your beauty out! 
 
 You are armed with love, with love, 
 Nor all the powers of Fate 
 Can touch you with a spear, 
 Nor all the hands of hate. 
 
 What of good and evil, 
 Hell and Heaven above — , 
 Trample them with love! 
 Ride over them with love! 
 
 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born at New Brunswick, New 
 Jersey, December 6, 1886. He was graduated from Rutgers 
 College in 1904 and received his A.B. from Columbia in 1906. 
 
Joyce Kilmer 185 
 
 In 1917 Kilmer joined the Officers' Reserve Training Corps, 
 but he soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after 
 America entered the world war, he enlisted as a private in 
 the Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. 
 
 On July 28, 1918, the five-day battle for the mastery of the 
 heights beyond the river Ourcq was begun. Two days later, 
 Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action. 
 
 Death came before the poet had developed or even ma- 
 tured his gifts. His first volume, Summer of Love (1911), is 
 wholly imitative; it is full of reflections of a dozen other 
 sources, "a broken bundle of mirrors." Trees and Other Poems 
 (1914) contains the title-poem by which Kilmer is best known 
 and, though various influences are here, a refreshing candor 
 lights up the lines. Main Street and Other Poems (1917) is 
 less derivative ; the simplicity is less self-conscious, the ecstasy 
 more spontaneous. 
 
 TREES ' 
 
 I think that I shall never see 
 A poem lovely as a tree. 
 
 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 
 Against the sweet earth's flowing breast ; 
 
 A tree that looks at God all day, 
 And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 
 
 A tree that may in summer wear 
 A nest of robins in her hair; 
 
 Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 
 Who intimately lives with rain. 
 
 Poems are made by fools like me, 
 But only God can make a tree. 
 
 1 From Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer. Copy- 
 right, 1914, by George H. Doran Company, Publishers. 
 
1 86 Joyce Kilmer 
 
 MARTIN 1 
 
 When I am tired of earnest men, 
 
 Intense and keen and sharp and clever, 
 Pursuing fame with brush or pen 
 
 Or counting metal discs forever, 
 Then from the halls of shadowland 
 
 Beyond the trackless purple sea 
 Old Martin's ghost comes back to stand 
 
 Beside my desk and talk to me. 
 
 Still on his delicate pale face 
 
 A quizzical thin smile is showing, 
 His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace, 
 
 His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing. 
 He wears a brilliant-hued cravat, 
 
 A suit to match his soft gray hair, 
 A rakish stick, a knowing hat, 
 
 A manner blithe and debonair. 
 
 How good, that he who always knew 
 
 That being lovely was a duty, 
 Should have gold halls to wander through 
 
 And should himself inhabit beauty. 
 How like his old unselfish way 
 
 To leave those halls of splendid mirth 
 And comfort those condemned to stay 
 
 Upon the bleak and sombre earth. 
 
 Some people ask: What cruel chance 
 Made Martin's life so sad a story? 
 
 Martin? Why, he exhaled romance 
 And wore an overcoat of glory. 
 
 1 From Trees and Other Poems by Joyce Kilmer. Copy- 
 right, 1 914, by George H. Doran Company, Publishers, 
 
Joyce Kilmer 187 
 
 A fleck of sunlight in the street, 
 
 A horse, a book, a girl who smiled, — 
 
 Such visions made each moment sweet 
 For this receptive, ancient child* 
 
 Because it was old Martin's lot 
 
 To be, not make, a decoration, 
 Shall we then scorn him, having not 
 
 His genius of appreciation? 
 Rich joy and love he got and gave; 
 
 His heart was merry as his dress. 
 Pile laurel wreaths upon his grave 
 
 Who did not gain, but was, success. 
 
 Orrick Johns 
 
 Orrick Johns was born at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1887. He 
 schooled himself to be an advertising copy writer, his creative 
 work being kept as an avocation. 
 
 Asphalt and Other Poems (1917) is a queer mixture. Cheap 
 stanzas crowd against lines of singular beauty. The same 
 peculiarity is evident in Black Branches (1920), where much 
 that is strained and artificial mingles with poetry that is not 
 only spontaneous but searching. At his best, notably in the 
 refreshing "Country Rhymes," Johns is a true and poignant 
 singer. 
 
 THE INTERPRETER 
 
 In the very early morning when the light was low 
 
 She got all together and she went like snow, 
 
 Like snow in the springtime on a sunny hill, 
 
 And we were only frightened and can't think still. 
 
 We can't think quite that the katydids and frogs 
 
 And the little crying chickens and the little grunting hogs, 
 
1 88 Orrick Johns 
 
 And the other living things that she spoke for to us 
 Have nothing more to tell her since it happened thus. 
 
 She never is around for anyone to touch, 
 But of ecstasy and longing she too knew much . . . 
 And always when anyone has time to call his own, 
 She will come and be beside him as quiet as a stone. 
 
 Alan Seeger 
 
 Alan Seeger was born in New York, June 22, 1888. When 
 he was still a baby, his parents moved to Staten Island, where 
 he remained through boyhood. Later, there were several other 
 migrations, including a sojourn in Mexico, where Seeger spent 
 the most impressionable years of his youth. In 1906, he entered 
 Harvard. 
 
 1914 came, and the European war had not entered its third 
 week when, along with some forty of his fellow-countrymen, 
 Seeger enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France. He was in 
 action almost continually, serving on various fronts. On the 
 fourth of July, 1916, ordered to take the village of Belloy-en- 
 Santerre, Seeger advanced in the first rush with his squad which 
 was practically wiped out by hidden machine-gun fire. Seeger 
 fell, mortally wounded, and died the next morning. 
 
 Seeger's literary promise was far greater than his poetic 
 accomplishment. With the exception of his one famous poem, 
 there is little of importance, though much of charm, in his 
 collected Poems (published, with an Introduction by William 
 Archer, in 1916). 
 
 "I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH DEATH" x 
 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 
 At some disputed barricade, 
 
 When Spring comes back with rustling shade 
 
 1 From Poems by Alan Seeger. Copyright, 1916, by Charles 
 Scribner's Sons. By permission of the publishers. 
 
Alan Seeger 189 
 
 ■ 
 
 And apple-blossoms fill the air — 
 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 
 When Spring brings back blue days and fair. 
 
 It may be he shall take my hand 
 
 And lead me into his dark land 
 
 And close my eyes and quench my breath — 
 
 It may be I shall pass him still. 
 
 I have a rendezvous with Death 
 
 On some scarred slope of battered hill, 
 
 When Spring comes round again this year 
 
 And the first meadow-flowers appear. 
 
 God knows 'twere better to be deep 
 Pillowed in silk and scented down, 
 Where love throbs out in blissful sleep, 
 Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath, 
 Where hushed awakenings are dear . . . 
 But I've a rendezvous with Death 
 At midnight in some flaming town, 
 When Spring trips north again this year, 
 And I to my pledged word am true, 
 I shall not fail that rendezvous. 
 
 Margaret Widdemer 
 
 Margaret Widdemer was born at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 
 and began writing in her childhood. After graduating from 
 Drexel Institute Library School in 1909, she contributed to vari- 
 ous magazines. 
 
 Miss Widdemer's poetic work has two distinct phases. In 
 the one mood, she is the protesting poet, the champion of the 
 down-trodden, the lyricist on fire with angry passion. In the 
 other, she is the writer of well-made, polite and popular 
 sentimental verse. Her finest poems are in Factories with Other 
 Lyrics (1915), although several of her best songs are in The 
 
190 Margaret Widdemer 
 
 Old Road to Paradise (1918), which divided, with Sandburg's 
 Cornhuskers, the Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918. A new volume, 
 Cross Currents, appeared in 1921. 
 
 Miss Widdemer is also the author of two books of short 
 stories, four novels and several books for girls. 
 
 FACTORIES 
 
 I have shut my little sister in from life and light 
 
 (For a rose, for a ribbon, for a wreath across my hair), 
 
 I have made her restless feet still until the night, 
 
 Locked from sweets of summer and from wild spring 
 air; 
 
 I who ranged the meadowlands, free from sun to sun, 
 Free to sing and pull the buds and watch the far wings 
 
 fly, 
 
 I have bound my sister till her playing time was done — 
 Oh, my little sister, was it I ? Was it I ? 
 
 I have robbed my sister of her day of maidenhood 
 
 (For a robe, for a feather, for a trinket's restless spark), 
 
 Shut from love till dusk shall fall, how shall she know 
 good, 
 How shall she go scatheless through the sun-lit dark? 
 
 I who could be innocent, I who could be gay, 
 
 I who could have love and mirth before the light went 
 
 by, 
 
 I have put my sister in her mating-time away — 
 Sister, my young sister, was it I ? Was it I ? 
 
 I have robbed my sister of the lips against her breast, 
 (For a coin, for the weaving of my children's lace 
 and lawn), 
 Feet that pace beside the loom, hands that cannot rest — 
 How can she know motherhood, whose strength is 
 gone? 
 
Margaret Widdemer 191 
 
 I who took no heed of her, starved and labor-worn, 
 I, against whose placid heart my sleepy gold-heads lie, 
 
 Round my path they cry to me, little souls unborn — 
 God of Life! Creator! It was I! It was I! 
 
 THE WATCHER 
 
 She always leaned to watch for us, 
 
 Anxious if we were late, 
 In winter by the window, 
 
 In summer by the gate; 
 
 And though we mocked her tenderly, 
 
 Who had such foolish care, 
 The long way home would seem more safe 
 
 Because she waited there. 
 
 Her thoughts were all so full of us, 
 
 She never could forget! 
 And so I think that where she is 
 
 She must be watching yet, 
 
 Waiting till we come home to her, 
 
 Anxious if we are late — 
 Watching from Heaven's window, 
 
 Leaning from Heaven's gate. 
 
 Aline Kilmer 
 
 Aline (Murray) Kilmer was born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 
 1888. She was married to Joyce Kilmer in 1908 and, after 
 his death during battle in France, began to deliver lectures, 
 beginning in 1917. Since her youth, she has lived in New York. 
 
 Candles That Burn (1919) reveals a personal as well as 
 
192 Aline Kilmer 
 
 poetic warmth. Here is a domesticated flame, a quiet but none 
 the less colorful hearth-fire. By its light, her world is revealed 
 with a quaintly individualized grace. Her poems about her 
 children are particularly well characterized. Vigils (1921) is 
 a more ambitious and even more original offering. The nimble 
 dexterity of "Unlearning," the banter of "Perversity" and the 
 clean fervor of "Things" display Mrs. Kilmer as a distinct 
 poetic personality. 
 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 Deborah danced, when she was two, 
 
 As buttercups and daffodils do; 
 
 Spirited, frail, naively bold, 
 
 Her hair a ruffled crest of gold. 
 
 And whenever she spoke her voice went singing 
 
 Like water up from a fountain springing. 
 
 But now her step is quiet and slow; 
 She walks the way primroses go; 
 Her hair is yellow instead of gilt, 
 Her voice is losing its lovely lilt; 
 And in place of her wild, delightful ways 
 A quaint precision rules her days. 
 
 For Deborah now is three, and, oh, 
 
 She knows so much that she did not know. 
 
 THINGS 
 
 Sometimes when I am at tea with you, 
 
 I catch my breath 
 At a thought that is old as che world is old 
 
 And more bitter than death. 
 
Aline Kilmer 193 
 
 It is that the spoon that you just laid down 
 
 And the cup that you hold 
 May be here shining and insolent 
 
 When you are still and cold. 
 
 Your careless note that I laid away 
 
 May leap to my eyes like flame, 
 When the world has almost forgotten your voice 
 
 Or the sound of your name. 
 
 The golden Virgin da Vinci drew 
 
 May smile on over my head, 
 And daffodils nod in the silver vase 
 
 When you are dead. 
 
 So let moth and dust corrupt and thieves 
 
 Break through and I shall be glad, 
 Because of the hatred I bear to things 
 
 Instead of the love I had. 
 
 For life seems only a shuddering breath, 
 
 A smothered, desperate cry; 
 And things have a terrible permanence 
 
 When people die. 
 
 Elinor Wylie 
 
 Elinor Wylie was born in Somerville, New Jersey, but she 
 is, she protests, completely a Pennsylvanian by parentage. She 
 wrote from her infancy until her maturity and then, for the pro- 
 verbial seven years, did not write a word. 
 
 Nets to Catch the Wind (1921) is one of the most brilliant 
 first volumes recently issued in America. Mrs. Wylie's bril- 
 liance, it must be added, is one which always sparkles but seldom 
 burns. Too often she achieves a frigid ecstasy; emotion is 
 never absent from her lines but frequently it reflects a passion 
 frozen at its source. For the most part, she exhibits a dramatic 
 
194 Elinor Wylie 
 
 keenness, a remarkable precision of word and gesture. A poem 
 like "The Eagle and the Mole" is notable not only for its 
 incisive symbolism but for its firm outlines and bright clarity 
 of speech. 
 
 THE EAGLE AND THE MOLE 
 
 Avoid the reeking herd, 
 Shun the polluted flock, 
 Live like that stoic bird, 
 The eagle of the rock. 
 
 The huddled warmth of crowds 
 Begets and fosters hate; 
 He keeps, above the clouds, 
 His cliff inviolate. 
 
 When flocks are folded warm, 
 And herds to shelter run, 
 He sails above the storm, 
 He stares into the sun. 
 
 If in the eagle's track 
 Your sinews cannot leap, 
 Avoid the lathered pack, 
 Turn from the steaming sheep. 
 
 If you would keep your soul 
 From spotted sight or sound, 
 Live like the velvet mole; 
 Go burrow underground. 
 
 And there hold intercourse 
 With roots of trees and stones, 
 With rivers at their source, 
 And disembodied bones. 
 
Elinor Wylie 195 
 
 SEA LULLABY 
 
 The old moon is tarnished 
 With smoke of the flood, 
 The dead leaves are varnished 
 With color like blood, 
 
 A treacherous smiler 
 With teeth white as milk, 
 A savage beguiler 
 In sheathings of silk, 
 
 The sea creeps to pillage, 
 She leaps on her prey; 
 A child of the village 
 Was murdered today. 
 
 She came up to meet him 
 In a smooth golden cloak, 
 She choked him and beat him 
 To death, for a joke. 
 
 Her bright locks were tangled, 
 She shouted for joy, 
 With one hand she strangled 
 A strong little boy. 
 
 Now in silence she lingers 
 Beside him all night 
 To wash her long fingers 
 In silvery light. 
 
 Conrad Aiken 
 
 Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, 
 August 5, 1889. He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 
 
196 
 
 Conrad Aiken 
 
 1912, travelled extensively for three years, and since then, he 
 has devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, 
 Massachusetts. 
 
 The most outstanding feature of Aiken's creative work is its 
 adaptations of other models transmuted by Aiken's own music. 
 His first volume, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse 
 (1914), is the Keats tradition crossed and paraphrased by 
 Masefield. Turns and Movies (1916) is a complete change; 
 in more than half of this book, Aiken begins to speak with his 
 true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new 
 rhythms, haunting cadences, muted philosophy. 
 
 Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Charnel Rose 
 (1918) and The House of Dust (1920) are packed with a tired 
 but often beautiful music. Primarily, a lyric poet, Aiken 
 frequently condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his 
 best moments are these "lapses" into tune. The music of the 
 Morning Song from "Senlin" (in The Charnel Rose) is rich 
 with subtleties of rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical 
 movement. Beneath the flow and flexibility of these lines, there 
 is a delightful whimsicality, an extraordinary summoning of 
 the immensities that loom behind the casual moments of every- 
 day. 
 
 Punch, the Immortal Liar (1921), in many ways Aiken's most 
 appealing work, contains this poet's sharpest characterizations as 
 well as his most beautiful symphonic effects. 
 
 MIRACLES 
 
 Twilight is spacious, near things in it seem far, 
 And distant things seem near. 
 Now in the green west hangs a yellow star. 
 And now across old waters you may hear 
 The profound gloom of bells among still trees, 
 Like a rolling of huge boulders beneath seas. 
 
 Silent as thought in evening contemplation 
 Weaves the bat under the gathering stars. 
 Silent as dew, we seek new incarnation, 
 Meditate new avatars. 
 
Conrad Aiken 197 
 
 In a clear dusk like this 
 Mary climbed up the hill to seek her son, 
 To lower him down from the cross, and kiss 
 The mauve wounds, every one. 
 
 Men with wings 
 
 In the dusk walked softly after her. 
 
 She did not see them, but may have felt 
 
 The winnowed air around her stir; 
 
 She did not see them, but may have known 
 
 Why her son's body was light as a little stone. 
 
 She may have guessed that other hands were there 
 
 Moving the watchful air. 
 
 Now, unless persuaded by searching music 
 
 Which suddenly opens the portals of the mind, 
 
 We guess no angels, 
 
 And are contented to be blind. 
 
 Let us blow silver horns in the twilight, 
 
 And lift our hearts to the yellow star in the green, 
 
 To find perhaps, if, while the dew is rising, 
 
 Clear things may not be seen. 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A GIRL 
 
 This is the shape of the leaf, and this of the flower, 
 And this the pale bole of the tree 
 
 Which watches its bough in a pool of unwavering water 
 In a land we never shall see. 
 
 The thrush on the bough is silent, the dew falls softly, 
 In the evening is hardly a sound. . . . 
 And the three beautiful pilgrims who come here together 
 Touch lightly the dust of the ground. 
 
198 Conrad Aiken 
 
 Touch it with feet that trouble the dust but as wings do, 
 Come shyly together, are still, 
 
 Like dancers, who wait, in a pause of the music, for music 
 The exquisite silence to fill . . . 
 
 This is the thought of the first, and this of the second, 
 And this the grave thought of the third: 
 "Linger we thus for a moment, palely expectant, 
 And silence will end, and the bird 
 
 "Sing the pure phrase, sweet phrase, clear phrase in the 
 
 twilight 
 To fill the blue bell of the world; 
 
 And we, who on music so leaflike have drifted together, 
 Leaflike apart shall be whirled 
 
 "Into what but the beauty of silence, silence forever? . . ." 
 
 . . . This is the shape of the tree, 
 
 And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful 
 
 pilgrims: 
 This is what you are to me. 
 
 MORNING SONG FROM "SENLIN" 
 
 It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 
 
 When the light drips through the shutters like the dew, 
 
 I arise, I face the sunrise, 
 
 And do the things my fathers learned to do. 
 
 Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops 
 
 Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die, 
 
 And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet 
 
 Stand before a glass and tie my tie. 
 
 Vine-leaves tap my window, 
 Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, 
 
Conrad Aiken 199 
 
 The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree 
 Repeating three clear tones. 
 
 It is morning. I stand by the mirror 
 
 And tie my tie once more. 
 
 While waves far off in a pale rose twilight 
 
 Crash on a white sand shore. 
 
 I stand by a mirror and comb my hair: 
 
 How small and white my face! — 
 
 The green earth tilts through a sphere of air 
 
 And bathes in a flame of space. 
 
 There are houses hanging above the stars 
 
 And stars hung under a sea . . . 
 
 And a sun far off in a shell of silence 
 
 Dapples my walls for me. . . . 
 
 It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning 
 Should I not pause in the light to remember God ? 
 Upright and firm I stand on a star unstable, 
 He is immense and lonely as a cloud. 
 I will dedicate this moment before my mirror 
 To him alone, for him I will comb my hair. 
 Accept these humble offerings, clouds of silence! 
 I will think of you as I descend the stair. 
 
 Vine-leaves tap my window, 
 The snail-track shines on the stones; 
 Dew-drops flash from the chinaberry tree 
 Repeating two clear tones. 
 
 It is morning, I awake from a bed of silence, 
 Shining I rise from the starless waters of sleep. 
 The walls are about me still as in the evening, 
 I am the same, and the same name still I keep. 
 
200 Conrad Aiken 
 
 The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion, 
 The stars pale silently in a coral sky. 
 In a whistling void I stand before my mirror, 
 Unconcerned, and tie my tie. 
 
 There are horses neighing on far-off hills 
 Tossing their long white manes, 
 And mountains flash in the rose-white dusk, 
 Their shoulders black with rains. . . . 
 It is morning, I stand by the mirror 
 And surprise my soul once more ; 
 The blue air rushes above my ceiling, 
 There are suns beneath my floor. . . . 
 
 ... It is morning, Senlin says, I ascend from darkness 
 
 And depart on the winds of space for I know not where ; 
 
 My watch is wound, a key is in my pocket, 
 
 And the sky is darkened as I descend the stair. 
 
 There are shadows across the windows, clouds in heaven, 
 
 And a god among the stars; and I will go 
 
 Thinking of him as I might think of daybreak 
 
 And humming a tune I know. . . . 
 
 Vine-leaves tap at the window, 
 Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, 
 The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree 
 Repeating three clear tones. 
 
 Maxwell Bodenheim 
 
 Maxwell Bodenheim was born at Natchez, Mississippi, May 
 26, 1892. His education, with the exception of grammar school 
 training, was achieved under the guidance of the U. S. Army, in 
 which Bodenheim served a full enlistment of three years, be- 
 ginning in 1910. In 1918, his first volume appeared and even 
 
Maxwell Bodenheim 201 
 
 those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim's complex 
 idiom were forced to recognize its intense individuality. 
 
 Minna and Myself (1918) and Advice (1920) reveal, first 
 of all, this poet's extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under 
 his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober 
 adjectives bear fantastic fruit. Sometimes he packs his meta- 
 phors so close that they become inextricably mixed. Sometimes 
 he spins his fantasies so thin that the cord of coherence snaps 
 and the poem frays into unpatterned ravellings. But, at his 
 best, in the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks 
 with a light and nimble footstep. 
 
 POET TO HIS LOVE 
 
 An old silver church in a forest 
 
 Is my love for you. 
 
 The trees around it 
 
 Are words that I have stolen from your heart. 
 
 An old silver bell, the last smile you gave, 
 
 Hangs at the top of my church. 
 
 It rings only when you come through the forest 
 
 And stand beside it. 
 
 And then, it has no need for ringing, 
 
 For your voice takes its place. 
 
 OLD AGE 
 
 In me is a little painted square 
 
 Bordered by old shops with gaudy awnings. 
 
 And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men, 
 
 Drinking sunlight. 
 
 The old men are my thoughts; 
 
 And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart, 
 
 And quietly unload supplies. 
 
 We fill slim pipes and chat 
 
202 Maxwell Bodenheim 
 
 And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the 
 square. . . . 
 
 Strong men, tinkling women, and squealing children 
 
 Stroll past us, or into the shops. 
 
 They greet the shopkeepers and touch their hats or fore- 
 heads to me. . . . 
 
 Some evening I shall not return to my people. 
 
 Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 
 
 Edn»a St. Vincent Millay, possibly the most gifted of the 
 younger lyricists, was born February 22, 1892, at Rockland, 
 Maine. After a childhood spent almost entirely in New 
 England, she attended Vassar College, from which she was 
 graduated in 191 7. Since that time she has lived in New York 
 City and abroad. 
 
 Although the bulk of her poetry is not large, the quality of 
 it approaches and sometimes attains greatness. Her first long 
 poem, "Renascence," was written when Miss Millay was scarcely 
 nineteen; it remains today one of the most remarkable poems 
 of this generation. Beginning like a child's aimless verse, it 
 proceeds, with a calm lucidity, to an amazing climax. It is as 
 if a child had, in the midst of its ingenuousness, uttered some 
 terrific truth. The cumulative power of this poem is surpassed 
 only by its beauty. 
 
 Renascence, Miss Millay's first volume, was published in 
 1917. It is full of the same passion as its title poem; here is 
 a hunger for beauty so intense that no delight is great enough 
 to give the soul peace. Such poems as "God's World" and the 
 unnamed sonnets vibrate with this rapture. 
 
 Figs from Thistles (1920) is a far more sophisticated booklet. 
 Sharp and cynically brilliant, Miss Millay's craftsmanship no 
 less than her intuition saves these poems from mere cleverness. 
 
 Second April (1921) is an intensification of her lyrical gift 
 tinctured with an increasing sadness. Her poignant poetic 
 play, Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players 
 in New York, was published in The Monthly Chapbook (Eng- 
 land) ; the issue of July, 1920, being devoted to it. 
 
Edna St. Vincent Millay 203 
 
 GOD'S WORLD 
 
 O world, I cannot hold thee close enough ! 
 
 Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! 
 
 Thy mists that roll and rise! 
 Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag 
 And all but cry with colour ! That gaunt crag 
 To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! 
 World, World, I cannot get thee close enough ! 
 
 Long have I known a glory in it all, 
 
 But never knew I this ; 
 
 Here such a passion is 
 As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear 
 Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year. 
 My soul is all but out of me, — let fall 
 No burning leaf ; prithee, let no bird call. 
 
 RENASCENCE 
 
 All I could see from where I stood 
 Was three long mountains and a wood ; 
 I turned and looked another way, 
 And saw three islands in a bay. 
 So with my eyes I traced the line 
 Of the horizon, thin and fine, 
 Straight around till I was come 
 Back to where I'd started from; 
 And all I saw from where I stood 
 Was three long mountains and a wood. 
 Over these things I could not see ; 
 These were the things that bounded me; 
 
204 Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 And I could touch them with my hand, 
 Almost, I thought, from where I stand. 
 And all at once things seemed so small 
 My breath came short, and scarce at all. 
 But, sure, the sky is big, I said ; 
 Miles and miles above my head; 
 So here upon my back I'll lie 
 And look my fill into the sky. 
 And so I looked, and, after all, 
 The sky was not so very tall. 
 The sky, I said, must somewhere stop, 
 And — sure enough! — I see the top! 
 The sky, I thought, is not so grand; 
 I 'most could touch it with my hand ! 
 And, reaching up my hand to try, 
 I screamed to feel it touch the sky. 
 
 I screamed, and — lo! — Infinity 
 
 Came down and settled over me; 
 
 And, pressing of the Undefined 
 
 The definition on my mind, 
 
 Held up before my eyes a glass 
 
 Through which my shrinking sight did pass 
 
 Until it seemed I must behold 
 
 Immensity made manifold; 
 
 Whispered to me a word whose sound 
 
 Deafened the air for worlds around, 
 
 And brought unmufHed to my ears 
 
 The gossiping of friendly spheres, 
 
 The creaking of the tented sky, 
 
 The ticking of Eternity. 
 
 I saw and heard, and knew at last 
 The How and Why of all things, past, 
 
Edna St. Vincent Millay 205 
 
 And present, and forevermore. 
 
 The universe, cleft to the core, 
 
 Lay open to my probing sense 
 
 That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence 
 
 But could not, — nay! But needs must suck 
 
 At the great wound, and could not pluck 
 
 My lips away till I had drawn 
 
 All venom out. — Ah, fearful pawn ! 
 
 For my omniscience I paid toll 
 
 In infinite remorse of soul. 
 
 All sin was of my sinning, all 
 
 Atoning mine, and mine the gall 
 
 Of all regret. Mine was the weight 
 
 Of every brooded wrong, the hate 
 
 That stood behind each envious thrust, 
 
 Mine every greed, mine every lust. 
 
 And all the while for every grief, 
 
 Each suffering, I craved relief 
 
 With individual desire, — 
 
 Craved all in vain ! And felt fierce fire 
 
 About a thousand people crawl; 
 
 Perished with each, — then mourned for all! 
 
 A man was starving in Capri; 
 
 He moved his eyes and looked at me ; 
 
 I felt his gaze, I heard his moan, 
 
 And knew his hunger as my own. 
 
 I saw at sea a great fog-bank 
 
 Between two ships that struck and sank; 
 
 A thousand screams the heavens smote ; 
 
 And every scream tore through my throat; 
 
 No hurt I did not feel, no death 
 
 That was not mine ; mine each last breath 
 
 That, crying, met an answering cry 
 
 From the compassion that was I. 
 
206 Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 All suffering mine, and mine its rod; 
 Mine, pity like the pity of God. 
 Ah, awful weight! Infinity 
 Pressed down upon the finite Me! 
 My anguished spirit, like a bird, 
 Beating against my lips I heard; 
 Yet lay the weight so close about 
 There was no room for it without. 
 And so beneath the weight lay I 
 And suffered death, but could not die. 
 
