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Title: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Volume I
October-March, 1912-13
Author: Various
Editor: Harriet Monroe
Release Date: July 15, 2013 [EBook #43224]
Language: English
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Poetry
A Magazine of Verse
VOLUME I.
October-March, 1912-13
Harriet Monroe ~ Editor
[Illustration]
_Reprinted with the permission
of the original publisher._
A. M. S. REPRINT CO.
New York, New York
Copyright
By HARRIET MONROE
1912-1913
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 1
OCTOBER, 1912
POETRY
I
It is a little isle amid bleak seas--
An isolate realm of garden, circled round
By importunity of stress and sound,
Devoid of empery to master these.
At most, the memory of its streams and bees,
Borne to the toiling mariner outward-bound,
Recalls his soul to that delightful ground;
But serves no beacon toward his destinies.
It is a refuge from the stormy days,
Breathing the peace of a remoter world
Where beauty, like the musing dusk of even,
Enfolds the spirit in its silver haze;
While far away, with glittering banners furled,
The west lights fade, and stars come out in heaven.
II
It is a sea-gate, trembling with the blast
Of powers that from the infinite sea-plain roll,
A whelming tide. Upon the waiting soul
As on a fronting rock, thunders the vast
Groundswell; its spray bursts heavenward, and drives past
In fume and sound articulate of the whole
Of ocean's heart, else voiceless; on the shoal
Silent; upon the headland clear at last.
From darkened sea-coasts without stars or sun,
Like trumpet-voices in a holy war,
Utter the heralds tidings of the deep.
And where men slumber, weary and undone,
Visions shall come, incredible hopes from far,--
And with high passion shatter the bonds of sleep.
_Arthur Davison Ficke_
I AM THE WOMAN
I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker,
Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek,
Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek,
Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker,
Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek,
Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak.
I am she that is terribly fashioned, the creature
Wrought in God's perilous mood, in His unsafe hour.
The morning star was mute, beholding my feature,
Seeing the rapture I was, the shame, and the power,
Scared at my manifold meaning; he heard me call
"O fairest among ten thousand, acceptable brother!"
And he answered not, for doubt; till he saw me crawl
And whisper down to the secret worm, "O mother,
Be not wroth in the ancient house; thy daughter forgets not at all!"
I am the Woman, fleër away,
Soft withdrawer back from the maddened mate,
Lurer inward and down to the gates of day
And crier there in the gate,
"What shall I give for thee, wild one, say!
The long, slow rapture and patient anguish of life,
Or art thou minded a swifter way?
Ask if thou canst, the gold, but oh if thou must,
Good is the shining dross, lovely the dust!
Look at me, I am the Woman, harlot and heavenly wife;
Tell me thy price, be unashamed; I will assuredly pay!"
I am also the Mother: of two that I bore
I comfort and feed the slayer, feed and comfort the slain.
Did they number my daughters and sons? I am mother of more!
Many a head they marked not, here in my bosom has lain,
Babbling with unborn lips in a tongue to be,
Far, incredible matters, all familiar to me.
Still would the man come whispering,
"Wife!" but many a time my breast
Took him not as a husband: I soothed him and laid him to rest
Even as the babe of my body, and knew him for such.
My mouth is open to speak, that was dumb too much!
I say to you I am the Mother; and under the sword
Which flamed each way to harry us forth from the Lord,
I saw Him young at the portal, weeping and staying the rod,
And I, even I was His mother, and I yearned as the mother of God.
I am also the Spirit. The Sisters laughed
When I sat with them dumb in the portals, over my lamp,
Half asleep in the doors: for my gown was raught
Off at the shoulder to shield from the wind and the rain
The wick I tended against the mysterious hour
When the Silent City of Being should ring with song,
As the Lord came in with Life to the marriage bower.
"Look!" laughed the elder Sisters; and crimson with shame
I hid my breast away from the rosy flame.
"Ah!" cried the leaning Sisters, pointing, doing me wrong,
"Do you see?" laughed the wanton Sisters,
"She will get her lover ere long!"
And it was but a little while till unto my need
He was given indeed,
And we walked where waxing world after world went by;
And I said to my lover, "Let us begone,
"Oh, let us begone, and try
"Which of them all the fairest to dwell in is,
"Which is the place for us, our desirable clime!"
But he said, "They are only the huts and the little villages,
Pleasant to go and lodge in rudely over the vintage-time!"
Scornfully spake he, being unwise,
Being flushed at heart because of our walking together.
But I was mute with passionate prophecies;
My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,
While universe drifted by after still universe.
Then I cried, "Alas, we must hasten and lodge therein,
One after one, and in every star that they shed!
A dark and a weary thing is come on our head--
To search obedience out in the bosom of sin,
To listen deep for love when thunders the curse;
For O my love, behold where the Lord hath planted
In every star in the midst His dangerous Tree!
Still I must pluck thereof and bring unto thee,
Saying, "The coolness for which all night we have panted;
Taste of the goodly thing, I have tasted first!"
Bringing us noway coolness, but burning thirst,
Giving us noway peace, but implacable strife,
Loosing upon us the wounding joy and the wasting sorrow of life!
I am the Woman, ark of the Law and sacred arm to upbear it,
Heathen trumpet to overthrow and idolatrous sword to shear it:
Yea, she whose arm was round the neck of the morning star at song,
Is she who kneeleth now in the dust and cries at the secret door,
"Open to me, O sleeping mother! The gate is heavy and strong.
"Open to me, I am come at last; be wroth with thy child no more.
"Let me lie down with thee there in the dark, and be slothful
with thee as before!"
_William Vaughan Moody_
TO WHISTLER, AMERICAN
_On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery._
You also, our first great,
Had tried all ways;
Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,
And this much gives me heart to play the game.
Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong,
And much of little moment, and some few
Perfect as Dürer!
"In the Studio" and these two portraits,[A] if I had my choice!
And then these sketches in the mood of Greece?
You had your searches, your uncertainties,
And this is good to know--for us, I mean,
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art.
You were not always sure, not always set
To hiding night or tuning "symphonies";
Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried
And stretched and tampered with the media.
You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts
Show us there's chance at least of winning through.
_Ezra Pound_
[Footnote A:
"Brown and Gold--de Race."
"Grenat et Or--Le Petit Cardinal."
]
MIDDLE-AGED
A STUDY IN AN EMOTION
"'Tis but a vague, invarious delight
As gold that rains about some buried king.
As the fine flakes,
When tourists frolicking
Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light
Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes
And start to inspect some further pyramid;
As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath
Their transitory step and merriment,
Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus
Gains yet another crust
Of useless riches for the occupant,
So I, the fires that lit once dreams
Now over and spent,
Lie dead within four walls
And so now love
Rains down and so enriches some stiff case,
And strews a mind with precious metaphors,
And so the space
Of my still consciousness
Is full of gilded snow,
The which, no cat has eyes enough
To see the brightness of."
_Ezra Pound_
FISH OF THE FLOOD
Fish of the flood, on the bankèd billow
Thou layest thy head in dreams;
Sliding as slides thy shifting pillow,
One with the streams
Of the sea is thy spirit.
Gean-tree, thou spreadest thy foaming flourish
Abroad in the sky so grey;
It not heeding if it thee nourish,
Thou dost obey,
Happy, its moving.
So, God, thy love it not needeth me,
Only thy life, that I blessèd be.
_Emilia Stuart Lorimer_
TO ONE UNKNOWN
I have seen the proudest stars
That wander on through space,
Even the sun and moon,
But not your face.
I have heard the violin,
The winds and waves rejoice
In endless minstrelsy,
Yet not your voice.
I have touched the trillium,
Pale flower of the land,
Coral, anemone,
And not your hand.
I have kissed the shining feet
Of Twilight lover-wise,
Opened the gates of Dawn--
Oh not your eyes!
I have dreamed unwonted things,
Visions that witches brew,
Spoken with images,
Never with you.
_Helen Dudley_
SYMPHONY OF A MEXICAN GARDEN
1. THE GARDEN _Poco sostenuto_ in A major
The laving tide of inarticulate air.
_Vivace_ in A major
The iris people dance.
2. THE POOL _Allegretto_ in A minor
Cool-hearted dim familiar of the doves.
3. THE BIRDS _Presto_ in F major
I keep a frequent tryst.
_Presto meno assai_
The blossom-powdered orange-tree.
4. TO THE MOON _Allegro con brio_ in A major
Moon that shone on Babylon.
TO MOZART
_What junipers are these, inlaid
With flame of the pomegranate tree?
The god of gardens must have made
This still unrumored place for thee
To rest from immortality,
And dream within the splendid shade
Some more elusive symphony
Than orchestra has ever played._
I In A major
_Poco sostenuto_
The laving tide of inarticulate air
Breaks here in flowers as the sea in foam,
But with no satin lisp of failing wave:
The odor-laden winds are very still.
An unimagined music here exhales
In upcurled petal, dreamy bud half-furled,
And variations of thin vivid leaf:
Symphonic beauty that some god forgot.
If form could waken into lyric sound,
This flock of irises like poising birds
Would feel song at their slender feathered throats,
And pour into a grey-winged aria
Their wrinkled silver fingermarked with pearl;
That flight of ivory roses high along
The airy azure of the larkspur spires
Would be a fugue to puzzle nightingales
With too-evasive rapture, phrase on phrase.
Where the hibiscus flares would cymbals clash,
And the black cypress like a deep bassoon
Would hum a clouded amber melody.
But all across the trudging ragged chords
That are the tangled grasses in the heat,
The mariposa lilies fluttering
Like trills upon some archangelic flute,
The roses and carnations and divine
Small violets that voice the vanished god,
There is a lure of passion-poignant tone
Not flower-of-pomegranate--that finds the heart
As stubborn oboes do--can breathe in air,
Nor poppies, nor keen lime, nor orange-bloom.
What zone of wonder in the ardent dusk
Of trees that yearn and cannot understand,
Vibrates as to the golden shepherd horn
That stirs some great adagio with its cry
And will not let it rest?
O tender trees,
Your orchid, like a shepherdess of dreams,
Calls home her whitest dream from following
Elusive laughter of the unmindful god!
_Vivace_
The iris people dance
Like any nimble faun:
To rhythmic radiance
They foot it in the dawn.
They dance and have no need
Of crystal-dripping flute
Or chuckling river-reed,--
Their music hovers mute.
The dawn-lights flutter by
All noiseless, but they know!
Such children of the sky
Can hear the darkness go.
But does the morning play
Whatever they demand--
Or amber-barred bourrée
Or silver saraband?
THE POOL
II. In A minor
_Allegretto_
Cool-hearted dim familiar of the doves,
Thou coiled sweet water where they come to tell
Their mellow legends and rehearse their loves,
As what in April or in June befell
And thou must hear of,--friend of Dryades
Who lean to see where flower should be set
To star the dusk of wreathed ivy braids,
They have not left thy trees,
Nor do tired fauns thy crystal kiss forget,
Nor forest-nymphs astray from distant glades.
Thou feelest with delight their showery feet
Along thy mossy margin myrtle-starred,
And thine the heart of wildness quick to beat
At imprint of shy hoof upon thy sward:
Yet who could know thee wild who art so cool,
So heavenly-minded, templed in thy grove
Of plumy cedar, larch and juniper?
O strange ecstatic Pool,
What unknown country art thou dreaming of,
Or temple than this garden lovelier?
Who made thy sky the silver side of leaves,
And poised its orchid like a swan-white moon
Whose disc of perfect pallor half deceives
The mirror of thy limpid green lagoon,
He loveth well thy ripple-feathered moods,
Thy whims at dusk, thy rainbow look at dawn!
Dream thou no more of vales Olympian:
Where pale Olympus broods
There were no orchid white as moon or swan,
No sky of leaves, no garden-haunting Pan!
THE BIRDS
III. In F major
_Presto_
I keep a frequent tryst
With whirr and shower of wings:
Some inward melodist
Interpreting all things
Appoints the place, the hours.
Dazzle and sense of flowers,
Though not the least leaf stir,
May mean a tanager:
How rich the silence is until he sings!
The smoke-tree's cloudy white
Has fire within its breast.
What winged mere delight
There hides as in a nest
And fashions of its flame
Music without a name?
So might an opal sing
If given thrilling wing,
And voice for lyric wildness unexpressed.
In grassy dimness thatched
With tangled growing things,
A troubadour rose-patched,
With velvet-shadowed wings,
Seeks a sustaining fly.
Who else unseen goes by
Quick-pattering through the hush?
Some twilight-footed thrush
Or finch intent on small adventurings?
I have no time for gloom,
For gloom what time have I?
The orange is in bloom;
Emerald parrots fly
Out of the cypress-dusk;
Morning is strange with musk.
The wild canary now
Jewels the lemon-bough,
And mocking-birds laugh in the rose's room.
THE ORANGE TREE
In D Major
_Presto meno assai_
The blossom-powdered orange tree,
For all her royal speechlessness,
Out of a heart of ecstasy
Is singing, singing, none the less!
Light as a springing fountain, she
Is spray above the wind-sleek turf:
Dream-daughter of the moon's white sea
And sister to its showered surf!
TO THE MOON
IV. In A major
_Allegro con brio_
Moon that shone on Babylon,
Searching out the gardens there,
Could you find a fairer one
Than this garden, anywhere?
Did Damascus at her best
Hide such beauty in her breast?
When you flood with creamy light
Vines that net the sombre pine,
Turn the shadowed iris white,
Summon cactus stars to shine,
Do you free in silvered air
Wistful spirits everywhere?
Here they linger, there they pass,
And forget their native heaven:
Flit along the dewy grass
Rare Vittoria, Sappho, even!
And the hushed magnolia burns
Incense in her gleaming urns.
When the nightingale demands
Word with Keats who answers him,
Shakespeare listens--understands--
Mindful of the cherubim;
And the South Wind dreads to know
Mozart gone as seraphs go.
Moon of poets dead and gone,
Moon to gods of music dear,
Gardens they have looked upon
Let them re-discover here:
Rest--and dream a little space
Of some heart-remembered place!
_Grace Hazard Conkling_
EDITORIAL COMMENT
AS IT WAS
Once upon a time, when man was new in the woods of the world, when his
feet were scarred with jungle thorns and his hands were red with the
blood of beasts, a great king rose who gathered his neighbors together,
and subdued the wandering tribes. Strange cunning was his, for he ground
the stones to an edge together, and bound them with thongs to sticks;
and he taught his people to pry apart the forest, and beat back the
ravenous beasts. And he bade them honeycomb the mountainside with caves,
to dwell therein with their women. And the most beautiful women the king
took for his own, that his wisdom might not perish from the earth. And
he led the young men to war and conquered all the warring tribes from
the mountains to the sea. And when fire smote a great tree out of
heaven, and raged through the forest till the third sun, he seized a
burning brand and lit an altar to his god. And there, beside the
ever-burning fire, he sat and made laws and did justice. And his people
loved and feared him.
And the king grew old. And for seven journeys of the sun from morn to
morn he moved not, neither uttered word. And the hearts of the people
were troubled, but none dared speak to the king's despair; neither wise
men nor warriors dared cry out unto him.
Now the youngest son of the king was a lad still soft of flesh, who had
never run to battle not sat in council nor stood before the king. And
his heart yearned for his father, and he bowed before his mother and
said, "Give me thy blessing, for I have words within me for the king;
yea, as the sea sings to the night with waves will my words roll in
singing unto his grief." And his mother said, "Go, my son; for thou hast
words of power and soothing, and the king shall be healed."
So the youth went forth and bowed him toward the king's seat. And the
wise men and warriors laid hands upon him, and said, "Who art thou, that
thou shouldst go in ahead of us to him who sitteth in darkness?" And the
king's son rose, and stretched forth his arms, and said, "Unhand me and
let me go, ye silent ones, who for seven sun-journeys have watched in
darkness and uttered no word of light! Unhand me, for as a fig-tree with
fruit, so my heart is rich with words for the king."
Then he put forth his strength and strode on singing softly, and bowed
him before the king. And he spake the king's great deeds in cunning
words--his wars and city-carvings and wise laws, his dominion over men
and beasts and the thick woods of the earth; his greeting of the gods
with fire.
And lo, the king lifted up his head and stretched forth his arms and
wept. "Yea, all these things have I done," he said, "and they shall
perish with me. My death is upon me, and I shall die, and the tribes I
have welded together shall be broken apart, and the beasts shall win
back their domain, and the green jungle shall overgrow my mansions. Lo,
the fire shall go out on the altar of the gods, and my glory shall be as
a crimson cloud that the night swallows up in darkness."
Then the young man lifted up his voice and cried: "Oh, king, be
comforted! Thy deeds shall not pass as a cloud, neither shall thy laws
be strewn before the wind. For I will carve thy glory in rich and
rounded words--yea, I will string thy deeds together in jewelled beads
of perfect words that thy sons shall wear on their hearts forever."
"Verily thy words are rich with song," said the king; "but thou shalt
die, and who will utter them? Like twinkling foam is the speech of man's
mouth; like foam from a curling wave that vanishes in the sun."
"Nay, let thy heart believe me, oh king my father," said the youth. "For
the words of my mouth shall keep step with the ripple of waves and the
beating of wings; yea, they shall mount with the huge paces of the sun
in heaven, that cease not for my ceasing. Men shall sound them on
suckling tongues still soft with milk, they shall run into battle to the
tune of thy deeds, and kindle their fire with the breath of thy wisdom.
And thy glory shall be ever living, as a jewel of jasper from the
earth--yea, as the green jewel of jasper carven into a god for the rod
of thy power, oh king, and of the power of thy sons forever."
The king sat silent till the going-down of the sun. Then lifted he his
head, and stroked his beard, and spake: "Verily the sun goes down, and
my beard shines whiter than his, and I shall die. Now therefore stand at
my right hand, O son of my wise years, child of my dreams. Stand at my
right hand, and fit thy speech to music, that men may hold in their
hearts thy rounded words. Forever shalt thou keep thy place, and utter
thy true tale in the ears of the race. And woe be unto them that hear
thee not! Verily that generation shall pass as a cloud, and its glory
shall be as a tree that withers. For thou alone shalt win the flying
hours to thee, and keep the beauty of them for the joy of men forever."
_H. M._
ON THE READING OF POETRY
In the brilliant pages of his essay on Jean François Millet, Romain
Rolland says that Millet, as a boy, used to read the Bucolics and the
Georgics "with enchantment" and was "seized by emotion--when he came to
the line, 'It is the hour when the great shadows seek the plain.'
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae?"
To the lover and student of poetry, this incident has an especial charm
and significance. There is something fine in the quick sympathy of an
artist in one kind, for beauty expressed by the master of another
medium. The glimpse M. Rolland gives us of one of the most passionate
art-students the world has ever known, implies with fresh grace a truth
Anglo-Saxons are always forgetting--that poetry is one of the great
humanities, that poetry is one of the great arts of expression.
Many of our customs conspire to cause, almost to force, this forgetting.
Thousands of us have been educated to a dark and often permanent
ignorance of classic poetry, by being taught in childhood to regard it
as written for the purpose of illustrating Hadley's Latin, or Goodwin's
Greek grammar, and composed to follow the rules of versification at the
end of the book. It seems indeed one of fate's strangest ironies that
the efforts of these distinguished grammarians to unveil immortal
masterpieces are commonly used in schools and colleges to enshroud, not
to say swaddle up, the images of the gods "forever young," and turn them
into mummies. In our own country, far from perceiving in Vergil's quiet
music the magnificent gesture of nature that thrilled his Norman
reader--far from conceiving of epic poetry as the simplest universal
tongue, one early acquires a wary distrust of it as something one must
constantly labor over.
Aside from gaining in childhood this strong, practical objection to
famous poetry, people achieve the deadly habit of reading metrical lines
unimaginatively. After forming--generally in preparation for entering
one of our great universities--the habit of blinding the inner eye,
deafening the inner ear, and dropping into a species of mental coma
before a page of short lines, it is difficult for educated persons to
read poetry with what is known as "ordinary human intelligence."
It does not occur to them simply to listen to the nightingale. But
poetry, I believe, never speaks her beauty--certainly never her scope
and variety, except on the condition that in her presence one sits down
quietly with folded hands, and truly listens to her singing voice.
"So for one the wet sail arching through the rainbow round the bow,
And for one the creak of snow-shoes on the crust."
Many people do not like poetry, in this way, as a living art to be
enjoyed, but rather as an exact science to be approved. To them poetry
may concern herself only with a limited number of subjects to be
presented in a predetermined and conventional manner and form. To such
readers the word "form" means usually only a repeated literary effect:
and they do not understand that every "form" was in its first and best
use an originality, employed not for the purpose of following any rule,
but because it said truly what the artist wished to express. I suppose
much of the monotony of subject and treatment observable in modern verse
is due to this belief that poetry is merely a fixed way of repeating
certain meritorious though highly familiar concepts of existence--and
not in the least the infinite music of words meant to speak the little
and the great tongues of the earth.
It is exhilarating to read the pages of Pope and of Byron, whether you
agree with them or not, because here poetry does speak the little and
the great tongues of the earth, and sings satires, pastorals and
lampoons, literary and dramatic criticism, all manner of fun and
sparkling prettiness, sweeping judgments, nice discriminations,
fashions, politics, the ways of gentle and simple--love and desire and
pain and sorrow, and anguish and death.
The impulse which inspired, and the appreciation which endowed this
magazine, has been a generous sympathy with poetry as an art. The
existence of a gallery for poems and verse has an especially attractive
social value in its power of recalling or creating the beautiful and
clarifying pleasure of truly reading poetry in its broad scope and rich
variety. The hospitality of this hall will have been a genuine source of
happiness if somehow it tells the visitors, either while they are here,
or after they have gone to other places, what a delight it is to enjoy a
poem, to realize it, to live in the vivid dream it evokes, to hark to
its music, to listen to the special magic grace of its own style and
composition, and to know that this special grace will say as deeply as
some revealing hour with a friend one loves, something nothing else can
say--something which is life itself sung in free sympathy beyond the
bars of time and space.
