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TWENTIETH-CENTURT
AMERICAN
POETRY
Edited, and, with a Preface, Iry
Conrad Aiken
THE MODERN LIBRARY
Neu> York
Copyright, 1944, by Random House, Inc.
Random House is THE PUBLISHER OF
THE MODERN LIBRARY
BBNNBTT A. CEBP DONALD 8. KLOPFBR ROBERT K. HAAS
Manufactured in the United States of America
By H. Wolff
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
*Y thanks are due the following poets, publishers and
agents for permission to reprint poems copyrighted by
them:
Lee Anderson
"Prevailing Winds" by Lee Anderson
R. P. Blackmur
"All Things Are a Flowing," "Half-Tide Ledge" and
"Scarabs for the Living" by R. P. Blackmur
Boni & Liveright
Poems by H. D,, from Collected Poems
Brandt and Brandt
"On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven" by Edna St. Vincent
Millay, from The Buc\ in the Snow, published by Harper &
Brothers, copyright, 1928, by Edna St. Vincent Millay; "What
Lips My Lips Have Kissed," from The Harp Weaver, published
by Harper & Brothers, copyright, 1920, by Edna St. Vincent
Millay
"Preludes to Attitude" and "Preludes to Definition" by Conrad
Aiken, from Preludes to Memnon, published by Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, copyright, 1930, 1931, by Conrad Aiken
"My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love," "Anyone Lived
in a Pretty How Town" and "As Freedom Is a Breakfastfood" by
E. E. Cummings, from Fifty Poems, published by Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, copyright, 1939, 1940, by E. E. Cummings; "Always
Before Your Voice My Soul," from Tulips and Chimneys, pub-
lished by Thomas Seltzer, copyright, 1923, by Thomas Seltzer;
"Somewhere I Have Never Travelled Gladly Beyond," from Col-
lected Poems, published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., copyright,
1923, 1925, 1931, 1935, 1938, by E. E. Cummings
Nicholas L. Brown
Poems by Alfred Kreymborg, from Blood of Things
,i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Malcolm Cowley
"Stone Horse Shoals," "The Long Voyage" and "Eight
Melons" by Malcolm Cowley, from The Dry Season, copyright,
1941
John Day Company
"Country Summer" and "Sundown" by Leonie Adams
Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc.
"Ajanta" by Muriel Rukeyser, from Beast in View
Farrar & Rinehart, Inc.
"The Sea," "Young Love" and "Hide in the Heart" by
Lloyd Frankenberg
Horace Gregory
"Fortune for Mirabel," "The Passion of MThail IV" and
"Chorus for Survival XIV" by Horace Gregory, from Poems:
1930-1940, published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1941
Harcourt Brace & Co., Inc.
"Jazz Fantasia" and "Wind Song" by Carl Sandburg, from
Smofe and Steel
"Animula," "Marina," "Ash Wednesday" and "Burnt Nor-
ton*' by T. S. Eliot, from Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot
Harper & Brothers
"Renascence" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Robert Hillyer
"Letter to a Teacher of English" by Robert Hillyer
Henry Holt & Co., Inc.
Poems by Robert Frost, from North of Boston and A Boy's
Will. "My November Guest," "Mowing," "To Earthward"
"Fire and Ice" "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,"
'Bereft," "Desert Places," from A Further Range and Col-
lected Poems by Robert Frost
"Gone" and "Cool Tombs" by Carl Sandburg, from Chi-
cago Poems and Corn Hustlers
"Axle Song," "No Faith," "The Whisperer" and "His Trees"
by Mark Van Doren
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii
Houghton Mifflin Co.
Poems by Anna Hempstcad Branch, from Rose of the Wind
Poems by Amy Lowell
Poems by John Gould Fletcher
"L'An Trentiesme de Mon Age," "The Too-Late Born,"
"Einstein," "You, Andrew Marvell" and "Memorial Rain" by
Archibald MacLeish
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Poems by Wallace Stevens and "Sea Surface Full of Clouds,"
"To the One of Fictive Music," "Cortege for Rosenbloom" by
Wallace Stevens
"Correspondent," "Charioteer," "Ghost," "At the Last,"
"Ganymede" by Witter Bynner
"This Corruptible," "The Eagle and the Mole," "O Vir-
tuous Light," "Escape," "Hymn to Earth," "Minotaur," "Con-
fession of Faith," "True Vine" by Elinor Wylie
"Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter," "Lady Lost," "Blue
Girls," "Here Lies a Lady," "Captain Carpenter," "Husband
Betrayed," "Little Boy Blue" by John Crowe Ransom
Poems by T. S. Eliot
Litde, Brown & Company
Poems by Emily Dickinson, from Poems: First Series, Poems:
Second Series, Poems: Third Series and The Single Hound
Liveright Publishing Corporation
"The Tree," "The Tomb at Akr Caar," "Portrait d'une
Femme," "Apparuit," "A Virginal," "The Return," "The
River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," "Dance Figure," "Ite,"
"Lament of the Frontier Guard" and "Taking Leave of a
Friend" by Ezra Pound
"Voyages II," "The River," "The Dance," "Indiana," "At-
lantis," from The Bridge, "Paraphrase," "In Shadow," "Leg-
end" and "Voyages VI" by Hart Crane
Macmillan Company
Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson from Collected Poems
"Poems about the Moon" and "The Eagle That Is Forgotten"
by Vachel Lindsay, from Collected Poems
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Poems by John Gould Fletcher
"The Monkeys," "The Fish" and "Poetry" by Marianne
Moore
"The White Dress" and "Lightning for Atmosphere," by
Marya Zaturenska, from Listening Landscape
"The Late Summer," "A Letter" and "The Marginal Dark"
by John Malcolm Brinnin
New Directions
"Song," "A Reason for Writing" and "Spring Song" by
Theodore Spencer
"Heracles," "Sonnet to the Moon" and "Sir Gawaine and
the Green Knight" by Yvor Winters
"Train Ride" and "Fish Food" by John Wheelwright
"A Letter from the Country" by Howard Baker
"End of Season," "Revelation" and "Pursuit" by Robert
Penn Warren
"The Character of Love Seen as a Search for the Lost,"
"Fog" and "At the New Year" by Kenneth Patchen
"In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," "At This Moment of
Time," "Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now" and "Men-
treche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace" by Delmore Schwartz
"The Drill" and "Parade" by Harry Brown
The New Republic
"The Last Supper" by Oscar Williams
Oxford University Press
"Dwarf of Disintegration," "The Leg in the Subway/' "Din-
ner Guest" and "The Man Coming Toward You" by Oscar
Williams
"The Largess," "Experience Evoked," "The Groundhog"
and "1934" by Richard Eberhart
Random House, Inc.
"Continent's End," "Birds," "Love the Wild Swan" and
"Apology for Bad Dreams" by Robinson Jeffcrs
Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc.
"Nostalgia," "The Fly," "Epitaph for John and Richard,"
"Travelogue for Exiles," "The Twins," "Poet" and "Waitress"
by Karl Jay Shapiro
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
Charles Scribner's Sons
"Solipsism" and "Odes" by George Santayana
"Hasbrouck and the Rose," "Hymn to Chance" and "About
Women" by H. Phelps Putnam
"Old Countryside" and "Summer Wish" by Louise Bogan
"A Recollection," "Fiametta," "Admonition" and "The Re-
turn" by John Peale Bishop
"Ode to the Confederate Dead" by Allen Tate
Helen Frith Stickney
Poems by Trumbull Stickney
The Title
"His Shield" by Marianne Moore
Viking Press, Inc.
"Boy with His Hair Cut Short" by Muriel Rukeyser
"There Came You Wishing Me," "Be Beautiful, Noble,
Like the Antique Ant," "God Said, *I Made a Man'," "Now,
If You Will Look in My Brain," "My Mouth Is Very Quiet,"
"The Way My Ideas Think Me," "Saw God Dead, but Laugh-
ing" and "Mostly Are We Mosdess" by Jose Garcia Villa
William Carlos Williams
"The Wanderer" by William Carlos Williams
Edmund Wilson
"Riverton," "A House of the Eighties" and "The Voice" by
Edmund Wilson
C. A.
PREFACE BY CONRAD AIKEN xix
EMILY DICKINSON
"In Winter" 3
I Died for Beauty 4
I've seen a Dying Eye 5
The Chariot 5
If I Shouldn't Be Alive 6
Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers 6
The Wind 7
In the Garden 7
The Snake 8
The Storm 9
It Was Not Death 9
Parting 10
To My Quick Ear 10
Not Any Sunny Tone 1 1
A Snake n
I Have a King u
Evening 12
Aurora 13
Immortality 13
Trying to Forget 14
I Felt a Funeral 14
Dying 15
A Clock Stopped 15
DWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford 16
Eros Turannos 27
The Gift of God 28
For a Dead Lady 30
The Man Against the Sky 30
ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH
The Monk in the Kitchen 39
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Solipsism 42
Odes 43
xi
xii COHTEH'TS
TRUMBULL STICKNEY
Be Still. The Hanging Gardens Were a Dream 49
Live Blindly 50
He Said: "If in His Image I Was Made" 50
On Some Shells Found Inland 51
In Ampezzo 51
Now in the Palace Gardens 54
Fidelity 55
At Sainte-Marguerite 55
Leave Him Now Quiet 57
Near Helikon 58
In Ampezzo (II.) 58
Mnemosyne 61
AMY LOWELL
Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String 61
The City of Falling Leaves 62
.ROBERT FROST
The Road Not Taken 66
Home Burial 67
The Wood-Pile 70
% The Fear 71
Birches 75
The Sound of the Trees 76
Hyla Brook 77
The Oven Bird 77
My November Guest 78
Mowing 79
To Earthward 79
Fire and Ice 80
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 80
Bereft 81
Desert Places 82
CARL SANDBURG
Cool Tombs 82
Jazz Fantasia 83
Wind Song 83
Gone 84
VACHEL LINDSAY
The Eagle That Is Forgotten 85
x
Poems about the Moon 86
WALLACE STEVENS
Peter Quince at the Clavier 90
Sunday Morning 93
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle 97
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird 101
Domination of Black 104
Sea Surface Full of Clouds 105
To the One of Fictive Music 108
Cortege for Rosenbloorn 109
WITTER BYNNER
Correspondent i j i
Charioteer in
Ghost 112
At the Last 112
Ganymede 113
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
The Wanderer 113
ELINOR WYLIE
This Corruptible 123
The Eagle and the Mole 125
O Virtuous Light 126
Escape 127
Hymn to Earth 128
Minotaur 130
Confession of Faith 131
True Vine 132
EZRA POUND
The Tree 133
The Tomb at Akr (Jaar 133
Portrait d'une Femme 134
Apparuit 135
A Virginal 136
The Return 137
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter 137
Dance Figure 138
Ite i39
Lament of the Frontier Guard 140
Taking Leave of a Friend 140
xv
ALFRED KREYMBORG
Arabs 141
Nun Snow 142
Manikin and Minikin 144
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
Irradiations 156
Blue Symphony 160
White Sympony 164
H. D.
At Baia 169
Not Honey 170
Song 172
The Garden 172
MARIANNE MOORE
The Monkeys 173
The Fish 174
Poetry 176
His Shield 177
ROBINSON JEFFERS
Continent's End 178
Birds 179
Love the Wild Swan 180
Apology for Bad Dreams 181
MARSDEN HARTLEY
Warblers 184
Indian Point 185
T. S. ELIOT
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 186
Portrait of a Lady 190
Sweeney Among the Nightingales 194
Whispers of Immortality 195
3erontion 19?
