Chapter I: Saw a Man (2)

So with all of Frost’s characters. Like the worn out incompetent in
“The Death of the Hired Man” (one of the finest _genre_ pictures of
our time), the country boy in “Birches,” or the positive,
tight-lipped old lady in “The Black Cottage,” his people are always
intensified through the poet’s circumlocutory but precise
psychology. They remain close to their soil. Frost’s monologs and
dramatic idyls, written in a conversational blank verse, establish
the connection between the vernacular and the language of
literature; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a
photographic realist. “There are,” he once said, “two types of
realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to
show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the
potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind.... To me,
the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.”

In March, 1915, Frost came back to America—to a hill outside of
Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. _North of Boston_ had been
published in the United States and its author, who had left the
country an unknown writer, returned to find himself famous.
_Mountain Interval_, containing some of Frost’s most beautiful poems
(“Birches,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “The Hill Wife”), appeared
in 1916. The idiom is the same as in the earlier volumes, but the
notes are more varied, the convictions are stronger. The essential
things are unchanged. The first poem in Frost’s first book sums it
up:

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this
poet, has made his grimness far less “gray” than some of his critics
are willing to admit. This elfin whimsy winks through the broad
bucolic humor of “The Cow in Apple Time,” the mock pity of “The Road
Not Taken,” the tenderness of “The Runaway” and the lovely
apostrophe to an orchard in “Good-Bye and Keep Cold.”

Frost taught at Amherst College from 1916 to 1919, but found that
his association with scholastic life took too much of his creative
energy. In 1920, therefore, he bought a few acres in Vermont and
devoted himself once more to the double labors of farmer and poet.
Through his lyrics as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered
(and is voicing) some of the deepest and richest notes in American
poetry.

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“_Why_ do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down!” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

THE TUFT OF FLOWERS

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

“As all must be,” I said within my heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim over night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly-weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.
“I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’
What good is he? Who else will harbour him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there’s no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’
‘All right,’ I say, ‘I can’t afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’
‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have to.’
I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there’s someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”

“Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.

“I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”

“He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.
When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,
Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,
A miserable sight, and frightening, too—
You needn’t smile—I didn’t recognize him—
I wasn’t looking for him—and he’s changed.
Wait till you see.”

“Where did you say he’d been?”

“He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.”

“What did he say? Did he say anything?”

“But little.”

“Anything? Mary, confess
He said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.”

“Warren!”

“But did he? I just want to know.”

“Of course he did. What would you have him say?
Surely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man
Some humble way to save his self-respect.
He added, if you really care to know,
He meant to clear the upper pasture, too.
That sounds like something you have heard before?
Warren, I wish you could have heard the way
He jumbled everything. I stopped to look
Two or three times—he made me feel so queer—
To see if he was talking in his sleep.
He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember—
The boy you had in haying four years since.
He’s finished school, and teaching in his college.
Silas declares you’ll have to get him back.
He says they two will make a team for work:
Between them they will lay this farm as smooth!
The way he mixed that in with other things.
He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft
On education—you know how they fought
All through July under the blazing sun,
Silas up on the cart to build the load,
Harold along beside to pitch it on.”

“Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.”

“Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.
You wouldn’t think they would. How some things linger!
Harold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him.
After so many years he still keeps finding
Good arguments he sees he might have used.
I sympathise. I know just how it feels
To think of the right thing to say too late.
Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin.
He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying
He studied Latin like the violin
Because he liked it—that an argument!
He said he couldn’t make the boy believe
He could find water with a hazel prong—
Which showed how much good school had ever done him.
He wanted to go over that. But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay—”

“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”

“He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be
Some good perhaps to someone in the world.
He hates to see a boy the fool of books.
Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.”

Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard the tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Warren leaned out and took a step or two,
Picked up a little stick, and brought it back
And broke it in his hand and tossed it by.
“Silas has better claim on us you think
Than on his brother? Thirteen little miles
As the road winds would bring him to his door.
Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day.
Why didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich,
A somebody—director in the bank.”