_E. W._
THE MOTIVE OF THE MAGAZINE
In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an
organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its
own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them.
The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of
power, if they are to do their work and be heard. For as the world grows
greater day by day, as every member of it, through something he buys or
knows or loves, reaches out to the ends of the earth, things precious to
the race, things rare and delicate, may be overpowered, lost in the
criss-cross of modern currents, the confusion of modern immensities.
Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the great cities of
the world; and every week or two a new periodical is born to speak for
one or the other of them, and tenderly nursed at some guardian's
expense. Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is
whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered,
willy-nilly, by men's material needs. Poetry alone, of all the fine
arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its
immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose
triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and
distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and
glamour.
Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process
as unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like
every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal
relation between the artist and his public. The people must do their
part if the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must
cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as the rose.
The present venture is a modest effort to give to poetry her own place,
her own voice. The popular magazines can afford her but scant
courtesy--a Cinderella corner in the ashes--because they seek a large
public which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their verse
but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their
literature, even in prose. Most magazine editors say that there is no
public for poetry in America; one of them wrote to a young poet that the
verse his monthly accepted "must appeal to the barber's wife of the
Middle West," and others prove their distrust by printing less verse
from year to year, and that rarely beyond page-end length and
importance.
We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and
that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in
this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance. In this belief
we have been encouraged by the generous enthusiasm of many subscribers
to our fund, by the sympathy of other lovers of the art, and by the
quick response of many prominent poets, both American and English, who
have sent or promised contributions.
We hope to publish in _Poetry_ some of the best work now being done in
English verse. Within space limitations set at present by the small size
of our monthly sheaf, we shall be able to print poems longer, and of
more intimate and serious character, than the popular magazines can
afford to use. The test, limited by ever-fallible human judgment, is to
be quality alone; all forms, whether narrative, dramatic or lyric, will
be acceptable. We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a
green isle in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and Truth,
austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, may
follow her brave quest unafraid.
NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
In order that the experiment of a magazine of verse may have a fair
trial, over one hundred subscriptions of fifty dollars annually for five
years have been promised by the ladies and gentlemen listed below. In
addition, nearly twenty direct contributions of smaller sums have been
sent or promised. To all these lovers of the art the editors would
express their grateful appreciation.
Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor
Mr. Howard Shaw
Mr. Arthur T. Aldis
Mr. Edwin S. Fechheimer
Mrs. Charles H. Hamill
[B]Mr. D. H. Burnham
Mrs. Emmons Blaine (2)
Mr. Wm. S. Monroe
Mr. E. A. Bancroft
Mrs. Burton Hanson
Mr. John M. Ewen
Mr. C. L. Hutchinson
Mrs. Wm. Vaughan Moody
Hon. Wm. J. Calhoun
{Miss Anna Morgan
{Mrs. Edward A. Leicht
Mrs. Louis Betts
Mr. Ralph Cudney
Mrs. George Bullen
Mrs. P. A. Valentine
Mr. P. A. Valentine
Mr. Charles R. Crane
Mr. Frederick Sargent
Mrs. Frank G. Logan
Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus
Mrs. Emma B. Hodge
Mr. Wallace Heckman
Mr. Edward B. Butler (2)
Miss Elizabeth Ross
Mrs. Bryan Lathrop
Mr. Martin A. Ryerson
Mrs. La Verne Noyes
Mrs. E. Norman Scott (2)
Mr. Wm. O. Goodman
Mrs. Charles Hitchcock
Hon. John Barton Payne
Mr. Thomas D. Jones
Mr. H. H. Kohlsaat
Mr. Andrew M. Lawrence
Miss Juliet Goodrich
Mr. Henry H. Walker
Mr. Charles Deering
Mr. Jas. Harvey Peirce
Mr. Charles L. Freer
Mrs. W. F. Dummer
Mr. Jas. P. Whedon
Mr. Arthur Heun
Mr. Edward F. Carry
Mrs. George M. Pullman
Mr. Cyrus H. McCormick (2)
Mr. F. Stuyvesant Peabody
Mrs. F. S. Winston
Mr. J. J. Glessner
{Mr. C. C. Curtiss
{Mrs. Hermon B. Butler
Mr. Will H. Lyford
Mr. Horace S. Oakley
Mr. Eames Mac Veagh
Mrs. K. M. H. Besly
Mr. Charles G. Dawes
Mr. Clarence Buckingham
Mrs. Potter Palmer
Mr. Owen F. Aldis
Mr. Albert B. Dick
Mr. Albert H. Loeb
The Misses Skinner
Mr. Potter Palmer
Miss Mary Rozet Smith
Misses Alice E. and Margaret D. Moran
{Mrs. James B. Waller
{Mr. John Borden
Mr. Victor F. Lawson
{Mrs. H. M. Wilmarth
{Mrs. Norman F. Thompson
{Mrs. William Blair
{Mrs. Clarence I. Peck
Mr. Clarence M. Woolley
Mr. Edward P. Russell
Mrs. Frank O. Lowden
Mr. John S. Miller
Miss Helen Louise Birch
Nine members of the Fortnightly
Six members of the Friday Club
Seven members of the Chicago Woman's Club
Mr. William L. Brown
Mr. Rufus G. Dawes
Mr. Gilbert E. Porter
Mr. Alfred L. Baker
Mr. George A. McKinlock
Mr. John S. Field
Mrs. Samuel Insull
Mr. William T. Fenton
Mr. A. G. Becker
Mr. Honoré Palmer
Mr. John J. Mitchell
Mrs. F. A. Hardy
Mr. Morton D. Hull
Mr. E. F. Ripley
Mr. Ernest MacDonald Bowman
Mr. John A. Kruse
Mr. Frederic C. Bartlett
Mr. Franklin H. Head
Mrs. Wm. R. Linn
[Footnote B: _Deceased._]
* * * * *
Through the generosity of five gentlemen, _Poetry_ will give two hundred
and fifty dollars in one or two prizes for the best poem or poems
printed in its pages the first year. In addition a subscriber to the
fund offers twenty-five dollars for the best epigram.
* * * * *
Mr. Maurice Browne, director of the Chicago Little Theatre, offers to
produce, during the season of 1913-14, the best play in verse published
in, or submitted to, _Poetry_ during its first year; provided that it
may be adequately presented under the requirements and limitations of
his stage.
* * * * *
We are fortunate in being able, through the courtesy of the
Houghton-Mifflin Co., to offer our readers a poem, hitherto unprinted,
from advance sheets of the complete works of the late William Vaughan
Moody, which will be published in November. The lamentable death of
this poet two years ago in the early prime of his great powers was a
calamity to literature. It is fitting that the first number of a
magazine published in the city where for years he wrote and taught,
should contain an important poem from his hand.
Mr. Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose recent distinguished
success in London led to wide recognition in his own country, authorizes
the statement that at present such of his poetic work as receives
magazine publication in America will appear exclusively in _Poetry_.
That discriminating London publisher, Mr. Elkin Mathews, "discovered"
this young poet from over seas, and published "Personae," "Exultations"
and "Canzoniere," three small volumes of verse from which a selection
has been reprinted by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. under the title
"Provença." Mr. Pound's latest work is a translation from the Italian of
"Sonnets and Ballate," by Guido Cavalcanti.
Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke, another contributor, is a graduate of Harvard,
who studied law and entered his father's office in Davenport, Iowa. He
is the author of "The Happy Princess" and "The Breaking of Bonds," and a
contributor to leading magazines. An early number of _Poetry_ will be
devoted exclusively to Mr. Ficke's work.
Mrs. Roscoe P. Conkling is a resident of the state of New York; a young
poet who has contributed to various magazines.
Miss Lorimer is a young English poet resident in Oxford, who will
publish her first volume this autumn. The London _Poetry Review_, in its
August number, introduced her with a group of lyrics which were
criticized with some asperity in the _New Age_ and praised with equal
warmth in other periodicals.
* * * * *
Miss Dudley, who is a Chicagoan born and bred, is still younger in the
art, "To One Unknown" being the first of her poems to be printed.
* * * * *
_Poetry_ will acknowledge the receipt of books of verse and works
relating to the subject, and will print brief reviews of those which
seem for any reason significant. It will endeavor also to keep its
readers informed of the progress of the art throughout the
English-speaking world and continental Europe. The American metropolitan
newspaper prints cable dispatches about post-impressionists, futurists,
secessionists and other radicals in painting, sculpture and music, but
so far as its editors and readers are concerned, French poetry might
have died with Victor Hugo, and English with Tennyson, or at most
Swinburne.
NOTE.--Eight months after the first general
newspaper announcement of our efforts to secure a
fund for a magazine of verse, and three or four
months after our first use of the title _Poetry_,
a Boston firm of publishers announced a
forthcoming periodical of the same kind, to be
issued under the same name. The two are not to be
confused.
THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR COMPANY
PRINTERS CHICAGO
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 2
NOVEMBER, 1912
THE PIPER
George Borrow in his _Lavengro_
Tells us of a Welshman, who
By some excess of mother-wit
Framed a harp and played on it,
Built a ship and sailed to sea,
And steered it home to melody
Of his own making. I, indeed,
Might write for Everyman to read
A thaumalogue of wonderment
More wonderful, but rest content
With celebrating one I knew
Who built his pipes, and played them, too:
No more.
Ah, played! Therein is all:
The hounded thing, the hunter's call;
The shudder, when the quarry's breath
Is drowned in blood and stilled in death;
The marriage dance, the pulsing vein,
The kiss that must be given again;
The hope that Ireland, like a rose,
Sees shining thro' her tale of woes;
The battle lost, the long lament
For blood and spirit vainly spent;
And so on, thro' the varying scale
Of passion that the western Gael
Knows, and by miracle of art
Draws to the chanter from the heart
Like water from a hidden spring,
To leap or murmur, weep or sing.
I see him now, a little man
In proper black, whey-bearded, wan,
With eyes that scan the eastern hills
Thro' thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles.
His hand is on the chanter. Lo,
The hidden spring begins to flow
In waves of magic. (He is dead
These seven years, but bend your head
And listen.) Rising from the clay
The Master plays _The Ring of Day_.
It mounts and falls and floats away
Over the sky-line ... then is gone
Into the silence of the dawn!
_Joseph Campbell_
BEYOND THE STARS
Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead,
(It was so strange to me that they should weep!)
Tall candles burned about me in the dark,
And a great crucifix was on my breast,
And a great silence filled the lonesome room.
I heard one whisper, "Lo! the dawn is breaking,
And he has lost the wonder of the day."
Another came whom I had loved on earth,
And kissed my brow and brushed my dampened hair.
Softly she spoke: "Oh that he should not see
The April that his spirit bathed in! Birds
Are singing in the orchard, and the grass
That soon will cover him is growing green.
The daisies whiten on the emerald hills,
And the immortal magic that he loved
Wakens again--and he has fallen asleep."
Another said: "Last night I saw the moon
Like a tremendous lantern shine in heaven,
And I could only think of him--and sob.
For I remembered evenings wonderful
When he was faint with Life's sad loveliness,
And watched the silver ribbons wandering far
Along the shore, and out upon the sea.
Oh, I remembered how he loved the world,
The sighing ocean and the flaming stars,
The everlasting glamour God has given--
His tapestries that wrap the earth's wide room.
I minded me of mornings filled with rain
When he would sit and listen to the sound
As if it were lost music from the spheres.
He loved the crocus and the hawthorn-hedge,
He loved the shining gold of buttercups,
And the low droning of the drowsy bees
That boomed across the meadows. He was glad
At dawn or sundown; glad when Autumn came
With her worn livery and scarlet crown,
And glad when Winter rocked the earth to rest.
Strange that he sleeps today when Life is young,
And the wild banners of the Spring are blowing
With green inscriptions of the old delight."
I heard them whisper in the quiet room.
I longed to open then my sealèd eyes,
And tell them of the glory that was mine.
There was no darkness where my spirit flew,
There was no night beyond the teeming world.
Their April was like winter where I roamed;
Their flowers were like stones where now I fared.
Earth's day! it was as if I had not known
What sunlight meant!... Yea, even as they grieved
For all that I had lost in their pale place,
I swung beyond the borders of the sky,
And floated through the clouds, myself the air,
Myself the ether, yet a matchless being
Whom God had snatched from penury and pain
To draw across the barricades of heaven.
I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon;
In flight on flight I touched the highest star;
I plunged to regions where the Spring is born,
Myself (I asked not how) the April wind,
Myself the elements that are of God.
Up flowery stairways of eternity
I whirled in wonder and untrammeled joy,
An atom, yet a portion of His dream--
His dream that knows no end....
I was the rain,
I was the dawn, I was the purple east,
I was the moonlight on enchanted nights,
(Yet time was lost to me); I was a flower
For one to pluck who loved me; I was bliss,
And rapture, splendid moments of delight;
And I was prayer, and solitude, and hope;
And always, always, always I was love.
I tore asunder flimsy doors of time,
And through the windows of my soul's new sight
I saw beyond the ultimate bounds of space.
I was all things that I had loved on earth--
The very moonbeam in that quiet room,
The very sunlight one had dreamed I lost,
The soul of the returning April grass,
The spirit of the evening and the dawn,
The perfume in unnumbered hawthorn-blooms.
There was no shadow on my perfect peace,
No knowledge that was hidden from my heart.
I learned what music meant; I read the years;
I found where rainbows hide, where tears begin;
I trod the precincts of things yet unborn.
Yea, while I found all wisdom (being dead),
They grieved for me ... I should have grieved for them!
_Charles Hanson Towne_
[Greek: CHORIKOS]
The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.
Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,
Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings--
Symbols of ancient songs
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges,
Watched of none
Save the frail sea-birds
And the lithe pale girls,
Daughters of Okeanos.
And the songs pass
From the green land
Which lies upon the waves as a leaf
On the flowers of hyacinth;
And they pass from the waters,
The manifold winds and the dim moon,
And they come,
Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk,
To the quiet level lands
That she keeps for us all,
That she wrought for us all for sleep
In the silver days of the earth's dawning--
Proserpine, daughter of Zeus.
And we turn from the Kuprian's breasts,
And we turn from thee,
Phoibos Apollon,
And we turn from the music of old
And the hills that we loved and the meads,
And we turn from the fiery day,
And the lips that were over-sweet;
For silently
Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,
With purple robe
Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.
And of all the ancient songs
Passing to the swallow-blue halls
By the dark streams of Persephone,
This only remains:
That in the end we turn to thee,
Death,
That we turn to thee, singing
One last song.
O Death,
Thou art an healing wind
That blowest over white flowers
A-tremble with dew;
Thou art a wind flowing
Over long leagues of lonely sea;
Thou art the dusk and the fragrance;
Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling;
Thou art the pale peace of one
Satiate with old desires;
Thou art the silence of beauty,
And we look no more for the morning;
We yearn no more for the sun,
Since with thy white hands,
Death,
Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets,
The slim colorless poppies
Which in thy garden alone
Softly thou gatherest.
And silently;
And with slow feet approaching;
And with bowed head and unlit eyes,
We kneel before thee:
And thou, leaning towards us,
Caressingly layest upon us
Flowers from thy thin cold hands,
And, smiling as a chaste woman
Knowing love in her heart,
Thou sealest our eyes
And the illimitable quietude
Comes gently upon us.
_Richard Aldington_
TO A GREEK MARBLE
[Greek: Photnia, photnia],
White grave goddess,
Pity my sadness,
O silence of Paros.
I am not of these about thy feet,
These garments and decorum;
I am thy brother,
Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,
And thou hearest me not.
I have whispered thee in thy solitudes
Of our loves in Phrygia,
The far ecstasy of burning noons
When the fragile pipes
Ceased in the cypress shade,
And the brown fingers of the shepherd
Moved over slim shoulders;
And only the cicada sang.
I have told thee of the hills
And the lisp of reeds
And the sun upon thy breasts,
And thou hearest me not,
[Greek: Photnia, photnia],
Thou hearest me not.
_Richard Aldington_
AU VIEUX JARDIN.
I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
Tore like the green leafy boughs
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water-lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white color of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.
_Richard Aldington_
UNDER TWO WINDOWS
I. AUBADE
The dawn is here--and the long night through I have
never seen thy face,
Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate
of thy dwelling-place.
While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found
the far world-edge,
No leaflet stirred of the leaves that climb to garland
thy window ledge.
Yet the vine had quivered from root to tip, and opened
its flowers again,
If only the low moon's light had glanced on a moving
casement pane.
Warm was the wind that entered in where the barrier
stood ajar,
And the curtain shook with its gentle breath, white as
young lilies are;
But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw
the folds aside,
(I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to
set the casement wide.
Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his five
sweet notes a bird,
And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thought
thou hadst surely heard.
But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand
throats awake,
Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon,
for thy sake?
Nay--bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait
no more
Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at
the open door!
II. NOCTURNE
My darling, come!--The wings of the dark have wafted
the sunset away,
And there's room for much in a summer night, but no
room for delay.
A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering
moon looks up
From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in
its cup.
The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom--elder,
viburnum, rose;
The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that
sighs of love as it goes.
The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the
greater ones abide,
With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside.
The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower
of the elder gleams,
Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest
dreams.
Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south,
That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy
sweeter mouth.
Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and
have naught to see?
Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say
nothing of thee and me?
--My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are
guiding her way;
There is room for much in a summer night, but no room
for delay!
_Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer_
THE SINGING PLACE
Cold may lie the day,
And bare of grace;
At night I slip away
To the Singing Place.
A border of mist and doubt
Before the gate,
And the Dancing Stars grow still
As hushed I wait.
Then faint and far away
I catch the beat
In broken rhythm and rhyme
Of joyous feet,--
Lifting waves of sound
That will rise and swell
(If the prying eyes of thought
Break not the spell),
Rise and swell and retreat
And fall and flee,
As over the edge of sleep
They beckon me.
And I wait as the seaweed waits
For the lifting tide;
To ask would be to awake,--
To be denied.
I cloud my eyes in the mist
That veils the hem,--
And then with a rush I am past,--
I am Theirs, and of Them!
And the pulsing chant swells up
To touch the sky,
And the song is joy, is life,
And the song am I!
The thunderous music peals
Around, o'erhead--
The dead would awake to hear
If there were dead;
But the life of the throbbing Sun
Is in the song,
And we weave the world anew,
And the Singing Throng
Fill every corner of space--
Over the edge of sleep
I bring but a trace
Of the chants that pulse and sweep
In the Singing Place.
_Lily A. Long_
IMMURED
Within this narrow cell that I call "me",
I was imprisoned ere the worlds began,
And all the worlds must run, as first they ran,
In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free.
I beat my hands against the walls and find
It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!
_Lily A. Long_
NOGI
Great soldier of the fighting clan,
Across Port Arthur's frowning face of stone
You drew the battle sword of old Japan,
And struck the White Tsar from his Asian throne.
Once more the samurai sword
Struck to the carved hilt in your loyal hand,
That not alone your heaven-descended lord
Should meanly wander in the spirit land.
Your own proud way, O eastern star,
Grandly at last you followed. Out it leads
To that high heaven where all the heroes are,
Lovers of death for causes and for creeds.
_Harriet Monroe_
THE JESTER
I have known great gold Sorrows:
Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully
Through the slow-pacing morrows:
I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing
Dim endless voices cried of suffering
Vibrant and far in broken litany:
Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly
Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air--
All things most tragical, most fair,
Have still encompassed me ...
I dance where in the screaming market-place
The dusty world that watches buys and sells,
With painted merriment upon my face,
Whirling my bells,
Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery.
I have known great gold Sorrows ...
Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones,
If it shall make them merry, and forget
That grief shall rise and set
With the unchanging, unforgetting suns
Of their relentless morrows?
_Margaret Widdemer_
THE BEGGARS
The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces,
Begging of Life for Joy!
I saw the little daughters of the poor,
Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay,
Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled
A hideous flushed beggar at the door,
Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed,
Complacent in his profitable mask.
They mocked his horror, but they gave to him
From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in
To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts
Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand
Covered by darkness, to the luring voice
Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings,
Of silks, of feathers, bought--so cheap!--with just
Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant
For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life:
(A frock of satin for an hour's shame,
A coat of fur for two days' servitude;
"And the clothes last," the thought runs on, within
The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days;
"Who cares or knows after the hour is done?")
--Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy!
The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible,
Complacent in the marketable mask
That earned his comforts--and they gave to him!
But ah, the little painted, wistful faces
Questioning Life for Joy!
_Margaret Widdemer_
[Illustration]
REVIEWS AND COMMENTS
MOODY'S POEMS
_The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody_ will soon be published in
two volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our present interest is in the
volume of poems, which are themselves an absorbing drama. Moody had a
slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness of his young dreams yielded
slowly to a man's more definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of
life. When he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to think
his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner of the great poets
of the earth, the world with God. Apparently the unwritten poems
cancelled by death would have rounded out, in art of an austere
perfection, the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel
this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first act of an
uncompleted drama, _The Death of Eve_.
Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams of the meaning of life
lack the props and pillars of the old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion
and despair are a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and
good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took the whole scheme of
things for his province, as a truly heroic poet should; there are always
large spaces on his canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic
_Masque of Judgment_ and the shorter poems derived from present-day
subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating the case, so to
speak, against God. Somewhat in the terms of modern science is his
statement--the universe plunging on toward its doom of darkness and
lifelessness, divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love
doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all away with a vast
inscrutable gesture.
This seems to be the mood of the _Masque of Judgment_, a mood against
which that very human archangel, Raphael, protests in most appealing
lines. The poet broods over the earth--
The earth, that has the blue and little flowers--
with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like his own angel
he is
a truant still
While battle rages round the heart of God.
The lamps are spent at the end of judgment day,
and naked from their seats
The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait.
