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Title: Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913
Author: Braithwaite, William Stanley
Language: English
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Transcriber’s Note
Table of Contents added by Transcriber.
ANTHOLOGY OF
MAGAZINE VERSE
FOR 1913
_Including the Magazines
and the Poets_ *.* _A Review_
BY
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
_Author of “The House of Falling Leaves,”
“The Book of Elizabethan Verse,” etc._
*.*
ISSUED BY
W. S. B.
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
COPYRIGHT 1913, BY
WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
Thomas Todd Co., Printers
14 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.
TO THE POETS OF AMERICA
SINGING TODAY
THE SOUL OF THEIR COUNTRY
TRUTH, BEAUTY, BROTHERHOOD
THEIR NAMES ARE TORCHES
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction v
Hymn to Demeter, by Louis V. Ledoux 1
Over the Wintry Threshold, by Bliss Carman 2
In April, by Margaret Lee Ashley 3
May Is Building Her House, by Richard Le Gallienne 3
In a Forgotten Burying-ground, by Ruth Guthrie Harding 4
Wind, by Fannie Stearns Davis 5
The Speckled Trout, by Madison Cawein 5
Trees, by Joyce Kilmer 7
In the Hospital, by Arthur Guiterman 7
Love of Life, by Tertius van Dyke 8
God’s Will, by Mildred Howells 8
On the Birth of a Child, by Louis Untermeyer 9
To a Child Falling Asleep, Robert Alden Sanborn 9
A Roman Doll, by Agnes Lee 12
Sappho, by Sara Teasdale 13
Of Moira Up the Glen, by Edward J. O’Brien 16
Morning Glories, by John G. Neihardt 17
Lest I Learn, by Witter Bynner 18
Later, by Willard Huntington Wright 18
The Old Maid, by Sara Teasdale 19
Departure, by John Hall Wheelock 20
An Adieu, by Florence Earle Coates 20
Heart’s Tide, by Ethel M. Hewitt 21
Waiting, by Charles Hanson Towne 22
Desiderium, by Richard Le Gallienne 22
Human, by Richard Burton 23
The Ghost, by Hermann Hagedorn 23
A Mountain Gateway, by Bliss Carman 24
Perugia, by Amelia Josephine Burr 25
Ghosts, by Marguerite Mooers Marshall 27
St. John and the Faun, by George Edward Woodberry 28
School, by Percy MacKaye 30
The Marvelous Munchausen, by William Rose Benét 34
Train-mates, by Witter Bynner 38
The Kallyope Yell, by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay 39
Thanksgiving For Our Task, by Shaemas OSheel 43
A Likeness, by Willa Sibert Cather 46
The Field of Glory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson 48
Rich Man, Poor Man--, by Francis Hill 49
The Sin Eater, by Ruth Comfort Mitchell 50
Night-sentries, by George Sterling 52
The Swordless Christ, by Percy Adams Hutchison 54
What of the Night?, by Willard Huntington Wright 55
A Threnody, by Louis V. Ledoux 57
November, by Mahlon Leonard Fisher 61
Salutation, by Ruth Sterry 62
Here Lies Pierrot, by Richard Burton 62
List of “Distinctive Poems,” Their Authors, and the Magazines
in Which They Appeared 64
The “Best Poems” Chosen from the “Distinctive” List 69
Titles and Authors of All Poems Appearing in the Seven
Magazines For 1918 71
Index of First Lines 99
INTRODUCTION
Poetry is one of the realities that persist. The façade and dome of
palace and temple, the monuments of heroes and saints, crumble before
the ruining breath of time, while the Psalms last. So when another
year passes and we sum up our achievements, there is no achievement
more vital in registering the soul of a people than its poetry. But in
all things that men do, their relationship is objective except those
things in which art, religion, love, and nature express their influence
through the private thoughts and feelings of men. These four things
are the realities, all the others are symbols. And the essence of art,
as well as religion and love and nature, is a conscious and mysterious
thing, called Poetry. And men will find, if they will only stop to
look, that at the bottom of all this poetry, no matter what the theme
or the particular artistic shaping, there is something with which they
are familiar, because in their own souls there has been an unceasing
mystery which they find named in the magic utterance of some lonely and
neglected maker of verses.
The poetry in the magazines for this past year has been of a general
high standard. The long poems have been well sustained, and there has
been a larger quantity of pure lyric pieces than in the past two or
three years. The influence of Masefield has shown itself in American
verse, notably in the two long poems by Harry Kemp, “The Harvest
Hand” and “The Factory.” One of the noblest poems of the year is Henry
van Dyke’s “Daybreak in the Grand Cañon of Arizona,” which breathes a
fine national spirit, full of reverence for the greatness with which
the American destiny is symbolized in the natural grandeur of our
country. Mr. Markham has a long narrative in “The Shoes of Happiness,”
full of his visionary and spiritual promptings. And in “The Vision of
Gettysburg” Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson reflects also the national
spirit with particular significance.
The poetry of the year in volumes has not been as ample as last year.
The three poets who have aroused most discussion are the Bengali poet
Tagore, who brought to the Western world in “Gitanjali” a spiritual
message full of mystic but exalted idealism; Francis Thompson, the
great Catholic poet, because of the publication of his collected
works; and Robert Bridges, who, by his appointment to the English
laureateship, became known to a large number of readers who had
hitherto been unfamiliar with his very perfect and delicate gift of
lyric beauty. Of American poets the volumes by Fannie Stearns Davis,
William Rose Benét, Josephine Preston Peabody, Margaret Root Garvin,
and George Edward Woodberry are the most significant. The most
important book of poems of the year by an American poet, however, is
that of Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, “General William Booth Enters into
Heaven and Other Poems.” Here is a man with a big vision, with a
fine originality, and an art that is particularly his own. There has
been no “Lyric Year” this autumn, but a little volume that serves
in some sense its purpose is Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse’s “Little
Book of Modern Verse,” which is intended to represent the quality of
contemporary American verse.
I want to call attention to a poet who has not yet presented himself
except through an occasional magazine piece, but who has written two
of the finest sonnets in American poetry. Last year I reprinted, in my
annual summary, Mr. Mahlon Leonard Fisher’s “As an Old Mercer,” and
pronounced that an achievement which could hardly be surpassed. But
in the sonnet “November,” which is reprinted in this book, Mr. Fisher
has done, I believe, something that is even greater. It must rank with
Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “Tears” and Longfellow’s “Nature” as the best
sonnets that have been accomplished by American poets. I have known one
competent judge and lover of poetry to declare that not since Keats’
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and Miss Reese’s “Tears” has
there appeared so fine a sonnet in English poetry. The man who has
written “November” has added something to American poetry that cannot
be too highly estimated.
Another poet who has enriched the magazines this year, after a period
of silence, is Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, and in “The Field of
Glory” we are under the spell once more of that characteristic magic
with which he is endowed alone among American poets.
As in former years, in my annual summary in the _Boston Transcript_, I
have examined the contents of the leading American monthly magazines.
I originally started, nine years ago, when the first summary appeared,
with these six: The Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century,
Lippincott’s, and McClure’s. Later I turned to The Forum. The poetry in
McClure’s during the two years previous to the beginning of the present
year had fallen off; the magazine would reprint occasionally verses
from the books of accomplished but little known English and Irish
poets, which, with the small amount of space that it devoted to verse,
left but little chance of encouragement to native singers. This year
I have included The Smart Set, which, under the new editorship of Mr.
Willard Huntington Wright, himself a poet of considerable attainment,
has been the means of offering the public a high and consistent
standard of excellence in the verse it printed.
To the six magazines, namely, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century, Forum,
Lippincott’s, and The Smart Set, I have added this year a weekly, The
Bellman. West of New York it is the best edited and most influential
periodical published. Indeed, it is widely read in the East. In its
pages three of the younger American poets of distinctive achievement
have been presented. Though the late Arthur Upson had published some
two or three books of verse before The Bellman was established, yet it
was practically the first American magazine to print his work. Amelia
J. Burr made her first considerable poetic appearance in The Bellman,
and the best work, the sonnets that have placed Mr. Mahlon Leonard
Fisher in the forefront of contemporary American, or English, sonnet
writers, appeared in this same publication. As last year, I have
winnowed from other magazines distinctive poems for classification and
notice, one each from The Outlook, The Independent, the North American
Review, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse; three from the Poetry Journal and
three from the Yale Review.
* * * * *
The poems published during the year in the seven representative
magazines I have submitted to an impartial critical test, choosing from
the total number what I consider the “distinctive” poems of the year.
From the distinctive pieces are selected eighty-one poems, to which
are added five from the other magazines not represented in the list of
seven, making a total of eighty-six, which are intended to represent
what I call an “Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913.”
By a further process of elimination, similar to that of previous years,
I have made another selection of forty poems which for one reason or
another in the purpose of this estimate seem to stand grouped above the
others.
The medium of magazine publication, towards which some critics,
and some poets too (a fact which can hardly be justified), and a
considerable portion of the reading public have a disparaging opinion,
is deserving of better repute for the general high quality of poetic
art that is published. Not many years ago it was a favorite exercise of
the reviewer, when noticing the average book of verse which happened
to include selections reprinted from various magazines, to term the
work “magazinable,” or the poet a “magazine poet.” Even poets who
detested being called “minor” poets preferred that rather vague and
indiscriminate distinction, rather than the unrespectable “magazinable.”
Quoting what I have written in previous years, to emphasize the
methods which guided my selections, the reader will see how impartial
are the tests by which the distinctive and best poems are chosen: “I
have not allowed any special sympathy with the subject to influence
my choice. I have taken the poet’s point of view, and accepted his
value of the theme he dealt with. The question was: How vital and
compelling did he make it? The first test was the sense of pleasure the
poem communicated; then to discover the secret or the meaning of the
pleasure felt; and in doing so to realize how much richer one became in
a knowledge of the purpose of life by reason of the poem’s message.”
In one hundred and twenty-one numbers of these seven magazines I find
there were published during 1913 a total of 506 poems. The total number
of poems printed in each magazine, and the number of the distinctive
poems are: Century, total 58, 30 of distinction; Harper’s, total 57, 29
of distinction; Scribner’s, total 45, 30 of distinction; Forum, total
53, 27 of distinction; Lippincott’s, total 66, 21 of distinction; The
Bellman, total 53, 25 of distinction; The Smart Set, total 169, 49 of
distinction.
Following the text of the poems making the anthology in this volume, I
have given the titles and authors of all the poems classified as the
distinctive, published in the magazines for the year, only excepting
those that are included in the anthology; in addition I give a list
of all the poems and their authors in the one hundred and twenty-one
numbers of the magazines examined, for the purpose of a record which
readers and students of poetry will find useful.
I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness and thanks to the editors
of Scribner’s Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Forum, The Century
Magazine, The Outlook, Lippincott’s Magazine, The Bellman, The
Independent, The Smart Set, the Yale Review, Poetry, A Magazine of
Verse; and to the publishers of these magazines, including The Poetry
Journal, for the permission kindly given to reprint in this volume the
text of the poems making the “Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913.” To
the authors of these poems I am equally indebted and grateful for their
willingness to have me reprint their work in this form. Since their
appearance in the magazines and before the close of the year when the
contents of this volume was made up, two poems herein included appeared
in the original volumes of their authors. For the use of William Rose
Benét’s “The Marvelous Munchausen” I have also to thank The Century
Co., publishers of “Merchants of Cathay,” in which volume it appears.
As far as I know, only three of the poems here included are to come
out immediately in books by their authors. The last four stanzas of “A
Threnody,” by Mr. Louis V. Ledoux, are reprinted by permission of the
editor of Scribner’s Magazine, and the rest of the poem is published in
advance, by permission of Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, from a volume
of Mr. Ledoux’s poems, which is also to include the “Hymn to Demeter”
from “A Sicilian Idyl,” they are to issue in January, under the title
of “The Shadow of Ætna.” The two selections by Mr. Richard Burton,
“Here Lies Pierrot” and “Human”; the two by Willard Huntington Wright,
“What of the Night?” and “Later”; the one by George Edward Woodberry,
“St. John and the Faun”; and the two by Richard Le Gallienne, “May is
Building Her House” and “Desiderium” (which while this Introduction
is being written has come out in Mr. Le Gallienne’s volume, “The
Lonely Dancer and Other Poems,” John Lane Co.), are also being issued
immediately in forthcoming volumes. If there are any others I do not
know of them, and in which case I would gladly give credit, so I
trust any omission of such will be charged to ignorance rather than
intention. I wish it to be understood that the privilege extended me so
courteously, by both the authors and the magazines, to print the poems
in this volume, does not in any sense restrict the authors in their
rights to print the poems in volumes of their own.
A significant fact which the poetry in this volume must bring to the
reader’s mind in considering American poetry of today is, that these
selections have been published for the first time during the current
year. Our poetry needs, more than anything else, encouragement and
support, to reveal its qualities. The poets are doing satisfying and
vitally excellent work, and it only remains for the American public to
do its duty by showing a substantial appreciation.
Lastly, I wish to thank the Boston Transcript for the privilege of
reprinting material in this book which originally appeared in the
columns of that paper.
_Cambridge, December, 1913._ W. S. B.
HYMN TO DEMETER
FROM “A SICILIAN IDYL”
Weave the dance, and raise again the sacred chorus;
Wreathe the garlands of the spring about the hair;
Now once more the meadows burst in bloom before us,
Crying swallows dart and glitter through the air.
Glints the plowshare in the brown and fragrant furrow;
Pigeons coo in shady coverts as they pair;
Come the furtive mountain folk from cave and burrow,
Lean, and blinking at the sunlight’s sudden glare.
Bright through midmost heaven moves the lesser Lion;
Hide the Hyades in ocean caverns hoar;
Past the shoulders of the sunset flames Orion,
Following the sisters seaward evermore.
Gleams the east at evening, lit by low Arcturus;
Out to subtle-scented dawns beside the shore,
Yet a little and the Pleiades will lure us:
Weave the dance and raise the chorus as of yore.
Far to eastward up the fabled gulf of Issus,
Northward, southward, westward, now the trader goes,
Passing headlands clustered yellow with narcissus,
Bright with hyacinth, with poppy, and with rose.
Shines the sea and falls the billow as undaunted,
Past the rising of the stars that no man knows,
Sails he onward through the islands siren-haunted,
Till the clashing gates of rock before him close.
Kindly Mother of the beasts and birds and flowers,
Gracious bringer of the barley and the grain,
Earth awakened feels thy sunlight and thy showers;
Great Demeter! Let us call thee not in vain;
Lead us safely from the seed-time to the threshing,
Past the harvest and the vineyard’s purple stain;
Let us see thy corn-pale hair the sunlight meshing,
When the sounding flails of autumn swing again.
_Yale Review_ _Louis V. Ledoux_
OVER THE WINTRY THRESHOLD
Over the wintry threshold
Who comes with joy today,
So frail, yet so enduring,
To triumph o’er dismay?