The Hollow Men 199
Animula 202
Marina 203
Ash Wednesday 205
Burnt Norton 212
JOHN CROWE RANSOM
Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter 217
Lady Lost 2I&
Blue Girls 219
Here Lies a Lady 219
Captain Carpenter 220
Husband Betrayed 222
Little Boy Blue 223
CONRAD AIKEN
Preludes to Attitude 224
Preludes to Definition 237
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY
On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven 241
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed 241
Renascence 242
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH
L'An Trentiesme de Mon Age 247
The Too-Late Born 248
Einstein 248
You, Andrew Marvell 254
Memorial Rain 256
MARK VAN DOREN
Axle Song 257
No Faith 258
The Whisperer 259
His Trees 260
E. E. CUMMINGS
My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love 262
Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town 264
As Freedom Is a Breakfastfood 265
Always Before Your Voice My Soul 266
Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly
Beyond 268
H. PHELPS PUTNAM
Hasbrouck and the Rose ^69
Hymn to Chance 270
About Women 272
ROBERT HILLYER
Letter to a Teacher of English 273
LEE ANDERSON
Prevailing Winds 278
xv
EDMUND WILSON
Riverton 293
A House of the Eighties 293
The Voice 204
LOUISE BOGAN
Old Countryside 295
Summer Wish 296
HORACE GREGORY
Fortune for Mirabel 301
The Passion of M'Phail (IV) 302
Chorus for Survival (XIV) 303
MALCOLM COWLEY
Stone Horse Shoals 304
The Long Voyage 305
Eight Melons 306
THEODORE SPENCER
Song 306
A Reason for Writing 307
Spring Song 308
R. P. BLACKMUR
-. All Things Are a Flowing 308
Half-Tide Ledge 309
Scarabs for the Living 310
JOHN PEALE BISHOP
A Recollection 312
Fiametta 312
Admonition 313
The Return 314
YVOR WINTERS
Heracles 315
Sonnet to the Moon 317
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight 317
JOHN WHEELRIGHT
Train Ride 319
Fish Food 320
ALLEN TATE
Ode to the Confederate Dead 32^
HART CRANE
Voyages (II) 324
xv
The River, The Dance, Indiana, Atlantis, from
"The Bridge" 325
Paraphrase 339
tn Shadow 339
Legend 340
Voyages (VI) 341
LEONIE ADAMS
Country Summer 342
Sundown 343
OSCAR WILLIAMS
Dwarf of Disintegration 344
The Leg in the Subway 346
Dinner Guest 347
The Man Coming Toward You 349
The Last Supper 350
MARYA ZATURENSKA
The White Dress 351
Lightning for Atmosphere 352
HOWARD BAKER
A Letter from the Country 353
ROBERT PENN WARREN
End of Season 356
Revelation 357
Pursuit 358
KENNETH PATCHEN
The Character of Love Seen as a Search for
the Lost 360
Fog 361
At the New Year 362
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave 363
At This Moment of Time 364
Socrates' Ghost Must Haunt Me Now 364
"Mentreche il Vento, Come Fa, Si Tace" 365
RICHARD EBERHART
The Largess 366
Experience Evoked 367
The Groundhog 368
1934 3^
xv
MURIEL RUKEYSER
Ajanta 371
Boy with His Hair Cut Short 375
KARL JAY SHAPIRO
Nostalgia 376
The Fly 377
Epitaph for John and Richard 379
Travelogue for Exiles 379
The Twins 380
Poet 381
Waitress 383
JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN
The Late Summer 384
A Letter 385
The Marginal Dark 385
HARRY BROWN
The Drill 386
Parade 388
LLOYD FRANKENBERG
The Sea 389
% Young Love 391
Hide in the Heart 392
JOSE GARCIA VILLA
There Came You Wishing Me 396
Be Beautiful, Noble, Like the Antique Ant 396
God Said, "I Made a Man" 397
Now, If You Will Look in My Brain 398
My Mouth Is Very Quiet 398
The Way My Ideas Think Me 399
Saw God Dead but Laughing 399
Mostly Are We Mostless 400
INDEX OF POETS 401
INDEX OF FIRST LINES 403
PREFACE
WHEN this anthology was first compiled, twenty-two
years ago, it was with a very specific purpose: it was pri-
marily designed for publication in England, and in the pious
hope of enlightening that country, then singularly uninformed
about American literature, as to the state of contemporary Amer-
ican poetry. With this end in view, the editor quite avowedly
made no attempt, as he put it, "to cover the entire field" of
American poetry, but rather, as seemed to promise a more effec-
tive introduction, "to compile an anthology in which fewer poets
might figure, and in which, therefore, they might more gener-
ously and identifiably be represented." For this purpose, four-
teen poets were selected, and with them Emily Dickinson, the
latter because she was at that time wholly unknown in England,
and because, as the editor observed it, "seemed wise to include
in an anthology of the contemporary, one poet of an earlier
generation." The little book justified itself, if modestly. The
English critics were properly irritated, and made their first an-
noyed and surprised acquaintance with, among others, Robinson
and Stevens.
In the five years which passed before the book came out in
America, it did not seem to the editor that the poetic "scene"
had sufficiently altered, in its main features, to warrant any
great change in its contents. Accordingly, it remained pretty
much the same book that the English had known; and in fact it
has remained the same ever since. The depression came and
went, and the New Deal, and the Writers' Project. And the war
came. Indeed, a generation, and more, had passed and quite sud-
denly it appeared that where before there was one poet, now
there were fifty. To the twenty years of twentieth-century Amer-
ican poetry in the original volume, there were now twenty more
to be added; and what had in those days seemed at best a
very promising beginning was now secure and brilliant in ac-
complishment. "The best English poetry being written today"
an anonymous American writer made the remark a few years
ago to an anonymous English writer "is being written by
Americans." It was quite true, and it is still quite true. The half
xix
xx PREFACE
century of American poetry which begins with Emily Dickinson
is so varied, so rich and so new, as to compare favorably with
any but the greatest similar spans in the whole history of Eng-
lish poetry. For the first time, English poetry is really being
revitalized on the western shores of the Atlantic. For the first
time, American poetry is assured, mature and easy, in an un-
forced awareness of its wonderful bilateral tradition, its unique
inheritance of two separate but complementary cultures. "The
European who has settled in America"-~the editor noted in his
earlier volume "and who has become the American, uses the
English language; but one must bear it constantly in mind that
although he has worked few outward changes in the language,
he has none the less begun very distinctly to charge it anew with
emotional and temperamental and tactile significances, which
arise naturally out of his adjustment to a new scene." Mr. T. S.
Eliot once observed that the American had one very great cul-
tural advantage over the European: he could, if he wished,
become European; in that process of "becoming," or acquiring,
he could actually possess more than the European, possess it with
a fuller awareness. May one not say similarly that the English
language, whether as it crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower,
or as it passes the New York customs barrier today, has one
great advantage over the English language of Whitechapel or
Canterbury or Parliament Square or the Banbury Road? It is
the English language becoming American.
But let the poets speak for themselves. Here are fifty-five
where before were fifteen; and of every sort; and all of them
good. As in his first compilation, the editor has on the whole
preferred to include such poets as could be represented with a
group of poems, and, with a few exceptions, to avoid the one-
poem poet. Emily Dickinson remains, both as forerunner and
as touchstone. Trumbull Stickney, the natural link between
Emily Dickinson and the real twentieth-century "thing," has
been given the space that he deserves; he too is a forerunner.
If Mr. W. H. Auden is not represented, it is simply because he
is really no more an American poet than Mr. Eliot is an English
one. For the rest, here is such a body of poetry as must, one dares
to believe, become a literary landmark.
CONRAD AIKEN
Brcwster, Massachusetts.
TWENTIETH -CENTURY
EMILY DICKINSON
"In Winter"
I
IN Winter, in my room,
I came upon a worm,
Pink, lank, and warm.
But as he was a worm
And worms presume,
Not quite with him at home
Secured him by a string
To something neighbouring,
And went along.
A trifle afterward
A thing occurred,
I'd not believe it if I heard
But state with creeping blood;
A snake, with mottles rare,
Surveyed my chamber floor,
In feature as the worm before.
But ringed with power.
The very string
With which I tied him, too,
When he was mean and new,
That string was there.
I shrank "How fair you are!"
Propitiation's claw
3
AMERICAN POETRY
"Afraid," he hissed,
"Of me?
No cordiality?"
He fathomed me.
Then to a rhythm slim
Secreted in his form,
As patterns swim,
Projected him.
That time I flew,
Both eyes his way,
Lest he pursue
Nor ever ceased to run,
Till in a distant town,
Towns on from mine
I sat me down;
This was a dream.
II
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
EMILY DICKINSON
III
I've seen a dying eye
Run round and round a room
In search of something, as it seemed,
Then cloudier become;
And then, obscure with fog,
And then be soldered down,
Without disclosing what it be,
'Twcre blessed to have seen.
IV
The Chariot
\ ECAUSE I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling on the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
AMERICAN POETRY
V
If I shouldn't be alive
When the robins come,
Give the one in red cravat
A memorial crumb.
If I couldn't thank you,
Being just asleep,
You will know I'm trying
With my granite lip!
VI
Safe in their alabaster chambers,
Untouched by morning and untouched by noon,
Sleep the meek members of the resurrection,
Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.
Light laughs the breeze in her castle of sunshine;
Babbles the bee in a stolid ear;
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
Grand go the years in the crescent above them;
Worlds scoop their arcs, and firmaments row,
Diadems drop and Doges surrender,
Soundless as dots on a disk of snow.
VII
The Wind
OF all the sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody
EMILY DICKINSON
The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.
When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,
I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant
Rise solemn in the tree,
As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed
In seamless company.
VIII
In the Garden
A BIRD came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
AMERICAN POETRY
Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home
Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.
IX
The Snafe
A NARROW fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him did you not,
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun-
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
EMILY DICKINSON
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
The Storm
npHERE came a wind like a bugle;
JL It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!
XI
It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down;
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues, for noon.
It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.
to AMERICAN POETRY
And yet it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen
Set orderly for burial,
Reminded me of mine,
As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key;
And 'twas like midnight, some,
When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.
But most like chaos stopless, cool-
Without a chance or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.
XII
Parting
MY life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
XIII
To my quick ear the leaves conferred;
The bushes they were bells;
DICKINSON
I could not find a privacy
From Nature's sentinels. -"
In cave if I presumed to hide,
The walls began to tell;
Creation seemed a mighty crack
To make me visible.
XIV
Not any sunny tone
From any fervent zone
Finds entrance there.