This conflict between love and doubt is the motive also of _Gloucester
Moors_, _The Daguerreotype_, _Old Pourquoi_--those three noblest,
perhaps, of the present-day poems--also of _The Brute_ and _The
Menagerie_, and of that fine poem manqué, the _Ode in Time of
Hesitation_. _The Fie-Bringer_ is an effort at another
theme--redemption, light after darkness. But it is not so spontaneous as
the _Masque_; though simpler, clearer, more dramatic in form, it is
more deliberate and intellectual, and not so star-lit with memorable
lines. _The Fire-Bringer_ is an expression of aspiration; the poet longs
for light, demands it, will wrest it from God's right hand like
Prometheus. But his triumph is still theory, not experience. The reader
is hardly yet convinced.
If one feels a grander motive in such poems as the one-act _Death of
Eve_ and _The Fountain_, or the less perfectly achieved _I Am the
Woman_, it is not because of the tales they tell but because of the
spirit of faith that is in them--a spirit intangible, indefinable, but
indomitable and triumphant. At last, we feel, this poet, already under
the shadow of death, sees a terrible splendid sunrise, and offers us the
glory of it in his art.
_The Fountain_ is a truly magnificent expression of spiritual triumph in
failure, and incidentally of the grandeur of Arizona, that tragic
wonderland of ancient and future gods. Those Spanish wanderers, dying in
the desert, in whose half-madness dreams and realities mingle, assume in
those stark spaces the stature of universal humanity, contending to the
last against relentless fate. In the two versions of _The Death of Eve_,
both narrative and dramatic, one feels also this wild, fierce triumph,
this faith in the glory of life. Especially in the dramatic fragment, by
its sureness of touch and simple austerity of form, and by the majesty
of its figure of the aged Eve, Moody's art reached its most heroic
height. We have here the beginning of great things.
The spirit of this poet may be commended to those facile bards who lift
up their voices between the feast and the cigars, whose muses dance to
every vague emotion and strike their flimsy lutes for every
light-o'-love. Here was one who went to his desk as to an altar,
resolved that the fire he lit, the sacrifice he offered, should be
perfect and complete. He would burn out his heart like a taper that the
world might possess a living light. He would tell once more the grandeur
of life; he would sing the immortal song.
That such devotion is easy of attainment in this clamorous age who can
believe? Poetry like some of Moody's, poetry of a high structural
simplicity, strict and bare in form, pure and austere in ornament,
implies a grappling with giants and wrestling with angels; it is not to
be achieved without deep living and high thinking, without intense
persistent intellectual and spiritual struggle.
_H. M._
BOHEMIAN POETRY
_An Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry_, translated by
P. Selver (Henry J. Drane, London).
This is a good anthology of modern Bohemian poetry, accurately
translated into bad and sometimes even ridiculous English. Great credit
is due the young translator for his care in research and selection. The
faults of his style, though deplorable, are not such as to obscure the
force and beauty of his originals.
One is glad to be thus thoroughly assured that contemporary Bohemia has
a literature in verse, sensitive to the outer world and yet national.
Mr. Selver's greatest revelation is Petr Bezruc, poet of the mines.
The poetry of Brezina, Sova and Vrchlicky is interesting, but Bezruc's
_Songs of Silesia_ have the strength of a voice coming _de profundis_.
A hundred years in silence I dwelt in the pit,
* * * * *
The dust of the coal has settled upon my eyes--
* * * * *
Bread with coal is the fruit that my toiling bore;--
That is the temper of it. Palaces grow by the Danube nourished by his
blood. He goes from labor to labor, he rebels, he hears a voice mocking:
I should find my senses and go to the mine once more--
And in another powerful invective:
I am the first who arose of the people of Teschen.
* * * * *
They follow the stranger's plough, the slaves fare downwards.
He thanks God he is not in the place of the oppressor, and ends:
Thus 'twas done. The Lord wills it. Night sank o'er my people.
Our doom was sealed when the night had passed;
In the night I prayed to the Demon of Vengeance.
The first Beskydian bard and the last.
This poet is distinctly worth knowing. He is the truth where our
"red-bloods" and magazine socialists are usually a rather boresome pose.
As Mr. Selver has tried to make his anthology representative of all the
qualities and tendencies of contemporary Bohemian work it is not to be
supposed that they are all of the mettle of Bezruc.
One hears with deep regret that Vrchlicky is just dead, after a life of
unceasing activity. He has been a prime mover in the revival of the
Czech nationality and literature. He has given them, besides his own
work, an almost unbelievable number of translations from the foreign
classics, Dante, Schiller, Leopardi. For the rest I must refer the
reader to Mr. Selver's introduction.
_Ezra Pound_
"THE MUSIC OF THE HUMAN HEART"
This title-phrase has not been plucked from the spacious lawn of
_Bartlett's Familiar Quotations_. It grew in the agreeable midland yard
of Mr. Walt Mason's newspaper verse, and appeared in a tribute of his to
Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, whose fifty-ninth birthday anniversary,
falling on the seventh of October, has been widely celebrated in the
American public libraries and daily press.
Mr. Riley's fine gift to his public, the special happiness his genius
brings to his readers, cannot, for lack of space, be adequately
described, or even indicated, here. Perhaps a true, if incomplete,
impression of the beauty of his service may be conveyed by repeating a
well-known passage of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's _Letters from John
Chinaman_--a passage which I can never read without thinking very
gratefully of James Whitcomb Riley, and of what his art has done for
American poetry-readers.
Mr. Dickinson says:--
In China our poets and literary men have
taught their successors for long generations, to
look for good not in wealth, not in power, not in
miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a
choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most
simple and universal relations of life. To feel,
and in order to feel, to express, or at least to
understand the expression, of all that is lovely
in nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive
in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end....
The pathos of life and death, the long embrace,
the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that
glides forever away, with its freight of music
and light, into the shadow and bush of the
haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes
us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the
gale--to all these things we are trained to
respond, and the response is what we call
literature.
Among Mr. Riley's many distinguished faculties of execution in
expressing, in stimulating, "an exquisite appreciation of the most
simple and universal relations of life," one faculty has been, in so far
as I know, very little mentioned--I mean his mastery in creating
character. Mr. Riley has expressed, has incarnated in the melodies and
harmonies of his poems, not merely several living, breathing human
creatures as they are made by their destinies, but a whole world of his
own, a vivid world of country-roads, and country-town streets, peopled
with farmers and tramps and step-mothers and children, trailing clouds
of glory even when they boast of the superiorities of "Renselaer," a
world of hardworking women and hard-luck men, and poverty and
prosperity, and drunkards and raccoons and dogs and grandmothers and
lovers. To have presented through the medium of rhythmic chronicle, a
world so sharply limned, so funny, so tragic, so mean, so noble, seems
to us in itself a striking achievement in the craft of verse.
No mere word of criticism can of course evoke, at all as example can,
Mr. Riley's genius of identification with varied human experiences, the
remarkable concentration and lyric skill of his characterization. Here
are two poems of his on the same general theme--grief in the presence of
death. We may well speak our pride in the wonderful range of inspiration
and the poetic endowment which can create on the same subject musical
stories of the soul as diverse, as searching, as fresh and true, as the
beloved poems of _Bereaved_ and _His Mother_.
BEREAVED
Let me come in where you sit weeping; aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.
The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
To kiss. Such arms, such hands I never knew.
May I not weep with you.
Fain would I be of service, say something
Between the tears, that would be comforting;
But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
Who have no child to die.
HIS MOTHER
Dead! my wayward boy--my own--
Not _the Law's_, but mine; the good
God's free gift to me alone,
Sanctified by motherhood.
"Bad," you say: well, who is not?
"Brutal"--"With a heart of stone"--
And "red-handed." Ah! the hot
Blood upon your own!
I come not with downward eyes,
To plead for him shamedly:
God did not apologize
When He gave the boy to me.
Simply, I make ready now
For His verdict. You prepare--
You have killed us both--and how
Will you face us There!
_E. W._
THE OPEN DOOR
Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics that POETRY
may become a house of refuge for minor poets.
The phrase is somewhat worn. Paragraphers have done their worst for the
minor poet, while they have allowed the minor painter, sculptor,
actor--worst of all, architect--to go scot-free. The world which laughs
at the experimenter in verse, walks negligently through our streets, and
goes seriously, even reverently, to the annual exhibitions in our
cities, examining hundreds of pictures and statues without expecting
even the prize-winners to be masterpieces.
During the past year a score or more of cash prizes, ranging from one
hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, were awarded in Pittsburgh, Chicago,
Washington, New York and Boston for minor works of modern art. No word
of superlative praise has been uttered for one of them: the first
prize-winner in Pittsburgh was a delicately pretty picture by a
second-rate Englishman; in Chicago it was a clever landscape by a
promising young American. If a single prize-winner in the entire list,
many of which were bought at high prices by public museums, was a
masterpiece, no critic has yet dared to say so.
In fact, such a word would be presumptuous, since no contemporary can
utter the final verdict. Our solicitous critics should remember that
Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Burns, were minor poets to the subjects of
King George the Fourth, Poe and Whitman to the subjects of King
Longfellow. Moreover, we might remind them that Drayton, Lovelace,
Herrick, and many another delicate lyrist of the anthologies, whose
perfect songs show singular tenacity of life, remain minor poets through
the slightness of their motive; they created little masterpieces, not
great ones.
The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine--may the great poet we
are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample
genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling
alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best
English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by
whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine
promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions. Without
muzzles and braces this is manifestly impossible unless all the critical
articles are written by one person.
NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Mr. Ezra Pound has consented to act as foreign correspondent of POETRY,
keeping its readers informed of the present interests of the art in
England, France and elsewhere.
The response of poets on both sides of the Atlantic has been most
encouraging, so that the quality of the next few numbers is assured. One
of our most important contributions is Mr. John G. Neihardt's brief
recently finished tragedy, _The Death of Agrippina_, to which an entire
number will be devoted within a few months.
Mr. Joseph Campbell is one of the younger poets closely associated with
the renaissance of art and letters in Ireland. His first book of poems
was _The Gilly of Christ_; a later volume including these is _The
Mountainy Singer_ (Maunsel & Co.).
Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, the New York poet and magazine editor, has
published three volumes of verse, _The Quiet Singer_ (Rickey),
_Manhattan_, and _Youth and Other Poems_; also five song-cycles in
collaboration with two composers.
Mr. Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one of the "Imagistes," a
group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in
_vers libre_; trying to attain in English certain subtleties of cadence
of the kind which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French. Mr.
Aldington has published little as yet, and nothing in America.
Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the well-known writer on art, began comparatively
late to publish verse in the magazines. Her volume, _Poems_ (Macmillan),
was issued in 1910.
Miss Long and Miss Widdemer are young Americans, some of whose poems
have appeared in various magazines.
The last issue of POETRY accredited Mr. Ezra Pound's _Provenca_ to the
Houghton-Mifflin Co. This was an error; Small, Maynard & Co. are Mr.
Pound's American publishers.
BOOKS RECEIVED
_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts. John Lane.
_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson._ John Lane.
_Lyrical Poems_, by Lucy Lyttelton. Thomas B. Mosher.
_The Silence of Amor_, by Fiona Macleod, Thomas B. Mosher.
_Spring in Tuscany and Other Lyrics._ Thomas B. Mosher.
_Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins.
Mitchell Kennerley.
_A Round of Rimes_, by Denis A. MacCarthy. Little, Brown & Co.
_Voices from Erin and Other Poems_, by Denis A. MacCarthy.
Little, Brown & Co.
_Love and The Year and Other Poems_, by Grace Griswold.
Duffield & Co.
_Songs and Sonnets_, by Webster Ford. The Rooks Press, Chicago.
_The Quiet Courage and Other Songs of the Unafraid_,
by Everard Jack Appleton. Stewart and Kidd Co.
_In Cupid's Chains and Other Poems_, by Benjamin F. Woodcox.
Woodcox & Fanner.
_Maverick_, by Hervey White. Maverick Press.
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 3
DECEMBER, 1912
THE MOUNTAIN TOMB
Pour wine and dance, if manhood still have pride,
Bring roses, if the rose be yet in bloom;
The cataract smokes on the mountain side.
Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.
Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet,
Let there be no foot silent in the room,
Nor mouth with kissing nor the wine unwet.
Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.
In vain, in vain; the cataract still cries,
The everlasting taper lights the gloom,
All wisdom shut into its onyx eyes.
Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.
_William Butler Yeats_
TO A CHILD DANCING UPON THE SHORE
Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won.
And he, the best warrior, dead
And all the sheaves to bind!
What need that you should dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
_William Butler Yeats_
FALLEN MAJESTY
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face
And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gipsy camping place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what's gone.
The lineaments, the heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd
Will gather and not know that through its very street
Once walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning cloud.
_William Butler Yeats_
LOVE AND THE BIRD
The moments passed as at a play,
I had the wisdom love can bring,
I had my share of mother wit;
And yet for all that I could say,
And though I had her praise for it,
And she seemed happy as a king,
Love's moon was withering away.
Believing every word I said
I praised her body and her mind,
Till pride had made her eyes grow bright,
And pleasure made her cheeks grow red,
And vanity her footfall light;
Yet we, for all that praise, could find
Nothing but darkness overhead.
I sat as silent as a stone
And knew, though she'd not said a word,
That even the best of love must die,
And had been savagely undone
Were it not that love, upon the cry
Of a most ridiculous little bird,
Threw up in the air his marvellous moon.
_William Butler Yeats_
THE REALISTS
Hope that you may understand.
What can books, of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land;
Paintings of the dolphin drawn;
Sea nymphs, in their pearly waggons,
Do but wake the hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons.
_William Butler Yeats_
SANGAR
TO LINCOLN STEFFENS
Somewhere I read a strange, old, rusty tale
Smelling of war; most curiously named
"The Mad Recreant Knight of the West."
Once, you have read, the round world brimmed with hate,
Stirred and revolted, flashed unceasingly
Facets of cruel splendor. And the strong
Harried the weak ...
Long past, long past, praise God
In these fair, peaceful, happy days.
The Tale:
Eastward the Huns break border,
Surf on a rotten dyke;
They have murdered the Eastern Warder
(His head on a pike).
"Arm thee, arm thee, my father!
"Swift rides the Goddes-bane,
"And the high nobles gather
"On the plain!"
"O blind world-wrath!" cried Sangar,
"Greatly I killed in youth,
"I dreamed men had done with anger
"Through Goddes truth!"
Smiled the boy then in faint scorn,
Hard with the battle-thrill;
"Arm thee, loud calls the war-horn
"And shrill!"
He has bowed to the voice stentorian,
Sick with thought of the grave--
He has called for his battered morion
And his scarred glaive.
On the boy's helm a glove
Of the Duke's daughter--
In his eyes splendor of love
And slaughter.
Hideous the Hun advances
Like a sea-tide on sand;
Unyielding, the haughty lances
Make dauntless stand.
And ever amid the clangor,
Butchering Hun and Hun,
With sorrowful face rides Sangar
And his son....
Broken is the wild invader
(Sullied, the whole world's fountains);
They have penned the murderous raider
With his back to the mountains.
Yet tho' what had been mead
Is now a bloody lake,
Still drink swords where men bleed,
Nor slake.
Now leaps one into the press--
The Hell 'twixt front and front--
Sangar, bloody and torn of dress
(He has borne the brunt).
"Hold!" cries "Peace! God's Peace!
"Heed ye what Christus says--"
And the wild battle gave surcease
In amaze.
"When will ye cast out hate?
"Brothers--my mad, mad brothers--
"Mercy, ere it be too late,
"These are sons of your mothers.
"For sake of Him who died on Tree,
"Who of all Creatures, loved the Least,"--
"Blasphemer! God of Battles, He!"
Cried a priest.
"Peace!" and with his two hands
Has broken in twain his glaive.
Weaponless, smiling he stands
(Coward or brave?)
"Traitor!" howls one rank, "Think ye
"The Hun be our brother?"
And "Fear we to die, craven, think ye?"
The other.
Then sprang his son to his side,
His lips with slaver were wet,
For he had felt how men died
And was lustful yet;
(On his bent helm a glove
Of the Duke's daughter,
In his eyes splendor of love
And slaughter)--
Shouting, "Father no more of mine!
"Shameful old man--abhorr'd,
"First traitor of all our line!"
Up the two-handed sword.
He smote--fell Sangar--and then
Screaming, red, the boy ran
Straight at the foe, and again
Hell began ...
Oh, there was joy in Heaven when Sangar came.
Sweet Mary wept, and bathed and bound his wounds,
And God the Father healed him of despair,
And Jesus gripped his hand, and laughed and laughed ...
_John Reed_
A LEGEND OF THE DOVE
Soft from the linden's bough,
Unmoved against the tranquil afternoon,
Eve's dove laments her now:
"Ah, gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?"
That yearning in his voice
Told not to Paradise a sorrow's tale:
As other birds rejoice
He sang, a brother to the nightingale.
By twilight on her breast
He saw the flower sleep, the star awake;
And calling her from rest,
Made all the dawn melodious for her sake.
And then the Tempter's breath,
The sword of exile and the mortal chain--
The heritage of death
That gave her heart to dust, his own to pain ...
In Eden desolate
The seraph heard his lonely music swoon,
As now, reiterate;
"Ah gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?"
_George Sterling_
AT THE GRAND CAÑON
Thou settest splendors in my sight, O Lord!
It seems as tho' a deep-hued sunset falls
Forever on these Cyclopean walls--
These battlements where Titan hosts have warred,
And hewn the world with devastating sword,
And shook with trumpets the eternal halls
Where seraphim lay hid by bloody palls
And only Hell and Silence were adored.
Lo! the abyss wherein great Satan's wings
Might gender tempests, and his dragons' breath
Fume up in pestilence. Beneath the sun
Or starry outposts on terrestrial things,
Is no such testimony unto Death
Nor altars builded to Oblivion.
_George Sterling_
KINDRED
Musing, between the sunset and the dark,
As Twilight in unhesitating hands
Bore from the faint horizon's underlands,
Silvern and chill, the moon's phantasmal ark,
I heard the sea, and far away could mark
Where that unalterable waste expands
In sevenfold sapphire from the mournful sands,
And saw beyond the deep a vibrant spark.
There sank the sun Arcturus, and I thought:
Star, by an ocean on a world of thine,
May not a being, born like me to die,
Confront a little the eternal Naught
And watch our isolated sun decline--
Sad for his evanescence, even as I?
_George Sterling_
REMEMBERED LIGHT
The years are a falling of snow,
Slow, but without cessation,
On hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were;
But snow and the crawling night in which it fell
May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame.
Thus it was that some slant of sunset
In the chasms of piled cloud--
Transient mountains that made a new horizon,
Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles--
Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,
Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone.
Clear in the vistas of memory,
The peaks of a world long unremembered,
Soared further than clouds, but fell not,
Based on hills that shook not nor melted
With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed.
Rent with stupendous chasms,
Full of an umber twilight,
I beheld that larger world.
Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine
Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,
Dull as with duskier tincture.
Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring,
Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight,
That must pass with its passing--
Too fragile for day or for darkness,
Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own.
Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours,
Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.
These things I beheld,
Till the gold was shaken with flight
Of fantastical wings like broken shadows,
Forerunning the darkness;
Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices,
Like pain's last cry ere oblivion.
_Clark Ashton Smith_
SORROWING OF WINDS
O winds that pass uncomforted
Through all the peacefulness of spring,
And tell the trees your sorrowing,
That they must moan till ye are fled!
Think ye the Tyrian distance holds
The crystal of unquestioned sleep?
That those forgetful purples keep
No veiled, contentious greens and golds?
Half with communicated grief,
Half that they are not free to pass
With you across the flickering grass,
Mourns each vibrating bough and leaf.
And I, with soul disquieted,
Shall find within the haunted spring
No peace, till your strange sorrowing
Is down the Tyrian distance fled.
_Clark Ashton Smith_
AMERICA
_I hear America singing_ ...
And the great prophet passed,
Serene, clear and untroubled
Into the silence vast.
When will the master-poet
Rise, with vision strong,
To mold her manifold music
Into a living song?
_I hear America singing_ ...
Beyond the beat and stress,
The chant of her shrill, unjaded,
Empiric loveliness.
Laughter, beyond mere scorning,
Wisdom surpassing wit,
Love, and the unscathed spirit,
These shall encompass it.
_Alice Corbin_
SYMBOLS
Who was it built the cradle of wrought gold?
A druid, chanting by the waters old.
Who was it kept the sword of vision bright?
A warrior, falling darkly in the fight.
Who was it put the crown upon the dove?
A woman, paling in the arms of love.
Oh, who but these, since Adam ceased to be,
Have kept their ancient guard about the Tree?
_Alice Corbin_
THE STAR
I saw a star fall in the night,
And a grey moth touched my cheek;
Such majesty immortals have,
Such pity for the weak.
_Alice Corbin_
NODES
The endless, foolish merriment of stars
Beside the pale cold sorrow of the moon,
Is like the wayward noises of the world
Beside my heart's uplifted silent tune.
The little broken glitter of the waves
Beside the golden sun's intense white blaze,
Is like the idle chatter of the crowd
Beside my heart's unwearied song of praise.
The sun and all the planets in the sky
Beside the sacred wonder of dim space,
Are notes upon a broken, tarnished lute
That God will someday mend and put in place.
And space, beside the little secret joy
Of God that sings forever in the clay,
Is smaller than the dust we can not see,
That yet dies not, till time and space decay.
And as the foolish merriment of stars
Beside the cold pale sorrow of the moon,
My little song, my little joy, my praise,
Beside God's ancient, everlasting rune.
_Alice Corbin_
POEMS
I
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me
seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a
brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my
accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and
that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou
leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one
knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me
my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the
play of the many.
II
No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my master's will. Henceforth
I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in
murmurings of a song.
Men hasten to the King's market. All the buyers and sellers are there.
But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of
work.
Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time,
and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum.
Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil,
but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my
heart on to him, and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless
inconsequence!
III
On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I
knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.
Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my
dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange smell in the south wind.
That vague fragrance made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to
me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its
completion.
I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and this perfect
sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.
IV
By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But
it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou
keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me
alone. But day passes by after day and thou are not seen.
If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart--thy
love for me still waits for my love.
V
I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this
life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery
like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon
the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that
the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the
form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as
ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love
death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother
takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the
left one.
