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THE
LYRIC YEAR
ONE HUNDRED POEMS
EDITED BY
FERDINAND EARLE
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1912
Copyright 1912 by
Mitchell Kennerley
Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company
East Twenty-fourth Street
New York
THE LYRIC YEAR PRIZES
THE following selections were made by the
three judges after the contents of the
volume had been chosen by the editor:
Mr. WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE :
First Award — To a Thrush, by Thomas
Augustine Daly.
Second Award — An Ode for the Centenary
of the Birth of Robert Browning, by
George Sterling.
Third Award — A Ritual for a Funeral, by
Ridgely Torrence.
Mr. EDWARD J. WHEELER:
First Award — Second Avenue, by Orrick
Johns.
Second Award — An Ode for the Centenary
of the Birth of Robert Browning, by
George Sterling.
Third Award — To a Thrush, by Thomas
Augustine Daly.
iii
281421
iv The Lyric Year Prizes
THE EDITOR:
First Award — Renascence, by Edna St. Vin
cent Millay.
Second Award — Second Avenue, by Orrick
Johns.
Third Award — A Ritual for a Funeral, by
Ridgely Torrence.
It will be seen that five poems were men
tioned by the judges and in arriving at a final
decision each first choice was given three
points, the second choice two points and the
third one point, with the following result:
Second Avenue, by Orrick Johns 5
To a Thrush, by Thomas Augus
tine Daly 4
An Ode for the Centenary of the
Birth of Robert Browning, by
George Sterling 4
Renascence, by Edna St. Vincent
Millay 3
A Ritual for a Funeral, by Ridgely
Torrence 2
The terms of the competition called for a
first prize of five hundred dollars and two
second prizes of two hundred and fifty each,
and they have accordingly been awarded as
follows :
First Prize Mr. Orrick Johns
) Mr. Thomas Augustine Daly
Second Prizes ^ Mr George Sterling
November first, 1912
NOTE BY THE EDITOR
TF the usual volume of verse by a single
•^ author may be termed a one man's show, if
poems appearing in the magazines may be com
pared to paintings handled by dealers, if time-
honored anthologies may be called poetical
museums, The Lyric Year aspires to the posi
tion of an Annual Exhibition or Salon of
American poetry, for it presents a selection
from one year's work of a hundred American
poets.
The famous first series of Francis T. Pal-
grave's The Golden Treasury, which includes
most of "the best original Lyrical pieces and
songs in our language" from Thomas Wyatt,
born in 1503, to Samuel Rogers, who died in
1855, is also composed of about one hundred
poets. Of Professor Palgrave's three hundred
and thirty-nine poems, covering over three cen
turies, only five pieces are credited to women
— whereas their work constitutes more than
forty per cent, of this collection,
vii
viii Note by the Editor
Curiously enough, current verse is more mas
culine; a tendency due, however, to contact
with more virile influences. We are witness
ing the decline of Latin and Grecian influence,
and the ascendency of the art of Norseman,
Slav and Anglo-Saxon — a resurrection of
Northern 4)eities.
Our twentieth century poetry is democratic,
scientific, humane. Its independence reveals
the liberating touch of Walt Whitman, sweet
with robust optimism. It reflects the exhilara
ting trend that is sweeping over Continental
music, painting and poetry.
The Editor has endeavored to give prefer
ence to poems fired with the Time spirit and
marked by some special distinction, rather than
mere technical performances — poems represen
tative, as much as possible, of the work done
to-day in America, rather than an index to his
personal taste.
Ten thousand poems by nearly two thousand
writers of verse have been personally examined
by the Editor for this competition.
F. E.
THE LYRIC YEAR
LETHARGY
AROUND THE SUN
THE YOUNG GOD WISH
PATERNITY
MIRAGE
TO MY VAGRANT LOVE
THE STEEL AGE
DEDICATION
SONNET
THE CAMBERWELL GARDEN
TO ROBERT BROWNING
THE PIPER
THE MYSTERIARCHS
THOUGHTS IN A CATHEDRAL
FROM A CITY STREET
THE VOICE OF APRIL
MORNING
THE DYING NUN
WILLIAM JAMES
NEW YORK
GOLDEN-THROATED PASTORAL
HORN
HEARTHSTONE AND HIGHWAY
TO A THRUSH
YE WHO ARE TO SING
COMRADES
ZOE AKINS
KATHARINE LEE BATES
DOROTHY LANDERS BEALL
WILLIAM ROSE BENET
PAUL RELLAND BIRGE
ELOISE BRITON
FLORENCE BROOKS
PAULINE FLORENCE BROWER
CHARLES L. BUCHANAN
RICHARD BURTON
WITTER BYNNER
DONN BYRNE
BLISS CARMAN
RHYS CARPENTER
ARMOND CARROLL
MADISON CAWEIN
ANNE CLEVELAND CHENEY
JOHN VANCE CHENEY
HAROLD CHILDS
FLORENCE EARLE COATES
GRACE HAZARD CONKLING
HELEN COALE CREW
THOMAS AUGUSTINE DALY
OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN
FANNIE STEARNS DAVIS
PAGE
I
3
6
ii
13
14
18
21
22
23
25
28
30
37
40
42
45
47
49
So
S3
62
67
72
76
The Lyric Year
PAGE
SONG
MARION DELCOMYN
78
JETSAM
HERMAN MONTAGU DONNER
79
AWAKENING
JULIA C. R. DORR
85
ZAMBOANGA
SUSAN DYER
86
THE DEAD
GEORGE DYRE ELDRIDGE
90
THE SEA-GULL
JOHN ERSKINE
92
THE FAUN
GENEVIEVE FARNELL-BOND
94
KISA-G6TAMI
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
98
THE GLIMPSE
LOUISE AYRES GARNETT
104
TO A POET
MARGARET ROOT GARVIN
105
SO AS YOU TOUCH ME I DREAM
FRANCES GREGG
1 06
THE MERCIFUL ENSIGN
HERMANN HAGEDORN
1 08
MONARCH AND MENDICANT
JULIAN HAWTHORNE
in
THE MIDNIGHT FERRY
MAX J. HERZBERG
120
THE END
C. HILTON-TURVEY
I23
THEIPOET IN THE[MARKET-PLACE
MARGARET BELLE HOUSTON
124
I DREAMED THAT DREAM WAS
QUENCHED
GOTTFRIED HULT
128
LITTLE BIG-HORN
PERCY ADAMS HUTCHINSON
I3I
SECOND AVENUE
ORRICK JOHNS
132
THE WHITE CITY
THOMAS S. JONES, JR.
138
I SING THE BATTLE
HARRY KEMP
139
MARTIN
JOYCE KILMER
141
THE TIRED
FLORENCE KIPER
143
MIRIAM
HERMAN E. KITTREDGE
144
THE UNKNOWN BROTHERS
LOUIS V. LEDOUX
155
TO ROBERT BROWNING
AGNES LEE
158
SHADOW
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
1 60
SATURNALIA
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
162
0. HENRY
NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY
166
THE TEMPEST
G. CONSTANT LOUNSBERY
169
HILL-TOP
ARVIA MACKAYE
171
THE SIBYL'
PERCY MACKAYE
172
MEDITATION OVER A SKULL
CHARLES H. MACKINTOSH
176
The Lyric Year
CATHERINE MARKHAM 178
EDWIN MARKHAM 1 79
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILL AY l8o
ANGELA MORGAN 189
BERTHA NEWBERRY 192
EDWARD j. O'BRIEN 193
THEODORE EUGENE OERTEL 194
JAMES OPPENHEIM 198
SHAEMAS O SHEEL
JOSEPHINE P. PEABODY
MURIEL RICE
MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER
JESSIE E. SAMPTER
ANNE HATHAWAY ALONE AT
AVON
THE TESTING
RENASCENCE
TO-DAY
THE BELOVED
THE WHISPER OF EARTH
WAVE PASSIONS
PITTSBURGH
HE WHOM A DREAM HATH POS
SESSED
WOMAN-SONG
THE CRISIS
FEAR NOT, O SOUL
PAT
PSALM
TO BROWNING THE MUSIC-MASTER ROBERT H. SCHAUFFLER
AMERICA HERMAN SCHEFFAUER
THE MOB
LET THERE BE DREAMS TO-DAY
A PRAYER
THE QUESTION
AN ODE FOR THE CENTENARY
OF THE BIRTH OF ROBERT
BROWNING
THE CALL
THE CITIES
I SHALL NOT CARE
SARPEDON
A RITUAL FOR A FUNERAL
AN EASTER CANTICLE
THE WIFE
CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES
A DAY'S END
200
2O2
214
215
216
218
2 2O
222
EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER 228
CLINTON SCOLLARD 230
WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD 233
MARION CUMMINGS STANLEY 234
GEORGE STERLING 235
ALAN SULLIVAN 242
MILDRED McNEAL SWEENEY 244
SARA TEASDALE 250
EDITH M. THOMAS 251
RIDGELY TORRENCE 256
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE 263
ANNA SPENCER TWITCHELL 265
LOUIS UNTERMEYER 266
ALLAN UPDEGKAFF 267
'The Lyric Year
THE FALLEN PHARAOH
THE HYMN OF ARMAGEDDON
ADONIS
THE BLACK DICE
CONFESSION
THE FORGOTTEN SOUL
WHITMAN AND EMERSON
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
ALIEN SUN-FLOWERS
THE GRAY MAN
SELMA
TO A CITY SWALLOW
PAGE
LEONARD VAN NOPPEN 272
GEORGE SYLVESTER VIERECK 273
BLANCHE S. WAGSTAFF 277
HENRY CHRISTEEN WARNACK 278
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK 280
MARGARET WIDDEMER 28l-
MARGUERITE O. B. WILKINSON 283
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 285
REA WOODMAN 2QI
WILLIAM HERVEY WOODS 293
WILLARD H. WRIGHT 2Q5
EDITH WYATT 2Q7
THE LYRIC YEAR
LETHARGY
ZOE AKINS
TVTY mood is like a desert — bare and blank,
^ •*• Where all ways are encompassed by the
South,
And desolation and eternal drouth
Breed on the sand but sage and cacti rank.
I care not where I go ; I scarcely feel
The menacing fatigue about my feet, —
The skies that scourge, the distances that
cheat,
The constant wounds that neither hurt nor heal.
I know nor hour from hour nor day from day;
I follow paths dead winds left in the sand, —
Content to travel nowhere, and to stand,
Deciding nothing, at some changing way . . .
i
The Lyric Year
I know that night has come . . . and I would lie
Forever in the sleep that all men shun ;
But a strange wind that drives me on and on
Is stronger than my willingness to die.
And some distress I question not, nor fight,
Some thirst Ithought was past is urging me —
Too weary for resistance — toward a sea
Edged by a zone of cities gay and bright.
Shall I return to ways that once I trod?
Shall I be glad to live? Or shall I grieve
For this lost land that listlessly I leave . . .
Faintly aware of many stars . . . and God?
The Lyric Year
AROUND THE SUN
KATHARINE LEE BATES
weazen planet Mercury,
Whose song is done, —
Rash heart that drew too near
His dazzling lord the Sun! —
Forgets that life was dear,
So shrivelled now and sere
The goblin planet Mercury.
But Venus, thou mysterious,
Enveiled one,
Fairest of lights that fleet
Around the radiant Sun,
Do not thy pulses beat
To music blithe and sweet,
O Venus, veiled, mysterious?
And Earth, our shadow-haunted Earth,
Hast thou, too, won
The graces of a star
From the glory of the Sun?
The Lyric Year
Do poets dream afar
That here all lustres are,
Upon our blind, bewildered Earth?
We dream that mighty forms on Mars,
With wisdom spun
From subtler brain than man's,
Are hoarding snow and sun,
Wringing a few more spans
Of life, fierce artisans,
From their deep-grooved, worn planet Mars,
But thou, colossal Jupiter,
World just begun,
Wild globe of golden steam,
Chief nursling of the Sun,
Transcendest human dream,
That faints before the gleam
Of thy vast splendor, Jupiter.
And for what rare delight,
Or woes to shun,
Of races increate,
New lovers of the Sun,
Was Saturn ringed with great
Rivers illuminate,
Ethereal jewel of delight?
The Lyric Year
Far from his fellows, Uranus
Doth lonely run
In his appointed ways
Around the sovereign Sun, —
Wide journeys that amaze
Our weak and toiling gaze,
Searching the path of Uranus.
But on the awful verge
Of voids that stun
The spirit, Neptune keeps
The frontier of the Sun.
Over the deeps on deeps
He glows, a torch that sweeps
The circle of that shuddering verge.
On each bright planet waits
Oblivion,
Who casts beneath her feet
Ashes of star and sun;
But when all ruby heat
Is frost, a Heart shall beat,
Where God within the darkness waits.
The Lyric Year
THE YOUNG GOD WISH
DOROTHY LANDERS BEALL
TN the land of New Sight I found him, the
A young God Wish !
Roses had twined them their wantoning arms
round his knees,
Eager proud lilies had drooped their pale
throats as to please
The wild infinite heart of him; stern, on a sky
of leaves,
He towered in granite silence, as one who
grieves
For immutable starry lore.
There I hailed him, the young God Wish!
Never a sigh — not a quiver of sorrow or joy.
But he gazed, with his prophet's head held
low on his hand,
Far ahead, far beyond to the luminous ex
quisite band
The Lyric Year
Of silver horizon. His wide blue eyes were
like lakes
In a rock-gray face — clear pools where the
morning awakes,
Flame of the element-light, pure fire that
cleanses and makes.
Still he sat — will he ever know sorrow or joy?
Then, the pitiful grip of his hands in the stony
earth
Told me a God knows pain as a God knows
good;
And I crouched to him, feeling his greatness.
Ah, Soul of the wood,
God of wild Want, I am thine. Thou art my
God. Reveal
All the anguish and silence and woe that a God
can feel!
Ah, ah, the pitiful grip of his hands in the
stony earth !
Dawn on the lakes of his eyes, and dawn in my
soul.
He stirs like a glad grave wind ! He sees me !
He knows !
Slowly his mountain-body relinquishes throes
8 The Lyric Year
Of question and doubt and desire. He moves.
Will he smile?
Will he speak? I am tiny and f reward and
filthy and vile!
He smiles. He is speaking. Ah, dawn in his
eyes, in my soul!
I am the young God Wish. All my life is
desire.
I am the wailing spirit of infinite want.
I want all the beautiful knowledge — the power,
the sea,
All the winds and the earth and the little un-
hesitant flowers.
I want pain and truth and life — ah, most bit
terly, life.
And deepest of all I want love and love and
love!
I am the young God Wish. By my very desire,
My naked and potent Want, I can bring life
to me.
I can sit all day like a stern sea-cliff, still and
strong,
And want all imagined divine, all human, all
love
The Lyric Year
Into me, here with me. I am the soul of de
sire.
See, in my eyes, how the whole life-motion of
things
Unrolls and speeds and develops — O I am the
world !
By my want I have lived all the lives of all
time,
I have loved all the loves, I have made all the
bridges and forts;
I have built, I have mated and died in a thou
sand lives.
I am insatiable, incarnate Want. I am God!
Sit by my heart and hear the great meaning
of life.
Live in desire ! Lo, I am the young God Wish !
So, in the bracken-fastnesses, Want and I
Sit watching together, watching and wanting
forever.
I, crouched humbly between his omnipotent
knees
Under the universal paean of singing trees;
He, brooding over me — dawn in his yearnful
eyes,
Above us twain the slow, glad gold of sunrise,
io The Lyric Year
And a joy like new birth and a want, ever
rising, that lies
In our deepest souls — ah, we live in that want.
For, who dies
But the wantless, the passionless? Hail, ah
Thou Infinite Wish!
Lo, in the bracken fastnesses, Want and I !
The Lyric Year n
PATERNITY
WILLIAM ROSE BENET
only women dream the future's child
Or children, though such deep desire
they bear
For all the rich rewards of motherhood,
They smile in travail; though each girl un-
grown
Who sings her dolls uncertain lullabies
Sees infant faces, feels soft arms that cling,
Hears deep within the nursery of her heart
A medley of small mirth adorable,
And, as she grows, mothers all things she loves,
Lacking the little head against her breast
And yearning for it, when she cannot know
Wherefore she yearns. Yet sometimes to a
man,
Roughest and sternest though he be of men,
Shocked into strength and pondering, from his
young
Exuberance and easy joy, there comes
A longing that convulses all his soul;
12 The Lyric Year
And, standing in the wind against some dawn's
Prospect of racing cloud and lightening sky,
Or hard-beset in battle with the world
Deep in the city's stridence, or at pause
Before some new-discovered truth of life,
Unwittingly his hands go out to touch,
Hold off, and scan the youth of him that was,
Thrill to that brighter youth it is decreed
Each father shall inherit from his son.
And, if his hands grope blindly, so his heart,
To hear a young voice at his shoulder speak,
Know young, elastic strides beside his own,
Resolve the problems of an unsullied heart
Flaming to his for counsel. I, scarce-grown
Into my manhood, hovering, hovering still
Over my boyhood (as the gravest, oldest
Of men doth yet, or is no man of men),
Felt my heart tense, and but a noon ago
Strove in quick torture — for no woman's arms,
No woman's eyes, but for a questioning voice
Beside me, and a sturdy little step
In rhythm with mine. A phantom face looked
up,
Trusting, round-eyed, alive with curious joy;
And all my being yearned : My son ! My son !
The Lyric Year 13
MIRAGE
PAUL RELLAND BIRGE
T O, Kings and Poets toward the sinking
•^— ' sun
Travel one Road, whose end the Shadows
make
Wherein a stately slumber each shall take
The while whole deserts through the hour-glass
run.
Lovers with songs and Princes crowned with
gold,
Wise men and Beggars toward that Twilight
move;
Queens in their pride and Damsels wan with
love
Pass like rapt shadows toward that Vale of
Cold.
So all we piteous children of the light,
Singing or sighing, toward the ashen gray
That darkens with the Sunset's fading ray
Depart, like cloud-drift on the wastes of Night.
14 The Lyric Year
TO MY VAGRANT LOVE
ELOISE BRITON
T^\EAR Vagrant love whose heart is scarred
•""^ By the deep wounds of passion's war;
Whose every kiss, a blood-red rose,
From seed of dead desire grows
And kisses gone before;
Dear love, whose arms sure magic know
To kindle all the form they hold;
Whose hands are sweet against my breast
Because of others they have pressed,
And love-lore learned of old;
Dear, I have left you ere the flame
Should cease to leap from lip to lip;
Ere my white limbs should lose their power,
Or into that last pallid hour
Love's waning moon should slip.
Yes, I have left you and I know
That you will miss me for a night;
That you will toss an hour or two,
The Lyric Year
And moan a little as you do,
Grown hungry for delight.
And, love, you shall not deem it ill
That I am glad, full glad of this :
So little shall remain of me
Of all the sweet infinity
That lingers in a kiss.
For I, who in soft, languorous dreams
Had half imagined such as you,
Not knowing, and yet hungering
For some more vivid, throbbing thing
Than any that I knew,
Since you have touched me I am grown
Myself all flame, and full of sighs.
The strange new longings you have waked,
And thirsts you roused and have not slaked
Are heavy in my eyes.
My feet are shod with restlessness,
My days pass like a summer drouth;
Strange, sudden heats are in my blood,
And my lips ache where you have wooed,
An-hungered for your mouth.
1 6 The Lyric Year
And yet, and yet, — dear vagrant love.
How can I wish the past undone?
Your kisses and your sweet, sweet words,
As soft as little throbbing birds,
Wish them denied the sun,
Thrust back into the womb of time
And made as things that shall not be?
Nay, though my love be big with death
Yet have I drawn the keenest breath
That life could hold for me.
For you have taught me, love of mine,
What breath can be, and how the tide
Sweeps up and surges in my blood,
Drowns with sweet stranglings at the flood,
And ebbs then satisfied.
It has been very good, my hour,
And perfect as a rounded ring.
As we began, we ended so,
Nor trod the downward paths that go
To love's diminishing.
So at the last, dear vagrant love,
When longer, stronger loves are dead,
And you return, a restless wraith,
The Lyric Year 17
Down vistas of forgotten faith,
Dim with pale words long said,
Amid the burnt-out fires of love
There you shall find my hour at last,
Unclouded by the dust of them,
But vivid as a naked gem,
Still burning, in the past.
1 8 The Lyric Year
THE STEEL AGE
FLORENCE BROOKS
'TMrlE world is dry and cold and mechanized,
•*• The hearts of men are dead that are not
sad,
All the quick souls are beaten back to darkness,
Song has no joy, love is no longer glad.
The rivers run no more triumphant clear,
Harassed by factory, slaughter-house and
sewer,
Smoke settles down on the once shining trees,
And grime leaves the bright grass no longer
pure.
The sunset flares in rage, the morning breaks
In calculating beats upon a gong
Calling to waken those who once had souls
But now crawl forth a callous, desperate
throng.
The Lyric Year 19
Nor funeral nor birth is sacred here
Where love is called by an ignoble name,
Nor tragedy significant, nor law
Righteous, and war has grown a greedy game.
O all the music of the years is dumb,
Lost is the tender grief that love begets;
Dead is delight in dreams of delicate hue,
Composed of all sweet woes and soft regrets.
And men are faint in all the ruck and din;
Those whirring leathers, sullen fires, fierce
steels,
Plague the once lively brain, the eager heart,
Become a throbbing sore amid mad wheels.
O symbol of the solemn wheel of fate
Whose dark majestic orbit spins in space, /
How sordid have thine images become
Wanting the soul of beauty and love's grace!
Go out, all men, and wander in the waste,
Go trail your anguish over swamp and sand,
Lay down your heads at dusk and cry aloud
How live the stagnant souls in our great land!
2O The Lyric Year
O weary poet, prisoned in foul walls,
Let some new order spring from thine old woe,
Take thyself out and wander to the void
In loneliness wherever thy feet go !
Perchance thou mayest find some hidden place
Alone upon the border of a grove,
Thy gaze turned toward the line of the far sea
To dream anew the vision of life and love.
The Lyric Year 21
DEDICATION
PAULINE FLORENCE BROWER
T OOK in my life, not in mine eyes, to see
*~* How deep thou dwellest in me.
Trust not my lips, nor any mood of mine
To prove that I am thine.
By what I am and what I shall achieve
I bid thee to believe:
A service rendered silently to thee
My every act must be.
The secret power that shapes me as I grow
My constancy must show.
My smallest task shall be the test to tell
If I have heeded well.
All sorrow I would touch with tenderness
Because of thy caress:
And every grief of which I bear the scar
Shall brighten to a star.
So I will weave thy being into mine;
Thy hidden light shall shine
Through me, till I shall be
The Testament of thee.
22 The Lyric Year
SONNET
CHARLES L. BUCHANAN
Tj^OR all that I am wrong I have no plea.
A I hold no claim of sober righteousness,
Although not wilfully do my ways digress
From envied ways of health and sanity;
Nor am I anything I wish to be,
But all that I have gathered through distress.
My heart is as a broken melody,
My senses are grown numb and passionless.
No other shares the secret that I know:
My wasted worth of song hath passed unblown.
From my sick, shattered senses I alone
Am conscious of a music's vast outflow.
Must I be speechless of my truth, and go
As doth some winged thing that hath not
flown 1
The Lyric Year 23
THE CAMBERWELL GARDEN
RICHARD BURTON
(Browning was born May 7, at Camberwell,
a suburb of London)
MAY hath her own blithe beauty, nor doth
need
The other loveliness of human deed
And human fellowship ; yet doubly fair
She seems to brood o'er Camberwell, since
there
Once walked the lad who made of blooms and
birds
His cronies, knew their winsome ways and
words.
Far did he wander; many a mile away
And many a year, he saw the face of May
Rosy, recurrent, in Italian nooks
Uplifting summer arms and siren looks.
This month of melody and warmth and shine
Is welcome to the heart of man as wine !
24 The Lyric Year
Ah, but at Camberwell each sound and sight
And scent — sure ministers to his delight —
Were interwoven with dewy memories
Stronger and sweeter than from overseas;
And wheresoe'er his feet in faring turned,
Whiles, for that garden-place he must have
yearned.
He who comes back to greet an old, dear
friend,
And finds him gone, knows it is not the end,
But lovingly awaits the gladder day
When all friends gather in from far-away.
So maiden May comes back and waits for him
In grass and flower and every greening limb.
******
Long gone the garden, and the singer too
Sleeps otherwhere ; but still the sky is blue,
Spring scents are rife, old magic still beguiles,
And May in Camberwell recalls, and smiles.
The Lyric Year 25
TO ROBERT BROWNING
WITTER BYNNER
tell the truth about you, Robert Brown-
ing,
I bring no wreath of laurel to your crowning
Save this: that no one who has loved — can
doubt you,
Robert Browning.
An amateur of melody and hue,
Of marble outline and of Italy,
Of heresies and individuals
And every eccentricity of truth;
And yet an Englishman, a healthy brute
Loving old England, thrushes and the dawn;
A scholar loving polite gentleman;
A man of fashion loving the universe;
A connoisseur loving dead artists' lives,
Their names, their labors and their enemies;
A poet loving all the ways of words;
A human being giving love as love,
Denying death and proving happiness; —
26 The Lyric Year
When you love women, because youth loves
women,
And when you love a woman, because heart
Understands heart through more than youth
or age
Or time, and when you marvellously become
The man whom Carlyle and whom Landor
love —
You are life's poet by a poet's life. . . .
But when you set yourself about with words,
Abracadabra, bric-a-brac and the dust
Of piled confusion, toying with obsolete
Prescriptions, and with owlish lenses hide
Your eyes until you marvellously become
A ponderous, pondering apothecary —
You dispense remedies, but not to me !
Let me take down your bulky book of records,
And find those certain pages where you tell
The beauty of a shoulder or reveal
The pure and simple permanence of love!
It is enough to learn, by a lazy glance
Through other passages, how you conserve
The true susceptibility and pathos
Of bishops, mediums and murderers,
Manage the rhythm of fantastic souls,
Mark in the fault something to profit by:
Challenge the far perfection resident
The Lyric Year 27
In imperfection's opportunity
And — more magnanimous than most of us —
Finding yourself in all humanity,
Forgive humanity for what you find.
You see, I know your text and care for it !
And though I will not hunt for it through all
Your dark old corners, I shall wait outside
And watch you through the windows and ad
mire
The amazing industry with which you piece
Your manuscripts together to maintain
And to corroborate with many proofs
Your cheerful confidence in any man.
— Who would has heard me rank you, Robert
Browning
I bring no wreath of laurel to your crowning
Save this: that for your confidence — I thank
you,
Robert Browning.
28 The Lyric Year
THE PIPER
DONN BYRNE
I" WILL take my pipes and go now, for the
bees upon the sill
Are singing of the summer that is coming
from the stars.
I will take my pipes and go now, for the little
mountain rill
Is pleading with the bagpipes in tender,
crooning bars.
I will go o'er hills and valleys, and through
fields of ripening rye,
And the linnet and the throstle and the bit
tern in the sedge
Will hush their throats and listen as the piper
passes by,
On the great long road of silver that ends
at the world's edge.
I will take my pipes and go now, for the sand-
flower on the dunes
Is a-weary of the sobbing of the big white
sea,
The Lyric Year 29
And is asking for the piper, with his basket-
full of tunes,
To play the merry lilting that sets all hearts
free.