Ah, quick her tears are springing,
And quickly they are dried,
For sorrow walks before her,
But gladness walks beside.
She comes with gusts of laughter,--
The music as of rills;
With tenderness and sweetness,
The wisdom of the hills.
Her hands are strong to comfort,
Her heart is quick to heed;
She knows the signs of sadness,
She knows the voice of need;
There is no living creature,
However poor or small,
But she will know its trouble,
And hearken to its call.
Oh, well they fare forever,
By mighty dreams possessed,
Whose hearts have lain a moment
On that eternal breast.
_Smart Set_ _Bliss Carman_
IN APRIL
If I am slow forgetting,
It is because the sun
Has such old tricks of setting
When April days are done.
The soft spring sunlight traces
Old patterns--green and gold;
The flowers have no new faces,
The very buds are old!
If I am slow forgetting--
Ah, well, come back and see
The same old sunbeams petting
My garden-plots and me.
Come smell the green things growing,
The boxwood after rain;
See where old beds are showing
Their slender spears again.
At dusk, that fosters dreaming--
Come back at dusk and rest,
And watch our old star gleaming
Against the primrose west.
_Harper’s_ _Margaret Lee Ashley_
MAY IS BUILDING HER HOUSE
May is building her house. With apple blooms
She is roofing over the glimmering rooms;
Of the oak and the beech hath she builded its beams,
And, spinning all day at her secret looms,
With arras of leaves each wind-swayed wall
She pictureth over, and peopleth it all
With echoes and dreams,
And singing of streams.
May is building her house. Of petal and blade,
Of the roots of the oak is the flooring made,
With a carpet of mosses and lichen and clover,
Each small miracle over and over,
And tender, traveling green things strayed.
Her windows, the morning and evening star,
And her rustling doorways, ever ajar
With the coming and going
Of fair things blowing,
The thresholds of the four winds are.
May is building her house. From the dust of things
She is making the songs and the flowers and the wings;
From October’s tossed and trodden gold
She is making the young year out of the old;
Yea! out of winter’s flying sleet
She is making all the summer sweet,
And the brown leaves spurned of November’s feet
She is changing back again to spring’s.
_Harper’s_ _Richard Le Gallienne_
IN A FORGOTTEN BURYING-GROUND
Eternal in the brooding of the old Norwegian spruces
I hear the wistful tenderness of loves They used to know,
And in the swelling wood-notes that the eager springtide looses
Sobs again Their heart-break from the Springs of Long Ago:
And sometime, thro’ the silence, with the April shadows lying
Aslant the solemn acre where I take my dreamless rest,
Perhaps the stifled need of You my heart was ever crying
Will find its way across the years--to stir a stranger’s breast!
_The Poetry Journal_ _Ruth Guthrie Harding_
WIND
The Wind bows down the poplar trees,
The Wind bows down the crested seas;
And he has bowed the heart of me
Under his hand of memory.
O heavy-handed Wind, who goes
Hurting the petals of the rose;
Who leaves the grasses on the hill
Broken and pallid, spent and still!
O heavy-handed Wind, who brings
To me all echoing ancient things:
Echoing sorrow and defeat,
Crying like mourners, hard to meet!
The Wind bows down the poplar trees
And all the ocean’s argosies;
But deeper bends the heart of me,
Under his hand of memory.
_Harper’s_ _Fannie Stearns Davis_
THE SPECKLED TROUT
With rod and line I took my way
That led me through the gossip trees,
Where all the forest was asway
With hurry of the running breeze.
I took my hat off to a flower
That nodded welcome as I passed;
And, pelted by a morning shower,
Unto its heart a bee held fast.
A head of gold one great weed tossed,
And leaned to look when I went by;
And where the brook the roadway crossed
The daisy kept on me its eye.
And when I stooped to bathe my face,
And seat me at a great tree’s foot,
I heard the stream say, “Mark the place:
And undermine it rock and root.”
And o’er the whirling water there
A dragonfly its shuttle plied,
Where wild a fern let down its hair,
And leaned to see the water’s pride--
A speckled trout. The spotted elf,
Whom I had come so far to see,
Stretched out above a rocky shelf,
A shadow sleeping mockingly.
* * * * *
And I have sat here half the day
Regarding it. It has not stirred.
I heard the running water say--
“He does not know the magic word.
“The word that changes everything,
And brings all Nature to his hand:
That makes of this great trout a king,
And opes the way to Faeryland.”
_The Bellman_ _Madison Cawein_
TREES
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s hungry breast;
A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree!
_Poetry, A Magazine of Verse_ _Joyce Kilmer_
IN THE HOSPITAL
Because on the branch that is tapping my pane
A sun-wakened leaf-bud, uncurled,
Is bursting its rusty brown sheathing in twain,
I know there is Spring in the world.
Because through the sky-patch whose azure and white
My window frames all the day long
A yellow-bird dips for an instant of flight,
I know there is Song.
Because even here in this Mansion of Woe
Where creep the dull hours, leaden-shod,
Compassion and Tenderness aid me, I know
There is God.
_Scribner’s_ _Arthur Guiterman_
LOVE OF LIFE
Love you not the tall trees spreading wide their branches,
Cooling with their green shade the sunny days of June?
Love you not the little bird lost among the leaflets,
Dreamily repeating a quaint, brief tune?
Is there not a joy in the waste windy places;
Is there not a song by the long dusty way?
Is there not a glory in the sudden hour of struggle?
Is there not a peace in the long quiet day?
Love you not the meadows with the deep lush grasses;
Love you not the cloud-flocks noiseless in their flight?
Love you not the cool wind that stirs to meet the sunrise;
Love you not the stillness of the warm summer night?
Have you never wept with a grief that slowly passes;
Have you never laughed when a joy goes running by?
Know you not the peace of rest that follows labor?--
You have not learnt to live then; how can you dare to die?
_Scribner’s_ _Tertius van Dyke_
GOD’S WILL
God meant me to be hungry,
So I should seek to find
Wisdom, and truth, and beauty,
To satisfy my mind.
God meant me to be lonely,
Lest I should wish to stay
In some green earthly Eden
Too long from heaven away.
God meant me to be weary,
That I should yearn to rest
This feeble, aching body
Deep in the earth’s dark breast.
_Harper’s_ _Mildred Howells_
ON THE BIRTH OF A CHILD
Lo--to the battle-ground of Life,
Child, you have come, like a conquering shout,
Out of a struggle--into strife;
Out of a darkness--into doubt.
Girt with the fragile armor of Youth,
Child, you must ride into endless wars,
With the sword of protest, the buckler of truth,
And a banner of love to sweep the stars....
About you the world’s despair will surge;
Into defeat you must plunge and grope--
Be to the faltering, an urge;
Be to the hopeless years, a hope!
Be to the darkened world a flame;
Be to its unconcern a blow--
For out of its pain and tumult you came,
And into its tumult and pain you go.
_The Independent_ _Louis Untermeyer_
TO A CHILD FALLING ASLEEP
Over the dim edge of sleep I lean,
And in her eyes’ illimitable grey distances,
Look down into the shadow-tinted space,--
The cloudy air of sleep,--
To see the rose-lit petal of a Child’s fair soul
Seek dreamily the farther gloom,
Where waking eyes may follow her no more.
One more last time her lids are lifted,
And in her look I read a wistful fare-thee-well;
Her spirit waves a twinkling white hand,
Her bark is out upon the sea of dream,--
The calm, grey sea, full and immovably established,
That drinks the river of my love, without o’erflowing,
Nor ever gives my image back to me.
When o’er the sun-swept land
Murmuring twilight spread her dusky tent,
A Stranger passed before our friendly sun,--
Between the dark and dawn,--
A Stranger whom we love but never see.
And as she came and cast her blue benignant shadow over all,
She set a silver trumpet to her lips,
And blew a note that thrilled in Children’s hearts;
Because in little hearts the echo-fairies love to play,
Roaming the scented meadows there,
Where Love has been and sown the amaranthine flowers,
Out of whose pristine cups are born the singing stars.
And as the first free rainbow bubble sailed,
Launched by the Stranger with the silver pipe,
Upon the listening air;
As first the hollow note
Kissed the sweet lips and died of happiness,
The little Child unfurled her sails.
I stood there on the very verge of sleep,
And called to her,
And Love’s own self had deigned to wait within my heart,
(Because I kept it always fit for Childish guests)
And would have given welcome had she stayed.
But then I saw the eyelids close,
And knew that Azrael who championed her soul,
Had shut the gates lest I should see
More than my life could bear.
Yet I had seen her go,
And sight no more could hold of Beauty’s wine.
I had seen the fair face flush,
As the soft curtains of the tinted west,
Are drawn before the temple of the Night,
When the day-worn Sun has passed within;
Had seen the little body, whitely gowned,
Folded within its nest;
Had caught the last light kiss
Before the lips lay still;
And I had looked into the cool grey deep,
Where Sleep received the rose-leaf soul of her,
And bore it out upon her gentle waters.
Into the night I passed,
Where on the mellow bosom of the west,
Floated the flame-lit shell of Hesperus;
And as I stayed with hallowed breath,
The soul of fire fell over the rim of night:
And then I knew the soul of her I loved,
Had heard the last clear call,
The low Elysian chant of Hesperus,
And loving me had borne the love I gave,
Out and beyond and over all the ends of earth,
And where the altar flame of Venus burned,
Had laid the gift and breathed her Childhood’s prayer.
_The Poetry Journal_ _Robert Alden Sanborn_
A ROMAN DOLL
(IN A MUSEUM)
How an image of paint and wood
Leaped to her life with a love’s control,
Struck the chords of her motherhood,
Passionate little mother-soul!
Fair to her sight were the stolid eyes,
Dear to her toil the robes empearled.
She crooned it the ancient lullabies,
She gathered it close from the outer world.
They watched together, as Nero’s pyres
Fed the haze of a hundred fires.
_Me in her fresh young arms she bore.
See, I am small,
Only a doll.
But I keep her kiss forevermore._
Long and lonely the toy has lain.
One by one into time’s abyss
Years have dropped as the drops of rain.
Yet the cycles have left us this!
O red-lipped mother, O mother sweet,
Today a sister has heard you call,
Your heart is beating in her heart-beat.
I saw her weep o’er the crumbling doll.
She knew, she knew! You had lived and smiled!
You had loved your dream, little Roman child!
_Me in her fresh young arms she bore.
See, I am small,
Only a doll.
But I keep her kiss forevermore._
_The Poetry Journal_ _Agnes Lee_
SAPPHO
Midnight, and in the darkness not a sound;
So, with hushed breathing, sleeps the autumn night.
Only the white immortal stars shall know,
Here in the house by the low-lintelled door,
How for the last time I have lit the lamp.
I think you are not wholly careless now,
Walls, that have sheltered me so many an hour,
Bed, that has brought me ecstasy and sleep,
Floors, that have borne me when a gale of joy
Lifted my soul and made me half a god.
Farewell; across the threshold many feet
Shall pass, but never Sappho’s feet again.
Girls shall come in whom love has made aware
Of all their swaying beauty--they shall sing,
But never Sappho’s voice like golden fire
Shall seek for heaven thro’ your echoing rafters;
There shall be sparrows bringing back the spring
Over the long blue meadows of the sea,
And south wind playing on the reeds of rain,
But never Sappho’s whisper in the night,
Never her love-cry when the lover comes.
Farewell, I close the door and make it fast.
* * * * *
The little street lies meek beneath the moon,
Running, as rivers run, to meet the sea.
I too go seaward and shall not return.
Oh, garlands on the door-posts that I pass,
Woven of asters and of autumn leaves,
I make a prayer for you: Cypris, be kind,
That every lover may be given love.
I shall not hasten lest the paving-stones
Should echo with my sandals and awake
Those who are warm beneath the cloak of sleep;
Lest they should rise and see me and should say:
“Whither goes Sappho lonely in the night?”
Whither goes Sappho? Whither all men go,
But they go driven, straining back with fear,
And Sappho goes as lightly as a leaf
Blown from brown autumn forests to the sea.
* * * * *
Here on the rock Zeus lifted from the waves,
I shall await the waking of the dawn,
Lying beneath the weight of dark as one
Lies breathless till the lover shall awake.
And with the sun, the sea shall cover me;
I shall be less than the dissolving foam,
Murmuring and melting on the ebbing tide.
I shall be less than spindrift, less than shells--
And yet I shall be greater than the gods;
For destiny no more can bow my soul
As rain bows down the watch-fires on the hills.
Yea, if my soul escape, it shall aspire
Toward the white heaven as flame that has its will.
I go not bitterly, not dumb with grief,
Not broken by the ache of love--I go
As one grown tired lies down and hopes to sleep.
Yet they shall say: “It was for Cercolas--
She died because she could not bear her love.”
They shall remember how we used to walk
Here on the cliff beneath the oleanders,
In the long limpid twilight of the spring,
Looking toward Khios where the amber sky
Was pierced by the faint arrow of a star.
How should they know the wind of a new beauty
Sweeping my soul had winnowed it with song?
I have been glad tho’ love should come or go,
Happy as trees that find a wind to sway them,
Happy again when it has left them rest.
Others shall say: “Grave Dica wrought her death.”
She would not lift her lips to take a kiss,
Or ever lift her eyes to take a smile.
She was a pool the winter paves with ice,
That the wild hunter in the hills must leave
With thirst unslaked in the brief southward sun.
Ah, Dica, it is not for thee I go.
And not for Phaon, tho’ his ship lifts sail
Here in the windless harbor, for the south.
Oh, darkling deities that guard the Nile,
Watch over one whose gods are far away;
Egypt, be kind to him--his eyes are deep.
Yet they are wrong who say, it was for him.
How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover,
Never transfused and lost in what she loved,
Never so wholly loving nor at peace.
I asked for something greater than I found,
And every time that love has made me weep,
I have rejoiced that love could be so strong;
For I have stood apart and watched my soul
Caught in the gust of passion, as a bird
With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind
Struggles and frees itself to find the sky.
* * * * *
It is not for a single god, I go.
I have grown weary of the winds of heaven.
I will not be a reed to hold the sound
Of whatsoever breath the gods may blow,
Turning my torment into music for them.
They gave me life--the gift was bountiful,
I lived with the swift singing strength of fire,
Seeking for beauty as a flame for fuel,
Beauty in all things and in every hour.
The gods have given life, I gave them song;
The debt is paid and now I turn to go.
The breath of dawn blows the stars out like lamps,
There is a rim of silver on the sea.
As one grown tired, who hopes to sleep, I go.
_Scribner’s_ _Sara Teasdale_
OF MOIRA UP THE GLEN
It’s little that I’d care for the glories of Ireland,
Waiting for the shadows to gather in the glen,
Come the time of darkness, sitting by the hearth-light,
Whispering with bated breath for fear the little men
Should catch us and spell us to serve them for a year’s time,
Toiling and moiling within a faëry snare.