VI
Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh, thou beautiful,
there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and
sounds and odours. There comes the morning with the golden basket in her
right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth.
And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds,
through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden
pitcher from the western ocean of rest.
But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her
flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor
night, nor form nor colour, and never never a word.
_Rabindranath Tagore_
EDITORIAL COMMENT
A PERFECT RETURN
It is curious that the influence of Poe upon Baudelaire, Verlaine, and
Mallarmé, and through them upon English poets, and then through these
last upon Americans, comes back to us in this round-about and indirect
way. We have here an instance of what Whitman calls a "perfect return."
We have denied Poe, we do not give him his full meed of appreciation
even today, and yet we accept him through the disciples who have
followed or have assimilated his tradition. And now that young
Englishmen are beginning to feel the influence of Whitman upon French
poetry, it may be that he too, through the imitation of _vers libre_ in
America, will begin to experience a "perfect return."
Must we always accept American genius in this round-about fashion? Have
we no true perspective that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look
abroad for genius, only to find that it is of American origin?
* * * * *
This bit of marginalia, extracted from a note-book of 1909, was relieved
of the necessity of further elaboration by supplementary evidence
received in one day from two correspondents. One, a brief sentence from
Mr. Allen Upward: "It is much to be wished that America should learn to
honor her sons without waiting for the literary cliques of London."
The other, the following "news note" from Mr. Paul Scott Mowrer in
Paris. The date of Léon Bazalgette's translation, however, is hardly so
epochal as it would seem, since Whitman has been known for many years in
France, having been partly translated during the nineties.
Mr. Mowrer writes:
"It is significant of American tardiness in the development of a
national literary tradition that the name of Walt Whitman is today a
greater influence with the young writers of the continent than with our
own. Not since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so moved
by anything American. The suggestion has even been made that
'Whitmanism' is rapidly to supersede 'Nietzscheism' as the dominant
factor in modern thought. Léon Bazalgette translated _Leaves of Grass_
into French in 1908. A school of followers of the Whitman philosophy and
style was an almost immediate consequence. Such of the leading reviews
as sympathize at all with the strong 'young' movement to break the
shackles of classicism which have so long bound French prosody to the
heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine, are publishing not only
articles on 'Whitmanism' as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new
flexible chanting rhythms. In this regard _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_,
_La Renaissance Contemporaine_, and _L'Effort Libre_ have been
preëminently hospitable.
"The new poems are not so much imitations of Whitman as inspirations
from him. Those who have achieved most success in the mode thus far are
perhaps Georges Duhamel, a leader of the 'Jeunes,' whose plays are at
present attracting national notice; André Spire, who writes with
something of the apostolic fervor of his Jewish ancestry; Henri Franck,
who died recently, shortly after the publication of his volume, _La
Danse Devant l'Arche_; Charles Vildrac, with _Le Livre d'Amour_; Philéas
Lebesgue, the appearance in collected form of whose _Les Servitudes_ is
awaited with keen interest; and finally, Jean Richard Bloch, editor of
_L'Effort Libre_, whose prose, for example in his book of tales entitled
_Levy_, is said to be directly rooted in Whitmanism.
"In Germany, too, the rolling intonations of the singer of democracy
have awakened echoes. The _Moderne Weltdichtung_ has announced itself,
with Whitman as guide, and such apostles as Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, in
_Lobegesang des Lebens_, and Ernst Lissauer in _Der Acker_ and _Der
Strom_.
"What is it about Whitman that Europe finds so inspiriting? First, his
acceptance of the universe as he found it, his magnificently shouted
comradeship with all nature and all men. Such a doctrine makes an
instant though hardly logical appeal in nations where socialism is the
political order of the day. And next, his disregard of literary
tradition. Out of books more books, and out of them still more, with the
fecundity of generations. But in this process of literary propagation
thought, unfortunately, instead of arising like a child ever fresh and
vigorous as in the beginning, grows more and more attenuated, paler,
more sickly. The acclaim of Whitman is nothing less than the inevitable
revolt against the modern flood of book-inspired books. Write from
nature directly, from the people directly, from the political meeting,
and the hayfield, and the factory--that is what the august American
seems to his young disciples across the seas to be crying to them.
"Perhaps it is because America already holds as commonplaces these
fundamentals seeming so new to Europe that the Whitman schools have
sprung up stronger on the eastern side of the Atlantic than on the
western."
It is not that America holds as commonplaces the fundamentals expressed
in Whitman that there have been more followers of the Whitman method in
Europe than in America, but that American poets, approaching poetry
usually through terms of feeling, and apparently loath to apply an
intellectual whip to themselves or others, have made no definite
analysis of the rhythmic units of Whitman. We have been content to
accept the English conception of the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman. The
curious mingling of the concrete and the spiritual, which is what
certain modern painters, perhaps under the Whitman suggestion, are
trying to achieve, was so novel as to be disconcerting, and the vehicle
so original as to appear uncouth--uncadenced, unmusical. The
hide-bound, antiquated conception of English prosody is responsible for
a great deal of dead timber. It is a significant fact that the English
first accepted the spirit of Whitman, the French his method. The
rhythmic measure of Whitman has yet to be correctly estimated by English
and American poets. It has been sifted and weighed by the French poets,
and though Whitman's influence upon modern French poetry has been
questioned by English critics, the connection between his varied
rhythmic units and modern _vers libre_ is too obvious to be discounted.
There may be an innate necessity sufficient to cause a breaking-up of
forms in a poetic language, but there is no reason to believe that
Paris, the great clearing-house of all the arts, would not be quick to
adopt a suggestion from without. English poets, certainly, have not been
loath to accept suggestions from Paris.
At any rate this international acceptance of the two greatest American
poets, and the realization of their international influence upon us, may
awaken us to a new sense of responsibility. It would be a valuable
lesson, if only we could learn to turn the international eye, in
private, upon ourselves. If the American poet can learn to be less
parochial, to apply the intellectual whip, to visualize his art, to
separate it and see it apart from himself; we may learn then to
appreciate the great poet when he is "in our midst." and not wait for
the approval of English or French critics.
_A. C. H._
TAGORE'S POEMS
The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by
himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English
poetry and of world poetry. I do not use these terms with the looseness
of contemporary journalism. Questions of poetic art are serious, not to
be touched upon lightly or in a spirit of bravura.
Bengal is a nation of fifty million people. The great age of Bengali
literature is this age in which we live. And the first Bengali whom I
heard singing the lyrics of Tagore said, as simply as one would say it
is four o'clock, "Yes, we speak of it as the Age of Rabindranath."
The six poems now published were chosen from a hundred lyrics about to
appear in book form. They might just as well have been any other six,
for they do not represent a summit of attainment but an average.
These poems are cast, in the original, in metres perhaps the most
finished and most subtle of any known to us. If you refine the art of
the troubadours, combine it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that
the sound-unit principle of the most advanced artists in _vers libre_,
you would get something like the system of Bengali verse. The sound of
it when spoken is rather like good Greek, for Bengali is daughter of
Sanscrit, which is a kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric
idiom.
All this series of a hundred poems are made to music, for "Mr." Tagore
is not only the great poet of Bengal, he is also their great musician.
He teaches his songs, and they are sung throughout Bengal more or less
as the troubadours' songs were sung through Europe in the twelfth
century.
And we feel here in London, I think, much as the people of Petrarch's
time must have felt about the mysterious lost language, the Greek that
was just being restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That
Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections have been the
goal of our endeavor ever since.
I speak with all seriousness when I say that this beginning of our more
intimate intercourse with Bengal is the opening of another period. For
one thing the content of this first brief series of poems will destroy
the popular conception of Buddhism, for we in the Occident are apt to
regard it as a religion negative and anti-Christian.
The Greek gave us humanism; a belief in _mens sana in corpore sano_, a
belief in proportion and balance. The Greek shows us man as the sport of
the gods; the sworn foe of fate and the natural forces. The Bengali
brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in an age of
steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship
between man and the gods; between man and nature.
It is all very well to object that this is not the first time we have
had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the arts alone can we find the
inner heart of a people. There is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction
in this eastern expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts
alone that one people learns to meet another far distant people in
friendship and respect.
I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship is nearer for
the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to London.
_Ezra Pound_
REVIEWS
_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson_ (John Lane.)
This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago, had a real lyric
gift, though a very slight one. The present volume is a collection of
all her poems, from the first girlish sheaf _Tares_, to _The Lamp and
the Lute_, which she was preparing for publication when she died.
Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples along as smoothly and
delicately as a meadow rill, with never a pause nor a flurry nor a
thrill. She sings prettily of everyone, from the _Last Fairy_ to William
Ernest Henley, and of everything, from _Death and Justice_ to the
_Orchard of the Moon_, but she has nothing arresting or important to say
of any of these subjects, and no keen magic of phrase to give her
warbling that intense vitality which would win for her the undying fame
prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.
Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light, and her tune a
quiet monotone of gentle soothing music which has a certain soft appeal.
Perhaps the secret of it is the fine quality of soul which breathes
through these numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole
story, and too preoccupied with the little things around and within her
to pay much attention to the thinking, fighting, ever-moving world
without.
* * * * *
A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is _The Adventures of
Young Maverick_, by Hervey White, who runs a printing press at
Woodstock, N. Y., and bravely publishes _The Wild Hawk_, his own little
magazine. The poem has as many moods as _Don Juan_, which is plainly,
though not tyrannically, its model.
The poem is long for these days--five cantos and nearly six hundred
Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most casual reader, one would think, could
scarcely find it tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily
at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage, and the poem
becomes eloquently pictorial in setting forth his beauty:
Young Maverick in the upland pastures lay
Woven as in the grass, while star-like flowers,
Shaking their petals down in sweet array
Dappled his flanks with gentle breathless showers.
The thread green stems, tangled in bending bowers,
Their pollen plumes of dust closed over him,
Enwoofing through the drowse of summer hours,
The pattern of his body, head and limb;
His color of pale gold glowed as with sunshine dim.
The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom, spaciousness,
strong sunshine; also its careless good humor and half sardonic fun. The
race between the horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and
rhythmical as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family, even to the fat
old Gregorio, are characterized to the life, with a sympathy only too
rare among writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Certain other characterizations are equally incisive, this for example:
Sometimes I peep into a modern poet
Like Arthur Symons, vaguely beautiful,
Who loves but love, not caring who shall know it;
I wonder that he never finds it dull.
Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly a poet of
the broad, level average American people, that both social and artistic
theories sit very lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance now
and then, because he can not help it, but always he achieves a warm
vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.
* * * * *
_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the ingenious effort
of a theorist in human nature to unroll the convolutions of the immortal
traitor's soul. And it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to
remould characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition. In the
art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries to make him over into
a pattern of misguided loyalty has his labor for his pains.
The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered is accurately measured
and sufficiently sonorous.
_H. M._
_Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins (Mitchell
Kennerley).
The poems in this volume are creditable in texture, revealing a
conscious sense of artistic workmanship which it is a pleasure to find
in a book of first poems by a young American. A certain rhythmic
monotony may be mentioned as an impression gained from a consecutive
reading, and a prevailing twilight mood, united, in the longer poems,
with a vein of the emotionally feminine.
Two short lyrics, however, _I Am the Wind_ and _The Tragedienne_, stand
apart in isolated perfection, even as the two Greek columns in the
ruined theater at Arles; an impression recalled by the opening stanza of
_The Tragedienne_:
Upon a hill in Thessaly
Stand broken columns in a line
About a cold forgotten shrine
Beneath a moon in Thessaly.
This is the first of the monthly volumes of poetry to be issued by Mr.
Kennerley. It awakens pleasant anticipation of those to follow.
_Lyrical Poems_, By Lucy Lyttelton. (Thomas B. Mosher.)
The twilight mood also prevails in the poems of Lucy Lyttelton, although
the crest of a fine modern impulse may be traced in _A Vision_, _The
Japanese Widow_, _The Black Madonna_, and _A Song of Revolution_.
"Where is Owen Griffiths?" Broken and alone
Crushed he lies in darkness beneath Festiniog stone.
"Bring his broken body before me to the throne
For a crown.
"Oftentimes in secret in prayer he came to me,
Now to men and angels I know him openly.
I that was beside him when he came to die
Fathoms down.
"And, Evan Jones, stand forward, whose life was shut in gloom,
And a narrow grave they gave you 'twixt marble tomb and tomb.
But now the great that trod you shall give you elbow room
And renown."
These poems unite delicacy and strength. They convince us of sincerity
and intensity of vision.
_A. C. H._
NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS.
It is hardly necessary to introduce to the lovers of lyric and dramatic
verse Mr. William Butler Yeats, who honors the Christmas number of
_Poetry_ by his presence. A score or more of years have passed since his
voice, perfect in quality, began to speak and sing in high loyalty to
the beauty of poetic art, especially the ancient poetic art of his own
Irish people. His influence, reinforced by the prompt allegiance of Lady
Gregory, Mr. Douglass Hyde, the late J. M. Synge, and many other Irish
men and women of letters, has sufficed to lift the beautiful old Gaelic
literature out of the obscurity of merely local recognition into a
position of international importance. This fact alone is a sufficient
acknowledgment of Mr. Yeats' genius, and of the enthusiasm which his
leadership has inspired among the thinkers and singers of his race.
Mr. George Sterling, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, is well known to
American readers of poetry through his two books of verse, _Wine of
Wizardry_ and _The House of Orchids_.
Mr. Clark Ashton Smith, also of California, is a youth whose talent has
been acclaimed quite recently by a few newspapers of his own state, and
recognized by one or two eastern publications.
Mr. John Reed, of New York, and Alice Corbin, the wife of William P.
Henderson, the Chicago painter, are Americans. The latter has
contributed verse and prose to various magazines. The former is a young
journalist, born in 1887, who has published little verse as yet.
Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of Bengal, is sufficiently introduced by
Mr. Pound's article.
BOOKS RECEIVED
_The Vaunt of Man and Other Poems_, by William Ellery Leonard.
B. W. Huebsch.
_Romance, Vision and Satire_: English Alliterative Poems of
the XIV Century, Newly Rendered in the Original Metres,
by Jessie L. Weston. Houghton Mifflin Co.
_Etain The Beloved_, by James H. Cousins. Maunsel & Co.
_Uriel and Other Poems_, by Percy MacKaye. Houghton Mifflin Co.
_The Unconquered Air_, by Florence Earle Coates.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
_A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass_, by Amy Lowell.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
_The Lure of the Sea_, by J. E. Patterson. George H. Doran Co.
_The Roadside Fire_, by Amelia Josephine Burr. George H. Doran Co.
_By the Way._ Verses, Fragments and Notes, by William Allingham.
Arranged by Helen Allingham. Longmans, Green & Co.
_Gabriel_, A Pageant of Vigil, by Isabelle Howe Fiske.
Thomas B. Mosher.
_Pilgrimage to Haunts of Browning_, by Pauline Leavens.
The Bowrons, Chicago.
_The Wind on the Heath_, Ballads and Lyrics, by May Byron.
George H. Doran.
_Valley Song and Verse_, by William Hutcheson.
Fraser, Asher & Co.
_The Queen of Orplede_, by Charles Wharton Stork. Elkin Mathews.
_Pocahontas_, A Pageant, by Margaret Ullman. The Poet Lore Co.
_Poems_, by Robert Underwood Johnson. The Century Co.
_Songs Before Birth_, Isabelle Howe Fiske. Thomas B. Mosher.
_Book Titles From Shakespeare_, by Volney Streamer.
Thomas B. Mosher.
_A Bunch of Blossoms_, Little Verses for Little Children,
by E. Gordon Browne. Longmans, Green & Co.
_June on the Miami_, by William Henry Venable. Stewart & Kidd.
_The Tragedy of Etarre_, A Poem, by Rhys Carpenter.
Sturgis & Walton Co.
_In Other Words_, by Franklin P. Adams. Doubleday, Page & Co.
_Verses and Sonnets_, by Julia Stockton Dinsmore.
Doubleday, Page & Co.
_Anna Marcella's Book of Verses_, by Cyrenus Cole.
Printed for Personal Distribution.
_Atala_, An American Idyl, by Anna Olcott Commelin.
E. P. Dutton & Co.
_Spring in Tuscany_, an Authology. Thos. B. Mosher.
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 4
JANUARY, 1913
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN
(_To be sung to the tune of_ THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB _with indicated
instruments_.)
[Sidenote: Bass drums]
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum.
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
The saints smiled gravely, and they said, "He's come,"
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravos from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug-fiends pale--
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail!
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of death--
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
Every slum had sent its half-a-score
The round world over--Booth had groaned for more.
Every banner that the wide world flies
[Sidenote: Banjo]
Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes.
Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang!
Tranced, fanatical, they shrieked and sang,
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
Hallelujah! It was queer to see
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free!
Loons with bazoos blowing blare, blare, blare--
On, on, upward through the golden air.
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
[Sidenote: Bass drums slower and softer]
Booth died blind, and still by faith he trod,
Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.
Booth led boldly and he looked the chief:
Eagle countenance in sharp relief,
Beard a-flying, air of high command
Unabated in that holy land.
[Sidenote: Flutes]
Jesus came from out the Court-House door,
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there
Round and round the mighty Court-House square.
Yet in an instant all that blear review
Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new.
The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled
And blind eyes opened on a new sweet world.
[Sidenote: Bass drums louder and faster]
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl;
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean.
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
[Sidenote: Grand Chorus--tambourines--all instruments in full blast]
The hosts were sandalled and their wings were fire--
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
Oh, shout Salvation! it was good to see
Kings and princes by the Lamb set free.
The banjos rattled, and the tambourines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of queens!
[Sidenote: Reverently sung--no instruments]
And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master through the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier while the throng knelt down.
He saw King Jesus--they were face to face,
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
_Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?_
_Nicholas Vachel Lindsay_
WASTE LAND
Briar and fennel and chincapin,
And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
Or dead of an old despair,
Born of an ancient care.
The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,
And the note of a bird's distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
Clung to the loneliness
Like burrs to a trailing dress.
So sad the field, so waste the ground,
So curst with an old despair,
A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound,
And a chipmunk's stony lair,
Seemed more than it could bear.
So lonely, too, so more than sad,
So droning-lone with bees--
I wondered what more could Nature add
To the sum of its miseries ...
And _then_--I saw the trees.
Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose--
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind's repose.
And a man stood there, as still as moss,
A lichen form that stared;
With an old blind hound that, at a loss,
Forever around him fared
With a snarling fang half bared.
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again--
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn....
Were they a part of the grim death there--
Ragweed, fennel, and rue?
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
That there into semblance grew
Out of the grief I knew?
_Madison Cawein_
MY LADY OF THE BEECHES
Here among the beeches
Winds and wild perfume,
That the twilight pleaches
Into gleam and gloom,
Build for her a room.
Her, whose Beauty cometh,
Misty as the morn,
When the wild bee hummeth,
At its honey-horn,
In the wayside thorn.
As the wood grows dimmer,
With the drowsy night,
Like a moonbeam glimmer
Here she walks in white,
With a firefly-light.
Moths around her flitting,
Like a moth she goes;
Here a moment sitting
By this wilding rose,
With my heart's repose.
Every bough that dances
Has assumed the grace
Of her form: and Fancies,
Flashed from eye and face,
Brood about the place.
And the water, shaken
In its plunge and poise,
To itself has taken
Quiet of her voice,
And restrains its joys.
Would that these could tell me
What and whence she is;
She, who doth enspell me,
Fill my soul with bliss
Of her spirit kiss.
Though the heart beseech her,
And the soul implore,
Who is it may reach her--
Safe behind the door
Of all woodland lore?
_Madison Cawein_
THE WAYFARERS
Earth, I dare not cling to thee
Lest I should lose my precious soul.
_'Tis not more wondrous than the fluff
Within the milkweed's autumn boll._
Earth, shall my sacred essences
But sink into thy senseless dust?
_The springtide takes its way with them--
And blossoms blow as blossoms must._
Earth, I swear with solemn vow,
I feel a greatness in my breath!
_The grass-seed hath its dream of God,
Its visioning of life and death._
_Anita Fitch_
_LES CRUELS AMOUREUX_
Two lovers wakened in their tombs--
They had been dead a hundred years--
And in the _langue_ of old Provence
They spoke of ancient tears.
"_M'amour_," she called, "I've pardoned you;"
(How sad her dreaming seemed to be!)
"When I had kissed your dead face once
Love's sweet returned to me."
"_M'amour_," he called, "it was too late."
(How dreary seemed his ghostly sighs!)
"Blessed the soul that love forgives,"
He whispered, "ere it dies."
And then they turned again and slept
With must and mold in ancient way;
And so they'll sleep and wake, 'tis told,
Until the Judgment Day.
ENVOI
_O damoiseau et damoiselle_,
Guard ye your loving while ye live!
Sin not against love's sacred flame--
While yet ye may, forgive.
_Anita Fitch_
LOVE-SONGS OF THE OPEN ROAD
MORNING
The morning wind is wooing me; her lips have swept my brow.
Was ever dawn so sweet before? the land so fair as now?
The wanderlust is luring to wherever roads may lead,
While yet the dew is on the hedge. So how can I but heed?
The forest whispers of its shades; of haunts where we have been,--
And where may friends be better made than under God's green inn?
Your mouth is warm and laughing and your voice is calling low,
While yet the dew is on the hedge. So how can I but go?
NOON
The bees are humming, humming in the clover;
The bobolink is singing in the rye;
The brook is purling, purling in the valley,
And the river's laughing, radiant, to the sky!
The buttercups are nodding in the sunlight;
The winds are whispering, whispering to the pine;
The joy of June has found me; as an aureole it's crowned me
Because, oh best belovèd, you are mine!
NIGHT
In Arcady by moonlight,
(Where only lovers go),
There is a pool where only
The fairest roses grow.
Why are the moonlit roses
So sweet beyond compare?
Among their purple shadows
My love is waiting there.
* * * * *
To Arcady by moonlight
The roads are open wide,
But only joy can enter
And only joy abide.