I will take my pipes and go now, and God go
with you all,
And keep all sorrow from you, and the dark
heart's load.
I will take my pipes and go now, for I hear
the summer call,
And you'll hear the pipes a-singing as I pass
along the road.
30 The Lyric Year
THE MYSTERIARCHS
BLISS CARMAN
*11/THO called us forth out of darkness and
gave us the gift of life,
Who set our hands to the toiling, our feet in
the field of strife?
Out of their beauty and longing, out of their
raptures and tears,
In patience and pride they bore us, to war with
the warring years.
Darkly they mused, predestined to knowledge
of viewless things,
Saving the seed of wisdom, guarding the living
springs.
Little they reckoned privation, hunger or hard
ship or cold,
If only the life might prosper, and the joy that
grows not old.
The Lyric Year 31
With sorceries subtler than music, with knowl
edge older than speech,
Gentle as wind in the wheat-field, strong as the
tide on the beach.
Who looked on the world before them, and
summoned and chose our sires,
Subduing the wayward impulse to the will of
their deep desires?
They schooled us to service and honor, modest
and clean and fair, —
The code of their pride of living, taught with
the sanction of prayer.
Who were our sharers of sorrow, who were
our makers of joy,
Lighting the lamp of high manhood in the
heart of the lonely boy?
Who strengthened our souls with courage and
sent us forth to achieve,
Foreseeing and not refusing, the portion of
them that grieve?
32 The Lyric Year
Haloed with love and with wonder, in sheltered
ways they trod,
Seers of sublime divination, keeping the truce
with God
Sovereigns of ultimate issues under the greater
laws,
Theirs was the mystic mission of the eternal
cause.
Confident, tender, courageous, leaving the law
for the higher,
Lifting the feet of the nations out of the dust
and the mire;
Luring civilization on to the fair and new,
Given God's bidding to follow, having God's
business to do;
Mothers, unmilitant, lovely, moulding our
manhood then,
Walked in their woman's glory, swaying the
might of men.
Who called us from youth and dreaming, and
set ambition alight,
And made us fit for the contest, — men, by their
tender rite?
The Lyric Year 33
Who chose us above our knowledge, charming
our strength and skill,
To be the pride of their power, to be the means
of their will?
If we be the builders of beauty, if we be the
masters of art,
Whose were the gleaming ideals, whose the
uplift of the heart?
Versed in the soul's traditions, skilled in hu
manity's lore,
They scoff at the waste of progress and weep
for the sins of war.
Truly they measure the lightness of trappings
and ease and fame,
For the teeming desire of their yearning is
ever and ever the same :
To crown their lovers with gladness, to clothe
their sons with delight,
And see the men of their making lords in the
best man's right.
34 The Lyric Year
We are shaken with dark misgiving, as king
doms rise and fall;
But the women who went to found them are
never counted at all.
Lavish of joy and labor, broken only by wrong,
These are the guardians of being, spirited, sen
tient and strong.
Theirs is the starry vision, theirs the inspiriting
hope,
Since Night the brooding enchantress promised
that day should ope.
Lo, we have built and invented, reasoned, dis
covered, and planned,
To rear us a palace of splendor, and make us
a heaven by hand, —
And behold they turn from our triumphs, as
it was in the first of days,
For a little glory of ardor and a little justice
of praise.
These are the rulers of kingdoms beyond the
domains of state,
Martyrs of all men's folly, over-rulers of fate.
The Lyric Year 35
These we will love and honor, these we will
serve and defend,
Fulfilling the fitness of nature, till nature shall
have an end.
The foolish may babble and riot, but the deep-
eyed help-mates know
The power that settled the rooftree was more
than the power of the blow.
And the law that guides our malehood out of
the mirk and the reek,
Is the law of love almighty, the law of the
strength of the weak.
This is the code unwritten, this is the creed we
hold,
Because of the little and lonely, because of the
helpless and old, —
Apart from the brunt of the battle our won
drous women shall bide,
For the sake of a tranquil wisdom and the need
of a spirit's guide.
36 The Lyric Year
Come they into assembly, or keep they another
door,
Our makers of life shall lighten the days as the
years of yore.
The lure of their laughter shall lead us, the lilt
of their words shall sway;
Though life and death should defeat us, their
solace shall be our stay.
Veiled in mysterious beauty, vested in magical
grace,
They have walked with angels at twilight and
looked upon glory's face.
Life we will give for their safety, care for their
fruitful ease,
Though we break at the toiling benches or go
down in the smoky seas.
This is the gospel appointed to govern a world
of men,
Till love has died, and the echoes have whis
pered the last Amen.
The Lyric Year 37
THOUGHTS IN A CATHEDRAL
RHYS CARPENTER
T ORD, not with these thy priesthood dwells,
••^ Not in these carven stalls,
Not where the mighty organ swells,
Nor mid the toll of bells,
Not in thy Sabbath, God, not in thy holy halls
Where the cleft sunlight falls
Deep-stained like wine,
Not here, O God, not here
Where the deep pulse of silence holds thy
shrine
'Twixt awe and fear,
Not here thy voice, not here that breath divine.
How very old, O God, are we, how very old.
The Spring with all its blossom comes anew;
The giant shadows of the elms unfold,
The river grasses show their tenderest hue,
And all the meadows shine with gold,
And the great skies are blue.
The Lyric Year
Within our hearts a glory stirs;
Our slothful winter blood
Like river-flood
With rushing stream in foaming speed
Leaps on, or like the warrior's steed
Which feels the battle spurs.
Is here thy shrine, O God? Art thou revealed
In swaying blossom and in blowing field,
Is thy deep priesthood but the heart of joy,
The ever-brimming laughter unconcealed
Of Spring's light-hearted mirth?
Shall even these fresh pleasures never cloy?
Dwells here thy priesthood, God, on earth?
Ah no, ah no ; we are not as the leaf,
In thoughtless growth unfurled;
And though our life be brief
We are as ancient as the world,
Arid in our heart there lies unmeasured
grief.
Our memories are older than the sea
And wash the headlands of uncrumbling
time;
Deep visionary gods are we,
And not the masking creatures of a rhyme:
God dwells within us, silent, secretly.
The Lyric Year 39
Yet unto some he speaks, through some he
moves in view
And with creative finger writes beneath our
eyes,
Lest we grow blind and perish. Yet how few,
How few on whom the sacred laurel lies,
To whom their labor yields
Fruit in unfurrowed fields,
Upon whose quiet brows
No hate and anger rouse,
But deep within their eyes
Like dawn upon the hills, the mystic visions
rise.
Their knowledge is a servant unto power,
Their passions are the root whence springs
the flower,
Their hearts are turned to catch the hidden
strain
Of laughter and of pain,
And all the ages mould for them a single hour.
They see the dawn of wisdom on the earth,
They draw from Time's enchanted wells,
Theirs are the doors of death and birth.
With these thy holy priesthood dwells.
4° The Lyric Year
FROM A CITY STREET
ARMOND CARROLL
"LTERE brood the harpies of our modern
A A time,
Here on the crags which high uplift
Their steel-knit skeletons of brick and lime
Above the surfs that surge and shift.
Decrepit, gaunt and wildly wracked are they,
Unkempt and wild their sooty hair
Which blows in the wind and veils the light of
day
From the grey gorges of their lair.
Some time they dumbly sway, and swaying
moan,
Muttering words as if in dream;
Or yet they chant weird song in monotone,
With fitful pause and sudden scream.
The Lyric Year 4*
Some time they laugh in strident ecstasy,
Shrill, penetrating as a spar
Of crackling lightning shattered through the
sky
When star meets crystal star.
Some time they sob, with hidden face and
bowed,
Shuddering like troubled trees
In the black night when storms with bulging
shroud
Steal onward in the breeze.
All time they mock the futile restless waves
That surge in great affair below,
And, mocking, hail to wide oblivious graves
The victims of the undertow.
42 The Lyric Year
THE VOICE OF APRIL
MADISON CAWEIN
APRIL calling, April calling, April calling
me!
I hear the voice of April there in each old ap
ple-tree ;
Bee-boom and wild perfume, and wood-brook
melody —
O hark, my heart, and hear, my heart, the
April ecstasy!
Hark to the hills, the oldtime hills, that speak
with sea and sky!
Or talk in murmurs with God's winds who on
their bosoms lie:
Bird-call and waterfall and white clouds blow
ing by —
O hark, my heart, O hear, my heart, the April's
cosmic cry!
The Lyric Year 43
There runs a whisper through the woods, the
word of bough to bough;
A sound of dead things donning green, of
beauty waking now :
Fern-bower and wildwood flower, each one a
prayer or vow —
O see, my heart, O look, my heart, where
Earth crowns white her brow.
And far away, and far away, yet nearer than
she seems,
Look where she takes the oldtime trail and
walks again with dreams :
Bird note and irised mote and laughter of wild
streams,
O hark, my heart, O hear, my heart, and fol
low where she gleams.
Earth hath put off her winter garb of gray and
drab and dun,
And robes herself in raiment green of love and
laughter spun:
Wood bloom and wood perfume and colors
of the sun —
O hark, my heart, O hear, my heart, where
her wild footsteps run!
44 The Lyric Year
O April, mother of my soul, take to your heart
your child;
And let him lie a little while upon its rapture
wild:
Lean close and near and let him hear the words
that once beguiled,
And on his eyes the kiss again of longing re
conciled.
O kiss, that fills the fields with flowers and
thrills with green each grove,
Dream down into this heart again and grow to
songs thereof:
Wild songs in singing throngs, that swift shall
mount above,
And like to birds, with lyric words, take Earth
and Heaven with love.
The Lyric Year 45
MORNING
ANNE CLEVELAND CHENEY
TIT ORNING— light everywhere —
Deep tang of purpose thrilling the air,
All things awakening, Hours alert,
Poised for the race, garments up-girt —
Radiant, ready!
As morning-glories unfurl, one by one,
Sweet, homely duties ope eyes at the sun;
Tread of school-children rouses old Earth
To broad, kindly mirth;
Streamers of smoke up-curl to the blue,
Where aspiration, new kindled, breaks through
The symbol of labor — up and away,
To an arching Ideal!
Call o' the day-
Chorus of energies, urgent or shrill
With clear affirmation, quicken the will
To zest of effort after the dream !
Roads move and gleam
46 The Lyric Year
Like shuttles, busily weaving to braid
A strong, goodly pattern of toil and of trade
Across nature's warp; as comrades link arm,
Town joins with town and village with farm,
In brotherhood, on the broad highway
Of universal service — day, day!
But hush, singing Heart ! Oh, yonder there,
What broods in deep shadow? Cowed by
grim Care,
Drudgery flags and clings to the dark!
Knoweth he aught of the sky or the lark?
Knoweth he aught of purpose a-thrill
With soaring strain of a buoyant will?
Song o' the City turns to a prayer —
Light, light, O God, everywhere!
The Lyric Year 47
THE DYING NUN
(Born out of Wedlock)
JOHN VANCE CHENEY
A ND shall death quench the fire long fought
"*•*• So well? 'Tis promised; yet as naught
Seems all else in the world beside,
The while I feel it burn. Throw wide
The shutter, sisters, to the warm springtide.
O, that wild love before my birth,
It holds me hard to the sweet earth!
My mother — God enfold her well! —
She loved, nor fought it, and so fell;
Her thoughts all heaven, she had no thought
for hell.
Chance mine, not hers, the very sin,
For that I quenched the flame within,
The strange wild flame; so did not live
My life, took not what life would give,
But turned, and fled to you, a fugitive.
48 The Lyric Year
Somewhat is plain : I have had naught.
Nay, I must say it, or hush the thought
Of all my thoughts the loudest, so
Deceive you. Kiss me, let me go.
Perhaps your way is God's ; I do not know.
The Lyric Year 49
WILLIAM JAMES
HAROLD CHILDS
HIS heart could brook no cold logician's
God,
Nor distant Absolute of later days;
He heard the music of life's common ways,
And the vast earth was more than empty clod.
For him no shop-worn creed with abstract rod
Could measure death and life; his radiant gaze
Turned homeward, and he saw in dust and haze
The greater Vision where the humble trod.
His was a firmer faith, that knows not fear
In the vast driftings of the cosmic weather,
But with a constant trust looks ever here
Where man and God are struggling on to
gether,
Where God as man is finite, each is free,
And each achieves his separate destiny.
50 The Lyric Year
NEW YORK
A Nocturne
FLORENCE EARLE COAXES
T\ OWN-GAZING, I behold,
^^^ Miraculous by night,
A city all of gold.
Here, there, and everywhere,
In myriad fashion fair,
A mystery untold
Of Light!
Not royal Babylon,
Nor Tyre, nor Rome the great —
In the all-powerful state
Her wisdom and her armed legions won —
Was so illuminate
As the strange world which, awed, I look upon.
With it compared, the ancient glories fail,
And, in the glow it doth irradiate,
The planets of the firmament grow pale!
Night, birth-fellow to Chaos, never wore
A robe so gemmed before.
The Lyric Year
The splendor streams
In lines and jets and scintillating gleams
From tower and spire and campanile bright,
And palaces of light.
How beautiful is this
Unmatched Cosmopolis! —
City of wealth and want,
Of pitiless extremes,
Selfish ambitions, pure aspiring dreams;
Whose miseries, remembered, daunt
The bravest spirit hope hath cheered —
This city loved and hated, honored, feared:
This Titan City, bold to dare:
This wounded Might
That, dreading darkness, still conceals its care
And hides its gaping hurt 'neath veils of
light!
O, I have looked on Venice when the moon
Silvered each dark lagoon,
And have in dreams beheld her
Clothed in resplendent pride,
The Adriatic's bride!
Naples I, too, have seen —
An even lovelier Queen —
And thought that nothing in the world ex
celled her —
52 The Lyric Year
Nay marvelled, as at close of day
I gazed across her opalescent bay
And saw Vesuvius burn on high
Against the soft Italian sky,
That anything on earth could wear
A charm so past compare 1
Yet, O Manhattan! Glowing now
Against the sombre night,
Thine opulence and squalor hid from sight,
Never was aught more beautiful than thou
Dost in thy calm appear —
So glorified and so transfigured here —
Since the Eternal, to creation stirred,
Breathed from His awful lips the mystic
word:
Let there be Light!
The Lyric Year 53
GOLDEN-THROATED PASTORAL
HORN
GRACE HAZARD CONKLING
English Horn.
Tristan and Isolde.
a wild faun, Pan had led
Once along some river-bed,
Left unfriended and alone,
Crave a music of his own?
Did he break a reed and try
To evoke the folding cry
That his heart stood still to hear
When the shepherd god was near?
In a wistful dream I see
How he tested tremulously
54 The Lyric Year
All the pale reed's slender strength:
How he breathed along the length
Of his elfin instrument
Utmost awe and daring blent:
He was half a god — but can
Any mimic mighty Pan?
Did the slim, low-laughing reed
Ripple courage for his need,
That his ivory hands grown bold
Cupped themselves to seek to hold
As the flower would hold the bee,
Tones as eager to be free,
Till its rills of flickering laughter
Were but echoes mocking after?
In some leafy privacy,
None but squirrels and birds to see,
Where the tossed moist light fell cool
And the moss was wonderful,
When he flung the reed aside
Wistful and unsatisfied,
Did some moulded lily hold
Promise of a tone of gold,
Or some wine-dark tulip gleam
Curved for sound across his dream,
The Lyric Year 55
That his slanted eyes shut tight
To mere wrinkles of delight,
Fed with vision of a horn
Flower-mouthed and forest-born?
Brown wood in the thicket sought
Long and earnestly he wrought,
Fashioning what tools were fit
To set free the god in it:
Like the wan reed's silver throat
Hollowed for the river's note
Shaped the dusky stem — to curl
Wide as tulip-buds unfurl
To a carven flower-cup
Where the music bubbling up
Should o'erbrim the magic mould
Changed from silver into gold.
Lost to all the forest — he
Laughed aloud for ecstasy:
Long forgot rainbow and rose —
All his dawns and afterglows :
Many a day to dusk drew on
O'er his deep oblivion:
Many a night a glow-worm dim
Lit her tiny torch for him,
56 The Lyric Year
Holding captive in a spark
Core and sweetness of the dark,
Ere the chiseled cup bloomed fair
Carven as of tawny air:
Ere his fingers shaped and knew
Little dells to slip into
Cunningly contrived for them
All along the hollowed stem —
Curious caverns of delight
Whence the tone should flow aright
Ere the bit of reed he set
Like a river-amulet
Cut to quiver at his mouth
Memories of the windy South.
'Twas mid-April when he drew
Firm his pouted lips and blew
A low challenge suave and fine
As the sorcery of wine —
Subtle as a shadowed pool —
Savage, rich and wonderful —
Till he doubted if the tone
And the rapture were his own:
And the dusk and drowsy brake
Dreamed a nightingale awake.
The Lyric Year 57
New to music, half afraid
Of the marvel he had made,
How his heart shook but to feel
The remembered glory steal
Back along his burning blood!
Dared he loose the lyric flood
And its waves of golden flame
Take full-breasted as they came?
Dared he prelude the sweet night
In that last bewildering light,
If perchance the mystic horn
Knew where all its winds were born?
If from that enchanted urn
There might spill along the fern
Chime of shaken bells that call
Down far hillsides pastoral?
He would question it alone
Softly in an undertone :
But the horn's first poignant cry
Lured the white moon up the sky
And the faun his fear forgot :
Grew a god — and knew it not.
Pungent utter youth he played,
Till the mosses of the glade
Shook their elfin caps of red
'Neath the pattering satyr-tread:
5 8 The Lyric Year
Till the little vivid trees
Yielded up their Dryades,
And the leaning thicket grew
Starred with wild eyes peering through
Not a leaf-eared faun but heard,
Nor a drowsy nested bird:
The dim forest thrilled with wings:
Small bewitched shy-natured things
Creeping closer to the sound
Huddled next the friendly ground:
And far-roaming wood-nymphs all
Thought they heard lacchus call —
Glimpsed his robe's empurpled hem
And his garland diadem.
Pan among the reeds alone
Felt a music not his own
Like the springtide's brimming flood
Tincture his immortal blood:
In enraptured quiet heard
How the moon-blanched river stirred,
Quick within that cry to heed
Leagues of reed become one reed.
Such a voice to sigh and yearn
Might make fleeing Syrinx turn!
Ah — what mad Arcadian
Dared out-lure the pipes of Pan?
The Lyric Year 59
Through the mellow midnight wood
Swept the sudden god and stood
Towering o'er the little faun
And the horn he played upon.
Anger and superb surprise
Burned like sunset through his eyes :
And the clustered listening trees
Heard those climbing cadences
Quaver underbreath — and fall
Down one piteous interval
To eclipse more faint and far
Than the ruin of a star.
Then the faun unshepherded,
All his pulsing music dead,
In a deep-breathed pallor prayed:
"This my horn that I have made,
Shaping it to joy of mine,
I would give as men pour wine
That the high gods may forgive :
God of Shepherds — let me live !"
So his darling instrument —
Reed and flute divinely blent —
At the god's dread feet he laid:
— And Pan lifted it and played. . .
60 The Lyric Year
What is truer than to dream?
I have seen the amber stream
Of the horn's translucent tone
Take the sunlight: I have known —
When the violins were faint —
The gray wood-dove's low complaint,
And the rosebreast's warbled fire,
And the nightingale's desire,
Hid within its singing wood
That a faun first understood:
I have felt his ecstasy
Quivering and quick in me :
Heard — and given breathless heed —
Leagues of reed through one frail reed
Down the night-wind sigh and call,
With the moon's spell over all,
When he first forgot his fear:
I have watched the god draw near,
And his anger — as he played —
Into rich mute wonder fade.
Once, the orchestra was mute
In such wonder — and no flute
Breathed, nor any violin:
Only somewhere deep within
The rapt consciousness there stirred
Some dim music never heard.
The Lyric Year 61
Sudden-sweet — a cry outrang
Zoned as though an orchid sang:
Such an odor-breathing tone
As the forest-god alone
Could have fluted — wild of wing —
Keen with human passioning —
New — and in an instant grown
As a heartbreak dear.
Thine own,
That bewildering song forlorn,
Golden-throated pastoral horn!
Thine that voice from all apart
Tristan heard, when to his heart — >
Steadfast o'er the endless foam —
White Isolde trembled home!
62 The Lyric Year
HEARTHSTONE AND HIGHWAY
HELEN COALE CREW
T HAVE built me a home;
And out of the good green earth arise
Its walls foursquare to the windswept skies
Where clouds are fretted to foam;
And faithfully over it all there lies
The roof, the guardian of mine and me,
Unyielding to all the storms that be,
Or the winds that about it roam.
I have shut me out from the night.
Aroar in the chimney's generous girth
The flames are leaping in rough red mirth;
Love at the hearth, with hand in mine,
Sits smiling, gracious and divine;
And a little child-face beside my chair
Glows in the flickering, roseate glare.
I have shut me in with delight !
The Lyric Year 63
O garden drowsy in the noon,
My soul has full content
Here where the poppies sway and swoon,
And the hours dream towards the rising moon
Till day and night are blent;
Till the dusk is a-murmur with plaintive croon,
And the sundial's shadows are spent 1
Faint and far are the nights to be,
And the dawns that shall follow after.
Close and warm at the heart of me
My child's upbubbling laughter.
Ghostly and dim the life that lies
Beyond, with its frets and fears;
For Love is kissing my drowsy eyes
And stopping my heedless ears.
And yet — did you hear? At the garden wall?
My heart is beating to answer a call;
A call that is urgent and wild;
A call that lures me away from the nest —
O God, that a soul should know unrest
At home} with Love and a child!
64 The Lyric Year
ii
So wide is the world ! So wide !
And ever my soul at its leash is astrain
For the alien joys that beckon amain,
Afar, from the other side!
See, the highway sweeps joyously by!
And clear is the call that urges me —
"Come out where life and adventure be!
Shall you hide yourself in restraining vails
When the wind-swept universe beckons and
calls?
Come out into life, ere you die!
Broad is the path where it lies at your feet;
But a thread it runs where heaven and earth
meet;
And at the horizon it dips and falls
Under the blue of the beckoning seas
Where a sail leans low as it turns and flees — "
Who calls! Who calls! Who calls!
Ill
I am out on the world's great tide;
The earth is before me, is mine !
With stress and struggle my soul is beguiled,
And the wind at my lips is wine !
The Lyric Year 65
I mingle with cities and folk;
Shoulder to shoulder I stride
With life and events — I am free from the
yoke !
So wide is the world! So wide!
The sea is smiling to the shore,
Wine-dark and all unharvested
As when, where'er adventure led,
Ulysses sailed in days of yore,
And met with hardships and delight
Upon its bosom broad and bright.
There's glamour on the glad green earth!
With dewy nights and glowing days,
In open fields and wooded ways
She brings new life to birth.
And grassblades sharply spring to light
Like Grecian spears on Trojan night.
Behold, the sun uplifts his shield
Blood-red, and dripping with the day!
So lifts my heart to meet the fray
Where pains or pleasures yield!
So climbs the eager sap anew
And stirs my pulses through and through!
66 The Lyric Year
IV
A sombre cloud in the skies —
Ever it grows with the fading day;
Ever I see, though I turn away,
Its blot, where the sunset lies.
There is dust on my lips, and the sun grows
gray,
And my heart is faint with the lengthening day.
A tender, plaintive cry —
Ever it rings on my ears.
Comes it out from the garden-plot
Where joyous laughter is all forgot?
Comes it from the still hearth-stone
Where Love keeps guard alone?
But I must put these memories by;
The world has no time for tears.
Nay, I will trudge on through sand and loam,
And I will forget that Love was sweet —
Ah God, that a heart should break for home
When the highway unrolls at its feet!
The Lyric Year 67
TO A THRUSH
THOMAS AUGUSTINE DALY
C ING clear, O throstle !
^ Thou golden-tongued apostle
And little brown-frocked brother
Of the loved Assisian!
Sing courage to the mother,
Sing strength into the man;
For they, who in another May
Trod Hope's scant wine from grapes of pain,
Have tasted in thy song to-day
The bitter-sweet red lees again.
To them in whose sad May-time thou
Sang'st comfort from thy maple bough
To tinge the presaged dole with sweet,
O prophet then, be prophet now
And paraclete!
That fateful May ! The pregnant vernal night
Was throbbing with the first faint pangs of
day,
68 The Lyric Year
The while, with cosmic urge toward life and
light,
Earth-atoms countless groped their destined
way;
And one full-winged to fret
Its tender oubliette,
The warding mother-heart above it woke.
Darkling she lay in doubt, then, sudden wise,
Whispered her husband's drowsy ear and broke
The estranging seal of slumber from his eyes :
"My hour is nigh: arise!"
Already, when, with arms for comfort linked,
The lovers at an eastward window stood,
The rosy day, in cloudy swaddlings, blinked
Through misty green new-fledged in Wister
Wood.
Breathless, upon this birth
The still-entranced earth
Seemed brooding motionless in windless space.
Then rose thy priestly chant, O holy bird!
And heaven and earth were quickened with its
grace;
To tears were moved two wedded souls who
heard,
And one, unborn, was stirred!
The Lyric Year 69
O Comforter, enough that from thy green,
Hid tabernacle in the wood's recess
To those care-haunted lovers thou, unseen,
Shouldst send thy flame-tipped song to cheer
and bless.
Enough for them to hear
And feel thy presence near;
And yet when he, regardful of her ease,
Had led her back by brightening hall and
stair
To her own chamber's quietude and peace,
One maple-bowered window shook with rare,
Sweet song — and thou wert there !
Hunter of souls ! the loving chase so nigh
Those spirits twain had never come before.
They saw the sacred flame within thine eye;
To them the maple's depths quick glory wore,
As though God's hand had lit
His altar fire in it,
And made a fane, of virgin verdure pleached,
Wherefrom thou might'st in numbers musi
cal
Expound the age-sweet words thy Francis
preached
To thee and thine, of God's benignant thrall
That broodeth over all.
70 The Lyric Year
And they, athirst for comfort, sipped thy song,
But drank not yet thy deeper homily.
Not yet, but when parturient pangs grew strong,
And from its cell the young soul struggled
free —
A new joy, trailing grief,
A little crumpled leaf,
Blighted before it bourgeoned from the stem —
Thou wert, as fabled robin to the rood,
A minister of charity to them;
And from the shadows of sad parenthood
They heard and understood.
Makes God one soul a lure for snaring three?
Ah! surely; so this nursling of the nest,
This teen-touched joy, ere birth anoint of thee,
Yet bears thy chrismal music in her breast.
Five Mays have come and sped
Above her sunny head,
And still the happy song abides in her.
For though on maimed limbs the body creeps,
It doth a spirit house whose pinions stir
Familiarly the far cerulean steeps
Where God His mansion keeps.
So come, O throstle!
Thou golden-tongued apostle
The Lyric Year 71
And little brown-frocked brother
Of the loved Assisian!
Sing courage to the mother,
Sing strength into the man;
That she who in another May
Came out of heaven, trailing care,
May never know that sometimes gray
Earth's roof is and its cupboards bare.
To them in whose sad May-time thou
Sang'st comfort from thy maple bough,
To tinge the presaged dole with sweet,
O prophet then, be prophet now
And paraclete !
