Chapter I: Shall Not Care48 (1)

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough;
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

THE LONG HILL[49]

I must have passed the crest a while ago
And now I am going down—
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.

All the morning I thought how proud I should be
To stand there straight as a queen,
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me—
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.

It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown—
But it’s no use now to think of turning back,
The rest of the way will be only going down.

WATER LILIES[50]

If you have forgotten water-lilies floating
On a dark lake among mountains in the afternoon shade,
If you have forgotten their wet, sleepy fragrance,
Then you can return and not be afraid.

But if you remember, then turn away forever
To the plains and the prairies where pools are far apart,
There you will not come at dusk on closing water lilies,
And the shadow of mountains will not fall on your heart.

TIRED

If I shall make no poems any more,
There will be rest, at least, so let it be,
Time to look up at golden stars and listen
To the long mellow thunder of the sea.
The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
All animals, and some of my own kind;
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
And half ironic musings of my mind.

_Gladys Cromwell_

Gladys Cromwell was born November 28, 1885, in New York City. She
was educated in New York private schools and lived abroad a great
deal. “Her life,” writes Anne Dunn, “was little indented by outer
events, being wholly of the mind and spirit.” She was most at home
in the world within herself, sensitive and—to the final, tragic
degree—self-effacing.

In January, 1918, Gladys and Dorothea, her twin-sister, enrolled in
the Canteen Service of the Red Cross, sailed for France and were
stationed at Châlons. Both girls worked unremittingly for eight
months. It was only at the end of their desperate labors that they
gave way to hopelessness, believing their efforts futile and the
whole world desolate. Signs of a mental breakdown show in their
diaries as early as October. “After the armistice,” writes Anne Dunn
in her biographical note which serves as an appreciative epilogue to
Gladys Cromwell’s _Poems_, “they showed symptoms of nervous
prostration; but years of self-control and consideration for others
made them conceal the black horror in which they lived, the agony
through which they saw a world which, they felt, contained no refuge
for beauty or quiet thought. And when, on their way home, they
jumped from the deck of the _Lorraine_ it was in response to a
vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.” After their death,
which occurred January 19, 1919, the French Government awarded the
two sisters the Croix de Guerre.

_Gates of Utterance_ (1915) has something more than the usual
“promise.” But the best of Miss Cromwell’s work can be found in her
posthumously published _Poems_ (1919), which, in 1920, received the
yearly prize offered by the Poetry Society of America, dividing the
honor with Neihardt’s _The Song of Three Friends_. Her most
significant poems betray that attitude to life which was at the
heart of her tragedy—a preoccupation that was a mixture of
fascination and fear. Her lines, never mediocre, are introspective
and fraught with serious concern—the work of a frailer and unsmiling
Emily Dickinson. Several of the best of her delicate songs, like the
two lyrics quoted, tremble on the verge of greatness.

THE CROWNING GIFT[51]

I have had courage to accuse;
And a fine wit that could upbraid;
And a nice cunning that could bruise;
And a shrewd wisdom, unafraid
Of what weak mortals fear to lose.

I have had virtue to despise
The sophistry of pious fools;
I have had firmness to chastise;
And intellect to make me rules
To estimate and exorcise.

I have had knowledge to be true;
My faith could obstacles remove;
But now my frailty I endue.
I would have courage now to love,
And lay aside the strength I knew.

THE MOULD[52]

No doubt this active will,
So bravely steeped in sun,
This will has vanquished Death
And foiled oblivion.

But this indifferent clay,
This fine, experienced hand
So quiet, and these thoughts
That all unfinished stand,

Feel death as though it were
A shadowy caress;
And win and wear a frail
Archaic wistfulness.

_Ezra Pound_

Ezra (Loomis) Pound was born at Hailey, Idaho, October 30, 1885;
attended Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania; and
went abroad, seeking fresh material to complete a thesis on Lope de
Vega, in 1908. After visiting Spain on a roundabout journey to
England, where he took up his residence and where he has lived ever
since, Pound halted for a while in Italy. It was there, in Venice,
to be precise, that Pound’s first book, _A Lume Spento_ (1908), was
printed. The following year Pound went to London and the chief poems
of the little volume were incorporated in _Personæ_ (1909), a small
collection containing some of Pound’s finest work.

Although the young American was a total stranger to the English
literary world, his book made a definite impression on critics of
all shades and tastes. Edward Thomas, one of the most careful
appraisers, wrote “the beauty of it is the beauty of passion,
sincerity and intensity, not of beautiful words and images and
suggestions.... The thought dominates the words and is greater than
they are.” Another critic (Scott James) placed the chief emphasis on
Pound’s metrical innovations, saying, “At first the whole thing may
seem to be mere madness and rhetoric, a vain exhibition of force and
passion without beauty. But as we read on, these curious meters seem
to have a law and order of their own.”

_Exultations_ (1909) was printed in the autumn of the same year that
saw the appearance of _Personæ_. It was received with even greater
cordiality; a new force and freedom were manifest in such poems as
“Sestina: Altaforte,” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” “Francesca” and
“Histrion.”