There is the peace unending
That perfect faith can know--
In Arcady by moonlight,
Where only lovers go.
_Kendall Banning_
SYMPATHY
As one within a moated tower,
I lived my life alone;
And dreamed not other granges' dower,
Nor ways unlike mine own.
I thought I loved. But all alone
As one within a moated tower
I lived. Nor truly knew
One other mortal fortune's hour.
As one within a moated tower,
One fate alone I knew.
Who hears afar the break of day
Before the silvered air
Reveals her hooded presence gray,
And she, herself, is there?
I know not how, but now I see
The road, the plain, the pluming tree,
The carter on the wain.
On my horizon wakes a star.
The distant hillsides wrinkled far
Fold many hearts' domain.
On one the fire-worn forests sweep,
Above a purple mountain-keep
And soar to domes of snow.
One heart has swarded fountains deep
Where water-lilies blow:
And one, a cheerful house and yard,
With curtains at the pane,
Board-walks down lawns all clover-starred,
And full-fold fields of grain.
As one within a moated tower
I lived my life alone;
And dreamed not other granges' dower
Nor ways unlike mine own.
But now the salt-chased seas uncurled
And mountains trooped with pine
Are mine. I look on all the world
And all the world is mine.
_Edith Wyatt_
A SONG OF HAPPINESS
Ah Happiness:
Who called you "Earandel"?
(Winter-star, I think, that is);
And who can tell the lovely curve
By which you seem to come, then swerve
Before you reach the middle-earth?
And who is there can hold your wing,
Or bind you in your mirth,
Or win you with a least caress,
Or tear, or kiss, or anything--
Insensate happiness?
Once I thought to have you
Fast there in a child:
All her heart she gave you,
Yet you would not stay.
Cruel, and careless,
Not half reconciled,
Pain you cannot bear;
When her yellow hair
Lay matted, every tress;
When those looks of hers,
Were no longer hers,
You went: in a day
She wept you all away.
Once I thought to give
You, plighted, holily--
No more fugitive,
Returning like the sea:
But they that share so well
Heaven must portion Hell
In their copartnery:
Care, ill fate, ill health,
Came we know not how
And broke our commonwealth.
Neither has you now.
Some wait you on the road,
Some in an open door
Look for the face you show'd
Once there--no more.
You never wear the dress
You danced in yesterday;
Yet, seeming gone, you stay,
And come at no man's call:
Yet, laid for burial,
You lift up from the dead
Your laughing, spangled head.
Yes, once I did pursue
You, unpursuable;
Loved, longed for, hoped for you--
Blue-eyed and morning brow'd.
Ah, lovely happiness!
Now that I know you well,
I dare not speak aloud
Your fond name in a crowd;
Nor conjure you by night,
Nor pray at morning-light,
Nor count at all on you:
But, at a stroke, a breath,
After the fear of death,
Or bent beneath a load;
Yes, ragged in the dress,
And houseless on the road,
I might surprise you there.
Yes: who of us shall say
When you will come, or where?
Ask children at their play,
The leaves upon the tree,
The ships upon the sea,
Or old men who survived,
And lived, and loved, and wived.
Ask sorrow to confess
Your sweet improvidence,
And prodigal expense
And cold economy,
Ah, lovely happiness!
_Ernest Rhys_
HELEN IS ILL
When she is ill my laughter cowers;
An exile with a broken rhyme,
My head upon the breast of time,
I hear the heart-beat of the hours;
I close my eyes without a sigh;
The vision of her flutters by
As glints the light of Mary's eyes
Upon the lakes in Paradise.
I seem to reach an olden town
And enter at the sunset gate;
And as the streets I hurry down,
I find the men are all elate,
As if an angel of the Lord
Had passed with dearest word and nod,
Remembered like a yearning chord
Of songs the people sing to God;
I come upon the sunrise gate--
As silent as her listless room--
There seven beggers sing and wait
And this the song that breaks the gloom:
God a 'mercy is most kind;
She the fairest passed this way;
We the lowest were not blind;
God a 'mercy bless the day.
_Roscoe W. Brink_
VERSES, TRANSLATIONS, AND REFLECTIONS
FROM "THE ANTHOLOGY"
HERMES OF THE WAYS
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it
Are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves
Break over it.
But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.
Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard
Shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.
Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.
Heu,
It whips round my ankles!
II
Small is
This white stream,
Flowing below ground
From the poplar-shaded hill,
But the water is sweet.
Apples on the small trees
Are hard,
Too small,
Too late ripened
By a desperate sun
That struggles through sea-mist.
The boughs of the trees
Are twisted
By many bafflings;
Twisted are
The small-leafed boughs.
But the shadow of them
Is not the shadow of the mast head
Nor of the torn sails.
Hermes, Hermes,
The great sea foamed,
Gnashed its teeth about me;
But you have waited,
Where sea-grass tangles with
Shore-grass.
_H. D._
PRIAPUS
_Keeper-of-Orchards_
I saw the first pear
As it fell.
The honey-seeking, golden-banded,
The yellow swarm
Was not more fleet than I,
(Spare us from loveliness!)
And I fell prostrate,
Crying,
Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms;
Spare us the beauty
Of fruit-trees!
The honey-seeking
Paused not,
The air thundered their song,
And I alone was prostrate.
O rough-hewn
God of the orchard,
I bring thee an offering;
Do thou, alone unbeautiful
(Son of the god),
Spare us from loveliness.
The fallen hazel-nuts,
Stripped late of their green sheaths,
The grapes, red-purple,
Their berries
Dripping with wine,
Pomegranates already broken,
And shrunken fig,
And quinces untouched,
I bring thee as offering.
_H. D._
EPIGRAM
(_After the Greek_)
The golden one is gone from the banquets;
She, beloved of Atimetus,
The swallow, the bright Homonoea:
Gone the dear chatterer;
Death succeeds Atimetus.
_H. D._,
"_Imagiste_."
EDITORIAL COMMENT
STATUS RERUM
_London, December 10, 1912_
The state of things here in London is, as I see it, as follows:
I find Mr. Yeats the only poet worthy of serious study. Mr. Yeats' work
is already a recognized classic and is part of the required reading in
the Sorbonne. There is no need of proclaiming him to the American
public.
As to his English contemporaries, they are food, sometimes very good
food, for anthologies. There are a number of men who have written a
poem, or several poems, worth knowing and remembering, but they do not
much concern the young artist studying the art of poetry.
The important work of the last twenty-five years has been done in Paris.
This work is little likely to gain a large audience in either America or
England, because of its tone and content. There has been no "man with a
message," but the work has been excellent and the method worthy of our
emulation. No other body of poets having so little necessity to speak
could have spoken so well as these modern Parisians and Flemings.
There has been some imitation here of their manner and content. Any
donkey can imitate a man's manner. There has been little serious
consideration of their _method_. It requires an artist to analyze and
apply a method.
Among the men of thirty here, Padraic Colum is the one whom we call most
certainly a poet, albeit he has written very little verse--and but a
small part of that is worthy of notice. He is fairly unconscious of such
words as "aesthetics," "technique" and "method." He is at his best in
_Garadh_, a translation from the Gaelic, beginning:
O woman, shapely as a swan,
On your account I shall not die.
The men you've slain--a trivial clan--
Were less than I:
and in _A Drover_. He is bad whenever he shows a trace of reading. I
quote the opening of _A Drover_, as I think it shows "all Colum" better
than any passage he has written. I think no English-speaking writer now
living has had the luck to get so much of himself into twelve lines.
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford
Go my cattle and me.
I hear in the darkness
Their slipping and breathing.
I name them the bye-ways
They're to pass without heeding.
Then the wet, winding roads,
Brown bogs with black water;
And my thoughts on white ships
And the King o' Spain's daughter.
I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any
man in London. Mr. Hueffer's beliefs about the art may be best explained
by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats.
Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations
which hang near the words. "Works of art beget works of art." He has
much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an
exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all "association" for
the sake of getting a precise meaning. He professes to prefer prose to
verse. You would find his origins in Gautier or in Flaubert. He is
objective. This school tends to lapse into description. The other tends
to lapse into sentiment.
Mr. Yeats' method is, to my way of thinking, very dangerous, for
although he is the greatest of living poets who use English, and though
he has sung some of the moods of life immortally, his art has not
broadened much in scope during the past decade. His gifts to English art
are mostly negative; i. e., he has stripped English poetry of many of
its faults. His "followers" have come to nothing. Neither Synge, Lady
Gregory nor Colum can be called his followers, though he had much to do
with bringing them forth, yet nearly every man who writes English verse
seriously is in some way indebted to him.
Mr. Hueffer has rarely "come off." His touch is so light and his
attitude so easy that there seems little likelihood of his ever being
taken seriously by anyone save a few specialists and a few of his
intimates. His last leaflet, _High Germany_, contains, however, three
poems from which one may learn his quality. They are not Victorian. I do
not expect many people to understand why I praise them. They are _The
Starling_, _In the Little Old Market-Place_ and _To All the Dead_.
The youngest school here that has the nerve to call itself a school is
that of the _Imagistes_. To belong to a school does not in the least
mean that one writes poetry to a theory. One writes poetry when, where,
because, and as one feels like writing it. A school exists when two or
three young men agree, more or less, to call certain things good; when
they prefer such of their verses as have certain qualities to such of
their verses as do not have them.
Space forbids me to set forth the program of the _Imagistes_ at length,
but one of their watchwords is Precision, and they are in opposition to
the numerous and unassembled writers who busy themselves with dull and
interminable effusions, and who seem to think that a man can write a
good long poem before he learns to write a good short one, or even
before he learns to produce a good single line.
Among the very young men, there seems to be a gleam of hope in the work
of Richard Aldington, but it is too early to make predictions.
There are a number of men whose names are too well known for it to seem
necessary to tell them over. America has already found their work in
volumes or anthologies. Hardy, Kipling, Maurice Hewlett, Binyon, Robert
Bridges, Sturge Moore, Henry Newbolt, McKail, Masefield, who has had the
latest cry; Abercrombie, with passionate defenders, and Rupert Brooke,
recently come down from Cambridge.
There are men also, who are little known to the general public, but who
contribute liberally to the "charm" or the "atmosphere" of London:
Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the grandest of old men, the last of the great
Victorians; great by reason of his double sonnet, beginning--
He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction's reach;
Ernest Rhys, weary with much editing and hack work, to whom we owe gold
digged in Wales, translations, transcripts, and poems of his own, among
them the fine one to Dagonet; Victor Plarr, one of the "old" Rhymers'
Club, a friend of Dowson and of Lionel Johnson. His volume, _In The
Dorian Mood_, has been half forgotten, but not his verses _Epitaphium
Citharistriae_. One would also name the Provost of Oriel, not for
original work, but for his very beautiful translations from Dante.
In fact one might name nearly a hundred writers who have given pleasure
with this or that matter in rhyme. But it is one thing to take pleasure
in a man's work and another to respect him as a great artist.
_Ezra Pound_
REVIEWS
_The Lyric Year_, Mr. Kennerley's new annual, contains among its hundred
contributions nearly a score of live poems, among which a few excite the
kind of keen emotion which only art of real distinction can arouse.
Among the live poems the present reviewer would count none of the
prize-winners, not even Mr. Sterling's, the best of the three, whose
rather stiff formalities in praise of Browning are, however, lit now and
then by shining lines, as--
Drew as a bubble from old infamies....
The shy and many-colored soul of man.
The other two prize-poems must have been measured by some academic
foot-rule dug up from the eighteenth century. Orrick Johns' _Second
Avenue_ is a _Grays Elegy_ essay of prosy moralizing, without a finely
poetic line in it, or any originality of meaning or cadence. And the
second prize went to an ode still more hopelessly academic. Indeed, _To
a Thrush_, by Thomas Augustine Daly, is one of the most stilted poems in
the volume, a far-away echo of echoes, full of the approved "poetic"
words--_throstle_, _pregnant_, _vernal_, _cerulean_, _teen_, _chrysmal_,
even _paraclete_--and quite guiltless of inspiration.
But one need not linger with these. As we face the other way one poem
outranks the rest and ennobles the book. This is _The Renascence_, said
to be by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, according to the editor, is only
twenty years old. This poem is the daring flight of a wide-winged
imagination, and the art of it, though not faultless, is strong enough
to carry us through keen emotions of joy and agony to a climax of
spiritual serenity. Though marred by the last twelve lines, which should
be struck out for stating the thesis too explicitly, this poem arouses
high hopes of its youthful author.
Among the other live poems--trees, saplings or flowers--are various
species. _Kisa-Gotami_, by Arthur Davison Ficke, tells its familiar
story of the Buddha in stately cadences which sustain the beauty of the
tale. _Jetsam_, a "_Titanic_" elegy by Herman Montagu Donner, carries
the dread and dangerous subject without violating its terrors and
sanctities with false sentiment or light rhythm. Ridgeley Torrence's
_Ritual for a Funeral_ is less sure of its ground, sometimes escaping
into vapors, but on the whole noble in feeling and flute-like in
cadence. Mrs. Conkling's bird ode has now and then an airy delicacy, and
Edith Wyatt's _City Swallow_ gives the emotion of flight above the roofs
and smoke of a modern town.
Of the shorter poems who could ignore Harry Kemp's noble lyric dialogue,
_I Sing the Battle_; _The Forgotten Soul_ by Margaret Widdemer, _Selma_,
by Willard H. Wright; _Comrades_ by Fannie Stearns Davis, or Nicholas
Vachel Lindsay's tribute to O. Henry, a more vital elegy than Mr.
Sterling's? These are all simple and sincere--straight modern talk
which rises into song without the aid of worn-out phrases. _Paternity_,
by William Rose Benét, _To My Vagrant Love_, by Elouise Briton, and
_Dedication_, by Pauline Florence Brower, are delicate expressions of
intimate emotion; and _Martin_, by Joyce Kilmer, touches with grace a
lighter subject.
To have gathered such as these together is perhaps enough, but more may
be reasonably demanded. As a whole the collection, like the prizes, is
too academic; Georgian and Victorian standards are too much in evidence.
The ambition of _The Lyric Year_ is to be "an annual Salon of American
poetry;" to this end poets and their publishers are invited to
contribute gratis the best poems of the year, without hope of reward
other than the three prizes. That so many responded to the call, freely
submitting their works to anonymous judges, shows how eager is the
hitherto unfriended American muse to seize any helping hand.
However, if this annual is to speak with any authority as a Salon, it
should take a few lessons from art exhibitions. Mr. Earle's position as
donor, editor and judge, is as if Mr. Carnegie should act as hanging
committee at the Pittsburg show, and help select the prize-winners. And
Messrs. Earle, Braithwaite and Wheeler, this year's jury of awards, are
not, even though all have written verse, poets of recognized distinction
in the sense that Messrs. Chase, Alexander, Hassam, Duveneck, and other
jurymen in our various American Salons, are distinguished painters.
In these facts lie the present weaknesses of _The Lyric Year_. However,
the remedy for them is easy and may be applied in future issues.
Meantime the venture is to be welcomed; at last someone, somewhere, is
trying to do something for the encouragement of the art in America.
_Poetry_, which is embarked in the same adventure, rejoices in
companionship.
_H. M._
* * * * *
Already many books of verses come to us, of which a few are poetry.
Sometimes the poetry is an aspiration rather than an achievement; but in
spite of crude materials and imperfect artistry one may feel the beat of
wings and hear the song. Again one searches in vain for the magic touch,
even though the author has interesting things to say in creditable and
more or less persuasive rhymed eloquence.
Of recent arrivals Mr. John Hall Wheelock has the most searching vision
and appealing voice. In _The Human Fantasy_ (Sherman, French & Co.) his
subject is New York, typified in the pathetic little love-affair of two
young starvelings, which takes its course through a stirring, exacting
milieu to a renunciation that leaves the essential sanctities intact.
The poet looks through the slang and shoddy of the lovers, and the dust
and glare of the city, to the divine power of passion in both. In _The
Beloved Adventure_ the emotion is less poignant; or, rather, the poet
has included many indifferent pieces which obscure the quality of finer
lyrics. More rigorous technique and resolute use of the waste-basket
would make more apparent the fact that we have here a true poet, one
with a singing voice, and a heart deeply moved by essential spiritual
beauty in the common manifestations of human character. At his best he
writes with immense concentration and unflagging vigor; and his hearty
young appetite for life in all its manifestations helps him to transmute
the repellant discords of the modern town into harmony. The fantasy of
_Love in a City_ is a "true thing" and a vital.
Mr. Hermann Hagedorn is also a true poet, capable of lyric rapture, but
sometimes, when he seems least aware, his muse escapes him. _The
Infidel_, the initial poem of his _Poems and Ballads_ (Houghton Mifflin
Co.), recalls his _Woman of Corinth_, and others in this book remind one
of this and of his Harvard class poem, _The Troop of the Guard_, in that
the words do not, like colored sands, dance inevitably into the absolute
shape determined by the wizardry of sound. He is still somewhat hampered
by the New England manner, a trend toward an external formalism not
dependent on interior necessity. This influence makes for academic and
lifeless work, and it must be deeply rooted since it casts its chill
also over the Boston school of painters.
But now and then Mr. Hagedorn frees himself; perhaps in the end he may
escape altogether. In such poems as _Song_, _Doors_, _Broadway_,
_Discovery_, _The Wood-Gatherer_, _The Crier in the Night_ and _A Chant
on the Terrible Highway_, we feel that he begins to speak for himself,
to sing with his own voice. Such poems are a challenging note that
should arrest the attention of all seekers after sincere poetic
expression.
Mr. Percy MacKaye, in _Uriel and Other Poems_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.),
shows also the Boston influence, but perhaps it is difficult to escape
the academic note in such poems for occasions as these. With fluent
eloquence and a ready command of verse forms he celebrates dead poets,
addresses noted living persons, and contributes to a number of
ceremonial observances. The poems in which he is most freely lyric are
perhaps _In the Bohemian Redwoods_ and _To the Fire-Bringer_, the
shorter of his elegies in honor of Moody, his friend.
In two dramatic poems, _The Tragedy of Etarre_, by Rhys Carpenter
(Sturgis & Walton Co.), and _Gabriel, a Pageant of Vigil_, by Mrs.
Isabelle Howe Fiske (Mosher), the academic note is confidently insisted
on. The former shows the more promise of ultimate freedom. It is an
Arthurian venture of which the prologue is the strongest part. In
firm-knit iambics Mr. Carpenter strikes out many effective lines and
telling situations. Indeed, they almost prompt the profane suggestion
that, simplified and compressed, they might yield a psychological
libretto for some "advanced" composer.
Mrs. Fiske's venture is toward heaven itself; but her numerous
archangels are of the earth earthy.
In _The Unconquered Air and Other Poems_ (Houghton Mifflin Co.), Mrs.
Florence Earle Coates shows not inspiration but wide and humane
sympathies. Her verse is typical of much which has enough popular appeal
and educative value to be printed extensively in the magazines; verse in
which subjects of modern interest and human sentiment are expressed in
the kind of rhymed eloquence which passes for poetry with the great
majority.
These poets may claim the justification of illustrious precedent. The
typical poem of this class in America, the most famous verse rhapsody
which stops short of lyric rapture, is Lowell's _Commemoration Ode_.
NOTES
Our poets this month play divers instruments. The audience may listen to
H. D.'s flute, the 'cello of Mr. Rhys, the big bass drum of Mr. Lindsay,
and so on through the orchestra, fitting each poet to his special
strain. Some of these performers are well known, others perhaps will be.
Mr. Ernest Rhys is of Welsh descent. In 1888-9 he lectured in America,
and afterward returned to London, where he has published _A London
Rose_, Arthurian plays and poems, and Welsh ballads, and edited
_Everyman's Library_.
Mr. Madison Cawein, the well-known Kentucky poet resident in Louisville,
scarcely needs an introductory word. His is landscape poetry chiefly,
but sometimes, as in Wordsworth, figures blend with the scene and
become a part of nature. A volume of his own selections from his
various books has recently been published by The MacMillan Company.
Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay is the vagabond poet who loves to tramp
through untravelled country districts without a cent in his pocket,
exchanging "rhymes for bread" at farmers' hearths. The magazines have
published engaging articles by him, but in verse he has been usually his
own publisher as yet.
"H. D., _Imagiste_," is an American lady resident abroad, whose identity
is unknown to the editor. Her sketches from the Greek are not offered as
exact translations, or as in any sense finalities, but as experiments in
delicate and elusive cadences, which attain sometimes a haunting beauty.
Mr. Kendall Banning is an editor and writer of songs. "The Love Songs of
the Open Road," with music by Lena Branscord, will soon be published by
Arthur Schmidt of Boston.
Mrs. Anita Fitch of New York has contributed poems to various magazines.
The February number of POETRY will be devoted to the work of two poets,
Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner.
BOOKS RECEIVED
_The Lyric Year._ Mitchell Kennerley.
_Poems and Ballads_, by Hermann Hagedorn. Houghton Mifflin Co.
_Shadows of the Flowers_, by T. B. Aldrich. Houghton Mifflin Co.
_Poems and Plays_, by William Vaughn Moody. Houghton Mifflin Co.
_Nimrod_, by Francis Rolt-Wheeler. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard.
_The Shadow Garden and Other Plays_, by Madison Cawein.
G. P. Putman's Sons.
_Via Lucis_, by Alice Harper. M. E. Church South,
Nashville, Tenn.
_Songs of Courage and Other Poems_, by Bertha F. Gordon.
The Baker & Taylor Co.
_Narrative Lyrics_, by Edward Lucas White. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
_The Dance of Dinwiddie_, by Marshall Moreton. Stewart & Kidd Co.
_The Three Visions and Other Poems_, by John A. Johnson.
Stewart & Kidd Co.
_Hands Across The Equator_, by Alfred Ernest Keet.
Privately printed.
_Songs Under Open Skies_, by M. Jay Flannery. Stewart & Kidd Co.
_Denys Of Auxerre_, by James Barton. Christophers, London.
_Songs in Many Moods_, by Charles Washburn Nichols.