72 The Lyric Year
YE WHO ARE TO SING
OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN
f~\ SILENCE of all silences, where wait
Fame's unblown years, whose choir my
soul would greet!
Graves, nor dead Time, are sealed so dumb in
fate,
For Death and Time must pass on echoing
feet.
No grass-locked vault, no sculptured winding-
sheet,
No age embalmed hour with mummied wing,
Is bosomed in such stillness, vast, complete,
As wraps the future, and no prayer may bring
From that unfathomed pause one minstrel mur
muring.
Yet never earth a lyreless dawn shall know;
No moon shall move unharped to her gray
home;
No midnight wreathe its chain of choric glow
But answering eye flash rhythmic to the
dome.
The Lyric Year 73
No path shall lie too deep in forest gloam
For the blithe singer's tread; no winds fore'er
Blow lute-lorn barks o'er unawakened foam;
Nor hidden isle sleep so enwaved but there
Shall touch and land at last Apollo's mariner.
And soon shall wake that morrow's melody,
When men of labor shall be men of dream,
With hand seer-guided, knowing Deity,
That breathes in sonant wood and fluting
stream,
Shapes, too, the wheel, the shaft, the shoul
dering beam,
Nor ceased to build when Magian toil began
To lift its towered world. What chime su
preme
Shall turn our tuneless march to music when
Sings the achieving God from conscious hearts
of men?
And one voice shall be woman's, lifting lay
Till all the lark heights of her being ring;
Majestic she shall take the chanted way,
And every song-peak's golden bourgeoning
Shall thrill beneath her feet that lyric spring
From ventured crest to crest. Strong, master-
less,
She, last in freedom, as the first shall sing,
74 The Lyric Year
Who, great in freedom, takes by Love her
place,
Wife, mother, more, her starward-moving self
— the race.
Ay, ye shall come, ye spirits girt with light
That falls o'er heaven's hills from dawn to
be;
Ye warders in the planet house of night,
Gliding to unguessed doors with prophet-
key,
And out where dim paths stir with minstrelsy
Wordless and strange to man, until your clear,
Doubt-shriven strain interprets to the clay.
O, might I hear ye as the world shall hear,
Nearer, a poet's journey, to the Golden Year!
Dear, honored bards of centuries dim and sped,
Yet glowing ever in your fadeless song,
No dust shall heap its silence o'er ye dead,
No cadent seas shall drown your choral
strong
In more melodious waves. I've lingered
long
The Lyric Year 75
By your brave harps strung for eternity;
But now runs my wild heart to meet the
throng
Who yet shall choir. O wondrous company,
If graves may listen then, I then shall listen
ing be!
The Lyric Year
COMRADES
FANNIE STEARNS DAVIS
need not say one word to me, as up
the hill we go,
(Night-time, white-time, all in the whispering
snow;)
You need not say one word to me, although
the hoary trees
Seem strange and old as pagan priests in sway
ing mysteries.
You need not think one thought of me, as up
the trail we go,
(Hill-trail, still-trail, all in the hiding snow;)
You need not think one thought of me, al
though a hare runs by,
And off behind the tumbled cairn we hear a
red fox cry.
O, good and rare it is to feel, as through the
night we go,
(Wild-wise, child-wise, all in the secret snow,)
The Lyric Year
77
That we are free of heart and foot as hare and
fox are free,
And yet that I am glad of you and you are
glad of me!
7 8 The Lyric Year
SONG
MARION DELCOMYN
IKE the south-flying swallows, the summer
"^^ has flown,
Like a fast-falling star, from unknown to un
known
Life flashes and falters and fades from our
sight:
Good-night, O my friend, — good-night !
Like the home-coming swallows that seek the
old eaves,
Like the buds that dream patiently under dead
leaves,
Love shall sleep in our hearts till our hands
meet again:
Until then, O my friend, — until then !
The Lyric Year 79
JETSAM
In Memory of the Sinking of the "Titanic"
HERMAN MONTAGU DONNER
rj ONED by what dread immensity
*-^ Is thy horizon, once so free,
That intermittent in thine eyes
Thou harborest grief for all that dies —
Thou who hast come among these hills
For strength and solace from all ills?
'Tis but a year hence we o'erscanned
The circumjacent leagues of land
From these copse-cinctured, cliff-perched
towers,
And reckoned every rapture ours.
What one of that smooth round of hours
Could thus with unimagined shock
Thy wonted gates of gladness lock,
And set beyond the bounds we see
New challenge in Infinity?
*****
Why should I not from these thy hills,
Thou askst, find balm for all my ills?
8o The Lyric Year
Thy untried soul divineth not
How Fate's Vandalic stroke can blot
Life's ordered manuscript, and sweep
The unwitting scribe to endless sleep,
Choosing to snatch his fluent pen
From jest and song and schemes of men.
Why may I glean not from thy hills
The comfort craved for crowding ills?
Because from out these uplands wide
Is conjured forth a swelling tide,
Whereon each wooded ridge and knoll
Heaves suddenly, as if to roll
With Titan rage against these walls,
And lash them till their ruin falls,
Gulfed deeper than thy deepest dell:
Aye, even to the maw of hell —
That hell I glimpsed once, months ago;
That hell I evermore must know:
When man's last steel leviathan,
Vain prodigy of thousand eyes
And funnels belching to the skies,
Proved, at Fate's touch, his pygmy span,
'And joined, on sands where none explore,
Sea-caravans stalled evermore!
The Lyric Year 81
Nay, each of those snow-mantled peaks
Of doom inexorable speaks :
In each I watch a Phantom rear,
Waiting till man draw hapless near,
To turn his awe to sudden fear,
His levity to panic screams;
And drop upon his futile dreams,
His puny and presumptuous stir,
A ruthless, last extinguisher.
When on this tower the wind-flails shiver,
I feel again the doomed boat quiver,
And see a dim white mass rush by,
Grim with the writ of Destiny
Launched careless from the unseen Pole
By the unheeding Over-Soul!
The ripping of our flank I hear;
The jests and laughter quenched in fear;
The davits' squeak of boats swung out;
The surging murmur; thunderous shout;
The rush of multitudinous feet;
The pistols' crack; morose retreat;
The shrieks of wounded on the deck;
The women's cries men soothe and check;
The stoic band, who, sinking, play
Their own and others' pangs away;
82 The Lyric Year
The creak of ropes and splash of keels
Far down the dark abreast, whence swells
A sound of moanings and farewells,
And beat of oars that fainter steals,
That Hope's deceiving beads still tells
For women whose self-sentenced men
Shall never clasp their hands again,
But, yielding life in sight of them,
Accept the sea's stern requiem!
Aye, shudder, friend ! Thou canst not know
In all thy days a tithe the woe
That surged to birth on that sea-waste
In anguished thousands ghastly-faced,
Trapped in their floating manse of pride,
Magnate and pauper side by side:
Both, bubbles whom the dread point nears
Of Fate's inexorable shears:
Some, throe-wrung, shrieking, praying vain,
Cursing the Summoner's disdain;
Some, wives sublimely fate-defiant,
In husbands' circling arms reliant,
Steeled with staunch faith through choking
breath
To eye unmoved the stare of Death:
The Lyric Year 83
Thrust through the portals long before
Their crushed shells reach the unfathomed
floor,
To seek the tombless millions sped:
The aeons' covenantless dead.
How I, sucked down in the abysm,
Passed shriven through the cataclysm,
Loosening Death's fingers from my hair,
Scarce am I fully now aware.
I feel Leviathan's last heave
With frightful hiss and roar, as cleave
The swirling waters upward ... then
Half doubting, I breathe air again,
Rave up to Heaven compassionate,
Battle eternal moments, and
Cramp to some rower's pitying hand,
Swooning that unto ghoulish Fate
Stark, spectral arms still supplicate.
And when Dawn final rescue brings,
The world is one of new-charged things,
For o'er the sea's sepulchral path
Broods Desolation's aftermath.
Thus, friend, thy soft and radiant hills
Lend but scant solace for my ills;
84 The Lyric Year
O'er their serenity I yet
See Destiny's dark riddle set.
Why hast Thou, Over-Soul, Force, God,
Made chaff of our aspiring clod?
Let Death in plans securest lurk,
Mocking our proudest handiwork?
Wouldst Thou with purging stroke impress
Athwart Man's pride his nothingness,
And from the elements' expanse
Shape rods for his arch-arrogance?
Wouldst Faith restore unto her own,
Since baffled Reason flees her throne?
Or wouldst Thou of Man's carnal sense
Strip the veneer and the pretense,
To show beneath how he is Thine,
Strung of a fibre still divine,
Which harper Death's rapt finger-tips
Sweep to sublime apocalypse?
The Lyric Year 85
AWAKENING
JULIA CAROLINE RIPLEY DORR
DOST thou remember how that one fair
day
Dawned just as other days? Earth gave no
sign,
Nor did far heaven proclaim the gift divine
It held in store for us, as buds of May
Pledge the year's wealth of fruitage, or as clay
Guards the rich promise of the slumbering vine :
And I, half child, dreamed of no rarer wine
Than Life had poured in my gold cup alway.
Then suddenly, as out of darkling space
One sees the glory of the evening star
Clear shining through the cloud-rifts floating
by,
Love touched my eyelids, and I saw thy face.
That day was in no earthly calendar;
Only God knew it, dear, and thou and I.
86 The Lyric Year
ZAMBOANGA
SUSAN DYER
AMBOANGA! Zamboanga!
With the moonlight on the sea
And the blue hills of Easilan
Looming up mysteriously!
Does the little darkling river
Still go whispering through the town
Where strange Southern stars are mirrored
With the palm-fronds peering down?
Do the countless shifting fireflies
Keep their lamps alight for me
In dreamful Zamboanga —
Zamboanga! Zamboanga! —
World-distant Zamboanga
By that moon-enchanted sea?
Ah, those nights in Zamboanga when we sat,
just you and I,
On the Fort, that crumbling shell of tran
sient power!
The Lyric Year 87
While, above, the vast Armadas of all time
went sailing by,
And we watched their flashing signals hour
on hour;
And a dance-drum throbbed insistent in the
Moro town below
With a secret, savage rhythm o'er repeating:
"No To-morrow! No To-morrow!" — (ran
the endless burden so?) —
Till within our very veins we felt it beating.
Sweet those days in Zamboanga, under staring
tropic skies
In our little boat with sails hibiscus-tinted,
When the painted vintas passed us like gigantic
butterflies,
And we followed where their wakes of opal
glinted;
Sweet the eves we rode together through the
Gorge's fragrant peace
Where we heard the warning voice of waters
falling,
Where the broken-hearted pigeons sobbed un
seen among the trees :
uNo To-morrow! No To-morrow!" — were
they calling?
88 The Lyric Year
It has faded, it is over, and the dance-drums
throb no more,
And the glamour only lingers in our dream
ing;
For to other ears these plaintive songs are
wafted from the shore,
And for other eyes the tragic sunsets' gleam
ing:
Unforgotten! . . . Had we tasted while the
well was brimming sweet,
Then perhaps we had not drunk such bitter
sorrow,
Had not heard these mocking memories so end
lessly repeat:
"No To-morrow! No To-morrow! No
To-morrow !"
Zamboanga! Zamboanga!
With the moonlight on the sea
And the blue hills of Basilan
Looming up mysteriously!
Softly moans the little river
Through the silence of the town
Where the Southern Cross is mirrored
Through the branches blazing down:
Still the madcap, soulless fireflies
Liqht their lamps . . . but not for me,
The Lyric Year 89
In faery Zamboanga —
Zamboanga! Zamboanga! —
In long-lost Zamboanga
By the opalescent sea!
9Q The Lyric Year
THE DEAD
GEORGE DYRE ELDRIDGE
have given us death for our portion,
the strange Gods hundred-named;
And one shall lie by the side of death, naked
and unashamed;
And the days shall forget in their gladness, and
the nights with their stars forget,
The eyes that have looked in the eyes of Death,
the wonder and pain of it.
But the Dead have seen the splendor of the
dimmed and flamed-out stars;
And they have seen the battle-front of long-
forgotten wars.
For them has the Earth lain silent in the depths
of the silent night;
For them were the days of travail and doubt,
and the joys of light.
They were glad as they sat at their feasting,
and the wine of their cups was red;
They were men in their lusting and wronging,
till the years of their lusting were sped;
The Lyric Year 91
They were saints in the days of their waiting,
and the days of their waiting were long;
They were sinners who joyed in their sinning,
and the might of their sinning was strong.
They stood at the morning of ages, and the
lure of their eyes was life;
They laughed in the strength of their manhood,
and joyed at the splendor of strife.
They died, and the hour of their dying was
the dawn of a people's sway;
They are dumb, but the cry of the living is loud
at the gates of day.
We come from the chambers of silence, the
gift of the Gods is breath.
We go to the chambers of darkness, and the
gift of the Gods is death.
92 The Lyric Year
THE SEA-GULL
JOHN ERSKINE
\IfHEN I weary lay on the barren sand —
Din of the sea-fret in my ears,
Salt of the sea-breath on my lips;
When I felt through earth the shock of waters
That, spilling from angry crests their spindrift,
Reared to whelm the immovable strand
And shattered themselves, shattered them
selves,
Splashed and spread up, limp and formless,
Sliding together down again with a harsh de
feated roar! —
Skyward suddenly I gazed,
And there, white arrow in the blue,
A sea-gull sped to sea.
Flying straight, wings leisurely beating
Like the flapping sails of a tide-drawn boat,
Borne it seemed by a hidden motion;
It heard the land-clatter, the human shrillness,
It heard the earth-shock in the siege of ocean,
As passing over it shot into silence —
The Lyric Year 93
Swiftest when just above me,
Then slower and slower, as farther and farther
It shrunk in the sun to a little mote,
Till the speed of it seemed as rest.
The sky-edge around it, the perfect circle,
Blue without cloud the vault above it,
Noiseless below, inexhaustible welcome,
The fathomless bosom's heave and sway,
Indigo valleys, green slopes and ridges
Marble-veined where the rhythm exuberant
Creams, as the waterfolds lap and crease —
Was it the sea-gull that folded its wings
At the centre of peace?
Or was it my soul?
94 The Lyric Year
THE FAUN
GENEVIEVE FARNELL-BOND
COMETIMES you hear me in the dawn,
^ The little-horned, fleet-footed Faun;
You see a ripple as I pass
And shake the dew-pearls from the grass:
A shadow through the gray morass
So quickly gone.
Lo, when the first faint-throated note
Of feathered songster is afloat,
A soft call on the silver air
Will tell you that the Faun is there,
To lure you to his leafy lair
Through paths remote.
I hide to watch the ruddy sun
Light up each dew-globe, one by one,
Until, with opalescent blaze,
Aspangle is the rosy haze
That lies along the wooded ways
Where I have run.
The Lyric Year 95
And when the gold god of the day
Comes wheeling up the azure way,
Sometimes I pipe on flutes of Pan
Soft pulsings never made of man,
To stir his spirit if I can
With sweet dismay.
One day I lay at gilded noon
With calm content half in a swoon^-
The world ablaze with torrid heat
Beyond this leafy green retreat —
But here the brown earth, cool and sweet,
Ajoy with June.
And then she came ... all clad in white,
Her eyes mysterious as night;
Her lips were red and ripe and young,
Her hair a faint gold halo flung;
About her all the fragrance clung
Of youth's delight.
And as she lay in leafy vale
She sang a melancholy tale :
"Though Love has never come to me,
To-morrow I a wife must be,
The church all sweet with melody
And roses pale;
g6 The Lyric Year
I shall have wealth and brave attire,
And all the people shall admire;
Though callow youth might term him cold,
Though he be what the world calls old,
All shall be bought with gleaming gold
In my desire."
Nimbly I blew a little tune,
And trembling stopped to softly croon
Until the maiden fell asleep,
Lest she should hear me shyly creep
Beside her in the grasses deep! . . .
And then, eftsoon
I bent me to her shell-pink ear
And whispered that her heart might hear:
"Lo, all about you in the grass,
In every cranny that you pass,
Is brighter wealth than men amass
With toil and tear:
"And little lovers, two by two,
With hearts that sing and wildly woo;
And all the voices in the trees
Are throbbing with love's rhapsodies;
And these alone shall bring heart's ease
To such as you;
The Lyric Year 97
(Afar the wild thrush knows his mate
And calls to her with heart elate)
Ah, to your lips this kiss I press,
And conjure dreams with deft caress:
O Love comes in swift eagerness:
I bid you wait!"
98 The Lyric Year
KISA-GdTAMI
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE
'V^OUNG Kisa-Gotami, the purely fair
As a white pearl brought from the un
known caves
Of sparkling sea — she who was late the song
Within her father's house — now being wed,
Bore a frail man-child, in whose little face
The flickering light of life for one day shone
And then departed like a mystery.
Thereupon, when her strength had half re
turned,
Still clasping to her breast the lifeless form
None dared take from her, Kisa-Gotami
Wandered the streets — as though her weary
feet
Sought for some marvel, seen in vision strange,
Which should restore the child and to a dream
Turn the bewildered anguish of her soul.
When noon was golden down the waving fields,
And when the purple shadows of the dusk
The Lyric Year 99
Crept from the hills, still the poor traveller
Stayed not her aimless passagings, distraught,
Wandering with the wandering moon. At
dawn,
Passing beyond the borders of the town
Unto a grove of pipal trees, she came
On a low hill-side, where Siddhartha — whom
Light smote in Gaya with revealing beam
And men thereafter called the Buddha — risen
For meditation in the clear sweet air
Of early morning, sat in deep repose.
And looking with wild eyes up to his face,
Whereon the aspect of a holy man
Brooded ineffably, a sudden flood
Of utterance from her long-unopened lips
Poured — as a river, feeling close ahead
The presence of the wide infinite sea,
Rolls with a sudden and importunate gush
Its troubled current into the calm deep.
"O Lord, my grief exceeds all mortal grief.
I shall not ever look on peace again
Unless I find the herb. Somewhere on earth
It must be growing now. Thy face is kind,
And wise as with great knowledge. I am worn
With seeking; and I am not wise. O Lord,
Canst thou not help me in my hour of pain?"
ioo The Lyric Year
To her the Buddha, with compassionate eyes,
Spake — "What is this thou seekest?"
And she said —
"I seek the herb that bringeth life again,"
While her glance touched the dead child in her
arms.
Then the deep eyes of Buddha dwelt on her,
Seeming to fold her in a brooding gaze
Of comprehension and profoundest thought,
Wherein the tides of pity rose and fell
And swept beyond her, as his inward sight
Opened on wider vistas and beheld
The web of sorrow that enfolds the world.
Until at length his musings died away,
And his heart saw her like a pitiful dove
Smitten and sinking in the lost abyss.
Gently he looked upon her, and then spake —
"Be thou not troubled: let the dawnlight lay
Cool fingers on thy brow; go thou in peace
Into the city; there a simple herb
Thou shalt procure — a grain of mustard seed,
The commonest thing that grows. Of such is
made
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The cure for all thy grief, and this thy child.
Heed only this — if from its strength shall come
Aught that may profit thee in thy desire,
Thou must obtain it from a happy home
Wherein nor child nor spouse nor sire has
died."
Then Kisa-Gotami, white gentle one,
Laughed aloud for joy, crying — "I go, I go."
With simple trust, before the Buddha's feet
She laid the dead child; and then turned in
haste
And sped unto the city with light steps,
Nor looked behind her.
And the Buddha sat
Brooding upon the hillside; strange slow
thoughts
Dwelt in his eyes, and voiceless mysteries
Swept o'er his brow like cloud-shadows that
move
Across the silent mountain-slopes at noon.
Thus meditation ruled upon his soul
While the dawn spent its pale and gorgeous
gleams,
And morning rose out of the wine-hued east
Into a dome of turquoise, and the sun
102 The Lyric Year
Measured its noontide height, to sink again
Slowly to westward.
Softly from the west
Came the first evening breath ; and with it came,
Out of the city, Kisa-Gotami,
With quiet steps. And in her eyes the light
Glimmered less wildly under the pale brow,
As to the Buddha she held out her hands —
Empty: she smiled; and tears fell; and she
spake.
"O Lord, my search is ended, and I know.
Unto each home I went, and begged of each
A little boon — a grain of mustard-seed.
And all with uttermost kindness would have
given,
Save that I asked if child or spouse or sire
Out of their midst had died; and every house
Replied — 'Nay, we have lost a well-loved one.'
From door to door I passed, but still the same.
Until at length a grave and aged man
Answered me — 'Child, the living are but few,
The dead are many/ And the sudden thought
Filled me of all the other mourning hearts ;
And in the great grief I became but one —
A tiny mote amid immensities
The Lyric Year 103
Of the world's sorrow; and their kinship spread
Like a warm cloak around me: I beheld
All other burdened souls stretch out to me
Infinite sisterhood. That which was I
Ceased then to be; I knew myself a part
Lost in the greater life. And lo ! my soul
Seemed purged and lightened and no more
afraid
Even of the pain that filled it. Now I come
To bear my dead unto my home again,
And give him sepulture, and strew young
flowers,
And reassume what life may hold."
Deep speech
Trembled upon the Buddha's lips, and ebbed
As ebbs a great tide on a starless shore.
And stretching forth his hand, in the last dusk
Of ghostly twilight, he, with voice wherein
Dwelt all the joys and sorrows of the world
And the wild bitterness and the final calm,
Spake gently, — "My disciple, go in peace."
104 The Lyric Year
THE GLIMPSE
LOUISE AYRES GARNETT
BEAT upon closed doors;
My hands are numb,
The oaken walls are mute,
The bolts are dumb.
Although my spirit plead,
My strength demand,
Unthrobbing stands the oak
Beneath my hand.
I beat upon closed doors:
0 Doors, respond!
Once through a shining rift
1 saw Beyond . . .
The Lyric Year 105
TO A POET
MARGARET ROOT GARVIN
"IIJT'HEN none besides was near to
speak,
Thy singing spoke to me;
When Sorrow was my only guest,
Thy grief was company.
Thy loss was comrade to mine own,
Though years and seas apart;
I bless thee for the brave despair
That brothered my sick heart.
No lyric word or wistful sigh
Hath stirred thy lips for long;
Yet I do thank thee with my tears,
Requite thee with my song.
io6 The Lyric Year
SO AS YOU TOUCH ME I DREAM
FRANCES GREGG
A H, in the dusk are you there — heart of the
heart of me,
What are you thinking?
Your hands in my hands,
And the life in us leaps to the sound of your
dreams.
O my Beauty of Beauty —
Bend me your head in the dusk — O my flower!
Purple Iris border the streams,
And the streams flow clear to a pool without
ripple ;
Silent, clear and untroubled is this pool of your
love,
White Iris grow on the border.
My aching dry lips reach out for you in the
dusk there;
Touch me with wine — the juice of the grape,
O my Harp — my gold-stringed one!
The Lyric Year 107
Purple and gold of the Iris — I hear the
singing —
Whisper and rustle of reeds by the river,
Golden and white are the Iris my thoughts
are,
Hovering over the stream.
Touch my brow with your hands — O my
dreamer of dreams —
White petals of flowers are your fingers.
Ah, — I am weary —
Do you glow in the dusk where you sit —
Strange power unfolding me?
Or what is the splendor I see?
Ah, the white glow of the upstanding Sword-
flower,
That borders the river of dreams !
io8 The Lyric Year
THE MERCIFUL ENSIGN
HERMANN HAGEDORN
"pHYSICIAN, the battle is done!
A Leave the wounded that slunk from the
fight!
In the valley a thousand and one
Cannot outlive the night!"
Quoth the surgeon: "I come anon!"
"Physician, three comrades of mine
Lie stiff, and three lie racked
With wounds." 'Twas an old ensign
Famished and battle-hacked:
But the surgeon was careless and fine;
And quoth, "I stay where I stand.
I've enough to tend till the day."
But the ensign's eyes command,
And the ensign points the way
And leads him forth by the hand.
The surgeon spoke never a word,
And out of the reeking tent
The Lyric Year 109
Into the powder-blurred
And vague moonlight they went,
Where the dead, unsepulchred,
Pillowed the writhing quick.
The surgeon was young. He reeled.
His tongue curled and grew thick;
A heaving sea was the field.
He gasped, and, dizzy and sick,
Staggered, blind through the dark;
And groans he heard, and cries,
Where he deemed was never a spark;
And bent over and stared into eyes
Staring and stony and stark.
And the ensign, like a ghoul,
Led on through the smoke and the stench.
They saw the corpse-thieves prowl,
And once, in an unseen trench,
Stumbled, and jowl to jowl
Lay with the terrible dead.
And the surgeon, painted with gore
Long cold, belched, and livid with dread,
Crawled forth, but went on once more,
And the ensign clutched him and led.
no The Lyric Year
And came to a barn at last
Where three dead troopers lay,
And other three, far past
All helping, writhed on the hay;
Burnt by the powder-blast,
And flaming from garment and hair.
"What can you do for these?"
The surgeon gazed down in despair.
They were boys who clutched at his knees
With bones and entrails bare.
"Nothing." The ensign gripped
The surgeon's arm: "Are you sure?"
Quoth the surgeon, pallid-lipped:
"Those wounds no man can cure."
And went. But the ensign ripped
His dirk forth, and bending nigher
The tortured shapes, upcaught
Their burning hair — in dire
Woe, as they weakly fought —
Cut their throats. The barn was their pyre.
The Lyric Year in
MONARCH AND MENDICANT
JULIAN HAWTHORNE
TV/IT heart was as a cloud, at night
** *• Born on a naked mountain height,
Cold — cold and white,
Unpregnant of desire
To give, or to require
To stoop, or to aspire.
Stealthily, subtilely creeping,
Silence — silence keeping,
Subduing sea and dry land,
Shore and reluctant island,
Upward and onward drawn,
Appeared the unimaginable dawn!
Brighter, brighter, higher
Soared shafts of quivering fire —
Gold-feathered arrows flying, aiming nigher,
Ever nigher my virgin battlement !
Bannered armies Orient
Scaling earth's steep ascent,
Stampeding night's dark horses in their cherub
H2 The Lyric Year
They storm — they storm my citadel! I burn
Like a rose — like an urn
Molten with living flame —
Lambent with life in-pouring!
Trembling, wondering, adoring,
Heedless of blame or shame,
I voyage, ah, whither? — never to return,
Never ! — to that chill eyrie whence I came !
The victor sun has hailed me where I float
Like a pearly boat
In spangled seas remote:
Laughing, the radiant corsair boards me, prize
Of his all-conquering eyes!
Onward we steer,
Breasting broad waves of opal atmosphere,
Domed with the sweep of Heaven's immensi
ties!
Fain would I then from quarries chaste of air
Erect a palace fair
Wherein my lord and I in peace may dwell:
Let marble's soul ascend in breathless towers
O'er beds of down and silver-winnowed bow
ers —
Bastions buttressed well
The Lyric Year 113
With spiritual snow
Round our love-gardens throw
Their majesty, to guard this home of ours —
This home enskied of maiden passion-flowers!
All that deep noon of day
Heart to beating heart we lay,
And oh, love had his way!
His flaming bridegroom ardors thrill
The resonant chords of my consenting soul,
Taking insatiable toll
Of joys long lingering their thirst to fill,
Till the brimmed vase of ichor jolting spill
Its freight celestial ! Rapt we take our flight
On pinions irrecoverable of delight
To summits where senses cease, quenched in
the might
Of intimations from abodes
Of beings fit to mate with gods !