Better a grave of Balm
Toward human nature's home,
And Robins near,
Than a stupendous Tomb
Proclaiming to the gloom
How dead we are.
XV
A Snathe
SWEET is the swamp with its secrets,
Until we meet a snake;
'Tis then we sigh for houses,
And our departure take
At that enthralling gallop
That only childhood 4cnows,
A snake is summer's treason,
And guile is where it goes.
XVI
I have a king who does not speak;
So, wondering, through the hours meek
12 AMERICAN .POETRY
I trudge the day away-
Half glad when it is night and sleep,
If, haply, through a dream to peep
In parlours shut by day.
And if I do, when morning comes
It is as if a hundred drums
Did round my pillow roll,
And shouts fill all my childish sky,
And bells keep saying Victory*
From steeples in my soul!
And if I don't, the little Bird
Within the orchard is not heard,
And I omit to pray,
Tather, Thy will be done' today,
For my will goes the other way,
And it were perjury!
XVII
Evening
cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one
Their seam the day upon.
The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.
A vastness, as a neighbour, came
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home
And so the night became.
EMILY DICKINSON 13
XVIII
Aurora
OF bronze and blaze
The north, to-night!
So adequate its forms,
So preconcerted with itself,
So distant to alarms
An unconcern so sovereign
To universe, or me,
It paints my simple spirit
With tints of majesty,
Till I take vaster attitudes,
And strut upon my stem,
Disdaining men and oxygen,
For arrogance of them.
My splendours are menagerie;
But their competeless show
Will entertain the centuries
When I am, long ago,
An island in dishonoured grass,
Whom none but daisies know.
XIX
Immortality
IT is an honourable thought,
And makes one lift one's hat,
As one encountered gentlefolk
Upon a daily street,
That we've immortal place,
Though pyramids decay,
And kingdoms, like the orchard,
Flit russetly away.
i 4 AMERICAN POETRY
XX
Trying to Forget
BEREAVED of all, I went abroad,
No less bereaved to be
Upon a new peninsula-
The grave preceded me,
Obtained my lodgings ere myself,
And when I sought my bed,
The grave it was, reposed upon
The pillow for my head.
I waked, to find it first awake,
I rose it followed me;
I tried to drop it in the crowd,
To lose it in the sea,
In cups of artificial drowse
To sleep its shape away
The grave was finished, but the spade
Remained in memory.
XXI
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
EMILY DICKINSON
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I am silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
XXII
Dying
1 heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz.
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
XXIII
A clock stopped not the mantel's;
Geneva's farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still.
16 AMERICAN POETRY
An awe came on the trinket!
The figures hunched with pain,
Then quivered out of decimals
Into degreeless noon.
It will not stir for doctors,
This pendulum of snow;
The shopman importunes it,
While cool, concernless No
Nods from the gilded pointers,
Nods from the seconds slim,
Decades of arrogance between
The dial life and him.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford
are a friend then, as I make it out,
JL Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,
All most harmonious and out of his
Miraculous inviolable increase
Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like
Of olden time with timeless Englishmen;
And I must wonder what you think of him
All you down there where your small Avon flows
By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman.
Some, for a guess, would have him riding back
To be a farrier there, or say a dyer;
Or maybe one of your adept surveyors;
Or like enough the wizard of all tanners,
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON i
Not you no fear of that; for I discern
In you a kindling of the flame that saves
The nimble element, the true caloric;
I see it, and was told of it, moreover,
By our discriminate friend himself, no other.
Had you been one of the sad average,
As he would have itmeaning, as I take it,
The sinew and the solvent of our Island,
You'd not be buying beer for this Terpander's
Approved and estimated friend Ben Jonson;
He'd never foist it as a part of his
Contingent entertainment of a townsman
While he goes off rehearsing, as he must,
If he shall ever be the Duke of Stratford.
And my words are no shadow on your town
Far from it; for one town's as like another
As all are unlike London. Oh, he knows it
And there's the Stratford in him; he denies it,
And there's the Shakespeare in him. So, God help him!
I tell him he needs Greek; but neither God
Nor Greek will help him. Nothing will help that man.
You see the fates have given him so much,
He must have all or perish or look out
Of London, where he sees too many lords.
They're part of half what ails him: I suppose
There's nothing fouler down among the demons
Than what it is he feels when he remembers
The dust and sweat and ointment of his calling
With his lords looking on and laughing at him.
King as he is, he can't be king dc facto,
And that's as well, because he wouldn't like it;
He'd frame a lower rating of men then
Than he has now; and alter that would come
An abdication or an apoplexy.
He can't be king, not even king of Stratford
Though half the world, if not the whole of it,
May crown him with a crown that fits no king
Save Lord Apollo's homesick emissary:
Not there on Avon, or on any stream
i8 AMERICAN POETRY
Where Naiads and their white arms are no more
Shall he find home again. It's all too bad.
But there's a comfort, for he'll have that House
The best you ever saw; and he'll be there
Anon, as you're an Alderman. Good God!
He makes me lie awake o* nights and laugh.
And you have known him from his origin,
You tell me; and a most uncommon urchin
He must have been to the few seeing ones
A trifle terrifying, I dare say,
Discovering a world with his man's eyes,
Quite as another lad might see some finches,
If he looked hard and had an eye for Nature.
But this one had his eyes and their foretelling,
And he had you to fare with, and what else ?
He must have had a father and a mother-
In fact I've heard him say so and a dog,
As a boy should, I venture; and the dog,
Most likely, was the only man who knew him.
A dog, for all I know, is what he needs
As much as anything right here to-day,
To counsel him about his disillusions,
Old aches, and parturitions of what's coming
A dog of orders, an emeritus,
To wag his tail at him when he comes home,
And then to put his paws up on his knees
And say/ "For God's sake, what's it all about?"
I don't know whether he needs a dog or not
Or what he needs. I tell him he needs Greek;
I'll talk of rules and Aristotle with him,
And if his tongue's at home he'll say to that,
"I have your word that Aristotle knows,
And you mine that I don't know Aristotle.'*
He'll all at odds with all the unities,
And what's yet worse it doesn't seem to matter;
He treads along through Time's old wilderness
As if the tramp of all the centuries
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 19
Had left no roads and there are none, for him;
He doesn't see them, even with those eyes
And that's a pity, or I say it is.
Accordingly we have him as we have him
Going his way, the way that he goes best,
A pleasant animal with no great noise
Or nonsense anywhere to set him off
Save only divers and inclement devils
Have made of late his heart their dwelling-place.
A flame half ready to fly out sometimes
At some annoyance may be fanned up in him,
But soon it falls, and when it falls goes out;
He knows how little room there is in there
For crude and futile animosities,
And how much for the joy of being whole,
And how much for long sorrow and old pain.
On our side there are some who may be given
To grow old wondering what he thinks of us
And some above us, who are, in his eyes,
Above himself and that's quite right and English.
Yet here we smile, or disappoint the gods
Who made it so; the gods have always eyes
To see men scratch; and they see one down here
Who itches, manor-bitten, to the bone,
Albeit he knows himself yes, yes, he knows
The lord of more than England and of more
Than all the seas of England in all time
Shall ever wash. D'ye wonder that I laugh?
He see me, and he doesn't seem to care;
And why the devil should he? I can't tell you.
I'll meet him out alone of a bright Sunday,
Trim, rather spruce, and quite the gentleman.
"What, ho, my lord!" say I. He doesn't hear me;
Wherefore I have to pause and look at him.
He's not enormous, but one looks at him.
A little on the round if you insist,
For now, God save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
20 AMERICAN POETRY
More years to that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station
The mystery that's his a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame
For being won so easy, and at friends
Who laugh at him for what he wants the most,
And for his dukedom down in Warwickshire;
By which you see we're all a little jealous. . . .
Poor Greene! I fear the colour of his name
Was even as that of his ascending soul;
And he was one where there are many others-
Some scrivening to the end against their fate,
Their puppets all in ink and all to die there;
And some with hands that once would shade an eye
That scanned Euripides and ^schylus
Will reach by this time for a pot-house mop
To slush their first and last of royalties.
Poor devils! and they all play to his hand;
for so it was in Athens and old Rome.
But that's not here or there; I've wandered off.
Green does it, or I'm careful. Where's that boy?
Yes, he'll go back to Stratford. And we'll miss him?
Dear sir, there'll be no London here without him.
We'll all be riding, one of these fine days,
Down there to see him and his wife won't like us;
And then we'll think of what he never said
Of women which, if taken all in all
With what he did say, would buy many horses.
Though nowadays he's not so much for women:
"So few of them," he says, "are worth the guessing."
But there's a worm at work when he says that,
And while he says it one feels in the air
A deal of circumambient hocus-pocus.
They've had him, dancing till his toes were tender,
And he can feel 'em now, come chilly rains.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
There's no long cry for going into it,
However, and we don't know much about it.
But you in Stratford, like most here in London.
Have more now in the Sonnets than you paid for;
He's put one there with all her poison on,
To make a singing fiction of a shadow
That's in his life a fact, and always will be.
But she's no care of ours, though Time, I fear,
Will have a more reverberant ado
About her than about another one
Who seems to have decoyed him, married him,
And sent him scutding on his way to London
With much already learned, and more to learn,
And more to follow. Lord! how I see him now,
Pretending, maybe trying, to be like us.
Whatever he may have meant, we never had him;
He failed us, or escaped, or what you will
And there was that t about him (God knows what
We'd flayed another had he tried it on us)
That made as many of us as had wits
More fond of all his easy distances
Than one another's noise and clap-your-shoulder.
But think you not, my friend, he'd never talk!
Talk? He was eldritch at it; and we listened
Thereby acquiring much we knew before
About ourselves, and hitherto had held
Irrelevant, or not prime to the purpose.
And there were some, of course, and there be now,
Disordered and reduced amazedly
To resignation by the mystic seal
Of young finality the gods had laid
On everything that made him a young demon;
And one or two shot looks at him already
As he had been their executioner;
And once or twice he was, not knowing it
Or knowing, being sorry for poor clay
And saying nothing . . . Yet, for all his engines,
You'll meet a thousand of an afternoon
Who strut and sun themselves and see around 'em
22 AMERICAN POETRY
A world made out of more that has a reason
Than his, I swear, that he sees here to-day;
Though he may scarcely give a Fool an exit
But we mark how he sees in everything
A law that, given that we flout it once too often,
Brings fire and iron down on our naked heads.
To me it looks as if the power that made him,
For fear of giving all things to one creature,
Left out the first faith, innocence, illusion,
Whatever 'tis that keeps us out o' Bedlam
And thereby, for his too consuming vision,
Empowered him out of nature; though to see him,
You'd never guess what's going on inside him.
Hell break out some day like a keg of ale
With too much independent frenzy in it;
And all for cellaring what he knows won't keep,
And what he'd best forget but that he can't.
You'll have it, and have more thai) I'm foretelling;
And there'll be such a roaring at the Globe
As never stunned the bleeding gladiators.
He'll have to change the colour of its hair
A bit, for now he calls it Cleopatra.
Black hair would never do for Cleopatra.