L. H. Blackmer Press.
_The Lord's Prayer._ A Sonnet Sequence by Francis Howard Williams.
George W. Jacobs & Co.
_The Buccaneers_, by Don C. Seitz. Harper & Bros.
_The Tale of a Round-House_, by John Masefield. The MacMillan Co.
_XXXIII Love Sonnets_, by Florence Brooks. John Marone.
_The Poems of Ida Ahlborn Weeks._ Published By Her Friends,
Sabula, Iowa.
_The Poems of LeRoy Titus Weeks._ Published by the author.
_Ripostes_, by Ezra Pound. Stephen Swift.
_The Spinning Woman of the Sky_, by Alice Corbin.
The Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co.
_The Irish Poems of Alfred Perceval Graves._ Maunsel & Co.
_Welsh Poetry Old and New, in English Verse_,
by Alfred Perceval Graves. Longmans, Green & Co.
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 5
FEBRUARY, 1913
POEMS
BY
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
SWINBURNE, AN ELEGY
I
The autumn dusk, not yearly but eternal,
Is haunted by thy voice.
Who turns his way far from the valleys vernal
And by dark choice
Disturbs those heights which from the low-lying land
Rise sheerly toward the heavens, with thee may stand
And hear thy thunders down the mountains strown.
But none save him who shares thy prophet-sight
Shall thence behold what cosmic dawning-light
Met thy soul's own.
II
Master of music! unmelodious singing
Must build thy praises now.
Master of vision! vainly come we, bringing
Words to endow
Thy silence,--where, beyond our clouded powers,
The sun-shot glory of resplendent hours
Invests thee of the Dionysiac flame.
Yet undissuaded come we, here to make
Not thine enrichment but our own who wake
Thy echoing fame.
III
Not o'er thy dust we brood,--we who have never
Looked in thy living eyes.
Nor wintry blossom shall we come to sever
Where thy grave lies.
Let witlings dream, with shallow pride elate,
That they approach the presence of the great
When at the spot of birth or death they stand.
But hearts in whom thy heart lives, though they be
By oceans sundered, walk the night with thee
In alien land.
IV
For them, grief speaks not with the tidings spoken
That thou art of the dead.
No lamp extinguished when the bowl is broken,
No music fled
When the lute crumbles, art thou nor shalt be;
But as a great wave, lifted on the sea,
Surges triumphant toward the sleeping shore,
Thou fallest, in splendor of irradiant rain,
To sweep resurgent all the ocean plain
Forevermore.
V
The seas of earth with flood tides filled thy bosom;
The sea-winds to thy voice
Lent power; the Grecian with the English blossom
Twined, to rejoice
Upon thy brow in chaplets of new bloom;
And over thee the Celtic mists of doom
Hovered to give their magics to thy hand;
And past the moon, where Music dwells alone,
She woke, and loved, and left her starry zone
At thy command.
VI
For thee spake Beauty from the shadowy waters;
For thee Earth garlanded
With loveliness and light her mortal daughters;
Toward thee was sped
The arrow of swift longing, keen delight,
Wonder that pierces, cruel needs that smite,
Madness and melody and hope and tears.
And these with lights and loveliness illume
Thy pages, where rich Summer's faint perfume
Outlasts the years.
VII
Outlasts, too well! For of the hearts that know thee
Few know or dare to stand
On thy keen chilling heights; but where below thee
Thy lavish hand
Has scattered brilliant jewels of summer song
And flowers of passionate speech, there grope the throng
Crying--"Behold! this bauble, this is he!"
And of their love or hate, the foolish wars
Echo up faintly where amid lone stars
Thy soul may be.
VIII
But some, who find in thee a word exceeding
Even thy power of speech--
To whom each song,--like an oak-leaf crimson, bleeding,
Fallen,--can teach
Tidings of that high forest whence it came
Where the wooded mountain-slope in one vast flame
Burns as the Autumn kindles on its quest--
These rapt diviners gather close to thee:--
Whom now the Winter holds in dateless fee
Sealèd of rest.
IX
Strings never touched before,--strange accents chanting,--
Strange quivering lambent words,--
A far exalted hope serene or panting
Mastering the chords,--
A sweetness fierce and tragic,--these were thine,
O singing lover of dark Proserpine!
O spirit who lit the Maenad hills with song!
O Augur bearing aloft thy torch divine,
Whose flickering lights bewilder as they shine
Down on the throng.
X
Not thy deep glooms, but thine exceeding glory
Maketh men blind to thee.
For them thou hast no evening fireside story.
But to be free--
But to arise, spurning all bonds that fold
The spirit of man in fetters forged of old--
This was the mighty trend of thy desire;
Shattering the Gods, teaching the heart to mould
No longer idols, but aloft to hold
The soul's own fire.
XI
Yea, thou didst burst the final gates of capture;
And thy strong heart has passed
From youth, half-blinded by its golden rapture,
Into the vast
Desolate bleakness of life's iron spaces;
And there found solace, not in faiths, or faces,
Or aught that must endure Time's harsh control.
In the wilderness, alone, when skies were cloven,
Thou hast thy garment and thy refuge woven
From thine own soul.
XII
The faiths and forms of yesteryear are waning,
Dropping, like leaves.
Through the wood sweeps a great wind of complaining
As Time bereaves
Pitiful hearts of all that they thought holy.
The icy stars look down on melancholy
Shelterless creatures of a pillaged day:
A day of disillusionment and terror,
A day that yields no solace for the error
It takes away.
XIII
Thee with no solace, but with bolder passion
The bitter day endowed.
As battling seas from the frail swimmer fashion
At last the proud
Indomitable master of their tides,
Who with exultant power splendidly rides
The terrible summit of each whelming wave,--
So didst thou reap, from fields of wreckage, gain;
Harvesting the wild fruit of the bitter main,
Strength that shall save.
XIV
Here where old barks upon new headlands shatter,
And worlds seem torn apart,
Amid the creeds now vain to shield or flatter
The mortal heart,
Where the wild welter of strange knowledge won
From grave and engine and the chemic sun
Subdues the age to faith in dust and gold:
The bardic laurel thou hast dowered with youth,
In living witness of the spirit's truth,
Like prophets old.
XV
Thee shall the future time with joy inherit.
Hast thou not sung and said:
"Save its own light, none leads the mortal spirit,
None ever led"?
Time shall bring many, even as thy steps have trod,
Where the soul speaks authentically of God,
Sustained by glories strange and strong and new.
Yet these most Orphic mysteries of thy heart
Only to kindred can thy speech impart;
And they are few.
XVI
Few men shall love thee, whom fierce powers have lifted
High beyond meed of praise.
But as some bark whose seeking sail has drifted
Through storm of days,
We hail thee, bearing back thy golden flowers
Gathered beyond the Western Isles, in bowers
That had not seen, till thine, a vessel's wake.
And looking on thee from our land-built towers
Know that such sea-dawn never can be ours
As thou sawest break.
XVII
Now sailest thou dim-lighted, lonelier water.
By shores of bitter seas
Low is thy speech with Ceres' ghostly daughter,
Whose twined lilies
Are not more pale than thou, O bard most sweet,
Most bitter;--for whose brow sedge-crowns were mete
And crowns of splendid holly green and red;
Who passest from the dust of careless feet
To lands where sunrise thou hast sought shall greet
Thy holy head.
XVIII
Thou hast followed after him whose hopes were greatest,--
That meteor-soul divine;
Near whom divine we hail thee: thou the latest
Of that bright line
Of flame-lipped masters of the spell of song,
Enduring in succession proud and long,
The banner-bearers in triumphant wars:
Latest; and first of that bright line to be,
For whom thou also, flame-lipped, spirit-free,
Art of the stars.
TO A CHILD--TWENTY YEARS HENCE
You shall remember dimly,
Through mists of far-away,
Her whom, our lips set grimly,
We carried forth today.
But when, in days hereafter,
Unfolding time shall bring
Knowledge of love and laughter
And trust and triumphing,--
Then from some face the fairest,
From some most joyous breast,
Garner what there is rarest
And happiest and best,--
The youth, the light the rapture
Of eager April grace,--
And in that sweetness, capture
Your mother's far-off face.
And all the mists shall perish
That have between you moved.
You shall see her you cherish;
And love, as we have loved.
PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN
She limps with halting painful pace,
Stops, wavers, and creeps on again;
Peers up with dim and questioning face
Void of desire or doubt or pain.
Her cheeks hang gray in waxen folds
Wherein there stirs no blood at all.
A hand like bundled cornstalks holds
The tatters of a faded shawl.
Where was a breast, sunk bones she clasps;
A knot jerks where were woman-hips;
A ropy throat sends writhing gasps
Up to the tight line of her lips.
Here strong the city's pomp is poured ...
She stands, unhuman, bleak, aghast:
An empty temple of the Lord
From which the jocund Lord has passed.
He has builded him another house,
Whenceforth his flame, renewed and bright,
Shines stark upon these weathered brows
Abandoned to the final night.
THE THREE SISTERS
Gone are the three, those sisters rare
With wonder-lips and eyes ashine.
One was wise and one was fair,
And one was mine.
Ye mourners, weave for the sleeping hair
Of only two your ivy vine.
For one was wise and one was fair,
But one was mine.
AMONG SHADOWS
In halls of sleep you wandered by,
This time so indistinguishably
I cannot remember aught of it,
Save that I know last night we met.
I know it by the cloudy thrill
That in my heart is quivering still;
And sense of loveliness forgot
Teases my fancy out of thought.
Though with the night the vision wanes
Its haunting presence still may last--
As odour of flowers faint remains
In halls where late a queen has passed.
A WATTEAU MELODY
Oh, let me take your lily hand,
And where the secret star-beams shine
Draw near, to see and understand
Pierrot and Columbine.
Around the fountains, in the dew,
Where afternoon melts into night,
With gracious mirth their gracious crew
Entice the shy birds of delight.
Of motley dress and maskèd face,
Of sparkling unrevealing eyes,
They track in gentle aimless chase
The moment as it flies.
Their delicate beribboned rout,
Gallant and fair, of light intent,
Weaves through the shadows in and out
With infinite artful merriment.
* * * * *
Dear Lady of the lily hand,
Do then our stars so clearly shine
That we, who do not understand,
May mock Pierrot and Columbine?
Beyond this garden-grove I see
The wise, the noble and the brave
In ultimate futility
Go down into the grave.
And all they dreamed and all they sought,
Crumbled and ashen grown, departs;
And is as if they had not wrought
These works with blood from out their hearts.
The nations fall, the faiths decay,
The great philosophies go by,--
And life lies bare, some bitter day,
A charnel that affronts the sky.
The wise, the noble and the brave,--
They saw and solved, as we must see
And solve, the universal grave,
The ultimate futility.
* * * * *
Look, where beside the garden-pool
A Venus rises in the grove,
More suave, more debonair, more cool
Than ever burned with Paphian love.
'Twas here the delicate ribboned rout
Of gallants and the fair ones went
Among the shadows in and out
With infinite artful merriment.
Then let me take your lily hand,
And let us tread, where starbeams shine,
A dance; and be, and understand
Pierrot and Columbine.
_Arthur Davison Ficke_
POEMS
BY
WITTER BYNNER
APOLLO TROUBADOUR
When a wandering Italian
Yesterday at noon
Played upon his hurdy-gurdy
Suddenly a tune,
There was magic in my ear-drums:
Like a baby's cup and spoon
Tinkling time for many sleigh-bells,
Many no-school, rainy-day-bells,
Cow-bells, frog-bells, run-away-bells,
Mingling with an ocean medley
As of elemental people
More emotional than wordy,--
Mermaids laughing off their tantrums,
Mermen singing loud and sturdy,--
Silver scales and fluting shells,
Popping weeds and gurgles deadly,
Coral chime from coral steeple,
Intermittent deep-sea bells
Ringing over floating knuckles,
Buried gold and swords and buckles,
And a thousand bubbling chuckles,
Yesterday at noon,--
Such a melody as star-fish,
And all fish that really are fish,
In a gay, remote battalion
Play at midnight to the moon!
Could any playmate on our planet,
Hid in a house of earth's own granite,
Be so devoid of primal fire
That a wind from this wild crated lyre
Should find no spark and fan it?
Would any lady half in tears,
Whose fashion, on a recent day
Over the sea, had been to pay
Vociferous gondoliers,
Beg that the din be sent away
And ask a gentleman, gravely treading
As down the aisle at his own wedding,
To toss the foreigner a quarter
Bribing him to leave the street;
That motor-horns and servants' feet
Familiar might resume, and sweet
To her offended ears,
The money-music of her peers!
Apollo listened, took the quarter
With his hat off to the buyer,
Shrugged his shoulder small and sturdy,
Led away his hurdy-gurdy
Street by street, then turned at last
Toward a likelier piece of earth
Where a stream of chatter passed,
Yesterday at noon;
By a school he stopped and played
Suddenly a tune....
What a melody he made!
Made in all those eager faces,
Feet and hands and fingers!
How they gathered, how they stayed
With smiles and quick grimaces,
Little man and little maid!--
How they took their places,
Hopping, skipping, unafraid,
Darting, rioting about,
Squealing, laughing, shouting out!
How, beyond a single doubt,
In my own feet sprang the ardour
(Even now the motion lingers)
To be joining in their paces!
Round and round the handle went,--
Round their hearts went harder;--
Apollo urged the happy rout
And beamed, ten times as well content
With every son and daughter
As though their little hands had lent
The gentleman his quarter.--
(You would not guess--nor I deny--
That that same gentleman was I!)
No gentleman may watch a god
With proper happiness therefrom;
So street by street again I trod
The way that we had come.
He had not seen me following
And yet I think he knew;
For still, the less I heard of it,
The more his music grew:
As if he made a bird of it
To sing the distance through....
And, O Apollo, how I thrilled,
You liquid-eyed rapscallion,
With every twig and twist of Spring,
Because your music rose and filled
Each leafy vein with dew,--
With melody of olden sleigh-bells,
Over-the-sea-and-far-away-bells,
And the heart of an Italian,
And the tinkling cup and spoon,--
Such a melody as star-fish,
And all fish that really are fish,
In a gay remote battalion
Play at midnight to the moon!
ONE OF THE CROWD
Oh I longed, when I went in the woods today,
To see the fauns come out and play,
To see a satyr try to seize
A dryad's waist--and bark his knees,
To see a river-nymph waylay
And shock him with a dash of spray!--
And I teased, like a child, by brooks and trees:
"Come back again! We need you! _Please!_
Come back and teach us how to play!"
But nowhere in the woods were they.
I found, when I went in the town today,
A thousand people on their way
To offices and factories--
And never a single soul at ease;
And how could I help but sigh and say:
"What can it profit them, how can it pay
To strain the eye with rivalries
Until the dark is all it sees?--
Or to manage, more than others may,
To store the wasted gain away?"
But one of the crowd looked up today,
With pointed brows. I heard him say:
"Out of the meadows and rivers and trees
We fauns and many companies
Of nymphs have come. And we are these,
These people, each upon his way,
Looking for work, working for pay--
And paying all our energies
To earn true love ... For, seeming gay,
"Once we were sad," I heard him say.
NEIGHBORS
Neighbors are not neighborly
Who close the windows tight,--
Nor those who fix a peeping eye
For finding things not right.
Let me have faith, is what I pray,
And let my faith be strong!--
But who am I, is what I say,
To think my neighbor wrong?
And though my neighbor may deny
That faith could be so slight,
May call me wrong, yet who am I
To think my neighbor right?
Perhaps we wisely by and by
May learn it of each other,
That he is right and so am I--
And save a lot of bother.
THE HILLS OF SAN JOSÉ
I look at the long low hills of golden brown
With their little wooded canyons
And at the haze hanging its beauty in the air--
And I am caught and held, as a ball is caught and held by a player
Who leaps for it in the field.
And as the heart in the breast of the player beats toward the ball,
And as the heart beats in the breast of him who shouts
toward the player,
So my heart beats toward the hills that are playing ball with the sun,
That leap to catch the sun
And to throw it to other hills--
Or to me!
GRIEVE NOT FOR BEAUTY
Grieve not for the invisible, transported brow
On which like leaves the dark hair grew,
Nor for the lips of laughter that are now
Laughing inaudibly in sun and dew,
Nor for those limbs that, fallen low
And seeming faint and slow,
Shall yet pursue
More ways of swiftness than the swallow dips
Among ... and find more winds than ever blew
The straining sails of unimpeded ships!
Mourn not!--yield only happy tears
To deeper beauty than appears!
THE MYSTIC
By seven vineyards on one hill
We walked. The native wine
In clusters grew beside us two,
For your lips and for mine,
When, "Hark!" you said,--"Was that a bell
Or a bubbling spring we heard?"
But I was wise and closed my eyes
And listened to a bird;
For as summer leaves are bent and shake
With singers passing through,
So moves in me continually
The wingèd breath of you.
You tasted from a single vine
And took from that your fill--
But I inclined to every kind,
All seven on one hill.
PASSING NEAR
I had not till today been sure,
But now I know:
Dead men and women come and go
Under the pure
Sequestering snow.
And under the autumnal fern
And carmine bush,
Under the shadow of a thrush,
They move and learn;
And in the rush
Of all the mountain-brooks that wake
With upward fling
To brush and break the loosening cling
Of ice, they shake
The air with Spring!
I had not till today been sure,
But now I know:
Dead youths and maidens come and go
Below the lure
And undertow
Of cities, under every street
Of empty stress,
Or heart of an adulteress:
Each loud retreat
Of lovelessness.
For only by the stir we make
In passing near
Are we confused, and cannot hear
The ways they take
Certain and clear.
Today I happened in a place
Where all around
Was silence; until, underground,
I heard a pace,
A happy sound.
And people whom I there could see
Tenderly smiled,
While under a wood of silent, wild
Antiquity
Wandered a child,
Leading his mother by the hand,
Happy and slow,
Teaching his mother where to go
Under the snow.
Not even now I understand--
I only know.
_Witter Bynner_
REVIEWS AND COMMENTS
_The Story of a Round House and other Poems_,
by JOHN MASEFIELD (Macmillan)
Not long ago I chanced to see upon a well-known page, reflective and
sincere, these words: "The invisible root out of which the poetry
deepest in and dearest to humanity grows is Friendship."
A recent volume may well serve as a distinguished illustration of the
saying's truth. Few persons, I think, will read _The Story of a Round
House and other Poems_ without a sense that the invisible root of its
deep poetry is that fine power which Whitman called Friendship, the
genius of sympathetic imagination.
This is the force that knits the sinews of the chief, the life-size
figure of the book. _Dauber_ is the tale of a man and his work. It is
the story of an artist in the making. The heroic struggles of an English
farmer's son of twenty-one to become a painter of ships and the ocean,
form the drama of the poem. The scene is a voyage around the Horn, the
ship-board and round-house of a clipper where Dauber spends cruel,
grinding months of effort to become an able seaman on the road of his
further purpose--
Of beating thought into the perfect line.
His fall from the yard-arm toward the close of the conquered horrors of
his testing voyage; the catastrophe of his death after
He had emerged out of the iron time
And knew that he could compass his life's scheme--
these make the end of the tragedy.
Tragedy? Yes. But a tragedy of the same temper as that of the great
Dane, where the pursuit of a mortal soul's intention is more, far more,
than his mortality. Unseen forever by the world, part of its unheard
melodies, are all the lines and colors of the Dauber's dreaming. At
Elsinore rules Fortinbras, the foe: the fight is lost; the fighter has
been slain. These are great issues, hard, unjust and wrong. But the
greatest issue of all is that men should be made of the stuff of
magnificence. You close the poem, you listen to the last speech of its
deep sea-music, thinking: Here is death, the real death we all must die;
here is futility, and who knows what we all are here for? But here is
glory.
Only less powerful than the impression of the strain of Dauber's
endeavor, is the impression of its loneliness. The sneers of the
reefers, their practical jokes, the dulness, the arrogance, the smugness
and endless misunderstanding, the meanness of man on the apprentice
journey, has a keener tooth than the storm-wind.
The verities of _Dauber_ are built out of veracities. The reader must
face the hardship of labor at sea. He must face the squalors, the
miseries. If he cannot find poetry in a presentment of the cruel,
dizzying reality of a sailor's night on a yard-arm in the icy gale off
Cape Horn, then he will not perhaps feel in the poem the uncompromising
raciness inherent in romances that are true. For the whole manner of
this sea-piece is that of bold, free-hand drawing of things as they are.
Its final event presents a genuinely epic subject from our contemporary
history--the catastrophic character of common labor, and one of its
multitudinous fatalities.
Epic rather than lyric, the verse of _Dauber_ has an admirable and
refreshing variety in its movement. It speaks the high, wild cry of an
eagle:
--the eagle's song
Screamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.
It speaks thick-crowding discomforts on the mast with a slapping, frozen
sail:
His sheath-knife flashed,
His numb hand hacked with it to clear the strips;
The flying ice was salt upon his lips.
The ice was caking on his oil-skins; cold
Struck to his marrow, beat upon him strong,
The chill palsied his blood, it made him old;
The frosty scatter of death was being flung.
Some of the lines, such as--
The blackness crunched all memory of the sun--
have the hard ring, the thick-packed consonantal beauty of stirring
Greek.
_Dauber_ will have value to American poetry-readers if only from its
mere power of revealing that poetry is not alone the mellow lin-lan-lone
of evening bells, though it be that also, but may have music of
innumerable kinds.
_Biography_, the next poem in the book, sings with a different voice and
sees from a different point of view, the difficulty of re-creating in
expression--here expression through words, not through colors--
This many-pictured world of many passions.
_Biography_, too, rises from the invisible root of friendship and bears
with wonderfully vivid arborescence an appreciative tale of the fine
contribution of different companionships to a life.