Anon by wistful windings languorous
Of amaranthine pathways slow descending,
Panting, with drowsy eyelids amorous,
We sigh to breathe again the sweet of that
love-blending !
Ah, safe — so safe I seemed from harms!
Slumber possessed him, even in my arms !
H4 The Lyric Year
While secret through my veins strange stirrings
ran
Of mystic Woman melting into Man!
Forgetting the inevitable fate
Of mortal measured by immortal state,
I saw each atom of my being bound
Fast in the golden round
Of his eternity!
Merged in one glorious identity —
One shining mesh of interwoven life —
Fearless forever of the impending knife
Of that one pitiless Sister of the Three —
Forever! sang my soul aloud —
I, creature of a day, a sun-illumined cloud!
Rash song, how vainly sung!
For suddenly aloft in darkness drest
Hovered a shape that flung
Harsh shadow o'er my love-warmed nest!
Who dares thus to invade
Our peace? — I would have said —
But horror silenced me — my lord was gone,
My bridegroom, from my side! Aye, he had
flown
Swifter than dream, and was not! And a
swarm
Of goblins ominous of wreck and storm
The Lyric Year 115
Hatefully rioted where had been the tent,
A moment past, of love and blandishment!
Of their foul rage I, maddened, seemed now
soul
And leader, hounding on to what mad goal!
Black mists coiled, lit by terrible intervals
Of snaky brightness hissed from riven walls
Toppling chaotic: in headlong crash and roar
Of volleying reverberations hoarse-resounding
And muttering unendingly, they fell ! Gray as
a shore
Wasted by waves tempestuously pounding
Through desolate ages — fantastic with wild
shapes
Of crags and thunder-bolted capes,
Lay the cloud island of my dream dispelled,
Nay, mine own corpse, love-murdered, unan-
eled,
Unmourned, save by the comfortless cold rain
Down-dropping like gray blood of ghosts un
timely slain !
Howbeit, in that swoon, methought there came
Two spirits, one of ice, the other, flame.
The first said — Change alone has sway
Supreme : strong adamant to Change must yield
Even as the rathe wild-rose of an April field:
n6 The Lyric Year
The ^Eon is twin-sister of the Day:
Immortal Soul itself would die,
Were Change not soul of immortality!
Quoth the other — Hollow were Life's festival,
Angels and men how poor, did Change rule
all!
Shall he who bent the Heavens and delved the
Abyss
Vouchsafe no talisman mightier than this
To curb the questionings of the awful Mind?
The rose of April changes with the wind —
Never the archetypal Rose
In Paradise that blows!
Change is but a mask, concealing ill
The changeless lineaments of eternal Will —
And Will is love! — But Love unveiled must
kill!
Muttered the first. No further answer deigned
The other: and they parted. I remained
Long pondering there alone.
At last, wrought marvellously, I saw the throne
Of westering Day glow on the glowing sea,
A palpitating pageantry
Of many a wreath of gold profusely strewn,
Panels of chrysophrase and amethyst,
Banners wove of crimson mist,
From jewelled towers out-thrown:
The Lyric Year 117
And high, high aloft,
Floating on wings that flushed with hues as
soft
As meadow-flowers in Spring,
Seraphs in nuptial chorus seemed to sing!
Midmost of that array,
A mendicant, astray,
I crouched bewildered. Gloriously upraised
On the great throne sat One whose aspect
blazed
Effulgent, beautiful, benign,
Centre and source of life and love condign —
And yet my bridegroom — mine !
Monarch and mendicant there each other faced,
He, robed and crowned, she naked and dis
graced!
Was it perchance to witness stern decree
Of death or banishment fulfilled on me
That Elements of earth and air
Seemed thronging, murmuring round me
there ? —
Or was it but the murmuring of the sea,
And wavering thoughts of joys unborn or dead
That my strained sense misled?
I raised my eyes to look at him; but shone
So blinding bright his countenance, mine own
The Lyric Year
Perforce again I bowed,
And silence far and wide held all the listening
crowd I
The King his sceptre lifts! I hear or seem to
hear —
What voice of yearning music! — "Draw thou
near,
Beloved, clothed in splendor, as my Queen,
And be thou seated here!"
Upon which words, behold! a dazzling sheen
Miraculous of raiment, dyed
In gold and purple pride,
Graces my limbs astonished : on my brow
Stars, diademed, sparkle! Now
Borne onward as a royal bride,
I rest my lord beside,
While lutes low warble and pure trumpets blow!
My heart was as a cloud, a livelong day
Adrift on tides of air; some time the play
Of soul-creating passion; some time torn
By rebels of despair and scorn:
Nor opened the apocalyptic Gate
Of mortal and immortal fate !
But oh, what blessed word
Was this which now I heard! —
The Lyric Year 119
"In earth or cloud or sun
The soul of love is one:
Love is thy soul and mine :
Naught may our knot untwine !
Thee, in thy cloud pursued,
Thee, not thy cloud, I wooed:
The cloud dissolves, but we
Of clouds henceforth are free,
And all I am is thine, and I am all in theel"
The earth from light to dark reluctant
wheeled,
But lo! another Earth in deathless dawn re
vealed !
120 The Lyric Year
THE MIDNIGHT FERRY
MAX J. HERZBERG
T CRIED to my God,
A Leaning above the rhythmic ferry's side:
Why do you stir my soul with churning yeast
Of fevered discontent?
With this vain struggle all my heart is spent —
If I be man or beast!
And whichsoe'er I be,
I earn your righteous rod!
Lo now! this twinkling sea,
Relapsing and resurging with the tide,
Is reckless in its beauty; the ships plod
Hither and thither, and the yellow moon
Dips towards the west unvexedly;
The pale stars swoon
In languid loveliness, and never thought nor
care
Disturbs them in their blue and griefless
lair.
Why am I thrall and all the world else free?
The Lyric Year 121
Then in my heart I heard the cry of the sea :
A million years the sun has sucked me forth
In viewless spirals through the burdened air —
East, west, the winds have borne me, south
and north,
But to my hollow cave I come again.
I have guessed the sorrows of the earth and
men,
And known all things: I have tracked ships
mile by mile,
And heard the sailors singing in the south
Their homing song;
The stars have gazed on me the whole night
long;
I have glassed the scaled and sprawling croco
dile,
And twitched and dandled to and fro
The Lotos-blow
By mud-black fields a-wash with the old Nile;
Within my heart gnarled monsters crawl
And build their nests far from the swing of
tides,
Where the deep ocean pounds their shelly sides.
But, God, shall this be all?
My tongue is full of speech,
My heart of words, but inarticulate
I grope through Man into a stumbling mouth I
122 The Lyric Year
Beauty must know itself or else it hath no soul.
Frame therefore thou my lips and teach
My aching mumble till it shall grow plain!
A thousand secrets I would prate
That I gave ear to where my gossiping currents
roll;
But now there is not even the knowledge in me
That I am not free.
Beneath the moon so cried the sea in pain.
The Lyric Year 123
THE END
C. HILTON-TURVEY
'"PHE moth hath found the candle-light,
A And I your eyes!
Lured from the blackness of the night,
Could he surmise —
Adventurous sprite winging his flight
In airy guise —
The panther-flame that leapt to blight
His enterprise?
Poor vagrant, now in sorry plight
Shattered he lies :
The moth hath found the candle-light,
And I your eyes!
124 The Lyric Year
THE POET IN THE MARKET-PLACE
MARGARET BELLE HOUSTON
A BOUT the City's Market-place
•*• The pliant throngs press out and in.
The seller lifts an eager face
And cries his wares above the din.
Here are the stalls of sunny fruit,
Crimson and cool and purple-veined,
And here are piled with mouths too mute
Bright birds with soft breasts newly-stained.
Here is the booth where one beats gold
To twinkling rings or shining bands,
And here are glistening, fold on fold,
The silken looms of sunrise lands.
Here are the vats of ripened wine.
Joy! sings a voice, for him who quaffs!
And here one leans and flings a coin,
And laughs and drinks, and drinks and
laughs.
The Lyric Year 125
And flitting bright, from stall to stall,
Too beautiful, with eyes of fire,
A woman, smiling light on all,
Offers her painted lips for hire.
About the City's Market-place
The changing throngs pour out and in,
But one there is with lifted face
Cries not his wares above the din.
Apart he sits, and all alone
Beside the Market's outer stalls,
Watching the sun drift o'er the stone
And spread a rainbow down the walls.
Strange ware hath he ! A lamp that glows
With sun-pure light, whose flame doth start
In oil of tears. A folded rose
Sprung from the dust of Helen's heart.
The wind-cry of a wandering shell,
A font of moonlight from the South,
A draft of heaven with dregs of hell —
This kiss from Cleopatra's mouth.
The nightingale's last note at eve
Cloven with rapture's swift assail.
126 The Lyric Year
A faery scarf of misty weave
Powdered with star-dust, bright and pale.
And ah! (That few may know or see)
Closed in this casket carved and sweet,
Garnered in gloom of Calvary —
The drops that fell from Jesu's feet.
*****
Lo! Quiet holds the Market-place.
The booths loom dark, a barren line.
The woman with the painted face
Goes forth with him who quaffed the wine,
And he that sitteth all alone
Looks sudden on an empty street.
(The sun hath trailed adown the stone
Dropping the rainbow at his feet.)
He smiles — he sighs — the day is done !
How many passed his laden stall!
How many saw there — every one —
Some folded parchments — that was all!
Ah, Christ! The cruel Market-place!
My Brother! (Soft! A tardy buyer!)
The woman with the painted face
Looks down in his with eyes of fire.
The Lyric Year 127
Brother! (Canst thou then deny
Thou art of closest kin with me?)
Of all the throngs that came to buy
Thank God that no man bought of thee!
Thor Sorrow take her burning toll,
Tho' Hunger keep thee, hand in handf
Thou hast not bartered half thy soul
To him who doth not understand!
128 The Lyric Year
I DREAMED THAT DREAM WAS
QUENCHED
GOTTFRIED HULT
T DREAMED that Dream was quenched,
And my heart blenched
At how the world emptied itself of joy.
Of Spring, erewhile so fresh, —
Spring with the heart of trysting maid and boy,
The spirit flower seemed gone to seed in flesh.
Of Summer, with her sheen
At the meeting-place of heavenly and terrene,
Evanished, too, the soul! nor without it
Was morning any longer exquisite.
Forests, that are but seaweed of the sky,
Like stranded ooze did seem of space gone dry.
There was no mystery in things, no spell
Of bird-song in the air, no nacre on the shell.
No lingering afterglows of twilight eves,
Nor autumn's red apocalyptic leaves,
Oped Revery a visionary page.
Rose drearily the sun, as in a cage
Some tawny bulk, once leonine, upheaves
The Lyric Year 129
To be its living pendulum. The moon,
Appearing moth-white from its cloud-cocoon,
Became the murky wraith of old eclipse.
No more the sea was Sea,
Fathomless as to thought, eternity,
In wonted might uphurled,
But only the vast sepulchre of ships,
Whose ghosts, at ebbing tide,
Disbodied of incrusted wreckage, eyed
Afar the stark, cold, and dismembered world.
In that drear time,
Man knew no longer youth or prime,
The newly-born seemed old incredibly.
A delver within ruined hills for ore,
Ten thousand years or more,
Emerged into white noon, had been as he, —
So shriveled up with night, so cursed with
grime.
More terror than befalls from Nature's hand,
When lancing a Volcano's pent-up ache, —
More desolation than of fire and quake
He wrought upon the land.
For in the age's wake,
Wonder and Song had ceased to be;
And battle flags were rent for scullionry;
130 The Lyric Year
And Love was plucked as theme from the
world's tomes.
His pauseless fires I saw
Burn brick with toil-won straw:
Rose bastions, wherein Life immured itself;
Rose glutless vaults of pelf;
And everywhere were palaces and domes, —
But Joy was not, nor any hush for Awe.
Still Thought made feint to explore
The universe for lore;
But moulted was the very sense of truth, — ?
Impossible save to miracle and youth!
Nor work was wrought but bore
Evidence that the heart within was blind, —
That impotent is the dream-widowed mind.
Thus Man strained on and on
From futile deed to futile deed — and died:
And the air clarified
Of smoke from kilns and mills; and presently
Afar I seemed to see
Earth and the planets, hollow-eyed and hagged,
In horrible hellish dance, that never flagged,
About the bubbling caldron of the sun.
The Lyric Year 131
LITTLE BIG-HORN
PERCY ADAMS HUTCHINSON
trail is broad! the swift word came.
Now sound to the saddle ! Custer cried.
The White Men rode like a scorching flame:
The Red, like the whirlwind's bride.
They met where the river cut the heights,
With crash of carbine, with shout and yell:
The White Men fought as the soldier fights:
The Red, like the fiends of Hell.
To their rock-fenced holds the Red Men rode :
(O the wolf shall win through the might of
the pack)
To their skin-built huts the Red Men rode :
The White Men, they came not back.
132 The Lyric Year
SECOND AVENUE
ORRICK JOHNS
TN gutter and on sidewalk swells
•*• The strange, the alien Disarray,
Flung from the Continental hells,
From Eastern dark to Western day.
They pass where once the armies passed
Who stained with splendid blood the land;
But bloody paths grow hard with years
And bloody fields grow rich and grand.
Are you, O motley multitude,
Descendants of the squandered dead,
Who honored courage more than creeds
And fought for better things than bread?
The eternal twilight of the street
Drives you to madness like a wine,
To bastioned gates with bleeding feet,
To walls that curse and locks that shine . . .
The Lyric Year 133
O curious poison! yellow fruit!
Bright lotos that enchains the sense 1
That gives the maiden to the brute
And power gives to Impotence I
That gives to man his blindest wish
Of flaccid ease and flaming lust! —
For gold you have grown feverish,
And song has fallen into dust.
For gold you drive the alien slaves,
The Gentile fiercer than the Jew, —
Like men immured in living graves
You breathe and breed! Ah, not for you
The gorgeous canvas of the morn,
The sprinkled gayety of grass,
The sunlight dripping from the corn,
The stars that hold high-vestured mass,
The shattered grandeur of the hills,
The little leaping lovely ways
Of children, or what beauty spills
In summer greens and autumn grays.
These are not gained by any toil
Of groping hands that plead and plod,
134 The Lyric Year
But are the unimpoverished spoil
Poured from the bursting stores of God.
How often when the spring is near
Has one of you forgot his cares,
And gone, the Bridegroom of the year,
Filling with song the streets and stairs?
How often does the wild-bloom smell
Over the mountained city reach
To hold the tawny boys in spell
Or wake the aching girls to speech?
The clouds that drift across the sea
And drift across the jagged line
Of mist-enshrouded masonry —
Hast thou forgotten these are thine?
That drift across the jagged line
Which you, my people, reared and built
To be a temple and a shrine
For gods of iron and of gilt —
Aye, these are thine to heal thy heart,
To give thee back the thrill of Youth,
To seek therein the gold of Art,
And seek the broken shapes of Truth.
The Lyric Year 135
O vaulting walls that drive the wind
To feats of such fantastic fun,
You make men dull, you make men blind,
You mar the ritual of the sun;
The dramas of the dawn you mar,
The streaming tapestries of dusk —
For fruit of life the visions are
And things are but the fibred husk . . .
Lo, these who all unthinking strive
To ports they do not dimly guess —
Can any arts among them thrive?
Can they be bred to loveliness?
By strange design and veiled pretext
God's will upon the race is told,
For one year does not know the next,
And, youthful still, the world grows old —
And these who live from hour to hour
Know little of the mysteries
Nor stand aghast before a flower
Nor worship under wistful trees.
Yet maybe now there passes here
In reverential dream a boy,
136 The Lyric Year
Whose voice shall rise another year
And rouse the sleeping lords of joy . . .
Beat on then, O ye human seas,
Beat on to destiny or doom:
The world shall hear your harmonies
And follow in your widening flume;
Beat on, ye thousand thousand feet,
Beat on through unreturning ways;
Not mine to say whereto ye beat,
Not mine to scorn you or to praise;
The world has seen your shining bands
Thrown westward, binding sea to sea,
And heard your champing hammers drum
The music of your deity;
The world has seen your miracles
Of steel and steam and straining mass;
And yet shall see your fingers mould
A finer plaything ere you pass.
You, having brothers in all lands,
Shall teach to all lands brotherhood;
The harlot, toiling with her hands,
Shall lead the godly and the good.
The Lyric Year 137
And on some far-off silent day
A thinker gazing on a hill
Shall cast his staff and horn away
And answer to your clamoring will.
He shall bring back the faded bays,
The Muses to their ancient rule,
The temples to the market-place,
The genius nearer to the fool.
138 The Lyric Year
THE WHITE CITY
THOMAS S. JONES, JR.
TV/1" AY it not be that we at last shall win
•*••*• That Place long sought, whose towers
we both have seen?
Can we forget, who oft so near have been
That ever Music sounds above life's din!
For now there beats a melody within
Each moment, and white visions intervene,
Where Earth's dull clouds unfurl their misty
screen
And where our paths are dark and choked with
sin.
It lies so near, that, often in the dawn
Or when the stars first show their silver fire,
We seem on old lost ways we once have
trod:
Upon the grass a Light no more withdrawn,
Upon the wind a Song time cannot tire,
And in our hearts the very Voice of God.
The Lyric Year 139
I SING THE BATTLE
HARRY KEMP
T SING the song of the great clean guns that
•*• belch forth death at will.
Ah, but the wailing mothers, the lifeless forms
and still!
I sing the song of the billowing flags, the bugles
that cry before.
Ah, but the skeletons flapping rags, the lips
that speak no more !
I sing the clash of bayonets, of sabres that
flash and cleave.
And wilt thou sing the maimed ones, too, that
go with pinned-up sleeve?
I sing acclaimed generals that bring the victory
home.
Ah, but the broken bodies that drip like honey
comb!
14° The Lyric Year
I sing of hosts triumphant, long ranks of march
ing men.
And wilt thou sing the shadowy hosts that
never march again?
The Lyric Year 141
MARTIN
JOYCE KILMER
WHEN I am tired of earnest men,
Intense and keen and sharp and clever,
Pursuing fame with brush or pen
Or counting metal disks forever,
Then from the halls of shadowland
Beyond the trackless purple sea
Old Martin's ghost comes back to stand
Beside my desk and talk to me.
Still on his delicate pale face
A quizzical thin smile is showing,
His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace,
His kind blue eyes are gray and glowing.
He wears a brilliant-hued cravat,
A suit to match his soft gray hair,
A rakish stick, a knowing hat,
A manner blithe and debonair.
How good,', that he who always knew
That being lovely was a duty,
Should have gold halls to wander through
And should himself inhabit beauty.
The Lyric Year
How like his old unselfish way
To leave those halls of splendid mirth
And comfort those condemned to stay
Upon the bleak and sombre earth.
^f
Some people ask: What cruel chance
Made Martin's life so sad a story?
Martin? Why, he exhaled romance
And wore an overcoat of glory.
A fleck of sunlight in the street,
A horse, a book, a girl who smiled,
Such visions made each moment sweet
For this receptive, ancient child.
/* • •
Because it was old Martin's lot
To be, not make, a decoration,
Shall we then scorn him, having not
His genius of appreciation?
Rich joy and love he got and gave;
His heart was merry as his dress.
Pile laurel wreaths upon his grave
Who did not gain, but was, success. (
The Lyric Year 143
THE TIRED
FLORENCE KIPER
OUIET dead, whom others weep,
We have envy of thy sleep.
Dead in us is being's zest;
Easy would it be to rest.
Stooped so low are we by toil,
We are near the friendly soil.
Quiet dead, do seeds of spring
Ever stir thy slumbering?
Does the push of life anew
Wake in thee its yearnings too?
We would lie too deep and still
E'en to know the sentient thrill.
We would lie too still and deep
E'er to waken from our sleep.
Surely in the depths of earth
There is resting from rebirth.
Surely somewhere there is peace,
Where the tides of being cease.
Many have with life been blest.
Lord, Thy weary ask Thee rest.
144 The Lyric Year
MIRIAM
HERMAN E. KITTREDGE
TN a valley grim and lonely, where all sight
•* and sound tell only
Of the kingly castled grandeur of a long-
forgotten day —
O'er the toppling turrets hoary, where none
lives to tell the story
Of ill-fated love and glory — dreamily the
moonlight lay.
On the weed-grown walks I wandered — by the
unfed fountains pondered
As to what fair face, there glassed of yore,
had with the lilies vied —
Wandered through the ivied arches — mused
beneath o'er-spreading larches
Where no sunbeam ever parches — mused,
and in the silence, sighed.
Soon a weird reverberation filled my soul with
consternation,
Welling from the crumbling casements of a
solitary tower, —
The Lyric Year 145
Melancholy sound evoking in a rusty, muffled
croaking, —
Drear monotony provoking, — as it told the
midnight hour.
Scarcely had its iteration, adding awe to desola
tion,
Through deserted halls and secret ways
labyrinthine echoed round,
When an object most amazing fixed my eyes
in changeless gazing
As, its glowing form emblazing, it arose
from out the ground, —
Iridescent hues assembling, — all its gaudy plu
mage trembling
In the mellow silver moonlight, as, me-
thought, in days of yore
When the golden sun was shining, — its fair
mistress disinclining
To indulge in vain divining of the omen that
it bore.
Through the silent park parading, — never once
my sight evading, —
Toward the tower late resounding, proudly
moved the stately bird
146 The Lyric Year
In its royal vesture gleaming, while I followed
as in dreaming, —
Questioning my senses' seeming, — though I
uttered not a word.
Suddenly a sound was shattered into myriad
beats that clattered
In the distant flinty roadway, dimly mersed
in mystic light.
Was it youth, or sturdy yeomen? — brigand
brave, or friend, or foemen? —
Then the bird of evil omen vanished from
my startled sight.
At its magic disappearing, tremblingly I won
dered, fearing
That my senses had betrayed me — that no
clock had struck the hour —
That the peacock's plumage gleaming was a
wild, fantastic seeming —
Was the merest lunar dreaming — then a
light flashed in the tower —
Flashed and flashed, and kept repeating, as
though it would flash a greeting
To each footfall, faster beating, on the near-
ing rocky road,
The Lyric Year 147
Where a horseman large and larger looming
on a foamy charger, —
Looming large and looming larger, — waved
his sword, in answering code.
Halting, cautiously dismounting, as though to
himself recounting,
Step by step, some plot clandestine centered
in the lonely tower, —
Helmet, sword, and armor gleaming in the
moonlight o'er him streaming, —
Near his charger stood he, seeming paragon
of knighthood's flower.
While I gazed in admiration — now too numb
with consternation
To deny or further question my own senses
in the least —
Sable-robed for saying masses, there uprose
among the grasses,
Rustling as when light wind passes, a wan-
visaged, ghastly priest.
Leering at the knightly horseman as at hated
vandal Norseman
Bent on pagan purpose impious the holies to
despoil,
148 The Lyric Year
Stealthily he turned and, sneaking, as though
set on vengeance wreaking,
Made his way where steps uncreaking up a
lofty turret toil.
Scarcely had the shadows blended where his
skulking form ascended
When there glided forth a vision, from an
ivy-mantled door
In the tower late resounding, of such loveliness
astounding —
Of such loveliness dumfounding — as no man
had seen before.
Past the waking fountains, falling, where the
snowlike lilies, lolling,
Seemed as though on Heaven calling its own
purity to note,
Straight she came, with graceful tripping,
through the shadowy moonlight slip
ping,—
All my senses, bee-like, sipping, — to the
drawbridge o'er the moat.
On its pivot newly turning, — tremulous, as
with the yearning
Of the hearts in anguish burning on each
foe-defying bank, —
The Lyric Year 149
Ere its seeming age-long hinging brought its
ends to safe impinging,
Beauty was in terror cringing, and the soul
within me sank.
Forth, as girt for battle, rushing, came her
lord, with anger flushing,
In response to timely warning, from the dis
tant turret's gloom,
And with sword and imprecation, — listening to
no oblation
Of eternal consecration, — forced her to a
watery tomb.
Forward sprang the knightly lover, as the
drawbridge clanged above her,
O'er the sable shrouded water of the deep-
ingulfing moat;
And his dangling scabbard's crashing kept in
time with every clashing
Of the blades like lightning flashing round
about his gleaming coat.
Suddenly a loud lamenting, as of some lost soul
repenting,
Rose from where a priestly figure, bartering
malice for despair,
150 The Lyric Year
Heeded not the clashing duel, heeded not the
gashing cruel, —
Recking not a ruby jewel, sparkling on the
silver air.
Frantic, — sobbing, — wildly wailing, — of the
saints in vain availing, —
Wringing hands and hair disheveled, — paced
he madly to and fro,
Gazing at the frowning tower that had served
as Beauty's bower
Till it sounded with the hour — then upon
her tomb below.
Paused he now, on mania verging, with his
wavering shadow merging
Where his soul, in desperation, on some ob
ject seemed to dote.
Then a sound of water splashing met and min
gled with the clashing
Of the angry swords, still flashing, as he
plunged into the moat.
Thrust on thrust — successful parry; each the
other seemed to harry —
Long the issue seemed to tarry, till the san
guine cavalier,
The Lyric Year 151
Tiger-like, his foeman rushing, set a crimson
fountain gushing
That, to pallid silence hushing, changed the
drawbridge to a bier.
Then, methought, his purpose pondered. Then,
methought, his footsteps wandered
Toward me, as I froze with horror, brook
ing not a breathing sound.
Then — O direfulness appalling ! — bare made
he his breast, and, falling,
Sank upon his sword-point, — calling Miriam!
— to the gory ground.
Miriam, I echoing uttered; and an iterant mur
mur muttered
Miriam — then something fluttered, and I
quickly turned around,
When a peacock, plumage trembling, — gaudy
ocelli resembling
Myriad evil eyes dissembling, — rose again
from out the ground.
With its tail erect and quivering, crept it
toward me — caused a shivering —
Like a many-headed cobra gloating in its
luring spell.
152 The Lyric Year
And I took to backward pacing, as the fowl,
my fear embracing, —
Never once an inch retracing, — forced me
where the foeman fell; —
Forced me, till, with many a tumble, I could
hear the drawbridge rumble —
Till, methought, I heard a grumble from a
gruesome, upturned face.
Then, the shame within me burning, I, in
pride, the peacock spurning,
Pondered, that, some way discerning, I might
flee the frightful place.
Long I mused, my courage tussling with the
rasping and the rustling
Of the fowl, triumphant, — bustling, menac
ing, — athwart my way,
When a plan of liberation reached a sudden
consummation
With the raucous intonation of the knightly
charger's neigh.
At that sound the peacock vanished, and I
sprang as one who, banished
To the realms of haunting Horror, spies a
means of quick escape —
The Lyric Year 153
Sprang to where the charger waited for his
master long belated, —
Champing, stamping, irritated, — lashing tail
and arching nape.
Straightway to the saddle leaping, raised I rein,
when, circling, sweeping,
Made he for the shadowy vista of the road
way whence he came, —
O'er the clattering stones careering, as though
his new burden fearing —
Then his sides, my limp limbs nearing, sent
a freezing through my frame.
Onward, in a course unveering, — hedges, boul
ders, brooklets clearing, —
(Moon-dim cliffs and caverns leering), —
clung I to that icy horse —
Over moor and meadow miry — crags where
eagles have their eyrie —
Like a wanton, wild Valkyrie in some legend
of the Norse.