“He never told us that.”

“We know it though.”

“I think his brother ought to help, of course.
I’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right
To take him in, and might be willing to—
He may be better than appearances.
But have some pity on Silas. Do you think
If he’d had any pride in claiming kin
Or anything he looked for from his brother,
He’d keep so still about him all this time?”

“I wonder what’s between them.”

“I can tell you.
Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—
But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good
As anyone. He won’t be made ashamed
To please his brother, worthless though he is.”

“I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”

“No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay
And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.
He wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge.
You must go in and see what you can do.
I made the bed up for him there to-night.
You’ll be surprised at him—how much he’s broken.
His working days are done; I’m sure of it.”

“I’d not be in a hurry to say that.”

“I haven’t been. Go, look, see for yourself.
But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He’s come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon.”

It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

Warren returned—too soon, it seemed to her,
Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.

“Warren,” she questioned.

“Dead,” was all he answered.

GOOD-BYE AND KEEP COLD

This saying good-bye on the verge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark,
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter cut off by a hill from the house.
I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse,
(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call,
I’d summon grouse, rabbit and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm,
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so;
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these
And such as is done to their wood with an ax—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And share in an orchard’s arboreal plight,
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light!)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod;
But something has to be left to God.

THE RUNAWAY

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted to us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled
And we saw him or thought we saw him dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
“I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.
He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, ‘Sakes,
It’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know!
Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.”
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.”

BIRCHES

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
_Toward_ heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

FRAGMENTARY BLUE

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird or butterfly
Or flower or wearing-stone or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

THE ONSET

Always the same when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long—
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,—
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who, overtaken by the end,
Gives up his errand and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak;
It cannot check the Peeper’s silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill
That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake
And dead weeds like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.

_William Ellery Leonard_

William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January
25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his
studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling
for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has
been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906.

_The Vaunt of Man_ (1912) is Leonard’s most representative volume.
Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in
spirit. Leonard’s insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the
simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This
protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in _The Lynching
Bee_ (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the
poet’s outrage speaks with a new ironism.

Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes
of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of
paraphrases of the fables of Æsop.

THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT

O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame,
And unimaginable wind and sea,
All inner shrines and temples of the free,
Legends and hopes and golden books of fame;
I that upon the mountain carved my name
With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me,
O how came I to stoop to loving thee—
I that had never stooped before to shame?

O ’twas not thee! Too eager of a white
Far beauty and a voice to answer mine,
Myself I built an image of delight,
Which all one purple day I deemed divine—
And when it vanished in the fiery night,
I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine.

TO THE VICTOR

Man’s mind is larger than his brow of tears;
This hour is not my all of time; this place
My all of earth; nor this obscene disgrace
My all of life; and thy complacent sneers
Shall not pronounce my doom to my compeers
While the Hereafter lights me in the face,
And from the Past, as from the mountain’s base,
Rise, as I rise, the long tumultuous cheers.

And who slays me must overcome a world:
Heroes at arms, and virgins who became
Mothers of children, prophecy and song;
Walls of old cities with their flags unfurled;
Peaks, headlands, ocean and its isles of fame—
And sun and moon and all that made me strong!

_Sarah N. Cleghorn_

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was born at Norfolk, Virginia, February 4,
1876. She came North early in her youth and was graduated from Burr
and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont (in 1895), in which town,
after a year at Radcliffe, she has lived ever since.

An ardent worker for lost causes, Miss Cleghorn’s fiery spirit
shines through _Portraits and Protests_ (1917), the first half of
which is coolly descriptive and the second half, hotly
insurrectionary verse.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

“The unfit die: the fit both live and thrive.”
Alas, who say so?—They who do survive.

So when her bonfires lighted hill and plain,
Did Bloody Mary think on Lady Jane.

So Russia thought of Finland, while her heel
Fell heavier on the prostrate commonweal.

So Booth of Lincoln thought: and so the High
Priests let Barabbas live, and Jesus die.