But you and I are not yet two old women,
And you're a man of office. What he does
Is more to you than how it is he does it-
And that's what the Lord God has never told him.
They work together, and the Devil helps 'em;
They do it of a morning, or if not,
They do it of a night; in which event
He's peevish of a morning. He seems old;
He's not the proper stomach or the sleep
And they're two sovran agents to conserve him
Against the fiery art that has no mercy
But what's in that prodigious grand new House.
I gather something happening in his boyhood
Fulfilled him with a boy's determination
To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well,
I hope at last hell have his joy of it,
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 23
And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,
And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,
Be less than hell to his attendant ears.
Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him.
He may be wise. With London two days off,
Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him;
But there's no quickening breath from anywhere
Shall make of him again the young poised faun
From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already
A legend of himself before I came
To blink before the last of his first lightning.
Whatever there be, there'll be no more of that;
The coming on of his old monster Time
Has made him a still man; and he has dreams
Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.
He knows how much of what men paint themselves
Would blister in the light of what they are;
He sees how much of what was great now shares
An eminence transformed and ordinary;
He knows too much of what the world has hushed
In others, to be loud now for himself;
He knows now at what height low enemies
May reach his heart, and high friends let him fall;
But what not even such as he may know
Bedevils him the worst: his lark may sing
At heaven's gate how he will, and for as long
As joy may listen, but he sees no gate,
Save one whereat the spent clay waits a little
Before the churchyard has it, and the worm.
Not long ago, late in an afternoon,
I came on him unseen down Lambeth way,
And on my life I was afear'd of him:
He gloomed and mumbled like a soul from Tophet,
His hands behind him and his head bent solemn.
"What is it now," said I, "another woman?"
That made him sorry for me, and he smiled.
"No, Ben," he mused; "it's Nothing. It's all Nothing.
We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done;
24 AMERICAN POETRY
Spiders and flies we're mostly one or t'other
We come, we go; and when we're done, we're done;"
:< By God, you sing that song as if you knew it!"
Said I, by way of cheering him; "what ails ye?"
"I think I must have come down here to think,"
Says he to that, and pulls his little beard;
"Your fly will serve as well as anybody,
And what's his hour? He flies, and flies, and flies,
And in his fly's mind has a brave appearance;
And then your spider gets him in her net,
And eats him out, and hangs him up to dry.
That's Nature, the kind mother of us all.
And then your slattern housemaid swings her broom,
And where's your spider? And that's Nature, also.
It's Nature, and it's Nothing. It's all Nothing.
It's all a world where bugs and emperors
Go singularly back to the same dust,
Each in his time; and the old, ordered stars
That sang together, Ben, will sing the same
Old stave to-morrow."
When he talks like that,
There's nothing for a human man to do
But lead him to some grateful nook like this
Where we be now, and there to make him drink .
He'll drink, for love of me, and then be sick;
A sad sign always in a man of parts,
And always very ominous. The great
Should be as large in liquor as in love
And our great friend is not so large in either:
One disaSects him, and the other fails him;
Whatso he drinks that has an antic in it,
He's wondering what's to pay in his insides;
And while his eyes are on the Cyprian
He's fribbling all the time witli that damned House,
We laugh here at his thrift, but after all
It may be thrift that saves him from the devil;
God gave it, anyhow and we'll suppose
He knew the compound of His handiwork.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 25
To-day the clouds are with him, but anon
He'll out of 'em enough to shake the tree
Of life itself and bring down fruit unheard-of
And, throwing in the bruised and whole together,
Prepare a wine to make us drunk with wonder;
And if he live, there'll be a sunset spell
Thrown over him as over a glassed lake
That yesterday was all a black wild water,
God send he live to give us, if no more,
What now's a-rampage in him, and exhibit,
With a decent half-allegiance to the ages
An earnest of at least a casual eye
Turned once on what he owes to Gutenberg,
And to the fealty of more centuries
Than are as yet a picture in our vision.
"There's time enough I'll do it when I'm old,
And we're immortal men," he says to that;
And then he says to me, "Ben, what's 'immortal'?
Think you by any force of ordination
It may be nothing of a sort more noisy
Than a small oblivion of component ashes
That of a dream-addicted world was once
A moving atomy much like your friend here?"
Nothing will help that man. To make him laugh,
I said then he was a mad mountebank
And by the Lord I nearer made him cry.
I could have eat an eft then, on my knees,
Tails, claws, and all of him; for I had stung
The king of men, who had no sting for me,
And I had hurt him in his memories;
And I say now, as I shall say again,
I love the man this side idolatry.
He'll do it when he'i> old, he says. I wonder.
He may not be so ancient as all that.
For such as he the thing that is to do
Will do itself but there's a reckoning;
The sessions that are now too much his own,
The roiling inward of a still outside,
26 AMERICAN POETRY
The churning out of all those blood-fed lines,
The nights of many schemes and little sleep,
The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking,
The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching
This weary jangling of conjoined affairs
Made out of elements that have no end,
And all confused at once, I understand,
Is not what makes a man to live forever.
O, no, not now! He'll not be going now:
There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes. He'll stay awhile. Just wait:
Just wait a year or two for Cleopatra,
For she's to be a balsam and a comfort;
And that's not all a jape of mine now, either.
For granted once the old way of Apollo
Sings in a man, he may then, if he's able,
Strike unafraid whatever strings he will
Upon the last and wildest of new lyres;
Nor out of his new magic, though it hymn
The shrieks of dungeoned hell, shall he create
A madness or a gloom to shut quite out
A cleaving daylight, and a last great calm
Triumphant over shipwreck and all storms.
He might have given Aristotle creeps,
But surely would have given him his Catharsis.
He'll not be going yet. There's too much yet
Unsung within the man. But when he goes,
I'd stake ye coin o' the realm his only care
For a phantom world he sounded and found wanting
Will be a portion here, a portion there,
Of this or that thing or some other thing
That has a patent and intrinsical
Equivalence in those egregious shillings.
And yet he knows, God help him! Tell me, now,
If ever there was anything let loose
On earth by gods or devils heretofore
Like this mad, careful, proud, indifferent Shakespeare!
Where was it, if it ever was? By heaven,
'Twas never yet in Rhodes or Pergamon
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 27
In Thebes or Nineveh, a thing like this!
No thing like this was ever out of England;
And that he knows. I wonder if he cares.
Perhaps he does. . . . O Lord, that House in Stratford!
Eros Turannos
HE fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.
Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.
A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.
The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
?8 AMERICAN POETRY
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbour side
Vibrate with her seclusion.
We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.
Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.
The Gift of God
BLESSED with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so
That her degree should be so great
Among the favoured of the Lord
That she may scarcely bear the weight
Of her bewildering reward.
As one apart, immune, alone,
Or featured for the shining ones,
And like to none that she has known
Of other women's other sons
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 29
The firm fruition of her need,
He shines anointed; and he blurs
Her vision, till it seems indeed
A sacrilege to call him hers.
She fears a little for so much
Of what is best, and hardly dares
To think of him as one to touch
With aches, indignities, and cares;
She sees him rather at the goal.
Still shining; and her dream foretells
The proper shining of a soul
Where nothing ordinary dwells.
Perchance a canvass of the town
Would find him far from flags and shouts.
And leave him only the renown
Of many smiles and many doubts;
Perchance the crude and common tongue
Would havoc strangely with his worth;
But she, with innocence unwrung,
Would read his name around the earth.
And others, knowing how this youth
Would shine, if love could make him great*
When caught and tortured for the truth
Would only writhe and hesitate;
While she, arranging for his days
What centuries could not fulfil,
Transmutes him with her faith and praise,
And has him shining where she will.
She crowns him with her gratefulness,
And says again that life is good;
And should the gift of God be less
In him than in her motherhood,
His fame, though vague, will not be small,
As upward through her dream he fares,
Half clouded with a crimson fall
Of roses thrown on marble stairs.
30 AMERICAN POETRY
For a Dead Lady
NO more with overflowing light
Shall fill the eyes that now are faded,
Nor shall another's fringe with night
Their woman-hidden world as they did.
No more shall quiver down the days
The flowing wonder of her ways,
Whereof no language may requite
The shifting and the many-shaded.
The grace, divine, definitive,
Clings only as a faint forestalling;
The laugh that love could not forgive
Is hushed, and answers to no calling;
The forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years;
The breast where roses could not live
Has done with rising and with falling.
The beauty, shattered by the laws
That have creation in their keeping,
No longer trembles at applause,
Or over children that are sleeping;
And we who delve in beauty's lore
Know all that we have known before
Of what inexorable cause
Makes Time so vicious in his reaping.
The Man Against the Sty
BETWEEN me and the sunset, like a dome
Against the glory of a world on fire,
Now burned a sudden hill,
Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,
With nothing on it for the flame to kill
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 31
Save one who moved and was alone up there
To loom before the chaos and the glare
As if he were the last god going home
Unto his last desire.
Dark, marvellous, and inscrutable he moved on
Till down the fiery distance he was gone,
Like one of those eternal, remote things
That range across a man's imaginings
When a sure music fills him and he knows
Wha' he may say thereafter to few men
The touch of ages having wrought
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought
A phantom or a legend until then;
For whether lighted over ways that save,
Or lured from all repose,
If he go on too far to find a grave,
Mostly alone he goes.
Even he, who stood where I had found him,
On high with fire all round him,
Who moved along the molten west,
And over the round hill's crest
That seemed half ready with him to go down,
Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,
As if there were to be no last thing left
Of a nameless unimaginable town
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken
Down to the perils of a depth not known,
From death defended, though by men forsaken,
The bread that every man must eat alone;
He may have walked while others hardly dared
Look on to see him stand where many fell;
And upward out of that as out of hell,
He may have sung and striven
To mount where more of him shall yet be given,
Bereft of all retreat,
To sevenfold heat-
As on a day when three in Dura shared
The furnace, and were spared
For glory by that king of Babylon
32 AMERICAN POETRY
Who made himself so great that God, who heard,
Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.
Again, he may have gone down easily,
By comfortable altitudes, and found,
As always, underneath him solid ground
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand
Possessed already of the promised land,
Far stretched and fair to see:
A good sight, verily,
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him
Shine glad with hidden tears.
Why question of his ease of who before him,
In one place or another where they left
Their names as far behind them as their bones,
And yet by dint of slaughter, toil, and theft,
And shrewdly sharpened stones,
Carved hard the way for his ascendancy
Through deserts of lost years?
Why trouble him now who sees and hears
No more than what his innocence requires,
And therefore to no other height aspires
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires?
He may do more by seeing what he sees
Than others eager for iniquities;
He may, by seeing all things for the best,
Incite futurity to do the rest.
Or with an even likelihood,
He may have met with atrabilious eyes
The fires of time on equal terms and passed
Indifferently down, until at last
His only kind of grandeur would have been,
Apparently, in being seen.