Onward, till the dark grew dimmer; onward,
till, methought, a shimmer
Grew into a pallid glimmer where the day is
wont to break.
The Lyric Year
Was I mad? or was I dreaming?— then a lone
star o'er me beaming,
And the landscape by me streaming, told
that I was sane, awake.
Onward, in a valley narrow, till it froze my
very marrow;
Onward — then a golden arrow from the
quiver of the dawn :
And I felt the saddle sinking till I stood, be
wildered, blinking,
On the ground, my senses linking, and my
ghostly mount was gone.
The Lyric Year 155
THE UNKNOWN BROTHERS
(After reading the Greek Anthology)
LOUIS V. LEDOUX
CINGING band by song united
^ When the blue /Egean plains
Girdled isles where lovers lighted
Lamps in Kypris' seaward fanes;
Singing Brothers, earth enfolden,
What of you and of your olden
Music now? What still remains?
Scattered blooms surviving only
As the petal holds the rose,
In the garden where the lonely
Scarlet flower of Sappho blows;
And of some no single token —
Leaf or bud, or blossom broken,
Now the mounded garden shows.
Was there lack of exaltation
In the burden of your song?
156 The Lyric Year
Did you fail in consecration?
Proved the path of Beauty long?
Did you pause for pleasant resting?
Swerve or falter in your questing?
Have the ages done you wrong?
Some there may have been who faltered
By the bright ^Egean foam,
Seeing life with vision altered
As the soul forgot jts home;
Some, it may be, in confusion
After Youth's divine illusion,
Turned to till the kindly loam.
Some there are in all the ages
Lonely vigil fail to keep;
Some allured by wisdom's pages
Chart the sky and sound the deep;
Some give up the long foregoing —
Human touches, reaping, sowing;
Some with Sappho take the leap.
But the most wait unrepining,
Hopeful when all hope is fled,
For fulfilment of the shining
Dawn that lingers far ahead;
The Lyric Year 157
And by paths of no returning,
Where the hearth-fires are not burning,
March companioned by the dead.
Through neglect or loud derision,
Mocked at by the worldly-wise,
Bearing burdens of misprision,
Seeking truth and finding lies,
Follow they the glow or glimmer
Of the vision growing dimmer
As the death-mist fills their eyes.
Never can you be requited,
Unknown Brothers, staunch and brave;
You the bitter gods have slighted,
Only half their gift they gave, —
Gave the patience of endeavor,
Kept fruition back forever,
Felled the cypress by your grave.
You are passed; but unknown Brothers,
Finding faith of small avail,
Follow now as followed others,
And I pause to bid them hail:
Brothers are they in believing,
Some it may be are achieving,
But they triumph though they fail.
158 The Lyric Year
TO ROBERT BROWNING
AGNES LEE
T_TE who leaves a glimmer of his soul
A A In a bit of marble, in a song,
He shall win the unseen aureole
Set above the stars the ages long,
And the fleeting import of his days
Echoes of eternity shall praise.
We of earth thy mastery would hail,
Iron hand that shook the gates of art,
Crumpled rock to ridge's flowering trail,
Yours, O feet, that, following no chart,
Forged a future, or in spaces free
Walked the winding floor of some old sea.
Poet of life's ordinances deep —
Cities lying restless in the night,
Tossing, turning ere they fall asleep —
Meadow-streams in peace of pale moonlight,
We, the tossing city, we, the stream,
Share thy noble heritage of dream!
The Lyric Year 159
Ah ! There is a name within thy name
Known to love and lyric everywhere,
Lettered on the heart in strokes of flame,
Hers who wrought in love's encloistered air
Gathering the guerdon of her hours,
Holding up to thee and heaven her flowers.
Call we unto her, thou art in sight,
Call we unto thee, she glides to us.
And before the garden of delight
Where forever song is tremulous
Two beloved forms Time radiates,
Passing in together through the gates.
160 The Lyric Year
SHADOW
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
TILTHEN leaf and flower are newly made,
And bird and butterfly and bee
Are at their summer posts again;
When all is ready, lo ! 'tis she,
Suddenly there after soft rain —
The deep-lashed dryad of the shade.
Shadow! the fairest gift of June,
Gone like .the rose the winter through,
Save in the ribbed anatomy
Of ebon line the moonlight drew,
Stark on the snow, of tower or tree,
Like letters of a dead man's rune.
Dew-breathing shade, all summer lies
In the cool hollow of thy breast,
Thou moth-winged creature darkly fair;
The very sun steals down to rest
Within thy swaying tendrilled hair,
And forest-flicker of thine eyes.
The Lyric Year 161
Made of all shapes that flit and sway,
And mass, and scatter in the breeze,
And meet and part, open and close;
Thou sister of the clouds and trees,
Thou daintier phantom of the rose,
Thou nun of the hot and honeyed day.
Misdeemed art thou of those who hold
Darkness thy soul, thy dwelling-place
Night and its stars; nay! all of light
Wert thou begot, all flowers thy face,
And, hushed in thee, all colors bright
Hide from the noon their blue and gold.
Thy voice the song of hidden rills,
The sigh deep-bosomed silence heaves
From the full heart of happy things, —
The lap of water-lily leaves,
The noiseless language of the wings
Of evening making strange the hills.
1 62 The Lyric Year
SATURNALIA
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
I
TIT'ITH whirl of skirt and scent of hair
And click of heels and castanets
She dances in the fevered air,
She dances on the edge of doom,
She dances in the velvet gloom
Of slender, gold-tipped cigarettes;
She dances and I cannot bear
The fragrance of her flowing hair.
Her bosom is a morbid white
Under the sharp electric light
Where pallid, eager figures sit
Fawning on her with satyr eyes;
But she is cold and exquisite,
And her glance empty of replies.
She dances, dances, nothing stirs
Save fluttering hands and fervid feet,
For rigid is that smile of hers,
The Lyric Year 163
That luring laughter of the street.
She hurls aside her castanets
And beats upon a tambourine,
And flashes o'er the painted scene;
Across the smoke of cigarettes
Floats to me through the fevered air
The savor of her dewy hair.
Her magic throttles me, and dims
My vision unto aught but her:
Far, faint the calling noises whir:
The pallor of her fragile limbs
Must cool my burning side; the scent
Of her warm raiment must be near.
I have no hope, I have no fear,
My brain, my will, my soul are spent.
Drive forth the crowd! Darken the light!
She must be mine . . . mine . . . mine . . .
to-night . . .
II
The pale dawn hurries up the street,
The gaunt, black houses turn to gray;
Rumbling on jagged stones a dray
Makes my nerves tremble and my heart beat.
The bars are open: ragged, queer,
Desolate children run to fetch
1 64 The Lyric Year
Their father's morning quart of beer;
Yonder a sodden, sullen wretch
Makes mouths at me as though I were
His boon-companion of the street;
The sharp chill of the morning air
Tingles in chest and hands and feet.
Ill
I wander — and the sordid scene,
Forecourt of writhing forms of hell,
Bestial, superb, abominable,
Fades — and I come where wide, serene,
Lustrous with the triumphing sun
The river flows athwart the sky —
Pearl, amber and vermilion —
And earth, instinct with deity,
Breathes the old rapture of the dawn.
And suddenly the paths wherein
My erring soul and sense had gone —
Glitter of revel, obscene din —
Obscure the lustral light that fills
My vision — and I do not dare
Turn aching eyes unto the bare
Peaks of the everlasting hills . . .
Thou fool ! There is no curse but fear.
Behind the veil of stars and seas,
The Lyric Year 165
Silent, magnanimous, austere
Sit the Eternal Presences,
Who wrought thee not to alternate
Between blind lust and blinder shame,
But who assigned thy mystic fate
Unto the stars, unto the flame.
Once more shall beat the tambourine,
Once more shall click the castanets,
On the imperishable scene
Beyond the glow of cigarettes,
The Dancer of an endless day
Once more shall dance thy soul away.
And from this ardor of the sense,
Even from the Dancer's painted mien,
Thy soul must wring a recompense
Inviolable and serene.
Stung by the blight of passionate scars,
Tried in the earth-born flame of thee,
Thou shalt at last hear resonantly
The Jubilate of the stars.
Deep in thee the immortal fire,
Unborrowed or of ape or clod,
Must magically change desire
Into the yearnings that aspire
Nearer the Singing Spheres of God.
1 66 The Lyric Year
O. HENRY
NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY
"He could not forget that he was a Sidney/'
TS this Sir Philip Sidney, this loud clown,
A The darling of the glad and gaping town?
This is that dubious hero of the press
Whose slangy tongue and insolent address
Were spiced to rouse on Sunday afternoon
The man with yellow journals round him
strewn.
We laughed and dozed, then roused and read
again
And vowed O. Henry funniest of men.
He always worked a triple-hinged surprise
To end the scene and make one rub his eyes.
He comes with vaudeville, with stare and leer.
He comes with megaphone and specious cheer.
His troupe, too fat or short or long or lean,
Step from the pages of the magazine
The Lyric Year 167
With slapstick or sombrero or with cane,
The rube, the cowboy or the masher vain.
They overact each part. But at the height
Of revel and absurdity's delight
The masks fall off for one queer instant there
And show real faces: faces full of care
And desperate longing; love that's hot or cold;
And subtle thoughts, and countenances bold.
The masks go back. 'Tis one joke more.
Laugh on!
The goodly grown-up company is gone.
No doubt, had he occasion to address
The brilliant court of purple-clad Queen Bess,
He would have wrought for them the best he
knew
And led more loftily his actor-crew.
How coolly he misquoted. 'Twas his art:
Slave-scholar, who misquoted — from the heart !
So when he slapped his back with friendly roar
JEsop awaited him, without the door, —
^Esop the Greek, who made dull masters laugh
With little tales of fox and dog and calf.
And, be it said, 'mid these his pranks so odd,
With something nigh to chivalry he trod,
And oft the drear and driven would defend —
The little shop-girl's knight, unto the end.
1 68 The Lyric Year
Yea, he had passed, ere we could understand
The blade of Sidney glimmered in his hand.
Yea, ere we knew, Sir Philip's sword was drawn
With valiant cut and thrust, and he was gone.
The Lyric Year 169
THE TEMPEST
G. CONSTANT LOUNSBERY
^HROUGH the hours caressed of the sun
•*• and shadow
Sleeps the summer day in her deep-leaved
bowers,
With a lilt of leaves and low laughing waters
Drowsed in the sunlight.
On outspreading wings from the haunts of
Heaven,
Down the mountains, down the astonished
valley,
Undenied, and rending the rocks asunder
Plunges the tempest.
Ah, the quivering lightning that stabs the dark
ness,
Ah, the awakened voice of triumphant
thunder :
All the earth is shaken, the waters tremble,
Fearing the fury.
1 70 The Lyric Year
So with the face of flame and with locks un
loosened,
With a rush of wings and disastrous laughter
Love has caught me sleeping, and storms me
onward
Faster and faster.
* * *
In the untroubled calm of the tender twilight
Sleeps the Earth; but ah, all my soul within me
Cries to thee: O sweet, draw thou near, be
friend me —
Heed me and hear me.
Nay, thou shalt not leave me alone, and lonely,
Nay, I will not loose thee except thou love me,
Lean thy face and lift thou my lips, and kiss
me —
Ah ! Aphrodite !
The Lyric Year 171
HILL-TOP
ARVIA MACKAYE
/^LIMBING through a hole in the fence,
^* Skipping through twisted steeple-bush,
Away, away I wander hence,
Up brambly slopes my path to push
Soon where I come to a little stream
Foam is falling fair as snow;
It glistens down a sunny beam
To where — to where I do not know.
To the mossy hill-top then I run,
Where the fairies' golden goblets lie,
And bask in the dreamy, setting sun,
Till, with a twinkle, he says Good-bye :
And there I lie and play and sing,
And sit in the soft moss, cool and green,
And watch the pink clouds make a ring
In the glow of the sleeping face unseen.
The Lyric Year
THE SIBYL
PERCY MACKAYE
[To Edward Gordon Craig: "On the Art of
the Theatre."}
/CLOUDY, vast, the caverned stage
Glows with twilight. — Where are they:
Ribald love, and conscious rage,
Joyless banter, captious quibble,
Brass and bauble of Broadway?
What are such to her — the Sibyl,
Where she dreams beside her solemn
Single column
In the quiet? —
Bats in swoon,
Gnats in riot,
Midgets swarming 'gainst the moon:
Such are they
Beneath the grace
And the rapture of her face.
The Lyric Year 173
She will waken. Long she's slumbered
Through the noisy years unnumbered,
Since her radiant limbs withdrew —
Swift, adept,
Divinely calm —
From the leering satyrs' view
To the visioned silences
Where she slept,
Pillowed in her bended arm
On the starred Acropolis.
She has wakened! She has smiled
With a tender, large delight
At the spell-charms of her child,
Her own spirit's acolyte.
At his wand-touch she has risen
In the mind of man — her prison
And her temple. Lo, she moves!
Sensuous, with form of fable,
Most divinely reasonable,
Not the comets through the ether,
Not the planets in their grooves
Tread a more harmonious measure
Than she paces, in her pleasure,
On the silences beneath her.
For the silences are thrumming
As with heart-beats at her coming,
174 The Lyric Year
And the Passions pause aghast
At the glorious decision
Of her movements, as they mark
Wild vivaces of her vision,
Deep andantes of her dark;
And her gestures — as she lifts
Pillared vistas of the past,
Spacious visions of the marches
Of to-morrow, gracious arches
Through whose rifts
Beauty beckons, — hold no mirror
To the error
And the grossness of the age,
Mimic not
Whims and gropings of emotion,
Atrophies and tricks of thought,
But her rapture is the rage
Of man's spirit in its fullness,
Purged of accident and dullness;
And her music, born of motion,
Recreates the spirit's trance,
Weaving symphonies of sunlight,
Waking chorals from the wan light
Of the Pleiads in their dance.
Through her cloudy, caverned stage
Bursts the morning: and she stands
The Lyric Year i?5
In the quiet, by her solemn
Shining column,
Gazing forth serenely glad
On the roaring, dazzled lands
Where the little children, clad
In the garments of her spirit,
On enchanted feet come streaming,
For she knows they shall inherit
All the ages of her dreaming.
Then the sated ones and blinded,
And the timid, callous minded,
Clutch the children's sleeves, and stare,
Crying: "What behold you there?
There is nothing !" — But the lover,
And the young of soul, his friend,
And the artist, follow after
The children in their laughter,
And the daring half discover,
And the happy comprehend.
176 The Lyric Year
MEDITATION OVER A SKULL
CHARLES H. MACKINTOSH
FN this strange Cup of ivory, love-wrought,
"•• Once brimmed the gray and golden Wine of
Thought.
Cast it aside! The World has drained the
Wine:
And lo, New Grapes are ripening on the Vine!
Press me New Grapes, and twine about my
brow
The leaves of all the Pasts that make the Now:
This very Vine that yields Itself anew
Roots in the myriad mould of such as You.
When the Last Drop drips from my empty
Cup,
And when the thirsty Vine has drawn it up,
Shall I begrudge the heritage of Then,
And bid New Grapes brim my Old Cup again?
The Lyric Year 177
Or shall I hope that some discerning Guest
Will think my Cup more precious than the rest,
Bear It away, and set It on some shelf
Because It held the Wine that was Myself?
Press me New Grapes ; sufficient to my Task
That I may offer Drink to all who ask;
I shall not need refilling, nor a Shrine,
For I shall live in Them that drink my Wine !
178 The Lyric Year
ANNE HATHAWAY ALONE AT AVON
CATHERINE MARKHAM
/T*O put away love in the grave's safe keeping,
A Leaving a handful of roses there;
To know that 'tis only death that is heaping
The silence between two hearts that care —
For this indeed may a woman go weeping,
And yet have a joy to wear.
But O for the grave to invade the living —
To see love die in the eyes love wore;
To know, whatever the asking or giving,
The love that tarried will speak no more;
Lost like the snows in the wild sea's sieving
Is the love that goes this door.
Whatever the measure of earth's bereaving,
Whatever the burden of life's arrears,
O the last-wrung drop of the utmost grieving,
The salt leached out of our human tears
Is hers who watches love's careless leaving,
And faces the loveless years.
The Lyric Year f 179
THE TESTING
EDWIN MARKHAM
TT7HEN, in the dim beginning of the years,
God mixed in man the raptures and the
tears
And scattered thro' his brain the starry stuff,
He said, "Behold! Yet this is not enough,
For I must test his spirit to make sure
That he can dare the Vision and endure.
"I will withdraw my Face»
Veil me in shadow for a certain space,
And leave behind only a broken clue,
A crevice where the glory glimmers thro',
Some whisper from the sky,
Some footprint in the road to track Me by.
"I will leave man to make the fateful guess,
Will leave him torn between the No and Yes,
Leave him unresting till he rests in Me,
Drawn upward by that choice that makes him
free —
Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose,
With all in life to win or all to lose."
i8o The Lyric Year
RENASCENCE
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
ALL I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
The Lyric Year 181
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And — sure enough! — I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And, reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and — lo ! — Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
1 82 The Lyric Year
And present, and forevermore.
The universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not, — nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out. — Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire, —
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each, — then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri ;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
The Lyric Year 183
I saw at sea a great fog-bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine ; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me !
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the Weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more, — there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
1 84 The Lyric Year
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who's six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
The Lyric Year 185
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear ic; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you !
0 God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud's gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
1 ceased; and, through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
1 86 The Lyric Year
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and — crash!
Before the wild wind's whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain's cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see, —
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
The Lyric Year 187
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell, —
I know not how such things can be ! —
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah ! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
0 God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
1 know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
1 88 The Lyric Year
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart !
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, —
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat — the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
The Lyric Year 189
TO-DAY
ANGELA MORGAN
be alive in such an age !
With every year a lightning page
Turned in the world's great wonder book
Whereon the leaning nations look.
When men speak strong for brotherhood,
For peace and universal good,
When miracles are everywhere
And every inch of common air
Throbs a tremendous prophecy
Of greater marvels yet to be.
O thrilling age !
O willing age !
When steel and stone and rail and rod
Become the avenue of God —
A trump to shout His thunder through
To crown the work that man may do.
To be alive in such an age !
When man, impatient of his cage,
Thrills to the soul's immortal rage
190 The Lyric Year
For conquest — reaches goal on goal,
Travels the earth from pole to pole,
Garners the tempests and the tides
And on a Dream Triumphant rides.
When, hid within a lump of clay,
A light more terrible than day
Proclaims the presence of that Force
Which hurls the planets on their course,
O age with wings!
O age that flings
A challenge to the very sky,
Where endless realms of conquest lie.
When earth, on tiptoe, strives to hear
The message of a sister sphere,
Yearning to reach the cosmic wires
That flash Infinity's desires.
To be alive in such an age!
That thunders forth its discontent
With futile creed and sacrament,
Yet craves to utter God's intent,
Seeing beneath the world's unrest
Creation's huge, untiring quest,
And through Tradition's broken crust
The flame of Truth's triumphant thrust;
Below the seething thought of man
The push of a stupendous Plan.
The Lyric Year 191
O age of strife!
O age of life!
When Progress rides her chariot high,
And on the borders of the sky
The signals of the century
Proclaim the things that are to be ...
The rise of woman to her place,
The coming of a nobler race.
To be alive in such an age —
To live to it,
To give to it!
Rise, soul, from thy despairing knees.
What if thy lips have drunk the lees?
Fling forth thy sorrow to the wind —
And link thy hope with humankind . . .
The passion of a larger claim
Will put thy puny grief to shame.
Breathe the world thought, do the world deed,
Think hugely of thy brother's need.
And what thy woe, and what thy weal?
Look to the work the times reveal !
Give thanks with all thy flaming heart —
Crave but to have in it a part.
Give thanks and clasp thy heritage —
To be alive in such an age!
192 The Lyric Year
THE BELOVED
BERTHA NEWBERRY
T AM made still and strange . . . What is
•*- it cries
So faint and thin against the trembling rain?
Hear not, it is a wistful voice that lies!
A little love that drags a heavy chain!
What is this glimmer, pale as languid thought,
That strives to hold the drifting mists apart?
Be still, my Love; it is the hand that sought
To keep thee from my safe and loving heart!
My dreaming hand is tangled in Thy hair,
For fumes of sleep are perfume of Thy
breath;
Thy face, Beloved, seeks me through the air,
And drowsily I feel Thy arms, O Death.
Now let Thy stilling kisses find my mouth,
While Gemini, that twinned sign of my birth,
Fades green along the chambers of the south
Beyond the solid ramparts of the Earth.
The Lyric Year 193
THE WHISPER OF EARTH
EDWARD j. O'BRIEN
TN the misty hollow shyly greening branches
Soften to the south wind, bending to the
rain.
From the moistened earthland flutter little
whispers,
Breathing hidden beauty, innocent of stain.
Little plucking fingers tremble through the
silence,
Little silent voices sigh the dawn of spring,
Little burning earth-flames break the awful
stillness,
Little crying wind-sounds come before the
King.
Powers, dominations urge the budding of the
crocus,
Cherubim are singing in the moist cool stone,
Seraphim are calling through the channels of
the lily,
God has heard the earth-cry and journeys to
His throne.
194 The Lyric Year
WAVE PASSIONS
THEODORE EUGENE OERTEL
TTEAR the surf upon the sands:
•*" Hear the laughing waves upon the
golden sands:
What a merry, merry din,
As they chase each other in:
As they leap, leap, leap,
From the bosom of the deep, everywhere,
To clasp the slender fingers of the air, —
Of the flower-scented air,
Of the smiling maiden air
As they kiss the trailing tresses of her wonder
ful, soft hair;
While they fashion dainty garlands such as
Naiads love to wear,
Made of bubbles with their tints
Iridescent and pearl glints;
While resplendent,
For a pendant
That will tinkle like a bell,
Drops a periwinkle shell.
The Lyric Year 195
Hear the surf upon the sands:
Hear the maddened waves upon the shrink
ing sands:
How they gnash their teeth and roar,
As they rush upon the shore,
As they dash themselves to foam upon the
shore.
How they pound, pound, pound,
With a doleful, hollow sound:
How they hammer, hammer, hammer,
As with wild, unceasing clamor
They reach upward for the moon, —
For the cloud-encrusted moon:
For the scared and pallid moon:
Drunken devils how they swagger as they stag
ger while they yell
The pestilential message that is yammered down
in hell,
Through the confines of the night;
The melancholy night:
Through the marches of the lone and weeping
night.
Hear the surf upon the sands:
Hear the sullen waves upon the sodden
sands.
196 The Lyric Year
They are muttering and groaning,
And their sinfulness condoning,
As they part the drifting tresses of their dead:
Of the dumb, accusing dead,
With their prayerful arms outspread,
In an attitude appealing,
And a rigidness revealing
All the terrors they have known:
While their bleary eyes are bare,
In a horror-haunted stare,
And their pleading lips are frozen in a mute,
despairing moan.
While they lave,
Every wave
Is fashioning a grave.
As they boom, boom, boom,
They are digging at a tomb:
Are hollowing a damp and sandy tomb.
Hear the surf upon the sands:
Hear the sobbing waves upon the sighing
sands :
With demeanor penitential,
And low voices reverential,
They are smoothing with their hands,
With their patient, tender hands,
The Lyric Year 201
He whom a dream hath possessed knoweth no
more of sorrow,
At death and the dropping of leaves and the
fading of suns he smiles,
For a dream remembers no past and scorns the
desire of a morrow,
And a dream in a sea of doom sets surely the
ultimate isles.
He whom a dream hath possessed treads the
impalpable marches,
From the dust of the day's long road he
leaps to a laughing star,
And the ruin of worlds that fall he views from
eternal arches,
And rides God's battlefield in a flashing and
golden car.
202 The Lyric Year
WOMAN-SONG
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
I
'VT'OU that sleep not, Shadow moving at mid
night,
To and fro, where the windows glimmer and
darken,
To and fro, where you with your ailing treas
ure
Lean down to harken:
You that sleep not, Shadow behind the case
ment ! —
Toilful Shadow, gaunt from the cup of sorrow;
Humble, ceaseless, shaping late in the mid
night
Bread of To-morrow:
You, wan Shadow, wasting the light of the
taper,
Light of your eyes, at a stitch-by-stitch adorn
ing;
Starven star-light, only to pale as stars do,
Toward the gray morning:
The Lyric Year 203
You that keep your watch by the countless
windows,
Waking, working, — there where they gleam
and darken,
Even you, that over the wide world's breath
ing
Lean down and harken:
Dark Immortal ! — Shadow of mortal woman,
Why do you wake, when the sentries sleep, and
the sages? —
Towering Shadow, flung on the dark of night
time,
Dark of the ages?
(Loud from the tower
Swung the Bell.
And the sentry called
. . . 'All's . . well!9
The candle flared
Before the night.
The Shadow trimmed the light.)
II
What new pride, Shadow of ceaseless vigil,
Knocks at your heart? — Or what far folly of
questing
204 The Lyric Year
Stirs you now, between the loom and the
cradle ? —
Woman unresting !
What vain longing, — circle and cry of sea-
birds —
Widens your eyes with the sleepless light be
side you?
All the besieging years, your toil and your
burden
Who hath denied you?
Who hath said to you, 'Rest; — yea, rest for
your portion!'
Who forbade to your eyes their watch or their
weeping?
Who withheld the helpless years of the man-
child
From your sole keeping?
Mind of the Moon, — lo, some moon-madness
is on you!
Ours the folly, leaving you free to wander,
Gathering herbs for healing, under the moon
light,
Where you might ponder:
The Lyric Year 205
Ways and ways of the Moon; her song and
her strangeness;
Spinning, — singing, even as her earth-born
daughters
Spin and sing; yet laying her strong command
ment
Over the waters.
(The echoes died
Around the hour.
Back went the doves,
Back to the tower.
The house was blind
With sleep, within
The Shadow turned, to spin.)
Ill
Is it some new thirst of a shining peril? —
Glorious Death men sing as they go to meet
him
Far and far? — But turn thee again to thy
shelter! —
There shalt thou meet him; —
206 The Lyric Year
Greet him, speak him fair, — hostess and hand
maid!
Death for a year-long guest, what pride should
he kindle?
Face-to-face with thy smiling eyes, — and hold
ing
Flax for thy spindle !
Is it for men's red harvest, weariless Woman?
Spoils of empire? Triumph of shuddering
wonder? —
You, who fought with the vultures over your
treasure,
Yea, for such plunder!
You who shore your hair by the walls of Car
thage ! —
Gave your beauteous hair, but to arm the bow
men, —
Smiting white through the long-spent storm of
arrows,
Lightnings of omen!
(One by one,
The stars went by;
The Shadow harkened
For a cry.
The Lyric Year 207
The sentry went,
Whose watch was done.
. . . The Shadow spun.)
IV
Not yet spent, — with the night of that endless
travail? —
Sons of men, slaying the sons of mothers ! —
Not yet spent? — For all shed life of your
giving?
Yours, not another's.
Who but you, — spun of your breath with your
beauty?
Plucked the light of the stars you fought in
their courses? —
Light, for the morning-gaze of the torn young
eye-lids
Trampled of horses!
Who but you, — to bear the bloom and the bur
den —
Breath and death, and doom of the world, for
your share.