THE INCENTIVE

I saw a sickly cellar plant
Droop on its feeble stem, for want
Of sun and wind and rain and dew—
Of freedom!—Then a man came through
The cellar, and I heard him say,
“Poor, foolish plant, by all means stay
Contented here: for—know you not?—
This stagnant dampness, mould and rot
Are your incentive to grow tall
And reach that sunbeam on the wall.”
—Even as he spoke, the sun’s one spark
Withdrew, and left the dusk more dark.

_Carl Sandburg_

Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg,
Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen
he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was,
in rapid succession, porter in a barber-shop, scene-shifter in a
cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a
pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in
Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of
learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America.
When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh
adventure, enlisted in Company C., Sixth Illinois Volunteers.

On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered
Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think
in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the
world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the
underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself
richly. So, what with the fact that the “terrible Swede,” as captain
of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little
wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected
editor-in-chief of the college paper.

After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living.
He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as
district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He
became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a
business magazine, he became a “safety first” expert; his articles
on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers’
conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods
found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations.

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf”; a tiny
pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like
the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these
experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with
their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of
these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses)
might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent
collection of Sandburg’s pieces. The idiom of _Smoke and Steel_
(1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of
“Milville” (1903), which begins:

Down in southern New Jersey they make glass.
By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand
let in the light.

Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the
poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally
unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared
in _Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_; later the same year one of the
group (the now famous “Chicago”) was awarded the Levinson prize of
two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first,
full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg—tardily but
triumphantly—had arrived.

_Chicago Poems_ (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct
poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal
exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg’s speech is simple
and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his
predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See
Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was
coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language,
unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was
only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness,
he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used
colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for
new poetic values in “limber, lasting, fierce words”—unconsciously
answering Whitman who asked, “Do you suppose the liberties and brawn
of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With
gloved gentleman-words?”

_Cornhuskers_ (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as
sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power
and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent
panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a
Norse saga; _Cornhuskers_ is keen with a salty vigor, a vast
sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the
raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in
this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that
must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a
big-fisted, rough-neck sort of poetry. “Cool Tombs,” one of the most
poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; “Grass”
whispers as quietly as the earlier “Fog” stole in on stealthy, cat
feet.

_Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is the synthesis and sublimation of its
predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused
mood, accent and image in a new intensity. It is a fit setting for
the title-poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an
epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries
and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions:
the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of
sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. _Smoke and Steel_ is a
rich amalgam; indigenous to the core. And what makes it so vital is
Sandburg’s own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually
fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life.

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs,
he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in
the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall
Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in
the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw
in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder?
does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool
tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries,
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and
blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are
losers ... tell me if any get more than the
lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

FROM “SMOKE AND STEEL”

Smoke of the fields in spring is one, Smoke of the leaves in autumn another. Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel, They all go up in a line with a smokestack, Or they twist ... in the slow twist ... of the wind. If the north wind comes they run to the south. If the west wind comes they run to the east. By this sign all smokes know each other. Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn, Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue, By the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”

Hunted and hissed from the center Deep down long ago when God made us over, Deep down are the cinders we came from— You and I and our heads of smoke.

· · · · · ·

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job Cross on the sky and count our years And sing in the secrets of our numbers; Sing their dawns and sing their evenings, Sing an old log-fire song: You may put the damper up, You may put the damper down, The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Smoke of a city sunset skyline, Smoke of a country dusk horizon— They cross on the sky and count our years.

· · · · · ·

Smoke of a brick-red dust Winds on a spiral Out of the stacks For a hidden and glimpsing moon. This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill, This is the slang of coal and steel. The day-gang hands it to the night-gang, The night-gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this—
Let us understand half of it.
In the rolling mills and sheet mills,
In the harr and boom of the blast fires,
The smoke changes its shadow
And men change their shadow;
A nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.