He may have had for evil or for good
No argument; he may have had no care
For what without himself went anywhere
To failure or to glory, and least of all
For such a stale, flamboyant miracle;
He may have been the prophet of an art
Immovable to old idolatries;
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 33
He may have been a player without a part,
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies
For such a flaming way to advertise;
He may have been a painter sick at heart
With Nature's toiling for a new surprise;
He may have been a cynic, who now, for all
Of anything divine that his effete
Negation may have tasted,
Saw truth in his own image, rather small,
Forbore to fever the ephemeral,
Found any barren height a good retreat
From any swarming street,
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;
And when the primitive old-fashioned stars
Came out again to shine on joys and wars
More primitive, and all arrayed for doom,
He may have proved a world a sorry thing
In his imagining,
And life a lighted highway to the tomb.
Or, mounting with unfirm unsearching tread,
His hopes to chaos led,
He may have stumbled up there from the past,
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams
A flame where nothing seems
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
And while it all went out,
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
May then have eased a painful going down
From pictured heights of power and lost renown,
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavour
Remote and unapproachable forever;
And at his heart there may have gnawed
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed
And long dishonoured by the living death
Assigned alike by chance
To brutes and hierophants;
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him.
34 AMERICAN POETRY
And so have left him as death leaves a child,
Who sees it all too near;
And he who knows no young way to forget
May struggle to the tomb unreconciled.
Whatever suns may rise and set
There may be nothing kinder for him here
Than shafts and agonies;
And under these
He may cry out and stay on horribly;
Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,
He may go forward like a stoic Roman
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie
Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,
Curse God and die.
Or maybe there, like many another one
Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead,
Black-drawn against wild red,
He may have built unawed by fiery gules
That in him no commotion stirred,
^A living reason out of molecules
Why molecules occurred,
And one for smiling when he might have sighed
Had he seen far enough,
And in the same inevitable stuff
Discovered an odd reason too for pride
In being what he must have been by laws
Infrangible and for no kind of cause.
Deterred by no confusion or surprise
He may have seen with his mechanic eyes
A world without a meaning, and had room,
Alone amid magnificence and doom,
To build himself an airy monument
That should, or fail him in his vague intent,
Outlast an accidental universe
To call it nothing worse
Or, by the burrowing guile
Of Time disintegrated and effaced,
Like once-remembered mighty trees go down
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 35
To ruin, of which by man may now be traced
No part sufficient even to be rotten,
And in the book of things that are forgotten
Is entered as a thing not quite worth while.
He may have been so great
That satraps would have shivered at his frown,
And all he prized alive may rule a state
No larger than a grave that holds a clown;
He may have been a master of his fate,
And of his atoms ready as another
In his emergence to exonerate
His father and his mother;
He may have been a captain of a host,
Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,
And then give up the ghost.
Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these,
Sun scattered and soon lost.
Whatever the dark road he may have taken,
This man who stood on high
And faced alone the sky,
Whatever drove or lured or guided him
A vision answering a faith unshaken,
An easy trust assumed by easy trials,
A sick negation born of weak denials,
A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,
A blind attendance on a brief ambition
Whatever stayed him or derided him,
His way was even as ours;
And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,
Must each await alone at his own height
Another darkness or another light;
And there, of our poor self dominion refl,
If inference and reason shun
Hell, Heaven, and Oblivion,
May thwarted will (perforce precarious,
But for our conservation better thus)
Have no misgivings left
36 AMERICAN POETRY
Of doing yet what here we leave undone?
Or if unto the last of these we cleave,
Believing or protesting we believe
In such an idle and ephemeral
Florescence of the diabolical
If, robbed of two fond old enormities,
Our being had no onward auguries,
What then were this great love of ours to say
For launching other lives to voyage again
A little farther into time and pain,
A little faster in a futile chase
For a kingdom and a power and a Race
That would have still in sight
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night?
Is this the music of the toys we shake
So loud as if there might be no mistake
Somewhere in our indomitable will?
Are we no greater than the noise we make
Along our blind atomic pilgrimage
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go
Because our brains and bones and cartilage
Will have it so?
If this we say, then let us all be still
About our share in it, and live and die
More quietly thereby.
Where was he going, this man against the sky?
You know not, nor do I.
But this we know, if we know anything:
That we may laugh and fight and sing
And of our transcience here make offering
To an orient Word that will not be erased,
Or, save in incommunicable gleams
Too permanent for dreams,
Be found or known.
No tonic or ambitious irritant
Of increase or of want
Has made an otherwise insensate waste
Of ages overthrown
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 37
A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste
Of other ages that are still to be
Depleted and rewarded variously
Because a few, by fate's economy,
Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;
No soft evangel of equality,
Safe-cradled in a communal repose
That huddles into death and may at last
Be covered well with equatorial snows
And all for what, the devil only knows
Will aggregate an inkling to confirm
The credit of a sage or of a worm,
Or tell us why one man in five
Should have a care to stay alive
While in his heart he feels no violence
Laid on his humour and intelligence
When infant Science makes a pleasant face
And waves again that hollow toy, the Race;
No planetary trap where souls are wrought
For nothing but the sake of being caught
And sent again to nothing will attune
Itself to any key of any reason
Why man should hunger through another season
To find out why 'twere better late than soon
To go away and let the sun and moon
And all the silly stars illuminate
A place for creeping things,
And those that root and trumpet and have wings,
And herd and ruminate,
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision
Of man's immortal vision.
Shall we, because Eternity records
Too vast an answer for the time-born words
We spell, whereof so many are dead that once
In our capricious lexicons
Were so alive and final, hear no more
The Word itself, the living word
38 AMERICAN POETRY
That none alive has ever heard
Or ever spelt,
And few have ever felt
Without the fears and old surrenderings
And terrors that began
When Death let fall a feather from his wings
And humbled the first man?
Because the weight of our humility,
Wherefrom we gain
A little wisdom and much pain,
Falls here too sore and there too tedious,
Are we in anguish or complacency,
Not looking far enough ahead
To see by what mad couriers we are led
Along the roads of the ridiculous,
To pity ourselves and laugh at faith
And while we curse life bear it?
And if we see the soul's dead end in death,
Are we to fear it?
What folly is here that has not yet a name
Unless we say outright that we are liars?
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires
That lights again the way by which we came ?
Why pay we such a price, and one we give
So clamouringly, for each racked empty day
That leads one more last human hope away,
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes
Our children to an unseen sacrifice?
If after all that we have lived and thought,
All comes to Nought
If there be nothing after Now,
And we be nothing anyhow,
And we know that why live ?
'Twcre sure but weaklings' vain distress
To suffer dungeons where so many doors
Will open on the cold eternal shores
That look sheer down
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness
Where all who know may drown.
ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH 39
ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH
The Monf( in the Kitchen
I
ORDER is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
It has a meek and lowly grace,
Quiet as a nun's face.
Lo I will have thee in this place!
Tranquil well of deep delight,
All things that shine through thee appear
As stones through water, sweetly clear.
Thou clarity,
That with angelic charity
Revealcst beauty where thou art,
Spread Myself like a clean pool,
Then all the things that in thee are,
Shall seem more spiritual and fair,
Reflection from serener air
Sunken shapes of many a star
In the high heavens set afar.
II
Ye stolid, homely, visible things,
Above you all brood glorious wings
Of your deep entities, set high,
Like slow moons in a hidden sky.
But you , their likenesses, are spent
Upon another element.
40 AMERICAN POETRY
Truly ye are but seemings
The shadowy cast-off gleamings
Of bright solidities. Ye seem
Soft as water, vague as dream;
Image, cast in a shifting stream.
Ill
What are ye?
1 know not.
Brazen pan and iron pot,
Yellow brick and gray flag-stone
That my feet have trod upon
Ye seem to me
Vessels of bright mystery.
For ye do bear a shape, and so
Though ye were made by man, I know
An inner Spirit also made,
And ye his breathings have obeyed.
IV
Shape, the strong and awful spirit,
Laid his ancient hand on you.
He waste chaos doth inherit;
He can alter and subdue.
Verily, he doth lift up
Matter, like a sacred cup.
Into deep substance he reached, and io
Where ye were not, ye were; and so
Out of useless nothing, ye
Groaned and laughed and came to be.
And I use you, as I can,
Wonderful uses, made for man,
Iron pot and brazen pan.
ANNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH
What arc ye?
I know not;
Nor what I really do
When I move and govern you.
There is no small work unto God.
He required of us greatness;
Of His least creature
A high angelic nature,
Stature superb and bright completeness,
He sets to us no humble duty.
Each act that He would have us do
Is haloed round with strangest beauty;
Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks
Of His plainest child He asks.
When I polish the brazen pan
I hear a creature laugh afar
In the gardens of a star,
And from his burning presence run
Flaming wheels of many a sun.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
When I cleanse this earthen floor
My spirit leaps to see
Bright garments trailing over it,
A cleanness made by me.
Purger of all men's thoughts and ways,
With labour do I sound Thy praise,
My work is done for Thee.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
Therefore let me spread abroad
The beautiful cleanness of my God.
VI
One time in the cool of dawn
Angels came and worked with me.
42 AMERICAN POETRY
The air was soft with many a wing.
They laughed amid my solitude
And cast bright looks on everything.
Sweetly of me did they ask
That they might do my common task.
And all were beautiful but One
With garments whiter than the sun
Had such a face
Of deep, remembered grace;
That when I saw I cried "Thou art
The great Blood-Brother of my heart.
Where have I seen Thee?" And He said,
"When we are dancing round God's throne,
How often thou art there.
Beauties from thy hands have flown
Like white doves wheeling in mid air.
Nay thy soul remembers not?
Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot/'
VII
What are we? I know not.
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Solipsism
TT COULD believe that I am here alone,
JL And all the world my dream;
The passion of the scene is all my own,
And things that seem but seem.
Perchance an exhalation of my sorrow
Hath raised this vaporous show,
GEORGE SANTAYANA 43
For whence but from my soul should all things borrow
So deep a tinge of woe?
I keep the secret doubt within my breast
To be the gods' defence,
To ease the heart by too much ruth oppressed
And drive the horror hence.
O sorrow that the patient brute should cower
And die, not having sinned!
O pity that the wild and fragile flower
Should shiver in the wind!
Then were I dreaming dreams I know not of,
For that is part of me
That feels the piercing pang of grief and love
And doubts eternally.
But whether all to me the vision come
Or break in many beams,
The pageant ever shifts, and being's sum
Is but the sum of dreams.
Odes
I
WHAT god will choose me from this labouring nation
To worship him afar, with inward gladness,
At sunset and at sunrise, in some Persian
Garden of roses;
Or under the full moon, in rapturous silence,
Charmed by the trickling fountain, and the moaning
Of the death-hallowed cypress, and the myrtle
Hallowed by Venus?
44 AMERICAN POETRY
O for a chamber in an eastern tower,
Spacious and empty, roofed in odorous cedar,
A silken soft divan, a woven carpet
Rich, many-coloured;
A jug that, poised on her firm head, a Negress
Fetched from the well; a window to the ocean,
Lest of the stormy world too deep seclusion
Make me forgetful!
Thence I might watch the vessel-bearing waters
Beat the slow pulses of the life eternal,
Bringing of nature's universal travail
Infinite echoes;
And there at even I might stand and listen
To thrum of distant lutes and dying voices
Chanting the ditty an Arabian captive
Sang to Darius.