Breath for men, and men that shall die to
morrow; —
Glory of warfare!
208 The Lyric Year
Breath for men; yea, bodies for men, — for
women :
Women that breathe and bloom, and bring
forth in sorrow
Men, and men, to nurture and rear as worship.
Men, for To-morrow.
Doom, — doom, deeper than seas can fathom,
Darker than all the dark of the tides up-
buoying
Lordly ships: — that glory of Love should
kindle
Life, for destroying!
(The tide ebbed;
The tide turned;
The wind died;
The taper burned.
The cock crew
That night was done.
The Shadow spun.)
The Lyric Year 209
Woman, Woman, now that the lifted voices —
Lifted never till now, — call thee to slumber;
Surely mayest thou shut from thy mothering
eyelids
Griefs without number!
Now the covering darkness lifts from the
house-tops,
Baring stark those wretched beyond their tell
ing, —
Count not thou their wants and their wounds !
— nay, go not
Forth of thy dwelling.
What wilt thou see? — The thousand shames
and hungers;
Old despairs, clinging thy thousand pities !
What wilt thou hear? — Save all that must
faint and famish
Through all thy cities?
The morning-stars
Were laughing all.
The Shadow heard them call.
210 The Lyric Year
The darkness called her by her name.
The Shadow rose and came.
There were the early stars astir
And one and all they laughed at her.
O sister wise they sung to her;
Old songs, old words they flung to her,
She knew again, — again
The olden laughter of a star,
From long ago, and far and far!
But all their music and their mirth
Fell as the little words of earth,
Unto an old refrain'. —
Silver laughter and golden scorn,
Across the soothsay of gray morn,
With the smiting of sweet rain.
VI
'Spin, — spin! Thou who wert made for spin
ning!
We are only the stars. Lo, thou art human.
Thou art the Spinner, — yea from the far be
ginning,
Thou who art Woman.
The Lyric Year 211
'Forth, come forth, — unto the uttermost bor
ders;
Forth, where the old despairs and shames im
plore thee, —
Forth of thy small shut house, — where thy
dominion
Widens before thee.
'Spin, — spin! Lift up thy radiant distaff!
Spinner thou art, — yea, from the dim begin
ning,
Life and the web of All Life, and the hosts and
their glory; —
Thine was the spinning.
'Spin, — spin! while that the Three were spin
ning,
Thou, behind them, gavest their flax, O
Mother;
Thou, the spinner and spun and the thread
that was severed; —
Thou, not another.
'Weave, — spin! Lift up thy heart with thy
spinning; —
Look and behold it, shading thine eyes from
our laughter: —
212 The Lyric Year
Life and the glory of Life and the hosts of
the living,
Here and hereafter!
'Warp, — weft, woven of flame and rapture;
Out of the Moon, silence and white desire;
Out of the Sun, wonder and will and vision,
One with his fire.
'Fear not, fear not! Let not thy lowliness
draw thee
Back to thy small shut house, O thou too lowly!
Lo, in thy shrining hands the web of thy glory,
Blinding and holy.
'Never thine own; — not for thy poor posses
sion, —
Sitting in darkness, spent with a dim en
deavor; —
Life and the web of All Life, and the hosts of
the living
Now and forever.
'Rise, come, with the Sun to thy chorusing
vineyards !
We are but stars, and fading. Lo, thou art
human.
Put on thy beautiful garments, O thou Beloved,
Thou who art Woman.
The Lyric Year 213
'Rise, come! Blow out thy tremulous rush
light;
Come, where the golden tides give cry of
warning: —
Over the dark, flooding the world with wonder,
Flows the first Morning!
'Rise, come! Known, at last, of the nations; —
Even of this thy world, thou hadst in thy keep
ing. —
Thou sole sentinel over the dark of the ages! —
Love, the Unsleeping.'
214 The Lyric Year
THE CRISIS
MURIEL RICE
TT\EAR, do not ask for more.
•*"^ What more than friendship; the quick
clasp of hand,
Those words, when wordlessly we understand,
The smile enriched with every smile of yore?
Dear, do not ask for more.
Dear, do not ask for less.
What less than friendship; the hands free
again,
The careless laughter, careless of Love's pain,
And thoughts a little wayward to confess?
Dear, do not ask for less.
And must I give thee all,
All beyond friendship; my bright years to be
Caught up in thine, a single destiny, —
Or wilt thou pass forever from my call?
Dear, must I give thee all?
The Lyric Year 215
FEAR NOT, O SOUL
MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS
FEAR not, O soul, that thou shalt sink too
low!
Infinity is deep as is the sea;
And depth on depth is mercy under thee,
And calm and limitless those waters flow;
Profound beyond what human heart can know,
Below the scorn of men, though deep it be,
The waters that overwhelm thee, buoyantly
Shall bear thee up if thou wilt have it so.
And fear not thou, although thou climbest high.
Toil upward. Still the mountain summits yield
A farther, fairer world beneath the cloud;
Rivers and lakes reflecting back the sky,
Peaks beyond peaks, and valleys new-revealed:
O soul of mine, be humble, and be proud!
216 The Lyric Year
PAT
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER
/"pHERE'S a lure in your laugh an' a spell
in your smile, Pat;
An' I know well there's roguery in iv'ry wile,
Pat;
An' it's achin' I am with your laughin',
An' it's achin' I am for your laughin',
Pat.
There's a wail in your song an' the keenin'
rings high, Pat;
There's a fear in your joy an' a pang in your
cry, Pat;
An' it's wistful I am with your dreamin',
An' it's wistful I am for your dreamin',
Pat.
There's a croon in your heart an' a plaint in
your soul, Pat;
There's a bliss in your grief an' wealth in your
dole, Pat;
The Lyric Year 217
An' I'm lovin' ye, dear, for your carin',
An' I'm lovin' ye, dear, for not carin',
Pat.
2i8 The Lyric Year
PSALM
JESSIE E. SAMPTER
/T^HEY have burned to Thee many tapers in
-*- many temples:
I burn to Thee the taper of my heart.
They have sought Thee at many altars, they
have carried lights to find Thee :
I find Thee in the white fire of my heart.
They have gone forth restlessly, forging many
shapes, images where they seek Thee,
idols of deed and thought:
Thou art the fire of my deeds; Thou art the
white flame of my dreams.
O vanity! They know things and codes and
customs,
They believe what they see to be true ; but they
know not Thee,
Thou art within the light of their eyes that see,
and the core of fire.
The Lyric Year 219
The white fire of my heart forges the shapes
of my brain;
The white fire of my heart is a sun, and my
deeds and thoughts are its dark planets;
It is a far flame of Thee, a star in Thy firma
ment.
With pleasant warmth flicker the red fires of
the hearth,
And the blue, mad flames of the marsh flare
and consume themselves :
I too am an ember of Thee, a little star; my
warmth and my light travel a long way.
So little, so wholly given to its human quest,
And yet of Thee, wholly of Thee, Thou Un
speakable,
All the colors of life in a burning white mist
Pure and intense as Thou, O Heart of life!
Frail is my taper, it flickers in the storm,
It is blown out in the great wind of the world:
Yet when the world is dead and the seas are a
crust of salt,
When the sun is dark in heaven and the stars
have changed their courses,
Forever somewhere with Thee, on the altar of
life
Shall still burn the white fire of my heart.
220 The Lyric Year
TO BROWNING THE MUSIC-MASTER
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER
I once was a lad
Of a single thought,
Melody-mad,
With ears for naught
But the miracles Bach and Beethoven wrought,
When suddenly you,
Out of the blue,
With the formal old master Galuppi, dropped.
And grim-eyed Hugues
Of the mountainous fugues,
And the rampired walls of the marvellous
Abt —
To fashion me straight from Tone's far strand
A way to a humaner, dearer shore —
A bridge to poetry-land.
Then to my soul I swore:
If poets may win such store
Of music's own highland air,
Yet abide in the common round,
Transmuting man's dusty ground
The Lyric Year 221
To gems for the world to wear —
Theirs too is a priceless art.
Is a thing that I fain would share —
A thing that is near to my heart !
Thus were a young soul's ears unstopped
By Galuppi and Hugues and the marvellous
Abt,
Who parted wide for wondering eyes
The port of a second paradise;
Showing how right it is and meet
That a Schubert's voice may never repeat
What a Shakespeare's lips once solemnize; —
That music waxes where word-life wanes,
And, with thirsty lips to Poetry's veins,
Grows by her want, by her wasting, gains.
For the protean art is this, and this :
The rainbow shimmer of love's first bliss,
A gesture despairing, a dream-like whim,
The down on the plumes of the Cherubim,
The body of Ariel, lissome and fresh —
Too subtle for Poesie's golden mesh,
An exquisite, evanescent shape
That breaks through language to escape
To the bourne of that country, brighter, vaster,
Where now you are singing, dear Music-
Master.
222 The Lyric Year
AMERICA
HERMAN SCHEFFAUER
TI7HITE leman of the Westward-faring
Time-
Still white! though charred with zones of sin,
Prone, where the coupled oceans chime
And the Gulf is great with din —
0 thou exposed with wounded flanks
On argent capes, on shores that climb —
Thy son am I ! Shall I give thanks?
Down all the sounding arches of the days,
Give thanks to thee, young mother, thanks and
praise?
1 mark thy cities, ant-hills in thy lap,
The gray spume of the driven multitude
Blown from the Old World's shoal and crest
As by some thunderclap
When storms embrace in midnight's interlude, —
Swart foam that mounts upon thy breast
Where heels of the Helots trample rude —
Ah, Golgotha where giant crucifixes rest!
The Lyric Year 223
What red tornadoes violate thee,
With rites unnameable, obscene,
Pale mistress of the fettered States!
Much do I love thee, much do hate thee,
With iron loves and with golden hates.
Not till thy torrents wash thee clean
Shall a pure vision re-create thee —
Niagara, with her rivers threshed to dust
And terrible tongues of foam must purge thy
lust!
Thou at thy domed breasts hast lain me, —
Too mortal was the milk perchance;
Would that the savage posset then had slain me
Ere wrath took sword my nursling peace to
slay.
Now starlight with its blades must lance
These fevers from the flesh of me, —
I that am marble stained with clay,
I that am troubled earth, but earth of thee.
A hint of some stupendous birth
Hath come to me
Across thy laden oceans, Earth,
Across thy silences, Eternity!
Ever the eyes of this lone wanderer see
The blank horizon hewn and bent —
Stage where a fateful dawn must burst,
224 The Lyric Year
As when irascible lightnings bright
Hiss through the armour-joints of night,
And the crashing mail of the dark is rent
And there fall floods of unappeasable light
To slake the world's gray agony, the thirst
Of tribes that many desolate morns
Pushed from their lips the brimming horns
Of old afflictions in their realms accurst.
Or fought the swordlike wind that blows
From iron thrones in ancient lands,
Till they fared with the western stars, and their
woes
Were made less by thy hands.
I mark thee, Woman, stretched beneath the
span
Where hope's great arch, aflame above the
wrack
Of battles earthen and tritonian,
Lifts up the starred, intolerable Zodiac!
Thy many fires I mark; hast thou no sun,
White titaness that couchest in the West,
Braiding thy stormy tresses dun
Midst hissing of the scythes that never rest?
With ruinous feet, like swift eclipses run
Thy vandals, earth to rifle and deflower,
Whilst panting 'neath the wings of thy simoons,
The Lyric Year 225
Thine insolent, salient walls mount hour by
hour,
Walls fiery with unreadable red runes,
Tottering like giants drunken with their power,
Yet vain as spirals dancing from the dunes.
Thy lust is for the millionfold,
Idolatress ! thy boast is in thy swarms ! —
They that are vext by sulphurous rains
That hounded beauty naked from thine arms,
And left the fane-fires ashen cold
And jackals in the broken fanes!
Thou that dost mate with monsters; gold
In smouldering and Plutonian clouds
Makes one vast ember of thy nakedness,
Though banners cover as with shrouds
Thy limbs, thy songless lips, idolatress I
Deep down thy rayless eyes I stare,
Whose craters hold the unplumbed night,
Where I would find the lost and laden soul
The golden Minotaur dragged to his lair,
Where I would find the torches Mammon stole
And see relumed great miracles of light,
Like suns within the firmamental scroll.
Out of the harsh duress of coal and steel,
226 The Lyric Year
The incubus of mass, the carnal welter
Of myriads that under the chariot wheel
Of Greed's arch-pontiff grovel, hast thou shel
ter,
Hast thou a hospice in thy heart,
Safe from his heel?
Or a feast for song, or temples hewn and fast,
Or caverns holy with silence, aloft, apart,
Wherein may dream the acolytes of art,
Whence eagles, to be comrades of the blast,
May yet spread wing for summits unadored?
Above thy black sirocco's howl
Thy clashing, maddened metal brays
With thunderous cymbals and the incense
steams
From iron mouths innumerable, abhorred,
Making thy seas impure, thy mountains foul.
Thou hast nor tongue nor time to praise
The passions built of years — O thing of days !
Thou art so young, O soiled and splendid
Mother!
Art thou of song so fruitless, being young?
Hath youth no magic shell for song,
Nor ever a sybilline glory for thy tongue,
No harp to drown the roar of brazen hives,
No anthem, no sonorous tubes to smother
The Lyric Year 227
The clamour of mad anvils, the loud throng
Of hucksters and of silver-blasted lives?
Thy towns like fierce alembics vapour-plumed,
Might brew phantasmal wines of dream,
Their million lifted windows snare the gleam
That from the sunk, tartarean dome
Of sunset shoots, their granite shafts consumed
Know the wild rapt sidereal fire,
And Song that of all exiles found no home
Under thine aegis, from its solar lyre
Fling galaxies upon thy shields
Till all thy heavens foam to red,
Thine emerald savannahs and gold fields
Stir like immortal lutes once more,
And none should ask thee again: Is Beauty
dead?
Till thou breed bards thy greatness waits
In anchored ships of bronze beyond thy shore,
And thy lost soul sits rocking by thy gates,
And the tawny maelstroms violate thee,
Suborned and pallid mistress of the States! —
So the profounds in me must love yet hate thee
With iron loves and with golden hates.
228 The Lyric Year
THE MOB
EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER
YOU see me not while Justice keeps her seat;
Where Right is on her throne I stand on
guard,
Or go my way upon my million feet,
In peace I go — until my way is barred.
I speak all tongues; about the world I range
And live forever, though I seem to die.
I am the bright impatience of slow change,
The lightning when the storm is passing by.
For ages I lie silent under wrong,
Then seize some outcast man to be my head;
From out the gutter I catch up a song;
And round me, when I rest, the land is red.
They call me brute who would not have me
man;
They keep me chained who would not see me
free;
They reap above the furrow that I ran ;
They eat my grindings — and they trample me.
The Lyric Year 229
I am the last cry of a land undone,
The huge abortion of a people's pain.
I rise and make a way where way was none;
I am their manhood come to life again.
230 The Lyric Year
LET THERE BE DREAMS TO-DAY
CLINTON SCOLLARD
T ET there be dreams — one said. I an
swered, Yea,
Let there be dreams to-day,
Fair dreams that come and go
As silently as snow,
And one — this one — shall stay
Within my heart of hearts for aye and aye 1
This one dear dream! — O bugler, call the
dawn!
0 trumpeter, sound summons to the night!
These twain are blended for my soul's delight
And never shall be gone !
These twain o'er Garda with the sun and moon :
1 have known many a boon,
But no such guerdon as this dream confers.
You who are beauty's faithful worshippers,
Listen, for rapture stirs
Within me at the conjuring of this dream!
Sun-gleam, moon-beam,
On Garda that is loveliness supreme!
The Lyric Year 231
Gaze upon Garda's bosom! Gaze with awe!
For surely mortal vision never saw
So sapphirine a pool of under-sky!
Mark you where Garda's mountains lift on
high,
And the bold eagles fly
F the sun's fiery eye,
Here, if it be on earth, is majesty!
So let me dream my dream of dreams, and
slake
My sense of beauty's thirst, most perfect Lake 1
And let the moon and sun
In wondrous antiphon
Repeat and yet repeat
Their tale, and make this miracle complete !
In this, my vista-dream, shall Riva still
Sit by its crescent harbor. From its hill
Shall Malcesine's ancient castle throw
Its bastioned shadow on the lake below,
And isolated San Vigilio
From the deep cincture of its cypress bower
Face evermore the radiant sunset hour,
Looking where Salo, amid verdant vines,
In its blue haven like a jewel shines.
232 The Lyric Year
Still shall Gordone, among speading palms,
Take the eternal airs of spring for alms,
And Sirmione pine with backward gaze
For the renascence of old Roman days,
And sweet Catullus of the liquid phrase!
Even the veriest hind
May catch some marvel from the crooning wind
Haunting the heath and hearth at evenfall
When twilight shapes its etchings on the wall.
Who was not born a dreamer in some wise,
Let him be pitied! Dull and dark his way.
But he who sees with wide or lidded eyes,
Waking or sleeping, some ethereal ray,
A happiness is his none may gainsay;
And so for me, in their all-golden guise,
Let there be dreams to-day!
The Lyric Year 233
A PRAYER
WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD
HpHOU that canst hush the sea and brood
•*• the land
And softly lead the wandering worlds above,
Keep Thou within the hollow of Thy hand
The one I love.
Lay on her head the crown of all delight,
Lily and rose and not a leaf of rue;
Clothe her with courage and immortal might,
Strength to be true.
And give her faith, O Father, give her faith
In every mask Thy visage to perceive,
And hear above all storms Thy voice that saith,
Believe ! Believe !
Thine was the hand that struck the kindling
spark
And lit our torch with love's triumphant
light;
Let all the winds that beat it in the dark
Make it more bright.
234 The Lyric Year
THE QUESTION
MARION CUMMINGS STANLEY
on the starry skies I gaze
Or count the tale of time gone by,
With fear I tremble and amaze,
So brief, so frail a thing am I.
Yet in this little brain is wrought
The glittering web of time and space,
And in the compass of a thought
The rolling worlds have place.
In vain I seek the sages all,
In vain I question earth and sky.
I am so great, I am so small,
O God, what thing am I ?
The Lyric Year 235
AN ODE FOR THE CENTENARY OF
THE BIRTH OF ROBERT
BROWNING
GEORGE STERLING
A S unto lighter strains a boy might turn
•*•*• From where great altars burn
And Music's grave archangels tread the night,
So I, in seasons past,
Loved not the bitter might
And merciless control
Of thy bleak trumpets calling to the soul.
Their consummating blast
Held inspirations of affright,
As when a faun
Hears mournful thunders roll
On breathless, wide transparencies of dawn.
Nor would I hear
With thee, superb and clear
The indomitable laughter of the race;
Nor would I face
Clean truth, with her cold agates of the well,
Nor with thee trace
236 The Lyric Year
Her footprints passing upward to the snows,
But sought a phantom rose
And islands where the ghostly siren sings;
Nor would I dwell
Where star-forsaking wings
On mortal thresholds hide their mystery,
Nor watch with thee
The light of heaven cast on common things.
But now in dreams of day I see thee stand
A grey, great sentry on the encompassed wall
That fronts the Night forever, in thy hand
A consecrated spear
To test the dragons of man's ancient fear
From secret gulfs that crawl —
A captain of that choral band
Whose reverend faces, anxious of the Dark,
Yet undismayed
By rain of ruined worlds against the night,
Turned evermore to hark
The music of God's silence, and were stayed
By something other than the reason's light.
And I have seen thee as
An eagle, strong to pass
Where tempest-shapen clouds go to and fro
And winds and noons have birth,
The Lyric Year 237
But whose regard is on the lands below
And wingless things of earth.
And yet not thine for long
The feigned passion of the nightingale,
Nor shards of haliotis, nor the song
Of cymballed fountains hidden in the dale,
Nor gardens where the feet of Fragrance steal:
'Twas thine the laying-on to feel
Of tragic hands imperious and cold,
That, grasping, led thee from the dreams of
old,
Making thee voyager
Of seas within the cosmic solitude,
Whose moons the long-familiar stars occlude —
Whose living sunsets stir
With visions of the timelessness we crave.
And thou didst ride a wave
That gathered solemn music to its breast,
And, breaking, shook our strand with thought's
unrest,
Till men far inland heard its mighty call
Where the young mornings vault the world's
blue wall.
Nature hath lonely voices at her heart
And some thou heardst, for at thine own
Were chords beyond all Art
238 The Lyric Year
That stir but to the eternal undertone.
But not necessitous to thee
The dreams that were when Arcady began
Or Paphos soared in iris from the sea;
For thou couldst guess
The rainbows hidden in the frustrate slime,
And saw'st in crownless Man
A Titan scourged through Time
With pains and raptures of his loneliness.
And thou wast wanderer
In that dim House that is the human heart,
Where thou didst roam apart,
Seeing what pillars were
Between its deep foundations and the sun,
What halls of dream undone,
What seraphs hold compassionate their wings
Before the youth and bitterness of things
Ere all see clear
The gain in loss, the triumph in the tear.
Time's whitest loves lie radiant in thy song,
Like starlight on an ocean, for thine own
Was as a deathless lily grown
In Paradise — ethereal and strong.
And to thine eyes
Earth had no earth that held not haughty dust,
And seeds of future harvestings in trust,
The Lyric Year 239
And hidden azures of eventual skies.
Yet hadst thou sharper strains,
Even as the Power determines us with pains,
And, seeing harvests, saw'st as well the chaff,
And, seeing Beauty, saw'st her shames no less,
Loosing the sweet,
High thunder of thy Jovian laugh
On souls purblind in their self-righteousness.
O vision wide and keen!
Which knew, untaught, that pains to joyance
are
As night unto the star
That on the effacing dawn must burn unseen.
And thou didst know what meat
Was torn to give us milk,
What countless worms made possible the silk
That robes the mind, what plan
Drew as a bubble from old infamies
And fen-pools of the Past
The shy and many-colored soul of man.
Yea ! thou hast seen the lees
In that rich cup we lift against the day,
Seen the man-child at his disastrous play —
His shafts without a mark,
His fountains flowing downward to the dark,
His maiming and his bars,
Then turned to see
240 The Lyric Year
His vatic shadow cast athwart the stars,
And his strange challenge to infinity.
But who am I to speak,
Far down the mountain, of its altar-peak,
Or cross on feeble wings,
Adventurous, the oceans in thy mind?
We of a wider day's bewilderings
For very light seem blind,
And fearful of the gods our hands have
formed.
Some lift their eyes and seem
To see at last the lofty human scheme
Fading and toppling as a sunset stormed
By wind and evening, with the stars in doubt.
And some cry, On to Brotherhood/ And
some,
(Their Dream's high music dumb)
Nay! let us hide in roses all our chains,
Tho' all the lamps go out!
Let us accept our lords!
Time's tensions move not save to subtler pains!
And over all the Silence is as swords . . .
Wherefore be near us in our day of choice,
Lest Hell's red choirs rejoice;
And may our counsels be
The Lyric Year 241
More wise, more kindly, for the thought of
thee;
And may our deeds attest
Thy covenant of fame
To men of after-years that see thy name
Held like a flower by Honor to her breast.
Thy station in our hearts long since was won —
Safe from the jealous years —
Thou of whose love, thou of whose thews and
tears
We rest most certain when the day is done
And formless shadows close upon the sun!
Thou wast a star ere death's long night shut
down,
And for thy brows the crown
Was graven ere the birth-pangs, and thy bed
Is now of hallowed marble, and a fane
Among the mightier dead:
More blameless than thine own what soul hath
stood?
Dost thou lie deaf until another Reign,
Or hear as music o'er thy head
The ceaseless trumpets of the war for Good?
Ah, thou! ah, thou!
Stills God thy question now?
242 The Lyric Year
THE CALL
ALAN SULLIVAN
/T^URN ye again, my people, turn;
Enter my palace wild and rude,
And cheerly let your camp-fires burn
Throughout my scented solitude.
The glare, the tumult and the stress
Are gone with yesterday, and we
Are children of the wilderness,
Of wonder and of mystery.
Mark how the tilted mountains lie
Mantled with moss and cloistered fir.
My brother, canst thou pass them by,
Art thou not too a worshipper?
The long lake wrinkling in the wind,
The breathless wood, and, over all,
Through tangled underbrush entwined
The riot of a waterfall.
The Lyric Year 243
The multitudinous sounds that blend
In one vast stillness void of sound,
A slumber too divine to end,
Interminable and profound.
Close to the bosom undefiled
Of her who bore mankind I press,
Receiving, like a wandering child,
Her inarticulate caress.
Turn ye again, my people, turn,
Enter my palace wild and rude,
And cheerly let your camp-fires burn
Throughout my scented solitude.
244 The Lyric Year
THE CITIES
MILDRED McNEAL SWEENEY
TO arduous wars, to Crusades far no more
With Richard and his kings, disdaining
peace!
No more to adventure on the perilous seas,
When Drake and Frobisher forsake the
shore,
Undo the sea's blue door,
And fling their puny sails to the far advancing
breeze.
The wilderness is not! The roads are plain 1
The colonies are founded and are old!
They bid no more the young men to be bold.
They spread no more a perilous far domain —
No realms to wrest from Spain —
They heap the hand no more with diamond
and gold.
Whither to turn for fortune and desire!
Where in an unconceived task to spend
The Lyric Year 245
This joyous strength! In what bright cause to
lend
A soul more fleet and restless than new fire,
Sprung with the wind and higher!
How by a service strange to attain the mar
vellous end!
So Life springs up, a prince within the breast,
And cries Let not the vision dim away,
And forward turns to a long imagined day,
A messenger, bearing the divine unrest,
The passion unconfessed,
The winged unwritten law all spirit must obey.
And young men rise and dream of mightier
cares.
They turn from fields and from the homely
wage.
Closed to their eyes is that abundant page.
Dim stands the maid, and pale the rose she
wears.
Mute are the village fairs.
They must press fleetly on, new perils to en
gage.
And one doth leave his father's green expanse,
And try his way. And find. And send the call
246 The Lyric Year
Exulting homeward. When his comrades all
Give up their beating hearts to dusty chance,
To arduous advance,
And take the city way — paven street, gray sky,
dull wall.
A clerk's stool and a drudging office day.
And for their guerdon all a paper fee.
For home four narrow walls where none would
be.
No winds. No isles unknown and far away.
No cloudy heaven and gay.
No lands to win. No toils where arms shall
mighty be.
A paper task and nine o'clock to five.
A pleasuring brief and harried by the crowd.
Through every street the city murmuring loud.
O Lord of Tasks, is this to be alive?
Is this how souls should thrive?
Is this that mighty all wherewith we are en
dowed?
Ardent with youth we press within the door
Of the incomparable age: then lost and blind
Step forth in the light. All's new and all to
find.
The Lyric Tear 247
We grope our way along the enchanted floor
One golden step the more,
Giving breath and toil and dream to the em-
piry of mind.
The desk, the pen, the clack of many keys,
The gain, the bitter loss told strictly down
When blue day ends — these are the iron crown
Upon our eager brows, the new release,
The invisible prize to seize,
The Mind's most pure adventure that must IDC
our own!
The body trudges, many-tasked and dumb.
But ah, the Mind, a wanderer through the
spheres,
Takes spoil more strange than many thousand
spears,
And like a banner brings the future home,
Sets in her windowed room
Clotho to spinning, stays rude Atropos' ready
shears.