I’m thinkin’ ’twould be fearsome in the gray misty strangeness.--
’Tis hiding we’ll be in the clear free air!
The sunlight above us, and willow hedge for shelter,
A tangle of soft things to rustle by the stream,
Where Moira, my white dove, whose beauty is my sorrow,
Would sit with me and travel on the long bright dream,
Travel with the water from the mountain to the meadow,
Down across the lowlands and gaily to the sea,
Out beyond the breakers to the shimmer of a far line
Poised and trembling within the heart of me.
What shall I murmur to coax the dream of beauty
Out from the shadows to welcome in the dawn?
How shall I sing it that she may know the glory,
Know it and come by the first flush of morn?
The moonlight is dark light, ’tis fear I’m after feelin’,
The fairies should be in it and steal her heart away,
A goblet for their feasting, they’d drain it and fill it
With dreams of a far world beyond the light of day.
It’s God’s light I’m wanting, and Moira to see it,
See it and tremble with the love of God,
And seeing it she’d turn, and look within my own eyes,
And wonder at the vision transforming a sod
Into worshipful silence and thought that is living,
Burning, and shaped by the warmth of its fire
To a chalice of tears and of laughter for singing
The lovely unfolding of dream-purged desire.
_Smart Set_ _Edward J. O’Brien_
MORNING GLORIES
Distant as a dream’s flight,
Lay an eerie plain,
Where the weary moonlight
Swooned into a moan;
Wailing after dead seed
Came the ghost of rain.
There was I, a wild weed,
Growing all alone.
Like a doubted story,
Came the thought of day;
God and all His glory
Lingered otherwhere,
Busy with the spring thrill
Many dreams away.
Could a little weed’s will
Fling so far a prayer?
Lo, the sudden wonder!
(Is a prayer so fleet?)
From the desert under,
Morning glories grew;
Twined me, bound me
With caressing feet;
Wove song ’round me--
Pink, white, blue!
As a fog is rifted
By the eager breeze,
Darkness broke and lifted,
Tossing like a sea!
Lo, the dawn was flowering
Through the maple trees!
Oh, and you were showering
Kisses over me!
_Smart Set_ _John G. Neihardt_
LEST I LEARN
Lest I learn, with clearer sight,
Such beauty cannot be--
Tie a bandage, pull it tight,
Blind me, I would not see!
Lest I learn, with clearer will,
Such wonder cannot be--
Oh, kiss me nearer, nearer still,
And make a fool of me!
_Smart Set_ _Witter Bynner_
LATER
I went to the place where my youth took birth
In the slow, round kiss of an amorous girl,
When sonnets and lace were the measure of earth,
When death was forgotten and life was a whirl.
I addled my brain with the memories flown
Of Heatherby Kaiser and Muriel Moore;
I thought of the women and men I had known,--
The glittering eyes and the bolt on the door--
The warm, gray walls and the odor of musk,
The wine, the piano, the glistening feet,
The eyes grown hazy like shadows at dusk,
The minstreling music that rose from the street.
I thought of Elise with her soft, gold hair;
And the buttonhook hung from the chandelier.
The spirit of passionate youth had been there--
But somehow the dream of it wasn’t quite clear,
For the place had been altered; the walls were red,
And the woodwork was stained with a desolate brown;
And they told me a woman had lain in the bed
For a year and a half with the curtains down.
_Smart Set_ _Willard Huntington Wright_
THE OLD MAID
I saw her in a Broadway car,
The woman I might grow to be;
I felt my lover look at her
And then turn suddenly to me.
Her hair was dull and drew no light,
And yet its color was as mine;
Her eyes were strangely like my eyes,
Tho’ love had never made them shine.
Her body was a thing grown thin,
Hungry for love that never came;
Her soul was frozen in the dark,
Unwarmed forever by love’s flame.
I felt my lover look at her
And then turn suddenly to me--
His eyes were magic to defy
The woman I shall never be.
_The Forum_ _Sara Teasdale_
DEPARTURE
The twilight is starred,
The dawn has arisen;
Light breaks from the east
And Song from her prison.
Faint odors and sounds
The west-wind discloses
Of laughter and birds,
Of singing and roses.
It is time to be gone--
Day scatters the gloom;
But here at my side,
But still in the room,
Like the angel of life,
Too kind to depart,
You hang at my lips,
You hang at my heart!
_The Forum_ _John Hall Wheelock_
AN ADIEU
Sorrow, quit me for a while!
Wintry days are over;
Hope again, with April smile,
Violets sows and clover.
Pleasure follows in her path,
Love itself flies after,
And the brook a music hath
Sweet as childhood’s laughter.
Not a bird upon the bough
Can repress its rapture,
Not a bud that blossoms now
But doth beauty capture.
Sorrow, thou art Winter’s mate,
Spring cannot regret thee;
Yet, ah, yet--my friend of late--
I shall not forget thee!
_Harper’s_ _Florence Earle Coates_
HEART’S TIDE
I thought I had forgotten you,
So far apart our lives were thrust!
’Twas only as the earth forgets
The seed the sower left in trust.
’Twas only as the creeks forget
The tides that left their hollows dry;
Or as the home-bound ship forgets
Streamers of seaweed drifting by.
My heart is earth that keeps untold
The secret of the seeds that sleep.
My thoughts are chalices of sand;
Your memory floods them and I weep.
_Harper’s_ _Ethel M. Hewitt_
WAITING
I thought my heart would break
Because the Spring was slow.
I said, “How long young April sleeps
Beneath the snow!”
But when at last she came,
And buds broke in the dew,
I dreamed of my lost love,
And my heart broke, too!
_Harper’s_ _Charles Hanson Towne_
DESIDERIUM
Face in the tomb, that lies so still,
May I draw near,
And watch you sleep and love you,
Without word or tear?
You smile, your eyelids flicker;
Shall I tell
How the world goes that lost you?
Shall I tell?
Ah, love, lift not your eyelids;
’Tis the same
Old story that we laughed at,
Still the same.
We knew it, you and I,
We knew it all:
Still is the small the great,
The great the small;
Still the cold lie quenches
The flaming truth,
And still embattled age
Wars against youth.
Yet I believe still in the ever-living God
That fills your grave with perfume,
Writing your name in violets across the sod,
Shielding your holy face from hail and snow;
And, though the withered stay, the lovely go.
No transitory wrong or wrath of things
Shatters the faith--that each slow minute brings
That meadow nearer to us where your feet
Shall flutter near me like white butterflies--
That meadow where immortal lovers meet,
Gazing forever in immortal eyes.
_Smart Set_ _Richard Le Gallienne_
HUMAN
Weighed down by grief, o’erborne by deep despair,
She lifted up white arms to heaven and prayed
That day for death; she made a mighty prayer
Beside her dear one gently to be laid.
And standing thus, it flashed across her mind
How she must make a seemly silhouette
Against the sky, her figure sharply lined
Upon the westering sunlight, black as jet.
_Smart Set_ _Richard Burton_
THE GHOST
One whom I loved and never can forget
Returned to me in dream, and spoke with me,
As audibly, as sweet familiarly
As though warm fingers twined warm fingers yet.
Her eyes were bright and with great wonder wet
As in old days when some strange, swift decree
Brought touch-close love or death; and sorrow-free
She spoke as one long purged of all regret.
I heard, oh, glad beyond all speech, I heard,
Till to my lips the flaming query flashed:
_How is it--over there?_ Then, quite undone,
She trembled; in her deep eyes like a bird
The gladness fluttered, and as one abashed
She shook her head bewildered, and was gone.
_Scribner’s_ _Hermann Hagedorn_
A MOUNTAIN GATEWAY
I know a vale where I would go one day,
When June comes back and all the world once more
Is glad with summer. Deep with shade it lies,
A mighty cleft in the green bosoming hills,
A cool, dim gateway to the mountains’ heart.
On either side the wooded slopes come down,
Hemlock and beech and chestnut; here and there
Through the deep forest laurel spreads and gleams,
Pink-white as Daphne in her loveliness--
That still perfection from the world withdrawn,
As if the wood gods had arrested there
Immortal beauty in her breathless flight.
Far overhead against the arching blue
Gray ledges overhang from dizzy heights,
Scarred by a thousand winters and untamed.
The road winds in from the broad riverlands,
Luring the happy traveler turn by turn,
Up to the lofty mountains of the sky.
And where the road runs in the valley’s foot,
Through the dark woods the mountain stream comes down,
Singing and dancing all its youth away
Among the boulders and the shallow runs,
Where sunbeams pierce and mossy tree trunks hang,
Drenched all day long with murmuring sound and spray.
There, light of heart and footfree, I would go
Up to my home among the lasting hills,
And in my cabin doorway sit me down,
Companioned in that leafy solitude
By the wood ghosts of twilight and of peace.
And in that sweet seclusion I should hear,
Among the cool-leafed beeches in the dusk,
The calm-voiced thrushes at their evening hymn--
So undistraught, so rapturous, so pure,
It well might be, in wisdom and in joy,
The seraphs singing at the birth of time
The unworn ritual of eternal things.
_Smart Set_ _Bliss Carman_
PERUGIA
For the sake of a weathered gray city set high on a hill
To the northward I go,
Where Umbria’s valley lies mile upon emerald mile
Outspread like a chart.
The wind in her steep, narrow streets is eternally chill
From the neighboring snow,
But linger who will in the lure of a southerly smile,
Here is my heart.
Wrought to a mutual blueness are mountains and sky,
Intermingling they meet;
Little gray breathings of olive arise from the plain
Like sighs that are seen,
For man and his Maker harmonious toil, and the sigh
Of such labor is sweet,
And the fruits of their patience are vistas of vineyards and grain
In a glory of green.
No wind from the valley that passes the casement but flings
Invisible flowers.
The carol of birds is a gossamer tissue of gold
On a background of bells.
Sweetest of all, in the silence the nightingale sings
Through the silver-pure hours,
Till the stars disappear like a dream that may never be told,
Which the dawning dispels.
Never so darkling the alley but opens at last
On unlimited space;
Each gate is the frame of a vision that stretches away
To the rims of the sky.
Never a scar that was left by the pitiless past
But has taken a grace,
Like the mark of a smile that was turned upon children at play
In a summer gone by.
Many the tyrants, my city, who held thee in thrall.
What remains of them now?
Names whispered back from the dark through a portal ajar,
They come not again.
By men thou wert made and wert marred, but, outlasting them all,
Is the soul that is thou--
A soul that shall speak to my soul till I, too, pass afar,
And perchance even then.
_Century_ _Amelia Josephine Burr_
GHOSTS
They call you cold New England,
But underneath your snow
Is blood as red as roses
That in your gardens blow.
The God that lights your forests
With torch of cardinal flower,
Forbids that ever the Puritan
Escape his crimson hour.
The flame that skims brown furrows--
The scarlet tanager’s breast,
Is sign to preacher and ploughman
Of dreams that haunt their rest.
When witch and warlock perished
By fagot, scaffold and tree,
Their tortures slew their bodies
But set their spirits free!
In freedom gliding, gloating,
Through the haunts their children claim
The swollen ghosts of the wicked
Grow fat on new-wrought shame.
The old, sweet evil lingers,
The demon of uncontrol,
And madness creeps and crouches
In every haggard soul.
And he who held moon revels
In Salem forests deep,
Well loves his hypocrite servants
Nor seeks to spoil their sleep.
They call you cold New England--
But surely even your snow
Is drift not of ice but of ashes,
To guard the flames below!
_Smart Set_ _Marguerite Mooers Marshall_
ST. JOHN AND THE FAUN
I
O blest Imagination!
Bright power beneath man’s lid,
That in apparent beauty
Unveils the beauty hid!
In the gleaming of the instant
Abides the immortal thing;
Our souls that voyage unspeaking
Press forward, wing and wing;
From every passing object
A brighter radiance pours;
The Lethe of our daily lives
Sweeps by eternal shores.
II
On the deep below Amalfi,
Where the long roll of the wave
Slowly breathed, and slipped beneath me
To gray cliff and sounding cave,
Came a boat-load of dark fishers,
Passed, and on the bright sea shone;
There, the vision of a moment,
I beheld the young St. John.
At the stern the boy stood bending
Full his dreaming gaze on me;
Inexorably spread between us
Flashed the blue strait of the sea;
Slow receding,--distant,--distant,--
While my bosom scarce drew breath,--
Dreaming eyes on my eyes dreaming
Holy beauty without death.
III
In the cloudland o’er Amalfi,
Where with mists the deep ravine
Like a cauldron smoked, and, clearing,
Showed, far down, the pictured scene,
Capes and bays and peaks and ocean,
And the city, like a gem,
Set in circlets of pale azure
That her beauty ring and hem,--
Once, returning from the chasm
By the mountain’s woodland way,
Underneath the oak and chestnut
Where I loved to make delay,
(And dark boys and girls with faggots
Would pass near on that wild lawn,
And at times they brought me rosebuds),
There one day I saw a faun.
The wood was still with noontide,
The very trees seemed lone,
When from a neighboring thicket
His moon-eyes on me shone,
Motionless, and bright, and staring,
And with a startled grace;
As nature, wildly magical
Was the beauty of his face;
And as some gentle creature
That, curious, has fear,
Dumb he stood and gazed upon me,
But did not venture near;
And I moved not, nor motioned,
Nor gave him any sign,
Nor broke the momentary spell
Of the old world divine.
IV
Love, with no other agent
Save communion by the eye,
Evoked from those bright creatures
Our secret unity;
There, flowering from old ages,
Hung on time’s blossoming stem
All that fairest was in me
Or loveliest in them;
And truly it was happiness
Unto a poet’s heart
To find that living in his breast
Which is immortal art.
_The Forum_ _George Edward Woodberry_
SCHOOL
I
Old Hezekiah leaned hard on his hoe
And squinted long at Eben, his lank son.
The silence shrilled with crickets. Day was done,
And, row on dusky row,
Tall bean poles ribbed with dark the gold-bright afterglow.
Eben stood staring: ever, one by one,
The tendril tops turned ashen as they flared.
Still Eben stared.
O, there is wonder on New Hampshire hills,
Hoeing the warm, bright furrows of brown earth,
And there is grandeur in the stone wall’s birth,
And in the sweat that spills
From rugged toil its sweetness; yet for wild young wills
There is no dew of wonder, but stark dearth,
In one old man who hoes his long bean rows,
And only hoes.
Old Hezekiah turned slow on his heel.
He touched his son. Thro’ all the carking day
There are so many littlish cares to weigh
Large natures down, and steel
The heart of understanding. “Son, how is’t ye feel?
What are ye starin’ on--a gal?” A ray
Flushed Eben from the fading afterglow:
He dropped his hoe.
He dropped his hoe, but sudden stooped again
And raised it where it fell. Nothing he spoke,
But bent his knee and--crack! the handle broke,
Splintering. With glare of pain,
He flung the pieces down, and stamped upon them; then--
Like one who leaps out naked from his cloak--
Ran. “Here, come back! Where are ye bound--you fool?”