So would I dream awhile, and ease a little
The soul long stifled and the straitened spirit,
Tasting new pleasures in a far-oil country
Sacred to beauty.
II
bly heart rebels against my generation,
Vhat talks of freedom and is slave to riches,
i\nd, toiling 'neath each day's ignoble burden,
Boasts of the morrow.
No space for noonday rest or midnight watches,
No purest joy of breathing under heaven!
Wretched themselves, they heap, to make them happy,
Many possessions.
But thou, O silent Mother, wise, immortal,
To whom our toil is laughter, take, divine one,
GEORGE SANTAYANA 4$
This vanity away, and to thy lover
Give what is needful:
III
Gathering the echoes of forgotten wisdom,
And mastered by a proud, adventurous purpose,
Columbus sought the golden shores of India
Opposite Europe.
He gave the world another world, and ruin
Brought upon blameless, river-loving nations,
Cursed Spain with barren gold, and made the Andes
Fiefs of Saint Peter;
While in the cheerless North the thrifty Saxon
Planted his corn, and, narrowing his bosom,
Made covenant with God, and by keen virtue
Trebled his riches.
What venture hast thou left us, bold Columbus?
What honour left thy brothers, brave Magellan?
Daily the children of the rich for pastime
Circle the planet.
And what good comes to us of all your dangers?
A smaller earth and smaller hope of heaven.
Ye have but cheapened gold, and, measuring ocean,
Counted the islands.
No Ponce de Leon shall drink in fountains,
On any flowering Eastci*, youth eternal;
No Cortes look upon another ocean;
No Alexander
Found in the Orient dim a boundless kingdom,
And, clothing his Greek strength with barbarous splendour,
Build by the sea his throne, while Sacred Egypt
Honours his godhead.
5 AMERICAN POETRY
The earth, the mother once of godlike Theseus
And mighty Heracles, at length is weary,
And now brings forth a spawn of antlike creatures,
Blackening her valleys,
Inglorious in their birth and in their living,
Curious and querulous, afraid of battle,
Rummaging earth for coals, in camps of hovels
Crouching from winter,
As if grim fate, amid our boastful prating,
Made us the image of our brutish fathers,
When from their caves they issued, crazed with terror,
Howling and hungry.
For all things come about in sacred cycles,
And life brings death, and light eternal darkness,
And now the world grows old apace; its glory
Passes for ever.
Perchance the earth will yet for many ages
Bear her dead child, her moon, around her orbit;
Strange craft may tempt the ocean streams, new forests
Cover the mountains.
If in those latter days men still remember
Our wisdom and our travail and our sorrow,
They never can be happy, with that burden
Heavy upon them,
Knowing the hideous past, the blood, the famine,
The ancestral hate, the eager faith's disaster,
All ending in their little lives, and vulgar
Circle of troubles.
But if they have forgot us, and the shifting
Of sands has buried deep our thousand cities,
Fell superstition then will seize upon them;
Protean error.
GEORGE SANTAYANA 47
Will fill their panting heart with sickly phantoms
Of sudden blinding good and monstrous evil;
There will be miracles again, and torment,
Dungeon and fagot,
Until the patient earth, made dry and barren,
Sheds all her herbage in a final winter,
And the gods turn their eyes to some far distant
Bright constellation.
IV
Slowly the black earth gains upon the yellow,
And the caked hill-side is ribbed soft with furrows.
Turn now again, with voice and staff, my ploughman,
Guiding thy oxen.
Lift the great ploughshare, clear the stones and brambles,
Plant it the deeper, with thy foot upon it,
Uprooting all the flowering weeds that bring not
Food to thy children.
Patience is good for man and beast, and labour
Hardens to sorrow and the frost of winter,
Turn then, again, in the brave hope of harvest,
Singing to heaven.
Of thee the Northman by his beached galley
Dreamt, as he watched the never-setting Ursa
And longed for summer and thy light, O sacred
Mediterranean.
Unseen he loved thee; for the heart within him
Knew earth had gardens where he might be blessed,
Putting away long dreams and aimless, barbarous
Hunger for battle.
48 AMERICAN POETRY
The foretaste of thy languors thawed his bosom;
A great need drove him to thy caverned islands
From the gray, endless reaches of the outer
Desert of Ocean.
He saw thy pillars, saw thy sudden mountains
Wrinkled and stark, and in their crooked gorges,
'Neath peeping pine and cypress, guessed the torrent
Smothered in flowers.
Thine incense to the sun, thy gathered vapours,
He saw suspended on the flanks of Taurus,
Or veiling the snowed bosom of the virgin
Sister of Atlas.
He saw the luminous top of wide Olympus,
Fit for the happy gods; he saw the pilgrim
River, with rains of Ethiopia flooding
Populous Egypt.
And having seen, he loved thee. His racked spirit,
By thy breath tempered and the light that clothes thee,
Forgot the monstrous gods, and made of Nature
Mistress and mother.
The more should I, O fatal sea, before thee
Of alien words make echoes to thy music;
For I was born where first the rills of Tagus
Turn to the westward.
And wandering long, alas! have need of drinking
Deep of the patience of thy perfect sadness,
O thou that constant through the change of ages,
Beautiful ever,
Never wast wholly young and void of sorrows,
Nor ever canst be old,, while yet the morning
Kindles thy ripples, or the golden evening
Dyes thee in purple.
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 49
Thee, willing to be tamed but still untamable,
The Roman called his own until he perished,
As now the busy English hover o'er thee,
Stalwart and noble;
But all is naught to thee, while no harsh winter
Congeals thy fountains, and the blown Sahara
Chokes not with dreadful sand thy deep and placid
Rock-guarded havens.
Thou carest not what men may tread thy margin;
Nor I, while from some heather-scented headland
I may behold thy beauty, the eternal
Solace of mortals.
TRUMBULL STICKNEY
Be Still. The Hanging Gardens Were a Dream
BE still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream
That over Persian roses flew to kiss
The curled lashes of Semiramis.
Troy never was, nor green Skamander stream.
Provence and Troubadour are merest lies,
The glorious hair of Venice was a beam
Made within Titian's eye. The sunsets seem,
The world is very old and nothing is.
Be still. Thou foolish thing, thou canst not wake,
Nor thy tears wedge thy soldered lids apart,
But patter in the darkness of thy heart.
Thy brain is plagued. Thou art a frighted owl
Blind with the light of life thou'ldst not forsake,
And error loves and nourishes thy soul.
50 AMERICAN POETRY
Live Blindly
E^E blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest, as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.
He Said: "If in His Image I Was Made'
rE said: "If in his image I was made,
I am his equal and across the land
We two should make our journey hand in hand
Like brothers dignified and unafraid."
And God that day was walking in the shade.
To whom he said: "The world is idly planned,
We cross each other, let us understand
Thou who thou art, I who I am," he said.
Darkness came down. And all that night was heard
Tremendous clamour and the broken roar
Of things in turmoil driven down before.
Then silence. Morning broke, and sang a bird.
He lay upon the earth, his bosom stirred;
But God was seen no longer any more.
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 51
On Some Shells Found Inland
are my murmur-laden shells that keep
JL A fresh voice tho' the years lie very gray.
The wave that washed their lips and tuned their lay
Is gone, gone with the faded ocean sweep,
The royal tide, gray ebb and sunken neap
And purple midday, gone! To this hot clay
Must sing my shells, where yet the primal day,
Its roar and rhythm and splendour will not sleep.
What hand shall join them to their proper sea
If all be gone? Shall they forever feel
Glories undone and worlds that cannot be?
'T were mercy to stamp out this aged wrong,
Dash them to earth and crunch them with the heel
And make a dust of their seraphic song.
In Ampezzo
ONLY once more and not again the larches
Shake to the wind their echo, "Not again,"
We see, below the sky that over-arches
Heavy and blue, the plain
Between Tofana lying and Cristallo
In meadowy earths above the ringing stream:
Whence interchangeably desire may follow,
Hesitant as in dream,
At sunset, south, by lilac promontories
Under green skies to Italy, or forth
By calms of morning beyond Lavinores
Tyrol ward and to north:
As now, this last of latter days, when over
The brownish field by peasants are undone
Some widths of grass, some plots of mountain clover
Under the autumn sun,
52 AMERICAN POETRY
With honey-warm perfume that risen lingers
In mazes of low heat, or takes the air,
Passing delicious as a woman's fingers
Passing amid the hair;
When scythes are swishing and the mower's muscle
Spans a repeated crescent to and fro,
Or in dry stalks of corn the sickles rustle,
Tangle, detach and go,
Far thro' the wide blue day and greening meadow
Whose blots of amber beaded are with sheaves,
Whereover pallidly a cloud-shadow
Deadens the earth and leaves:
Whilst high around and near, their heads of iron
Sunken in sky whose azure overlights
Ravine and edges, stand the gray and maron
Desolate Dolomites,
And older than decay from the small summit
Unfolds a stream of pebbly wreckage down
Under the suns of midday, like some comet
Struck into gravel stone.
Faintly across this gold and amethystine
September, images of summer fade;
And gentle dreams now freshen on the pristine
Viols, awhile unplayed,
Of many a place where lovingly we wander,
More dearly held that quickly we forsake,
A pine by sullen coasts, an oleander
Reddening on the lake.
And there, each year with more familiar motion,
From many a bird and windy forestries,
Or along shaking fringes of the ocean
Vapours of music rise.
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 53
From many easts the morning gives her splendour;
The shadows fill with colours we forget;
Remembered tints at evening grow tender,
Tarnished with violet.
Let us away ! soon sheets of winter metal
On this discoloured mountain-land will close,
While elsewhere Spring-time weaves a crimson petal,
Builds and perfumes a rose.
Away! for here the mountain sinks in gravel.
Let us forget the unhappy site with change,
And go, if only happiness be travel
After the new and strange:
Unless 'twere better to be very single,
To follow some diviner monotone,
And in all beauties, where ourselves commingle,
Love but a love, but one,
Across this shadowy minute of our living,
What time our hearts so magically sing,
To mitigate our fever, simply giving
All in a little thing?
Just as here, past yon dumb and melancholy
Sameness of ruin, while the mountains ail,
Summer and sunset-coloured autumn slowly
Dissipate down the vale;
And all these lines along the sky that measure,
Sorapis and the rocks of Mezzodi
Crumble by foamy miles into the azure
Mediterranean sea:
Whereas to-day at sunrise, under brambles,
A league above the moss and dying pines
I picked this little in my hand that trembles
Parcel of columbines.
54 AMERICAN POETRY
Now in the Palace Gardens
NOW in the palace gardens warm with age,
On lawn and flower-bed this afternoon
The thin November-coloured foliage
Just as last year unfastens lilting down,
And round the terrace in gray attitude
The very statues are becoming sere
With long presentiment of solitude.
Most of the life that I have lived is here,
Here by the path and autumn's earthy grass
And chestnuts standing down the breadths of sky:
Indeed I know not how it came to pass,
The life I lived here so unhappily.