And evermore departs, desires, pursues,
On some far visioned task being all intent —
To build, to span, to brave the vast event,
To lord the unwilling airs, and for our use,
248 The Lyric Year
That we may have fleet news,
To brave one more divine, elusive element.
O whither and whither? The bold and joyful
host
Toward the far goal steps on, in error and
dream;
Follows what no man sees, a cloudy beam,
A vision in the night, a mighty word half lost
When some rude ford was crossed —
Speeds like a ship in the tide on some broad-
bosomed stream.
If Daedalus and his eager son had known,
Testing their wings above that windy isle!
If the slow fleets upon the ancient Nile
Had known, and Philip's host in Macedon,
Whither man's thought had gone!
How had they stood at gaze, fallen hand, and
glowing smile.
So rise the royal cities and call aloud!
And now as once to banners and to kings
The young men hasten thither. Each lad
brings
The Lyric Year 249
His humble service, labors and is proud,
Amid the eager crowd,
Proud of the towers, the wharves, the vision
where it springs.
O dear and arduous, bitter, strange and new!
No more our loins we gird, nor need the
sword !
It is our souls that bear the flaming word,
That hasten valiantly and are sped from view
Amid the unending blue,
Bearing our homage forth to an unannounced
lord.
250 The Lyric Year
I SHALL NOT CARE
SARA TEASDALE
I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful,
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.
The Lyric Year 251
SARPEDON
EDITH M. THOMAS
T1THEN the God of the darted light, obeying
the Voice Supreme,
The corse of divine Sarpedon had borne to a
crystal stream,
Had laved it therein, and embalmed, and
clothed it in raiment fair,
He called as a God may call, unheard in our
nether air;
And forth at his summons there came two
children of Silence and Night;
The younger was Sleep, and the elder was
Death — both, noiseless in flight.
Go, said the God, bear gently this prince to
the land of his birth;
There shall his friends and his lovers entomb
him and heap up the earth,
That men from afar shall descry, and though
dead his name shall not die.
252 The Lyric Year
Then, heard by no mortal ear and discerned
by no mortal eye,
Unknown as the dew, they descend, and out
of the evening gloom
The corse of Sarpedon they bear, whence
floated a sweet perfume
That was from the God's embalming, blent
with the flowers of Sleep.
And soon were they far on wing over river
and valley and steep. —
But now with compassion they spake, as on
ward the hero they bore:
I will lay a fair dream on his eyes. And I his
last sigh will restore.
Thereat, Sarpedon made murmur: Where
now is the roar of the fight?
Who are ye that bear me aloft through the
star-jeweled vault of the night?
Sleep am I, answered the younger, that ever
to thee was so kind.
Death am I, answered the elder, whom best
of all friends thou shalt find.
And together they spake: We are bearing
thee on to the land of thy birth;
The Lyric Year 253
There shall thy friends and thy lovers entomb
thee and heap up the earth,
That men from afar shall descry, and though
dead thy name shall not die.
Thus, over river and valley and steep they
swept through the sky,
When, hearken the Voice that falls with com
pelling, from far in the height:
Lift hither, my son, my Sarpedon, O children
of Silence and Night!
Then, as a smoke in lands that lie waste from
some mountain of fire,
Straight-rising, Sarpedon they bring to the
knees and the tears of his sire.
And the hand of the God, full of ruth, on the
hand of the hero was laid,
And the tears that are more than a mortal's —
the tears of the God were not stayed!
Spake then Sarpedon, upheld on the pinions
of Sleep and Death —
Spake by the force of the Deity giving brief
largess of breath:
Who layeth a hand on my hand, unmoving and
deedless for aye?
254 The Lyric Year
And who on my brows and mine eyelids the
lips of the living doth lay?
Then answer made Zeus: Thou dear one!
The Father of men and of Gods —
I, ere thy godlike form shall be laid under
Lycian clods,
Have called to me hither thy bearers that I
once more may embrace
Thee whom in fight I oft steeled though never
thou knewest my face!
Is it thou, O my Father, of whom would my
Mother, Europa, speak oft,
Saying, "Thy Father will not let thee die, but
will bear thee aloft —
Will snatch thee away from the strife ere the
doom of a mortal shall fall!"
Yet now wilt thou see me, encompassed and
vanquished for aye and for all?
Then sooth was the Voice: O son, as thy
Mother, Europa, hath died —
A flower of the field, of the race that must
fade with the summer's pride,
So must this flower of thy flesh and thy face —
sweet mould of her own —
Descend into sluggish earth and forever be no
more known.
The Lyric Year 255
Not thus with my portion in thee, O my child !
Already on high
Thou pacest with those that never were born,
that never shall die !
Then smiled the dead lips of Sarpedon, and
on his dead eyes was the smile,
For Sleep took the dream from his breast and
Death the last sigh did beguile.
So onward they pass through the night and at
dawn without sound they descend,
And leave the fair corse in a mead, to be found
by lover or friend.
256 The Lyric Year
A RITUAL FOR A FUNERAL
RIDGELY TORRENCE
A Voice To the glowing feast of birth
Shall Say: All the distant guests return;
Nothing pauses in the earth.
But onward, where no temporal eye may
range,
The lover and the love shall burn —
Upward, to the widening halls of change.
Though the paths be steep and strange,
On the steadfast dreams ascending,
Ever shall the wreathed door be found,
With the spirit's bridal garland crowned,
And the silver babbling welcome sound
To the banquet never ending.
And the wanderer entering ever young —
Flying toward the flying light —
Shall find the ripened worlds outflung
Upon the tables of his might.
All that sweetly rose and globed and
swayed
The Lyric Year 257
On the laddered vines of his endeavor
Shall be gathered up in love and weighed,
Gathered, pressed and poured with songs
for ever.
Golden apples of appeasement there,
Seeds to plant for those who rise thereafter,
Iron bowls of holy labor bear
Between the lamps of gorgeous laughter.
Never shall the revel fade
Nor the passing song be sung.
Beyond the outmost moons of sleep
From world to world the living rivers leap.
There as clear water waiting for our thirst
Is loveliness and unto each his own;
For all things deepen unto love alone
And unto deeper wakenings draw
Surely, as to a runner's goal;
And he whose love is greatest shall be first
Though over him should roll
The rushing trumpets of the sundered law
Pouring their wrathful vials,
And round him heavy swords of final trials
Smite, yet shall they melt when he has passed
And entered trembling to the inmost Awe
Whose airs are clear surprise; where he at
last
With eyes uptoiling to the streaming dome,
258 The Lyric Year
Shall see the fire-torn splendors wheeling
soft,
Shall hear an ocean music slowly wash aloft
And find himself again at home
Within his father's house :
Clasping new fruitage from the heavenly
boughs,
Being sweetly warmed and fed
With love the honeycomb and bread,
And remembering with smiles the things
departed,
He shall drink the glory in the veiled cup,
Seeing the healing of the broken-hearted
And the fallen sparrow lifted up.
And Though now the brief pavilion of our day
Another Fades as we toil to build the unfinished
Voice wall,
Shall Say: Though now no autumn orchard, yielding
all,
Fulfills the flowers of May,
Yet on the pinions of immortal yearning,
Beyond the shadow of the unreturning,
Above the star that gives us wise fore
warning
How wide the dusk enrings the steadfast
light,
The Lyric Year 259
We shall renew and gather and requite,
We shall pursue and seize again the
morning
And be found no more by night.
Though from the evening to the morning
glowing
No orb may rise nor orbit-song be clear,
Where deeper need is shall be deeper
knowing,
Where music hides there shall be ears to
hear.
Down from the arches of dream a thunder
of wings
Rolls, and for ever along the inward sight,
Out of the sorrowing cloud and blowing
fear,
With all the heavens rushing earthward,
armed,
A lightning plunging from the homes of
light
Hints to the spirit that it stands unharmed.
And over all, beacons the face afar
Of the stern justice, weighing our desire,
Sifting the will-to-be from what we are,
Balancing longing with the longed-for
fire,
260 The Lyric Year
Hunger with food, thirst with unfaltering
springs,
Hope with the hope fulfilled, and with the
night, a star.
Who has not left a dark abode
At noon, upon swift errands bent,
And stared along a blazing road
Sightless, till the pulsing veils were rent
That wisely waved him from the heart of
light.
Even so with radiance overflowed,
The earthly vision faints with sight
And shall, till all grows clear with seeing
And all with mightier gaze may know
That what was seen here shall not cease
from being.
Shall not cease — a sign is given; lo,
As a great circle, widening in the sea,
Passes forever to the shore, so we!
And if there be no coast nor any beach,
Yet shall the spirit wander undefeated;
With battles and with sweet embracings,
each
An endless circle endlessly completed.
The Lyric Year 261
The Sea remains. The lights illumed of old
For beacon on the bosom of the deep
Fail not nor sleep,
But lend their flames for ever to the gold
Of all the watch-fires newly lighted there.
And though on drifting skies the lodestar
wanes,
The ceaseless benediction of the rains
Shall, soon or late, out of the gleaming air,
Utter the rainbow to the cloud despair,
Make dim the half-light, dark the light
that feigns
And of the morning make the wanderer
aware.
The sea remains.
Nothing shall be lost nor fall
From the winter-dreaming tree
But shall find another bough
And fly in other summers free.
Endless Springs have kept the vow.
Here the spheral secret learn:
One has vanished into All;
All in One shall later burn
Outward from the dust.
And now,
As seed unto the seed's recall,
'Return.
262 The Lyric Year
Here the And through the glances of the rain
Ashes Shall His victor hours shall shine again.
Be Hidden His dreams, as lightnings, sweet to dare,
from Sight: Shall flower about us in the air,
And we shall weave them with our wills
To be a banner on the hills.
In music shall his happy voices move
And, in the silences, his love.
Not from the shore may any requiem swell
Nor winging of farewell
From us within the bubble Time or Place;
We are already on the water's face,
And wave with wave shall endlessly ally,
Too near for need of summons or recall:
The end of earth is the beginning sky;
The sea is under all,
From whose unfathomed wells we rise and
flow
Slowly along a winding glory, seeing
The wise unrest from which we had our
being
And the ineffable to which we go.
The Lyric Year 263
AN EASTER CANTICLE
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE
TN every trembling bud and bloom
-*• That cleaves the earth, a flowery sword,
I see Thee come from out the tomb,
Thou risen Lord.
In every April wind that sings
Down lanes that make the heart rejoice;
Yea, in the word the wood-thrush brings,
I hear Thy voice.
Lo! every tulip is a cup
To hold Thy morning's brimming wine;
Drink, O my soul, the wonder up —
Is it not thine ?
The great Lord God, invisible,
Hath roused to rapture the green grass;
Through sunlit mead and dew-drenched dell,
I see Him pass.
264 The Lyric Year
His old immortal glory wakes
The rushing streams and emerald hills;
His ancient trumpet softly shakes
The daffodils.
Thou art not dead! Thou art the whole
Of life that quickens in the sod;
Green April is Thy very soul,
Thou great Lord God!
The Lyric Year 265
THE WIFE
ANNA SPENCER TWITCHELL
TTE sees the wife, from slim young comeli-
•^ ness,
With bearing of his children and their care,
Grow stooped and withered, and the shining
hair
That was his pride grow thin and lustreless;
Day after day, with wordless, pained distress,
He strives to ease the load her shoulders bear,
Lifting a burden here, a burden there,
Or offering some clumsy, rare caress.
But ah! her girl-face never was so fair,
And eyes and lips that answered his desire,
Are limned with sacred meaning to him now;
To his rapt sight, an angel might aspire
To claim the stature of her soul, or wear
The halo that surrounds her mother-brow.
266 The Lyric Year
CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES
LOUIS UNTERMEYER
OD, we don't like to complain,
We know that the mines are no lark,
But — there's the pools from the rain,
But — there's the cold and the dark.
God, you don't know what it is,
You, in Your well-lighted sky,
Watching a meteor whizz —
Warm, with the sun always by.
God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You'd tire of it soon
Down in the dark and the damp. . .
Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars —
God, in return for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!
The Lyric Year 267
A DAY'S END
ALLAN UPDEGRAFF
/^ORGEOUS with foliate glows till the
^-* overfilled heart overthrown
Sickens and aches in a dazzle and revel of
color and light,
Petal by petal the day, deflowered like a rose
overblown,
Crumbles to opaline dust in the old black
casket of night.
It crumbles, fades utterly, dies with a dead
expressionless passion,
Yielding its beauty in languor, wasting itself
like a dream: —
No rose, no rose, but rather that fair mad
maiden in fashion,
Who sang and made rhymes of her flowers
and laughed in the death of the
stream —
Ophelia: or that Saint Sebastian who stands
with throat pierced with an arrow,
Calm as an elder Greek god, less man than
a glorified thing.
268 The Lyric Year
So strange, so vapid, so surcharged with un-
human questions to harrow
The allured and repelled human soul, is
this day's vanishing.
So they have vanished by billions, they drift
in ethereal darkness;
To the outermost infinite bourne of space
their wraiths drive on,
Wraiths whose Gorgon's beauty might freeze
the stars into starkness:
Was it for this that the winds blew cool
from the caves of the dawn?
Was it for this that the noon slipped shining
over the mountains,
Over the vaporous hills and vague resplen
dence of blue?
So the worlds are fed with days as with ever-
used waters the fountains,
Glories eternally dead which the dead blind
gods renew.
Mile sweeps of scarlets that tremble, dim
oceans of palpitant umber,
Purples as wide as the heavens, islands of
crimson and gold,
The Lyric Year 269
Bastions and turrets and towers, colors and
glows without number —
How are you better than leaves that glow
as they die in the cold?
Could it cry out, show sentience, either it or
the beings that shape it,
This beauty of death, these shapers of
death! — as aforetime the blood
Mantled up the white face of his statue who
had died had he chanced to undrape it
To find it the same marble maiden, un-
shamed in undraped maidenhood.
But the splendor is blind as the stony dim mo
tionless eyes of a Sibyl
Wherein in earlier days, Faith seeking the
meaning of life
Gazed and implored a sign, letting the bull's
blood dribble
Over the altar's faggots from the curved
sacrificial knife.
For the Homes of the Blessed have vanished
out of the sunset's hollow;
Tithonus waits not for Aurora where the
splendor of evening dies;
270 The Lyric Year
Ra is banished with Ormazd, Joshua's sun with
Apollo,
And the spirit of man revokes the spirit
it breathed in the skies.
Blue depths above, clouds, cliffs, the wide bur
nished ocean under,
And the Powers whose signs are planets
have laid thereon their hands:
Pure beauty is here in the highest, the world's
transcendent wonder
Of line and design and color, untroubled of
thought, which is man's.
Though it brand itself on my senses, am I a
child for this plaything?
I have dreamed, I have blinked too long in
kaleidoscopes of Chance
Where the suns and stars are glass-bits and
the strength between a lay thing
To fetter the flying ions in their endless
figured dance !
I will bid farewell to beauty, pure beauty, all
gaud and gleaming,
In which there is no truth — no aim I can
understand!
The Lyric Year 271
I will break the stone, cleave wood, and give
to the steel new seeming :
Be a god in my own right, and a right good
god of my hand!
272 The Lyric Year
THE FALLEN PHARAOH
LEONARD VAN NOPPEN
CTATUED, he lies beneath the scornful
^ stars,
Gazing forever on the infinite;
And all but doom is banished from his sight,
And he is still, that woke a storm of wars.
And he remembers how no human bars
Stayed the ascension of his conquering flight,
When like a constellation of the night
He trailed the triumph of his pageant cars.
And he remembers, too, that veiled hour
When he met Death, when, prone as any slave,
He knelt to Silence, powerless in power.
Lo, into dust the Ages, anger-shod,
Trample him prostrate, anchored to his grave,
Kingdomless, staring at the Heights of God!
The Lyric Year 273
THE HYMN OF ARMAGEDDON
GEORGE SYLVESTER VIERECK
'« And I stood upon the sands of the sea, and I saw a Beast
"rise up out of the sea, having seven heads. . . . And
«• he gathered them together into a place called in the
" Hebrew tongue Armageddon. . . . And the great
" city was divided into three parts." — Revelations — St. John.
A POCALYPTIC thunders roll out of the
crimson East:
The Day of Judgment is at hand, and we shall
slay the Beast.
What are the seven heads of him — the Beast
that shall be slain?
Sullivan, Taggart, Lorimer, Barnes, Penrose,
Murphy, Crane.
Into what cities leads his trail in venom steeped
and gore?
Ask Frisco, ask Chicago, mark New York and
Baltimore.
Where shall we wage the goodly fight, for
whom unsheath the sword?
We stand at Armageddon and we battle for
the Lord!
274 The Lyric Year
Though hell spit forth its snarling host we
shall not flinch or quail,
For in the last great skirmish God's own truth
must prevail.
Have they not seen the burning scroll that
flames upon the wall,
Of how their house is built of sand, and how
their pride must fall?
The cough of little lads th?t sweat where
never sun sheds light,
The sob of starving children and their mothers
in the night,
These, and the wrong of ages, we carry as a
sword,
Who stand at Armageddon and who battle for
the Lord!
God's soldiers from the West are we, from
North and East and South,
The seed of them who flung the tea into the
harbor's mouth,
And those who fought where Grant fought and
those who fought with Lee,
And those who under alien stars first dreamed
of liberty.
The Lyric Year 275
Not those of little faith whose speech is soft,
whose ways are dark,
Nor those upon whose forehead the Beast has
set his mark.
Out of the hand of justice we snatch her falter
ing sword;
We stand at Armageddon and we battle for
the Lord!
The sternest militant of God whose trumpet in
the fray
Has cleft the city into three shall lead us on
this day.
The holy strength that David had is his, the
faith that saves,
For he shall free the toilers as Abe Lincoln
freed the slaves.
And he shall rouse the lukewarm and those
whose eyes are dim,
The hope of twenty centuries has found a voice
in him.
Because the Beast shall froth with wrath and
perish by his sword,
He leads at Armageddon the legions of the
Lord!
276 The Lyric Year
For he shall move the mountains that groan
with ancient sham,
And mete with equal measure to the lion and
the lamb.
And he shall wipe away the tears that burn on
woman's cheek,
For in the nation's council hence the mothers,
too, shall speak.
Through him the rose of peace shall blow from
the red rose of strife,
America shall write his name into the Book of
Life.
And where at Armageddon we battle with the
sword
Shall rise the mystic commonwealth, the City
of the Lord!
The Lyric Year 277
ADONIS
BLANCHE SHOEMAKER WAGSTAFF
SNOW-SHIMMER on his bosom, blond and
bare;
Sun-birth upon his lips of scarlet flame;
And passion scenting all his tawny hair —
Such beauty is Death's claim!
Slain in a tempest of the soul: who knows?
But his quiescent body, cold and white,
Thrills me with rapture like some moon-
drenched rose
Upon a summer night.
Look, I shall take him now to be my own!
Our bridal couch the damp worm-cankered
sod;
And my wild kisses shall be only known
To God .
278 The Lyric Year
THE BLACK DICE
HENRY CHRISTEEN WARNACK
A T night when I play with the black dice,
•* *• Draining my evil wine —
The evil dice, with a will of their own,
And wine that is blood of a soul —
I come to the gate of a city,
A gateway with never a key,
Whose portals are wide for the many,
But ever are closed to me.
For I play in the night with the black dice ;
With wine are my garments stained;
False are the dice and clotted,
With wine that is blood of a soul —
The City Eternal is calling,
A city of flame and snow —
With the swine and their husks about me,
I hear but I may not go.
Yet once, as I played with the black dice,
Spilling my evil wine,
The Lyric Year 279
The dice and the wine were as mirrors,
And I saw the hands of a soul
Clutch at the thing that it strove for.
Ah, then came an end of the night —
The dead fell away from my footsteps,
And I entered the City of Light.
280 The Lyric Year
CONFESSION
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK
T OOK in my songs and you shall find her,
•L' Though from my lips a name so dear
Be uttered never, lost forever —
Lean with your heart and listen here !
For words too sweet, for speech too holy,
Lean to my song and listen well,
Here as the heart's blood in the heart-beat,
Here as the sea's voice in the shell:
Though from my loving vanished, vanished,
Still in my song it slumbers deep,
Like the one thought all day close guarded,
Betrayed by passionate lips in sleep.
The Lyric Year 281
THE FORGOTTEN SOUL
MARGARET WIDDEMER
I that cried against the pane on All
Souls' Night
(O pulse o' my heart's life, how could you
never hear?)
You filled the room I knew with yellow candle
light,
And cheered the girl beside you when she
prayed in fear.
'Twas I that touched your shoulder in the gray
wood-mist
(O core o' my heart's heart, how could you
never know?)
You only frowned and shuddered ere you bent
and kissed
The girl hard by you, handfast, where I
used to go.
282 The Lyric Year
'Twas I that stood to greet you on the church
yard pave
(O fire o' my heart's grief, how could you
never see?)
You smiled in pleasant dreaming as you
crossed my grave,
And crooned a little love-song where they
buried me.
The Lyric Year 283
WHITMAN AND EMERSON
MARGUERITE O. B. WILKINSON
l\/r ASTER who bravely planted seeds un-
^ •*• known
And labored with a stark sincerity
To aid their sturdy growth, behold them
grown !
Thy harvest hath restored our granary:
Wherefore, for bread, to thee and thee alone
Of all the bards who sing from sea to sea
Our native Great must look, and looking own
Thy providence for their futurity.
Let those who have a softer, daintier need
At other banquets rest; they will not find
Such power as thine to nourish — bread indeed,
Giving new life to body, heart and mind:
They will not find in all the halls of Time
A food more hardy, natural, sublime.
284 The Lyric Year
Master who entered in the heat of day
The vineyard where the purple of our race
Through olden courses found a tortuous way
On to the grape's fruition, 'twas thy grace
To dig about the roots of our dismay,
To speed the native sap, to make a place
For tendrils new, to press new fruit and say:
Unto this Grail, O Nation, lift thy face!
Thy thought hath filled our chalice to the brim,
And made a sacrament for those who live
Above the present moment's garish whim,
In hope to be, to toil, to love, to give :
Strong spiritual vintages combine
In this thy cup. There is no sweeter wine.
The Lyric Year 285
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY
T RODE in the dark of the spirit
A marvellous, marvellous way;
The faiths that the races inherit
Behind in the sunset lay;
Dome, mosque, and temple huddled
Bade farewell to the day;
But I rode into the leagues of the dark,
There was no light but my hoof-beats' spark
That sprang from that marvellous way.
Behind were the coffined gods in their shroud
Of jungle, desert and mound,
The mighty man-bones and the mummies proud
Stark in their caves underground;
And the planet that sepulchres god and man
Bore me in the cone of its dark profound
To the ultimate clash in stellar space,
The way of the dead, god-making race
Whirled with its dead gods round.
286 The Lyric Year
And my heart as the night grew colder
Drew near to the heart of my steed;
I had pillowed my head on his shoulder
Long years in the sand and the reed;
Long ago he was foaled of the Muses,
And sired of the heroes' deed;
And he came unto me by the fountain
Of the old Hellenic mountain,
And of heaven is his breed.
So my heart grew near to the heart of my
horse
Who was wiser, far wiser than I;
Yet wherever I leaned in my spirit's course,
He swayed, and questioned not why;
And this was because he was born above,
A child of the beautiful sky;
And now we were come to the kingdoms black,
And nevermore should we journey back
To the land where dead men lie.
Now whether or not in that grewsome air
My soul was seized by the dread cafard,
Terror of deserts, I cannot swear;
But I rode straight into an orbed star,
Where only reigned the spirit of good,
And only the holy and virtuous are;
The Lyric Year 287
And my horse's eyes sent forth sun-rays,
And in my own was a noontide gaze
That mastered that splendid star.
The madness of deserts, if so it be,
Burned in my brain, and I saw
The multitudinous progeny
Of the talon and the claw;
And Mammon in all their palaces
Gaped with a golden maw;
And we rode far off from the glittering roofs,
And the horse, as he passed, with his heaven-
shod hoofs
Broke the tables of their law.
And we came to a city adjacent thereby,
For the twain to one empire belong;
Black over it hung a terrible cry
From eternal years of wrong;
And the land, it was full of gallows and prisons
And the horrible deeds of the strong;
And we fled; but the flash of my horse's feet
Broke open the jails in every street,
And lightnings burned there long.
We were past the good and the evil
In the spirit's uttermost dark;
288 The Lyric Year
He is neither god nor devtt
For whom my heart-beats hark;
And I leaned my cheek to my horse's neck
And I sang to his ear in the dark, —
"There is neither good nor evil,
There is neither god nor devil,
And our way lies on through the dark.
"Once I saw by a throne
A burning angel who cried, —
*I will suffer all woes that man's spirit has
known,'
And he plunged in the turbid tide;
And wherever he sank with that heart of love,
He rose up purified;
Glowed brighter his limbs and his beautiful
face,
And he went not back to the heavenly place,
And he drew all men to his side.
"I have never heard it or learnt it,
It is in me, like my soul,
And the sights of this world have burnt it
In me to a living coal, —
The soul of man is a masterless thing
And bides not another's control;
The Lyric Year 289
And gypsy-broods of bandit-loins
Shall teach what the lawless life enjoins
Upon the lawless soul.
"When we dare neither to loose nor to bind,
However to us things appear;
When whatsoever in others we find,
We shall feel neither shame nor fear;
When we learn that to love the lowliest
We must first salute him our peer;
When the basest is most our brother,
And we neither look down on nor up to an
other, —
The end of our ride shall be near."
A wind arose from the dreadful past,
And the sand smoked on the knoll;
I saw, blown by the bolts of the blast,
The shreds of the Judgment Scroll;
I heard the death-spasms of Justice old
Under the seas and the mountains roll;
Then the horse who had borne me through all
disaster,
Turned blazing eyes upon me his master,
For the thoughts I sing are his soul.
290 The Lyric Year
And I sang in his ear, — " 'Tis the old world
dying
Whose death-cries through heaven are
rolled;
Through the souls of men a flame is flying
That shall a new firmament mould;
And the uncreated light in man's spirit
Shall sun, moon and stars unfold;"
Then the horse snuffed the dark with his nos
trils bright,
And he strode, and he stretched, and he
neighed to the light
That shall beam at the word to be told.
The Lyric Year 291
ALIEN SUN-FLOWERS
REA WOODMAN
DAFFODIL of the western sky,
Where the day is breathing low:
O retrospect of the folded hills
When quiet breezes blow:
O heart, heart, heart, under this daffodil sky,
Under a silence tender and deep —
Somewhere the prairies cry,
Squandering sunset-gold, to sleep
Under a daffodil sky.
O hyacinth of the western sky,
Where the day is flushed with death:
O Sibyl-grief of the watching hills
That seem to hold their breath:
O heart, heart, heart, under this hyacinth sky,
Under a sorrow prolonged and deep —
Somewhere the prairies sigh,
Sobbing their twilight thoughts asleep,
Under a hyacinth sky.
292 The Lyric Year
O amaranth of the western sky,
Where the grayling light dies cold:
O amplitude of the viewless hills
So withered and so old:
O heart, heart, heart, under this amaranth sky,
Under the star-dusk wistful and deep —
Somewhere the prairies lie,
Yielding to darkling dreams and sleep,
Under an amaranth sky.