In both of these books there was evident Pound’s erudition—a
familiarity with mediæval literature, Provençal singers, Troubadour
ballads—that, later on, was to degenerate into pedantry and become
hard and dry. Too often in his later work, Pound seems to be more
the archaeologist than the artist, digging with little energy and
less enthusiasm. _Canzoni_ (1911) and _Ripostes_ (1912) both contain
much that is sharp and living; they also contain the germs of
desiccation and decay. Pound began to scatter his talents; to start
movements which he quickly discarded for new ones; to spend himself
in poetic propaganda for the Imagists and others (see Preface); to
give more and more time to translation (_The Sonnets of Guido
Cavalcanti_ appeared in 1912) and arrangements from the Chinese
(_Cathay_, paraphrased from the notes of Ernest Fenollosa, was
issued in 1915); to lay the chief stress on _technique_, shades of
color, verbal _nuances_. The result was a lassitude of the creative
faculties, an impoverishment of emotion. In the later books, Pound
begins to suffer from a decadence which appraises the values in life
chiefly as æsthetic values. And this decadence expresses itself in a
weariness, a sterility of the imagination. Real feeling becomes
rarer in his work and the poet descends to flashy trivialities,
vagaries of assertion or sheer _bravado_ of expression—wasting much
of his gift in a mere tilting at convention.

But though this is true of a great quantity of his recent work,
though he often seems a living anachronism, drawing life not from
life itself but only from books, many of the poems in _Lustra_
(1917) yield a hard brightness. The influence of Browning and the
pre-Raphaelites is less pronounced and reflections of his earlier
energy stand out with a peculiar brilliance.

Too special to achieve permanence, too intellectual to become
popular, Pound’s contribution to his age should not be
underestimated. He was a pioneer in the new forms; he fought
dullness wherever he encountered it; under his leadership the
Imagists became not only a group but a protest; he helped to make
many of the paths which a score of unconsciously influenced poets
tread with such ease and nonchalance. Much of his poetry
gesticulates instead of speaking, a great portion of his art is
poetry in pantomime. And yet, without Pound, American poetry would
scarcely have been the many-voiced, multi-colored thing that it is.

A GIRL

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.
Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child—so high—you are;
And all this is folly to the world.

A VIRGINAL

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that’s come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter’s wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white their bark, so white this lady’s hours.

BALLAD FOR GLOOM

For God, our God is a gallant foe
That playeth behind the veil.

I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,
I have loved my God as a maid to man—
But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus’ pale.

I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man
Shall win at the turn of the game.
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose
Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.
When God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.

Δωρια

Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

_Louis Untermeyer_

Louis Untermeyer was born October 1, 1885, in New York City, where
he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine and New Jersey,
ever since. His education was sketchy; his continued failure to
comprehend algebra and geometry kept him from entering college. His
one ambition was to become a composer. At sixteen he appeared as a
pianist in semi-professional circles; at seventeen he entered his
father’s jewelry manufacturing establishment, of which he became
designer and factory manager.

Untermeyer’s first volume was _The Younger Quire_ (1911), a
twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology (_The Younger Choir_). It
was issued anonymously and only one hundred copies were printed.
Later in the same year, he published a sequence of some seventy
lyrics entitled _First Love_ (1911) in which the influences of
Heine, Henley and Housman were not only obvious but crippling. With
the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume is devoid of
character and, in spite of a certain technical facility, wholly
undistinguished.

It was with _Challenge_ (1914), now in its fourth edition, that the
author first spoke in his own idiom. Although the ghost of Henley
still haunts some of these pages, poems like “Summons,” “Landscapes”
and “Caliban in the Coal Mines” show “a fresh and lyrical sympathy
with the modern world.... His vision” (thus the Boston _Transcript_)
“is a social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of
the forces of justice.”

_Challenge_ was succeeded by _These Times_ (1917), evidently an
“interval” book which, lacking the concentration and unity of the
better known collection, sought (not always successfully) for larger
horizons. Certain poems (like “Swimmers,” “The Laughers” and the
colloquial sonnets) stand out, but as a whole it has neither the
energy of his earlier nor the surety of his later work. _The New
Adam_ (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the varied passions
are fused in a new heat.

Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published two volumes of
critical parodies, “_—— and Other Poets_” (1917) and _Including
Horace_ (1919)—paraphrases of the Latin bard as various classic and
modern poets might have rendered him. He has also printed a strict
metrical translation of three hundred and twenty-five _Poems of
Heinrich Heine_ (1917); a volume of prose criticism, _The New Era in
American Poetry_ (1919); and two text-books. He was one of the
Associate Editors of _The Seven Arts_ (1916-17) and has lectured at
various universities in the Eastern States.