He cried--“To school!”
II
Now on the mountain morning laughed with light--
With light and all the future in her face,
For there she looked on many a far-off place
And wild adventurous sight,
For which the mad young autumn wind hallooed with might
And dared the roaring mill-brook to the race,
Where blue-jays screamed beyond the pine-dark pool--
“To school!--To school!”
Blackcoated, Eben took the barefoot trail,
Holding with wary hand his Sunday boots;
Harsh catbirds mocked his whistling with their hoots;
Under his swallowtail
Against his hip-strap bumping, clinked his dinner pail;
Frost maples flamed, lone thrushes touched their lutes;
Gray squirrels bobbed, with tails stiff curved to backs,
To eye his tracks.
Soon at the lonely crossroads he passed by
The little one-room schoolhouse. He peered in.
There stood the bench where he had often been
Admonished flagrantly
To drone his numbers: now to this he said good-bye
For mightier lure of more romantic scene:
Good-bye to childish rule and homely chore
Forevermore!
All day he hastened like the flying cloud
Breathless above him, big with dreams, yet dumb.
With tightened jaw he chewed the tart spruce gum,
And muttered half aloud
Huge oracles. At last, where thro’ the pine-tops bowed
The sun, it rose!--His heart beat like a drum.
There, there it rose--his tower of prophecy:
The Academy!
III
They learn to live who learn to contemplate,
For contemplation is the unconfined
God who creates us. To the growing mind
Freedom to think is fate,
And all that age and after-knowledge augurate
Lies in a little dream of youth enshrined:
That dream to nourish with the skilful rule
Of love--is school.
Eben, in mystic tumult of his teens,
Stood bursting--like a ripe seed--into soul.
All his life long he had watched the great hills roll
Their shadows, tints and sheens
By sun- and moonrise; yet the bane of hoeing beans,
And round of joyless chores, his father’s toll,
Blotted their beauty; nature was as naught:
He had never _thought_.
But now he climbed his boyhood’s castle tower
And knocked. Ah, well then for his after-fate
That one of nature’s masters opened the gate,
Where like an April shower
Live influence quickened all his earth-blind seed to power.
Strangely his sense of truth grew passionate,
And like a young bull, led in yoke to drink,
He bowed to think.
There also bowed their heads with him to quaff--
The snorting herd! And many a wholesome grip
He had of rivalry and fellowship.
Often the game was rough,
But Eben tossed his horns and never balked the cuff;
For still through play and task his Dream would slip--
A radiant Herdsman, guiding destiny
To his degree.
IV
Once more old Hezekiah stayed his hoe
To squint at Eben. Silent, Eben scanned
A little roll of sheepskin in his hand,
While, row on dusky row,
Tall bean poles ribbed with dark the gold-pale afterglow.
The boy looked up: here was another land!
Mountain and farm with mystic beauty flared
Where Eben stared.
Stooping, he lifted with a furtive smile
Two splintered sticks, and spliced them. Nevermore
His spirit would go beastwise to his chore
Blinded, for even while
He stooped to the old task, sudden in the sunset’s pile
His radiant Herdsman swung a fiery door,
Thro’ which came forth with far-borne trumpetings
Poets and kings,
His fellow conquerors: there Virgil dreamed,
There Cæsar fought and won the barbarous tribes,
There Darwin, pensive, bore the ignorant gibes,
And One with thorns redeemed
From malice the wild hearts of men: there surged and streamed
With chemic fire the forges of old scribes
Testing anew the crucibles of toil
To save God’s soil.
So Eben turned again to hoe his beans,
But now, to ballads which his Herdsman sung,
Henceforth he hoed the dream in with the dung,
And for his ancient spleens
Planting new joys, imagination found him means.
At last old Hezekiah loosed his tongue:
“Well, boy, this school--what has it learned ye to know?”
He said: “To hoe.”
_The Forum_ _Percy MacKaye_
THE MARVELOUS MUNCHAUSEN
The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow,
And Piet and Sachs and Vroom--all in the long ago,--
Oh, the very long ago!--o’er their pipes and hollands seen;
And on the wall the man-o’-war, and firelight on the screen!
Their flowered, bulging waistcoats that wrinkle when they chuckle;
The baron, much-mustachioed, and gay with star and buckle,
And bristling in a uniform as scarlet as his cheeks,
With choker lace beneath his chin, and splendid, yellow breeks!
The smoke drifts blue, and bluer through that window, all abreeze,
Are glinting sky and glistening sea beyond the Holland quays.
Blue tiles, red bricks, the bustling wharves, with color’s oriflamme;
Starched caps and rosy-posy cheeks--the girls of Amsterdam!
The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow!
Oh, listen, will he tell them, as he told them long ago,--
Oh, very long ago, a-laughing in his sleeve!--
The marvelous Munchausen, with the fables _I_ believe?
* * * * *
“When I had sown the Turkey beans that reachéd to the moon,
And lifted all Westminster in the sling from my balloon
(Swung over the Atlantic,
They peered from windows, frantic),
When, eagle-back, I’d scanned the pole in broad, eternal noon,
“In Queen Mab’s chariot I ventured on the sea.
’Twas like a mammoth hazelnut, with matchless orrery
A-sparkle on its ceiling,
With planet systems wheeling
And giddy comets sizzling all about the head o’ me.
“The nine bulls drew it, as stout as those of Crete,
And all were shod with horrid skulls that clattered on their feet.
Rich banners waved behind ’em,
While on their backs, to mind ’em,
Postilion crickets chirruped them, all chirping loud and sweet.
“Ghost of the Cape I warn you of, for he is bottle-blue.
We split his Table Mountain. He gibbered and he flew.
The bulls straight showed disfeature
With gazing on the creature,
Stampeding in their harness when I gave the view-halloo.
“Though wrecked on Egypt’s obelisks, disaster I defied,
And harnessed Sphinx, the emperor’s gift, to tow an ark as wide
As great Westminster;
With beau and bell and spinster,
And cleric, clerk, and coronet all tête-à-tête inside.
“‘Good folk, we sail for Africa,’ said I to all my train.
‘When bold Munchausen leads you forth, what laggard dares remain
In slippered ease, uncaring
To share my deeds of daring?’
Their cheers amazed my modesty, and more had made me vain.
“‘The sultan’s bees I’ve shepherded. I’ve hornpiped at Marseilles,
Where gulped me down, well nigh to drown, the liveliest of whales.
I’m riskiest of riskers,
But, blow my grizzled whiskers!’
I cried, ‘May jackals gnaw my bones if now Munchausen fails!’
“By night the lions roared at us. By day the simoons came
And swept across our caravan in sandy clouds of flame;
But naught dismayed our temper, or
The genial Afric emperor
Had missed my handsome greeting, to his long-abiding shame.
“The people of the Mountains of the Moon I wined and dined.
I reigned at Gristariska when His Majesty declined.
Reforms I wrought untiring,
With Gog and Magog squiring,
And Frosticos, my bosom friend, who lent a legal mind.
“For last superb achievement,--bright tears may Envy shed!--
I built a bridge, from Africa to distant England spread:
No edifice of fable,
Nay, not the Tower of Babel,
Surpassed its mammoth glory in the heavens overhead.
“So back across its noble arch my retinue and I
Advanced with blaring trumpets through the regions of the sky.
Clouds lingered to enwreathe us,
Earth’s kingdoms far beneath us,
And martial music cheered our march from all the birds that fly.”
* * * * *
The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow,
And Piet and Sachs and Vroom all sleeping long ago,--
Oh, so very long ago!--and, chuckling in his sleeve,
Still, o’er the slumbering table,
Drone-droning on his fable,
The marvelous Munchausen, with the stories _I_ believe!
_Century_ _William Rose Benét_
TRAIN-MATES
Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,
A glory; but a negligible sight,
For you had often seen a mountain-peak
But not my paper. So we came to speak.
A smoke, a smile,--a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!--
You a young engineer, five feet eleven,
Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,
Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,
Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track
The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,--
And I a poet, wistful of my betters,
Reading George Meredith’s high-hearted Letters,
Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each
Absorbing to himself--as I to me
And you to you--a glad identity!
After a while when the others went away,
A curious kinship made us want to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time
You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,
Until we found that we were college men
And smoked more easily and smiled again;
And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
“I know your fine Greek Theatre on the hill
At Berkeley!” With your happy Grecian head
Upraised, “I never saw the place,” you said.
“Once I was free of class, I always went
Out to the field.”
Young engineer,
You meant as fair a tribute to the better part
As ever I did. Beauty of the heart
Is evident in temples. But it breathes
Alive where athletes quicken airy wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.
You are a poet quite as much as I,
Though differences appear in what we do,
And I an athlete quite as much as you.
Because you half-surmised my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.
Who knows but we shall look again and find
The circus-man and drummer, not behind
But leading in our visible estate,
As discus-thrower and as laureate?
_Yale Review_ _Witter Bynner_
THE KALLYOPE YELL
[_Loudly and rapidly with a leader, College yell fashion_]
I
Proud men
Eternally
Go about,
Slander me,
Call me the “Calliope.”
Sizz . . . . .
Fizz . . . . .
II
I am the Gutter Dream,
Tune-maker, born of steam,
Tooting joy, tooting hope.
I am the Kallyope,
Car called the Kallyope.
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
See the flags: snow-white tent,
See the bear and elephant,
See the monkey jump the rope,
Listen to the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!
Soul of the rhinoceros
And the hippopotamus
(Listen to the lion roar!)
Jaguar, cockatoot,
Loons, owls,
Hoot, Hoot.
Listen to the lion roar,
Listen to the lion roar,
Listen to the lion R-O-A-R!
Hear the leopard cry for gore,
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Hail the bloody Indian band,
Hail, all hail the popcorn stand,
Hail to Barnum’s picture there,
People’s idol everywhere,
Whoop, whoop, whoop, WHOOP!
Music of the mob am I,
Circus day’s tremendous cry:--
I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!
Hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot,
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Sizz, fizz . . . . .
III
Born of mobs, born of steam,
Listen to my golden dream,
Listen to my golden dream,
Listen to my G-O-L-D-E-N D-R-E-A-M!
Whoop whoop whoop whoop WHOOP!
I will blow the proud folk low,
Humanize the dour and slow,
I will shake the proud folk down,
(Listen to the lion roar!)
Popcorn crowds shall rule the town--
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Steam shall work melodiously,
Brotherhood increase.
You’ll see the world and all it holds
For fifty cents apiece.
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Every day a circus day.
_What?_
Well, _almost_ every day.
Nevermore the sweater’s den,
Nevermore the prison pen.
Gone the war on land and sea
That aforetime troubled men.
Nations all in amity,
Happy in their plumes arrayed
In the long bright street parade.
Bands a-playing every day.
_What?_
Well, _almost_ every day.
I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope!
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Hoot, toot, hoot, toot,
Whoop whoop whoop whoop,
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Sizz, fizz . . . . .
IV
Every soul
Resident
In the earth’s one circus tent!
Every man a trapeze king
Then a pleased spectator there.
On the benches! In the ring!
While the neighbors gawk and stare
And the cheering rolls along.
Almost every day a race
When the merry starting gong
Rings, each chariot on the line,
Every driver fit and fine
With the steel-spring Roman grace.
Almost every day a dream,
Almost every day a dream.
Every girl,
Maid or wife,
Wild with music,
Eyes a-gleam
With that marvel called desire:
Actress, princess, fit for life,
Armed with honor like a knife,
Jumping thro’ the hoops of fire.
(Listen to the lion roar!)
Making all the children shout
Clowns shall tumble all about,
Painted high and full of song
While the cheering rolls along,
Tho’ they scream,
Tho’ they rage,
Every beast
In his cage,
Every beast
In his den
That aforetime troubled men.
V
I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope,
Tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope;
Shaking window-pane and door
With a crashing cosmic tune,
With the war-cry of the spheres,
Rhythm of the roar of noon,
Rhythm of Niagara’s roar,
Voicing planet, star and moon,
SHRIEKING of the better years.
Prophet-singers will arise,
Prophets coming after me,
Sing my song in softer guise
With more delicate surprise;
I am but the pioneer
Voice of the Democracy;
I am the gutter-dream,
I am the golden dream,
Singing science, singing steam.
I will blow the proud folk down,
(Listen to the lion roar!)
I am the Kallyope, Kallyope, Kallyope,
Tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope, tooting hope,
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot, hoot toot,
Whoop whoop, whoop whoop,
Whoop whoop, whoop whoop,
Willy willy willy wah HOO!
Sizz .....
Fizz .....
_The Forum_ _Nicholas Vachel Lindsay_
THANKSGIVING FOR OUR TASK
The sickle is dulled of the reaping and the threshing-floor is bare;
The dust of night’s in the air.
The peace of the weary is ours:
All day we have taken the fruit and the grain and the seeds of the flowers.
The ev’ning is chill,
It is good now to gather in peace by the flames of the fire.
We have done now the deed that we did for our need and desire:
We have wrought our will.
And now for the boon of abundance and golden increase,
And immurèd peace,
Shall we thank our God?
Bethink us, amid His indulgence, His terrible rod?
Shall we be as the maple and oak,
Strew the earth with our gold, giving only bare boughs to the sky?
Nay, the pine stayeth green while the Winter growls sullenly by,
And doth not revoke
For soft days or stern days the pledge of its constancy.
Shall we not be
Also the same through all days,
Giving thanks when the battle breaks on us, in toil giving praise?
O Father who saw at the dawn,
That the folly of Pride would be the lush weed of our sin,
There is better than that in our hearts, O enter therein,
A light burneth, though wan
And weak be the flame, yet it gloweth, our Humility!
Ah, how can it be
Trimmed o’ the wick,
And replenished with oil to burn brightly and golden and quick?
For deep in our hearts
We wish to be thankful through lean years and fat without change,
Knowing that here Thou hast set for the spirit a range:
We would play well our parts,
Making America throb with the building of souls and the glory of good;
Yea, and we would,
And before the last Autumn we will
Build a temple from ocean to ocean where deeds never still
Melodiously shall proclaim
Thanksgiving forever that Thou hast set here to our hand
So wondrous a mystical harvest, that Thou dost demand
Sheaves bound in Thy name,
Yea, supersubstantial sheaves of strong souls that have grown
Fain to be known
As the corn of Thine occident field:
O Yielder of All, can America worthily thank Thee till such be her yield?
In the mellowing light
Of the goldenest days that precede the gray days of the year,
We sing Thee our harvesting song and we pray Thee to hear,
In the midst of Thy might:
Labor is given to us,
Let us give thanks!
Power worketh through us,
Let us give thanks!
Not for what we have
(So might speak a slave),
Not for the garnering,
Gratefully we sing,
But for the mighty thing
We must do, travailing!