 Deep in the earth I rested now; 
 Cool is its hand upon the brow 
 And soft its breast beneath the head 
 Of one who is so gladly dead. 
 And all at once, and over all, 
 The pitying rain began to fall. 
 I lay and heard each pattering hoof 
 Upon my lowly, thatched roof, 
 And seemed to love the sound far more 
 Than ever I had done before. 
 For rain it hath a friendly sound 
 To one who's six feet underground ; 
 And scarce the friendly voice or face: 
 A grave is such a quiet place. 
 
 The rain, I said, is kind to come 
 
 And speak to me in my new home. 
 
 I would I were alive again 
 
 To kiss the fingers of the rain, 
 
 To drink into my eyes the shine 
 
 Of every slanting silver line, 
 
 To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze 
 
 From drenched and dripping apple-trees. 
 
Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 207 
 
 For soon the shower will be done, 
 And then the broad face of the sun 
 Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth 
 Until the world with answering mirth 
 Shakes joyously, and each round drop 
 Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top. 
 How can I bear it; buried here, 
 While overhead the sky grows clear 
 And blue again after the storm? 
 O, multi-colored, multiform, 
 Beloved beauty over me, 
 That I shall never, never see 
 Again ! Spring-silver, autumn-gold, 
 That I shalLnever more behold h 
 Sleeping your myriad magics through, 
 Close-sepulchred away from you! 
 
 God, I cried, give me new birth, 
 And put me back upon the earth! 
 Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd 
 And let the heavy rain, down-poured 
 In one big torrent, set me free, 
 Washing my grave away from me! 
 
 1 ceased ; and, through the breathless hush 
 That answered me, the far-off rush 
 
 Of herald wings came whispering 
 Like music down the vibrant string 
 Of my ascending prayer, and — crash! 
 Before the wild wind's whistling lash 
 The startled storm-clouds reared on high 
 And plunged in terror down the sky, 
 And the big rain in one black wave 
 Fell from the sky and struck my grave. 
 I know not how such things can be 
 
208 Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 I only know there came to me 
 A fragrance such as never clings 
 To aught save happy living things; 
 A sound as of some joyous elf 
 Singing sweet songs to please himself, 
 And, through and over everything, 
 A sense of glad awakening. 
 The grass, a tip-toe at my ear, 
 Whispering to me I could hear; 
 I felt the rain's cool finger-tips 
 Brushed tenderly across my lips, 
 Laid gently on my sealed sight, 
 And all at once the heavy night 
 Fell from my eyes and I could see, — 
 A drenched and dripping apple-tree, 
 A last long line of silver rain, 
 A sky grown clear and blue again. 
 And as I looked a quickening gust 
 Of wind blew up to me and thrust 
 Into my face a miracle 
 Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, — 
 I know not how such things can be!— 
 I breathed my soul back into me. 
 Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I 
 And hailed the earth with such a cry 
 As is not heard save from a man 
 Who has been dead and lives ag;.in. 
 About the trees my arms I wound ; 
 Like one gone mad I hugged the ground; 
 I raised my quivering arms on high ; 
 I laughed and laughed into the sky, 
 Till at my throat a strangling sob 
 Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb 
 
Edna St. Vincent Mil lay 209 
 
 Sent instant tears into my eyes; 
 
 God, I cried, no dark disguise 
 Can e'er hereafter hide from me 
 Thy radiant identity! 
 
 Thou canst not move across the grass 
 But my quick eyes will see Thee pass, 
 Nor speak, however silently, 
 But my hushed voice will answer Thee. 
 
 1 know the path that tells Thy way 
 Through the cool eve of every day; 
 God, I can push the grass apart 
 And lay my finger on Thy heart! 
 
 The world stands out on either side 
 No wider than the heart is wide; 
 Above the world is stretched the sky, — 
 No higher than the soul is high. 
 The heart can push the sea and land 
 Farther away on either hand ; 
 The soul can split the sky in two, 
 And let the face of God shine through. 
 But East and West will pinch the heart 
 That cannot keep them pushed apart ; 
 And he whose soul is flat — the sky 
 Will cave in on him by and by. 
 
 THE PEAR TREE 
 
 In this squalid, dirty dooryard, 
 
 Where the chickens scratch and run, 
 
 White, incredible, the pear tree 
 Stands apart and takes the sun, 
 
210 Edna St. Vincent Millay 
 
 Mindful of the eyes upon it, 
 Vain of its new holiness, 
 
 Like the waste-man's little daughter 
 In her first communion dress. 
 
 Stephen Vincent Benet 
 
 Stephen Vincent Benet, the younger brother of William Rose 
 Benet, was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in July, 1898. 
 He was educated in various parts of the country, graduating 
 from Yale in 1919. 
 
 At seventeen he published a small book containing six 
 dramatic portraits, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a remarkable 
 set of monologues which, in spite of distinct traces of Browning, 
 was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In 
 Benet's next volume, Young Adventure (1918), one hears some- 
 thing more than the speech of an infant prodigy; the precocious 
 facility has developed into an individual vigor. 
 
 Heavens and Earth (1920), the most representative collec- 
 tion, has a greater imaginative sweep. His novel, The Be- 
 ginning of Wisdom, appeared in 1921. Like his brother, the 
 younger Benet is at his best in the decoratively grotesque; his 
 fancy exults in running the scales between the whimsically 
 bizarre and the lightly diabolic. 
 
 PORTRAIT OF A BOY 
 
 After the whipping, he crawled into bed; 
 Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping. 
 How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red! 
 He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping 
 A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before 
 In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed, 
 Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor 
 Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and 
 dreamed. 
 
Stephen Vincent Benet 211 
 
 Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light 
 Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave's 
 
 mouth 
 Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright, 
 The crooked constellations of the South; 
 Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars, 
 The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars. 
 Within, great casks like wattled aldermen 
 Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold 
 Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again, 
 Beside webbed purples from some galleon's hold, 
 A black chest bore the skull and bones in white 
 Above a scrawled "Gunpowder!" By the flames, 
 Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite, 
 Hailing their fellows by outrageous names 
 The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons. 
 "Doubloons!" they said. The words crashed gold. 
 
 "Doubloons!" 
 
 Leonie Adams 
 
 Leonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, December 
 9, 1899. After a public school preparation, she became a 
 member of the class of 1922 at Barnard, writing her first 
 published poems as an undergraduate. 
 
 The few poems by Miss Adams which have appeared show 
 an unusual distinction of thought. They establish a kinship 
 with Emily Dickinson by their intellectual restraint, with Edna 
 St. Vincent Millay by their spiritual fervor. 
 
 APRIL MORTALITY 
 
 Rebellion shook an ancient dust, 
 
 And bones bleached dry of rottenness 
 
 Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust 
 The earth, the sky, in their bright dress. 
 
212 Leonie Adams 
 
 Heart, heart, dost thou not break to kno 
 This anguish thou wilt bear alone? 
 
 We sang of it an age ago, 
 
 And traced it dimly upon stone. 
 
 With all the drifting race of men . 
 
 Thou also art begot to mourn 
 That she is crucified again, 
 
 The lonely Beauty yet unborn. 
 
 And if thou dreamest to have won 
 Some touch of her in permanence, 
 
 'Tis the old cheating of the sun, 
 The intricate lovely play of sense. 
 
 Be bitter still, remember how 
 Four petals, when a little breath 
 
 Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough, 
 Blew delicately down to death. 
 
 HOME-COMING 
 
 When I stepped homeward to my hill 
 Dusk went before with quiet tread; 
 
 The bare laced branches of the trees 
 Were as a mist about its head. 
 
 Upon its leaf-brown breast, the rocks 
 Like great gray sheep lay silent-wise; 
 
 Between the birch trees' gleaming arms, 
 The faint stars trembled in the skies. 
 
 The white brook met me half-way up 
 And laughed as one that knew me well, 
 
 To whose more clear than crystal voice 
 The frost had joined a crystal spell. 
 
Leonie Adams 213 
 
 The skies lay like pale-watered deep. 
 
 Dusk ran before me to its strand 
 And cloudily leaned forth to touch 
 
 The moon's slow wonder with her hand. 
 
 Hilda Conkling 
 
 Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was 
 born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The 
 daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 124), she came 
 to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was 
 three years old and has lived there ever since. 
 
 Hilda began to write poems — or rather, to talk them — at the 
 age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and 
 fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of 
 phrase and beauty of vision. 
 
 Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a 
 little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this 
 unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others 
 are startling in their precision and a power of painting the 
 familiar in unsuspected colors. She hears a chickadee talking 
 The way smooth bright pebbles 
 Drop into water. 
 The rooster's comb is "gay as a parade"; he has "pearl 
 trinkets on his feet" and 
 
 The short feathers smooth along his back 
 Are the dark color of wet rocks, 
 Or the rippled green of ships 
 When I look at their sides through water. 
 Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to the keen 
 senses of this child. 
 
 WATER 
 
 The world turns softly 
 Not to spill its lakes and rivers. 
 The water is held in its arms 
 And the sky is held in the water. 
 
214 Hilda Conk ling 
 
 What is water, 
 That pours silver, 
 And can hold the sky? 
 
 HAY-COCK 
 
 This is another kind of sweetness 
 Shaped like a bee-hive : 
 This is the hive the bees have left, 
 It is from this clover-heap 
 They took away the honey 
 For the other hive! 
 
 I KEEP WONDERING 
 
 I saw a mountain, 
 
 And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water. 
 
 I saw a cockatoo, 
 
 And he was like sunset clouds. 
 
 Even leaves and little stones 
 
 Are different to my eyes sometimes. 
 
 I keep wondering through and through my heart 
 
 Where all the beautiful things in the world 
 
 Come from. 
 
 And while I wonder 
 
 They go on being beautiful. 
 
MODERN BRITISH POETRY 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE END OF VICTORIANISM 
 
 The age commonly called Victorian came to an end in 
 England about 1885. It was an age distinguished by 
 many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in 
 spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level 
 from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, 
 in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism 
 was gilt and tinsel ; its realism was as cheap as its showy 
 glass pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimacas- 
 sars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation 
 (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) 
 and a kind of negation which, refusing to see any glamour 
 in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, to King 
 Arthur, to the legend of Troy — to the suave surround- 
 ings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of 
 actual experience. 
 
 The poets of a generation before this time were fired 
 with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of 
 nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms 
 and manifestations. The characteristic but by no means 
 the best poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, 
 "wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of 'sweetness 
 and light/ and a thousand lesser theories that have not 
 Truth but comfort for their end." 
 
 The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period 
 had already begun ; the best of Victorianism can be found 
 not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers 
 like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, 
 
 217 
 
21 8 Preface 
 
 William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy 
 with their time. 
 
 It was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now 
 famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion 
 a beauty whose existence was its "own excuse for being." 
 Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use 
 of aestheticism as a slogan ; the battle-cry of the group was 
 actually the now outworn but then revolutionary "Art 
 for Art's sake" ! And, so sick were people of the 
 shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate 
 past, that the slogan won. At least, temporarily. 
 
 THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE ESTHETIC PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The Yellow Book, the organ of a group of young 
 writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a 
 reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and 
 influenced by the French. The group of contributors was 
 a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common. 
 And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary 
 airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era. 
 
 Almost the first act of the "new" men was to rouse 
 and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of- 
 the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and 
 natural an impulse, still has a place of its own — especially 
 as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid- Victorian pro- 
 priety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and 
 energetic audacities of the sensational young authors 
 and artists. The old walls fell; the public, once so apa- 
 thetic to belles lettres, was more than attentive to every 
 phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of 
 the nineteenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art 
 and ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in 
 his penetrative summary, The Eighteen-Nineties, "as 
 though the declining century wished to make amends for 
 
Preface 219 
 
 several decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be 
 something more than a coincidence that placed this decade 
 at the close of a century, and fin de siecle may have been 
 at once a swan song and a death-bed repentance." 
 
 But later on, the movement (if such it may be called), 
 surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses 
 of revolt; it degenerated into a defense not of Art but 
 Artificiality. 
 
 It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in Patience) or 
 Robert Hichens (in The Green Carnation) to satirize 
 its distorted and disillusioned attitudinizing. It strained 
 itself to death ; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, 
 an extravaganza of extravagance. 
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY 
 
 Henley repudiated this languid aestheticism ; he scorned 
 a negative art which was out of touch with the world. 
 His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that 
 mere existence was glorious; life was coarse, difficult, often 
 dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he 
 knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hun- 
 gers of man ; it could not flourish only on its own essences 
 or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would 
 have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the 
 prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt 
 breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened 
 studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of 
 the joy of living and the courage of the "unconquerable 
 soul." He was a powerful influence not only as a poet 
 but as a critic and editor. A pioneer and something of a 
 prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings 
 of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor 
 Rodin. 
 
 If at times Henley's verse is imperialistic, over-muscu- 
 
220 Preface 
 
 lar and strident, his noisy moments are redeemed not only 
 by his delicate lyrics but by his passionate enthusiasm for 
 nobility in whatever cause it was joined. 
 
 THE CELTIC REVIVAL AND J. M. SYNGE 
 
 In 1889, William Butler Yeats published his Wander- 
 ings of Oisin; in the same year Douglas Hyde, the 
 scholar and folk-lorist, brought out his Book of Gaelic 
 Stories. 
 
 The revival of Gaelic and the renascence of Irish litera- 
 ture may be said to date from the publication of those two 
 books. The fundamental idea of both men and their fol- 
 lowers was the same. It was to create a literature which 
 would express the national consciousness of Ireland 
 through a purely national art. This community of fel- 
 lowship and aims is to be found in the varied but allied 
 work of Willam Butler Yeats, "A. E." (George W. Rus- 
 sell), Moira O'Neill, Lionel Johnson, Katharine Tynan, 
 Padraic Colum and others. They began to reflect the 
 strange background of dreams, politics, suffering and hero- 
 ism that is immortally Irish. The first fervor gone, a 
 short period of dullness set in. After reanimating the old 
 myths, surcharging the legendary heroes with a new sig- 
 nificance, it seemed for a while that the movement would 
 lose itself in a literary mysticism. But an increasing 
 concern with the peasant, the migratory laborer, the 
 tramp, followed ; an interest that was something of a re- 
 action against the influence of Yeats and his mystic other- 
 worldliness. And, in 1904, the Celtic Revival reached its 
 height with John Millington Synge, who was not only 
 the greatest dramatist of the Irish Theatre, but (to quote 
 such contrary critics as George Moore and Harold 
 Williams) "one of the greatest dramatists who have 
 written in English." Synge's poetry, brusque and all too 
 
Preface 221 
 
 small in quantity, was a minor occupation with him and 
 yet the quality and power of it is unmistakable. Its 
 content is never great but the raw vigor in it was to 
 serve as a bold banner — a sort of brilliant Jolly Roger 
 — for the younger men of the following period. It is 
 not only this dramatists brief verses and his intensely 
 musical prose but his sharp prefaces that have exercised 
 so strong an influence. 
 
 Synge's poetic power is unquestionably greatest in his 
 superb plays. In The Well of the Saints, The Playboy 
 of the Western World and Riders of the Sea there are 
 more poignance, beauty of form and richness of language 
 than in any piece of dramatic writing since Elizabethan 
 times. 
 
 But although Synge's poetry was not his major con- 
 cern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and 
 eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his 
 followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction 
 against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of 
 his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism 
 of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to 
 his Poems he wrote what was a slogan, a manifesto and 
 at the same time a classic credo for all that we call the 
 "new" poetry. "I have often thought," it begins, "that 
 at the side of poetic diction, which everyone condemns, 
 modern verse contains a great deal of poetic material, 
 using 'poetic* in the same special sense. The poetry of 
 exaltation will be always the highest; but when men lose 
 their poetic feeling for ordinary life and cannot write 
 poetry of ordinary things, their exalted poetry is likely to 
 lose its strength of exaltation in the way that men cease 
 to build beautiful churches when they have lost happiness 
 in building shops. . . . Even if we grant that exalted 
 poetry can be kept successfully by itself, the strong things 
 
222 Preface 
 
 of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is 
 exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood." 
 
 RUDYARD KIPLING 
 
 New tendencies are contagious. But they also disclose 
 themselves simultaneously in places and people where 
 there has been no point of contact. While Synge was 
 publishing his proofs of the keen poetry in everyday life, 
 Kipling was illuminating, in a totally different manner, 
 the wealth of poetic material in things hitherto regarded 
 as too commonplace for poetry. Before literary England 
 had quite recovered from its surfeit of Victorian priggish- 
 ness and pre-Raphaelite delicacy, Kipling came along with 
 high spirits and a great tide of life, sweeping all before 
 him. An obscure Anglo-Indian journalist, the publication 
 of his Barrack-room Ballads in 1892 brought him sudden 
 notice. By 1895 he was internationally famous. Brush- 
 ing over the pallid attempts to revive a pallid past, he 
 rode triumphantly on a wave of buoyant and sometimes 
 brutal joy in the present. Kipling gloried in the material 
 world; he did more — he glorified it. He pierced the 
 coarse exteriors of seemingly prosaic things — things like 
 machinery, bridge-building, cockney soldiers, slang, steam, 
 the dirty by-products of science (witness "M'Andrews 
 Hymn" and "The Bell Buoy") — and uncovered their 
 hidden glamour. "Romance is gone," sighed most of his 
 contemporaries, 
 
 ". . . and all unseen 
 Romance brought up the nine-fifteen." 
 
 That sentence (from his poem "The King") contains 
 the key to the manner in which the author of The Five 
 Nations helped to rejuvenate English verse. 
 
Preface 223 
 
 Kipling, with his perception of ordinary people in terms 
 of ordinary life, was one of the strongest links between 
 the Wordsworth-Browning era and the latest apostles of 
 vigor, beginning with Masefield. He has had a score of 
 imitators, ranging from the facile Cicely Fox Smith to 
 the glibly uninspired Robert W. Service, but none of 
 them has captured anything of his quality except his 
 characteristic beat and rhythms. There are occasional 
 and serious defects in Kipling's work. Frequently he falls 
 into a journalistic ease that tends to turn into jingle; he is 
 fond of a militaristic drum-banging that is as blatant as 
 the insularity he condemns. But a burning if sometimes 
 too fatuous faith shines through his achievements. His 
 best work reveals an intensity that crystallizes into beauty 
 what was originally tawdry, that lifts the vulgar and in- 
 cidental to the place of the universal. 
 
 JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 All art is a twofold revivifying — a recreation of subject 
 and a reanimating of form. And poetry becomes perenni- 
 ally "new" by returning to the old — with a different 
 consciousness, a greater awareness. In 191 1, when art 
 was again searching for novelty, John Masefield created 
 something startling and new by going back to 1385 and 
 The Canterbury Pilgrims! Employing both the Chau- 
 cerian model and a form similar to the practically forgot- 
 ten Byronic stanza, Masefield wrote, in rapid succession, 
 The Everlasting Mercy (1911), The Widow in the Bye 
 Street (1912), Dauber (19 12), The Daffodil Fields 
 (19 13) — four astonishing rhymed narratives and four 
 of the most remarkable poems of our generation. Ex- 
 pressive of every rugged phase of life, these poems, unit- 
 ing old and new manners, responded to Synge's proclama- 
 
224 Preface 
 
 tion that "the strong things of life are needed in poetry 
 also . . . and it may almost be said that before verse 
 can be human again it must be brutal." 
 
 Masefleld brought back to poetry that mixture of 
 beauty and brutality which is its most human and en- 
 during quality. He brought back that rich and almost 
 vulgar vividness which is the very life-blood of Chaucer, 
 of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Villon, of Heine — and of 
 all those who were not only great artists but great 
 humanists. As a purely descriptive poet, he can take his 
 place with the masters of sea and landscape. As an imag- 
 inative realist, he showed those who were stumbling from 
 one wild eccentricity to another to thrill them, that they 
 themselves were wilder, stranger, far more thrilling than 
 anything in the world — or out of it. Few things in con- 
 temporary poetry are as powerful as the regeneration of 
 Saul Kane (in The Everlasting Mercy) or the story of 
 Dauber, the tale of a tragic sea-voyage and a dreaming 
 youth who wanted to be a painter. The vigorous descrip- 
 tion of rounding Cape Horn in the latter poem is superbly 
 done, a masterpiece in itself. Masefield's later volumes 
 are quieter in tone, more measured in technique; there 
 is an almost religious ring to many of his Shakespearean 
 sonnets. But the swinging surge is there, a passionate 
 strength that leaps through all his work from Salt Water 
 Ballads (1902) to Reynard the Fox (1919). 
 
 THE WAR AND "THE GEORGIANS" 
 
 There is no sharp statistical line of demarcation be- 
 tween Masefleld and the younger men. Although sev- 
 eral of them owe much to him, most of the younger poets 
 speak in accents of their own. W. W. Gibson had 
 already reinforced the "return to actuality" by turning 
 from his first preoccupation with shining knights, fault- 
 
Preface 225 
 
 less queens, ladies in distress and all the paraphernalia of 
 hackneyed mediaeval romances, to write about ferrymen, 
 berry-pickers, stone-cutters, farmers, printers, circus-men, 
 carpenters — dramatizing (though sometimes theatricaliz- 
 ing) the primitive emotions of uncultured and ordinary 
 people in Livelihood, Daily Bread and Fires. This in- 
 tensity had been asking new questions. It found its 
 answers in the war; repressed emotionalism discovered a 
 new outlet. 
 
 The war caught up the youth of the country in a great 
 gust of national fervor. But after the first flush of false 
 romanticism passed, the consequent disillusion made itself 
 heard. The fierce war-poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Wil- 
 fred Owen and Robert Graves are the very opposite of 
 the jingo journalistic verse that attempted to paint the 
 world's greatest tragedy in bright and cheerful colors. 
 
 But this intensity was not confined to the martial or 
 the anti-militarist poets. It manifests itself even in the 
 less realistic poems of the romantic Rupert Brooke (who 
 owes less to his immediate predecessors than he does to 
 the passionately intellectual John Donne), in the dark 
 introspections of D. H. Lawrence and the brooding nobil- 
 ity of Charlotte Mew. And, though the younger of these 
 poets (John Freeman, W. J. Turner and others) are 
 echoing traditional English landscape poetry with great 
 persistence and little variety, magic has not disappeared 
 from the world of the contemporary Englishman. 
 
 Magic lives in the moon-soaked wonder and nursery- 
 rhyme whimsicality of Walter de la Mare, in the limpid 
 and unperturbed loveliness of Ralph Hodgson, in the naif 
 and delicate lyrics of W. H. Davies, in the soil-flavored 
 fantasies of James Stephens. Any one of these four sing- 
 ers would be an exquisite ornament to his decade. 
 
 All of the poets mentioned in this section (with the 
 
226 Preface 
 
 exception of Charlotte Mew and Wilfred Owen, whose 
 verse was posthumously published) have formed them- 
 selves in a loose group called "The Georgians," and an 
 anthology of their best work has appeared every two years 
 since 1913. Masefield, Lascelles Abercrombie and John 
 Drinkwater are also listed among the Georgian poets. 
 When their first collection appeared in March, 1913, 
 Henry Newbolt, critic as well as poet, wrote: "These 
 younger poets have no temptation to be false. They are 
 not for making something 'pretty/ something up to the 
 standard of professional patterns. . . . They write as 
 grown men walk, each with his own unconscious stride 
 and gesture. ... In short, they express themselves and 
 seem to steer without an effort between the dangers of 
 innovation and reminiscence." 
 
 The secret of this success is not an exclusive discovery 
 of the modern poets. It is their inheritance, derived from 
 those predecessors who, "from Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge onward, have worked for the assimilation of verse 
 to the manner and accent of natural speech." In its 
 adaptability no less than in its vigor, modern English 
 poetry is true to its period — and its past. 
 
Austin Dobson 
 
 (Henry) Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth, in 1840, and 
 was educated in Wales and on the Continent. In 1856, he re- 
 ceived a clerkship in The Board of Trade and remained in 
 official life a great part of his life. 
 
 His first collection, Vignettes in Rhyme (1873), attracted 
 attention by the ease with which the author managed his 
 dexterous and most difficult effects. With Proverbs in Porcelain 
 (1877), Old World Idylls (1883) and At the Sign of the Lyre 
 (1885), it was evident that a new master of vers de societe had 
 arisen. The crispness and clean delicacy of his verse make 
 him the peer of Prior, Praed and Thomas Hood. 
 
 During the latter part of his life, he devoted himself to a 
 type of semi-biographical essay, intended to preserve the spirit 
 of some nearly- or wholly-forgotten celebrity. In this form, his 
 prose is scarcely less distinctive than his verse; his detailed 
 and charmingly dispensed knowledge of the time of Queen Anne 
 gives to his writings its own special flavor of "archaic gentility". 
 
 Although most of his rhymes are charming rather than pro- 
 found, certain pages, like "Before Sedan," are memorable for 
 their serious clarity. 
 
 Dobson died September 3, 1921. 
 
 IN AFTER DAYS 
 
 In after days when grasses high 
 O'ertop the stone where I shall lie, 
 Though ill or well the world adjust 
 My slender claim to honored dust, 
 I shall not question or reply. 
 
 I shall not see the morning sky; 
 I shall not hear the night-wind's sigh ; 
 I shall be mute, as all men must 
 In after days! 
 227 
 
228 Austin Dobson 
 
 But yet, now living, fain were I 
 That some one then should testify, 
 Saying — "He held his pen in trust 
 To Art, not serving shame or lust." 
 Will none? — Then let my memory die 
 In after days! 
 
 BEFORE SEDAN 
 
 "The dead hand clasped a letter" 
 
 — Special Correspondence. 
 
 Here in this leafy place 
 
 Quiet he lies, 
 Cold with his sightless face 
 
 Turned to the skies; 
 'Tis but another dead ; 
 All you can say is said. 
 
 Carry his body hence, — 
 
 Kings must have slaves; 
 Kings climb to eminence 
 
 Over men's graves: 
 So this man's eye is dim ; — 
 Throw the earth over him. 
 
 What was the white you touched, 
 
 There, at his side? 
 Paper his hand had clutched 
 
 Tight ere he died ; — 
 Message or wish, may be ; 
 Smooth the folds out and see. 
 
Austin Dobson 229 
 
 Hardly the worst of us 
 
 Here could have smiled ! 
 Only the tremulous 
 
 Words of a child; 
 Prattle, that has for stops 
 Just a few ruddy drops. 
 
 Look. She is sad to miss, 
 
 Morning and night, 
 His — her dead father's — kiss; 
 
 Tries to be bright, 
 Good to mamma, and sweet. 
 That is all. "Marguerite." 
 
 Ah, if beside the dead 
 
 Slumbered the pain ! 
 Ah, if the hearts that bled 
 
 Slept with the slain ! 
 If the grief died ; — but no. 
 Death will not have it so. 
 
 Wilfred Scawen Blunt 
 
 Wilfred Scawen Blunt was born at Crabbet Park, Crawley, 
 Sussex, in 1840. He was educated at St. Mary's College, Oscott, 
 and was a member of the diplomatic service from 1850 to 1870. 
 He spent many years in the East, his observations making him 
 strongly sympathetic to lesser nationalities and all the down- 
 trodden. He favored the cause of the Egyptians; his voice was 
 always lifted for justice to Ireland. 
 
 As a poet, he is best known by his The Love Sonnets of 
 Proteus (1881) and The New Pilgrimage (1889). Both 
 volumes reveal a deep, philosophical nature expressing itself 
 in terms of high seriousness. 
 
 His remarkable My Diaries appeared when Blunt was an 
 octogenarian, in 1921. 
 
230 Wilfred Scawen Blunt 
 
 LAUGHTER AND DEATH 
 
 There is no laughter in the natural world 
 
 Of beast or fish or bird, though no sad doubt 
 
 Of their futurity to them unfurled 
 
 Has dared to check the mirth-compelling shout. 
 
 The lion roars his solemn thunder out 
 
 To the sleeping woods. The eagle screams her cry. 
 