A bar of steel—it is only Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, And left smoke and the blood of a man And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again, And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel, A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky; And always dark in the heart and through it, Smoke and the blood of a man. Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys The smoke nights write their oaths: Smoke into steel and blood into steel; Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men. Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

The birdmen drone
In the blue; it is steel
a motor sings and zooms.

· · · · · ·

Steel barb-wire around The Works.
Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.
Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted
and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking
clam-shells.
The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and
haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are
steel making steel.
Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the
billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped:
Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea,
climbing steel in the sky.

BLUE ISLAND INTERSECTION

Six street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.
Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump:
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

In the false dawn when the chickens blink
And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at to-morrow,
And the east fixes a pink half-eye this way,
In the time when only one milk wagon crosses
These three streets, these six street ends,
It is the sleep time and they rest.
The triangle banks and drug stores rest.
The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep.
The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk.

CLEAN CURTAINS

New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets.

The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a
nun’s bonnet.

One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way
paper boxes, strawboard cartons.

The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels
whirled dust—there was dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber
tire—dust of police
and fire wagons—dust of the winds that circled at midnights and noon
listening to no prayers.

“O mother, I know the heart of you,” I sang passing the rim of a nun’s
bonnet—O white curtains—and people clean as the prayers of Jesus here
in the faded ramshackle at Congress and Green.

Dust and the thundering trucks won—the barrages of the street wheels and
the lawless wind took their way—was it five weeks or six the little
mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white
prayers in the windows?

A. E. F.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall. Forefingers and thumbs will point absently and casually toward it. It will be spoken among half-forgotten, wished-to-be-forgotten things. They will tell the spider: Go on, you’re doing good work.

NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD

Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

GRASS

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

_Adelaide Crapsey_

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New
York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in
1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years after graduation
she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper
Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school.
In 1905 she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her
return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled
her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at
Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work
being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she
never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913,
after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which,
like some of Emily Dickinson’s, are so precise and poignant. She was
particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated.
These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the
lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables)
doubtless owe something to the Japanese _hokku_, but Adelaide
Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

“Her death,” writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, “was tragic. Full of
the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all
unfinished.” She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914.
Her small volume _Verse_ appeared in 1915, and a part of the
unfinished _Study in English Metrics_ was posthumously published in
1918.

THREE CINQUAINS

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen ...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.

THE WARNING

Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk ... as strange, as still ...
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?

ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

_Grace Hazard Conkling_

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After
graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the
University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she
has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done
much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling’s _Afternoons of April_ (1915) and _Wilderness Songs_
(1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle
colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of
flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the
poems are by no means monotonous. A fragrant whimsicality, a
childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire
Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the
manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).

THE WHOLE DUTY OF BERKSHIRE BROOKS

To build the trout a crystal stair;
To comb the hillside’s thick green hair;
To water jewel-weed and rushes;
To teach first notes to baby thrushes;
To flavor raspberry and apple
And make a whirling pool to dapple
With scattered gold of late October;
To urge wise laughter on the sober
And lend a dream to those who laugh;
To chant the beetle’s epitaph;
To mirror the blue dragonfly,
Frail air-plane of a slender sky;
Over the stones to lull and leap
Herding the bubbles like white sheep;
The claims of worry to deny,
And whisper sorrow into sleep!

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way
Nightingales sound.
Tall larches lilt and sway
Above the glittering ground:
The wild white cherry spray
Scatters radiance round.
The chuckle of the nightingale
Is like this elfin wood.
Even as his gleaming trills assail
The spirit’s solitude,
These leaves of light, these branches frail
Are music’s very mood.

The song of these fantastic trees,
The plumes of frost they wear,
Are for the poet’s whim who sees
Through a deceptive air,
And has an ear for melodies
When never a sound is there.

_Amelia Josephine Burr_

Amelia Josephine Burr was born in New York City in 1878. She was
educated at Hunter College and has made her home in Englewood, New
Jersey.

A great range of interests has been the outstanding feature of her
work. Too often she yields to her own facility, but there is decided
vigor in many pages of _The Roadside Fire_ (1912), _In Deep Places_
(1914) and _Life and Living_ (1916).