For our task and for our strength;
For the journey and its length;
For our dauntless eagerness;
For our humbling weariness;
For these, for these, O Father,
Let us give thanks!
For these, O Mighty Father,
Take Thou our thanks!
_The Forum_ _Shaemas OSheel_
A LIKENESS
PORTRAIT BUST OF AN UNKNOWN, CAPITOL, ROME
In every line a supple beauty--
The restless head a little bent--
Disgust of pleasure, scorn of duty,
The unseeing eyes of discontent.
I often come to sit beside him,
This youth who passed and left no trace
Of good or ill that did betide him,
Save the disdain upon his face.
The hope of all his House, the brother
Adored, the golden-hearted son,
Whom Fortune pampered like a mother;
And then--a shadow on the sun.
Whether he followed Cæsar’s trumpet,
Or chanced the riskier game at home
To find how favor played the strumpet
In fickle politics at Rome;
Whether he dreamed a dream in Asia
He never could forget by day,
Or gave his youth to some Aspasia,
Or gamed his heritage away;
Once lost, across the Empire’s border
This man would seek his peace in vain;
His look arraigns a social order
Somehow entrammelled with his pain.
“The dice of gods are always loaded”;
One gambler, arrogant as they,
Fierce, and by fierce injustice goaded,
Left both his hazard and the play.
Incapable of compromises,
Unable to forgive or spare,
The strange awarding of the prizes
He had no fortitude to bear.
Tricked by the forms of things material--
The solid-seeming arch and stone,
The noise of war, the pomp imperial,
The heights and depths about a throne--
He missed, among the shapes diurnal,
The old, deep-travelled road from pain,
The thoughts of men which are eternal,
In which, eternal, men remain.
Ritratto d’ignoto; defying
Things unsubstantial as a dream--
An Empire, long in ashes lying--
His face still set against the stream.
Yes, so he looked, that gifted brother
I loved, who passed and left no trace,
Not even--luckier than this other--
His sorrow in a marble face.
_Scribner’s_ _Willa Sibert Cather_
THE FIELD OF GLORY
War shook the land where Levi dwelt,
And fired the dismal wrath he felt,
That such a doom was ever wrought
As his, to toil while others fought;
To toil, to dream--and still to dream,
With one day barren as another;
To consummate, as it would seem,
The dry despair of his old mother.
Far off one afternoon began
The sound of man destroying man;
And Levi, sick with nameless rage,
Condemned again his heritage,
And sighed for scars that might have come,
And would, if once he could have sundered
Those harsh, inhering claims of home
That held him while he cursed and wondered.
Another day, and then there came,
Rough, bloody, ribald, hungry, lame,
But yet themselves, to Levi’s door,
Two remnants of the day before.
They laughed at him and what he sought;
They jeered him, and his painful acre;
But Levi knew that they had fought,
And left their manners to their Maker.
That night, for the grim widow’s ears,
With hopes that hid themselves in fears,
He told of arms, and featly deeds,
Whereat one leaps the while he reads,
And said he’d be no more a clown,
While others drew the breath of battle.
The mother looked him up and down,
And laughed--a scant laugh with a rattle.
She told him what she found to tell,
And Levi listened, and heard well
Some admonitions of a voice
That left him no cause to rejoice.
He sought a friend, and found the stars,
And prayed aloud that they should aid him;
But they said not a word of wars,
Or of a reason why God made him.
And who’s of this or that estate
We do not wholly calculate,
When baffling shades that shift and cling
Are not without their glimmering;
When even Levi, tired of faith,
Beloved of none, forgot by many,
Dismissed as an inferior wraith,
Reborn may be as great as any.
_The Outlook_ _Edwin Arlington Robinson_
RICH MAN, POOR MAN--
Oh, joy that burns in Denver tavern!
The lights, the drink, the ceaseless play!
A kingdom, dull within a cavern,
Across the boards he flings away.
Then night that falls on either mountain
(Ah, bitter black it falls between);
But he, like water to its fountain,
Is come again where life runs clean.
So Death shall find him, delving, peering.
Still silver rock, still golden sand.
He weeps to hear the magpies’ jeering,
But he is back in his own land.
_Lippincott’s_ _Francis Hill_
THE SIN EATER
I
Hark ye! Hush ye! Margot’s dead!
Hush! Have done wi’ your brawling tune!
Danced, she did, till the stars grew pale;
Mother o’ God, an’ she’s gone at noon!
Sh-h ... d’ye _hear_ me?--Margot’s _dead_!
Sickened an’ drooped an’ died in an hour!
(Bring me th’ milk an’ th’ meat an’ bread.)
Drooped, she did, like a wilted flower.
Come an’ look at her, how she lies,
Little an’ lone, and like she’s scared....
(She lost her beads last Friday week,
Tore her Book, an’ she never cared.)...
Eh, my lass, but it’s winter, now--
You that ever was meant for June,
Your laughing mouth an’ your dancing feet--
An’ now you’re done, like an ended tune.
Where’s that woman? Ah, give it me quick,
Food at her head an’ her poor, still feet....
There’s plenty, fool! D’ye think the wench
Had _so_ many sins for himself to eat?
Take up your cloak an’ hand me mine....
Are we fetchin’ him? Eh, for sure!
An’ you’ll come with me for all your quakes,
Clear to his cave across the moor!
--Margot, dearie, don’t look so scared,
It’s no long while till your peace begins!
What if you tore your Book, poor lamb?
I’m bringin’ you one will eat your sins!
II
It’s a blood-red sun that’s sinkin’....
Ohooo, but the marshland’s drear!
Woman, for why will you be shrinkin’?
I’m tellin’ you there’s nought to fear.
What if the twilight’s gloomish
An’ th’ shadows creep an’ crawl?--
Woman, woman, here’ll be th’ cave!
Stand by me close till I call!
“Sin Eater! Devil Cheater!”
(Eh, it echoes hollowly!)
“Margot’s dead at Willow Farm!
Shroud your face and follow me!”
III
One o’ th’ clock ... two o’ th’ clock....
This night’s a week in span!
Still he crouches by her side....
Devil ... ghost ... or man?...
IV
Woman, never cock’s crow sounded sweet before!
Set the casement wide ajar, fasten back the door!
Eh, but I be cold an’ stiff, waitin’ for th’ dawn;
Fetch me flowers--jessamine--see, the food is gone....
Light enough to see her now.... Mary! How her face
Shines on us like altar fires, now she’s sure o’ grace!
Never mind your Book, my lamb, never mind your beads,
There’s th’ Gleam before you now, follow where it leads.
V
Tearful peace and gentle grief
Brood on Willow Farm:
Margot, sleeping in her flowers,
Smiles, secure from harm:
In a cave across the moor,
Dank and dark within,
Moans the trafficker in souls,
Freshly bowed with sin.
_Smart Set_ _Ruth Comfort Mitchell_
NIGHT-SENTRIES
Ever as sinks the day on sea or land,
Called or uncalled, you take your kindred posts.
At helm and lever, wheel and switch, you stand,
On the world’s wastes and melancholy coasts.
Strength to the patient hand!
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Now roars the wrenching train along the dark;
How many watchers guard the barren way
In signal-towers, at stammering keys, to mark
The word the whispering horizons say!
To all that see and hark--
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
On ruthless streets, on byways sad with sin--
Half-hated by the blinded ones you guard--
Guard well, lest crime unheeded enter in!
The dark is cruel and the vigil hard,
The hours of guilt begin.
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Now storms the pulsing hull adown the sea:
Gaze onward, anxious eyes, to mist or star!
Where foams the heaving highway blank and free?
Where wait the reef, the berg, the cape, the bar?
Whatever menace be,
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Now the surf-rumble rides the midnight wind,
And grave patrols are on ocean edge.
Now soars the rocket where the billows grind,
Discerned too late, on sunken shoal or ledge.
To all that seek and find,
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
On lonely headlands gleam the lamps that warn,
Star-steady, or ablink like dragon-eyes.
Govern your rays, or wake the giant horn
Within the fog that welds the sea and skies!
Far distant runs the morn:
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Now glow the lesser lamps in rooms of pain,
Where nurse and doctor watch the joyless breath,
Drawn in a sigh, and sighing lost again.
Who waits without the threshold, Life or Death?
Reckon you loss or gain?
To all, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
Honor to you that guard our welfare now!
To you that constant in the past have stood!
To all by whom the future shall avow
Unconquerable fortitude and good!
Upon the sleepless brow
Of each, alert and faithful in the night,
May there be Light!
_Harper’s_ _George Sterling_
THE SWORDLESS CHRIST
VICISTI, GALILEE
Aye, down the years, behold, he rides,
The lowly Christ, upon an ass;
But conquering? Ten shall heed the call,
A thousand idly watch him pass:
They watch him pass, or lightly hold
In mock lip-loyalty his name:
A thousand--were they his to lead!
But meek, without a sword, he came.
A myriad horsemen swept the field
With Attila, the whirlwind Hun:
A myriad cannon spake for him,
The silent, dread Napoleon.
For these had ready spoil to give.
Had reeking spoil for savage hands;
Slaves, and fair wives, and pillage rare:
The wealth of cities: teeming lands.
And if the world, once drunk with blood,
Sated, has turned from arms to peace,
Man hath not lost his ancient lusts;
The weapons change; war doth not cease.
The mother in the stifling den,
The brain-dulled child beside the loom,
The hordes that swarm and toil and starve,
We laugh, and tread them to their doom.
They shriek, and cry their prayers to Christ;
And lift wan faces, hands that bleed:
In vain they pray, for what is Christ?
A leader--without men to lead.
Ah, piteous Christ, afar he rides:
We see him, but the face is dim.
We, that would leap at crash of drums,
Are slow to rise and follow him.
_The Forum_ _Percy Adams Hutchison_
WHAT OF THE NIGHT?
What of the night
And the eventual silences?
Art thou not cold with the knowledge of decay
And the uncompromising reaches of the earth?
What of the night
When the tune falters and the blood chills?
When thou art one with the grass
And the underbrush of the world,
Wilt thou forget the names of flowers,
The rhythm of song and the lips, still balmy with the breasts of women?
When thou and the fog on the hilltop are as brother and sister,
Wilt thou forget utterly the ways of men,
The clash of swords and the sting of wine,
The dim horizons and the grace of girls?
When thou art alone eternally
What of the night?
Where will God be
When thou art swathed in silence;
When the wreckage of dreams has crushed thee
And the lust for springtimes dissolved thee?
Wilt thou have visions only of the dawn
And autumn sunsets?
Will the memory of women’s faces haunt thy grave?
Will the odor of blue flowers find thy dust?
When thou art choking on the calm indifference of youth
And the everlasting beauty of trees,
Wilt thou dream only of the June,
The love of women and the great democracy of men?
When thou hast fought and failed,
And thy brow has withered laurelless,
And thy name has been effaced by the insatiable winds,
And thou hast gone out at the Western gate
To join the laggards of the dead,
Wilt thou crave only the withheld success,
The transitory fame of twilight years?
Will thy soul cry out only for the song,
The red dawn and the glad triumph of love?
Wilt thou indeed forget the days of pain,
The ineffectual prayers,
The lies of time and the bitterness of defeat?
Or, remembering these things,
Wilt thou forget the hands of women and the rude love of men,
And be glad of thy dark quietude?
When thou art part of the impending gloom,
I deem that life will seem to thee
In no such wise,--
But rather thou wilt dream it as a whole;
Not as a song, nor yet a broken bell;
But all that thou hast been--the great tears,
The rain, the kisses and the flutes,
The old sorrows and the hills at dawn,
Much laughter and much grief and the stern fight.
And thou shalt know how all of life is gain--
The gold of youth, the gray defeat of age--
How in the soul’s inharmony there lies
The incoherent unity of things.
_The Forum_ _Willard Huntington Wright_
A THRENODY
IN MEMORY OF THE DESTRUCTION OF MESSINA BY EARTHQUAKE
Sicilian Muse! O thou who sittest dumb
Amid the sodden fields and ways forlorn,
Where once the herdsmen singing, watched their kine
Breast-deep in fragrance, odorous eve and morn;
Stranger to thee, yet led by love I come,
A suppliant sable-stoled, to mix with thine
My tears, and at thy shrine
Kindle a funeral torch for Sicily:
Give not the suppliant’s prayer the meed of blame!
Scorn not the stranger’s proffered oil and wine!
O thou from whom the heavenly madness came,
When Orpheus hymning struck his golden lute,
And stirred old memories in Persephone,
While all the lonely shades in hell stood mute
To watch the still-beloved Eurydice
Borne lightly upward on the silver surge
To Enna’s flowery verge;--
Spirit august! Child of Mnemosyne!
With reverence and true humility
I break before thy feet my careless flute,
And wait upon my lips thy touch of flame:
Begin, Sicilian Muse! Begin the dirge!
O race unmindful of the Destinies!
The dread Euminides
Or Mœræ old, sent from Earth’s inmost core
A tremor, warning blindly ye who, blind,
See not the sleepless doom that evermore
Has watched your tragic shore
Since lost sea-rovers shaded first their eyes
To spy the riches of your waving store,
And grated up your sands with doubtful keel.
The startled jungle growled above its young;
The Arctic foxes snuffed the scentless wind;
But ye who knew yourselves a fated race,
That gods have loved and gods to hate exposed,
Though black the death clouds over Ætna hung,
Forgot the anguish in Pompeii’s face,
Beneath her half-drawn winding sheet disclosed;
Forgot white Lisbon’s doom, nor called to mind--
In pleasant Zancle taking noonday ease--
How, from its ashes by the western seas
A stricken Phœnix rises, stone and steel.
Fresh as her Poro flowers at early dawn,
When over Hybla’s hills the yellow bees
From aromatic blossoms shake the dew;
Fair as the maiden ere by dark Fate drawn,
She saw the wide earth yawn
Before the thunderous horses, and the strong
Arm of Aïdes crushed her gathered flowers;
So fresh, so fair, amid her storied seas,
She who remains through changes æon-long
A greater Helen wooed with sword and song,
Of mightier victors bride and battle prize,
Lay lapped in peace, when swift from Hades driven,
Upward the death-king came; the earth was riven,
And through the darkness rang her children’s cries.
Now Scylla unto fierce Charybdis calls,
While on the water spreads a crimson stain;
Now Galatea sobs in Ocean’s halls,
And vengeful Polyphemus laughs again.
The Nereids now in oozy caverns hide,
Where sea-kings of the old Æolian shore
Watch sunken argosies forevermore,
And tell their tales of dread Poseidon’s hate;
While dimly from the far, ensanguined tide
Patient Odysseus furrowed once of yore,
A glint of daylight through the darkness falls
On swaying helmets, tumbled bronze and gold,
On broidered vestments stiff and Tyrian dyed.
There hide they; but the sea-kings keep their state,
Telling of ancient dooms and deaths of old,
Nor know they how beside the darkened strait
And up the slopes of olive, vine and grain,
The dryads wail a land left desolate.