 Even the lark must strain a serious throat 
 
 To hurl his blest defiance at the sky. 
 
 Fear, anger, jealousy, have found a voice. 
 
 Love's pain or rapture the brute bosoms swell. 
 
 Nature has symbols for her nobler joys, 
 
 Her nobler sorrows. Who has dared foretell 
 
 That only man, by some sad mockery, 
 
 Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die ? 
 
 Thomas Hardy 
 
 Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, and has for years been 
 famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer of intense and 
 sombre novels. His Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the 
 Obscure are possibly his best known, although his Wessex Tales 
 and Life's Little Ironies are no less imposing. 
 
 It was not until he was almost sixty, in 1898 to be precise, 
 that Hardy abandoned prose and challenged attention as a 
 poet. The Dynasts, a drama of the Napoleonic Wars, is in 
 three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes, 
 a massive and most amazing contribution to contemporary art. 
 
 His Collected Poems were published by The Macmillan 
 Company in 1919 and reveal another and noble phase of one 
 of the greatest living writers of English. 
 
Thomas Hardy 231 
 
 IN TIME OF "THE BREAKING OF NATIONS" 
 
 Only a man harrowing clods 
 
 In a slow silent walk, 
 With an old horse that stumbles and nods 
 
 Half asleep as they stalk. 
 
 Only thin smoke without flame 
 
 From the heaps of couch-grass: 
 Yet this will go onward the same 
 
 Though Dynasties pass. 
 
 Yonder a maid and her wight 
 
 Come whispering by; 
 War's annals will fade into night 
 
 Ere their story die. 
 
 THE DARKLING THRUSH 
 
 I leaned upon a coppice gate 
 
 When Frost was spectre-gray, 
 And Winter's dregs made desolate 
 
 The weakening eye of day. 
 The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 
 
 Like strings from broken lyres, 
 And all mankind that haunted nigh 
 
 Had sought their household fires. 
 
 The land's sharp features seemed to be 
 The Century's corpse outleant; 
 
 His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
 The wind his death-lament. 
 
232 Thomas Hardy 
 
 The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
 Was shrunken hard and dry, 
 
 And every spirit upon earth 
 Seemed fervourless as I. 
 
 At once a voice burst forth among 
 
 The bleak twigs overhead 
 In a full-hearted evensong 
 
 Of joy unlimited; 
 An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small, 
 
 In blast-beruffled plume, 
 Has chosen thus to fling his soul 
 
 Upon the growing gloom. 
 
 So little cause for carollings 
 
 Of such ecstatic sound 
 Was written on terrestrial things 
 
 Afar or nigh around, 
 That I could think there trembled through 
 
 His happy good-night air 
 Some blessed hope, whereof he knew 
 
 And I was unaware. 
 
 Andrew Lang 
 
 Andrew Lang, critic and essayist, was born in 1844 and 
 educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Besides his many well- 
 known translations of Homer, Theocritus and the Greek An- 
 thology, he has published numerous biographical works. 
 
 As a poet, his chief claim rests on his delicate light verse. 
 Ballads and Lyrics of Old France (1872), Ballades in Blue 
 China (1880), and Rhymes a la Mode (1884) disclose Lang 
 as a lesser Austin Dobson. 
 
Andrew Lang 233 
 
 SCYTHE SONG 
 
 Mowers, weary and brown and blithe, 
 
 What is the word, methinks, ye know, 
 Endless over-word that the Scythe 
 
 Sings to the blades of the grass below? 
 Scythes that swing in the grass and clover, 
 
 Something, still, they say as they pass; 
 What is the word that, over and over, 
 
 Sings the Scythe to the flowers and grass? 
 
 Hush, ah, hush, the Scythes are saying, 
 
 Hush, and heed not, and fall asleep; 
 Hush they say to the grasses swaying; 
 
 Hush they sing to the clover deep ! 
 Hush — 'tis the lullaby Time is singing — 
 
 Hush and heed not for all things pass ; 
 Hush, ah, hush! and the Scythes are swinging 
 
 Over the clover, over the grass! 
 
 Robert Bridges 
 
 Robert (Seymour) Bridges was born in 1844 an d educated 
 at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After travel- 
 ing extensively, he studied medicine in London and practiced 
 until 1882. Most of his poems, like his occasional plays, are 
 classical in tone as well as treatment. He was appointed 
 poet laureate in 1913, following Alfred Austin. His command 
 of the secrets of rhythm, especially exemplified in Shorter Poems 
 (1894), through a subtle versification give his lines a firm deli- 
 cacy and beauty of pattern. 
 
234 Robert Bridges 
 
 WINTER NIGHTFALL 
 
 The day begins to droop, — 
 
 Its course is done: 
 But nothing tells the place 
 
 Of the setting sun. 
 
 The hazy darkness deepens, 
 
 And up the lane 
 You may hear, but cannot see, 
 
 The homing wain. 
 
 An engine pants and hums 
 In the farm hard by: 
 
 Its lowering smoke is lost 
 In the lowering sky. 
 
 The soaking branches drip, 
 And all night through 
 
 The dropping will not cease 
 In the avenue. 
 
 A tall man there in the house 
 Must keep his chair: 
 
 He knows he will never again 
 Breathe the spring air: 
 
 His heart is worn with work; 
 
 He is giddy and sick 
 If he rise to go as far 
 
 As the nearest rick: 
 
 He thinks of his morn of life, 
 His hale, strong years; 
 
 And braves as he may the night 
 Of darkness and tears. 
 
Arthur O'Shaughnessy 23$ 
 
 The Irish-English singer, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaugh- 
 nessy, was born in London in 1844. He was connected, for a 
 while, with the British Museum, and was transferred later to 
 the Department of Natural History. His first literary success, 
 Epic of W omen (1870), promised a brilliant future for the 
 young poet, a promise strengthened by his Music and Moon- 
 light (1874). Always delicate in health, his hopes were 
 dashed by periods of illness and an early death in London 
 in 1881. 
 
 The poem here reprinted is not only O'Shaughnessy's best 
 but is, because of its perfect blending of music and message, 
 one of the immortal classics of our verse. 
 
 ODE 
 
 We are the music-makers, 
 
 And we are the dreamers of dreams, 
 Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 
 
 And sitting by desolate streams ; 
 World-losers and world-forsakers, 
 
 On whom the pale moon gleams: 
 Yet we are the movers and shakers 
 
 Of the world for ever, it seems. 
 
 With wonderful deathless ditties 
 We build up the world's great cities, 
 
 And out of a fabulous story 
 
 We fashion an empire's glory : 
 One man with a dream, at pleasure, 
 
 Shall go forth and conquer a crown ; 
 And three with a new song's measure 
 
 Can trample an empire down. 
 
236 Arthur O'Shaughnessy 
 
 We, in the ages lying 
 
 In the buried past of the earth, 
 Built Nineveh with our sighing, 
 
 And Babel itself with our mirth; 
 And o'erthrew them with prophesying 
 
 To the old of the new world's worth ; 
 For each age is a dream that is dying, 
 
 Or one that is coming to birth. 
 
 Alice Meynell 
 
 Alice (Christina Thompson) Meynell was born in 1848, 
 was educated privately by her father and spent a great part 
 of her early life in Italy. She married Wilfred Meynell, the 
 friend and editor of Francis Thompson. 
 
 Her work, which is high in conception and fine in execu- 
 tion, is distinguished by its pensive, religious note. Her first 
 four volumes appeared, in a condensed form, in Collected 
 Poems (1913). Since then, her most representative work is A 
 Father of Women and Other Poems (1917). 
 
 THE SHEPHERDESS 
 
 She walks — the lady of my delight — 
 
 A shepherdess of sheep. 
 Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; 
 
 She guards them from the steep; 
 She feeds them on the fragrant height, 
 
 And folds them in for sleep. 
 
 She roams maternal hills and bright 
 
 Dark valleys safe and deep. 
 Into that tender breast at night, 
 
 The chastest stars may peep. 
 She walks — the lady of my delight — 
 
 A shepherdess of sheep. 
 
Alice Meynell 237 
 
 She holds her little thoughts in sight, 
 
 Though gay they run and leap. 
 She is so circumspect and right; 
 
 She has her soul to keep. 
 She walks — the lady of my delight — 
 
 A shepherdess of sheep. 
 
 William Ernest Henley 
 
 William Ernest Henley was born in 1849 and was educated 
 at the Grammar School of Gloucester. From childhood he was 
 afflicted with a tuberculous disease which finally necessitated 
 the amputation of a foot. His Hospital Verses, those vivid 
 precursors of current free verse, were a record of the time 
 when he was at the infirmary at Edinburgh; they are sharp 
 with the sights, sensations, even the actual smells of the sick- 
 room. In spite (or, more probably, because) of his continued 
 poor health, Henley never ceased to worship strength and 
 energy; courage and a triumphant belief in a harsh world 
 shine out of the athletic London Voluntaries (1892) and the 
 lightest and most musical lyrics in Hawthorn and Lavender 
 (1898). 
 
 After a brilliant and varied career (see Preface), devoted 
 mostly to journalism, Henley died in 1903. 
 
 INVICTUS 
 
 Out of the night that covers me, 
 Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul. 
 
 In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
 
 Under the bludgeonings of chance 
 My head is bloody, but unbowed. 
 
238 William Ernest Henley 
 
 Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
 Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
 
 And yet the menace of the years 
 Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 
 
 It matters not how strait the gate, 
 
 How charged with punishments the scroll, 
 
 I am the master of my fate: 
 I am the captain of my soul. 
 
 THE BLACKBIRD 
 
 The nightingale has a lyre of gold, 
 
 The lark's is a clarion call, 
 And the blackbird plays but a boxwood flute, 
 
 But I love him best of all. 
 
 For his song is all of the joy of life, 
 And we in the mad, spring weather, 
 
 We two have listened till he sang 
 Our hearts and lips together. 
 
 MARGARITA SORORI 
 
 A late lark twitters from the quiet skies; 
 
 And from the west, 
 
 Where the sun, his day's work ended, 
 
 Lingers as in content, 
 
 There falls on the old, grey city 
 
 An influence luminous and serene, 
 
 A shining peace. 
 
William Ernest Henley 239 
 
 The smoke ascends 
 
 In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires 
 
 Shine, and are changed. In the valley 
 
 Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun, 
 
 Closing his benediction, 
 
 Sinks, and the darkening air 
 
 Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night — 
 
 Night with her train of stars 
 
 And her great gift of sleep. 
 
 So be my passing! 
 
 My task accomplished and the long day done, 
 
 My wages taken, and in my heart 
 
 Some late lark singing, 
 
 Let me be gathered to the quiet w T est, 
 
 The sundown splendid and serene, 
 
 Death. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in 1850. He 
 was at first trained to be a lighthouse engineer, following the 
 profession of his family. However, he studied law instead, 
 was admitted to the bar in 1875, and abandoned law for 
 literature a few years later. 
 
 Though primarily a novelist, Stevenson has left one im- 
 mortal book of poetry which is equally at home in the nursery 
 and the library: A Child's Garden of Verses (first published 
 in 1885) is second only to Mother Goose's own collection in 
 its lyrical simplicity and universal appeal. Underwoods 
 (1887) and Ballads (1890) comprise his entire poetic output. 
 As a genial essayist, he is not unworthy to be ranked with 
 Charles Lamb. As a romancer, his fame rests securely on 
 Kidnapped, the unfinished masterpiece, Weir of Hermiston, and 
 that eternal classic of youth, Treasure Island. 
 
 Stevenson died after a long and dogged fight with his ill- 
 ness, in the Samoan Islands in 1894. 
 
240 Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 I will make you brooches and toys for your delight 
 Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. 
 I will make a palace fit for you and me, 
 Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. 
 
 I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room, 
 Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom, 
 And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white 
 In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night. 
 
 And this shall be for music when no one else is near, 
 The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! 
 That only I remember, that only you admire, 
 Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. 
 
 REQUIEM 
 
 Under the wide and starry sky 
 
 Dig the grave and let me lie : 
 Glad did I live and gladly die, 
 
 And I laid me down with a will. 
 
 This be the verse you 'grave for me : 
 Here he lies where he long'd to be; 
 
 Home is the sailor, home from the sea, 
 And the hunter home from the hill. 
 
 Fiona Macleod 
 
 (William Sharp) 
 
 William Sharp was born at Garthland Place, Scotland, in 
 1855. He wrote several volumes of biography and criticism, 
 published a book of plays greatly influenced by Maeterlinck 
 (Vistas) and was editor of "The Canterbury Poets'' series. 
 
Fiona Macleod 241 
 
 His feminine alter ego, Fiona Macleod, was a far different 
 personality. Sharp actually believed himself possessed of an- 
 other spirit; under the spell of this other self, he wrote sev- 
 eral volumes of Celtic tales, beautiful tragic romances and 
 no little unusual poetry. Of the prose stories written by Fiona 
 Macleod, the most barbaric and vivid are those collected in 
 The Sin-Eater and Other Tales; the longer Pharais, A Ro- 
 mance of the Isles, is scarcely less unique. 
 
 In ten years, 1882-1891, William Sharp published four 
 volumes of rather undistinguished verse. In 1896 From the 
 Hills of Dream appeared over the signature of Fiona Macleod; 
 The Hour of Beauty, a rather more distinctive collection, fol- 
 lowed shortly. Both poetry and prose were always the result 
 of two sharply differentiated moods constantly fluctuating; 
 the emotional mood was that of Fiona Macleod, the intellec- 
 tual and, it must be admitted, the more arresting mood was that 
 of William Sharp. 
 
 He died in 1905. 
 
 THE VALLEY OF SILENCE 
 
 In the secret Valley of Silence 
 
 No breath doth fall; 
 No wind stirs in the branches; 
 No bird doth call: 
 As on a white wall 
 
 A breathless lizard is still, 
 So silence lies on the valley 
 Breathlessly still. 
 
 In the dusk-grown heart of the valley 
 
 An altar rises white: 
 No rapt priest bends in awe 
 Before its silent light: 
 But sometimes a flight 
 
 Of breathless words of prayer 
 White-wing'd enclose the altar, 
 Eddies of prayer. 
 
!\1 Oscar Wilde 
 
 Oscar Wilde was born at Dublin, Ireland, in 1856, and even 
 as an undergraduate at Oxford he was marked for a brilliant 
 career. When he was a trifle over 21 years of age, he won 
 the Newdigate Prize with his poem Ravenna. 
 
 Giving himself almost entirely to prose, he speedily became 
 known as a writer of brilliant epigrammatic essays and even 
 more brilliant paradoxical plays such as An Ideal Husband 
 and The Importance of Being Earnest. His aphorisms and 
 flippancies were quoted everywhere; his fame as a wit was 
 only surpassed by his notoriety as an aesthete. (See Preface.) 
 
 Most of his poems in prose (such as The Happy Prince, The 
 Birthday of the Infanta and The Fisherman and His Soul) 
 are more imaginative and richly colored than his verse; but 
 in one long poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), he 
 sounded his deepest, simplest and most enduring note. Prison 
 was, in many ways, a regeneration for Wilde. It not only 
 produced The Ballad of Reading Gaol but made possible his 
 most poignant piece of writing, De Profundis, only a small 
 part of which has been published. 
 
 Wilde's society plays, flashing and cynical, were the fore- 
 runners of Bernard Shaw's audacious and far more searching 
 ironies. 
 
 Wilde died at Paris, November 30, 1900. 
 
 REQUIESCAT 
 
 Tread lightly, she is near 
 
 Under the snow, 
 Speak gently, she can hear 
 
 The daisies grow. 
 
 All her bright golden hair 
 Tarnished with rust, 
 
 She that was young and fair 
 Fallen to dust. 
 
Oscar Wilde 243 
 
 Lily-like, white as snow, 
 
 She hardly knew 
 She was a woman, so 
 
 Sweetly she grew. 
 
 Coffin-board, heavy stone, 
 
 Lie on her breast; 
 I vex my heart alone, 
 
 She is at rest. 
 
 Peace, peace; she cannot hear 
 
 Lyre or sonnet; 
 All my life's buried here, 
 
 Heap earth upon it. 
 
 John Davidson 
 
 John Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, in 
 1857. His Ballads and Songs (1895) and New Ballads (1897) 
 attained a sudden but too short-lived popularity, and his 
 great promise was quenched by an apathetic public and by his 
 own growing disillusion and despair. His sombre yet direct 
 poetry never tired of repeating his favorite theme: "Man is 
 but the Universe grown conscious." 
 
 Davidson died by his own hand at Penzance in 1909. 
 
 IMAGINATION 
 
 (From "New Years Eve JJ ) 
 
 There is a dish to hold the sea, 
 A brazier to contain the sun, 
 
 A compass for the galaxy, 
 
 A voice to wake the dead and done ! 
 
244 John Davidson 
 
 That minister of ministers, 
 
 Imagination, gathers up 
 The undiscovered Universe, 
 
 Like jewels in a jasper cup. 
 
 Its flame can mingle north and south; 
 
 Its accent with the thunder strive ; 
 The ruddy sentence of its mouth 
 
 Can make the ancient dead alive. 
 
 The mart of power, the fount of will, 
 The form and mould of every star, 
 
 The source and bound of good and ill, 
 The key of all the things that are, 
 
 Imagination, new and strange 
 In every age, can turn the year; 
 
 Can shift the poles and lightly change 
 The mood of men, the world's career. 
 
 William Watson 
 
 William Watson was born at Burley-in-Wharfedale, York- 
 shire, August 2, 1858. He achieved his first wide success 
 through his long and eloquent poems on Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 and Tennyson — poems that attempted, and sometimes suc- 
 cessfully, to combine the manners of these masters. The Hope 
 of the World (1897) contains some of his most characteristic 
 verse. 
 
 It was understood that he would be appointed poet laureate 
 upon the death of Alfred Austin. But some of his "radical" 
 and semi-political poems are supposed to have displeased the 
 powers at Court, and the honor went to Robert Bridges. His 
 best work, which has both dignity and imagination, may be 
 found in Selected Poems, published in 1903 by John Lane Co. 
 
William Watson 24.C 
 
 SONG * 
 
 April, April, 
 
 Laugh thy girlish laughter; 
 Then, the moment after, 
 Weep thy girlish tears, 
 April, that mine ears 
 Like a lover greetest, 
 If I tell thee, sweetest, 
 All my hopes and fears. 
 April, April, 
 
 Laugh thy golden laughter, 
 But, the moment after, 
 Weep thy golden tears! 
 
 ESTRANGEMENT ' 
 
 So, without, breach, we fall apart, 
 
 Tacitly sunder — neither you nor I 
 
 Conscious of one intelligible Why, 
 
 And both, from severance, winning equal smart. 
 
 So, with resigned and acquiescent heart, 
 
 Whene'er your name on some chance lip may lie, 
 
 I seem to see an alien shade pass by, 
 
 A spirit wherein I have no lot or part. 
 
 Thus may a captive, in some fortress grim, 
 
 From casual speech betwixt his warders, learn 
 
 That June on her triumphal progress goes 
 
 Through arched and bannered woodlands; while for him 
 
 She is a legend emptied of concern, 
 
 And idle is the rumour of the rose. 
 
 1 From The Hope of the World by William Watson. Copy- 
 right, 1897, by John Lane Company. Reprinted by permission 
 of the publishers. 
 
246 Francis Thompson 
 
 Born in 1859 at Preston, Francis (Joseph) Thompson was 
 educated at Owen's College, Manchester. Later he tried all 
 manner of strange ways of earning a living. He was, at 
 various times, assistant in a boot-shop, medical student, col- 
 lector for a book seller and homeless vagabond; there was 
 a period in his life when he sold matches on the streets of 
 London. He was discovered in terrible poverty by the editor 
 of a magazine to which he had sent some verses the year before. 
 Almost immediately thereafter he became famous. His ex- 
 alted mysticism is seen at its purest in "A Fallen Yew" and 
 "The Hound of Heaven." Coventry Patmore, the distin- 
 guished poet of an earlier period, says of the latter poem, 
 which is unfortunately too long to quote, "It is one of the 
 very few great odes of which our language can boast." 
 
 Thompson died, after a fragile and spasmodic life, in St. 
 John's Wood in November, 1907. 
 
 DAISY 
 
 Where the thistle lifts a purple crown 
 
 Six foot out of the turf, 
 And the harebell shakes on the windy hill- 
 
 O breath of the distant surf! — 
 
 The hills look over on the South, 
 And southward dreams the sea; 
 
 And with the sea-breeze hand in hand 
 Came innocence and she. 
 
 Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry 
 Red for the gatherer springs; 
 
 Two children did we stray and talk 
 Wise, idle, childish things. 
 
Francis Thompson 247 
 
 She listened with big-lipped surprise, 
 
 Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: 
 
 Her skin was like a grape whose veins 
 Run snow instead of wine. 
 
 She knew not those sweet words she spake, 
 
 Nor knew her own sweet way; 
 But there's never a bird, so sweet a song 
 
 Thronged in whose throat all day. 
 
 Oh, there were flowers in Storrington 
 
 On the turf and on the spray; 
 But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills 
 
 Was the Daisy-flower that day! 
 
 Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face. 
 
 She gave me tokens three: — 
 A look, a word of her winsome mouth, 
 
 And a wild raspberry. 
 
 A berry red, a guileless look, 
 
 A still word, — strings of sand ! 
 And yet they made my wild, wild heart 
 
 Fly down to her little hand. 
 
 For standing artless as the air, 
 
 And candid as the skies, 
 She took the berries with her hand, 
 
 And the love with her sweet eyes. 
 
 The fairest things have fleetest end, 
 
 Their scent survives their close: 
 But the rose's scent is bitterness' 
 
 To him that loved the rose. 
 
248 Francis Thompson 
 
 She looked a little wistfully, 
 
 Then went her sunshine way: — 
 
 The sea's eye had a mist on it, 
 
 And the leaves fell from the day. 
 
 She went her unremembering way, 
 She went and left in me 
 
 The pang of all the partings gone, 
 And partings yet to be. 
 
 She left me marvelling why my soul 
 Was sad that she was glad ; 
 
 At all the sadness in the sweet, 
 The sweetness in the sad. 
 
 Still, still I seemed to see her, still 
 Look up with soft replies, 
 
 And take the berries with her hand, 
 And the love with her lovely eyes. 
 
 Nothing begins, and nothing ends, 
 That is not paid with moan, 
 
 For we are born in other's pain, 
 And perish in our own. 
 
 TO A SNOWFLAKE 
 
 What heart could have thought you?- 
 
 Past our devisal 
 
 (O filigree petal!) 
 
 Fashioned so purely, 
 
 Fragilely, surely, 
 
 From what Paradisal 
 
 Imagineless metal, 
 
 Too costly for cost? 
 
 Who hammered you, wrought you, 
 
Francis Thompson 249 
 
 From argentine vapour ? — 
 
 "God was my shaper. 
 
 Passing surmisal, 
 
 He hammered, He wrought me, 
 
 From curled silver vapour, 
 
 To lust of his mind : — 
 
 Thou couldst not have thought me! 
 
 So purely, so palely, 
 
 Tinily, surely, 
 
 Mightily, frailly, 
 
 Insculped and embossed, 
 
 With His hammer of wind, 
 
 And His graver of frost." 
 
 A. E. Housman 
 
 A. E. Housman was born March 26, 1859, ana \ after a clas- 
 sical education, he was, for ten years, a Higher Division 
 Clerk in H. M. Patent Office. Later in life, he became a 
 teacher. 
 
 Housman has published only one volume of original verse, 
 but that volume, A Shropshire Lad (1896), is known wherever 
 modern English poetry is read. Underneath his ironies, there 
 is a rustic humor that has many subtle variations. From a 
 melodic standpoint, A Shropshire Lad is a collection of ex- 
 quisite, haunting and almost perfect songs. 
 
 Housman has been a professor of Latin since 1892 and, 
 besides his immortal set of lyrics, has edited Juvenal and 
 the books of Manilius. 
 
 REVEILLE 
 
 Wake: the silver dusk returning 
 Up the beach of darkness brims, 
 
 And the ship of sunrise burning 
 Strands upon the eastern rims. 
 
250 A. E. Housman 
 
 Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters, 
 Trampled to the floor it spanned, 
 
 And the tent of night in tatters 
 Straws the sky-pavilioned land. 
 
 Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying: 
 Hear the drums of morning play; 
 
 Hark, the empty highways crying 
 "Who'll beyond the hills away?" 
 
 Towns and countries woo together, 
 Forelands beacon, belfries call; 
 
 Never lad that trod on leather 
 Lived to feast his heart with all. 
 
 Up, lad : thews that lie and cumber 
 Sunlit pallets never thrive; 
 
 Morns abed and daylight slumber 
 Were not meant for man alive. 
 
 Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; 
 
 Breath's a ware that will not keep. 
 Up, lad: when the journey's over 
 
 There'll be time enough to sleep. 
 
 WHEN I WAS ONE-AND-TWENTY 
 
 When I was one-and-twenty 
 
 I heard a wise man say, 
 "Give crowns and pounds and guineas 
 
 But not your heart away; 
 Give pearls away and rubies 
 
 But keep your fancy free." 
 But I was one-and-twenty, 
 
 No use to talk to me. 
 
A. E. Housman 251 
 
 When I was one-and-twenty 
 
 I heard him say again, 
 "The heart out of the bosom 
 
 Was never given in vain; 
 'Tis paid with sighs a-plenty 
 
 And sold for endless rue." 
 And I am two-and-twenty, 
 
 And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true. 
 
 TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG 
 
 The time you won your town the race 
 We chaired you through the market-place; 
 Man and boy stood cheering by, 
 And home we brought you shoulder-high. 
 
 Today, the road all runners come, 
 Shoulder-high we bring you home, 
 And set you at your threshold down, 
 Townsman of a stiller town. 
 
 Smart lad, to slip betimes away 
 From fields where glory does not stay, 
 And early though the laurel grows, 
 It withers quicker than the rose. 
 
 Eyes the shady night has shut 
 Cannot see the record cut, 
 And silence sounds no worse than cheers 
 After earth has stopped the ears: 
 
 Now you will not swell the rout 
 Of lads that wore their honours out, 
 Runners whom renown outran 
 And the name died before the man. 
 
252 A. E. Housman 
 
 So set, before its echoes fade, 
 The fleet foot on the sill of shade, 
 And hold to the low lintel up 
 The still-defended challenge-cup. 
 
 And round that early-laurelled head 
 Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead, 
 And find unwithered on its curls 
 The garland briefer than a girl's. 
 
 Katharine Tynan Hinkson 
 
 Katharine Tynan was born at Dublin in 1861, and edu- 
 cated at the Convent of St. Catherine at Drogheda. She mar- 
 ried Henry Hinkson, a lawyer and author, in 1893. Her 
 poetry is largely actuated by religious themes, and much of 
 her verse is devotional and yet distinctive. In New Poems 
 (1911) she is at her best; graceful, meditative and with occa- 
 sional notes of deep pathos. 
 
 SHEEP AND LAMBS 
 
 All in the April morning, 
 
 April airs were abroad; 
 The sheep with their little lambs 
 
 Pass'd me by on the road. 
 
 The sheep with their little lambs 
 Pass'd me by on the road; 
 
 All in an April evening 
 
 I thought on the Lamb of God. 
 
 The lambs were weary, and crying 
 With a weak human cry; 
 
 I thought on the Lamb of God 
 Going meekly to die. 
 
Katharine Tynan Hinkson 253 
 
 Up in the blue, blue mountains 
 
 Dewy pastures are sweet: 
 Rest for the little bodies, 
 
 Rest for the little feet. 
 
 Rest for the Lamb of God 
 
 Up on the hill-top green; 
 Only a cross of shame 
 
 Two stark crosses between. 
 
 All in the April evening, 
 
 April airs were abroad; 
 I saw the sheep with their lambs, 
 
 And thought on the Lamb of God. 
 