Among the two-score shorter lyrics of the collection are songs of the
sea or of the country-side; chants of coast-town bells and ports, marine
ballads, and love-poems. This is, however, the loosest entitling of
their kinds; nothing but the work itself in its entirety, can ever tell
the actual subject of any true poem. Of these kinds it is not to the
marine ballads that one turns back again and again, not to the story of
"Spanish Waters" nor to any of the jingling-gold, the clinking-glass,
the treasure-wreck verses of the book. Their tunes are spirited, but not
a tenth as spirited as those of "The Pirates of Penzance." Indeed, to
the conventionally villainous among fictive sea-faring persons of song,
Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have done something that cannot now ever be
undone.
The poems in the volume one does turn back to again and again are those
with the great singing tones, that pour forth with originality, with
inexpressible free grace and native power. Again and again you will read
_A Creed_, _C. L. M._, _Born for Nought Else_, _Roadways_, _Truth_, _The
Wild Duck_, _Her Heart_, and--
But at the falling of the tide
The golden birds still sing and gleam.
The Atlanteans have not died,
Immortal things still give us dream.
The dream that fires man's heart to make,
To build, to do, to sing or say
A beauty Death can never take,
An Adam from the crumbled clay.
Wonderful, wonderful it is that in the hearing of our own generation,
one great voice after another has called and sung to the world from the
midst of the sea-mists of England. From the poetry of Swinburne, of
Rudyard Kipling, of John Masefield immortal things still give us dream.
Among the poems of this new book, more than one appear as incarnations
of the beauty Death can never take. Of these, perhaps, none is more
characteristic of the poet, nor will any more fittingly evince his
volume's quality than _Truth_.
Man with his burning soul
Has but an hour of breath
To build a ship of Truth
In which his soul may sail,
Sail on the sea of death.
For death takes toll
Of beauty, courage, youth,
Of all but Truth.
Life's city ways are dark,
Men mutter by, the wells
Of the great waters moan.
O death, O sea, O tide,
The waters moan like bells.
No light, no mark,
The soul goes out alone
On seas unknown.
Stripped of all purple robes,
Stripped of all golden lies,
I will not be afraid.
Truth will preserve through death;
Perhaps the stars will rise,
The stars like globes.
The ship my striving made
May see night fade.
_Edith Wyatt_
_Présences_, par P. J. Jouve: Georges Crès, Paris.
I take pleasure in welcoming, in Monsieur Jouve, a contemporary. He
writes the new jargon and I have not the slightest doubt that he is a
poet.
Whatever may be said against automobiles and aeroplanes and the
modernist way of speaking of them, and however much one may argue that
this new sort of work is mannered, and that its style will pass, still
it is indisputable that the vitality of the time exists in such work.
Here is a book that you can read without being dead sure of what you
will find on the next page, or at the end of the next couplet. There is
no doubt that M. Jouve sees with his own eyes and feels with his own
nerves. Nothing is more boresome than an author who pretends to know
less about things than he really does know. It is this silly sort of
false naïveté that rots the weaker productions of Maeterlinck. Thank
heaven the advance guard is in process of escaping it.
It is possible that the new style will grow as weak in the future in the
hands of imitators as has, by now, the Victorian manner, but for the
nonce it is refreshing. Work of this sort can not be produced by the
yard in stolid imitation of dead authors.
I defy anyone to read it without being forced to think, immediately,
about life and the nature of things. I have perused this volume twice,
and I have enjoyed it.
_E. P._
THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA
The Poetry Society of America, organized in 1910, was a natural
response, perhaps at the time unconscious, to the reawakened interest in
poetry, now so widely apparent.
There seemed no reason why poetry, one of the noblest of the arts,
should not take to itself visible organization as well as its sister
arts of music and painting, since it was certain that such organization
contributed much to their advancement and appreciation. Poetry alone
remained an isolated art, save through the doubtful value of coteries
dedicated to the study of some particular poet. In the sense of
fellowship, of the creative sympathy of contact, of the keener
appreciation which must follow the wider knowledge of an art, poetry
stood alone, detached from these avenues open from the beginning to
other arts.
The Society was therefore founded, with a charter membership of about
fifty persons, which included many of the poets doing significant work
to-day, together with critics and representatives of other arts, the
purpose from the outset being to include the appreciators of poetry as
well as its producers. It has grown to nearly two hundred members,
distributed from coast to coast, and eventually it will probably resolve
itself into branch societies, with the chief organization, as now, in
New York. Such societies should have a wide influence upon their
respective communities in stimulating interest in the work of living
poets, to which the Poetry Society as an organization is chiefly
addressed.
Since the passing of the nineteenth-century poets, the art of poetry,
like the art of painting, has taken on new forms and become the vehicle
of a new message. The poet of to-day speaks through so different a
medium, his themes are so diverse from those of the elder generation,
that he cannot hope to find his public in their lingering audience. He
must look to his contemporaries, to those touched by the same issues and
responsive to the same ideals. To aid in creating this atmosphere for
the poet, to be the nucleus of a movement for the wider knowledge of
contemporaneous verse, the Poetry Society of America took form and in
its brief period has, I think, justified the idea of its promoters.
Its meetings are held once a month at the National Arts Club in New
York, with which it is affiliated, and are given chiefly to the reading
and discussion of poetry, both of recently published volumes and of
poems submitted anonymously. This feature has proved perhaps the most
attractive, and while criticism based upon one hearing of a poem cannot
be taken as authoritative, it is often constructive and valuable.
The Society is assembling an interesting collection of books, a
twentieth century library of American poetry. Aside from its own
collection, it is taking steps to promote a wider representation of
modern poets in public libraries.
_Jessie B. Rittenhouse._
NOTES
"THAT MASS OF DOLTS"
Mr. Pound's phrase in his poem _To Whistler, American_, has aroused more
or less resentment, some of it quite emphatic. Apparently we of "these
states" have no longing for an Ezekiel; our prophets must give us, not
the bitter medicine which possibly we need, but the sugar-and-water of
compliment which we can always swallow with a smile.
Perhaps we should examine our consciences a little, or at least step
down from our self-erected pedestals long enough to listen to this
accusation. What has become of our boasted sense of humor if we cannot
let our young poets rail, or our sense of justice if we cannot cease
smiling and weigh their words? In certain respects we Americans are a
"mass of dolts," and in none more than our huge stolid, fundamental
indifference to our own art. Mr. Pound is not the first American poet
who has stood with his back to the wall, and struck out blindly with
clenched fists in a fierce impulse to fight. Nor is he the first whom
we, by this same stolid and indifferent rejection, have forced into
exile and rebellion.
After a young poet has applied in vain to the whole list of American
publishers and editors, and learned that even though he were a genius of
the first magnitude they could not risk money or space on his poetry
because the public would not buy it--after a series of such rebuffs our
young aspirant goes abroad and succeeds in interesting some London
publisher. The English critics, let us say, praise his book, and echoes
of their praises reach our astonished ears. Thereupon the poet in exile
finds that he has thus gained a public, and editorial suffrages, in
America, and that the most effective way of increasing that public and
those suffrages is, to remain in exile and guard his foreign reputation.
Meantime it is quite probable that a serious poet will have grown weary
of such open and unashamed colonialism, that he will prefer to stay
among people who are seriously interested in aesthetics and who know
their own minds. For nothing is so hard to meet as indifference; blows
are easier for a live man to endure than neglect. The poet who cries out
his message against a stone wall will be silenced in the end, even
though he bear a seraph's wand and speak with the tongues of angels.
* * * * *
One phase of our colonialism in art, the singing of opera in foreign
languages, has been persistently opposed by Eleanor E. Freer, who has
set to music of rare distinction many of the finest English lyrics, old
and new. She writes:
In the Basilikon Doron, King James I of
England writes to his son: "And I would, also,
advise you to write in your own language; for
there is nothing left to be said in Greek and
Latin already--and besides that, it best becometh
a King to purify and make famous his own tongue."
Might we add, it best becometh the kings of art
in America and England to sing their own language
and thus aid in the progress of their national
music and poetry?
* * * * *
Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner belong to the younger
group of American poets, both having been born since 1880, the former in
Davenport, Iowa, and the latter in Brooklyn. Both were graduated from
Harvard early in this century, after which Mr. Ficke was admitted to the
bar, and Mr. Bynner became assistant editor of McClure's.
Mr. Ficke has published _From the Isles_, _The Happy Princess_, _The
Earth Passion_ and _The Breaking of Bonds_; also _Mr. Faust_, a dramatic
poem, and a series of poems called _Twelve Japanese Painters_, will be
published this year. Mr. Bynner has published _An Ode to Harvard and
Other Poems_, and _An Immigrant_. His play, _His Father's House_, was
recently produced in California.
The March number of _Poetry_ will contain _The Silent House_, a one-act
play, by Agnes Lee, and poems by Alice Meynell, Alfred Noyes, Fannie
Stearns Davis and others.
BOOKS RECEIVED
_Bugle Notes of Courage and Love_, by Althea A. Ogden.
Unity Publishing Co.
_Altar-Side Messages_, by Evelyn H. Walker. Unity Publishing Co.
_Dream Harbor_, by J. W. Vallandingham. Privately printed.
_Hopeful Thoughts_, by Eleanor Hope. Franklin Hudson Publishing Co.
_The Youth Replies_, by Louis How. Sherman, French & Co.
_Songs of the Love Unending_, A Sonnet Sequence,
by Kendall Banning. Brothers of the Book.
_William Allingham_, The Golden Treasury Series. The Macmillan Co.
_Idylls Beside the Strand_, by Franklin F. Phillips.
Sherman, French & Co.
_The Minstrel with the Self-Same Song_, by Charles A. Fisher.
The Eichelberger Book Co.
_The Wife of Potiphar_, with Other Poems, by Harvey M. Watts.
The John C. Winston Co.
_A Scroll of Seers_, A Wall Anthology. Peter Paul & Son.
Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 6
MARCH, 1913
THE SILENT HOUSE
_David._ [_Re-reading a letter._] How may a letter bring
such darkness down--
With this: "She dallied with your love too long!"
And this: "It is the word of all the town:
"Corinna has no soul, for all her song!"
_Martha._ [_Entering with flowers._] O sir, I bring you
flaming bergamot,
And early asters, for your window-sill.
And where I found them? Now you'll guess it not.
I visited the garden on the hill,
And gathered till my arms could hold no more.
_David._ The garden of the little silent house!
_Martha._ The city lured her from her viny door.
But see, the flowers have stayed!
_David._ They seem to drowse
And dream of one they lost, a paler-blown.
How fares the house upon the hill?
_Martha._ The blinds
Are fast of late, and all are intergrown
With weedy havoc tossed by searching winds.
_David._ How somber suddenly the sky! A shower
Is in the air.
_Martha._ I'll light the lamps.
_David._ Not yet.
Leave me the beauty of the twilit hour.
_Martha._ Hear the wind rising! How the moorings fret!
More than a shower is on its way through space.
I would not be aboard of yonder barque.
[_She goes out._]
_David._ Corinna! Now may I recall her face.
It is my light to think by in the dark.
Yes, all my years of study, all the will
Tenacious to achieve, the tempered strife,
The victories attained through patient skill,
Lie at the door of one dear human life.
And yet ... the letter ...
Often have I read
How love relumes the flowers and the trees.
True! For my world is newly garmented:
Rewards seem slight, and slighter penalties.
Daily companionship is more and more.
To make one little good more viable,
To lift one load, is worth the heart's outpour.
And she--she has made all things wonderful.
And yet ... the letter ...
O to break a spell
Wherein the stars are crumbling unto dust!
There never was a hope--I know it well,
And struggle on, and love because I must.
Never a hope? Shall ever any scheme,
Her silence, or alarm of written word,
Or voiced asseveration, shake my dream?
She loves me! By love's anguish, I have heard!
We two from our soul-towers across a vale
Are calling each to each, alert, aware.
Shall one of us one day the other hail,
And no reply be borne upon the air?
Corinna, come to light my heart's dim place!
O come to me, Belovèd and Besought,
O'er grief, o'er gladness,--even o'er death apace,--
For I could greet your phantom, so it brought
Love's own reality!...
A song of hers
Seems striving hither, a faint villanelle
Half smothered by the gale's mad roisterers.
She used to sing it in the bracken dell.
Here is the rain against the window beating
In heavy drops that presage wilder storm.
The lake is lost within a lurid sheeting;
The house upon the hill has changed its form.
The melancholy pine-trees weep in rocking.
And what's that clamor at the outer door?
Martha! O Martha! Somebody is knocking! [_Calling._]
_Martha._ [_Re-entering._] You hear the rills that down
the gutters roar.
_David._ And are you deaf? The door--go open it!
This is no night to leave a man outside!
_Martha._ [_Muttering and going toward the door._] And
is it I am growing deaf a bit,
And blind a bit, with other ill-betide!
Well, I can see to thread a needle still,
And I can hear the ticking of the clock,
And I can fetch a basket from the mill.
But hallow me if ever I heard knock!
[_She throws the door open. David starts up and rushes
forward with outstretched arms._]
_David._ Corinna! You, Corinna! Drenched and cold!
At last, at last! But how in all the rain!
Martha!
[_Martha stands motionless, unseeing._]
Good Martha, you are growing old!
Draw fast the shades--shut out the hurricane.
Here, take the dripping cloak from out the room;
Bring cordial from the purple damson pressed,
And light the lamps, the candles--fire the gloom.
Why stand you gaping? See you not the guest?
_Martha._ I opened wide the door unto the storm.
But never heard I step upon the sill.
All the black night let in no living form.
I see no guest. Look hard as e'er I will,
I see none here but you and my poor self.
_David._ The room that was my mother's room prepare.
Spread out warm garments on the oaken shelf--
Her gown, the little shawl she used to wear.
[_Martha, wide-eyed, bewildered, lights the lamps and
candles and goes out, raising her hands._]
_Corinna._ The moments I may tarry fade and press.
Something impelled me hither, some clear flame.
They said I had no soul! O David, yes,
They said I had no soul! And so I came.
I have been singing, singing, all the way,
O, singing ever since the darkness grew
And I grew chill and followed the small ray.
Lean close, and let my longing rest in you!
_David._ Dear balm of light, I never thought to win
From out the pallid hours for ever throbbing!
How did you know the sorrow I was in?
_Corinna._ A flock of leaves came sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.
_David._ O, now I hold you fast, my love, my own,
My festival upleaping from an ember!
But, timid child, how could you come alone
Across the pathless woods?
_Corinna._ Do you remember?--
Over the summer lake one starry, stilly,
Sweet night, when you and I were drifting, dear,
I frighted at the shadow of a lily!
It is all strange, but now I have no fear.
_David._ Your eyes are weary, drooping. Sleep, then, sleep.
_Corinna._ I must go over to the silent house.
_David._ The dwelling stands forsaken up the steep,
With never beast nor human to arouse!
_Corinna._ Soon will the windows gleam with many lamps.
Hark!--heavy wheels are toiling to the north.
_David._ I will go with you where the darkness ramps.
_Corinna._ Strong arms are in the storm to bear me forth.
_David._ Not in these garments dripping as the trees!
Not in these clinging shadows!
_Corinna._ Ah, good-night!
Dear love, dear love, I must go forth in these.
Tomorrow you shall see me all in white.
_Agnes Lee_
THE ORACLE
(_To the New Telescope on Mt. Wilson_)
Of old sat one at Delphi brooding o'er
The fretful earth;--ironically wise,
Veiling her prescience in dark replies,
She shaped the fates of men with mystic lore.
The oracle is silent now. No more
Fate parts the cloud that round omniscience lies.
But thou, O Seer, dost tease our wild surmise
With portents passing all the wealth of yore.
For thou shalt spell the very thoughts of God!
Before thy boundless vision, world on world
Shall multiply in glit'ring sequence far;
And all the little ways which men have trod
Shall be as nothing by His star-dust whirled
Into the making of a single star.
A GARGOYLE ON NOTRE DAME
With angel's wings and brutish-human form,
Weathered with centuries of sun and storm,
He crouches yonder on the gallery wall,
Monstrous, superb, indifferent, cynical:
And all the pulse of Paris cannot stir
Her one immutable philosopher.
_Edmund Kemper Broadus_
SANTA BARBARA BEACH
Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?
The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.
Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.
There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.
--Swift flame--then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.
A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.
A rose, a wild light after--
And life calls through the years,
"Who dreams my fountains' laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears."
_Ridgely Torrence_
MATERNITY
One wept, whose only babe was dead,
New-born ten years ago.
"Weep not; he is in bliss," they said.
She answered, "Even so.
"Ten years ago was born in pain
A child, not now forlorn;
But oh, ten years ago in vain
A mother, a mother was born."
_Alice Meynell_
PROFITS
Yes, stars were with me formerly.
(I also knew the wind and sea;
And hill-tops had my feet by heart.
Their shaggéd heights would sting and start
When I came leaping on their backs.
I knew the earth's queer crooked cracks,
Where hidden waters weave a low
And druid chant of joy and woe.)
But stars were with me most of all.
I heard them flame and break and fall.
Their excellent array, their free
Encounter with Eternity,
I learned. And it was good to know
That where God walked, I too might go.
Now, all these things are passed. For I
Grow very old and glad to die.
What did they profit me, say you,
These distant bloodless things I knew?
Profit? What profit hath the sea
Of her deep-throated threnody?
What profit hath the sun, who stands
Staring on space with idle hands?
And what should God Himself acquire
From all the aeons' blood and fire?
My profit is as theirs: to be
Made proof against mortality:
To know that I have companied
With all that shines and lives, amid
So much the years sift through their hands,
Most mortal, windy, worthless sands.
This day I have great peace. With me
Shall stars abide eternally!
TWO SONGS OF CONN THE FOOL
MOON FOLLY
I will go up the mountain after the Moon:
She is caught in a dead fir-tree.
Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl,
Like a great pale apple is she.
I will leap and will clasp her in quick cold hands
And carry her home in my sack.
I will set her down safe on the oaken bench
That stands at the chimney-back.
And then I will sit by the fire all night,
And sit by the fire all day.
I will gnaw at the Moon to my heart's delight,
Till I gnaw her slowly away.
And while I grow mad with the Moon's cold taste,
The World may beat on my door,
Crying "Come out!" and crying "Make haste!
And give us the Moon once more!"
But I will not answer them ever at all;
I will laugh, as I count and hide
The great black beautiful seeds of the Moon
In a flower-pot deep and wide.
Then I will lie down and go fast asleep,
Drunken with flame and aswoon.
But the seeds will sprout, and the seeds will leap:
The subtle swift seeds of the Moon.
And some day, all of the world that beats
And cries at my door, shall see
A thousand moon-leaves sprout from my thatch
On a marvellous white Moon-tree!
Then each shall have moons to his heart's desire:
Apples of silver and pearl:
Apples of orange and copper fire,
Setting his five wits aswirl.
And then they will thank me, who mock me now:
"Wanting the Moon is he!"
Oh, I'm off to the mountain after the Moon,
Ere she falls from the dead fir-tree!
WARNING
You must do nothing false
Or cruel-lipped or low;
For I am Conn the Fool,
And Conn the Fool will know.
I went by the door
When Patrick Joyce looked out.
He did not wish for me
Or any one about.
He thought I did not see
The fat bag in his hand.
But Conn heard clinking gold,
And Conn could understand.
I went by the door
Where Michael Kane lay dead.
I saw his Mary tie
A red shawl round her head.
I saw a dark man lean
Across her garden-wall.
They did not know that Conn
Walked by at late dusk-fall.
You must not scold or lie,
Or hate or steal or kill,
For I shall tell the wind
That leaps along the hill;
And he will tell the stars
That sing and never lie;
And they will shout your sin
In God's face, bye and bye.
And God will not forget,
For all He loves you so.--
He made me Conn the Fool,
And bade me always know!
STORM DANCE
The water came up with a roar,
The water came up to me.
There was a wave with tusks of a boar,
And he gnashed his tusks on me.
I leaned, I leapt, and was free.
He snarled and struggled and fled.
Foaming and blind he turned to the sea,
And his brothers trampled him dead.
The water came up with a shriek,
The water came up to me.
There was a wave with a woman's cheek,
And she shuddered and clung to me.
I crouched, I cast her away.
She cursed me and swooned and died.
Her green hair tangled like sea-weed lay
Tossed out on the tearing tide.
Challenge and chase me, Storm!
Harry and hate me, Wave!
Wild as the wind is my heart, but warm,
Sudden and merry and brave.
For the water comes up with a shout,
The water comes up to me.
And oh, but I laugh, laugh out!
And the great gulls laugh, and the sea!
_Fannie Stearns Davis_
DIRGE FOR A DEAD ADMIRAL
What woman but would be
Rid of thy mastery,
Thou bully of the sea?
No more the gray sea's breast
Need answer thy behest;
No more thy sullen gun
Shall greet the risen sun,
Where the great dreadnaughts ride
The breast of thy cold bride;
Thou hast fulfilled thy fate:
Need trade no more with hate!
Nay, but I celebrate
Thy long-to-be-lorn mate,
Thy mistress and her state,
Thy lady sea's lorn state.
She hath her empery
Not only over thee
But o'er _our_ misery.
Hark, doth she mourn for thee?
Nay, what hath she of grief?
She knoweth not the leaf
That on her bosom falls,
Thou last of admirals!
Under the winter moon
She singeth that fierce tune,
Her immemorial rune;
Knoweth not, late or soon,
Careth not
Any jot
For her withholden boon
To all thy spirit's pleas
For infinite surcease!
If, on this winter night,
O thou great admiral
That in thy sombre pall
Liest upon the land,
Thy soul should take his flight
And leave the frozen sand,
And yearn above the surge,
Think'st thou that any dirge,
Grief inarticulate
From thy bereaved mate,
Would answer to thy soul
Where the waste waters roll?
Nay, thou hast need of none!
Thy long love-watch is done!
SPRING-SONG
Early some morning in May-time
I shall awaken
When the breeze blowing in at the window
Shall bathe me
With the delicate scents
Of the blossoms of apples,
Filling my room with their coolness
And beauty and fragrance--
As of old, as of old,
When your spirit dwelt with me,
My heart shall be pure
As the heart that you gave me.