Wail thou, great Muse, the dear Sicilian land!
Now greater grief is thine than when of old
Young Adon in the Cyprian’s arms lay cold,
And Daphnis’ years were told.
Take thou the lyre from Time’s enfeebled hand;
Hushed is the music of Empedocles,
Of splendid Pindar, pure Simonides,
Bion and Moschus and Theocritus,
And those who unto us
Nameless, yet live as human memories.
Hushed is the last of all that laurelled band,
Hushed, or on Charon’s strand
Urging in vain petition dolorous,
To pass where Pan, his boyish pipings done,
Stands wistful, while the nymphs, by fear made bold,
Cling with their long lithe arms about his knees.
Wail thou, great Muse! or loose from Acheron
Some worthy bearer of the singing bough
Whose madness whirls me now
On melting wings too near the southern sun.
Yet why for aught on earth should grief be loud,
Since all that is, is born to pass away?
Hero and maiden to the urn are vowed,
And beauty saves not when the debt falls due;
Apollo with the darker gods has died,
And Gæa at the last shall be as they.
O Helen of the soul! O golden isle!
By beauty doomed, by beauty sanctified,
Thou too canst not abide,
But like all else shalt last a little while--
A little longer than the falling spray--
Then pass as planet dust or gaseous cloud,
To build new cosmos, gnawed by new decay.
Earth’s senseless atoms ever clasp and whirl,
Unclasp again to form in mazes new;
And ever on the white cliff stands some girl
With dead eyes gazing on the sailless blue.
Earth’s roses die, but still the rose lives on,
The song survives the swift Leucadian leap;--
A dream of immortality is ours.
Where golden Daphnis in the morning shone,
Fresh sprung from Helicon,
New shepherds singing lead their careless sheep
Above the graves of Athens, Carthage, Rome,
Vandals and Moslems, and strange Northern Powers
That filled their destined hours,
And fed in turn the rich Sicilian loam,
Building, like coral insects from the deep,
Enchanted islands that till earth is gone,
Swept back to chaos in the atom swirl,
Shall be the seeker’s light, the spirit’s home.
Though Ætna crumble and the dark seas rise
Sowing the uplands with their sterile brine,
Still shall the soul descry with wistful eyes
Sicilian headlands bright with flower and fruit;
Still shall she hear, though all earth’s lips be mute,
Sicilian music in the morning skies.
Yea, deep within the heart of man it lies,
This visioned island bright with old romance,
A race inheritance
Of rest and joy and faith in things divine,
That shall endure awhile through change and chance,
And have the meaning of a childhood shrine,
Remembered when the faith of childhood dies.
Now fails the song, and down the lonely ways
The last low echoes die upon the breeze.
I lay my lyre upon the moveless knees
Of her who by the hollow roadway stays,
In anguish waiting for her children slain
That shall not come again
With springtime, leading the new lambs to graze.
They come no more; but while o’er hill and plain
The twilight darkens, and the evening rose
Aloft on Ætna glows,
Silent she sits amid the sodden leas,
With eyes that level on the ocean haze
Their unobserving stare, as seaward gaze
The eyes of stolid caryatides.
_Scribner’s_ _Louis V. Ledoux_
NOVEMBER
Hark you such sound as quivers? Kings will hear,
As kings have heard, and tremble on their thrones;
The old will feel the weight of mossy stones;
The young alone will laugh and scoff at fear.
It is the tread of armies marching near,
From scarlet lands to lands forever pale;
It is a bugle dying down the gale;
It is the sudden gushing of a tear.
And it is hands that grope at ghostly doors;
And romp of spirit children on the pave;
It is the tender sighing of the brave
Who fell, ah! long ago, in futile wars;
It is such sound as death; and, after all,
’Tis but the forest letting dead leaves fall.
_The Bellman_ _Mahlon Leonard Fisher_
SALUTATION
Did you choose the journey, friend?
No, nor I;
But to make it cheerfully,
Let us try.
When the day is dark, I pray,
Sing a song to cheer the way,
For tomorrow we will be
One day nearer to the sea.
Did you choose the journey, friend?
No, nor I;
But we know the end will come
By and by.
All today we bear the load
Up the weary winding road,
But tomorrow we may be
At the Inn in company.
_The Independent_ _Ruth Sterry_
HERE LIES PIERROT
The moon’s ashine; by many a lane
Walk wistful lovers to and fro;
It must be like old days again;
How they do love! _Here lies Pierrot._
She loved me once, did Columbine.
It sets my dusty heart aglow
Merely to lie and dream how fine
Her semblance was,--_Here lies Pierrot!_
Her perfumed presence, silks and lace,
Did madden men and wrought them woe;
For me alone her witching grace.
Where is she now? _Here lies Pierrot._
We two walked once beneath the moon--
Yellow it hung, and large and low--
And listened to the tender tune
Of nightingales,--_Here lies Pierrot!_
Our foolish vows of passion shook
The very stars, they trembled so.
How it comes back, her soft, shy look,
Now I am dead! _Here lies Pierrot!_
These other men and maids, who stroll
Through moonlit poplar trees arow,
Does each play the enchanted rôle
We phantoms played? _Here lies Pierrot!_
O joy, that I remember yet
Sweet follies of the long ago!
Dear heaven, I would not quite forget!
The moon’s ashine; _Here lies Pierrot!_
_Scribner’s_ _Richard Burton_
LIST OF “DISTINCTIVE POEMS,” THEIR AUTHORS, AND THE MAGAZINES IN WHICH
THEY APPEARED
_Century_--
A Light Bearer. Marion Couthouy Smith.
Unmasked. Madison Cawein.
Robert Browning. Margaret Widdemer.
Will’s Counsellor. Charles Wharton Stork.
Song of the Open Land. Richard Burton.
Along the Road. Robert Browning Hamilton.
A Prayer. Louis Untermeyer.
Charms. William Rose Benét.
Deep Water Song. John Reed.
Not Yet. Katharine Lee Bates.
The Double Crowning. Amelia Josephine Burr.
Vermont. Sarah N. Cleghorn.
To a Scarlet Tanager. Grace Hazard Conkling.
To the Experimenters. Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
My Conscience. James Whitcomb Riley.
The Little People. Amelia Josephine Burr.
For a Blank Page. Austin Dobson.
A Message from Italy. Margaret Widdemer.
The Gentle Reader. Arthur Davison Ficke.
Submarine Mountains. Cale Young Rice.
The Last Faun. Helen Minturn Seymour.
Ritual. William Rose Benét.
Emergency. William Rose Benét.
The Mother. Timothy Cole.
Perugia. Amelia Josephine Burr.
To Elsa, with a volume of the “Arabian Nights.” Grace Hazard Conkling.
The Carpenter’s Son. Sara Teasdale.
Sarvachraddên. Leonard Bacon.
The Shoes of Happiness. Edwin Markham.
Twilight Mystery. Madison Cawein.
_Harper’s_--
Presage. Richard Le Gallienne.
The Festa. George Edward Woodberry.
Panthea. Richard Le Gallienne.
The Upland. Henry A. Beers.
In April. Margaret Lee Ashley.
Waiting. Charles Hanson Towne.
May is Building Her House. Richard Le Gallienne.
The Sea Hounds. Dora Sigerson Shorter.
The Marble House. Ellen M. H. Gates.
Loss. Jessie B. Rittenhouse.
An Adieu. Florence Earle Coates.
The Deep Places. Amelia Josephine Burr.
The Seer. Alan Sullivan.
This is Her Garden. Mildred Howells.
Folk-Song. Louis Untermeyer.
September Rain. Charles Hanson Towne.
Heart’s Tide. Ethel M. Hewitt.
The Wanderer. John Masefield.
Wind. Fannie Stearns Davis.
The Mother. Fannie Stearns Davis.
By the Curb. James Stephens.
God’s Will. Mildred Howells.
On a Bright Winter Day. W. D. Howells.
A Secret. Florence Earle Coates.
Ghosts. Fannie Stearns Davis.
Out of It All. Edith M. Thomas.
Words. Ernest Rhys.
The Telegram. Thomas Hardy.
A Winter Reverie. James Stephens.
_Scribner’s_
Return. Curtis Hidden Page.
Old Portraits Revisited. Sarah Cleghorn.
The Old Remain. Madison Cawein.
To Lie in the Lew. Margaret Vandegrift.
The Secret. John Hall Wheelock.
The Exile. Thomas Nelson Page.
At Ease on Lethe’s Wharf. Helen Coale Crew.
Discords. C. A. Price.
In the Hospital. Arthur Guiterman.
The Jail. Sarah Cleghorn.
Song for a Child. Stark Young.
Here Lies Pierrot. Richard Burton.
Himself He Cannot Save. M. A. De Wolfe Howe.
The River. Sara Teasdale.
Love of Life. Tertius van Dyke.
Daybreak in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Henry van Dyke.
A Threnody. Louis V. Ledoux.
La Preciosa. Thomas Walsh.
The Song of Love. E. Sutton.
Sonnet. R. Henniker Heaton.
No Night There. William Hervey Woods.
In a Monastery Garden. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall.
In the Old Pasture. Harriet Prescott Spofford.
The Ghost. Hermann Hagedorn.
Gran’ Boule. Henry van Dyke.
A Likeness. Willa Sibert Cather.
Sappho. Sara Teasdale.
The Dead Forerunner. C. W.
The Grief. Theodosia Garrison.
The Enchantment. Laurence C. Hodgson.
_The Forum_--
What of the Night? Willard Huntington Wright.
The Italian Dead March. Shaemas OSheel.
The Girl Who Went to Ailey. Arthur Stringer.
Copper Mountain. Edwin D. Schoonmaker.
The Republic. Madison Cawein.
The Factory. Harry Kemp.
Earth’s Deities. Bliss Carman.
St. John and the Faun. George Edward Woodberry.
The Ring Fighters. Francis Hill.
Journey. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The Swordless Christ. Percy Adams Hutchison.
Shipwreck. Hermann Hagedorn.
The City That Will Not Repent. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
The Old Maid. Sara Teasdale.
Evening on Brooklyn Bridge. Allan Updegraff.
Mother-Heart. Anna Spencer Twitchell.
Departure. John Hall Wheelock.
A Prayer for Beauty. Witter Bynner.
School. Percy Mackaye.
Off Viareggio. Chester Allyn Reed.
In the Maternity Ward. Florence Earle Coates.
The Kallyope Yell. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
Birth. Frances Gregg.
For Those Dear Dead. Elaine Goodale Eastman.
Crossroads. Louis V. Ledoux.
Thanksgiving for Our Task. Shaemas OSheel.
Point Bonita. Witter Bynner.
_Lippincott’s_--
The Common Road. Jane Belfield.
Quatrain. Charles Wharton Stork.
The True Prophet. Richard Kirk.
Of Melodies Unheard. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
The Neighbor. Marguerite O. B. Wilkinson.
A New Friend, An Old Friend. Madison Cawein.
I Heard a Voice. Florence Earle Coates.
The Inn. Mary Eleanor Roberts.
Of an Artist. Charles Wharton Stork.
Rich Man, Poor Man--. Francis Hill.
The Cry of Man-Heart. J. B. E.
In Remembrance. Florence Earle Coates.
Troubadour Song. Frederick H. Martens.
Discontent. Frederick H. Martens.
Immutabilis. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Half the World Between Us. Mary Coles Carrington.
The Jew in America. Felix N. Gerson.
“Magnas Nugas.” Louise Ayres Garnett.
The Maid of the Ghetto. Herman Scheffauer.
The Coming of the King. Susie M. Best.
The Conqueror. Eleanor Duncan Wood.
_The Bellman_--
Lie Awake Songs. Amelia Josephine Burr.
Where Dives Lived. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
As in the Beginning. M. E. Buhler.
In Memoriam. Herbert J. Hall.
Breaking the Road. Lewis Worthington Smith.
The Fairy Tree. Ethel Barstow Howard.
Folly. Joyce Kilmer.
Richard Wagner. Agnes Lee.
Fra Angelico. Richard Burton.
In Cool, Green Haunts. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Pompeii at Dusk. Arthur Stringer.
The Migrant. Theresa V. Beard.
In the Cornfield. Joseph Warren Beach.
St. Alexis. Joyce Kilmer.
The Return. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Mediæval. Florence Earle Coates.
Children of the Night. Amelia Josephine Burr.
The Guardian Deeps. Ruth Shepard Phelps.
The Blind Gypsy. Kenneth Rand.
The Shadow. Madison Cawein.
The Speckled Trout. Madison Cawein.
Petruchio’s Wife. Amelia Josephine Burr.
November. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Christmas Downtown. Richard Burton.
After an Ice-Storm. Amelia Josephine Burr.
_Smart Set_--
The Voice of Nemesis. John G. Neihardt.
The Adventurer. Gordon Johnstone.
Heartbroken. Harry Kemp.
A Song. Lisette Woodworth Reese.
The Outcast. Arthur Stringer.
The Rack. George Sterling.
A Ballade of Too Much Beauty. Richard Le Gallienne.
Lyrics of Spring. Bliss Carman.
In the Cool of the Evening. Witter Bynner.
Morning-Glories. John G. Neihardt.
Two Songs. John Hall Wheelock.
Syrinx. Bliss Carman.
The Laboratory. Ludwig Lewisohn.
Ballade of Youth to Swinburne. Orrick Johns.
Later. Willard Huntington Wright.
Songs of Summer. Bliss Carman.
Au Marigny. Royal Craig.
Memory. Naomi Lange.
Woman the Mystical. John Hall Wheelock.
To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself. Joyce Kilmer.
Ghosts. Marguerite Mooers Marshall.
The Sin Eater. Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
Enough. Sara Teasdale.
Song. John Hall Wheelock.
The Harvest Hand. Harry Kemp.
A Greek Lover of Queen Maeve. Eleanor Rogers Cox.
Humming Birds. Arthur Stringer.
Human. Richard Burton.
The Great Carousal. Louis Untermeyer.
A Woman of the Streets. Charles Hanson Towne.
A Ballad to a Friend. Richard Le Gallienne.
Challenge. Louis Untermeyer.
A Mountain Gateway. Bliss Carman.
Violets. D. H. Lawrence.
Rain in the Night. John Vance Cheney.
Lest I Learn. Witter Bynner.
After Parting. Sara Teasdale.
Kisses in the Train. D. H. Lawrence.
The Dotage of Duns Scotus. Donn Byrne.
Desiderium. Richard Le Gallienne.
The Rainbow Chaser. Kenneth Rand.
The Mowers. D. H. Lawrence.
In the Market Place. George Sterling.
Winter. Sara Teasdale.
The Shadow. Witter Bynner.
Then and Now. Richard Burton.
Song Against Women. Willard Huntington Wright.
Fifty Years Spent. Maxwell Struthers Burt.
Of Moira Up the Glen. Edward J. O’Brien.