 Henry Newbolt 
 
 Henry Newbolt was born at Bilston, Staffordshire, in 1862. 
 His early work was frankly imitative of Tennyson; he even 
 attempted to add to the Arthurian legends with a drama in 
 blank verse entitled Mordred (1895). It was not until he 
 wrote his sea-ballads that he struck his own note. With the 
 publication of Admirals All (1897) his fame was widespread. 
 The popularity of his lines was due not so much to the sub- 
 ject-matter of Newbolt's verse as to the breeziness of his 
 music, the solid beat of rhythm, the vigorous swing of his 
 stanzas. 
 
 DRAKE'S DRUM 
 
 Drake he's in his hammock an' a thousand mile away, 
 (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?) 
 
 Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay, 
 An/ dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
 
254 Henry Newbolt 
 
 Yarnder lumes the island, yarnder lie the ships, 
 
 Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, 
 An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin' 
 
 He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago. 
 
 Drake he was a Devon man, an' ruled the Devon seas, 
 
 (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
 Rovin' tho' his death fell, he went wi' heart at ease, 
 
 An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe, 
 "Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore, 
 
 Strike et when your powder's runnin' low; 
 If the Dons sight Devon, I'll quit the port o' Heaven, 
 
 An' drum them up the Channel as we drummed 
 them long ago." 
 
 Drake he's in his hammock till the great Armadas come, 
 
 (Capten, art tha sleepin' there below?), 
 Slung atween the round shot, listenin' for the drum, 
 
 An' dreamin' arl the time o' Plymouth Hoe. 
 Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound, 
 
 Call him when ye sail to meet the foe; 
 Where the old trade's plyin' an' the old flag's flying 
 
 They shall find him, ware an' wakin', as they found 
 him long ago. 
 
 Arthur Symons 
 
 Born in Wales in 1865, Arthur Symons' first few publica- 
 tions revealed an intellectual rather than an emotional pas- 
 sion. Those volumes were full of the artifice of the period, 
 but Symons's technical skill and frequent analysis often saved 
 the poems from complete decadence. 
 
 The best of his poetry up to 1902 was collected in two 
 volumes, Poems, published by John Lane Co. The Fool of the 
 World appeared in 1907. 
 
Arthur Symons 255 
 
 IN THE WOOD OF FINVARA 
 
 I have grown tired of sorrow and human tears; 
 Life is a dream in the night, a fear among fears, 
 A naked runner lost in a storm of spears. 
 
 I have grown tired of rapture and love's desire; 
 
 Love is a flaming heart, and its flames aspire 
 
 Till they cloud the soul in the smoke of a windy fire. 
 
 I would wash the dust of the world in a soft green flood ; 
 Here between sea and sea, in the fairy wood, 
 I have found a delicate, wave-green solitude. 
 
 Here, in the fairy wood, between sea and sea, 
 I have heard the song of a fairy bird in a tree, 
 And the peace that is not in the world has flown to me. 
 
 THE CRYING OF WATER 
 
 O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, 
 
 All night long crying with a mournful cry, 
 
 As I lie and listen, and cannot understand 
 
 The voice of my heart in my side or the voice of the sea, 
 
 O water crying for rest, is it I, is it I ? 
 
 All night long the water is crying to me. 
 
 Unresting water, there shall never be rest 
 
 Till the last moon drop and the last tide fail, 
 
 And the fire of the end begin to burn in the west; 
 
 And the heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the 
 
 sea, 
 All life long crying without avail, 
 As the water all night long is crying to me. 
 
256 
 
 William Butler Yeats 
 
 Born at Sandymount, Dublin, in 1865, the son of John B. 
 Yeats, the Irish artist, the greater part of William Butler 
 Yeats' childhood was spent in Sligo. Here he became imbued 
 with the power and richness of native folk-lore; he drank in 
 the racy quality through the quaint fairy stories and old 
 wives' tales of the Irish peasantry. (Later he published a 
 collection of these same stories.) 
 
 It was in the activities of a "Young Ireland" society that 
 Yeats became identified with the new spirit; he dreamed of 
 a national poetry that would be written in English and yet 
 would be definitely Irish. In a few years he became one of 
 the leaders in the Celtic revival. He worked incessantly for 
 the cause, both as propagandist and playwright; and, though 
 his mysticism at times seemed the product of a cult rather 
 than a Celt, his symbolic dramas were acknowledged to be 
 full of a haunting, other-world spirituality. (See Preface.) 
 
 The Hour Glass (1904), his second volume of "Plays for an 
 Irish Theatre," includes his best one-act dramas with the 
 exception of his unforgettable The Land of Heart's Desire 
 (1894). The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) contains sev- 
 eral of his most beautiful and characteristic poems; a later 
 collection, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), displays his 
 recent, more colloquial manner. 
 
 THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE 
 
 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 
 And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made ; 
 Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee, 
 And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 
 
 And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes 
 
 dropping slow, 
 Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the 
 
 cricket sings ; 
 There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 
 And evening full of the linnet's wings. 
 
William Butler Yeats 257 
 
 I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore ; 
 While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, 
 I hear it in the deep heart's core. 
 
 THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER 
 
 I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow 
 Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow. 
 And then I must scrub, and bake, and sw T eep, 
 Till stars are beginning to blink and peep; 
 But the young lie long and dream in their bed 
 Of the matching of ribbons, the blue and the red, 
 And their day goes over in idleness, 
 And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress. 
 While I must w r ork, because I am old 
 And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold. 
 
 AN OLD SONG RESUNG 
 
 Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; 
 She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet. 
 She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree ; 
 But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree. 
 
 In a field by the river my love and I did stand, 
 And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand. 
 She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs ; 
 But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. 
 
258 William Butler Yeats 
 
 WHEN YOU ARE OLD 
 
 When you are old and gray and full of sleep, 
 And nodding by the fire, take down this book, 
 And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 
 Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep ; 
 
 How many loved your moments of glad grace, 
 And loved your beauty with love false or true; 
 But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 
 And loved the sorrows of your changing face. 
 
 And bending down beside the glowing bars 
 Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled 
 And paced upon the mountains overhead 
 And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 
 
 Rudyard Kipling 
 
 Born at Bombay, India, December 30, 1865, (Joseph) Rud- 
 yard Kipling, the author of a dozen contemporary classics, 
 was educated in England. He returned, however, to India 
 and took a position on the staff of "The Lahore Civil and 
 Military Gazette," writing for the Indian press until about 
 1890, when he went to England, where, with the exception of 
 a short sojourn in America, he has lived ever since. 
 
 Soldiers Three (1888) was the first of six collections of 
 short stories brought out in "Wheeler's Railway Library." 
 It was followed by the far more sensitive and searching 
 Plain Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars and The 
 Phantom 'Rikshaw, which contains two of the best and most 
 convincing ghost-stories in recent literature. 
 
 These tales, however, display only one side of Kipling's 
 extraordinary talents. As a writer of children's stories, he 
 has few living equals. Wee Willie Winkie, which contains 
 that stirring and heroic fragment "Drums of the Fore and 
 
Rudyard Kipling 259 
 
 Aft," is only a trifle less notable than his more obviously 
 juvenile collections. Just-So Stories and the two Jungle Books 
 (prose interspersed with lively rhymes) are classics for young 
 people of all ages. Kim, the novel of a super-Mowgli grown 
 up, is a more mature masterpiece. 
 
 Considered solely as a poet (see Preface), he is one of the 
 most vigorous and unique figures of his time. The spirit of 
 romance surges under his realities. His brisk lines conjure 
 up the tang of a countryside in autumn, the tingle of salt 
 spray, the rude sentiment of ruder natures, the snapping of a 
 banner, the lurch and rumble of the sea. His poetry is 
 woven of the stuff of myths but it never loses its hold on 
 actualities. 
 
 Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. His 
 varied poems have been finally collected in a remarkable one- 
 volume Inclusive Edition (1885-1918), an indispensable part 
 of any student's library. 
 
 GUNGA DIN 
 
 You may talk o' gin an' beer 
 
 When you're quartered safe out 'ere, 
 
 An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; 
 
 But if it comes to slaughter 
 
 You will do your work on water, 
 
 An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it. 
 
 Now in Injia's sunny clime, 
 
 Where I used to spend my time 
 
 A-servin' of 'Er Majesty the Queen, 
 
 Of all them black-faced crew 
 
 The finest man I knew 
 
 Was our regimental bhisti, 1 Gunga Din. 
 
 1 The bhisti, or water-carrier, attached to regiments in India, 
 is often one of the most devoted of the Queen's servants. He 
 is also appreciated by the men. 
 
260 Rudyard Kipling 
 
 It was "Din! Din! Din! 
 
 You limping lump o' brick-dust, Gunga Din! 
 
 Hi! slippy hitherao! 
 
 Water, get it! Panee lao/ 1 
 
 You squidgy-nosed old idol, Gunga Din!" 
 
 The uniform 'e wore 
 
 Was nothin' much before, 
 
 An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind, 
 
 For a twisty piece o' rag 
 
 An' a goatskin water-bag 
 
 Was all the field-equipment 'e could find. 
 
 When the sweatin' troop-train lay 
 
 In a sidin' through the day, 
 
 Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl, 
 
 We shouted "Harry By!" 2 
 
 Till our throats were bricky-dry, 
 
 Then w T e wopped 'im 'cause 'e couldn't serve us all. 
 
 It was "Din! Din! Din! 
 
 You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? 
 
 You put some juldee 3 in it, 
 
 Or I'll marrow 4 you this minute, 
 
 If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din!" 
 
 'E would dot an' carry one 
 
 Till the longest day was done, 
 
 An' 'e didn't seem to know the use o' fear. 
 
 1 Bring water swiftly. 
 
 2 Tommy Atkins' equivalent for "O Brother!" 
 8 Speed. 
 
 4 Hit you. 
 
Rudyard Kipling 261 
 
 If we charged or broke or cut, 
 
 You could bet your bloomin' nut, 
 
 'E'd be waitin' fifty paces right flank rear. 
 
 With 'is mussick x on 'is back, 
 
 'E would skip with our attack, 
 
 An' watch us till the bugles made "Retire." 
 
 An' for all 'is dirty 'ide, 
 
 'E was white, clear white, inside 
 
 When 'e went to tend the wounded under fire! 
 
 It was "Din! Din! Din!" 
 
 With the bullets kickin' dust-spots on the green. 
 
 When the cartridges ran out, 
 
 You could 'ear the front-files shout: 
 
 "Hi! ammunition-mules an' Gunga Din!" 
 
 I shan't forgit the night 
 
 When I dropped be'ind the fight 
 
 With a bullet where my belt-plate should 'a' been. 
 
 I was chokin' mad with thirst, 
 
 An' the man that spied me first 
 
 Was our good old grinnin', gruntin' Gunga Din. 
 
 'E lifted up my 'ead, 
 
 An' 'e plugged me where I bled, 
 
 An' 'e guv me 'arf-a-pint o' water — green; 
 
 It was crawlin' an' it stunk, 
 
 But of all the drinks I've drunk, 
 
 I'm gratefullest to one from Gunga Din. 
 
 It was "Din! Din! Din! 
 'Ere's a beggar with a bullet through 'is spleen ; 
 'E's chawin' up the ground an' e's kickin' all around: 
 For Gawd's sake, git the water, Gunga Din!" 
 
 1 Water-skin. 
 
262 Rudyard Kipling 
 
 'E carried me away 
 
 To where a dooli lay, 
 
 An' a bullet come an' drilled the beggar clean. 
 
 'E put me safe inside, 
 
 An' just before 'e died: 
 
 "I 'ope you liked your drink," sez Gunga Din. 
 
 So I'll meet 'im later on 
 
 In the place where 'e is gone — 
 
 Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 
 
 'E'll be squattin' on the coals 
 
 Givin' drink to pore damned souls, 
 
 An' I'll get a swig in Hell from Gunga Din! 
 
 Din! Din! Din! 
 
 You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! 
 
 Tho' I've belted you an' flayed you, 
 
 By the livin' Gawd that made you, 
 
 You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din ! 
 
 THE RETURN * 
 
 Peace is declared, and I return 
 
 To 'Ackneystadt, but not the same; 
 Things 'ave transpired which made me learn 
 
 The size and meanin' of the game. 
 I did no more than others did, 
 
 I don't know where the change began; 
 I started as an average kid, 
 
 I finished as a thinkin' man. 
 
 // England was what England seems 
 An not the England of our dreams, 
 
 1 From The Five Nations by Rudyard Kipling. Copyright 
 by Doubleday, Page & Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 
 
Rudyard Kipling 263 
 
 But only putty, brass, an paint, 
 
 J 0w quick we'd drop 'erl But she ain't! 
 
 Before my gappin' mouth could speak 
 
 I 'eard it in my comrade's tone; 
 I saw it on my neighbour's cheek 
 
 Before I felt it flush my own. 
 An' last it come to me — not pride, 
 
 Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
 (If such a term may be applied), 
 
 The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 
 
 Rivers at night that cluck an' jeer, 
 
 Plains which the moonshine turns to sea, 
 Mountains that never let you near, 
 
 An' stars to all eternity; 
 An' the quick-breathin' dark that fills 
 
 The 'ollows of the wilderness, 
 When the wind worries through the 'ills — 
 
 These may 'ave taught me more or less. 
 
 Towns without people, ten times took, 
 
 An' ten times left an' burned at last; 
 An' starvin' dogs that come to look 
 
 For owners when a column passed; 
 An' quiet, 'omesick talks between 
 
 Men, met by night, you never knew 
 Until — 'is face — by shellfire seen — 
 
 Once — an' struck off. They taught me, too. 
 
 The day's lay-out — the mornin' sun 
 
 Beneath your 'at-brim as you sight ; 
 The dinner-'ush from noon till one, 
 
 An' the full roar that lasts till night; 
 
264 Rudyard Kipling 
 
 An' the pore dead that look so old 
 
 An* was so young an hour ago, 
 An' legs tied down before they're cold — 
 
 These are the things which make you know. 
 
 Also Time runnin' into years — 
 
 A thousand Places left be'ind — 
 An' men from both two 'emispheres 
 
 Discussin' things of every kind; 
 So much more near than I 'ad known, 
 
 So much more great than I 'ad guessed — 
 An' me, like all the rest, alone — 
 
 But reachin' out to all the rest! 
 
 So 'ath it come to me — not pride, 
 
 Nor yet conceit, but on the 'ole 
 (If such a term may be applied), 
 
 The makin's of a bloomin' soul. 
 But now, discharged, I fall away 
 
 To do with little things again. . . . 
 Gawd, '00 knows all I cannot say, 
 
 Look after me in Thamesf ontein ! 
 
 // England was what England seems 
 An not the England of our dreams, 
 
 But only putty, brass, an paint, 
 
 J Ow quick we'd chuck 'erf But she ain't! 
 
 AN ASTROLOGER'S SONG * 
 
 To the Heavens above us 
 
 O look and behold 
 The Planets that love us 
 
 All harnessed in gold! 
 
 1 From Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling. Copy- 
 right by Doubleday, Page and Co. and A. P. Watt & Son. 
 
Rudyard Kipling 265 
 
 What chariots, what horses 
 
 Against us shall bide 
 While the Stars in their courses 
 
 Do fight on our side? 
 
 All thoughts, all desires, 
 
 That are under the sun, 
 Are one with their fires, 
 
 As we also are one: 
 All matter, all spirit, 
 
 All fashion, all frame, 
 Receive and inherit 
 
 Their strength from the same. 
 
 (Oh, man that deniest 
 
 All power save thine own, 
 Their power in the highest 
 
 Is mightily shown. 
 Not less in the lowest 
 
 That power is made clear. 
 Oh, man, if thou knowest, 
 
 What treasure is here!) 
 
 Earth quakes in her throes 
 
 And we wonder for why! 
 But the blind planet knows 
 
 When her ruler is nigh; 
 And, attuned since Creation 
 
 To perfect accord, 
 She thrills in her station 
 
 And yearns to her Lord. 
 
 The waters have risen, 
 
 The springs are unbound — 
 The floods break their prison, 
 
 And ravin around. 
 
266 Rudyard Kipling 
 
 No rampart withstands 'em, 
 Their fury will last, 
 
 Till the Sign that commands 'em 
 Sinks low or swings past. 
 
 Through abysses unproven 
 
 And gulfs beyond thought, 
 Our portion is woven, 
 
 Our burden is brought. 
 Yet They that prepare it, 
 
 Whose Nature we share, 
 Make us who must bear it 
 
 Well able to bear. 
 
 Though terrors o'ertake us 
 
 Well not be afraid. 
 No power can unmake us, 
 
 Save that which has made. 
 Nor yet beyond reason 
 
 Or hope shall we fall — 
 All things have their season, 
 
 And Mercy crowns all! 
 
 Then, doubt not, ye fearful — 
 
 The Eternal is King — 
 Up, heart, and be cheerful, 
 
 And lustily sing : — 
 What chariots, what horses 
 
 Against us shall bide 
 While the Stars in their courses 
 
 Do fight on our side? 
 
Rudyard Kipling 267 
 
 RECESSIONAL 
 
 God of our fathers, known of old, 
 Lord of our far-flung battle-line, 
 
 Beneath whose awful hand we hold 
 Dominion over palm and pine — 
 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 The tumult and the shouting dies; 
 
 The captains and the kings depart: 
 Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, 
 
 An humble and a contrite heart. 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget ! 
 
 Far-called, our navies melt away; 
 
 On dune and headland sinks the fire: 
 Lo, all our pomp of yesterday 
 
 Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! 
 Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget! 
 
 If, drunk with sight of power, we loose 
 Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, 
 
 Such boastings as the Gentiles use, 
 Or lesser breeds without the Law — 
 
 Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, 
 
 Lest we forget — lest we forget! 
 
 For heathen heart that puts her trust 
 
 In reeking tube and iron shard, 
 All valiant dust that builds on dust, 
 
 And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, 
 For frantic boast and foolish word — 
 Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord! 
 
268 Lionel Johnson 
 
 Born in 1867, Lionel (Pigot) Johnson received a classical 
 education at Oxford, and his poetry is a faithful reflection of 
 his studies in Greek and Latin literatures. Though he allied 
 himself with the modern Irish poets, his Celtic origin is a 
 literary myth; Johnson, having been converted to Catholicism 
 in 1891, became imbued with Catholic and, later, with Irish 
 traditions. His verse, while sometimes strained and over- 
 decorated, is chastely designed, rich and, like that of the 
 Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century, mystically devo- 
 tional. Poems (1895) contains his best work. 
 
 Johnson died in 1902 as a result of a fall. 
 
 MYSTIC AND CAVALIER 
 
 Go from me: I am one of those who fall. 
 What! hath no cold wind swept your heart at all, 
 In my sad company? Before the end, 
 Go from me, dear my friend ! 
 
 Yours are the victories of light : your feet 
 Rest from good toil, where rest is brave and sweet: 
 But after warfare in a mourning gloom, 
 I rest in clouds of doom. 
 
 Have you not read so, looking in these eyes? 
 Is it the common light of the pure skies 
 Lights up their shadowy depths? The end is set: 
 Though the end be not yet. 
 
 When gracious music stirs, and all is bright, 
 And beauty triumphs through a courtly night; 
 When I too joy, a man like other men : 
 Yet, am I like them, then? 
 
Lionel Johnson 269 
 
 And in the battle, when the horsemen sweep 
 Against a thousand deaths, and fall on sleep: 
 Who ever sought that sudden calm, if I 
 Sought not? yet could not die! 
 
 Seek with thine eyes to pierce this crystal sphere: 
 Canst read a fate there, prosperous and clear? 
 Only the mists, only the weeping clouds, 
 Dimness and airy shrouds. 
 
 Beneath, what angels are at work? What powers 
 Prepare the secret of the fatal hours? 
 See! the mists tremble, and the clouds are stirred: 
 When comes the calling word? 
 
 The clouds are breaking from the crystal ball, 
 Breaking and clearing: and I look to fall. 
 When the cold winds and airs of portent sweep, 
 My spirit may have sleep. 
 
 O rich and sounding voices of the air! 
 Interpreters and prophets of despair: 
 Priests of a fearful sacrament! I come, 
 
 To make with you mine home. 
 
 Ernest Dowson 
 
 Ernest Dowson was born at Belmont Hill in Kent in 1867. 
 His great-uncle was Alfred Domett (Browning's "Waring"), 
 who was at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand. Dow- 
 son, practically an invalid all his life, hid himself in miser- 
 able surroundings; for almost two years he lived in sordid 
 supper-houses known as "cabmen's shelters." He literally 
 drank himself to death. 
 
 His delicate and fantastic poetry was an attempt to escape 
 from a reality too big and brutal for him. His passionate 
 
270 Ernest Dowson 
 
 lyric, "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion," 
 a triumph of despair and disillusion, is an outburst in which 
 Dowson epitomized himself — "One of the greatest lyrical 
 poems of our time," writes Arthur Symons; "in it he has for 
 once said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating 
 and perhaps immortal music." 
 
 Dowson died obscure in 1900, one of the finest of modern 
 minor poets. His life was the tragedy of a weak nature 
 buffeted by a strong and merciless environment. 
 
 TO ONE IN BEDLAM 
 
 With delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars, 
 Surely he hath his posies, which they tear and twine; 
 Those scentless wisps of straw that, miserable, line 
 His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares. 
 
 Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars 
 With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine 
 Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine, 
 And make his melancholy germane to the stars'? 
 
 O lamentable brother! if those pity thee, 
 
 Am I not fain of all thy lone eyes promise me; 
 
 Half a fool's kingdom, far from men who sow and reap, 
 
 All their days, vanity? Better than mortal flowers, 
 
 Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep, 
 
 The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours ! 
 
 "A. E." 
 
 (George William Russell) 
 
 At Lurgan, a tiny town in the north of Ireland, George 
 William Russell was born in 1867. He moved to Dublin when 
 he was 10 years old and, as a young man, helped to form 
 
A. E." 271 
 
 the group that gave rise to the Irish Renascence — the group 
 of which William Butler Yeats, Doctor Douglas Hyde, Kath- 
 arine Tynan and Lady Gregory were brilliant members. Be- 
 sides being a splendid mystical poet, "A. E." is a painter of 
 note, a fiery nationalist, a distinguished sociologist, a public 
 speaker, a student of economics and one of the heads of the 
 Irish Agricultural Association. 
 
 The best of his mystical poetry is in Homeward: Songs by 
 the Way (1894.) and The Earth Breath and Other Poems. 
 Yeats has spoken of these poems as "revealing in all things 
 a kind of scented flame consuming them from within." 
 
 CONTINUITY 
 
 No sign is made while empires pass, 
 The flowers and stars are still His care, 
 The constellations hid in grass, 
 The golden miracles in air. 
 
 Life in an instant will be rent, 
 
 Where death is glittering blind and wild — 
 
 The Heavenly Brooding is intent 
 
 To that last instant on Its child. 
 
 It breathes the glow in brain and heart, 
 Life is made magical. Until 
 Body and spirit are apart, 
 The Everlasting works Its will. 
 
 In that wild orchid that your feet 
 In their next falling shall destroy, 
 Minute and passionate and sweet 
 The Mighty Master holds His joy. 
 
 Though the crushed jewels droop and fade, 
 The Artist's labors will not cease, 
 And of the ruins shall be made 
 Some yet more lovely masterpiece. 
 
272 "A. e: 
 
 THE UNKNOWN GOD 
 
 Far up the dim twilight fluttered 
 Moth-wings of vapour and flame: 
 
 The lights danced over the mountains, 
 Star after star they came. 
 
 The lights grew thicker unheeded, 
 For silent and still were we; 
 
 Our hearts were drunk with a beauty 
 Our eyes could never see. 
 
 Stephen Phillips 
 
 Born in 1868, Stephen Phillips is best known as the author 
 of Herod (1900), Paola and Francesca (1899), and Ulysses 
 (1902) ; a poetic playwright who succeeded in reviving, for a 
 brief interval, the blank verse drama on the modern stage. 
 
 Phillips failed to "restore" poetic drama because he was, 
 first of all, a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. In spite of 
 certain moments of rhetorical splendor, his scenes are spec- 
 tacular instead of emotional; his inspiration is 1 too often 
 derived from other models. He died in 1915. 
 
 FRAGMENT FROM "HEROD" 
 
 Herod speaks: 
 
 I dreamed last night of a dome of beaten gold 
 
 To be a counter-glory to the Sun. 
 
 There shall the eagle blindly dash himself, 
 
 There the first beam shall strike, and there the moon 
 
 Shall aim all night her argent archery; 
 
Stephen Phillips 273 
 
 And it shall be the tryst of sundered stars, 
 
 The haunt of dead and dreaming Solomon ; 
 
 Shall send a light upon the lost in Hell, 
 
 And flashings upon faces without hope. — 
 
 And I will think in gold and dream in silver, 
 
 Imagine in marble and conceive in bronze, 
 
 Till it shall dazzle pilgrim nations 
 
 And stammering tribes from undiscovered lands, 
 
 Allure the living God out of the bliss, 
 
 And all the streaming seraphim from heaven. 
 
 A DREAM 
 
 My dead love came to me, and said : 
 "God gives me one hour's rest, 
 
 To spend with thee on earth again : 
 How shall we spend it best?" 
 
 "Why, as of old," I said; and so 
 We quarrelled, as of old: 
 
 But, when I turned to make my peace, 
 That one short hour was told. 
 
 Laurence Binyon 
 
 (Robert) Laurence Binyon was born at Lancaster, August 10, 
 1869, a cousin of Stephen Phillips; in Primavera (1890) their 
 early poems appeared together. Binyon's subsequent volumes 
 showed little distinction until he published London Visions, 
 which, in an enlarged edition in 1908, revealed a gift of char- 
 acterization and a turn of speech in surprising contrast to 
 his previous academic Lyrical Poems (1894). 
 
274 Laurence Binyon 
 
 A SONG 
 
 For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth, 
 There is no measure upon earth. 
 Nay, they wither, root and stem, 
 If an end be set to them. 
 
 Overbrim and overflow, 
 If your own heart you would know; 
 For the spirit born to bless 
 Lives but in its own excess. 
 
 THE UNSEEN FLOWER 
 
 I think of a flower that no eye ever has seen, 
 
 That springs in a solitary air. 
 Is it no one's joy? It is beautiful as a queen 
 
 Without a kingdom's care. 
 
 We have built houses for Beauty, and costly shrines, 
 
 And a throne in all men's view: 
 But she was far on a hill where the morning shines 
 
 And her steps were lost in the dew. 
 
 Anthony C. Deane 
 
 Anthony C. Deane was born in 1870 and was the Seatonian 
 prizeman in 1905 at Clare College, Cambridge. He has been 
 Vicar of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, since 1916. His long 
 list of light verse and essays includes many excellent paro- 
 dies, the most brilliant and delightful being found in his New 
 Rhymes for Old (1901). 
 
Anthony G. Deane 2J$ 
 
 THE BALLAD OF THE BILLYCOCK 
 
 It was the good ship Billycock, with thirteen men aboard, 
 Athirst to grapple with their country's foes, — 
 
 A crew, 'twill be admitted, not numerically fitted 
 To navigate a battleship in prose. 
 
 It was the good ship Billycock put out from Plymouth 
 Sound, 
 While lustily the gallant heroes cheered, 
 And all the air was ringing with the merry bo'sun's sing- 
 ing, 
 Till in the gloom of night she disappeared. 
 
 But when the morning broke on her, behold, a dozen 
 ships, 
 
 A dozen ships of France around her lay, 
 (Or, if that isn't plenty, I will gladly make it twenty), 
 
 And hemmed her close in Salamander Bay. 
 
 Then to the Lord High Admiral there spake a cabin-boy: 
 "Methinks," he said, "the odds are somewhat great, 
 
 And, in the present crisis, a cabin-boy's advice is 
 That you and France had better arbitrate!" 
 
 "Pooh!" said the Lord High Admiral, and slapped his 
 manly chest, 
 
 "Pooh! That would be both cowardly and wrong; 
 Shall I, a gallant fighter, give the needy ballad-writer 
 
 No suitable material for ^ong? 
 
 "Nay — is the shorthand-writer here? — I tell you, one and 
 all, 
 
 I mean to do my duty, as I ought; 
 With eager satisfaction let us clear the decks for action 
 
 And fight the craven Frenchmen!" So they fought. 
 