BATTLE-SONG OF FAILURE

We strain toward Heaven and lay hold on Hell;
With starward eyes we stumble in hard ways,
And to the moments when we see life well
Succeeds the blindness of bewildered days,—
But what of that? Into the sullen flesh
Our souls drive home the spur with splendid sting.
Bleeding and soiled, we gird ourselves afresh.
Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

The loveless greed the centuries have stored
In marshy foulness traps our faltering feet.
The sins of men whom punishment ignored
Like fever in our weakened pulses beat;
But what of that? The shame is not to fail
Nor is the victor’s laurel everything.
To fight until we fall is to prevail.
Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

Yea, cast our lives into the ancient slough,
And fall we shouting, with uplifted face;
Over the spot where mired we struggle now
Shall march in triumph a transfigured race.
They shall exult where weary we have wept—
They shall achieve where we have striven in vain—
Leaping in vigor where we faintly crept,
Joyous along the road we paved with pain.
What though we seem to sink in the morass?
Under those unborn feet our dust shall sing,
When o’er our failure perfect they shall pass.
Forth, and make firm a highway for the King!

_Don Marquis_

Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born at Walnut, Bureau County,
Illinois, July 29, 1878. Since his boyhood he has been actively
connected with various newspapers, his chief metropolitan success
being due to his pungent column, “The Sun Dial” in the New York
_Evening Sun_.

Many of Marquis’s most penetrating and satiric skits have been
collected in his prose volumes, _Hermione_ (1916) and _Prefaces_
(1919). Besides his burlesque verse, Marquis has written a quantity
of serious poetry, the best of which he published in _Dreams and
Dust_ (1915).

UNREST

A fierce unrest seethes at the core
Of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar
That gave the gods their wings.

From what flat wastes of cosmic slime,
And stung by what quick fire,
Sunward the restless races climb!—
Men risen out of mire!

There throbs through all the worlds that are
This heart-beat hot and strong
And shaken systems, star by star,
Awake and glow in song.

But for the urge of this unrest
These joyous spheres are mute;
But for the rebel in his breast
Had man remained a brute.

When baffled lips demanded speech,
Speech trembled into birth—
(One day the lyric word shall reach
From earth to laughing earth.)—

When man’s dim eyes demanded light,
The light he sought was born—
His wish, a Titan, scaled the height
And flung him back the morn!

From deed to dream, from dream to deed,
From daring hope to hope,
The restless wish, the instant need,
Still lashed him up the slope!

· · · · · ·

I sing no governed firmament,
Cold, ordered, regular—
I sing the stinging discontent
That leaps from star to star!

_John Erskine_

John Erskine was born in New York City, October 5, 1879. He
graduated from Columbia University, receiving his A.M. in 1901 and
Ph.D. in 1903. He has taught English since 1903, first at Amherst
College, and (beginning in 1909) at Columbia.

Although most of Erskine’s works have been performed in the capacity
of editor and essayist, he has written two volumes of excellent
verse. _Actæon and Other Poems_ (1906) is little more than an
introduction to _The Shadowed Hour_ (1917), which contains such keen
verses as “Satan” and “Ash-Wednesday” in which philosophy and poetry
are interknit.

DEDICATION

When imperturbable the gentle moon
Glides above war and onslaught through the night,
When the sun burns magnificent at noon
On hate contriving horror by its light,
When man, for whom the stars were and the skies,
Turns beast to rend his fellow, fang and hoof
Shall we not think, with what ironic eyes
Nature must look on us and stand aloof?
But not alone the sun, the moon, the stars,
Shining unharmed above man’s folly move;
For us three beacons kindle one another
Which waver not with any wind of wars:
We love our children still, still them we love
Who gave us birth, and still we love each other.

_James Branch Cabell_

James Branch Cabell was born at Richmond, Virginia, April 14, 1879.
He taught French and Greek for two years at William and Mary College
(1896-7), worked in the pressroom of the Richmond _Times_ (1898),
was on the staff of the New York _Herald_ (1899-1901) and began
contributing to the magazines in 1902, writing over sixty short
stories as well as scattered essays, translations and papers on
historical and biographical subjects.