The Lyric Year 293
THE GRAY MAN
WILLIAM HERVEY WOODS
RAY Man, O Gray Man, and good man
riding, riding
So daringly, so certainly the thunder-roads
of War,
When came and whence came to thee thy gift
of guiding,
That soldier-hearts to martial arts thou
leadest like a star?
Shy heart and silent, we watched thee once
with smiling,
Each homely thing outshadowing, we
thought, the man aright,
Steadfast and rough-cast, without one grace
beguiling —
O Man of men, we had not then seen Stone
wall Jackson fight !
Nile hymns his Pharaohs, and Tiber's floods
go telling
The Cassars' deed the while they speed by
stoned shores of old —
294 The Lyric Year
Thy deeds three rivers, and each a Nile out-
swelling,
In choral tide horizon wide around the
world have rolled.
Thou, too, his Valley, bright Shenandoah of
story,
Thy singing name to Jackson's fame runs like
a haunting tune,
Till seers and sages forsake old fields of glory
To scan the plains where his campaigns win
to their wondrous noon.
Look ye — he's coming! That's he bareheaded
loping,
In haste to flee his soldiers' glee, down
shouting lines he goes —
Yell, boys, and rout him! He knows what
you're but hoping,
And this day done, your battle sun will set
on beaten foes.
The Lyric Year 295
SELMA
WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT
TIfHEN Selma died
No loved one watched, bereft and sor
row-eyed,
Above her calm profundity of sleep;
There was no one to say a prayer, or weep
A tear for some old memory; no hand
To close the dingy shade; no one to stand
At the dark door and guard her squalid rest,
Or draw the spread across her quiet breast.
Outside the reeling music cried and whined
And wheedled in the night; through the black
blind
A sword of yellow light fell in the room
Splitting the gloom.
They came to look, the blighted and the seared,
To stare at her from out their drawn eyes,
bleared
With drink and sin. A little while they gazed
Down at the slight pinched figure on the bed,
296 The Lyric Year
And one there was who gently stooped and
raised
The cold, unjewelled fingers of the dead;
Another creature who had watched the while
Cracked her red lips into a sneering smile;
And one, whose soul was lonelier than the rest,
Let fall the rasping semblance of a jest.
Then, cackling, they passed out, and no one
knew
That on the dead girl's cheek a faint rose blew,
Nor that a terrifying, startled trace
Of unforgotten childhood marked her face . . .
But one there was who bowed beneath the ruth
Of her dishevelled youth.
And when they went, he lingered by the bed,
For he knew all the sorrow of the dead:
Hers was the grief of loving overmuch,
And all her hopes had withered at his touch:
Hers was the fate to play the harlot's part;
And all her dreams were tangled round his
heart.
The Lyric Year 297
TO A CITY SWALLOW
EDITH WYATT
the height of the house-top sea, sil-
ver and blue and gray,
A swallow flies in my city skies and cries of
my city May.
Up from the South, swallow, fly to the North,
over the roof-top miles,
The pillaring stacks and the steam-cloud racks
and the telegraph's argent files,
Rich man's and poor man's and beggar man's
town, odors of pine and pitch,
Marbles and chalk on the hop-scotch walk, and
racketing rail and switch,
Over a thousand close-housed streets with a
million steps arow,
Where the nurses walk and the children talk
and the light-gowned women go ;
Dock-roof and dive-roof and prison-house roof,
pebbled and buff and brown,
Cry me the manifold souls' abodes and the
roads of my trading town.
298 The Lyric Year
For more to me is the house-top sea, where
your hooked wings fall and soar,
Than all of the echoes you trail for me of your
Spring on a woodland shore.
Oh, care-free you flew to the crocused North,
when the breath of the first Spring woke;
And not of the ways of the jasmine far, but
the hours that are, you spoke;
And free as you flew to the melting North a
myriad springs ago
A myriad more and a myriad more will buoy
you swift from the snow,
To cry of the stir of the hours that are, as you
cry through my day to me,
Through the amethyst of the bright-whirled
mist, over a roof-top sea,
Where some window will open afar, afar, and
some woman look out and say:
A swallow flies in my city skies and cries of my
city May !
LYRIC YEAR CONTRIBUTORS
ZOE AKINS was born in Missouri., 1886, and has just
published her first book of poems, Interpretations.
KATHARINE LEE BATES was born at Falmouth, Massa
chusetts, in 1859. For over twenty years she has
been professor of English Literature at Wellesley
College, and is author or editor or translator of a
host of books. This poem is reprinted here by
permission of the proprietors of The Old Farm
er's Almanack.
DOROTHY LANDERS BEALL was born at Washington,
D. C., in 1890, received her early education at
Kee Mar College, Hagerstown, Maryland, and
graduated from Mount Vernon Seminary, Wash
ington, in 1908. She has since studied in Paris.
A selection from her work, Poems, was published
two years ago, and a second volume is in prepa
ration.
WILLIAM ROSE BENET was born at Fort Hamilton,
New York Harbor, 1886. While at Yale Uni
versity he was chairman of the Yale Courant, and
an editor of the Yale Record; and is now an edi
torial assistant on the staff of the Century Maga
zine, and a regular contributor to the leading
periodicals.
PAUL RELLAND BIRGE was born at Fargo, North Da
kota, in 1883, of English and Norman Huguenot
ancestry. After being educated in several west-
299
300 Lyric Year Contributors
ern States, he entered the government service at
Washington, D. C., his present home.
ELOISE BRITON is the pseudonym of an American
woman who wishes to conceal her identity. The
Editor, however, is convinced by reliable author
ity that such a person exists.
FLORENCE BROOKS was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She studied drawing in Chicago and at Munich,
Germany, and in Columbia University; literature
in Nebraska University; music in Europe. She
is the author of three books of poems, and has
written novels, plays and stories.
PAULINE FLORENCE BROWER, nee Johnson, was born
in New York City, 1881. Her verse appears in
the leading magazines.
CHARLES L. BUCHANAN was born in New York, 1884.
After leaving boarding school he worked on the
Hartford Courant at book reviewing, and then
covered drama and music for the New York
Globe.
RICHARD EUGENE BURTON (Hartford, Conn., 1859)
is a member of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters, Professor of English, and charter
member of the Poetry Society of America; and
the author of eight volumes of verse.
WITTER BYNNER (Brooklyn, N. Y., 1881) graduated
from Harvard, and acted for some time as asso
ciate editor of McClure's Magazine, and as liter
ary advisor to two publishing houses. He is the
author of An Ode to Harvard, and An Immigrant
(poems).
Lyric Year Contributors 301
BRYAN OSWALD DONN-BYRNE (New York City,
1885) is of Irish parentage. He was educated
here, and at Dublin University (where he held a
boxing championship), and at Paris and Leipzig.
He is secretary of the Gaelic Literature Associa
tion of America. This poem first appeared in
Harper's Monthly.
BLISS CARMAN was born at Fredericton, New Bruns
wick, 1861. His books of verse and prose are
too widely known to require mention.
RHYS CARPENTER was born at Cotuit, Massachusetts,
in 1889. Graduating at Columbia University, he
went as Rhodes Scholar to Balliol College, Ox
ford, and, after receiving a degree, was awarded
the Drisler Fellowship in Classical Philology at
Columbia University, which affords a year's study
in Athens, Greece. He is the author of The
Tragedy of Etarre, a Poem, just published.
ARMOND CARROLL was born at Asheville, North Caro
lina, in 1887, and was educated at the Mount
Hermon School and at Yale University. Very
little of his verse has been published.
MADISON CAWEIN was born in Louisville, Kentucky,
his present home, in 1865; educated at public
school; and is the author of many volumes of
verse, prose, and translations, the choice of which
may be Kentucky Poems, edited by Mr. Edmund
Gosse.
ANNE CLEVELAND CHENEY, born in Brooklyn, N. Y.,
now lives in Boston, Massachusetts. A volume
of her verse, By the Sea, was recently published.
JOHN VANCE CHENEY (Groveland, N. Y., 1848),
poet, critic, librarian, editor, and lawyer, is the
302 Lyric Year Contributors
author of many books. His reply to Edwin
Markham's The Man "with the Hoe was awarded
an important prize some years ago.
HAROLD CHILDS was born at Chicago, Illinois. He
was educated at Columbia University and at the
University of Missouri and Ohio State, where he
is now a student.
FLORENCE EARLE COATES was born in Philadelphia.
For nine years she was president of The Brown
ing Society, Philadelphia, and has published four
volumes of verse.
GRACE HAZARD CONKLING was born in New York,
1878. After Smith College, she devoted herself
exclusively to the study of music in Germany un
der Wolfrum, and in France with Widor.
HELEN COALE CREW was born in Baltimore, Mary
land, in 1866; spent four years at Bryn Mawr
College, taking a B. A. ; and is the author of a
volume of verse, JEgean Echoes.
THOMAS AUGUSTINE DALY, born at Philadelphia, in
1871, was educated at public school, Villanova
College, and at Fordham University, where he re
ceived M. A. and Litt. D. He is general man
ager of the Catholic Standard and Times, a mem
ber of the American Press Humorists, humorous
lecturer, and the author of Canzoni; Carminia;
and Madrigali.
OLIVE TILFORD DARGAN is a Kentuckian by nativity,
the author of two volumes of dramas, and con
tributes verse to the magazines. We are in
debted for this poem to the Century Magazine.
Lyric Year Contributors 303
FANNIE STEARNS DAVIS was born at Cleveland, Ohio,
in 1884, and lives and was educated in Massachu
setts, where she graduated in 1904 from Smith
College.
MARION DELCOMYN, born in London, 1875, was edu
cated in Munich and in Paris. She now resides
in New York, where she engages in settlement
work, story and play writing, and in poetry.
HERMAN MONTAGU DONNER, born in Finland, 1864,
of English, American, and distinguished Swedish-
Finlander stock, received his education in the
capitals of Europe. He then settled in New
York and became naturalized, publishing English
Lyrics of a Finnish Harp. He is an instructor of
German and French literature.
JULIA CAROLINE RIPLEY DORR, although nearly
eighty-eight years a poet, is still in her prime,
and, to quote from Stedman's American Anthol
ogy, "holds a distinguished and enviable position
among American women." She is the author of
many books.
SUSAN HART DYER was born in Annapolis, Maryland.
After a course at The Art Students' League, New
York, and work on the faculty of Rollin's College
as teacher of music, she is now studying compo
sition at the Yale School of Music.
GEORGE DYRE ELDRIDGE (Massachusetts, 1848) was
educated at Antioch College, is the author of a
dozen novels, and many books on insurance, and
practices the profession of an actuary in New
York City.
JOHN ERSKINE was born at New York, his present
home, in 1879, and attended the Columbia Gram-
304 Lyric Year Contributors
mar school. He received A. B., A. M., and Ph.D.
at Columbia University, where he exercises a
professorship. He is the author of several books.
GENEVIEVE FARNELL-BOND — nee Browne — was born
in Cincinnati, where she was educated. She is
now a member of the Los Angeles Times staff,
and is known as a composer and an artist, and is
the author of a book of verse about to appear,
taking its title from her poem in this volume:
The Faun.
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE was born at Davenport,
Iowa, his present home, in 1883, educated at
Harvard, toured India, Japan, etc., was admitted
to the Bar in 1908, contributes to the magazines,
and is the author of four volumes of poetry, the
last entitled: The Breaking of Bonds. We are
indebted to Charles Scribner's Sons for his con
tribution.
LOUISE AYRES GARNETT was born in Indiana. She
graduated from Dearborn Seminary, of Chicago,
and has published innumerable songs and poems.
MARGARET ROOT GARVIN was born in New York City;
was educated at Lakewood, N. J., and abroad,
and has contributed poems to the magazines.
FRANCES GREGG (Mrs. Louis Wilkinson) was born
in Hartford, Connecticut. She was privately edu
cated, and then for ten years studied in art
schools.
HERMANN HAGEDORN, JR., born in New York, 1882,
studied at Harvard and in Germany, has traveled
extensively in Europe, Africa, and America, has
written several successful plays, is the author of
Lyric Year Contributors 305
A Troop of the Guard, and other Poems; and
Poems and Ballads, just published.
JULIAN HAWTHORNE, the son of Nathaniel Haw
thorne, was born in Boston, 1846, educated at
Harvard and in Germany. He has spent many
years in various parts of the world. Journalist,
biographer, critic, historian, scholar, novelist: he
is comparatively unknown as a poet, though a
charter member of the Poetry Society of America.
MAX J. HERZBERG, born in New York City, 1886, is
a graduate of Columbia University, where he did
considerable literary work. He publishes verse
in the magazines, and is at present instructor of
English in the Central High School of Newark,
New Jersey.
C. HILTON-TURVEY was born at Jefferson, Missouri,
and is married to T. Hilton-Turvey, the song
writer. Mrs. Hilton-Turvey is the author of a
number of published songs, stories and poems.
MARGARET BELLE HOUSTON was educated at St.
Mary's College, Dallas, and is the author of
Prairie Flowers (verse), besides a poetical drama
and many short stories.
GOTTFRIED EMANUEL HULT (Chicago, 1869) is pro
fessor of literature and of Greek at the University
of North Dakota. He is the author of Reveries
and other Poems; he lectures on esthetic and ethi
cal subjects, and contributes verse to the maga
zines.
PERCY ADAMS HUTCHISON was born at Newton, Mas
sachusetts, in 1875. He attended Harvard Col
lege; contributes to periodicals; and has just
edited British Poems, published by Charles
Scribner's Sons.
306 Lyric Year Contributors
ORRICK JOHNS was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in
1887. He was educated in the public schools
there, and later studied at the College of Arts
and Sciences, University of Missouri, and in the
School of Architecture at Washington University,
St. Louis. He is dramatic critic and book re
viewer for the St. Louis Mirror.
THOMAS S. JONES, JR., was born at Boonville, N. Y.,
in 1882, and graduated from Cornell University.
He is the author of twelve volumes of verse, sev
eral in collaboration with Clinton Scollard, also
herein represented.
HARRY KEMP (Ohio, 1883), after brief schooling, and
work in a factory, shipped on a bark for Au
stralia. Then other wanderings, study at the
Kansas State University and the Roycroft Shop,
more roving, labor and verse-writing.
JOYCE KILMER (New Brunswick, N. J.) attended Rut
gers College, and Columbia University. He has
published a book of verse, Summer of Love, and
is bringing out a volume of child and fairy poems,
in co-authorship with Aline Murray, his wife.
He is noted as a critic of poetry.
FLORENCE KIPER, born at Atchison, Kansas, in 1886,
lives in Chicago, where she attended school and
the University of Chicago. She contributes poems
to the magazines.
HERMAN E. KITTREDGE was born at Walden, Ver
mont, in 1871. He studied chemistry at Cooper
Institute, New York, and medicine at George
Washington University, D. C. Dr. Kittredge ex
pounds many original views on prosody; and is
best known for his recent work — Ingersoll: A
Biographical Appreciation.
Lyric Year Contributors 307
Louis V. LEDOUX was born in New York in 1880,,
and was educated at Columbia,, graduating in
1902. He studied literature chiefly under the
guidance of George Edward Woodberry, and is
the author of three books — Songs from the Silent
Land, The Soul's Progress and Other Poems, and
Ysdra.
AGNES LEE was born in Chicago. She was educated
in Switzerland; has translated Gautier's poetry
and Gregh's into English; contributes verse to
the magazines, and has published two books,
Round Rabbit, and The Border of the Lake.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE, born in Liverpool, Eng
land, 1866, was educated at Liverpool College.
He came to America about 1897, and is now a
charter member of the Poetry Society of America,
and the author of many well-known books of
poetry and prose.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN, born in Berlin, 1882, was brought
as a child to America, and is now assistant pro
fessor of German at the Ohio State University.
He is the author of a number of volumes, and
contributes regularly to the magazines: poems,
stories and criticisms.
NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY is tramping the Western
States on a prolonged evangelistic tour "preach
ing the Gospel of Beauty in rural districts and
trading (his) rhymes for bread." He hails from
Springfield, Illinois. His poem we reprint by
permission of the American Magazine.
G. CONSTANT LOUNSBERY (New York City) studied
for medicine at Bryn Mawr College, graduated
at Johns Hopkins, has published Love's Testament
308 Lyric Year Contributors
(sonnets), Iseult and other Poems, and Poems of
Revolt and Satan Unbound, and now enjoys a
distinguished position in Paris, her present home,
as a playwright.
ARVIA MACKAYE, daughter of Percy MacKaye, has
passed most of her ten years at Cornish, New
Hampshire, where, with children of the colony,
she has acted in Thackeray's The Rose and the
Ring, and in Midsummer Night's Dream. She
is the author of many lyrics, of which The Hermit
Thrush has been widely quoted, and was set to
music and published; and a fairy play, The Daf
fodils.
PERCY MACKAYE (New York, 1875), the well-
known dramatist, poet, lecturer, and scholar, dis
tinguished himself at Harvard and at the Uni
versity of Leipzig. He is the author of numerous
plays, poems and essays.
CHARLES HENRY MACKINTOSH was born in Hallaton,
England, in 1885, of Scottish descent. He lives
in Duluth, Minnesota, contributing as a profession
to a number of technical and literary periodicals.
CATHERINE MARKHAM'S maiden name was Anna Cath
erine Murphy; she is the wife of Edwin Mark-
ham. Their home on Staten Island is dear to
many a young poet.
EDWIN MARKHAM (Oregon City, 1852) worked on a
California ranch, wrote verse, schooled, attended
colleges, superintended educational institutions;
and, in 1899, after publishing The Man with a
Hoe, found himself world-famous. He is about
to publish Virgilia, and Other Poems.
Lyric Year Contributors 309
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY was born in 1892. At
the age of fourteen she revealed,, to quote an emi
nent critic, "phenomenal promise" as a writer of
verse; and has carried off no little honor during
her brief career.
ANGELA MORGAN'S poetry first came to public notice
when the Rev. Dr. G. Campbell Morgan of Lon
don preached a noted sermon here, from her poem,
God's Man. Her second success was Pickets of
Hell, extensively copied and recited. Miss Mor
gan is well known as a journalist and writer of
fiction.
BERTHA NEWBERRY was born at Coldwater, Michi
gan, and is now residing at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
California. She has written verse since childhood.
This year her poetical drama of old Egypt, The
Toad, was produced in two western cities.
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN is engaged in literary work and
edited the volumes of essays by Francis Thomp
son and John Davidson recently published.
THEODORE EUGENE OERTEL was born at Westerley,
Rhode Island, in 1864. In 1892 he graduated
from the Medical Department of George Wash
ington University, D. C.
JAMES OPPENHEIM (St. Paul, Minnesota, 1882) lives
in New York, and studied literature at Columbia
University. He is the author of Monday Morn
ing and other Poems, and a number of novels.
Pittsburgh appeared in The International Maga
zine.
SHAEMAS O SHEEL, born in New York City in 1886,
was educated at public school and Columbia Uni-
3io Lyric Year Contributors
versity. He contributes poems and critical essays
to the leading periodicals, and his collected poems,
The Blossomy Bough, was widely noticed.
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY (Mrs. Lionel S.
Marks) is a native of New York, educated and
residing in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts.
She is the author of a number of well-known vol
umes of verse, the latest being The Singing Man.
Her drama, The Piper, obtained the Stratford-on-
Avon prize, 1910.
MURIEL RICE published her first poem when nine
years old in the St. Nicholas Magazine. Her
first book of verse, privately printed, and trans
lated by Dr. Theodore Tessing into German, re
ceived no little comment. She is the author of
another volume, Poems.
MARY ELEANOR ROBERTS was born in Philadelphia in
1867. She is on the managing board of the
Browning Society, and is the author of Cloth of
Frieze.
FRANCIS ROLT-WHEELER, born of Irish parents in
1876, was educated in Europe and Africa, spend
ing his youth in adventure and before the mast.
Journalist, editor, lecturer, and chaplain of St.
Luke's Hospital, New York, he is vice-president
of the Gaelic Literature League, and the author
of many juvenile and scientific works, and a
poetic drama, Nimrod, just published.
JESSIE E. SAMPTER was born at New York, N. Y.,
her home, in 1883, of Jewish parents. She has
traveled widely, and is the author of The Seekers.
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER, born under the Ameri
can flag in Austria, 1879, arrived as an infant in
Lyric Year Contributors 311
Cleveland, Ohio. He knows the States down
every grade of the social scale, and his songs are
the fruit of familiar experience. Poet, famed
'cellist, athlete, globe-trotter, scholar, vagabond,
editor, sculptor, he has written many important
books, including two volumes of verse, the latter,
Scum o' the Earth, and other Poems, just pub
lished.
HERMAN GEORGE SCHEFFAUER, of California, tempo
rarily residing in England, is the author of two
volumes of verse, The Masque of Elements, and
Drake in California.
EDWIN DAVIES SCHOONMAKER, born at Scranton,
Pennsylvania, was educated in the public schools
of Ohio and Kentucky, and at Kentucky Wesleyan
College, Kentucky University, and at the Uni
versity of Chicago, and for some time filled the
chair of Latin and Greek in Eureka College, Eu
reka, Illinois. He contributes to the magazines,
and is the author of The Saxons and The Ameri
cans.
CLINTON SCOLLARD, born at Clinton, N. Y., his home,
in 1860, has published about thirty volumes of
verse. He is professor of English Literature at
Hamilton College, where he was educated, to
gether with Harvard University, and Cambridge,
England.
WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD was born at Barre,
Vermont, in 1861. He received LL.B. cum laude
in 1883 from the Boston University; and is now
an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the
District of Columbia. Beside contributing poems
to the magazines, he is the author of two volumes
of verse.
312 Lyric Year Contributors
MARION CUMMINGS STANLEY, nee Cummings, was
born at San Francisco, California. She gradu
ated from the University of California, and is now
assistant professor of philosophy at the University
of Arizona, and a regular contributor to the maga
zines.
GEORGE STERLING (Sag Harbor, N. Y., 1869) was
educated under Father Tabb at St. Charles Col
lege, is the author of The Testimony of the Suns
and other Poems, A Wine of Wizardry and other
Poems, The House of Orchids and other Poems.
ALAN SULLIVAN, born at Montreal, in 1868, studied
at the Lorette School, Scotland, and at Toronto
University. He is a contributor to the best maga
zines, prose and verse; and two of his plays were
produced this year by the Arts and Letters Club
of Toronto, where he is civil and mechanical en
gineer for a large corporation.
MILDRED McNEAL SWEENEY was born at Burnett,
Wisconsin, in 1871, and educated at Lawrence
University, Wisconsin. She has published
(poems) When Yesterday Was Young, and Men
of No Land.
SARA TEASDALE was born at St. Louis, Mo., in 1884,
where she was educated and now makes her home.
She is a lover of Italy, and the author of Sonnett
to Duse; also, Helen of Troy and other Poems.
EDITH MATILDA THOMAS was born at Chatham, Ohio,
in 1854, and resides in New York. She is the
author of a dozen volumes of verse and prose, and
a noted contributor to the leading magazines.
The Guest at the Gate (verse) appeared in 1909.
Lyric Year Contributors 313
RIDGELY TORRENCE, born at Xenia, Ohio, in 1875,
is the author of The House of a Hundred Lights;
El Dorado, a tragedy; Abelard and Heloise
(poetic drama) ; Three Plays for Women.
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE was born at Louisville,
Kentucky, in 1877. He now edits The Designer,
and was formerly editor of The Smart Set. He
is the author of several books of verse, such as
The Quiet Singert Manhattan, and Youth and
other Poems. Amy Woodforde-Finden has set
many of his lyrics to music.
ANNA SPENCER TWITCHELL was born at Louisville,
Kentucky, in 1889, and was educated in the pub
lic and high schools of Hamilton, Ohio. This
poem appeared in The Delineator.
Louis UNTERMEYER was born in New York City,
1885, and was educated in the local schools. He
is the author of a volume of parodies, The
Younger Quire; and a lyric sequence, First Love.
His sonnet, Mockery, was awarded the Interna
tional Magazine poetry prize, 1911.
ALLAN UPDEGRAFF was born near Grinnell, Iowa,
1883; was educated at public school in Springfield,
Mo., and at Yale University. He contributes
poetry and stories to the leading magazines.
LEONARD VAN NOPPEN was born in Holland, 1868;
came to North Carolina; has distinguished him
self as a Dutch scholar in several institutions and
by his metrical translation of Vondel's Lucifer.
For years he has been completing a vast epic,
entitled Armageddon, which will be published
this winter in London.
314 Lyric Year Contributors
GEORGE SYLVESTER VIERECK was born in Munich, of
German and American parents, twenty-seven years
ago, coming here as a child. For several years he
has enjoyed international fame as poet and writer,
beside a lively editorial career.
BLANCHE SHOEMAKER WAGSTAFF, born in Manhat
tan, N. Y., twenty-three years ago, is already
the author of five volumes of verse and drama,
and is associate editor of the International Maga
zine.
HENRY CHRISTEEN WARNACK, born at Caryville,
Tennessee, 1877, graduated from the Tennessee
Military Institute, is the author of Life's New
Psalm, Man the Master, and a large mass of un-
collected verse; and resides in Los Angeles, Cali
fornia, where he is engaged as an editorial writer
on the Los Angeles Times.
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK was born in Long Island in
1886. He spent his boyhood in New York City.
After graduating from Harvard in 1908, he stud
ied at the Universities of Berlin and Gottingen,
but returned in 1910 to New York, where, he is
engaged in business. His first book of poems was
The Human Fantasy; The Beloved Adventure
has just been issued.
MARGARET WIDDEMER was born at Doyleston, Penn
sylvania, and was educated exclusively by her
father. She won several first prizes for poetry
when still quite a child. Her present poem was
awarded second prize last year by the Philadel
phia Browning Society, and is published by per
mission of Scribner's Magazine.
Lyric Year Contributors 315
MARGUERITE O. B. WILKINSON was born in Halifax,
Nova Scotia. She studied at the Northwestern
and at the Transylvania Universities, has roamed
throughout America, coming into intimate contact
with all classes and types ; and lives in Santa Bar
bara, California. She is well represented in her
book of verse, In Vivid Gardens.
WILLIAM HERVEY WOODS was born in Green County,
Kentucky, November 17, 1852. He was educated
at Hampden-Sidney College and the Union Theo
logical Seminary, Virginia. He was ordained in
1878 and became pastor of the Franklin Square
Presbyterian Church, Baltimore. He is a fre
quent contributor to the leading magazines.
GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY was born in 1855, at
his present home, Beverly, Massachusetts. He is
the author or editor of three-score volumes, deal
ing principally with verse. We are indebted to
Scribner's Magazine for this poem.
REA WOODMAN was born at Jacksonville, Illinois;
taken to Kansas in a prairie schooner ; brought up
with forests, cowboys, Indians, horses, dogs and
guns; attended several universities; has published
three books of verse and nearly a score of plays
for schools and colleges ; and has taught, and done
editorial work.
WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT was born in Char-
lottesville, Va. ; educated in New York and at
Harvard University; studied painting; and was
art editor of the West Coast Magazine. He is
now part editor of the Los Angeles Times and
literary critic of Town Topics.
316 Lyric Year Contributors
EDITH WYATT resides in Chicago. She was educated
at Bryn Mawr College,, and has contributed many
poems, short stories and articles to the magazines.
She is the author of several books of prose. This
poem is reprinted by permission of the Metro
politan Magazine.
GENERAL LIBRARY
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MAY 18 1954
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