Yet blessing over all ! I do not care
What wormwood I have ate to cups of gall;
I care not what despairs are buried there
Under the ground, no, I care not at all.
Nay, if the heart have beaten, let it break!
I have not loved and lived but only this
Betwixt my birth and grave. Dear Spirit, take
The gratitude that pains so deep it is.
When Spring shall be again, and at your door
You stand to feel the mellower evening wind,
Remember if you will my heart is pure,
Perfectly pure and altogether kind;
How much it aches to linger in these things!
I thought the perfect end of love was peace
Over the long-forgiven sufferings.
But something else, I know not what it is,
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 55
The words that came so nearly and then not,
The vanity, the error of the whole,
The strong cross-purpose, oh, I know not what
Cries dreadfully in the distracted soul.
The evening fills the garden, hardly red;
And autumn goes away, like one alone.
Would I were with the leaves that thread by thread
Soften to soil, I would that I were one.
Fidelity
NOT lost or won but above all endeavour
Thy life like heaven circles around mine;
Thy eyes it seems upon my eyes did shine
Since forever.
For aught he summon up his earliest hour
No man remembers the surprise of day,
Nor where he saw with virgin wonder play
The first flower.
And o'er the imagination's last horizon
No brain has leaning descried nothing more:
Still there are stars and in the night before
More have arisen.
Not won or lost is unto thee my being;
Our eyes were always so together met.
If mine should close, if ever thine forget,
Time is dying.
At Sainte-Marguerite
HE gray tide flows and flounders in the rocks
JL Along the crannies up the swollen sand.
56 AMERICAN POETRY
Far out the reefs lie naked dunes and blocks
Low in the watery wind. A shaft of land
Going to sea thins out the western strand.
It rains, and all along and always gulls
Career sea-screaming in and weather-glossed.
It blows here, pushing round the cliff; in lulls
Within the humid stone a motion lost
Ekes out the flurried heart-beat of the coast.
It blows and rains a pale and whirling mist
This summer morning. I that hither came
Was it to pluck this savage from the schist.
This crazy yellowish bloom without a name,
With leathern blade and tortured wiry frame?
Why here alone, away, the forehead pricked
With dripping salt and fingers damp with brine,
Before the offal and the derelict
And where the hungry sea-wolves howl and whine
Like human hours? now that the columbine
Stands somewhere shaded near the fields that fall
Great starry sheaves of the delighted year,
And globing rosy on the garden wall
The peach and apricot and soon the pear
Drip in the teasing hand their sugared tear.
Inland a little way the summer lies.
Inland a little and but yesterday
I saw the weary teams, I heard the cries
Of sicklemen across the fallen hay,
And buried in the sunburned stacks I lay
Tasting the straws and tossing, laughing soft
Into the sky's great eyes of gold and blue
And nodding to the breezy leaves aloft
Over the harvest's mellow residue.
But sudden then then strangely dark it grew.
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 57
How good it is, before the dreary flow
Of cloud and water, here to lie alone
And in this desolation to let go
Down the ravine one with another, down
Across the surf to linger or to drown
The loves that none can give and none receive,
The fearful asking and the small retort,
The life to dream of and the dream to live!
Very much more is nothing than a part,
Nothing at all and darkness in the heart.
I would my manhood now were like the sea.
Thou at high-tide, when compassing the land
Thou find'st the issue short, questioningly
A moment poised, thy floods then down the strand
Sink without rancour, sink without command,
Sink of themselves in peace without despair,
And turn as still the calm horizon turns,
Till they repose little by little nowhere
And the long light unfathomable burns
Clear from the zenith stars to the sea-ferns.
Thou art thy Priest, thy Victim and thy God.
Thy life is bulwarked with a thread of foam,
And of the sky, the mountains and the sod
Thou askest nothing, evermore at home
In thy own self s perennial masterdom.
Leave Him Now Quiet
IT HAVE him now quiet by the way
11 ^ To rest apart.
I know what draws him to the dust alway
And churns him in the builder's lime:
He has the fright of time.
58 AMERICAN POETRY
I heard it knocking in his breast
A minute since;
His human eyes did wince,
He stubborned like the massive slaughter beast
And as a thing overwhelmed with sound
Stood bolted to the ground.
Leave him, for rest alone can cure
If cure there be
This waif upon the sea.
He is of those who slanted the great door
And listened wretched little lad
To what they said.
Near Helicon
BY such an all-embalming summer day
As sweetens now among the mountain pines
Down to the cornland yonder and the vinei,
To where the sky and sea are mixed in gray,
How do all things together take their way
Harmonious to the harvest, bringing wines
And bread and light and whatsoe'er combines
In the large wreath to make it round and gay.
To me my troubled life doth now appear
Like scarce distinguishable summits hung
Around the blue horizon: places where
Not even a traveller purposeth to steer,
Whereof a migrant bird in passing sung,
And the girl closed her window not to hear.
In Ampczzo (II.)
IN days of summer let me go
Up over fields, at afternoon,
And, lying low against my stone
TRUMBULL STICKNEY 59
On slopes the scythe has pain to mow,
Look southward a long hour alone.
For evening there is lovelier
Than vision or enchanted tale:
When wefts of yellow vapour pale,
And green goes down to lavender
On rosy cliffs, shutting the vale
Whose smoke of violet forest seeks
The steep and rock, where crimson crawls,
And drenched with carmine fire their wallf;
Go thinly smouldering to the peaks,
High, while the sun now somewhere falls;
Except a cloud-caught ochre spark
In one last summit, and away
On lazy wings of mauve and gray,
Away and near, like memory, dark
Is bluish with the filmy day,
What time the swallows flying few
Over uncoloured fields become
Small music thro' the shining dome;
And sleepy leaves are feeling dew
Above the crickets' under-hum,
In bye-tone to a savage sound
Of waters that with discord smite
The frigid wind and lurking light,
And swarm behind the gloom, and bound
Down sleepy valleys to the night:
And thoughts delicious of the whole,
Gathering over all degrees,
Yet sad for something more than these,
Across low meadow-lands of soul
Grow large, like north-lights no one sees.
AMERICAN POETRY
I care not if the painter wrought
The tinted dream his spirit hid,
When rich with sight he saw, amid
A jarring world, one tone, and caught
The colour passing to his lid.
Be still musician and thy choir!
Where trumpets blare and the bow stings
In symphony a thousand strings
To cry of wood-wind and desire
Of one impassioned voice that sings.
Nay, silence have the poet's mode
And southern vowels all! let die,
So ghostly-vague, the northern cry!
This world is better than an ode
And evening more than elegy.
Yet what shall singing do for me?
How shall a verse be crimsoned o'er?
I ever dream one art the more;
I who did never paint would sec
The colour painters languish for,
And wisely use the instruments
That earlier harmony affords;
I dream a poesy of chords
Embroidered very rich in tints:
'Tis not enough, this work of words.
A wilder thing inflames our hearts.
We do refuse to sift and share.
For we would musically bear
The burden of the gathered arts
Together which divided were,
And, passing Knowledge, highly rear
Upon her iron architrave
These airy images we crave,
Lest wholly vain and fallen sheer
Our vision dress us for the grave.
i
AMY LOWELL Si
Mnemosyne
T'S autumn in the country I remember.
How warm a wind blew here about the ways!
And shadows on the hillside lay to slumber
During the long sun-sweetened summer-days.
It's cold abroad the country I remember.
The swallows veering skimmed the golden grain
At midday with a wing aslant and limber;
And yellow cattle browsed upon the plain.
It's empty down the country I remember.
I had a sister lovely in my sight:
Her hair was dark, her eyes were very sombre;
We sang together in the woods at night.
It's lonely in the country I remember.
The babble of our children fills my ears,
And on our hearth I stare the perished ember
To flames that show all starry thro' my tears.
It's dark about the country I remember.
AMY LOWELL
i
Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String
S it the tinkling of mandolins which disturbs you?
Or the dropping of bitter-orange petals among the coffee-
cups ?
62 AMERICAN POETRY
Or the slow creeping of the moonlight between the olive-trees?
Drop! drop! the rain
Upon the thin plates of my heart.
String your blood to chord with this music,
Stir your heels upon the cobbles to the rhythm of a dance-tune.
They have slim thighs and arms of silver;
The moon washes away their garments;
They make a pattern of fleeing feet in the branch shadows,
And the green grapes knotted about them
Burst as they press against one another.
The rain \noc\s upon the plates of my heart,
They are crumpled with its beating.
Would you drink only from your brains, Old Man?
See, the moonlight has reached your knees,
It falls upon your head in an accolade of silver.
Rise up on the music,
Fling against the moon-drifts in a whorl of young light bodies:
Leaping grape-clusters,
Vine leaves tearing from a grey wall.
You shall run, laughing, in a braid of women,
And weave flowers with the frosty spines of thorns.
Why do you gaze into your glass,
And jar the spoons with your finger-tapping?
The rain is rigid on the plates of my heart.
The murmur of it is loud loud.
The City of Falling Leaves
TEAVES fall,
Jl J Brown leaves,
Yellow leaves streaked with brown.
They fall,
Flutter,
Fall again.
The brown leaves,
x ^nd the streaked yellow leaves,
AMY LOWELL 63
Loosen on their branches
And drift slowly downwards.
One,
One, two, three,
One, two, five.
All Venice is a falling of Autumn leaves
Brown,
And yellow streaked with brown.
"That sonnet, Abate,
Beautiful,
I am quite exhausted by it.
Your phrases turn about my heart
And stifle me to swooning.
Open the window, I beg.
Lord! What a strumming of fiddles and mandolins!
'Tis really a shame to stop indoors.
Call my maid, or I will make you lace me yourself.
Fie, how hot it is, not a breath of air!
See how straight the leaves are falling.
Marianna, I will have the yellow satin caught up with silver
fringe,
It peeps out delightfully from under a mantle.
Am I well painted to-day, caro Abate mio?
You will be proud of me at the Ridotto, hey?
Proud of being Cavalier Sefvente to such a lady?"
"Can you doubt it, Bellissima Contessa?
A pinch more rouge on the right cheek,
And Venus herself shines less. . ."
"You bore me, Abate,
I vow I must change you!
A letter, Achmet?
Run and look out of the window, Abate.
I will read my letter in peace."
The little black slave with the yellow satin turban
Gazes at his mistress with strained eyes.
His yellow turban and black skin
Are gorgeous barbaric.
The yellow satin dress with its silver flashings
64 AMERICAN POETRY
Lies on a chair
Beside a black mantle and a black mask.
Yellow and black,
Gorgeous barbaric.
The lady reads her letter,
And the leaves drift slowly
Past the long windows.
"How silly you look, my dear Abate,
With that great brown leaf in your wig.
Pluck it off, I beg you,
Or I shall die of laughing."
A yellow wall
Aflare in the sunlight,
Chequered with shadows,
Shadows of vine leaves,
Shadows of masks.
Masks coming, printing themselves for an instant,
Then passing on,
More masks always replacing them.
Masks with tricorns and rapiers sticking out behind
Pursuing masks with plumes and high heels,
4 Fhe sunlight shining under their insteps.
One,
One, two,
One, two, three,
There is a thronging of shadows on the hot wall,
Filigreed at the top with moving leaves.