276 Anthony C. Deane 
 
 And (after several stanzas which as yet are incomplete, 
 
 Describing all the fight in epic style) 
 When the Billycock was going, she'd a dozen prizes 
 towing 
 
 (Or twenty, as above) in single file! 
 
 Ah, long in glowing English hearts the story will remain, 
 
 The memory of that historic day, 
 And, while we rule the ocean, we will picture with 
 emotion 
 
 The Billycock in Salamander Bay! 
 
 P.S. — I've lately noticed that the critics — who, I think, 
 
 In praising my productions are remiss — 
 Quite easily are captured, and profess themselves en- 
 raptured, 
 
 By patriotic ditties such as this, 
 
 For making which you merely take some dauntless Eng- 
 lishmen, 
 
 Guns, heroism, slaughter, and a fleet — ■ 
 Ingredients you mingle in a metre with a jingle, 
 
 And there you have your masterpiece complete! 
 
 Why, then, with labour infinite, produce a book of verse 
 To languish on the "All for Twopence ,, shelf? 
 
 The ballad bold and breezy comes particularly easy — 
 I mean to take to writing it myself ! 
 
 William H. Davies 
 
 According to his own biography, William Henry Davies was 
 born in a public-house called Church House at Newport, in 
 the County of Monmouthshire, April 20, 1870, of Welsh par- 
 ents. He was, until Bernard Shaw "discovered" him, a cat- 
 
William H. Davies 277 
 
 tleman, a berry-picker, a panhandler — in short, a vagabond. 
 At the age of thirty-four he began to write poetry. In a 
 preface to Davies' second book, The Autobiography of a Super- 
 Tramp (1906), Shaw describes how the manuscript came into 
 his hands: 
 
 "In the year 1905 I received by post a volume of poems 
 by one William H. Davies, whose address was The Farm 
 House, Kensington, S. E. The author, as far as I could 
 guess, had walked into a printer's or stationer's shop; handed 
 in his manuscript; and ordered his book as he might have 
 ordered a pair of boots. It was marked 'price, half a crown.' 
 An accompanying letter asked me very civilly if I required a 
 half-crown book of verses; and if so, would I please send the 
 author the half crown: if not, would I return the book. This 
 was attractively simple and sensible. I opened the book, and 
 was more puzzled than ever; for before I had read three 
 lines I perceived that the author was a real poet. His work 
 was not in the least strenuous or modern; there was indeed 
 no sign of his ever having read anything otherwise than as a 
 child reads." 
 
 It is more than likely that Davies' first notoriety as a 
 tramp-poet who had ridden the rails in the United States and 
 had had his right foot cut off by a train in Canada, obscured 
 his merits as a genuine singer. Even his early The Soul's 
 Destroyer (1907) revealed that simplicity which is as naif 
 as it is strange. The books that followed are more clearly 
 melodious, more like the visionary wonder of Blake, more 
 artistically artless and always lyrical. 
 
 The best of these volumes have been condensed in The Col- 
 lected Poems of W. H. Davies (1916), the following verses 
 being reprinted by permission of the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. 
 
 DAYS TOO SHORT 
 
 When primroses are out in Spring, 
 
 And small, blue violets come between; 
 When merry birds sing on boughs green, 
 
 And rills, as soon as born, must sing; 
 
278 William H. Davies 
 
 When butterflies will make side-leaps, 
 As though escaped from Nature's hand 
 Ere perfect quite; and bees will stand 
 
 Upon their heads in fragrant deeps; 
 
 When small clouds are so silvery white 
 Each seems a broken rimmed moon — 
 When such things are, this world too soon, 
 
 For me, doth wear the veil of Night. 
 
 THE MOON 
 
 Thy beauty haunts me heart and soul, 
 Oh, thou fair Moon, so close and bright; 
 
 Thy beauty makes me like the child 
 That cries aloud to own thy light: 
 
 The little child that lifts each arm 
 
 To press thee to her bosom warm. 
 
 Though there are birds that sing this night 
 With thy white beams across their throats; 
 
 Let my deep silence speak for me 
 
 More than for them their sweetest notes: 
 
 Who worships thee till music fails, 
 
 Is greater than thy nightingales. 
 
 THE EXAMPLE 
 
 Here's an example from 
 
 A Butterfly; 
 That on a rough, hard rock 
 
 Happy can lie; 
 Friendless and all alone 
 On this unsweetened stone. 
 
William H. Davies 279 
 
 Now let my bed be hard, 
 
 No care take I; 
 I'll make my joy like this 
 
 Small Butterfly; 
 Whose happy heart has power 
 To make a stone a flower. 
 
 A GREETING 
 
 Good morning, Life — and all 
 Things glad and beautiful. 
 My pockets nothing hold, 
 But he that owns the gold, 
 The Sun, is my great friend — 
 His spending has no end. 
 
 Hail to the morning sky, 
 Which bright clouds measure high ; 
 Hail to you birds whose throats 
 Would number leaves by notes; 
 Hail to you shady bowers, 
 And you green fields of flowers. 
 
 Hail to you women fair, 
 That make a show so rare 
 In cloth as white as milk — 
 Be't calico or silk: 
 Good morning, Life — and all 
 Things glad and beautiful. 
 
 /. M. Synge 
 
 J. M. Synge, the most brilliant star of the Celtic revival, 
 was born at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, in 1871. As a child 
 
>8o J. M. Synge 
 
 in Wicklow, he was already fascinated by the strange idioms 
 and the rhythmic speech he heard there, a native utterance 
 which was his greatest delight and which was to be rich 
 material for his greatest work. 
 
 For some time, Synge's career was uncertain. He went to 
 Germany, half intending to become a professional musician. 
 There he studied the theory of music, perfecting himself mean- 
 while in Gaelic and Hebrew, winning prizes in both of these 
 languages. Yeats found him in France in 1898 and advised 
 him to go to the Aran Islands, to live there as if he were one 
 of the people. "Express a lif e,'' said Yeats, "that has never 
 found expression." 
 
 The result of this close contact was four of the greatest 
 poetic prose dramas not only of Synge's own generation, but of 
 several generations preceding it. (See Preface.) 
 
 In Riders to the Sea (1903), The Well of the Saints (1905), 
 and The Playboy of the Western World (1907) we have a 
 richness of imagery, a new language startling in its vigor, a 
 wildness and passion that contrast strangely with the suave 
 mysticism and delicate spirituality of his associates in the 
 Irish Theatre. 
 
 Synge's Poems and Translations (1910), a volume which was 
 not issued until after his death, contains not only his few hard 
 and earthy verses, but also Synge's prose-poems and his fa- 
 mous theory of poetry. 
 
 Synge died, just as he was beginning to attain fame, at a 
 private hospital in Dublin March 24, 1909. 
 
 PRELUDE 
 
 Still south I went and west and south again, 
 Through Wicklow from the morning till the night, 
 And far from cities and the sights of men, 
 Lived with the sunshine and the moon's delight. 
 
 I knew the stars, the flowers, and the birds, 
 
 The grey and wintry sides of many glens, 
 
 And did but half remember human words, 
 
 In converse with the mountains, moors and fens. 
 
/. M. Synge 281 
 
 A TRANSLATION FROM PETRARCH 
 
 {He is Jealous of the Heavens and the Earth) 
 
 What a grudge I am bearing the earth that has its arms 
 about her, and is holding that face away from me, where 
 I was finding peace from great sadness. 
 
 What a grudge I am bearing the Heavens that are 
 after taking her, and shutting her in with greediness, the 
 Heavens that do push their bolt against so many. 
 
 What a grudge I am bearing the blessed saints that 
 have got her sweet company, that I am always seeking; 
 and what a grudge I am bearing against Death, that is 
 standing in her two eyes, and will not call me with a 
 word. 
 
 BEG-INNISH 
 
 Bring Kateen-beug and Maurya Jude 
 
 To dance in Beg-Innish, 1 
 
 And when the lads (they're in Dunquin) 
 
 Have sold their crabs and fish, 
 
 Wave fawny shawls and call them in, 
 
 And call the little girls who spin, 
 
 And seven weavers from Dunquin, 
 
 To dance in Beg-Innish. 
 
 I'll play you jigs, and Maurice Kean, 
 Where nets are laid to dry, 
 Fve silken strings would draw a dance 
 From girls are lame or shy; 
 
 1 (The accent is on the last syllable.) 
 
282 /. M. Synge 
 
 Four strings I've brought from Spain and France 
 To make your long men skip and prance, 
 Till stars look out to see the dance 
 Where nets are laid to dry. 
 
 Well have no priest or peeler in 
 To dance in Beg-Innish; 
 But we'll have drink from M'riarty Jim 
 Rowed round while gannets fish, 
 A keg with porter to the brim, 
 That every lad may have his whim, 
 Till we up sails with M'riarty Jim 
 And sail from Beg-Innish. 
 
 Eva Gore-Booth 
 
 Eva Gore-Booth, the second daughter of Sir Henry Gore- 
 Booth and the sister of Countess Marcievicz, was born in 
 Sligo, Ireland, in 1871. She first appeared in "A. E.'s" an- 
 thology, New Songs, in which so many of the modern Irish 
 poets first came forward. 
 
 Her initial volume, Poems (1898), showed practically no 
 distinction — not even the customary "promise." But The One 
 and the Many (1904) and The Sorrowful Princess (1907) re- 
 vealed the gift of the Celtic singer who is half mystic, half 
 minstrel. Primarily philosophic, her verse often turns to 
 lyrics as haunting as the example here reprinted. 
 
 THE WAVES OF BREFFNY 
 
 The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the 
 sea, 
 And there is traffic on It and many a horse and cart, 
 But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me 
 And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through 
 my heart. 
 
Eva Gore-Booth 283 
 
 A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o'er the hill, 
 And there is glory in it ; and terror on the wind : 
 
 But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, 
 And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. 
 
 The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their 
 w T ay, 
 Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal ; 
 But the little waves of Breffny have drenched my heart 
 in spray, 
 And the little waves of Breffny go stumbling through 
 my soul. 
 
 Moira O'Neill 
 
 Moira O'Neill is known chiefly by a remarkable little col- 
 lection of only twenty-five lyrics, Songs from the Glens of 
 Antrim (1900), simple tunes as unaffected as the peasants of 
 whom she sings. The best of her poetry is dramatic without 
 being theatrical; it is melodious without falling into the tinkle 
 of most "popular" sentimental verse. 
 
 A BROKEN SONG 
 
 "Where am I from?" From the green hills of Erin. 
 "Have I no song then?" My songs are all sung. 
 "What o' my love?" 'Tis alone I am farin'. 
 Old grows my heart, an' my voice yet is young. 
 
 "If she was tall?" Like a king's own daughter. 
 "If she was fair?" Like a mornin' o' May. 
 When she'd come laughin' 'twas the runnin' wather, 
 When she'd come blushin' 'twas the break o' day. 
 
284 Moira O'Neill 
 
 "Where did she dwell?" Where one'st I had my 
 
 dwellin'. 
 "Who loved her best?" There's no one now will know. 
 "Where is she gone?" Och, why would I be tellm' ! 
 Where she is gone there I can never go. 
 
 Ralph Hodgson 
 
 This exquisite poet was born in Northumberland in 1871. 
 One of the most graceful of the younger word-magicians, 
 Ralph Hodgson will retain his freshness as long as there 
 are lovers of such rare songs as his "Eve," the lengthier 
 "The Song of Honor," and that memorable snatch of music, 
 "Time, You Old Gypsy Man." 
 
 Hodgson's verses, full of the love of all natural things, a 
 love that goes out to 
 
 "an idle rainbow 
 No less than laboring seas," 
 
 were originally brought out in small pamphlets, and distributed 
 by Flying Fame. A collected Poems appeared in America in 
 1917. 
 
 THE BIRDCATCHER 
 
 When flighting time is on, I go 
 With clap-net and decoy, 
 A-fowling after goldfinches 
 And other birds of joy; 
 
 I lurk among the thickets of 
 The Heart where they are bred, 
 And catch the twittering beauties as 
 They fly into my Head. 
 
Ralph Hodgson 285 
 
 TIME, YOU OLD GYPSY MAN 
 
 Time, you old gypsy man, 
 
 Will you not stay, 
 Put up your caravan 
 
 Just for one day? 
 
 All things I'll give you 
 Will you be my guest, 
 Bells for your jennet 
 Of silver the best, 
 Goldsmiths shall beat you 
 A great golden ring, 
 Peacocks shall bow to you, 
 Little boys sing, 
 Oh, and sweet girls w T ill 
 Festoon you with may. 
 Time, you old gypsy, 
 Why hasten away? 
 
 Last week in Babylon, 
 Last night in Rome, 
 Morning, and in the crush 
 Under Paul's dome; 
 Under Paul's dial 
 You tighten your rein- 
 Only a moment, 
 And off once again ; 
 Off to some city 
 Now blind in the womb, 
 Off to another 
 Ere that's in the tomb. 
 
286 Ralph Hodgson 
 
 Time, you old gypsy man, 
 Will you not stay, 
 
 Put up your caravan 
 Just for one day? 
 
 AFTER 
 
 "How fared you when you mortal were? 
 
 What did you see on my peopled star?" 
 "Oh, well enough," I answered her, 
 
 It went for me where mortals are! 
 
 "I saw blue flowers and the merlin's flight, 
 And the rime on the wintry tree; 
 
 Blue doves I saw and summer light 
 On the wings of the cinnamon bee." 
 
 THE MYSTERY 
 
 He came and took me by the hand 
 
 Up to a red rose tree, 
 He kept His meaning to Himself 
 
 But gave a rose to me. 
 
 I did not pray Him to lay bare 
 
 The mystery to me, 
 Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, 
 
 And His own face to see. 
 
 John McCrae 
 
 John McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, in 
 1872. He was graduated in arts in 1894 an d m medicine in 
 
John McCrae 287 
 
 1898. He finished his studies at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore 
 and returned to Canada, joining the staff of the Medical 
 School of McGill University. He was a lieutenant of ar- 
 tillery in South Africa (1899-1900) and was in charge of 
 the Medical Division of the McGill Canadian General Hos- 
 pital during the World War. After serving two years, he 
 died of pneumonia, January, 1918, his volume In Flanders 
 Fields (1919) appearing posthumously. 
 
 Few who read the title poem of his book, possibly the most 
 widely-read poem produced by the war, realize that it is a 
 perfect rondeau, one of the loveliest (and strictest) of the 
 French forms. 
 
 IN FLANDERS FIELDS 
 
 In Flanders fields the poppies blow 
 
 Between the crosses, row on row, 
 
 That mark our place; and in the sky 
 The larks, still bravely singing, fly 
 
 Scarce heard amid the guns below. 
 
 We are the Dead. Short days ago 
 We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 
 Loved and were loved, and now we lie 
 In Flanders fields. 
 
 Take up our quarrel with the foe : 
 To you from failing hands we throw 
 
 The torch; be yours to hold it high. 
 
 If ye break faith with us who die 
 We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 
 In Flanders fields. 
 
 Walter Be la Mare 
 
 The author of some of the most haunting lyrics in contem- 
 porary poetry, Walter (John) De la Mare, was born in 1873. 
 
288 Walter De la Mare 
 
 Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book 
 form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has 
 written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer 
 even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." 
 De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he 
 uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves 
 a grace that is remarkable in its universality. 
 
 De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in Peacock 
 Pie (191 3) he surprises us again and again by transforming 
 what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly 
 thrilling snatch of music. These magical poems read like 
 lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. 
 The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of 
 catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la 
 Mare's two magics. 
 
 This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of 
 the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our con- 
 sciousness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the 
 best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight 
 and mystery seem soaked in the lines and a cool wind from 
 Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern 
 verses, "The Listeners," is an example. In this poem there 
 is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the 
 thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the nar- 
 rative itself — the half-told adventure of some new Childe 
 Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe. 
 
 Some of his earlier poems and stories appeared originally 
 under the pseudonym, Walter Ramal; his most remarkable 
 prose, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), is an addition to the per- 
 manent literature of great novels. 
 
 THE LISTENERS 
 
 "Is there anybody there ?" said the Traveller, 
 
 Knocking on the moonlit door; 
 And his horse in the silence champed the grasses 
 
 Of the forest's ferny floor. 
 And a bird flew up out of the turret, 
 
 Above the Traveller's head: 
 
Walter De la Mare 289 
 
 And he smote upon the door again a second time; 
 
 "Is there anybody there?" he said. 
 But no one descended to the Traveller; 
 
 No head from the leaf-fringed sill 
 Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, 
 
 Where he stood perplexed and still. 
 But only a host of phantom listeners 
 
 That dwelt in the lone house then 
 Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight 
 
 To that voice from the world of men: 
 Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, 
 
 That goes down to the empty hall, 
 Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken 
 
 By the lonely Traveller's call. 
 And he felt in his heart their strangeness, 
 
 Their stillness answering his cry, 
 While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, 
 
 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; 
 For he suddenly smote on the door, even 
 
 Louder, and lifted his head: — 
 "Tell them I came, and no one answered, 
 
 That I kept my word," he said. 
 Never the least stir made the listeners, 
 
 Though every word he spake 
 Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house 
 
 From the one man left awake: 
 Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, 
 
 And the sound of iron on stone, 
 And how the silence surged softly backward, 
 
 When the plunging hoofs were gone. 
 
 OLD SUSAN 
 
 When Susan's work was done, she'd sit 
 With one fat guttering candle lit, 
 
290 Walter De la Mare 
 
 And window opened wide to win 
 The sweet night air to enter in; 
 There, with a thumb to keep her place, 
 She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face. 
 Her mild eyes gliding very slow 
 Across the letters to and fro, 
 While wagged the guttering candle flame 
 In the wind that through the window came. 
 
 And sometimes in the silence she 
 
 Would mumble a sentence audibly, 
 
 Or shake her head as if to say, 
 
 "You silly souls, to act this way!" 
 
 And never a sound from night I'd hear, 
 
 Unless some far-off cock crowed clear ; 
 
 Or her old shuffling thumb should turn 
 
 Another page; and rapt and stern, 
 
 Through her great glasses bent on me 
 
 She'd glance into reality; 
 
 And shake her round old silvery head, 
 
 With — "You! — I thought you was in bed!"- 
 
 Only to tilt her book again, 
 
 And rooted in Romance remain. 
 
 SILVER 
 
 Slowly, silently, now the moon 
 Walks the night in her silver shoon; 
 This way, and that, she peers, and sees 
 Silver fruit upon silver trees; 
 One by one the casements catch 
 Her beams beneath the silvery thatch; 
 Couched in his kennel, like a log, 
 With paws of silver sleeps the dog; 
 
Walter De la Mare zgi 
 
 From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep 
 Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep; 
 A harvest mouse goes scampering by, 
 With silver claws and a silver eye; 
 And moveless fish in the water gleam, 
 By silver reeds in a silver stream. 
 
 NOD 
 
 ■ 
 
 Softly along the road of evening, 
 
 In a twilight dim with rose, 
 Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew 
 
 Old Nod, the shepherd, goes. 
 
 His drowsy flock streams on before him, 
 Their fleeces charged with gold, 
 
 To where the sun's last beam leans low 
 On Nod the shepherd's fold. 
 
 The hedge is quick and green with briar, 
 From their sand the conies creep; 
 
 And all the birds that fly in heaven 
 Flock singing home to sleep. 
 
 His lambs outnumber a noon's roses, 
 Yet, when night's shadows fall, 
 
 His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon, 
 Misses not one of all. 
 
 His are the quiet steeps of dreamland, 
 
 The waters of no-more-pain; 
 His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars, 
 
 "Rest, rest, and rest again." 
 
292 G. K. Chesterton 
 
 The brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and 
 lyricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, 
 Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing 
 books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a 
 writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and every- 
 thing, like Tremendous Trifles (1909), Varied Types (1905), 
 and All Things Considered (1910). But he is also a stimu- 
 lating critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume Heretics 
 (1905) and his analytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles 
 Dickens and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and 
 grotesque romances like The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1906), 
 The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and The Flying Inn 
 (1914) ; the author of several books of fantastic short stories, 
 ranging from the wildly whimsical narratives in The Club of 
 Queer Trades (1905) to that amazing sequence The Innocence 
 of Father Brown (1911) — which is a series of religious de- 
 tective stories! 
 
 Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds 
 time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, 
 a lay preacher in disguise (witness Orthodoxy [1908], What's 
 Wrong with the World? [1910], The Ball and the Cross 
 [1909]) a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, 
 The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), a collection of 
 quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by The 
 Ballad of the White Horse (1911). 
 
 "Lepanto," from the later Poems (1915), anticipating the 
 banging, clanging verses of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," 
 is one of the finest of modern chants. It is interesting to see 
 how the syllables beat as though on brass; it is thrilling to 
 feel how, in one's pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp, the 
 drums snarl, and the tides of marching crusaders roll out of 
 lines like: 
 
 "Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
 Don John of Austria is going to the war; 
 Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 
 In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold; 
 Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, 
 Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he 
 comes. . . ." 
 
 Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of 
 a skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more 
 likely to outlive it. 
 
G. K. Chesterton 293 
 
 LEPANTO * 
 
 White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
 And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
 There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all 
 
 men feared, 
 It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard ; 
 It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
 For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. 
 They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, 
 They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, 
 And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, 
 And called the kings of Christendom for swords about 
 
 the Cross. 
 The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; 
 The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass ; 
 From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, 
 And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the 
 
 sun. 
 
 Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, 
 
 Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has 
 
 stirred, 
 Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, 
 The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, 
 The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has 
 
 sung, 
 That once went singing southward when all the world 
 
 was young. 
 In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, 
 Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade. 
 
 1 From Poems by G. K. Chesterton. Copyright by the John 
 Lane Co. and reprinted by permission of the publishers. 
 
294 ^- K. Chesterton 
 
 Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, 
 
 Don John of Austria is going to the war, 
 
 Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold 
 
 In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, 
 
 Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, 
 
 Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, 
 
 and he comes. 
 Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, 
 Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, 
 Holding his head up for a flag of all the free. 
 Love-light of Spain — hurrah! 
 Death-light of Africa! 
 Don John of Austria 
 Is riding to the sea. 
 
 Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, 
 (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 
 He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees, 
 His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas. 
 He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, 
 And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the 
 
 trees ; 
 And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to 
 
 bring 
 Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing. 
 Giants and the Genii, 
 Multiplex of wing and eye, 
 Whose strong obedience broke the sky 
 When Solomon was king. 
 
 They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the 
 
 morn, 
 From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their 
 
 eyes in scorn; 
 
G. K. Chesterton 295 
 
 They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of 
 
 the sea 
 Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be, 
 On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests 
 
 curl, 
 Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the 
 
 pearl ; 
 They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of 
 
 the ground, — 
 They gather and they wonder and give worship to 
 
 Mahound. 
 And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the her- 
 mit-folk can hide, 
 And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, 
 And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving 
 
 rest, 
 For that which was our trouble comes again out of the 
 
 west. 
 We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, 
 Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things 
 
 done. 
 But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I 
 
 know 
 The voice that shook our palaces — four hundred years 
 
 ago: 
 It is he that saith not 'Kismet' ; it is he that knows not 
 
 Fate ; 
 It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! 
 It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager 
 
 worth, 
 Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the 
 
 earth." 
 For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, 
 (Don John of Austria is going to the war.) 
 
296 G. K. Chesterton 
 
 Sudden and still — hurrah! 
 Bolt from Iberia! 
 Don John of Austria 
 Is gone by Alcalar. 
 
 St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the 
 
 north 
 {Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.) 
 Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift 
 And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift. 
 He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of 
 
 stone ; 
 The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone 
 
 alone ; 
 The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching 
 
 eyes, 
 And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, 
 And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, 
 And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face 
 
 of doom, 
 And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee, — 
 But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea. 
 Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse 
 Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, 
 Trumpet that sayeth ha! 
 
 Domino gloria! 
 Don John of Austria 
 Is shouting to the ships. 
 
 The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, 
 
 {Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.) 
 
 The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the 
 
 year, 
 The secret window whence the world looks small and 
 
 very dear. 
 
G. K. Chesterton 297 
 
 He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea 
 The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; 
 They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and 
 
 Castle dark, 
 They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark; 
 And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded 
 
 chiefs, 
 And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudi- 
 nous griefs, 
 Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race 
 
 repines 
 Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. 
 They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of 
 
 morning hung 
 The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was 
 
 young. 
 They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or 
 
 fleeing on 
 Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon. 
 And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell 
 Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of 
 
 his cell, [sign — 
 
 And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a 
 (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) 
 Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, 
 Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop, 
 Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, 
 Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, 
 Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea 
 White ror bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. 
 Vivat Hispania! 
 Domino Gloria! 
 Don John of Austria 
 Has set his people free! 
 
298 G. K. Chesterton 
 
 Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath 
 {Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.) 
 And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in 
 
 Spain, 
 Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain, 
 And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back 
 
 the blade. . . . 
 {But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.) 
 
 THE DONKEY 
 
 When fishes flew and forests walked 
 
 And figs grew upon thorn, 
 Some moment when the moon was blood, 
 
 Then surely I was born; 
 
 With monstrous head and sickening cry 
 
 And ears like errant wings, 
 The devil's walking parody 
 
 On all four-footed things. 
 
 The tattered outlaw of the earth, 
 
 Of ancient crooked will; 
 Starve, scourge, deride me : I am dumb, 
 
 I keep my secret still. 
 
 Fools! For I also had my hour; 
 
 One far fierce hour and sweet: 
 There was a shout about my ears, 
 
 And palms before my feet. 
 
 John Masefield 
 
 John Masefield was born June 1, 1874, in Ledbury, Hert- 
 fordshire. He was the son of a lawyer but, being of a rest- 
 
John Masefield 299 
 
 less disposition, he took to the sea at an early age and became 
 a wanderer for several years. At one time (in 1895, to be 
 exact) he worked for a few months as a sort of third assist- 
 ant barkeeper and dish-washer in Luke O'Connor's saloon, 
 the Columbia Hotel, in New York City. The place is still 
 there on the corner of Sixth and Greenwich Avenues. 
 
 The results of his wanderings showed in his early works, 
 Salt-Water Ballads (1902), Ballads (1903), frank and often 
 crude poems of sailors written in their own dialect, and A 
 Mainsail Haul (1905), a collection of short nautical stories. 
 
 It was not until he published The Everlasting Mercy (1911) 
 that he became famous. Followed quickly by those remark- 
 able long narrative poems, The Widow in the Bye Street 
 (1912), Dauber (1912), and The Daffodil Fields (1913), there 
 is in all of these that peculiar blend of physical exulting and 
 spiritual exaltation that is so striking, and so typical of Mase- 
 field. Their very rudeness is lifted to a plane of religious 
 intensity. (See Preface.) 
 
 The war, in which Masefield served with the Red Cross in 
 France and on the Gallipoli peninsula (of which campaign he 
 wrote a study for the government), softened his style; Good 
 Friday and Other Poems (1916) is as restrained and dignified 
 a collection as that of any of his contemporaries. Reynard 
 the Fox (1919) is the best of his new manner with a return 
 of the old vivacity. 
 
 Masefield has also written several novels of which Multitude 
 and Solitude (1909) is the most outstanding; half a dozen 
 plays, ranging from the classical solemnity of Pompey the 
 Great to the hot and racy Tragedy of Nan; and one of the 
 freshest, most creative critiques of Shakespeare (1911) in the 
 last generation. 
 
 A CONSECRATION 
 
 Not of the princes and prelates with periwigged 
 
 charioteers 
 Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the 
 
 years, — 
 Rather the scorned — the rejected — the men hemmed in 
 
 with the spears; 
 
300 John Masefield 
 
 The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies, 
 Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries. 
 The men with the broken heads and the blood running 
 into their eyes. 
 
 Not the be-medalled Commander, beloved of the throne, 
 Riding cock-horse to parade when the bugles are blown, 
 But the lads who carried the koppie and cannot be known. 
 
 Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the 
 
 road, 
 The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with 
 
 the goad, 
 The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load. 
 
 The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout, 
 The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to 
 
 the shout, 
 The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out. 
 
 Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the 
 
 mirth, 
 The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth ; — 
 Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the 
 
 earth! 
 
 Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold ; 
 
 Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 
 
 Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and 
 
 the cold — 
 Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. 
 
 Amen. 
 
John Masefield 301 
 
 SEA-FEVER 
 
 I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the 
 
 sky, 
 And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, 
 And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white 
 
 sail's shaking, 
 And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn 
 
 breaking. 
 
 I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running 
 tide 
 
 Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied ; 
 
 And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying, 
 
 And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea- 
 gulls crying. 
 
 I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life. 
 
 To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's 
 like a whetted knife; 
 
 And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow- 
 rover, 
 
 And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's 
 over. 
 
 ROUNDING THE HORN 
 
 {From "Dauber") l 
 
 Then came the cry of "Call all hands on deck!" 
 The Dauber knew its meaning; it was come: 
 Cape Horn, that tramples beauty into wreck, 
 And crumples steel and smites the strong man dumb. 
 
 1 From The Story of a Round-House by John Masefield. 
 Copyright, 1913, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by 
 permission cf the publishers. 
 
302 John Masefield 
 
 Down clattered flying kites and staysails; some 
 Sang out in quick, high calls: the fair-leads skirled, 
 And from the south-west came the end of the world . , 
 
 "Lay out!" the Bosun yelled. The Dauber laid 
 
 Out on the yard, gripping the yard, and feeling 
 
 Sick at the mighty space of air displayed 
 
 Below his feet, where mewing birds were wheeling. 
 
 A giddy fear was on him ; he was reeling. 
 
 He bit his lip half through, clutching the jack. 
 
 A cold sweat glued the shirt upon his back. 
 
 The yard was shaking, for a brace was loose. 
 
 He felt that he would fall; he clutched, he bent, 
 
 Clammy with natural terror to the shoes 
 
 While idiotic promptings came and went. 
 
 Snow fluttered on a wind-flaw and was spent; 
 
 He saw the water darken. Someone yelled, 
 
 "Frap it; don't stay to furl! Hold on!" He held. 
 
 Darkness came down — half darkness — in a whirl; 
 The sky went out, the waters disappeared. 
 He felt a shocking pressure of blowing hurl 
 The ship upon her side. The darkness speared 
 At her with wind; she staggered, she careered; 
 Then down she lay. The Dauber felt her go, 
 He saw her yard tilt downwards. Then the snow 
 
 Whirled all about — dense, multitudinous, cold — 
 Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek, 
 Which whiffled out men's tears, defeated, took hold, 
 Flattening the flying drift against the cheek. 
 The yards buckled and bent, man could not speak. 
 The ship lay on her broadside; the wind's sound 
 Had devilish malice at having got her downed. 
 
John Masefield 303 
 
 How long the gale had blown he could not tell, 
 Only the world had changed, his life had died. 
 A moment now was everlasting hell. 
 Nature an onslaught from the weather side, 
 A withering rush of death, a frost that cried, 
 Shrieked, till he withered at the heart; a hail 
 Plastered his oilskins with an icy mail. . . . 
 
 "Up!" yelled the Bosun; "up and clear the wreck!" 
 
 The Dauber followed where he led ; below 
 
 He caught one giddy glimpsing of the deck 
 
 Filled with white water, as though heaped with snow. 
 
 He saw the streamers of the rigging blow 
 
 Straight out like pennons from the splintered mast, 
 
 Then, all sense dimmed, all was an icy blast. 
 
 Roaring from nether hell and filled with ice, 
 Roaring and crashing on the jerking stage, 
 An utter bridle given to utter vice, 
 Limitless power mad with endless rage 
 Withering the soul ; a minute seemed an age. 
 He clutched and hacked at ropes, at rags of sail, 
 Thinking that comfort was a fairy tale, 
 
 Told long ago — long, long ago — long since 
 Heard of in other lives — imagined, dreamed — 
 There where the basest beggar was a prince. 
 To him in torment where the tempest screamed, 
 Comfort and warmth and ease no longer seemed 
 Things that a man could know; soul, body, brain, 
 Knew nothing but the wind, the cold, the pain. 
 
 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 
 
 Born at Hexam in 1878, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson has pub- 
 lished almost a dozen books of verse — the first four or five 
 
304 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 
 
 (see Preface) being imitative in manner and sentimentally 
 romantic in tone. With The Stonefolds (1907) and Daily 
 Bread (1910), Gibson executed a complete right- about-face and, 
 with dramatic brevity, wrote a series of poems mirroring the 
 dreams, pursuits and fears of common humanity. Fires (1912) 
 marks an advance in technique and power. And though in 
 Livelihood (1917) Gibson seems to be theatricalizing and 
 merely exploiting his working-people, his later lyrics fre- 
 quently recapture the veracity. 
 
 THE STONE 1 
 
 "And will you cut a stone for him, 
 To set above his head? 
 And will you cut a stone for him — 
 A stone for him?" she said. 
 
 Three days before, a splintered rock 
 
 Had struck her lover dead — 
 
 Had struck him in the quarry dead, 
 
 Where, careless of the warning call, 
 
 He loitered, while the shot was fired — 
 
 A lively stripling, brave and tall, 
 
 And sure of all his heart desired . . . 
 
 A flash, a shock, 
 
 A rumbling fall . . . 
 
 And, broken 'neath the broken rock, 
 
 A lifeless heap, with face of clay; 
 
 And still as any stone he lay, 
 
 With eyes that saw the end of all. 
 
 I went to break the news to her ; 
 And I could hear my own heart beat 
 
 1 From Fires by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. Copyright, 1912, 
 by The Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission of the pub- 
 lishers. 
 
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 305 
 
 With dread of what my lips might say. 
 But some poor fool had sped before; 
 And flinging wide her father's door, 
 Had blurted out the news to her, 
 Had struck her lover dead for her, 
 Had struck the girl's heart dead in her, 
 Had struck life, lifeless, at a word, 
 And dropped it at her feet: 
 Then hurried on his witless way, 
 Scarce knowing she had heard. 
 
 And when I came, she stood, alone 
 A woman, turned to stone: 
 And, though no word at all she said, 
 I knew that all was known. 
 
 Because her heart was dead, 
 
 She did not sigh nor moan, 
 
 His mother wept: 
 
 She could not weep. 
 
 Her lover slept : 
 
 She could not sleep. 
 
 Three days, three nights, 
 
 She did not stir: 
 
 Three days, three nights, 
 
 Were one to her, 
 
 Who never closed her eyes 
 
 From sunset to sunrise, 
 
 From dawn to evenfall: 
 
 Her tearless, staring eyes, 
 
 That seeing naught, saw all. 
 
 The fourth night when I came from work, 
 
 I found her at my door. 
 
 "And will you cut a stone for him?" 
 
306 Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 
 
 She said and spoke no more: 
 
 But followed me, as I went in, 
 
 And sank upon a chair; 
 
 And fixed her grey eyes on my face, 
 
 With still, unseeing stare. 
 
 And, as she waited patiently, 
 
 I could not bear to feel 
 
 Those still, grey eyes that followed me, 
 
 Those eyes that plucked the heart from me, 
 
 Those eyes that sucked the breath from me 
 
 And curdled the warm blood in me, 
 
 Those eyes that cut me to the bone, 
 
 And pierced my marrow like cold steel. 
 
 And so I rose, and sought a stone; 
 
 And cut it, smooth and square: 
 
 And, as I worked, she sat and watched, 
 
 Beside me, in her chair. 
 
 Night after night, by candlelight, 
 
 I cut her lover's name : 
 
 Night after night, so still and white, 
 
 And like a ghost she came; 
 
 And sat beside me in her chair; 
 
 And watched with eyes aflame. 
 
 She eyed each stroke; 
 
 And hardly stirred: 
 
 She never spoke 
 
 A single word: 
 
 And not a sound or murmur broke 
 
 The quiet, save the mallet-stroke. 
 
 With still eyes ever on my hands, 
 
 With eyes that seemed to burn my hands, 
 
 My wincing, overwearied hands, 
 
 She watched, with bloodless lips apart, 
 
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 307 
 
 And silent, indrawn breath: 
 And every stroke my chisel cut, 
 Death cut still deeper in her heart : 
 The two of us were chiseling, 
 Together, I and death. 
 
 And when at length the job was done, 
 
 And I had laid the mallet by, 
 
 As if, at last, her peace were won, 
 
 She breathed his name; and, with a sigh, 
 
 Passed slowly through the open door: 
 
 And never crossed my threshold more. 
 
 Next night I laboured late, alone, 
 To cut her name upon the stone. 
 
 SIGHT 1 
 
 By the lamplit stall I loitered, feasting my eyes 
 
 On colours ripe and rich for the heart's desire — 
 
 Tomatoes, redder than Krakatoa's fire, 
 
 Oranges like old sunsets over Tyre, 
 
 And apples golden-green as the glades of Paradise. 
 
 And as I lingered, lost in divine delight, 
 
 My heart thanked God for the goodly gift of sight 
 
 And all youth's lively senses keen and quick . . . 
 
 When suddenly, behind me in the night, 
 
 I heard the tapping of a blind man's stick. 
 
 1 From Borderlands and Thoroughfares by Wilfrid Wilson 
 Gibson. Copyright, 191 5, by The Macmillan Company. Re- 
 printed by permission of the publishers. 
 
3 o8 
 
 Edward Thomas 
 
 Edward Thomas, one of the little-known but most individual 
 of modern English poets, was born in 1878. For many years 
 before he turned to verse, Thomas had a large following as 
 a critic and author of travel-books, biographies, pot-boilers. 
 It needed something foreign to stir and animate what was 
 native in him. So when Robert Frost, the New England poet, 
 went abroad in 1912 for two years and became an intimate 
 of Thomas's, the English critic began to write poetry. Lov- 
 ing, like Frost, the minutia of existence, the quaint and casual 
 turn of ordinary life, he caught the magic of the English 
 countryside in its unpoeticized quietude. It is not disillusion, 
 it is rather an absence of illusion. Poems (1917), dedicated 
 to Robert Frost, is full of Thomas's fidelity to little things, 
 things as unglorified as the unfreezing of the "rock-like mud," 
 a child's path, a list of quaint-sounding villages, birds' nests 
 uncovered by the autumn wind, dusty nettles. His lines glow 
 with a deep reverence for the soil. 
 
 Thomas was killed at Arras, at an observatory outpost, on 
 Easter Monday, 1917. 
 
 IF I SHOULD EVER BY CHANCE 
 
 If I should ever by chance grow rich 
 
 I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 
 
 Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, 
 
 And let them all to my elder daughter. 
 
 The rent I shall ask of her will be only 
 
 Each year's first violets, white and lonely, 
 
 The first primroses and orchises — 
 
 She must find them before I do, that is. 
 
 But if she finds a blossom on furze 
 
 Without rent they shall all for ever be hers, 
 
 Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch, 
 
 Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater, — 
 
 I shall give them all to my elder daughter. 
 
Edward Thomas 309 
 
 TALL NETTLES 
 
 Tall nettles cover up, as they have done 
 These many springs, the rusty harrow, the plough 
 Long worn out, and the roller made of stone : 
 Only the elm butt tops the nettles now. 
 
 This corner of the farmyard I like most : 
 As well as any bloom upon a flower 
 I like the dust on the nettles, never lost 
 Except to prove the sweetness of a shower. 
 
 COCK-CROW 
 
 Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night 
 To be cut down by the sharp axe of light, — 
 Out of the night, two cocks together crow, 
 Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow : 
 And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand, 
 Heralds of splendour, one at either hand, 
 Each facing each as in a coat of arms: — 
 The milkers lace their boots up at the farms. 
 
 Seumas O' Sullivan 
 
 James Starkey was born in Dublin in 1879. Writing under 
 the pseudonym of Seumas O'Sullivan, he contributed a great 
 variety of prose and verse to various Irish papers. His repu- 
 tation as a poet began with his appearance in New Songs, 
 edited by George Russell ("A. E."). Later, he published The 
 Twilight People (1905), The Earth Lover (1909), and Poems 
 (1912). 
 
310 Seumas 0' Sullivan 
 
 PRAISE 
 
 Dear, they are praising your beauty, 
 The grass and the sky: 
 The sky in a silence of wonder, 
 The grass in a sigh. 
 
 I too would sing for your praising, 
 Dearest, had I 
 
 Speech as the whispering grass, 
 Or the silent sky. 
 
 These have an art for the praising 
 Beauty so high. 
 
 Sweet, you are praised in a silence, 
 Sung in a sigh. 
 
 Charlotte Mew 
 
 One of the most amazing figures in modern poetry is Char- 
 lotte Mew. She has published only one book, yet that one 
 small collection contains some of the finest poetry of our times. 
 
 In 191 6, The Farmer's Bride, a paper-covered pamphlet, 
 appeared in England. It contained just seventeen poems, the 
 pruned fruit of many years. Saturday Market (1921) is the 
 American edition of this volume with eleven poems added. 
 Had Miss Mew printed nothing but the original booklet, it 
 would have been sufficient to rank her among the most dis- 
 tinctive and intense of living poets. Hers is the distillation, 
 the essence of emotion, rather than the stirring up of pas- 
 sions. Her most memorable work is in dramatic projections 
 and poignant monologues (unfortunately too long to quote) 
 like "The Changeling," with its fantastic pathos, and that 
 powerful meditation, "Madeleine in Church." But lyrics as 
 swift as "Sea Love" or as slowly hymn-like as "Beside the 
 Bed," are equally sure of their place in English literature. 
 
Charlotte Mew 311 
 
 They are, like all of Miss Mew's contributions, disturbing in 
 their direct beauty; full of a speech that is profound without 
 ever being pompous. 
 
 BESIDE THE BED 
 
 Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded 
 The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet 
 breast : 
 So, smoothed and silenced you He, like a child, not again 
 to be questioned or scolded ; 
 But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest. 
 
 Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden 
 The blue beyond : or to screen the wavering flame sub- 
 due its breath : 
 Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, 
 like dawn, would quiver and redden, 
 Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death. 
 
 Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken, 
 It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never 
 very deep: 
 I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of 
 them dimmed suddenly and broken. 
 This is only a most piteous pretense of sleep! 
 
 SEA LOVE 
 
 Tide be runnin' the great world over: 
 
 'Twas only last June month I mind that we 
 
 Was thinkin' the toss and the call in the breast of the 
 lover 
 So everlastin' as the sea. 
 
312 Charlotte Mew 
 
 Heer's the same little fishes that sputter and swim, 
 Wi' the moon's old glim on the grey, wet sand; 
 
 An' him no more to me nor me to him 
 Than the wind goin' over my hand. 
 
 Harold Monro 
 
 Harold Monro, who describes himself as "author, publisher, 
 editor and book-seller," was born in Brussels in 1879. Monro 
 founded The Poetry Bookshop in London in 1912 and his 
 quarterly Poetry and Drama (discontinued during the war 
 and revived in 1919 as The Chapbook, a monthly) was, in a 
 sense, the organ of the younger men. 
 
 Monro's poetry is impelled by a peculiar mysticism, a mys- 
 ticism that depicts the play between the worlds of reality and 
 fantasy. His Strange Meetings (1917) and Children of Love 
 (1915) present, with an originality rare among Monro's con- 
 temporaries, the relation of man not only to the earth he rose 
 from, but to the inanimate things he moves among. Even 
 the most whimsical of this poet's concepts have an emotional 
 intensity beneath their skilful rhythms. 
 
 EVERY THING 
 
 Since man has been articulate, 
 
 Mechanical, improvidently wise, 
 
 (Servant of Fate), 
 
 He has not understood the little cries 
 
 And foreign conversations of the small 
 
 Delightful creatures that have followed him 
 
 Not far behind; 
 
 Has failed to hear the sympathetic call 
 
 Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind 
 
 Reposeful Teraphim 
 
Harold Monro 313 
 
 Of his domestic happiness; the Stool 
 He sat on, or the Door he entered through : 
 He has not thanked them, overbearing fool! 
 What is he coming to? 
 
 But you should listen to the talk of these. 
 
 Honest they are, and patient they have kept; 
 
 Served him without his Thank you or his Please . . . 
 
 I often heard 
 
 The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word, 
 
 Murmuring, before I slept. 
 
 The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud, 
 
 Then bowed, 
 
 And in a smoky argument 
 
 Into the darkness went. 
 
 The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath: — 
 "Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know 
 Why; and he always says I boil too slow. 
 He never calls me 'Sukie, dear/ and oh, 
 I wonder why I squander my desire 
 Sitting submissive on his kitchen fire." 
 
 Now the old Copper Basin suddenly 
 
 Rattled and tumbled from the shelf, 
 
 Bumping and crying: "I can fall by myself; 
 
 Without a woman's hand 
 
 To patronize and coax and flatter me, 
 
 I understand 
 
 The lean and poise of gravitable land." 
 
 It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout, 
 
 Twisted itself convulsively about, 
 
 Rested upon the floor, and, while I stare, 
 
 It stares and grins at me. 
 
3 H Harold Monro 
 
 The old impetuous Gas above my head 
 Begins irascibly to flare and fret, 
 Wheezing into its epileptic jet, 
 Reminding me I ought to go to bed. 
 
 The Rafters creak; an Empty-Cupboard door 
 Swings open; now a wild Plank of the floor 
 Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot. 
 Down from the chimney, half a pound of Soot 
 Tumbles and lies, and shakes itself again. 
 The Putty cracks against the window-pane. 
 A piece of Paper in the basket shoves 
 Another piece, and toward the bottom moves. 
 My independent Pencil, while I write, 
 Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock 
 Stirs all its body and begins to rock, 
 Warning the waiting presence of the Night, 
 Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain 
 Ticking of ordinary work again. 
 
 You do well to remind me, and I praise 
 Your strangely individual foreign ways. 
 You call me from myself to recognize 
 Companionship in your unselfish eyes. 
 I want your dear acquaintances, although 
 I pass you arrogantly over, throw 
 Your lovely sounds, and squander them along 
 My busy days. I'll do you no more wrong. 
 
 Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat. 
 
 You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat, 
 
 Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak, 
 
 Your touch grow kindlier from week to week. 
 
 It well becomes our mutual happiness 
 
 To go toward the same end more or less. 
 
Harold Monro 31^ 
 
 There is not much dissimilarity, 
 
 Not much to choose, I know it well, in fine, 
 
 Between the purposes of you and me, 
 
 And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine. 
 
 THE NIGHTINGALE NEAR THE HOUSE 
 
 Here is the soundless cypress on the lawn: 
 It listens, listens. Taller trees beyond 
 Listen. The moon at the unruffled pond 
 Stares. And you sing, you sing. 
 
 That star-enchanted song falls through the air 
 From lawn to lawn down terraces of sound, 
 Darts in white arrows on the shadowed ground ; 
 And all the night you sing. 
 
 My dreams are flowers to which you are a bee 
 As all night long I listen, and my brain 
 Receives your song; then loses it again 
 In moonlight on the lawn. 
 
 Now is your voice a marble high and white, 
 Then like a mist on fields of paradise, 
 Now is a raging fire, then is like ice, 
 Then breaks, and it is dawn. 
 
 Alfred Noyes 
 
 Alfred Noyes was born at Staffordshire, September 16, 1880, 
 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He is one of the 
 few contemporary poets who have been fortunate enough to 
 
3 16 Alfred Noyes 
 
 write a kind of poetry that is not only saleable but popular 
 with many classes of people. 
 
 His first book, The Loom of Years (1902), was published 
 when he was only 22 years old, and Poems (1904) intensified 
 the promise of his first publication. Unfortunately, Noyes has 
 not developed his gifts as deeply as his admirers have hoped. 
 His poetry, extremely straightforward and rhythmical, has 
 often degenerated into cheap sentimentalities; it has fre- 
 quently attempted to express profundities far beyond Noyes's 
 power. 
 
 What is most appealing about his best verse is its ease and 
 heartiness; this singer's gift lies in the almost personal bond 
 established between the poe* and his public. People have such 
 a good time reading his vivacious lines because Noyes had 
 such a good time writing them. Noyes's own relish filled and 
 quickened glees and catches like Forty Singing Seamen (1907), 
 the lusty choruses in Tales of the Mermaid Tavern (1913), 
 and the genuinely inspired nonsense of the earlier Forest of 
 Wild Thyme (1905). 
 
 His eight volumes were assembled in 1913 and published in 
 two books of Collected Poems (Frederick A. Stokes Company). 
 
 THE BARREL-ORGAN 
 
 There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 
 
 In the City as the sun sinks low; 
 And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 
 it sweet 
 And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; 
 And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
 pain 
 That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
 light; 
 And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
 In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 
 
Alfred Noyes 317 
 
 And now it's marching onward through the realms of 
 old romance, 
 
 And trolling out a fond familiar tune, 
 And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of 
 France, 
 
 And now it's prattling softly to the moon. 
 And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore 
 
 Of human joys and wonders and regrets; 
 To remember and to recompense the music evermore 
 
 For what the cold machinery forgets . . . 
 
 Yes; as the music changes, 
 
 Like a prismatic glass, 
 It takes the light and ranges 
 
 Through all the moods that pass; 
 Dissects the common carnival 
 
 Of passions and regrets, 
 And gives the world a glimpse of all 
 
 The colours it forgets. 
 
 And there La Traviata sighs 
 
 Another sadder song; 
 And there 77 Trovatore cries 
 
 A tale of deeper wrong; 
 And bolder knights to battle go 
 
 With sword and shield and lance, 
 Than ever here on earth below 
 
 Have whirled into — a dance! — 
 
 Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time ; 
 Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
 London!) 
 And you shall wander hand in hand with love in sum- 
 mer's wonderland ; 
 Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from 
 London!) 
 
3 18 Alfred Noyes 
 
 The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and 
 sweet perfume, 
 The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near 
 to London!) 
 And there they say, when dawn is high and all the 
 world's a blaze of sky 
 The cuckoo, though he's very shy, will sing a song for 
 London. 
 
 The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you'll 
 hear him there 
 At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
 London!) 
 The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long 
 halloo 
 And golden-eyed tu-whit, tu-whoo of owls that ogle 
 London. 
 
 For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard 
 At Kew, at Kew in lilac-time (and oh, so near to 
 London ! ) 
 And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut 
 spires are out 
 You'll hear the rest, without a doubt, all chorusing 
 for London: — 
 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac- 
 time; 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isnt far from 
 London!) 
 And you shall wander hand in hand with love in sum- 
 mer s wonderland; 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isnt far from 
 London!) 
 
Alfred Noyes 319 
 
 And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden 
 
 street, 
 In the City as the sun sinks low; 
 And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary 
 
 feet 
 Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat, 
 And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll never 
 
 meet, 
 Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies 
 
 and the wheat, 
 In the land where the dead dreams go. 
 
 Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote // Trovatore did you 
 dream 
 Of the City when the sun sinks low, 
 Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured 
 
 stream 
 On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem 
 To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam 
 As A che la morte parodies the world's eternal theme 
 And pulses with the sunset-glow ? 
 
 There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen 
 
 stone 
 In the City as the sun sinks low ; 
 There's a portly man of business with a balance of his 
 
 own, 
 There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful 
 
 tone, 
 And they're all of them returning to the heavens they 
 
 have known : 
 They are crammed and jammed in busses and — they're 
 
 each of them alone 
 In the land w r here the dead dreams go. 
 
320 Alfred Noyes 
 
 There's a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead 
 
 In the City as the sun sinks low; 
 And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red 
 As he sees a loafer watching him and — there he turns his 
 
 head 
 And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, 
 For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led 
 
 Through the land where the dead dreams go . . . 
 
 There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 
 
 In the City as the sun sinks low; 
 Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it 
 
 sweet 
 Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven 
 
 meet 
 Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand 
 
 feet 
 Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the 
 
 wheat 
 In the land where the dead dreams go. 
 
 So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah, 
 
 What have you to say 
 When you meet the garland girls 
 
 Tripping on their way? 
 All around my gala hat 
 
 I wear a wreath of roses 
 (A long and lonely year it is 
 
 I've waited for the May!) 
 If any one should ask you, 
 
 The reason why I wear it is — 
 My own love, my true love is coming 
 home today. 
 
Alfred Noyes 321 
 
 And it's buy a bunch of violets for the lady 
 
 {It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!) 
 
 Buy a bunch of violets for the lady; 
 While the sky burns blue above: 
 
 On the other side the street you'll find it shady 
 
 {It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!) 
 
 But buy a bunch of violets for the lady, 
 And tell her she's your own true love. 
 
 There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street 
 
 In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow; 
 And the music's not immortal; but the world has made 
 
 it sweet 
 And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song 
 
 complete 
 In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morn- 
 ing meet, 
 As it dies into the sunset glow; 
 And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the 
 pain 
 That surround the singing organ like a large eternal 
 light, 
 And they've given it a glory and a part to play again 
 In the Symphony that rules the day and night. 
 
 And there, as the music changes, 
 
 The song runs round again; 
 Once more it turns and ranges 
 
 Through all its joy and pain: 
 Dissects the common carnival 
 
 Of passions and regrets; 
 And the wheeling world remembers all 
 
 The wheeling song forgets. 
 
322 Alfred Noyes 
 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac- 
 time; 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isnt far from 
 London!) 
 And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in sum- 
 mer s wonderland, 
 Come down to Kew in lilac-time {it isnt far from 
 London!) 
 
 EPILOGUE 
 
 {From "The Flower of Old Japan') 
 
 Carol, every violet has 
 Heaven for a looking-glass! 
 
 Every little valley lies 
 Under many-clouded skies; 
 Every little cottage stands 
 Girt about with boundless lands. 
 Every little glimmering pond 
 Claims the mighty shores beyond — 
 Shores no seaman ever hailed, 
 Seas no ship has ever sailed. 
 
 All the shores when day is done 
 Fade into the setting sun, 
 So the story tries to teach 
 More than can be told in speech. 
 
 Beauty is a fading flower, 
 Truth is but a wizards tower, 
 Where a solemn death-bell tolls, 
 And a forest round it rolls. 
 
Alfred Noyes 323 
 
 We have come by curious ways 
 To the light that holds the days; 
 We have sought in haunts of fear 
 For that all-enfolding sphere: 
 And lo ! it was not far, but near. 
 We have found, O foolish-fond, 
 The shore that has no shore beyond. 
 
 Deep in every heart it lies 
 With its untranscended skies; 
 For what heaven should bend above 
 Hearts that own the heaven of love? 
 
 Carol, Carol, we have come 
 Back to heaven, back to home. 
 
 Padraic Colum 
 
 Padraic Colum was born at Longford, Ireland (in the same 
 county as Oliver Goldsmith), December 8, 1881, and was edu- 
 cated at the local schools. At 20 he was a member of a group 
 that created the Irish National Theatre, afterwards called The 
 Abbey Theatre. He has lived in America since 1914. 
 
 Colum began as a dramatist with Broken Soil (1904), The 
 Land (1905), Thomas Muskerry (1910), and this early 
 dramatic influence has colored much of his work, his best 
 poetry being in the form of dramatic lyrics. Wild Earth, his 
 most notable collection of verse, first appeared in 1909, and an 
 amplified edition of it was published in America in 1916. 
 
 THE PLOUGHER 
 
 Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, 
 
 earth broken; 
 Beside him two horses — a plough! 
 
324 Padraic Colum 
 
 Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn man 
 
 there in the sunset, 
 And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder 
 
 of cities! 
 
 "Brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker! Can'st hear? 
 
 There are ages between us. 
 "Is it praying you are as you stand there alone in the 
 
 sunset ? 
 
 "Surely our sky-born gods can be naught to you, earth 
 
 child and earth master? 
 "Surely your thoughts are of Pan, or of Wotan, or 
 
 Dana? 
 
 "Yet, why give thought to the gods? Has Pan led your 
 
 brutes where they stumble? 
 "Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put 
 
 hands to your plough? 
 
 "What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing 
 
 lone and bowed earthward, 
 "Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the 
 
 night-giving God." 
 
 Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with 
 
 the savage; 
 The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth 
 
 only above them. 
 