Although Cabell likes to describe himself as a genealogist, he is
the author of some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary
literature. But it is a prose that rises high above its own beauty
of style. In books like _The Certain Hour_ (1916), _The Cream of the
Jest_ (1917), _Jurgen_ (1919) and the poetry-crammed “comedy of
appearances,” _Figures of Earth_ (1921), the composite Cabell hero
emerges, triumphant in the midst of his defeats—the eternally
disillusioned, eternally hopeful Jurgen-Charteris-Kennaston: a
symbol of the human soul seeking some sort of finality, some
assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities.

Though Cabell is best known as a novelist, his books are liberally
dotted with original verses that do duty as chapter-headings,
mottoes, tail-pieces, interpolated songs and epilogues. A complete
volume of his verse, _From the Hidden Way_ (1916), bore the subtitle
“Being Seventy-Five Adaptations.” It purported to be paraphrases
from forgotten troubadours like Allesandro de Medici, Antoine Riczi,
Charles Garnier and half a dozen other obscure Parnassians. Cabell
even quoted the first lines of each of their poems in the original
Latin, French or Provençal. Even after the hoax was exposed, it was
difficult for most readers to believe that the entire
collection—names, references, first lines in the “original” and
all—were the creation of Cabell, the masquerader.

In _From the Hidden Way_, the romancer has added another story to
that gem-studded ivory tower in which Cabell lives and escapes the
modern world. Whether he echoes the mediæval ballata or the more
modern rondeau, roundel and sonnet, his is an artifice solidly
erected upon art.

SEA-SCAPES

I lie and dream in the soft warm sand; and the thunder and surge and the
baffled roar
Of the sea’s relentless and vain endeavors are a pleasant lullaby, here
on shore.

Since a little hillock screens yonder ageless, tenacious battlings
(which shatter, and pass
In foam and spume), I appraise, half-nodding, much sand and sky and
gaunt nodding grass.

And I am content to lie and dream; and I am too drowsy to rise, and see If it be worth breasting—that ocean yonder, which a little hillock hides from me.

ONE END OF LOVE

“It is long since we met,” she said.
I answered, “Yes.”

She is not fair,
But very old now, and no gold
Gleams in that scant gray withered hair
Where once much gold was: and, I think,
Not easily might one bring tears
Into her eyes, which have become
Like dusty glass.

“’Tis thirty years,”
I said. “And then the war came on
Apace, and our young King had need
Of men to serve him oversea
Against the heathen. For their greed,
Puffed up at Tunis, troubles him——”

She said: “This week my son is gone
To him at Paris with his men.”
And then: “You never married, John?”

I answered, “No.” And so we sate
Musing a while.

Then with his guests
Came Robert; and his thin voice broke
Upon my dream, with the old jests,
No food for laughter now: and swore
We must be friends now that our feud
Was overpast.

“We are grown old—
Eh, John?” he said. “And, by the Rood!
’Tis time we were at peace with God
Who are not long for this world.”

“Yea,”
I answered; “we are old.” And then,
Remembering that April day
At Calais, and that hawthorn field
Wherein we fought long since, I said:
“We are friends now.”

And she sate by,
Scarce heeding. Thus the evening sped.

And we ride homeward now, and I
Ride moodily; my palfrey jogs
Along a rock-strewn way the moon
Lights up for us; yonder the bogs
Are curdled with thin ice; the trees
Are naked; from the barren wold
The wind comes like a blade aslant
Across a world grown very old.

_Vachel Lindsay_

(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives
in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door
to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window
where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come
and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has
celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the
Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied
at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School
of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he
took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia
and the Carolinas, preaching “the gospel of beauty,” and formulating
his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) During the
following five years, Lindsay made several of these trips,
travelling as a combination missionary and minstrel. Like a true
revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met, a response to
beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his
supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded
for Bread.”