Yellow sunlight and black shadows,
Yellow and black,
Gorgeous barbaric.
Two masks stand together,
And the shadow of a leaf falls through them,
Marking the wall where they are n )t.
From hat-tip to shoulder-tip,
From elbow to sword-hilt,
The leaf falls.
The shadows mingle,
Blur together,
Slide a]or\g the wall and disappear.
AMY LOWELL 65
Gold of mosaics and candles,
And night blackness lurking in the ceiling beams.
Saint Mark's glitters with flames and reflections.
A cloak brushes aside,
And the yellow of satin
Licks out over the coloured inlays of the pavement.
Under the gold crucifixes
There is a meeting of hands
Reaching from black mantles.
Sighing embraces, bold investigations,
Hide in confessionals,
Sheltered by the shuffling of feet.
Gorgeous barbaric
In its mail of jewels and gold,
Saint Mark's looks down at the swarm of black masks;
And outside in the palace gardens brown leaves fall,
Flutter,
Fall.
Brown.
And yellow streaked with brown.
Blue-black, the sky over Venice,
With a pricking of yellow stars.
There is no moon,
And the waves push darkly against the prow
Of the gondola,
Coming from Malamocco
And streaming toward Venice.
It is black under the gondola hood,
But the yellow of a satin dress
Glares out like the eye of a watching tiger.
Yellow compassed about with darkness,
Yellow and black,
Gorgeous barbaric.
The boatman sings,
It is Tasso that he sings;
The lovers seek each other beneath their mantles,
And the gondola drifts over the lagoon, aslant to the coming
dawn.
But at Malamocco in front,
66 AMERICAN POETRY
In Venice behind,
Fall the leaves,
Brown,
And yellow streaked with brown.
They fall,
Flutter,
Fall.
ROBERT FROST
The Road Not Taken
roads diverged in a yellow wood,
JL And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST 67
Home Burial
r E saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: "What is it you see
From up there always for I want to know."
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said vo gain time: "What is it you see?"
Mounting until she cowered under him,
"I will find out now you must tell me, dear."
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,
Blind creature; and a while he didn't see.
But at last he murmured, "Oh," and again, "Oh."
"What is it what?" she said.
"Just that I see."
"You don't," she challenged. "Tell me what it is."
"The wonder is I didn't see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it that's the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There arc three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered Ifttle slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child's mound "
"Don't, don't, don't, don't," she cried.
68 AMERICAN POETRY
She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm
That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;
And turned on him with such a daunting look,
He said twice over before he knew himself:
"Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?"
"Not you! Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't need it!
I must get out of here. I must get air.
I don't know rightly whether any man can."
'Amy! Don't go to someone else this time.
Listen to me. I won't come down the stairs."
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
"There's something I should like to ask you, dear."
"You don't know how to ask it."
"Help me, then."
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.
"My v/ords are nearly always an offence.
I don't know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught
I should suppose. I can't say I see how.
A mar. must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I'd bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you're a mind to name.
Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love.
Two that don't love can't live together without them.
But two that do can't live together with them."
She moved the latch a little. "Don't, don't go.
Don't carry it to someone else this time.
Tell me about it if it's something human.
Let me into your grief. I'm not so much
Unlike other folks as your standing there
Apart would make me out. Give me my chance,
kl do think, though, you overdo it a little.
ROBERT FROST 69
What was it brought you up to think it the thing
To take your mother-loss of a first child
So inconsolably in the face of love.
You'd think his memory might be satisfied "
"There you go sneering now!"
"I'm not, I'm not!
You make me angry. I'll come down to you.
God, what a woman! And it's come to this,
A man can't speak of his own child that's dead."
"You can't because you don't know how.
If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand how could you? his little grkve;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, who is that man? I don't know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice
Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby's grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it."
"I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed."
"I can repeat the very words you were saying.
'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build/
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with that was in the darkened parlour.
70 AMERICAN POETRY
You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretence of following to the grave v
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the world's evil. I won't have my grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won't, I won't!"
"There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won't go now. You're crying. Close the doot.
The heart's gone out of it: why keep it up.
Amy! There's someone coming down the road!"
''You oh, you think the talk is all. I must go
Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you-
"If you do!" She was opening the door wider.
"Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will! "
The Wood-Pile
LIT walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went down. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather
ROBERT FROST 71
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself:
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this Year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was grey and the bark warping of! it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labour of his axe,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
The Fear
A LANTERN light from deeper in the barn
JT\. Shone on a man and woman in the door
And threw their lurching shadows on a house
Near by, all dark in every glossy window.
A horse's hoof pawed once the hollow floor,
And the back of the gig they stood beside
Moved in a little. The man grasped a wheel,
The woman spoke out sharply, "Whoa, stand still!
I saw it just as plain as a white plate,"
72 AMERICAN POETRY
She said, "as the light on the dashboard ran
Along the bushes at the roadside a man's face.
You must have seen it too."
"I didn't see it.
Are you sure "
"Yes, I'm sure!"
" it was a face?"
"Joel, I'll have to look. I can't go in,
I can't, and leave a thing like that unsettled.
Doors locked and curtains drawn will make no difference.
I always have felt strange when we came home
To the dark house after so long an absence,
And the key rattled loudly into place
Seemed to warn someone to be getting out
At one door as we entered at another.
What if I'm right, and someone all the time
Don't hold my arm!"
"I say it's someone passing."
"You speak as if this were a travelled road.
You forget where we are. What is beyond
That he'd be going to or coming from
At such an hour of night, and on foot too.
What was he standing still for in the bushes?"
"It's not so very late it's only dark.
There's more in it than you're inclined to say.
Did he look like ?"
"He looked like anyone.
I'll never rest to-night unless I know.
Give me the lantern."
"You don't want the lantern."
ROBERT FROST 73
She pushed past him and got it for herself.
"You're not to come/' she said. "This is my business.
If the time's come to face it, I'm the one
To put it the right way. He'd never dare
Listen! He kicked a stone. Hear that, hear that!
He's coming towards us. Joel, go in please.
Hark! I don't hear him now. But please go in."
"In the first place you can't make me believe it's "
"It is or someone else he's sent to watch.
And now's the time to have it out with him
While we know definitely where he is.
Let him get off and he'll be everywhere
Around us, looking out of trees and bushes
Till I shan't dare to set a foot outdoors.
And I can't stand it. Joel, let me go!"
"But it's nonsense to think he'd care enough."
"You mean you couldn't understand his caring.
Oh, but you see he hadn't had enough
Joel, I won't I won't I promise you.
We mustn't say hard things. You mustn't either."
"I'll be the one, if anybody goes!
But you give him the advantage with this light
What couldn't he do to us standing here!
And if to see was what he wanted, why
He has seen all there was to see and gone."
He appeared to forget to keep his hold,
But advanced with her as she crossed the grass
"What do you want?" she cried to all the dark.
She stretched up tall to overlook the light
That hung in both hands hot against her skirt.
"There's no one; so you're wrong," he said.
"There is
What do you want?" she cried, and then herself
Was startled when an answer really came.
74 AMERICAN POETRY
"Nothing." It came from well along the road.
She reached a hand to Joel for support:
The smell of scorching woollen made her faint.
"What are you doing round this house at night?"
"Nothing." A pause: there seemed no more to say.
And then the voice again: "You seem afraid.
I saw by the way you whipped up the horse.
I'll just come forward in the lantern light
And let you see."
"Yes, do Joel, go back!"
She stood her ground against the noisy steps
That came on, but her body rocked a little.
"You see," the voice said.
"Oh." She looked and looked.
"You don't see I've a child here by the hand."
"What's a child doing at this time of night ?"
"Out walking. Every child should have the memory
Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.
What, son?"
"Then I should think you'd try to find
Somewhere to walk "
"The highway as it happens-
We're stopping for the fortnight down at Dean's."
"But if that's all Joel you realize
,You won't think anything. You understand?
You understand that we have to be careful.
This is a very, very lonely place.
Joel!" She spoke as if she couldn't turn.
The swinging lantern lengthened to the ground,
It touched, it struck- it clattered and went out.
ROBERT FROST 75
Birches
WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snowcrust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
76 AMERICAN POETRY
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed it open,
I'd like to get away from earth a while
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a high birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
The Sound of the Trees
I WONDER about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They arc that that talks of going
But never gets away;
ROBERT FROST 77
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
Hyla
BY June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow^
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they arc.
The Oven Bird
JHI^HERE is a singer everyone has heard,
JL Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
78 AMERICAN POETRY
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
My November Guest
MY Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
ROBERT FROST 79
Mowing
was never a sound beside the wood but one,
JL And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the ^irnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not witnout feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
To Earthward
KVE at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
8o AMERICAN POETRY
Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
Fire and Ice
SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
w
HOSE woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
ROBERTFROST 8 1
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Bereft
WHERE had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west 'were massed.
Out in the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
8i AMERICAN POETRY
Desert Places
SNOW falling and night falling fast oh fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
CARL SANDBURG
Cool Tombs
EN Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he
forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the
dust, in the cool tombs.
And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street,
cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool
tombs.
CARL SANDBURG 83
Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in
November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she
remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?
Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheer-
ing a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . .
tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more
than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.
Jazz Fantasia
RUM on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the
long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.
Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy timpans, let
your trombones ooze, and go husha-husha-hush with the
slippery sandpaper.
Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops, moan
soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car
slipping away from a motorcycle-cop, bang-bang! you jazz-
men, bang altogether drums, traps, banjos, horns, tin cans
make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch
each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.
Can the rough stuff . . . Now a Mississippi steamboat pushes
up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the green
lanterns calling to the high soft stars ... a red moon rides
on the humps of the low river hills . . . Go to it, O jazzmen.
Wind Song
ENG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting
its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and lis-
tened or never listened at all,
84 AMERICAN POETRY
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into
whistling, "Who, who are you?"
I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and
there I took a sleep lesson.
There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how
they trap the tricky winds.
Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to
forget and how to hear the deep whine,
Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:
Who, who arc you?
Who can ever forget
listening to the wind go by
counting its money
and throwing it away?
Gone
EVERYBODY loved Chick Lorimer in our town
JC/ Far off.
Everybody loved her.
So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold
On a dream she wants.
Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.
Nobody knows why she packed her trunk ... a few old things
And is gone,
Gone with her little chin
Thrust ahead of her
And her soft hair blowing careless
From under a wide hat,
Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate lover.
Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?
Were there five men or fifty with aching hearts?
Everybody loved Chick Lorimer.
Nobody knows where she's gone.
VACHEL LINDSAY 85
VACHEL LINDSAY
The Eagle That Is Forgotten
(John P. Altgeld. Born December 30, 1847; died March 12, 1902)
SLEEP softly . . . eagle forgotten . . . under the stone.
Time has its way with you there, and the clay has its own.
'We have buried him now," thought your foes, and in secret
rejoiced.
They made a brave show of their mourning, their hatred un-
voiced,
They had snarled at you, barked at you, foamed at you, day aft