THE “BEST POEMS” CHOSEN FROM THE “DISTINCTIVE” LIST
A Likeness. Willa Sibert Cather.
Ghosts. Marguerite Mooers Marshall.
November. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Perugia. Amelia Josephine Burr.
God’s Will. Mildred Howells.
The Swordless Christ. Percy Adams Hutchison.
The Field of Glory. Edwin Arlington Robinson.
Love of Life. Tertius van Dyke.
Thanksgiving for Our Task. Shaemas OSheel.
Trees. Joyce Kilmer.
In the Hospital. Arthur Guiterman.
Night-Sentries. George Sterling.
Of Moira Up the Glen. Edward J. O’Brien.
On the Birth of a Child. Louis Untermeyer.
Rich Man, Poor Man--. Francis Hill.
In a Forgotten Burying-Ground. Ruth Guthrie Harding.
A Mountain Gateway. Bliss Carman.
Wind. Fannie Stearns Davis.
What of the Night? Willard Huntington Wright.
Heart’s Tide. Ethel M. Hewitt.
May is Building Her House. Richard Le Gallienne.
An Adieu. Florence Earle Coates.
A Threnody. Louis V. Ledoux.
Over the Wintry Threshold. Bliss Carman.
Waiting. Charles Hanson Towne.
The Ghost. Hermann Hagedorn.
School. Percy MacKaye.
Lest I Learn. Witter Bynner.
Human. Richard Burton.
Desiderium. Richard Le Gallienne.
Hymn to Demeter. Louis V. Ledoux.
Departure. John Hall Wheelock.
The Sin Eater. Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
The Kallyope Yell. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
Train-Mates. Witter Bynner.
The Marvelous Munchausen. William Rose Benét.
The Old Maid. Sara Teasdale.
Later. Willard Huntington Wright.
Sappho. Sara Teasdale.
To a Child Falling Asleep. Robert Alden Sanborn.
St. John and the Faun. George Edward Woodberry.
In April. Margaret Lee Ashley.
In the Cool of the Evening. Witter Bynner.
Shipwreck. Hermann Hagedorn.
Vermont. Sarah N. Cleghorn.
The Little People. Amelia Josephine Burr.
Winter. Sara Teasdale.
The Dotage of Duns Scotus. Donn Byrne.
Memory. Naomi Lange.
A Ballad of Too Much Beauty. Richard Le Gallienne.
Morning Glories. John G. Neihardt.
The Adventurer. Gordon Johnstone.
A Secret Florence. Earle Coates.
Out of It All. Edith M. Thomas.
Ghosts. Fannie Stearns Davis.
The Mother. Fannie Stearns Davis.
My Conscience. James Whitcomb Riley.
The Festa. George Edward Woodberry.
Of an Artist. Charles Wharton Stork.
Of Melodies Unheard. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
I Heard a Voice. Florence Earle Coates.
Along the Road. Robert Browning Hamilton.
The Double Crowning. Amelia Josephine Burr.
Deep Water Song. John Reed.
To Elsa, with a volume of the “Arabian Nights.” Grace Hazard Conkling.
Song for a Child. Stark Young.
The River. Sara Teasdale.
La Preciosa. Thomas Walsh.
The Song of Love. E. Sutton.
The Dead Forerunner. C. W.
Here Lies Pierrot. Richard Burton.
The Girl Who Went to Ailey. Arthur Stringer.
Mother-Heart. Anna Spencer Twitchell.
God’s World. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Soft Is Spring over Grand Pré. Bliss Carman.
A Woman of the Streets. Charles Hanson Towne.
The Republic. Madison Cawein.
Woman the Mystical. John Hall Wheelock.
Daybreak in the Grand Cañon of Arizona. Henry van Dyke.
The Shoes of Happiness. Edwin Markham.
The Wanderer. John Masefield.
The Harvest Hand. Harry Kemp.
The Factory. Harry Kemp.
Gran’ Boule, a Seaman’s Tale of the Sea. Henry van Dyke.
The Vision of Gettysburg. Robert Underwood Johnson.
The Anvil of Souls. William Rose Benét.
TITLES AND AUTHORS OF ALL POEMS APPEARING IN THE SEVEN MAGAZINES FOR
1918
CENTURY
_January_--
A Light-Bearer. Marion Couthouy Smith.
Unmasked. Madison Cawein.
Sleep. Katharine French.
Robert Browning. Margaret Widdemer.
Semele. Grace Denio Litchfield.
_February_--
Will’s Counsellor. Charles Wharton Stork.
Song of the Open Land. Richard Burton.
Along the Road. Robert Browning Hamilton.
A Prayer. Louis Untermeyer.
_March_--
Charms. William Rose Benét.
Deep Water Song. John Reed.
Where Am I While I Sleep? Grace Denio Litchfield.
Not Yet. Katharine Lee Bates.
The Double Crowning. Amelia J. Burr.
_April_--
The Rear-Guard. Leonard Bacon.
The Temple of Aphrodite. Alfred Noyes.
Winter-Sleep. Edith M. Thomas.
Vermont. Sarah N. Cleghorn.
The Lingering Snow. Harriet Prescott Spofford.
The Voice of the Dove. George Sterling.
_May_--
A Last Message. Grace Denio Litchfield.
To a Scarlet Tanager. Grace Hazard Conkling.
To the Experimenters. Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
The Young Heart in Age. Edith M. Thomas.
The Wine of Night. Louis Untermeyer.
_June_--
Off Capri. Sara Teasdale.
At the Closed Gate of Justice. James D. Corrothers.
To Alfred Noyes. Edwin Markham.
Finis. William H. Hayne.
Invulnerable. William Rose Benét.
_July_--
My Conscience. James Whitcomb Riley.
House-without-Roof. Edith M. Thomas.
Sierra Madre. Henry van Dyke.
Prayers for the Living. Mary W. Plummer.
The Little People. Amelia Josephine Burr.
Beauty in Eden. Alfred Noyes.
The High Tide at Gettysburg. Will H. Thompson.
For a Blank Page. Austin Dobson.
Maurice Maeterlinck. Stephen Phillips.
_August_--
A Double Star. Leroy Titus Weeks.
A Message from Italy. Margaret Widdemer.
The Marvelous Munchausen. William Rose Benét.
Wingèd Victory. Victor Whitlock.
To a Royal Mummy. Anna Glen Stoddard.
_September_--
The Gentle Reader. Arthur Davison Ficke.
Submarine Mountains. Cale Young Rice.
The Last Faun. Helen Minturn Seymour.
Ritual. William Rose Benét.
_October_--
The Beggar. James W. Foley.
Emergency. William Rose Benét.
The Mother. Timothy Cole.
_November_--
Perugia. Amelia Josephine Burr.
To Elsa. Grace Hazard Conkling.
Ex Oriente. R. H. Titherington.
_December_--
The Carpenter’s Son. Sara Teasdale.
Sarvachraddên. Leonard Bacon.
Silence and Night. Ednah Proctor Clarke.
The Shoes of Happiness. Edwin Markham.
Twilight Mystery. Madison Cawein.
HARPER’S
_January_--
Presage. Richard Le Gallienne.
At Evening. B. MacArthur.
Transients. Theodosia Garrison.
_February_--
Moonshine. George Harris, Jr.
The Festa. G. E. Woodberry.
Night-Sentries. George Sterling.
Ruth. Samuel McCoy.
_March_--
Panthea. Richard Le Gallienne.
The Upland. Henry A. Beers.
Transit. Anna McClure Sholl.
Sunrise in New York. Alan Sullivan.
In the Night-Watches. James B. Kenyon.
Pine-trees. Jennie Coker Lea.
_April_--
“Sweet, When Life Is Done.” Anne Bunner.
Immensity. Harriet Prescott Spofford.
A Folk-Song. Margaret Widdemer.
In April. Margaret Lee Ashley.
Waiting. Charles Hanson Towne.
_May_--
The Dreamers. Theodosia Garrison.
The Common Lot. Lisette Woodworth Reese.
May is Building Her House. Richard Le Gallienne.
_June_--
The Sea Hounds. Dora Sigerson Shorter.
The Marble House. Ellen M. H. Gates.
The Old House. Ethel Augusta Cook.
Loss. Jessie B. Rittenhouse.
_July_--
In a Rose Garden. Amory Hare Cook.
An Adieu. Florence Earle Coates.
The Deep Places. Amelia Josephine Burr.
With the Daisies. James Stephens.
The Seer. Alan Sullivan.
_August_--
This Is Her Garden. Mildred Howells.
Day and Night. James Stephens.
When. Ellen M. H. Gates.
Folk-Song. Louis Untermeyer.
Summer in the City. Charles Hanson Towne.
_September_--
The Voice. Albert Bigelow Paine.
September Rain. Charles Hanson Towne.
Heart’s Tide. Ethel M. Hewitt.
The Wanderer. John Masefield.
Wind. Fannie Stearns Davis.
Chanson à Danser. Louise Morgan Sill.
_October_--
The First Year. Ellen M. H. Gates.
The Mother. Fannie Stearns Davis.
By the Curb. James Stephens.
God’s Will. Mildred Howells.
_November_--
To the Cuckoo. Henrietta Anne Huxley.
On a Bright Winter Day. W. D. Howells.
Flower of Life. Charlotte Wilson.
A Secret. Florence Earle Coates.
Ghosts. Fannie Stearns Davis.
All Souls. Edith M. Thomas.
_December_--
Out of It All. Edith M. Thomas.
The Voice. Louise Morgan Sill.
Words. Ernest Rhys.
Understanding. Anna Alice Chapin.
The Telegram. Thomas Hardy.
A Winter Reverie. James Stephens.
SCRIBNER’S
_January_--
Awakening. Julia C. R. Dorr.
Forget Me Not. Oliver Herford.
On Her Saint’s Day. E. Sutton.
Return. Curtis Hidden Page.
_February_--
The Hour When Love Repays. Ann Devoore.
_March_--
The Rocket. Louise Saunders Perkins.
Old Portraits Revisited. Sarah N. Cleghorn.
Winter Flowers. Ruth Draper.
The Old Remain. Madison Cawein.
_April_--
“To Lie in the Lew.” Margaret Vandegrift
The Shadowy City Looms. Lloyd Mifflin.
Petronius Arbiter. James B. Kenyon.
In the Heart of the Swamp. William Hamilton Hayne.
_May_--
Song. Julia C. R. Dorr.
The Secret. John Hall Wheelock.
The Exile. Thomas Nelson Page.
_June_--
“At Ease on Lethe Wharf.” Helen Coale Crewe.
Discords. C. A. Price.
The Catch. John Kendrick Bangs.
_July_--
In the Hospital. Arthur Guiterman.
The Jail. Sarah N. Cleghorn.
Song for a Child. Stark Young.
_August_--
Here Lies Pierrot. Richard Burton.
“Himself He Cannot Save.” M. A. DeWolfe Howe.
The River. Sara Teasdale.
Love of Life. Tertius van Dyke.
The Hill-Born. Maxwell Struthers Burt.
_September_--
Daybreak in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Henry van Dyke.
A Threnody. Louis V. Ledoux.
“The Rest Is Silence.” William H. Hayne.
La Preciosa. Thomas Walsh.
The Song of Love. E. Sutton.
Sonnet R. Henniker Heaton.
_October_--
No Night There. William Hervey Woods.
The Choice. Julia C. R. Dorr.
_November_--
In a Monastery Garden. Marjorie L. C. Pickthall.
In the Old Pasture. Harriet Prescott Spofford.
The Ghost. Hermann Hagedorn.
_December_--
“Gran’ Boule.” Henry van Dyke.
The Minster Statue on Christmas Eve. Benjamin R. C. Low.
A Likeness. Willa Sibert Cather.
Sappho. Sara Teasdale.
The Way to Inde. L. Brooke.
The Dead Forerunner. C. W.
The Grief. Theodosia Garrison.
Enchantment. Laurence C. Hodgson.
THE FORUM
_January_--
What of the Night? Willard Huntington Wright.
“Feuerzauber.” Louis Untermeyer.
Two Poems. Herbert Kaufman.
The Italian Dead March. Shaemas OSheel.
_February_--
The Girl Who Went to Ailey. Arthur Stringer.
Copper Mountain. Edwin Davies Schoonmaker.
Sea-Child. Hildegarde Hawthorne.
Love’s Constancy. Charles L. Buchanan.
_March_--
The Republic. Madison Cawein.
Where is David, The Next King of Israel? Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
The Factory. Harry Kemp.
_April_--
Earth Deities. Bliss Carman.
Mary. Victor Starbuck.
St. John and the Faun. G. E. Woodberry.
_May_--
Tiger. Witter Bynner.
The Common Road. Martin Schütze.
The Ring Fighters. Francis Hill.
Journey. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
_June_--
The Swordless Christ. Percy Adams Hutchison.
The Rivals. Scudder Middleton.
Shipwreck. Hermann Hagedorn.
_July_--
God’s World. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The City That Will Not Repent. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
The Old Maid. Sara Teasdale.
_August_--
Moods at May-Dawn. John Helston.
Poems. Allan Updegraff.
Song Primitive. Francis Hill.
Mother-Heart. Anna Spencer Twitchell.
_September_--
The Voice of the Lord. E. D. Schoonmaker.
Reverie. Zoë Akins.
Departure. John Hall Wheelock.
A Prayer for Beauty. Witter Bynner.
A City Morning. Edith Wyatt.
Out from Lynn. Lewis Worthington Smith.
_October_--
School. Percy MacKaye.
Prithee, Strive Not. Harry Kemp.
Off Viareggio. Chester Allyn Reed.
In the Maternity Ward. Florence Earle Coates.
The Poet of the Slums. Frank E. Hill.
_November_--
The Kallyope Yell. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay.
Birth. Frances Gregg.
For Those Dear Dead. Elaine Goodale Eastman.
Crossroads. Louis V. Ledoux.
_December_--
Thanksgiving for Our Task. Shaemas OSheel.
Pont Royal. Joseph Warren Beach.
Whispers. Lyman Bryson.
Point Bonita. Witter Bynner.
To An Old Friend. Arthur Davison Ficke.
The Dead Soul. Beatrice Redpath.
LIPPINCOTT’S
_February_--
The Common Road. Jane Belfield.
Quatrain. Charles Wharton Stork.
The Blind. Faith Baldwin.
Dreams. Arthur Wallace Peach.
Life. Harold Susman.
_March_--
“If a Lad Love a Lass.” Arthur Wallace Peach.
The True Prophet. Richard Kirk.
Of Melodies Unheard. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Rapture. George Platt Waller, Jr.
The Neighbor. Marguerite O. B. Wilkinson.
Lines for a Sun-Dial. Harvey M. Watts.
_April_--
The Smaller Voice. Richard Kirk.
A New Friend, An Old Friend. Madison Cawein.
The Oak That Fell This Morning. Jane Belfield.
Bestowal. J. B. E.
I Heard a Voice. Florence Earle Coates.