 A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and 
 
 the height up to heaven, 
 And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, 
 
 purples, and splendors. 
 
Joseph Campbell 325 
 
 (Seosamh MacCathmhaoil) 
 
 Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not 
 only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for The 
 Rushlight (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under 
 the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen 
 books of verse, the most striking of which is The Mountainy 
 Singer, first published in Dublin in 1909. 
 
 THE OLD WOMAN 
 
 As a white candle 
 
 In a holy place, 
 So is the beauty 
 
 Of an aged face. 
 
 As the spent radiance 
 Of the winter sun, 
 
 So is a woman 
 
 With her travail done. 
 
 Her brood gone from her, 
 And her thoughts as still 
 
 As the waters 
 
 Under a ruined mill. 
 
 Lascelles Abercrombie 
 
 Lascelles Abercrombie was born in 1881 and educated at 
 Victoria University, Manchester. Like Masefield, he gained 
 his reputation rapidly. Totally unknown until 1909, upon the 
 publication of Interludes and Poems, he was recognized as 
 one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his period. Emblems 
 of Love (1912), the ripest collection of his blank verse dia- 
 logues, justified the enthusiasm of his admirers. 
 
326 Lascelles Abercrombie 
 
 Many of Abercrombie's poems, the best of which are too 
 long to quote, are founded on scriptural themes, but it is the 
 undercurrent rather than the surface of his verse which moves 
 with a strong religious conviction. Abercrombie's images are 
 daring and brilliant; his lines, sometimes too closely packed, 
 glow with an intensity that is warmly spiritual and fervently 
 human. 
 
 FROM "VASHTI" 
 
 What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty ? 
 Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all 
 The world, but an awning scaffolded amid 
 The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge 
 This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty? 
 The East and West kneel down to thee, the North 
 And South; and all for thee their shoulders bear 
 The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn 
 Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea, 
 Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men 
 That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears 
 Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, 
 Whatever has been passionate in clay, 
 Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body 
 The yearnings of all men measured and told, 
 Insatiate endless agonies of desire 
 Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! 
 What beauty is there, but thou makest it? 
 How is earth good to look on, woods and fields, 
 The season's garden, and the courageous hills, 
 All this green raft of earth moored in the seas? 
 The manner of the sun to ride the air, 
 The stars God has imagined for the night? 
 What's this behind them, that we cannot near, 
 
Lascelles Abercrombie 327 
 
 Secret still on the point of being blabbed, 
 
 The ghost in the world that flies from being named? 
 
 Where do they get their beauty from, all these? 
 
 They do but glaze a lantern lit for man, 
 
 And woman's beauty is the flame therein. 
 
 James Stephens 
 
 This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 
 1882. Stephens was discovered in an office and saved from 
 clerical slavery by George Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, 
 Stephens's most poetic moments are in his highly-colored prose. 
 And yet, although the finest of his novels, The Crock of Gold 
 (1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than 
 all his volumes of verse, his Insurrections (1909) and The Hill 
 of Vision (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once 
 hotly ironic and coolly whimsical. 
 
 Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend 
 of incongruities — he combines in his verse the grotesque, the 
 buoyant and the profound. 
 
 THE SHELL 
 
 And then I pressed the shell 
 
 Close to my ear 
 
 And listened well, 
 
 And straightway like a bell 
 
 Came low and clear 
 
 The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, 
 
 Whipped by an icy breeze 
 
 Upon a shore 
 
 Wind-swept and desolate. 
 
 It w T as a sunless strand that never bore 
 
 The footprint of a man, 
 
 Nor felt the weight 
 
328 James Stephens 
 
 Since time began 
 
 Of any human quality or stir 
 
 Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. 
 
 And in the hush of waters was the sound 
 
 Of pebbles rolling round, 
 
 For ever rolling with a hollow sound. 
 
 And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go, 
 
 Swish to and fro 
 
 Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. 
 
 There was no day, 
 
 Nor ever came a night 
 
 Setting the stars alight 
 
 To wonder at the moon: 
 
 Was twilight only and the frightened croon, 
 
 Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind 
 
 And waves that journeyed blind — 
 
 And then I loosed my ear. ... O, it was sweet 
 
 To hear a cart go jolting down the street. 
 
 WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB 
 
 I saw God. Do you doubt it? 
 
 Do you dare to doubt it? 
 I saw the Almighty Man. His hand 
 Was resting on a mountain, and 
 He looked upon the World and all about it: 
 I saw him plainer than you see me now, 
 
 You mustn't doubt it. 
 
 He was not satisfied; 
 
 His look was all dissatisfied. 
 His beard swung on a wind far out of sight 
 Behind the world's curve, and there was light 
 
James Stephens 329 
 
 Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, 
 "That star went always wrong, and from the start 
 I was dissatisfied." 
 
 He lifted up His hand — 
 
 I say He heaved a dreadful hand 
 Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, "Stay, 
 You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way; 
 And I will never move from where I stand." 
 He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead," 
 
 And stayed His hand. 
 
 John Drinkwater 
 
 Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 
 1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln — A Play 
 (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical 
 biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most 
 of them meditative in mood. 
 
 The best of his verses have been collected in Poems, 1908- 
 19, and the two here reprinted are used by special arrange- 
 ment with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized pub- 
 lishers. 
 
 RECIPROCITY 
 
 I do not think that skies and meadows are 
 Moral, or that the fixture of a star 
 Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees 
 Have wisdom in their windless silences. 
 Yet these are things invested in my mood 
 With constancy, and peace, and fortitude; 
 That in my troubled season I can cry 
 Upon the wide composure of the sky, 
 And envy fields, and wish that I might be 
 As little daunted as a star or tree. 
 
330 John Drinkwater 
 
 A TOWN WINDOW 
 
 Beyond my window in the night 
 Is but a drab inglorious street, 
 
 Yet there the frost and clean starlight 
 As over Warwick woods are sweet. 
 
 Under the grey drift of the town 
 The crocus works among the mould 
 
 As eagerly as those that crown 
 
 The Warwick spring in flame and gold. 
 
 And when the tramway down the hill 
 Across the cobbles moans and rings, 
 
 There is about my window-sill 
 
 The tumult of a thousand wings. 
 
 /. C. Squire 
 
 Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1883, at Plymouth, 
 of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and 
 Cambridge University, and became known first as a remark- 
 ably adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and 
 Tricks of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what 
 is more, excellent criticism. He edited The New Statesman 
 for a while and founded The London Mercury (a monthly of 
 which he is editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym 
 "Solomon Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every 
 week for six years, many of these papers being collected in 
 his volume, Books in General (1919). 
 
 His original poetry is intellectual but simple, sometimes 
 metaphysical and always interesting technically in its variable 
 rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was pub- 
 lished under the title, Poems: First Series. Another volume, 
 Poems: Second Series appeared during Squire's visit to Amer- 
 ica in the fall of 1921. 
 
J. C. Squire 331 
 
 A HOUSE 
 
 Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, 
 
 In clouds of hyacinths the sun retires, 
 And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him 
 
 Keep but in memory their borrowed fires. 
 
 And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, 
 From that faint exquisite celestial strand, 
 
 And turn and see again the only dwelling-place 
 In this wide wilderness of darkening land. 
 
 The house, that house, O now what change has come to it. 
 
 Its crude red-brick faqade, its roof of slate; 
 What imperceptible swift hand has given it 
 
 A new, a wonderful, a queenly state? 
 
 No hand has altered it, that parallelogram, 
 
 So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; 
 That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was; 
 
 No, it is not that any line has changed. 
 
 Only that loneliness is now accentuate 
 
 And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, 
 
 This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, 
 And all men's energies seem very brave. 
 
 And this mean edifice, which some dull architect 
 Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind, 
 
 Takes on the quality of that magnificent 
 Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind. 
 
 Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be, 
 
 Yet imperturbable that house will rest, 
 Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, 
 Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast. 
 
332 7. C. Squire 
 
 Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac 
 May howl their menaces, and hail descend : 
 
 Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, 
 Not even scornfully, and wait the end. 
 
 And all a universe of nameless messengers 
 From unknown distances may whisper fear, 
 
 And it will imitate immortal permanence, 
 
 And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear. 
 
 It stood there yesterday; it will tomorrow, too, 
 When there is none to watch, no alien eyes 
 
 To watch its ugliness assume a majesty 
 From this great solitude of evening skies. 
 
 So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, 
 While life remains to it prepared to outface 
 
 Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries 
 May hide and wait for it in time and space. 
 
 Anna Wickham 
 
 Anna Wickham was born in Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1883. 
 She went to Australia at six, returned when she was twenty- 
 one, studied for Opera in Paris with De Reszke and suddenly, 
 after a few years of marriage, became a poet. In a burst of 
 creative energy she wrote nine hundred poems in four years. 
 
 Her two first books were republished in America in one 
 volume, The Contemplative Quarry (1921). The most casual 
 reading of Anna Wickham's work reveals the strength of her 
 candor. The poems could scarcely be put in the category of 
 "charming" verse; they are astringent and sometimes harsh; 
 gnarled frequently by their own changes of mood. Her lines 
 present the picture of woman struggling between dreams and 
 domesticity; they are acutely sensitive, restless, analytical. 
 The very tone of her poetry reflects the disturbed music and 
 the nervous intensity of her age. 
 
Anna Wickham 333 
 
 ENVOI 
 
 God, thou great symmetry, 
 
 Who put a biting lust in me 
 
 From whence my sorrows spring, 
 
 For all the frittered days 
 
 That I have spent in shapeless ways, 
 
 Give me one perfect thing. 
 
 DOMESTIC ECONOMY 
 
 I will have few cooking-pots, 
 
 They shall be bright; 
 
 They shall reflect to blinding 
 
 God's straight light. 
 
 I will have four garments, 
 
 They shall be clean; 
 
 My service shall be good, 
 
 Though my diet be mean. 
 
 Then I shall have excess to give to the poor, 
 
 And right to counsel beggars at my door. 
 
 THE SINGER 
 
 If I had peace to sit and sing, 
 Then I could make a lovely thing; 
 But I am stung with goads and whips, 
 So I build songs like iron ships. 
 
 Let it be something for my song, 
 If it is sometimes swift and strong. 
 
334 James Elroy Flecker 
 
 Another poet whose early death was a blow to English 
 literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, Novem- 
 ber 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker at first 
 found little to interest him but a classical reaction against 
 realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a 
 passion for technical perfection. 
 
 The advent of the war began to make Fleckers verse more 
 personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed 
 him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him 
 from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and 
 death. 
 
 His two colorful volumes are The Golden Journey to 
 Samarkand (1913) and The Old Ships (1915). 
 
 STILLNESS 
 
 When the words rustle no more, 
 
 And the last work's done, 
 When the bolt lies deep in the door, 
 
 And Fire, our Sun, 
 Falls on the dark-laned meadows of the floor; 
 
 When from the clock's last chime to the next chime 
 
 Silence beats his drum, 
 And Space with gaunt grey eyes and her brother Time 
 
 Wheeling and whispering come, 
 She with the mould of form and he with the loom of 
 rhyme : 
 
 Then twittering out in the night my thought-birds flee, 
 
 I am emptied of all my dreams: 
 I only hear Earth turning, only see 
 
 Ether's long bankless streams, 
 And only know I should drown if you laid not your hand 
 on me. 
 
D. H. Lawrence 335 
 
 David Herbert Lawrence, born in 1885, is one of the most 
 psychologically intense of the modern poets. This intensity, 
 ranging from a febrile morbidity to an exalted and almost 
 frenzied mysticism, is seen even in his prose works — particu- 
 larly in his short stories, The Prussian Officer (1917) and his 
 analytical Sons and Lovers (1913). 
 
 As a poet he is often caught in the net of his own emo- 
 tions; his passion thickens his utterance and distorts his 
 rhythms, which sometimes seem purposely harsh and bitter- 
 flavored. But within his range he is as powerful as he is 
 poignant. His most notable volumes of poetry are Amores 
 (1916), Look! We Have Come Through! (1918), and New 
 Poems (1920). 
 
 PIANO 
 
 Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; 
 
 Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see 
 
 A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the 
 
 tingling strings 
 And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who 
 
 smiles as she sings. 
 
 In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song 
 Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong 
 To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside 
 And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our 
 guide. 
 
 So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour 
 With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour 
 Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast 
 Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child 
 for the past. 
 
336 D. H. Lawrence 
 
 FORSAKEN AND ^FORLORN 
 
 The house is silent, it is late at night, I am alone. 
 From the balcony 
 I can hear the Isar moan, 
 Can see the white 
 Rift of the river eerily, between the pines, under a sky 
 of stone. 
 
 Some fireflies drift through the middle air 
 Tinily. 
 I wonder where 
 Ends this darkness that annihilates me ? 
 
 John Freeman 
 
 John Freeman, born in 1885, has published several volumes 
 of pleasantly descriptive verse. The two most distinctive are 
 Stone Trees (1916) and Memories of Childhood (1919). 
 
 STONE TREES 
 
 Last night a sword-light in the sky 
 Flashed a swift terror on the dark. 
 In that sharp light the fields did lie 
 Naked and stone-like; each tree stood 
 Like a tranced woman, bound and stark. 
 
 Far off the wood 
 With darkness ridged the riven dark. 
 
 And cows astonished stared with fear, 
 And sheep crept to the knees of cows, 
 And conies to their burrows slid, 
 And rooks were still in rigid boughs, 
 
John Freeman 337 
 
 And all things else were still or hid. 
 
 From all the wood 
 Came but the owl's hoot, ghostly, clear. 
 
 In that cold trance the earth was held 
 It seemed an age, or time was nought. 
 Sure never from that stone-like field 
 Sprang golden corn, nor from those chill 
 Grey granite trees was music wrought. 
 
 In all the wood 
 Even the tall poplar hung stone still. 
 
 It seemed an age, or time was none . . . 
 Slowly the earth heaved out of sleep 
 And shivered, and the trees of stone 
 Bent and sighed in the gusty wind, 
 And rain swept as birds flocking sweep. 
 
 Far off the wood 
 Rolled the slow thunders on the wind. 
 
 From all the wood came no brave bird, 
 
 No song broke through the close-faH'n night, 
 
 Nor any sound from cowering herd : 
 
 Only a dog's long lonely howl 
 
 When from the window poured pale light. 
 
 And from the wood 
 The hoot came ghostly of the owl. 
 
 Shane Leslie 
 
 Shane Leslie, the only surviving son of Sir John Leslie, was 
 born at Swan Park, Monaghan, Ireland, in 1885 and was edu- 
 cated at Eton and the University of Paris. He worked for a 
 time among the Irish poor and was deeply interested in the 
 Celtic revival. 
 
338 
 
 Shane Leslie 
 
 Leslie has been editor of The Dublin Review since 1916. 
 He is the author of several volumes on Irish political matters 
 as well as The End of a Chapter and Verses in Peace and 
 War. 
 
 FLEET STREET 
 
 I never see the newsboys run 
 Amid the whirling street, 
 With swift untiring feet, 
 
 To cry the latest venture done, 
 
 But I expect one day to hear 
 Them cry the crack of doom 
 And risings from the tomb, 
 
 With great Archangel Michael near; 
 
 And see them running from the Fleet 
 As messengers of God, 
 With Heaven's tidings shod 
 
 About their brave unwearied feet. 
 
 Siegfried Sassoon 
 
 Siegfried (Loraine) Sassoon, the poet whom Masefield hailed 
 as "one of England's most brilliant rising stars," was born 
 September 8, 1886. He was educated at Marlborough and 
 Clare College, Cambridge, and was a captain in the Royal 
 Welsh Fusiliers. He fought three times in France, once in 
 Palestine, winning the Military Cross for bringing in wounded 
 on the battlefield. 
 
 His poetry divides itself sharply in two moods — the lyric 
 and the ironic. His early lilting poems were without signifi- 
 cance or individuality. But with The Old Huntsman (1917) 
 Sassoon found his own idiom, and became one of the leading 
 younger poets upon the appearance of this striking volume. 
 The first poem, a long monologue evidently inspired by Mase- 
 
Siegfried Sassoon 339 
 
 field, gave little evidence of what was to come. Immediately 
 following it, however, came a series of war poems, undis- 
 guised in their tragedy and bitterness. Every line of these 
 quivering stanzas bore the mark of a sensitive and outraged 
 nature ; there was scarcely a phrase that did not protest against 
 the "glorification" and false glamour of war. 
 
 Counter- Attack appeared in 1918. In this volume Sassoon 
 turned entirely from an ordered loveliness to the gigantic bru- 
 tality of war. At heart a lyric idealist, the bloody years in- 
 tensified and twisted his tenderness till what was stubborn 
 and satiric in him forced its way to the top. In Counter-At- 
 tack, Sassoon found his angry outlet. Most of these poems 
 are choked with passion; many of them are torn out, roots 
 and all, from the very core of an intense conviction; they 
 rush on, not so much because of the poet's art but almost in 
 spite of it. 
 
 Early in 1920 Sassoon visited America. At the same time 
 he brought out his Picture Show (1920), a vigorous answer to 
 those who feared that Sassoon had "written himself out" or 
 had begun to burn away in his own fire. 
 
 Sassoon's three volumes are the most vital and unsparing 
 records of the war we have had. They synthesize in poetry 
 what Barbusse's Under Fire spreads out in panoramic prose. 
 
 DREAMERS 
 
 Soldiers are citizens of death's gray land, 
 
 Drawing no dividend from time's tomorrows. 
 In the great hour of destiny they stand, 
 
 Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows. 
 Soldiers are sworn to action ; they must win 
 
 Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. 
 Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin 
 
 They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives. 
 
 I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats, 
 And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain, 
 
34° Siegfried Sassoon 
 
 Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats, 
 And mocked by hopeless longing to regain 
 
 Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats, 
 And going to the office in the train. 
 
 THE REAR-GUARD 
 
 Groping along the tunnel, step by step, 
 
 He winked his prying torch with patching glare 
 
 From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. 
 
 Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know, 
 
 A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; 
 
 And he, exploring fifty feet below 
 
 The rosy gloom of battle overhead. 
 
 Tripping, he grabbed the wall ; saw someone lie 
 
 Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug, 
 
 And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. 
 
 "I'm looking for headquarters." No reply. 
 
 "God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.) 
 
 "Get up and guide me through this stinking place." 
 
 Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, 
 
 And flashed his beam across the livid face 
 
 Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore 
 
 Agony dying hard ten days before ; 
 
 And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. 
 
 Alone he staggered on until he found 
 
 Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair 
 
 To the dazed, muttering creatures underground 
 
 Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. 
 
 At last, with sweat of horror in his hair, 
 
 He climbed through darkness to the twilight air, 
 
 Unloading hell behind him step by step. 
 
Siegfried Sassoon 341 
 
 AFTERMATH 
 
 Have you forgotten yet? . . . 
 
 For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged 
 
 days, 
 Like traffic checked awhile at the crossing of city ways: 
 And the haunted gap in your mind has rilled with 
 
 thoughts that flow 
 Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man 
 
 reprieved to go, 
 Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare. 
 But the past is just the same, — and Wars a bloody 
 
 game. . . . 
 Have you forgotten yet? . . . 
 Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you 11 
 
 never forget. 
 
 Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at 
 
 Mametz, — ■ 
 The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled 
 
 sandbags on parapets? 
 Do you remember the rats; and the stench 
 Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench, — 
 And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless 
 
 rain? 
 Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen 
 
 again ?" 
 
 Do you remember that hour of din before the attack, — 
 And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook 
 
 you then 
 As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your 
 
 men? 
 Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back 
 
342 Siegfried Sassoon 
 
 With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey 
 Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay? 
 
 Have you forgotten yetf . . . 
 
 Look up, end swear by the green of the Spring thai you 11 
 never forget. 
 
 Rupert Brooke 
 
 Possibly the most famous of the Georgians, Rupert 
 (Chawner) Brooke, was born at Rugby in August, 1887, his 
 father being assistant master at the school. As a youth, 
 Brooke was keenly interested in all forms of athletics, play- 
 ing cricket, football, tennis, and swimming as well as most 
 professionals. He was six feet tall, his finely molded head 
 topped with a crown of loose hair of lively brown; "a golden 
 /oung Apollo," said Edward Thomas. Another friend of his 
 wrote, "To look at, he was part of the youth of the world." 
 
 At the very outbreak of the war, Brooke enlisted, fired 
 with an idealism that conquered his irony. After seeing serv- 
 ice in Belgium, 1914, he spent the following winter in a 
 training-camp in Dorsetshire and sailed with the British 
 Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in February, 191 5, to take 
 part in the unfortunate Dardanelles Campaign. 
 
 Brooke never reached his destination. He died of blood- 
 poison at Skyros, April 23, 1915. His early death was one 
 of England's great literary losses. 
 
 Brooke's sonnet-sequence, 191 4 (from which "The Soldier" 
 is taken), which, with prophetic irony, appeared a few weeks 
 before his death, contains the accents of immortality. And 
 "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" (unfortunately too long 
 to reprint in this volume), is fully as characteristic of the 
 lighter and more playful side of Brooke's temperament. Both 
 these phases are combined in "The Great Lover," of which 
 Lascelles Abercrombie has written, "It is life he loves, and 
 not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar 
 details of life, remembered and catalogued with delightful 
 zest." 
 
Rupert Brooke 343 
 
 SONNET x 
 
 Oh! Death will find me, long before I tire 
 Of watching you ; and swing me suddenly 
 
 Into the shade and loneliness and mire 
 
 Of the last land! There, waiting patiently, 
 
 One day, I think, I'll feel a cool wind blowing, 
 
 See a slow light across the Stygian tide, 
 And hear the Dead about me stir, unknowing, 
 
 And tremble. And I shall know that you have died. 
 
 And watch you, a broad-browed and smiling dream, 
 Pass, light as ever, through the lightless host, 
 
 Quietly ponder, start, and sway, and gleam — 
 Most individual and bewildering ghost! — 
 
 And turn, and toss your brown delightful head 
 
 Amusedly, among the ancient Dead. 
 
 THE GREAT LOVER 1 
 
 I have been so great a lover: filled my days 
 So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise, 
 The pain, the calm, the astonishment, 
 Desire illimitable, and still content, 
 And all dear names men use, to cheat despair, 
 For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear 
 Our hearts at random down the dark of life. 
 Now, ere the unthinking silence on that strife 
 
 1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright 
 I 9 I 5> by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 
 
344 Rupert Brooke 
 
 Steals down, I would cheat drowsy Death so far, 
 
 My night shall be remembered for a star 
 
 That outshone all the suns of all men's days. 
 
 Shall I not crown them with immortal praise 
 
 Whom I have loved, who have given me, dared with me 
 
 High secrets, and in darkness knelt to see 
 
 The inenarrable godhead of delight? 
 
 Love is a flame; — we have beaconed the world's night. 
 
 A city: — and we have built it, these and I. 
 
 An emperor: — we have taught the world to die. 
 
 So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence, 
 
 And the high cause of Love's magnificence, 
 
 And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names 
 
 Golden for ever, eagles, crying flames, 
 
 And set them as a banner, that men may know, 
 
 To dare the generations, burn, and blow 
 
 Out on the wind of Time, shining and streaming. . . . 
 
 These I have loved: 
 
 White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
 Ringed with blue lines ; and feathery, faery dust ; 
 Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust 
 Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; 
 Rainbows ; and the blue bitter smoke of wood ; 
 And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; 
 And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, 
 Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; 
 Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon 
 Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss 
 Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is 
 Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen 
 Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; 
 The benison of hot water ; furs to touch ; 
 The good smell of old clothes; and other such — 
 
Rupert Brooke 345 
 
 The comfortable smell of friendly ringers, 
 Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers 
 About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . . 
 
 Dear names, 
 And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames; 
 Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring; 
 Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing: 
 Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain, 
 Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train; 
 Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam 
 That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home; 
 And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold 
 Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould; 
 Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew; 
 And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new; 
 And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; — 
 All these have been my loves. And these shall pass. 
 Whatever passes not, in the great hour, 
 Nor all my passion, all my prayers, have power 
 To hold them with me through the gate of Death. 
 They'll play deserter, turn with the traitor breath, 
 Break the high bond we made, and sell Love's trust 
 And sacramented covenant to the dust. 
 — Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake, 
 And give what's left of love again, and make 
 New friends, now strangers. . . . 
 
 But the best I've known, 
 Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown 
 About the winds of the world, and fades from brains 
 Of living men, and dies. 
 
 Nothing remains. 
 
 O dear my loves, O faithless, once again 
 This one last gift I give: that after men 
 
346 Rupert Brooke 
 
 Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed 
 
 Praise you, "All these were lovely''; say, "He loved/' 
 
 THE SOLDIER 1 
 
 If I should die, think only this of me; 
 
 That there's some corner of a foreign field 
 That is for ever England. There shall be 
 
 In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
 A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
 
 Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
 A body of England's, breathing English air, 
 
 Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 
 
 And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
 A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 
 
 Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England 
 given ; 
 Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
 And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
 In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 
 
 Joseph Plunkett 
 
 Joseph Plunkett was born in Ireland in 1887 and devoted 
 himself to the cause that has compelled so many martyrs. 
 He gave all his hours and finally his life in an effort to es- 
 tablish the freedom of his country. He was one of the lead- 
 ers of that group of Nationalists which included MacDonagh 
 and Padraic Pearse. 
 
 After the Easter Week uprising in Dublin in 1916, Plunkett 
 and his compatriots were arrested by the British Government 
 and executed. 
 
 1 From The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Copyright, 
 I 9 I 5> by John Lane Company and reprinted by permission. 
 
Joseph Plunkett 347 
 
 I SEE HIS BLOOD UPON THE ROSE 
 
 I see His blood upon the rose 
 And in the stars the glory of His eyes, 
 His body gleams amid eternal snows, 
 His tears fall from the skies. 
 
 I see His face in every flower; 
 
 The thunder and the singing of the birds 
 
 Are but His voice — and carven by His power, 
 
 Rocks are His written words. 
 
 All pathways by His feet are worn, 
 His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, 
 His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, 
 His cross is every tree. 
 
 F. W. Harvey 
 
 Harvey was a lance-corporal in the English army and was 
 in the German prison camp at Giitersloh when he wrote The 
 Bugler, one of the isolated great poems written during the 
 war. Much of his other verse is haphazard and journalistic, 
 although Gloucestershire Friends contains several lines that 
 glow with the colors of poetry. 
 
 THE BUGLER 
 
 God dreamed a man; 
 
 Then, having firmly shut 
 
 Life like a precious metal in his fist 
 
 Withdrew, His labour done. Thus did begin 
 
 Our various divinity and sin. 
 
 For some to ploughshares did the metal twist, 
 
 And others — dreaming empires — straightway cut 
 
348 F. W. Harvey 
 
 Crowns for their aching foreheads. Others beat 
 Long nails and heavy hammers for the feet 
 Of their forgotten Lord. (Who dares to boast 
 That he is guiltless?) Others coined it: most 
 Did with it — simply nothing. (Here again 
 Who cries his innocence?) Yet doth remain 
 Metal unmarred, to each man more or less, 
 Whereof to fashion perfect loveliness. 
 
 For me, I do but bear within my hand 
 
 (For sake of Him our Lord, now long forsaken) 
 
 A simple bugle such as may awaken 
 
 With one high morning note a drowsing man : 
 
 That wheresoe'er within my motherland 
 
 That sound may come, 'twill echo far and wide 
 
 Like pipes of battle calling up a clan, 
 
 Trumpeting men through beauty to God's side. 
 
 T. P. Cameron Wilson 
 
 "Tony" P. Cameron Wilson was born in South Devon in 
 1889 and was educated at Exeter and Oxford. He wrote one 
 novel besides several articles under the pseudonym Tipuca, a 
 euphonic combination of the first three initials of his name. 
 
 When the war broke out he was a teacher in a school at 
 Hindhead, Surrey; and, after many months of gruelling con- 
 flict, he was given a captaincy. He was killed in action by a 
 machine-gun bullet March 23, 1918, at the age of 29. 
 
 SPORTSMEN IN PARADISE 
 
 They left the fury of the fight, 
 And they were very tired. 
 
 The gates of Heaven were open quite, 
 Unguarded and unwired. 
 