A SWEETHEART: THOMPSON STREET
Queen of all streets, Fifth Avenue
Stretches her slender limbs
From the great Arch of Triumph, on,--
On, where the distance dims
The splendors of her jewelled robes,
Her granite draperies;
The magic, sunset-smitten walls
That veil her marble knees;
For ninety squares she lies a queen,
Superb, bare, unashamed,
Yielding her beauty scornfully
To worshippers unnamed.
But at her feet her sister glows,
A daughter of the South:
Squalid, immeasurably mean,--
But oh! her hot, sweet mouth!
My Thompson Street! a Tuscan girl,
Hot with life's wildest blood;
Her black shawl on her black, black hair,
Her brown feet stained with mud;
A scarlet blossom at her lips,
A new babe at her breast;
A singer at a wine-shop door,
(Her lover unconfessed).
Listen! a hurdy-gurdy plays--
Now alien melodies:
She smiles, she cannot quite forget
The mother over-seas.
But she no less is mine alone,
Mine, mine!... Who may I be?
Have _I_ betrayed her from her home?
I am called Liberty!
THE OFF-SHORE WIND
The skies are sown with stars tonight,
The sea is sown with light,
The hollows of the heaving floor
Gleam deep with light once more,
The racing ebb-tide flashes past
And seeks the vacant vast,
A wind steals from a world asleep
And walks the restless deep.
It walks the deep in ecstasy,
It lives! and loves to free
Its spirit to the silent night,
And breathes deep in delight;
Above the sea that knows no coast,
Beneath the starry host,
The wind walks like the souls of men
Who walk with God again.
The souls of men who walk with God!
With faith's firm sandals shod,
A lambent passion, body-free,
Fain for eternity!
O spirit born of human sighs,
Set loose 'twixt sea and skies,
Be thou an Angel of mankind,
Thou night-unfettered wind!
Bear thou the dreams of weary earth,
Bear thou Tomorrow's birth,
Take all our longings up to Him
Until His stars grow dim;
A moving anchorage of prayer,
Thou cool and healing air,
Heading off-shore till shoreless dawn
Breaks fair and night is gone.
_Samuel McCoy_
"THE HILL-FLOWERS"
"_I will lift up mine eyes to the hills._"
I
_Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city--Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!_
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;
As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung
And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung
From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss
that ne'er could cloy,
From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,
With a song to God the Giver, o'er that waste of wild perfume;
Blowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,
While the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,
So, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream, I rise,
And I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.
Life, thy dawn makes all things new! Hills of Youth, I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.
II
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Floats a brother's face to meet me! Is it you? Is it you?
For the night I leave behind keeps these dazzled eyes still blind!
But oh, the little hill-flowers, their scent is wise and kind;
And I shall not lose the way from the darkness to the day,
While dust can cling as their scent clings to memory for aye;
And the least link in the chain can recall the whole again,
And heaven at last resume its far-flung harvests, grain by grain.
To the hill-flowers clings my dust, and tho' eyeless Death may thrust
All else into the darkness, in their heaven I put my trust;
And a dawn shall bid me climb to the little spread of thyme
Where first I heard the ripple of the fountain-heads of rhyme.
And a fir-wood that I know, from dawn to sunset-glow,
Shall whisper to a lonely sea, that swings far, far below.
Death, thy dawn makes all things new. Hills of Youth, I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.
_Alfred Noyes_
EDITORIAL COMMENT
THE SERVIAN EPIC
Poetry as the inspiration of the Balkan war was the theme of a recent
talk given by Madame Slavko Grouitch before the Friday Club in Chicago,
and elsewhere, during her brief sojourn in her native country. Madame
Grouitch was a student at the American School of Archaeology in Athens
when she married the young Servian diplomat who now represents his
nation in London.
According to the speaker, the Servian national songs have kept alive the
heroic spirit of the people during more than four centuries of Turkish
oppression. Through them each generation of the illiterate peasantry has
fought once more the ancient wars, and followed once more the ancient
leaders even to the final tragedy of the battle of Kossovo, where in
1377 they made their last brave stand against the Mohammedan invader.
Whenever a few people assemble for a festival, some local bard, perhaps
an old shepherd or soldier, a blind beggar or reformed brigand, will
chant the old songs to the monotonous music of the _gusle_, while the
people dance the _Kolo_.
"There are thousands of songs in the Servian epic," says Mme. Grouitch,
"and each has many variants according to whether it is sung in Bosnia,
Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia, Servia, Bulgaria or Macedonia; for
all these political divisions are peopled by the Servian race descended
from the heroes whose deeds are the theme of such unwearied narration.
The bard is called the Guslar from his one-stringed instrument, whose
melancholy cadence--a sighing-forth of sound--affects the emotions and
increases the pathos of the words. For the story is usually sad, even
when it proclaims the triumph of great deeds."
These songs invariably begin:
Once it was so; now it is told.
And they as invariably end:
From me the song; from God health to you.
A number of poems were read from Mme. Mijatovich's rather uninspired
translation of the Kossovo series, published in London in 1881. Extreme
simplicity and vividness characterize the old epic, which follows the
hopeless struggle of the noble Czar Lazar against the foe without, and
suspicions, dissensions, blunders, even treacheries, within. Certain
characters stand out with the uncompromising exactness of some biblical
story: the Czar himself; his over-zealous Vojvode; Milosh Obilich, whose
murder of Sultan Murad precipitated the disaster; and certain haughty
and passionate women, like the Empress Militza and her two daughters.
Also "Marko, the King's son," whose half-mythical figure is of the race
of Achilles.
"There was one thing," said Mme. Grouitch, "which the Turk could not
take away from the Serb--the heavenly gift of poetry; that continued to
dwell hidden in the breast of the southern Slav. His body was enslaved,
but his soul was not; his physical life was oppressed, but his spiritual
being remained free. In the eighteenth century Europe re-discovered the
Servian national poetry, and became conscious that the race survived as
well as its ideals. Then Serb and Bulgar again appeared in current
history, and began to retrace the ancient boundaries.
"All the conferences of all the powers can never diminish the hopes, nor
eclipse the glory of the Serb race in the minds of the Balkan peoples;
because the Guslar, who is their supreme national leader, is forever
telling them of that glory, and urging them to concerted action against
all outside foes. It was the Guslar who led the Montenegrin Serbs from
one heroic victory to another, so that 'their war annals,' as Gladstone
said, 'are more glorious than those of all the rest of the world.' It
was the Guslar who inspired Kara George and his heroic band of Servian
peasants to keep up their battle until free Servia was born.
"Amid the roar of cannon at Lule Burgas and Monastir, I could hear the
mighty voice of the Guslar reminding Serb and Bulgar that their fight
was for 'the honored cross and golden liberty.' And they obeyed because
it was the voice of their nation. It is this irresistible national
spirit which leads their armies, and beside it the spirit of German
training behind the Turk is a lifeless shadow. The Ottoman power in
Europe is in ruins now, a wreck in the path of a national earthquake
which the Guslar has prophesied for five hundred years. The Guslar has
done his duty, and he stands today in a blaze of glory at the head of
the united and victorious nations of the Balkans."
The speaker told of an impressive ceremony at the Servian legation in
London. Young Servians, recalled home for military service last autumn,
met there on the eve of departure. Wine being served, the minister and
his young patriots rose with lifted glasses, and chanted the ancient
summons of Czar Lazar to his people:
Whoever born of Serbian blood or kin
Comes not to fight the Turk on Kossovo,
To him be never son or daughter born,
No child to heir his lands or bear his name!
For him no grape grow red, no corn grow white;
In his hands nothing prosper!
May he live
Alone, unloved! and die unmourned, alone!
_H. M._
IMAGISME[C]
Some curiosity has been aroused concerning _Imagisme_, and as I was
unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an
_imagiste_, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew
anything about the "movement." I gleaned these facts.
[Footnote C: Editor's Note--In response to many requests for information
regarding _Imagism_ and the _Imagistes_, we publish this note by Mr.
Flint, supplementing it with further exemplification by Mr. Pound. It
will be seen from these that _Imagism_ is not necessarily associated
with Hellenic subjects, or with _vers libre_ as a prescribed form.]
The _imagistes_ admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post
Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with
these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a
revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance
with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all
time,--in Sappho, Catullus, Villon. They seemed to be absolutely
intolerant of all poetry that was not written in such endeavor,
ignorance of the best tradition forming no excuse. They had a few rules,
drawn up for their own satisfaction only, and they had not published
them. They were:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective
or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute
to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
By these standards they judged all poetry, and found most of it wanting.
They held also a certain 'Doctrine of the Image,' which they had not
committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and
would provoke useless discussion.
The devices whereby they persuaded approaching poetasters to attend
their instruction were:
1. They showed him his own thought already
splendidly expressed in some classic (and the school
musters altogether a most formidable erudition).
2. They re-wrote his verses before his eyes, using
about ten words to his fifty.
Even their opponents admit of them--ruefully--"At least they do keep bad
poets from writing!"
I found among them an earnestness that is amazing to one accustomed to
the usual London air of poetic dilettantism. They consider that Art is
all science, all religion, philosophy and metaphysic. It is true that
_snobisme_ may be urged against them; but it is at least _snobisme_ in
its most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy
behind it; and they are stricter with themselves than with any outsider.
_F. S. Flint_
A FEW DONT'S BY AN IMAGISTE
An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex
in an instant of time. I use the term "complex" rather in the technical
sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might
not agree absolutely in our application.
It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives
that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits
and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in
the presence of the greatest works of art.
It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce
voluminous works.
All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate
necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DONT'S for those beginning to write
verses. But I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.
To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as
dogma--never consider anything as dogma--but as the result of long
contemplation, which, even if it is some one else's contemplation, may
be worth consideration.
Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves
written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual
writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the
Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.
LANGUAGE
Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.
Don't use such an expression as "dim lands _of peace_." It dulls the
image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the
writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the _adequate_
symbol.
Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has
already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is
going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the
unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition
into line lengths.
What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.
Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of
music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least
as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends
on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency
either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.
Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular
decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to
admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed
babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was
"pearl-pale," I can not remember.
Use either no ornament or good ornament.
RHYTHM AND RHYME
Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can
discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the
words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement;
e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the
lyrics of Shakespeare--if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the
cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their
component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and
unstressed, into vowels and consonants.
It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does
rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.
Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and
delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know
harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is
too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the
artist seldom have need of them.
Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull
to go in prose.
Don't be "viewy"--leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic
essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a
landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more
about it.
When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad" he presents
something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of
his nothing that one can call description; he presents.
Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising
agent for a new soap.
The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until
he has _discovered_ something. He begins by learning what has been
discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on
being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to
applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are
unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room.
They are "all over the shop." Is it any wonder "the public is
indifferent to poetry?"
Don't chop your stuff into separate _iambs_. Don't make each line stop
dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the
beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you
want a definite longish pause.
In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that
phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws
govern, and you are bound by no others.
Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your
words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that,
at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough
to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of
false stopping due to line ends and caesurae.
The musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can
not. The term harmony is misapplied to poetry; it refers to simultaneous
sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort
of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more
or less as an organ-base. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of
surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious,
but it must be well used if used at all.
Vide further Vildrac and Duhamel's notes on rhyme in "_Technique
Poetique_."
That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative _eye_ of the
reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that
which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the
original.
Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation, as compared with
Milton's rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth as does not seem too
unutterably dull.
If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine
when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you
have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer. Good prose will do
you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write
it.
Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original
matter "wobbles" when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to
be translated can not "wobble."
If you are using a symmetrical form, don't put in what you want to say
and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.
Don't mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in
terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to
find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.
The first three simple proscriptions[D] will throw out nine-tenths of
all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic; and will
prevent you from many a crime of production.
" ... _Mais d'abord il faut etre un poete_," as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac
have said at the end of their little book, "_Notes sur la Technique
Poetique_"; but in an American one takes that at least for granted,
otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent!
_Ezra Pound_
[Footnote D: Noted by Mr. Flint.]
NOTES
Agnes Lee (Mrs. Otto Freer) who has lived much in Boston, but is now a
resident of Chicago, is known as the author of various books of poetry,
the most representative, perhaps, being _The Border of the Lake_,
published about two years ago by Sherman, French & Co. She has
translated Gautier's _Emaux et Camees_ into English poetry; and has
contributed to the magazines. Her long poem, _The Asphodel_, which
appeared in _The North American Review_ several years ago, attracted
wide attention.
Mr. Edmund Kemper Broadus is a member of the faculty of the University
of Alberta, Canada.
Miss Fannie Stearns Davis is a young American who has written many songs
and lyrics, a collection of which is to be published this spring. She
was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but now lives in the East.
Mrs. Meynell, who is the wife of Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, editor of one of
the leading English Catholic reviews, hardly needs an introduction in
America, where her exquisite art is well known. Her small volumes of
essays--_The Rhythm of Life_, _The Color of Life_, _The Children_, etc.,
and her _Poems_ are published by The John Lane Company.
Mr. Ridgely Torrence is the author of _El Dorado_, _A Tragedy_, _Abelard
and Eloise_, a poetic drama, and _Rituals for The Events of Life_. He
contributes infrequently to the magazines, several of his longer poems
having never been republished. He lives in New York.
Mr. Samuel McCoy was born, thirty-one years ago, at Burlington, Iowa. He
now lives at Indianapolis, and devotes himself wholly to literary work.
He was educated at Princeton, and from 1906 to 1908 was associate editor
of _The Reader_. A collection of Mr. McCoy's poems will be issued in
book form this year by the Bobbs-Merrill Company.
Mr. Alfred Noyes, a young English poet, is a well known contributor to
English and American magazines, and has published many books of poetry.
_The Loom of Years_; _The Flower of Old Japan_; _Poems_; _The Forest
of Wild Thyme_; _Drake, English An Epic_; _Forty Singing Seamen_, and
_The Enchanted Island_ are among the titles of his published works; and
a new volume, _The Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_, is to be published this
spring by the Frederick A. Stokes Co.
Early numbers of Poetry will contain poems by John G. Neihardt, Ezra
Pound, Harriet Monroe, William Carlos Williams, Allen Upward, and
others.
BOOKS RECEIVED
_Songs of a Syrian Lover_, by Clinton Scollard. Elkin Mathews.
_Annatese of Song_, by George M. P. Baird. Privately Printed.
_Pearls of Thought, A Collection of Original Poems_,
by Samuel M. Fleishman. Privately Printed.
_The Summons of the King, A Play_, by Philip Becker Goetz.
The MacDowell Press.
_Drake, An English Epic_, by Alfred Noyes. Frederick A. Stokes Co.
_Sherwood, or Robin Hood and the Three Kings, A Play in Five Acts_,
by Alfred Noyes. Frederick A. Stokes Co.
_The Enchanted Island and Other Poems_, by Alfred Noyes.
Frederick A Stokes Co.
_Songs of the City_, by DeCamp Leland. The Westende Publishing Co.
_In Vivid Gardens_, by Marguerite Wilkinson. Sherman, French & Co.
_A Book of Verse_, by Alice Hathaway Cunningham.
Cochrane Publishing Co.
_Chilhowee, A Legend of the Great Smoky Mountains_,
by Henry V. Maxwell. Knoxville Printing Co.
_Sappho, And the Island of Lesbos_, by Mary Mills Patrick.
Houghton Mifflin Co.
_Harp of Milan_, by Sister M. Fidés Shepperson.
J. H. Yewdale & Sons.
_Two Legends, A Souvenir of Sodus Bay_, by Mrs. B. C. Rude.
Privately Printed.
_Moods_, by David M. Cory. The Poet Lore Co.
_Poems_, by Charles D. Platt. Charles D. Platt, Dover. New Jersey.
_Poems, Old and New_, by A. H. Beesly. Longmans, Green & Co.
_Paroles devant la Vie_, par Alexandre Mercereau. E. Figuière
_Alexandre Mercereau_, par Jean Metzinger. E. Figuiére, Paris.
_Anthologie-Critique_, par Florian-Parmentier.
Gastien-Serge, Paris.
PERIODICALS
_The Wild Hawk_, Hervey White. The Maverick Press,
Woodstock, N. Y.
_The Bibelot_, Thos. B. Mosher, Portland, Maine.
_The Idler_, Robert J. Shores, New York City.
_The Century_, New York City.
_The Forum_, New York City.
_The Conservator_, Horace Traubel, Philadelphia.
_The Nation_, New York City.
_The Poetry Review_, Harold Munro, London.
_The Poetry Review_ (New Series), Stephen Phillips, London.
_The Literary Digest_, New York City.
_Current Opinion_, New York City.
_The International_, New York City.
_The Dial_, Chicago.
_The Survey_, New York City.
_The Nation_, New York City.
_The Music News_, Chicago.
_Mercure de France_, 26 Rue de Condé, Paris.
_L'Effort Libre_, Galerie Vildrac, 11 Rue de Seine, Paris.
_Les Poétes_, E. Basset, 3 Rue Dante, Paris.
(This number devoted to poems selected from the work of
Nicolas Beauduin, _Paroxyste_.)
_L'Ile Sonnante_, 21 Rue Rousselet, Paris.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I
VERSE
PAGE
_Aldington, Richard_:
CHORIKOS 39
To a Greek Marble 42
Au Vieux Jardin 43
_Banning, Kendall_:
Love Songs of the Open Road 110
_Brink, Roscoe W._:
Helen Is Ill 117
_Broadus, Edmund Kemper_:
The Oracle 179
A Gargoyle on Notre Dame 179
_Bynner, Witter_:
Apollo Troubadour 150
One of the Crowd 153
Neighbors 155
The Hills of San José 156
Grieve Not for Beauty 156
The Mystic 157
Passing Near 158
_Campbell, Joseph_:
The Piper 33
_Conkling, Grace Hazard_:
Symphony of a Mexican Garden 11
_Cawein, Madison_:
Waste Land 104
My Lady of the Beeches 106
_Corbin, Alice_:
America 81
Symbols 82
The Star 82
Nodes 87
_Davis, Fannie Stearns_:
Profits 182
Two Songs of Conn the Fool 183
Storm Dance 186
_Dudley, Helen_:
To One Unknown 10
_Ficke, Arthur Davison_:
Poetry 1
Swinburne, An Elegy 137
To a Child--Twenty Years Hence 144
Portrait of an Old Woman 145
The Three Sisters 146
Among Shadows 147
A Watteau Melody 147
_Fitch, Anita_:
The Wayfarers 108
Les Cruels Amoureux 109
_H. D. "Imagiste"_:
Verses, Translations and Reflections from
"The Anthology" 118
_Lee, Agnes_:
The Silent House 173
_Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel_:
General Booth Enters into Heaven 101
_Long, Lily A._:
The Singing Place 47
Immured 49
_Lorimer, Emilia Stuart_:
Fish of the Flood 9
_McCoy, Samuel_:
Dirge for a Dead Admiral 187
Spring Song 189
A Sweetheart: Thompson Street 189
Off-shore Wind 190
_Meynell, Alice_:
Maternity 181
_Monroe, Harriet_:
Nogi 50
_Moody, William Vaughn_:
I Am the Woman 3
_Noyes, Alfred_:
The Hill Flowers 192
_Pound, Ezra_:
To Whistler, American 7
Middle-aged 8
_Reed, John_:
Sangar 71
_Rensselaer, Mrs. Schuyler Van_:
Under Two Windows 44
_Rhys, Ernest_:
A Song of Happiness 114
_Smith, Clark Ashton_:
Remembered Light 77
Sorrowing of Winds 78
_Sterling, George_:
A Legend of the Dove 75
At the Grand Cañon 76
Kindred 77
_Tagore, Rabindranath_:
Poems 84
_Torrence, Ridgely_:
Santa Barbara Beach 180
_Towne, Charles Hanson_:
Beyond the Stars 35
_Widdemer, Margaret_:
The Jester 51
The Beggars 52
_Wyatt, Edith_:
Sympathy 112
_Yeats, William Butler_:
The Mountain Tomb 67
To a Child Dancing upon the Shore 68
Fallen Majesty 68
Love and the Bird 69
The Realists 70
PROSE ARTICLES
As It Was, _H. M._, 19
On the Reading of Poetry, _E. W._, 22
The Motive of the Magazine, _H. M._, 26
Moody's Poems, _H. M._, 54
Bohemian Poetry, _Ezra Pound_, 57
"The Music of the Human Heart," _E. W._, 59
The Open Door, 62
A Perfect Return, _A. C. H._, 87
Tagore's Poems, _Ezra Pound_, 92
Reviews:
_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson_, 94
_The Adventures of Young Maverick_, by Hervey White, 95
_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts, 96
_Interpretations_, by Zoë Akins, 97
_Lyrical Poems_, by Lucy Lyttelton, 97
Status Rerum, _Ezra Pound_, 123
Reviews:
_The Lyric Year_, 128
_The Human Fantasy_, and
_The Beloved Adventure_, by John Hall Wheelock, 131
_Poems and Ballads_, by Hermann Hagedorn, 132
_Uriel and Other Poems_, by Percy MacKaye, 133
_The Tragedy of Etarre_, by Rhys Carpenter, 133
_Gabriel_, by Isabelle Howe Fiske, 133
_The Unconquered Air_, by Florence Earle Coates, 133
_The Story of a Round House and Other Poems_,
by John Masefield, 160
_Présences_, by P. J. Jouve, 165
The Poetry Society of America,
_Jessie B. Rittenhouse_, 166
"That Mass of Dolts", 168
The Servian Epic, _H. M._, 195
Imagisme, _F. S. Flint_, 199
A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste, _Ezra Pound_, 202
Notes, 29,64,99,134,168,206
_Editor_ HARRIET MONROE
_Advisory Committee_ HENRY B. FULLER
EDITH WYATT
H. C. CHATFIELD-TAYLOR
_Foreign Correspondent_ EZRA POUND
_Administration Committee_ WILLIAM T. ABBOTT
CHARLES H. HAMIL
TO HAVE GREAT POETS THERE MUST
BE GREAT AUDIENCES TOO
_Whitman_
End of Project Gutenberg's Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Volume I, by Various
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