I Wonder Is There Laughter? Ethel M. Colson.
The Old House. Marie V. Caruthers.
_May_--
The Seasons of the Heart. Edward Wilbur Mason.
A Birthday. William Stanley Braithwaite.
The Inn. Mary Eleanor Roberts.
Of An Artist. Charles Wharton Stork.
_June_--
June. Charles Hanson Towne.
Rich Man, Poor Man--. Francis Hill.
The Cry of Man-Heart. J. B. E.
The Cherished. Arthur Wallace Peach.
Solitude. J. J. O’Connell.
_July_--
Gettysburg. H. Percival Allen.
In Remembrance. Florence Earle Coates.
Symbols. Arthur Wallace Peach.
Sympathy. Ella Sollenberger.
If You Knew--. Ethel Hallett Porter.
Troubadour Song. Frederick H. Martens.
At Dawn. Grace E. Mott.
_August_--
Discontent. Frederick H. Martens.
Immutabilis. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
In Exile. James B. Kenyon.
An Idyl. Carolyn Wells.
Half the World Between Us. Mary Coles Carrington.
The Jew in America. Felix N. Gerson.
The Cosmic Thrall. Jane Belfield.
Doubt. Margaret Louise Loudon.
_September_--
The Poet to His Love. Norma Bright Carson.
Mother-of-Pearl. Mary Eleanor Roberts.
Supreme Moments. Charles Hanson Towne.
Ripples. Thomas Grant Springer.
Return. Nancy Byrd Turner.
_October_--
Benedicite. W. J. Lampton.
The Hour. Sara Teasdale.
Heritage. Ella Morrow Sollenberger.
Your Way and Mine. Richard Kirk.
Quatrain. Mary Eleanor Roberts.
_November_--
Color Notes. Charles Wharton Stork.
Unattainable. Reginald Wright Kauffman.
To Two Bereaved. Richard Kirk.
A Violin. Clinton Scollard.
“Magnas Nugas.” Louise Ayres Garnett.
The Maid of the Ghetto. Herman Scheffauer.
_December_--
The Witch-Moon. Charlotte Wilson.
Starlight. Ethel Hallett Porter.
The Coming of the King. Susie M. Best.
The Conqueror. Eleanor Duncan Wood.
Christmas Eve. Caroline Giltinan.
THE BELLMAN
Cantiga. Thomas Walsh.
Forbidden Wisdom. Ethel Talbot Scheffauer.
I That Have Lived. C. T. Ryder.
Lie Awake Songs. A. J. Burr.
Tarpaulin Cove. Henry Adams Bellows.
Where Dives Lived. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Whither Away. Lewis Worthington Smith.
At the Winter Solstice. M. E. Buhler.
Ballade of Lent. Arthur Adams.
As in the Beginning. M. E. Buhler.
On the Drive. Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
Two Houses. Agnes Lee.
In Memoriam. Herbert J. Hall.
The Night Herder. Charles Badger Clark, Jr.
Breaking the Road. Lewis Worthington Smith.
The Fairy Tree. Ethel Barstow Howard.
Folly. Joyce Kilmer.
Richard Wagner. Agnes Lee.
To Sappho Dead. Florence Earle Coates.
Tintagel. Hamilton Fish Armstrong.
Fra Angelico. Richard Burton.
Songs We May Not Sing. Barr Moses.
Ludwig of Bavaria. Amelia Josephine Burr.
In Cool, Green Haunts. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Pompeii at Dusk. Arthur Stringer.
Wind at Night. Ethel Talbot Scheffauer.
The Migrant. Theresa V. Beard.
In the Cornfield. Joseph W. Beach.
Lesbia. Henry Adams Bellows.
Lie Awake Song. Amelia Josephine Burr.
St. Alexis. Joyce Kilmer.
En Rapport. Alice McCray Walther.
Two Partings. Reginald Wright Kauffman.
The Return. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Medieval. Florence Earle Coates.
Vigil. Richard Burton.
Children of the Night. Amelia J. Burr.
The Guardian Deeps. Ruth Shepard Phelps.
Empire. William Rose Benét.
Phantom Shoal. J. Donald Adams.
The Blind Gypsy. Kenneth Rand.
The Shadow. Madison Cawein.
The Speckled Trout. Madison Cawein.
Stories. Lewis Worthington Smith.
Petruchio’s Wife. Amelia J. Burr.
November. Mahlon Leonard Fisher.
Christmas Downtown. Richard Burton.
After an Ice-Storm. Amelia J. Burr.
THE SMART SET
_January_--
The Voice of Nemesis. John G. Neihardt.
This White December Morning. Gordon Johnstone.
Christmas Eve. Florence Wilkinson.
The Other Side. Guy Templeton.
When Pierrot Passes. Theodosia Garrison.
A Ballade of Hope. Brian Bellasis.
The Land of Dreams-Come-True. Frank Stephens.
Why? E. Graves Mabie.
Theory and Practice. Walt Mason.
I Commute. Mrs. J. L. O’Connell.
_February_--
To My Valentine. Glenn Ward Dresbach.
The Adventurer. Gordon Johnstone.
Rain and Sunshine. Charles F. Lummis.
Mine Utmost Hour. Charles Hanson Towne.
The Harmony of the Spheres. Blanche Elisabeth Wade.
Two of a Kind. Eunice Ward.
The Isle of Truth. John Kendrick Bangs.
Maiden Lane. Louis Untermeyer.
Vagabondage. Katherine Williams Sinclair.
Young Maidens Early Dead. Gertrude Huntington McGiffert.
_March_--
Her Home-Coming. James B. Kenyon.
The Old Boulevardier. Reginald Wright Kauffman.
Heartbreak. Harry Kemp.
A Song. Lisette Woodworth Reese.
The Mad Sea King. Harrold Skinner.
Guerdons. Arthur Wallace Peach.
Gray Hours. Mrs. John Schwartz.
The Outcast. Arthur Stringer.
Gipsy Blood. Martha Haskell Clark.
Les Corbeaux. Philéas Lebesgue.
_April_--
The Rack. George Sterling.
Tell Me. Edgar Saltus.
April Song. Willard Huntington Wright.
A Ballad of Too Much Beauty. Richard Le Gallienne.
Regrets. H. E. Zimmerman.
At Dawn You Go. Eleanor Walsh.
Lyrics of Spring. Bliss Carman.
Faith. Archibald Sullivan.
In the Cool of the Evening. Witter Bynner.
Morning Glories. John G. Neihardt
Two Songs. John Hall Wheelock.
Into Arcady. Marsh K. Powers.
Spring in Japan. Louis Untermeyer.
_May_--
Syrinx. Bliss Carman.
Challenge. John Hall Wheelock.
A Spring Afternoon. Louis Untermeyer.
Union Square. Witter Bynner.
The Laboratory. Ludwig Lewisohn.
Ballade of Youth to Swinburne. Orrick Johns.
“My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Irvin S. Cobb.
Broadway. Sara Teasdale.
Black and White. K. B. Boynton.
A Cabaret Dancer. Zoë Akins.
Later. Willard Huntington Wright.
Etre Poète. Georges Boutelleau.
_June_--
Songs of Summer. Bliss Carman.
Nocturne. Edward Heyman Pfeiffer.
Yesterdays. Reginald Wright Kauffman.
A Ballad of Saint Vitus. George Sylvester Viereck.
Au Marigny. Royal Craig.
Memory. Naomi Lange.
Woman the Mystical. John Hall Wheelock.
The Chill of Death. Paul Scott Mowrer.
Carnival Night. Philip Markhall.
Drought. Lisette Woodworth Reese.
To a Young Poet Who Killed Himself. Joyce Kilmer.
“Lilith.” Louis Untermeyer.
Prayer. Sara Teasdale.
Ghosts. Marguerite Mooers Marshall.
_July_--
The Sin Eater. Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
Servant Girl and Grocer’s Boy. Joyce Kilmer.
Enough. Sara Teasdale.
Thanks. Louis Untermeyer.
Song. John Hall Wheelock.
The Harvest Hand. Harry Kemp.
Lyric. Gerald Dinwiddie.
Daphne. Bliss Carman.
The Monks at Choir Time. Florence Wilkinson.
The Poor Little Lady. Allan Updegraff.
The Summons. Reginald Wright Kauffman.
A Greek Lover of Queen Maeve. Eleanor Rogers Cox.
A Desert Song. Clinton Scollard.
Bachelors. René Laidlaw.
The Happy Man. Jane Almard.
Humming Birds. Arthur Stringer.
Romance. Arthur Ketchum.
_August_--
The Master Mariner. George Sterling.
The Song of the Wheat. C. L. Marsh.
Human. Richard Burton.
Home-Coming. Norreys Jephson O’Conor.
Breath. Witter Bynner.
The Bartender. Joyce Kilmer.
The Great Carousal. Louis Untermeyer.
The Wine Press. Theodore Lynch FitzSimons.
Without Inconstancy. Harry Kemp.
Sea Longing. Sara Teasdale.
The Crickets. Henry Eastman Lower.
Serenade. J. W. Wood.
L’Ame des Choses. Florian-Parmentier.
Wail of a Waitress. Ethel M. Kelley.
_September_--
Poems. Ezra Pound.
Heart of the World. Maxwell Struthers Burt.
The Three Hermits. William Butler Yeats.
A Woman of the Streets. Charles Hanson Towne.
A Ballad to a Friend. Richard Le Gallienne.
Challenge. Louis Untermeyer.
A Mountain Gateway. Bliss Carman.
Fellow Travelers. Achmed Abdullah.
The Close. C. Hilton-Turvey.
The Stage Entrance. Frederick Lovelace Macon.
The Shadow of Aspiration. Robert Haven Schauffler.
A Day. Arthur Wallace Peach.
Violets. D. H. Lawrence.
An Old House. Samuel McCoy.
Naples. Charmy.
Rain i’ the Night. John Vance Cheney.
Lest I Learn. Witter Bynner.
_October_--
After Parting. Sara Teasdale.
October. Bliss Carman.
Kisses in the Train. D. H. Lawrence.
To Certain Poets. Joyce Kilmer.
“Phasellus Ille.” Ezra Pound.
The Dotage of Duns Scotus. Donn Byrne.
Desiderium. Richard Le Gallienne.
Love. Skipwith Cannell.
The Rainbow Chaser. Kenneth Rand.
_November_--
The Mowers. D. H. Lawrence.
At Dayfall in the Streets of Samarcand. Clinton Scollard.
In the Market Place. George Sterling.
The Enemy. Louisa Fletcher Tarkington.
Autumnal. Madison Cawein.
A Dead One. Witter Bynner.
Portrait d’Une Femme. Ezra Pound.
Poppies. W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez.
The Victor. Louis Untermeyer.
Winter. Sara Teasdale.
Fairy Gold. Richard Le Gallienne.
Dedication. Willard Huntington Wright.
The Ballet. K. B. Boynton.
_December_--
Dance of the Sunbeams. Bliss Carman.
The Shadow. Witter Bynner.
Zenia. Ezra Pound.
Then and Now. Richard Burton.
Song against Women. Willard Huntington Wright.
Song. K. B. Boynton.
Fifty Years Spent. Maxwell Struthers Burt.
Of Moira Up the Glen. Edward J. O’Brien.
The Last Monster. George Sterling.
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
PAGE
Aye, down the years, behold, he rides.
_Percy Adams Hutchison_ 54
Because on the branch that is tapping my pane.
_Arthur Guiterman_ 7
Did you choose the journey, friend?
_Ruth Sterry_ 62
Distant as a dream’s flight.
_John G. Neihardt_ 17
Eternal in the brooding of the old Norwegian spruces.
_Ruth Guthrie Harding_ 4
Ever as sinks the day on sea or land.
_George Sterling_ 52
Face in the tomb, that lies so still.
_Richard Le Gallienne_ 22
For the sake of a weathered gray city set high on a hill.
_Amelia J. Burr_ 25
God meant me to be hungry.
_Mildred Howells_ 8
Hark ye! Hush ye! Margot’s dead.
_Ruth Comfort Mitchell_ 50
Hark you such sound as quivers? Kings will hear.
_Mahlon Leonard Fisher_ 61
How an image of paint and wood.
_Agnes Lee_ 12
I know a vale where I would go one day.
_Bliss Carman_ 24
I saw her in a Broadway car.
_Sara Teasdale_ 19
I think that I shall never see.
_Joyce Kilmer_ 7
I thought I had forgotten you.
_Ethel M. Hewitt_ 21
I thought my heart would break.
_Charles Hanson Towne_ 22
I went to the place where my youth took birth.
_Willard Huntington Wright_ 18
If I am slow forgetting.
_Margaret Lee Ashley_ 3
In every line a supple beauty.
_Willa Sibert Cather_ 46
It’s little that I’d care for the glories of Ireland.
_Edward J. O’Brien_ 16
Lest I learn, with clearer sight.
_Witter Bynner_ 18
Lo--to the battle-ground of Life.
_Louis Untermeyer_ 9
Love you not the tall trees spreading wide their branches.
_Tertius van Dyke_ 8
May is building her house. With apple blooms.
_Richard Le Gallienne_ 3
Midnight, and in the darkness not a sound.
_Sara Teasdale_ 13
O blest Imagination.
_George Edward Woodberry_ 28
Oh, joy that burns in Denver tavern.
_Francis Hill_ 49
Old Hezekiah leaned hard on his hoe.
_Percy MacKaye_ 30
One whom I loved and never can forget.
_Hermann Hagedorn_ 23
Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height.
_Witter Bynner_ 38
Over the dim edge of sleep I lean.
_Robert Alden Sanborn_ 9
Over the wintry threshold.
_Bliss Carman_ 2
Proud men.
_Nicholas Vachel Lindsay_ 39
Sicilian Muse! O thou who sittest dumb.
_Louis V. Ledoux_ 57
Sorrow, quit me for a while.
_Florence Earle Coates_ 20
The moon’s ashine; by many a lane.
_Richard Burton_ 62
The sickle is dulled of the reaping and the threshing-floor
is bare.
_Shaemas OSheel_ 43
The snug little room with its brazier fire aglow.
_William Rose Benét_ 34
The twilight is starred.
_John Hall Wheelock_ 20
The Wind bows down the poplar trees.
_Fannie Stearns Davis_ 5
They call you cold New England.
_Marguerite Mooers Marshall_ 27
War shook the land where Levi dwelt.
_Edwin Arlington Robinson_ 48
Weave the dance, and raise again the sacred chorus.
_Louis V. Ledoux_ 1
Weighed down by grief, o’erborne by deep despair.
_Richard Burton_ 23
What of the night?
_Willard Huntington Wright_ 55
With rod and line I took my way.
_Madison Cawein_ 5
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling variations were were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Poems are shown here as they appeared in the original book. Some of
them appear elsewhere with different words or punctuation.
When it was not clear whether or not new stanzas began on new pages,
Transcriber did not add stanza breaks.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1913" ***
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