T. P. Cameron Wilson 349 
 
 There was no sound of any gun, 
 
 The land was still and green; 
 Wide hills lay silent in the sun, 
 
 Blue valleys slept between. 
 
 They saw far-off a little wood 
 
 Stand up against the sky. 
 Knee-deep in grass a great tree stood; 
 
 Some lazy cows went by . . . 
 There were some rooks sailed overhead, 
 
 And once a church-bell pealed. 
 "God! but it's England," someone said, 
 
 "And there's a cricket-field l" 
 
 W. /. Turner 
 
 W. J. Turner was born in 1889 ana \ although little known 
 until his appearance in Georgian Poetry 1016-17, has writ- 
 ten no few delicate poems. The Hunter (1916) and The 
 Dark Wind (1918) both contain many imaginative and musical 
 verses. 
 
 ROMANCE 
 
 When I was but thirteen or so 
 
 I went into a gold land, 
 Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
 
 Took me by the hand. 
 
 My father died, my brother too, 
 They passed like fleeting dreams, 
 
 I stood where Popocatapetl 
 In the sunlight gleams. 
 
35° W. J. Turner 
 
 I dimly heard the master's voice 
 And boys far-off at play, — 
 
 Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
 Had stolen me away. 
 
 I walked in a great golden dream 
 To and fro from school — 
 
 Shining Popocatapetl 
 
 The dusty streets did rule. 
 
 I walked home with a gold dark boy 
 And never a word I'd say, 
 
 Chimborazo, Cotopaxi 
 
 Had taken my speech away. 
 
 I gazed entranced upon his face 
 Fairer than any flower — 
 
 O shining Popocatapetl 
 It was thy magic hour : 
 
 The houses, people, traffic seemed 
 Thin fading dreams by day; 
 
 Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, 
 
 They had stolen my soul away! 
 
 Francis Ledwidge 
 
 Francis Ledwidge was born in Slane, County Meath, Ireland, 
 in 1891. His brief life was fitful and romantic. He was, at 
 various times, a miner, a grocer's clerk, a farmer, a scavenger, 
 an experimenter in hypnotism, and, at the end, a soldier. He 
 served as a lance-corporal on the Flanders front and was 
 killed in July, 1917, at the age of 26 years. 
 
 Ledwidge's poetry is rich in nature imagery; his lines are 
 full of color, in the manner of Keats, and unaffectedly melo- 
 dious, 
 
Francis Ledwidge 351 
 
 AN EVENING IN ENGLAND 
 
 From its blue vase the rose of evening drops; 
 
 Upon the streams its petals float away. 
 
 The hills all blue with distance hide their tops 
 
 In the dim silence falling on the grey. 
 
 A little wind said "Hush!" and shook a spray 
 
 Heavy with May's white crop of opening bloom; 
 
 A silent bat went dipping in the gloom. 
 
 Night tells her rosary of stars full soon, 
 
 They drop from out her dark hand to her knees. 
 
 Upon a silhouette of woods, the moon 
 
 Leans on one horn as if beseeching ease 
 
 From all her changes which have stirred the seas. 
 
 Across the ears of Toil, Rest throws her veil. 
 
 I and a marsh bird only make a wail. 
 
 Irene Rutherford McLeod 
 
 Irene Rutherford McLeod, born August 21, 1891, has written 
 three volumes of direct verse, the best of which may be found 
 in Songs to Save a Soul (1915) and Before Dawn (1918). The 
 latter volume is dedicated to A. de Selincourt, to whom she 
 was married in 1919. 
 
 LONE DOG 
 
 I'm a lean dog, a keen dog, a w T ild dog, and lone; 
 I'm a rough dog, a tough dog, hunting on my own; 
 I'm a bad dog, a mad dog, teasing silly sheep; 
 I love to sit and bay the moon, to keep fat souls from sleep. 
 
 I'll never be a lap dog, licking dirty feet, 
 
 A sleek dog, a meek dog, cringing for my meat, 
 
352 Irene Rutherford McLeod 
 
 Not for me the fireside, the well-filled plate, 
 But shut door, and sharp stone, and cuff and kick and 
 hate. 
 
 Not for me the other dogs, running by my side, 
 
 Some have run a short while, but none of them would 
 
 bide. 
 O mine is still the lone trail, the hard trail, the best, 
 Wide wind, and wild stars, and hunger of the quest! 
 
 Richard Aldington 
 
 Richard Aldington was born in England in 1892, and edu- 
 cated at Dover College and London University. His first poems 
 were published in England in 1909; Images Old and New ap- 
 peared in 1915. 
 
 Aldington and "H. D." (Hilda Doolittle, his American wife) 
 are conceded to be two of the foremost Imagist poets; their 
 sensitive, firm and clean-cut lines put to shame their scores of 
 imitators. Aldington's War and Love (1918), is somewhat 
 more regular in pattern, more humanized in its warmth. 
 
 IMAGES 
 
 1 
 Like a gondola of green scented fruits 
 Drifting along the dank canals of Venice, 
 You, O exquisite one, 
 Have entered into my desolate city. 
 
 II 
 
 The blue smoke leaps 
 Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing. 
 So my love leaps forth toward you, 
 Vanishes and is renewed. 
 
Richard Aldington 353 
 
 in 
 A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky- 
 When the sunset is faint vermilion 
 In the mist among the tree-boughs 
 Art thou to me, my beloved. 
 
 IV 
 
 A young beech tree on the edge of the forest 
 
 Stands still in the evening, 
 
 Yet shudders through all its leaves in the light air 
 
 And seems to fear the stars — 
 
 So are you still and so tremble. 
 
 v 
 
 The red deer are high on the mountain, 
 They are beyond the last pine trees. 
 And my desires have run with them. 
 
 VT 
 
 The flower which the wind has shaken 
 Is soon filled again with rain ; 
 So does my heart fill slowly with tears, 
 O Foam-Driver, Wind-of-the-Vineyards, 
 Until you return. 
 
 Robert Nichols 
 
 Robert Nichols was born on the Isle of Wight in 1893. His 
 first volume, Invocations (1915), was published while he was 
 at the front, Nichols having joined the army while he was still 
 an undergraduate at Trinity College, Oxford. After serving 
 one year as second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, he 
 was incapacitated by shell shock, visiting America in 1918-19 
 as a lecturer. His Ardours and Endurances (1917) is the most 
 representative work of this poet, although The Flower of Flame 
 (1920) shows an advance in power. 
 
354 Robert Nichols 
 
 NEARER 
 
 Nearer and ever nearer . . . 
 My body, tired but tense, 
 Hovers 'twixt vague pleasure 
 And tremulous confidence. 
 
 Arms to have and to use them 
 And a soul to be made 
 Worthy, if not worthy; 
 If afraid, unafraid. 
 
 To endure for a little, 
 To endure and have done: 
 Men I love about me, 
 Over me the sun! 
 
 And should at last suddenly 
 Fly the speeding death, 
 The four great quarters of heaven 
 Receive this little breath. 
 
 Wilfred Owen 
 
 Wilfred Owen's biography is pitifully brief. He was born 
 at Oswestry on the 18th of March, 1893, was educated at the 
 Birkenhead Institute, matriculated at London University in 
 1910, obtained a private tutorship in 1913 near Bordeaux and 
 remained there for two years. In 1915, in spite of delicate 
 health, he joined the Artist's Rifles, served in France from 1916 
 to June 1917, when he was invalided home. Fourteen months 
 later, he returned to the Western Front, was awarded the 
 Military Cross for gallantry in October and was killed — with 
 tragic irony — a week before the armistice, on November 4, 1918, 
 while trying to get his men across the Sombre Canal. 
 
Wilfred Owen 355 
 
 Owen's name was unknown to the world until his friend 
 Siegfried Sassoon unearthed the contents of his posthumous 
 volume, Poems (1920), to which Sassoon wrote the introduction. 
 It was evident at once that here was one of the most important 
 contributions to the literature of the War, expressed by a poet 
 whose courage was only surpassed by his integrity of mind 
 and his nobility of soul. The restrained passion as well as 
 the pitiful outcries in Owen's poetry have a spiritual kinship 
 with Sassoon's stark verses. They reflect that second stage 
 of the war, when the glib patter wears thin and the easy 
 patriotics have a sardonic sound in the dug-outs and trenches. 
 "He never," writes Sassoon, "wrote his poems (as so many 
 war-poets did) to make the effect of a personal gesture. He 
 pitied others; he did not pity himself." 
 
 It is difficult to choose among the score of Owen's compelling 
 and compassionate poems. Time will undoubtedly make a 
 place for lines as authentic as the magnificent "Apologia pro 
 Poemate Meo," the poignant "Greater Love," the majestic dirge, 
 "Anthem for Doomed Youth," among others. 
 
 APOLOGIA PRO POEMATE MEO 
 
 I, too, saw God through mud — 
 
 The mud that cracked on cheeks when w T retches 
 
 smiled. 
 War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, 
 And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child. 
 
 Merry it was to laugh there — 
 
 Where death becomes absurd and life absurder. 
 For power was on us as we slashed bones bare 
 Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder. 
 
 I, too, have dropped off fear — 
 
 Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon, 
 And sailed my spirit surging, light and clear 
 Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn; 
 
356 Wilfred Owen 
 
 And witnessed exultation — 
 
 Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl, 
 Shine and lift up with passion of oblation, 
 Seraphic for an hour, though they were foul. 
 
 I have made fellowships — 
 
 Untold of happy lovers in old song. 
 For love is not the binding of fair lips 
 With the soft silk of eyes that look and long, 
 
 By Joy, whose ribbon slips, — 
 
 But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are 
 
 strong ; 
 Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips ; 
 Knit in the welding of the rifle-thong. 
 
 I have perceived much beauty 
 
 In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; 
 
 Heard music in the silentness of duty; 
 
 Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate. 
 
 Nevertheless, except you share 
 
 With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, 
 Whose world is but the trembling of a flare, 
 And heaven but as the highway for a shell, 
 
 You shall not hear their mirth: 
 
 You shall not come to think them well content 
 By any jest of mine. These men are worth 
 Your tears : You are not worth their merriment. 
 
Wilfred Owen 357 
 
 ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH 
 
 What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? 
 
 Only the monstrous anger of the guns. 
 
 Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle 
 Can patter out their hasty orisons. 
 No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells, 
 Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, — 
 The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; 
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires. 
 
 What candles may be held to speed them all? 
 
 Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes 
 Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. 
 
 The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; 
 Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, 
 And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. 
 
 Charles Hamilton Sorley 
 
 Charles Hamilton Sorley, who promised greater things than 
 any of the younger poets, was born at Old Aberdeen in May, 
 1895. He studied at Marlborough College and University 
 College, Oxford. He was finishing his studies abroad and was 
 on a walking-tour along the banks of the Moselle when the 
 war came. Sorley returned home to receive an immediate com- 
 mission in the 7th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. In Au- 
 gust, 1915, at the age of 20, he was made a captain. On Octo- 
 ber 13, 1915, he was killed in action near Hulluch. 
 
 Sorley left but one book, Marlborough and Other Poems. The 
 verse contained in it is sometimes rough but never rude. 
 Restraint, tolerance, and a dignity unusual for a boy of 20, 
 distinguish his poetry. 
 
358 Charles Hamilton Sorley 
 
 TWO SONNETS 
 
 i 
 
 Saints have adored the lofty soul of you. 
 
 Poets have whitened at your high renown. 
 
 We stand among the many millions who 
 
 Do hourly wait to pass your pathway down. 
 
 You, so familiar, once were strange: we tried 
 
 To live as of your presence unaware. 
 
 But now in every road on every side 
 
 We see your straight and steadfast signpost there. 
 
 I think it like that signpost in my land 
 
 Hoary and tall, which pointed me to go 
 
 Upward, into the hills, on the right hand, 
 
 Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and blow, 
 
 A homeless land and friendless, but a land 
 
 I did not know and that I wished to know. 
 
 II 
 
 Such, such is death: no triumph: no defeat: 
 Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean, 
 A merciful putting away of what has been. 
 
 And this we know : Death is not Life effete, 
 
 Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen 
 
 So marvellous things know well the end not yet. 
 
 Victor and vanquished are a-one in death: 
 Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say, 
 "Come, what was your record when you drew breath?" 
 But a big blot has hid each yesterday 
 
Charles Hamilton Sorley 359 
 
 So poor, so manifestly incomplete. 
 And your bright Promise, withered long and sped, 
 Is touched; stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet 
 And blossoms and is you, when you are dead. 
 
 TO GERMANY 
 
 You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed, 
 And no man claimed the conquest of your land. 
 But gropers both, through fields of thought confined, 
 We stumble and we do not understand. 
 You only saw your future bigly planned, 
 And we the tapering paths of our own mind, 
 And in each other's dearest ways we stand, 
 And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind. 
 
 When it is peace, then we may view again 
 With new-won eyes each other's truer form 
 And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm 
 We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain, 
 When it is peace. But until peace, the storm, 
 The darkness and the thunder and the rain. 
 
 Robert Graves 
 
 Robert Graves was born in England of mixed Irish, Scottish 
 and German stock, July 26, 1895. One of "the three rhyming 
 musketeers" (the other two being the poets Siegfried Sassoon 
 and Robert Nichols), he was one of the several writers who, 
 roused by the war and giving himself to his country, re- 
 fused to glorify warfare or chant new hymns of hate. Like 
 Sassoon, Graves also reacts against the storm of fury and 
 blood-lust (see his poem "To a Dead Boche"), but, fortified 
 by a lighter and more whimsical spirit, where Sassoon is vio- 
 lent, Graves is volatile; where Sassoon is bitter Graves is 
 almost blithe. 
 
360 Robert Graves 
 
 An unconquerable gayety rises from his Fairies and Fusiliers 
 (1917), a surprising and healing humor that is warmly indi- 
 vidual. In Country Sentiment (1919) Graves turns to a fresh 
 and more serious simplicity. A buoyant fancy ripples beneath 
 the most archaic of his ballads and a quaintly original turn of 
 mind saves them from their own echoes. 
 
 IT'S A QUEER TIME 
 
 It's hard to know if you're alive or dead 
 
 When steel and fire go roaring through your head. 
 
 One moment you'll be crouching at your gun 
 Traversing, mowing heaps down half in fun: 
 The next, you choke and clutch at your right breast — 
 No time to think — leave all — and off you go . . . 
 To Treasure Island where the Spice winds blow, 
 To lovely groves of mango, quince, and lime — 
 Breathe no good-bye, but ho, for the Red West! 
 It's a queer time. 
 
 You're charging madly at them yelling "Fag!" 
 When somehow something gives and your feet drag. 
 You fall and strike your head; yet feel no pain 
 And find . . . you're digging tunnels through the hay 
 In the Big Barn, 'cause it's a rainy day. 
 Oh, springy hay, and lovely beams to climb ! 
 You're back in the old sailor suit again. 
 It's a queer time. 
 
 Or you'll be dozing safe in vour dug-out — 
 A great roar — the trench shakes and falls about — 
 You're struggling, gasping, struggling, then . . .hullo! 
 Elsie comes tripping gaily down the trench, 
 
Robert Graves 361 
 
 Hanky to nose — that lyddite makes a stench — 
 Getting her pinafore all over grime. 
 Funny! because she died ten years ago! 
 It's a queer time. 
 
 The trouble is, things happen much too quick; 
 Up jump the Boches, rifles thump and click, 
 You stagger, and the whole scene fades away; 
 Even good Christians don't like passing straight 
 From Tipperary or their Hymn of Hate 
 To Alleluiah-chanting, and the chime 
 Of golden harps . . . and . . . I'm not well today . . . 
 It's a queer time. 
 
 NEGLECTFUL EDWARD 
 
 Nancy 
 Edward, back from the Indian Sea, 
 "What have you brought for Nancy?" 
 
 Edward 
 "A rope of pearls and a gold earring, 
 And a bird of the East that will not sing. 
 A carven tooth, a box with a key — " 
 
 Nancy 
 "God be praised you are back," says she, 
 "Have you nothing more for your Nancy?" 
 
 Edward 
 "Long as I sailed the Indian Sea 
 I gathered all for your fancy: 
 Toys and silk and jewels I bring, 
 And a bird of the East that will not sing: 
 What more can you want, dear girl, from me?" 
 
362 Robert Graves 
 
 Nancy 
 "God be praised you are back," said she, 
 "Have you nothing better for Nancy?" 
 
 Edward 
 "Safe and home from the Indian Sea, 
 And nothing to take your fancy?" 
 
 Nancy 
 "You can keep your pearls and your gold earring, 
 And your bird of the East that will not sing, 
 But, Ned, have you nothing more for me 
 Than heathenish gew-gaw toys?" says she, 
 "Have you nothing better for Nancy?" 
 
 I WONDER WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO 
 BE DROWNED? 
 
 Look at my knees, 
 
 That island rising from the steamy seas! 
 
 The candle's a tall lightship; my two hands 
 
 Are boats and barges anchored to the sands, 
 
 With mighty cliffs all round; 
 
 They're full of wine and riches from far lands. . . 
 
 / wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 
 
 I can make caves, 
 
 By lifting up the island and huge waves 
 
 And storms, and then with head and ears well under 
 
 Blow bubbles with a monstrous roar like thunder, 
 
 A bull-of-Bashan sound. 
 
 The seas run high and the boats split asunder . . 
 
 / wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 
 
Robert Graves 363 
 
 The thin soap slips 
 
 And slithers like a shark under the ships. 
 
 My toes are on the soap-dish — that's the effect 
 
 Of my huge storms; an iron steamer's wrecked. 
 
 The soap slides round and round ; 
 
 He's biting the old sailors, I expect. . . . 
 
 / wonder what it feels like to be drowned? 
 
 Louis Golding 
 
 Louis Golding was born in Manchester in November, 1895 
 and received his early education at Manchester Grammar 
 School. War found him in 1914 and took him to Macedonia 
 and France, where he did considerable social and educational 
 work in several armies. 
 
 On his return to England in 1919, he published his first vol- 
 ume of poems, Sorrow of War y and in the same year resumed 
 his career at Oxford. The succeeding collection, Shepherd 
 Singing Ragtime (1921) and his remarkable novel Forward 
 From Babylon (1921), appeared while he was still an under- 
 graduate. 
 
 Golding is richly gifted ; he is a realist with a romantic, 
 almost a rhapsodic, vision. Anger, pity, irony, find a ringing 
 if not altogether controlled voice in his prose no less than in 
 his rhymes. 
 
 PLOUGHMAN AT THE PLOUGH 
 
 He, behind the straight plough, stands 
 Stalwart; firm shafts in firm hands. 
 
 Naught he cares for wars and naught 
 For the fierce disease of thought. 
 
 Only for the winds, the sheer 
 Naked impulse of the year, 
 
364 Louis Golding 
 
 Only for the soil which stares 
 Clean into God's face, he cares. 
 
 In the stark might of his deed 
 There is more than art or creed; 
 
 In his wrist more strength is hid 
 Than the monstrous Pyramid; 
 
 Stauncher than stern Everest 
 Be the muscles of his breast; 
 
 Not the Atlantic sweeps a flood 
 Potent as the ploughman's blood. 
 
 He, his horse, his ploughshare, these 
 Are the only verities. 
 
 Dawn to dusk, with God he stands, 
 The Earth poised on his broad hands. 
 
 THE SINGER OF HIGH STATE 
 
 On hills too harsh for firs to climb, 
 
 Where eagle dare not hatch her brood, 
 On the sheer peak of Solitude, 
 With anvils of black granite crude 
 
 He beats austerities of rhyme. 
 
 Such godlike stuff his spirit drinks, 
 He made great odes of tempest there. 
 The steel-winged eagle, if he dare 
 To cleave these tracts of frozen air, 
 
 Hearing such music, swoops and sinks. 
 
Louis Golding 365 
 
 Stark tumults, which no tense night awes, 
 
 Of godly love and titan hate 
 
 Down crags of song reverberate. 
 
 Held by the Singer of High State, 
 Battalions of the midnight pause. 
 
 On hills uplift from Space and Time, 
 On the sheer peak of Solitude, 
 With .stars to give his furnace food, 
 On anvils of black granite crude 
 
 He beats austerities of rhyme. 
 
A REFERENCE BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The following thirteen volumes deal, in considerable 
 detail, with many of the poets, groups and tendencies 
 considered in this collection. A few treat principally of 
 the period between i860 and 1890; the majority, how- 
 ever, reflect the shifting course of contemporary poetry. 
 Most of the thirteen contain liberal quotations, references, 
 and suggestions for supplementary reading. 
 
 Aiken, Conrad. Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry. 
 
 Alfred A. Knopf. 1919. 
 Boynton, Percy H. A History of American Literature. Ginn 
 
 and Company. 1919. 
 Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming of Age. (Chapters II 
 
 and III.) B. W. Huebsch. 1915. 
 Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Poetry. Charles Scribner's 
 
 Sons. 1913. 
 Lowell, Amy. Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, The 
 
 Macmillan Company. 1917. 
 Lowes, John Livingston. Convention and Revolt in Poetry. 
 
 Houghton Mifflin Company. 1919. 
 Monroe, Harriet, and Alice Corbin Henderson. The New 
 
 Poetry — An Anthology. The Macmillan Company. 1917. 
 Morris, Lloyd R. The Young Idea (An Anthology of Opin- 
 ion). Duffield and Company. 1917. 
 Newbolt, Henry. A New Study of English Poetry. E. P. 
 
 Dutton and Company. 1919. 
 Pattee, Fred Lewis. A History of American Literature Since 
 
 1870. The Century Company. 1915. 
 Rittenhouse, Jessie B. The Younger American Poets. (1860- 
 
 1900). Little, Brown and Company. 1904. 
 Untermeyer, Louis. The New Era in American Poetry. Henry 
 
 Holt and Company. 1919. 
 Wilkinson, Marguerite. New Voices, The Macmillan Com- 
 pany. 1919. 
 
 367 
 
Index 
 
 "iE," 270-272 
 
 Abercrombie, Lascelles, 325-327 
 Adams, Leonie, 211-213 
 Aiken, Conrad, 195-200 
 Aldington, Richard, 17, 352-353 
 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 5, 28- 
 30 
 
 Benet, Stephen Vincent, 210- 
 
 211 
 Benet, William Rose, 179-183 
 Binyon, Laurence, 273-274 
 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen, 229- 
 
 230 
 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 200-202 
 Booth, Eva Gore, 282-283 
 Branch, Anna Hempstead, 99- 
 
 103 
 Bridges, Robert, 233-234 
 Brooke, Rupert, 225, 342-346 
 Burton, Richard, 66-67 
 Bynner, Witter, 137-140 
 
 Campbell, Joseph, 325 
 Carman, Bliss, 10, 63-66 
 Carryl, Charles E., 43-45 
 Carryl, Guy Wetmore, 92-96 
 Cawein, Madison, 72-73 
 Chesterton, G. K., 292-298 
 Clark, Badger, 149-152 
 Colum, Padraic, 323-324 
 Conkling, Grace Hazard, 124- 
 
 125 . 
 Conkling, Hilda, 213-214 
 
 Crane, Stephen, 85-86 
 
 Crapsey, Adelaide, 123-124 
 
 Daly, T. A., 87-89 
 Davidson, John, 243-244 
 
 Davies, W. H., 225, 276-279 
 Deane, Anthony C, 274-276 
 De la Mare, Walter, 225, 287- 
 
 291 
 Dickinson, Emily, 25-28 
 Dobson, Austin, 227-229 
 Dowson, Ernest, 269-270 
 Drinkwater, John, 329-330 
 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 89-92 
 
 Eastman, Max, 153-154 
 
 Field, Eugene, 9, 48-51 
 Flecker, James Elroy, 334 
 Fletcher, John Gould, 17, 170- 
 
 176 
 Freeman, John, 336-337 
 Frost, Robert, 14-16, 109-117 
 
 Gibson, W. W., 224, 303-307 
 Golding, Louis, 363-365 
 Graves, Robert, 225, 359-363 
 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 62-63 
 
 "H. D.," 17, 176-178 
 Hardy, Thomas, 230-232 
 Harte, Bret, 8, 32-37 
 Harvey, F. W., 347"34-8 
 Hay, John, 9, 30-32 
 Henley, William Ernest, 219, 
 
 237-239 
 Hinkson, Katharine Tynan, 
 
 252-253 
 Hodgson, Ralph, 225, 284-286 
 Housman, A. E., 249-252 
 Hovey, Richard, 10, 67-72 
 
 Imagists, the, 17-19, 176 
 
 369 
 
370 
 
 Ind 
 
 ex 
 
 Johns, Orrick, 187-188 
 Johnson, Lionel, 268-269 
 
 Kemp, Harry, 152-153 
 Kilmer, Aline, 191-193 
 Kilmer, Joyce, 184-187 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 222-223, 
 
 258-267 
 Knibbs, H. H., 20, 97-99 
 Kreymborg, Alfred, 147-149 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 232-233 
 Lanier, Sidney, 9, 40-43 
 Lawrence, D. H., 225, 335-336 
 Ledwidge, Francis, 350-351 
 Leslie, Shane, 337-338 
 Lincoln, 22, 52, 78, 84, 139, 142, 
 
 172 
 Lindsay, Vachel, 20-21, 125- 
 
 135 
 Lowell, Amy, 17-19, 103-107 
 
 Macleod, Fiona, 240-241 
 Markham, Edwin, 12, 51-56 
 Masefield, John, 223-224, 298- 
 
 303 
 Masters, Edgar Lee, 14, 82-85 
 McCrae, John, 287 
 McLeod, Irene R., 351-352 
 Mew, Charlotte, 225, 310-312 
 Meynell, Alice, 236-237 
 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 202- 
 
 210 
 Miller, Joaquin, 8-9, 37-39 
 Monro, Harold, 312-315 
 Moody, William Vaughn, 11, 
 
 73-75 
 
 Neihardt, John G., 136-137 
 Newbolt, Henry, 226, 253-254 
 Nichols, Robert, 353-354 
 Noyes, Alfred, 315-323 
 
 O'Neill, Moira, 283-284 
 Oppenheim, James, 21, 140- 
 H5 
 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 235- 
 
 236 
 O'Sullivan, Seumas, 309-310 
 Owen, Wilfred, 225, 354-357 
 
 Phillips, Stephen, 272-273 
 Plunkett, Joseph, 346-347 
 Pound, Ezra, 17, 159-162 
 
 Reese, Lizette Woodworth, 59- 
 
 60 
 Ridge, Lola, 145-147 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 4, 45- 
 
 48 
 Robinson, E. A., 13-14, 76-82 
 Russell, George William, 270- 
 
 272 
 Russell, Irwin, 9, 56-59 
 
 Sandburg, Carl, 16-17, 117-122 
 Sassoon, Siegfried, 225, 338- 
 
 342 
 Seeger, Alan, 188-189 
 Sharp, William {see Fiona 
 
 Macleod) 
 Sherman, Frank Dempster, 60- 
 
 j2 
 
 Sill, Edward Rowland, 8, 40 
 Sorley, Charles H., 357-359 
 Squire, J. C, 330-332 
 Stephens, James, 225, 327-329 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 239- 
 
 240 
 Sterling, George, 75 
 Symons, Arthur, 254-255 
 Synge, J. M., 220-221, 279-282 
 
 Teasdale, Sara, 156-159 
 Thomas, Edward, 308-309 
 Thompson, Francis, 246-249 
 Tietjens, Eunice, 154-156 
 Torrence, Ridgely, 107-109 
 Turner, W. J., 349-350 
 Tynan, Katharine, 252-253 
 
 Untermeyer, Jean Starr, 167- 
 170 
 
Index 371 
 
 Untermeyer, Louis, 162-167 Wilde, Oscar, 218, 242-243 
 
 Wilson, T. P. C, 348-349 
 
 Watson, William, 244-245 Wylie, Elinor, 193-195 
 Wheelock, John Hall, 183-184 
 Whitman, Walt, 4, 5 f 8 
 
 Wickham, Anna, 332-333 Yeats, William Butler, 220, 
 
 Widdemer, Margaret, 189-191 256-258 
 
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