SUMMONS

The eager night and the impetuous winds,
The hints and whispers of a thousand lures,
And all the swift persuasion of the Spring,
Surged from the stars and stones, and swept me on ...
The smell of honeysuckles, keen and clear,
Startled and shook me, with the sudden thrill
Of some well-known but half-forgotten voice.
A slender stream became a naked sprite,
Flashed around curious bends, and winked at me
Beyond the turns, alert and mischievous.
A saffron moon, dangling among the trees,
Seemed like a toy balloon caught in the boughs,
Flung there in sport by some too-mirthful breeze ...
And as it hung there, vivid and unreal,
The whole world’s lethargy was brushed away;
The night kept tugging at my torpid mood
And tore it into shreds. A warm air blew
My wintry slothfulness beyond the stars;
And over all indifference there streamed
A myriad urges in one rushing wave ...
Touched with the lavish miracles of earth,
I felt the brave persistence of the grass;
The far desire of rivulets; the keen,
Unconquerable fervor of the thrush;
The endless labors of the patient worm;
The lichen’s strength; the prowess of the ant;
The constancy of flowers; the blind belief
Of ivy climbing slowly toward the sun,
The eternal struggles and eternal deaths—
And yet the groping faith of every root!
Out of old graves arose the cry of life;
Out of the dying came the deathless call.
And, thrilling with a new sweet restlessness,
The thing that was my boyhood woke in me—
Dear, foolish fragments made me strong again;
Valiant adventures, dreams of those to come,
And all the vague, heroic hopes of youth,
With fresh abandon, like a fearless laugh,
Leaped up to face the heaven’s unconcern. ...

And then—veil upon veil was torn aside—
Stars, like a host of merry girls and boys,
Danced gaily ’round me, plucking at my hand;
The night, scorning its stubborn mystery,
Leaned down and pressed new courage in my heart;
The hermit-thrush, throbbing with more than Song,
Sang with a happy challenge to the skies;
Love and the faces of a world of children
Swept like a conquering army through my blood.
And Beauty, rising out of all its forms,
Beauty, the passion of the universe,
Flamed with its joy, a thing too great for tears,
And, like a wine, poured itself out for me
To drink of, to be warmed with, and to go
Refreshed and strengthened to the ceaseless fight;
To meet with confidence the cynic years;
Battling in wars that never can be won,
Seeking the lost cause and the brave defeat.

CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES

God, we don’t like to complain
We know that the mine is no lark—
But—there’s the pools from the rain;
But—there’s the cold and the dark.

God, You don’t know what it is—
You, in Your well-lighted sky—
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with the sun always by.

God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You’d tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above,
And nothing that moves but the cars. ...
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!

SWIMMERS

I took the crazy short-cut to the bay;
Over a fence or two and through a hedge,
Jumping a private road, along the edge
Of backyards full of drying wash it lay.

I ran, electric with elation,
Sweating, impetuous and wild
For a swift plunge in the sea that smiled,
Quiet and luring, half a mile away.
This was the final thrill, the last sensation
That capped four hours of violence and laughter:
To have, with casual friends and casual jokes,
Hard sport, a cold swim and fresh linen after ...
And now, the last set being played and over,
I hurried past the ruddy lakes of clover;
I swung my racket at astonished oaks,
My arm still tingling from aggressive strokes.
Tennis was over for the day—
I took the leaping short-cut to the bay.

Then the swift plunge into the cool, green dark—
The windy waters rushing past me, through me;
Filled with a sense of some heroic lark,
Exulting in a vigor clean and roomy.
Swiftly I rose to meet the feline sea
That sprang upon me with a hundred claws,
And grappled, pulled me down and played with me.
Then, tense and breathless in the tightening pause
When one wave grows into a toppling acre,
I dived headlong into the foremost breaker;
Pitting against a cold and turbulent strife
The feverish intensity of life.

Out of the foam I lurched and rode the wave,
Swimming, hand over hand, against the wind;
I felt the sea’s vain pounding, and I grinned
Knowing I was its master, not its slave.
Oh, the proud total of those lusty hours—
The give and take of rough and vigorous tussles
With happy sinews and rejoicing muscles;
The knowledge of my own miraculous powers,
Feeling the force in one small body bent
To curb and tame this towering element.

Back on the curving beach I stood again,
Facing the bath-house, when a group of men,
Stumbling beneath some sort of weight, went by.
I could not see the hidden thing they carried;
I only heard: “He never gave a cry”—
“Who’s going to tell her?”—“Yes, and they just married”—
“Such a good swimmer, too.” ... And then they passed;
Leaving the silence throbbing and aghast.

A moment there my buoyant heart hung slack,
And then the glad, barbaric blood came back
Singing a livelier tune; and in my pulse
Beat the great wave that surges and exults....
Why I was there and whither I must go
I did not care. Enough for me to know
The same unresting struggle and the glowing
Beauty of spendthrift hours, bravely showing
Life, an adventure perilous and gay;
And Death, a long and vivid holiday.

HANDS

Strange, how this smooth and supple joint can be
Put to so many purposes. It checks
And rears the monsters of machinery
And shapes the idle gallantries of sex.

Those hands that light the fuse and dig the trap,
Fingers that spin the earth or plunge through shame—
And yours, that lie so lightly in your lap,
Are only blood and dust—all are the same.

What mastery directs them through the world
And gives these delicate bones so great a power?
You drop your head. You sleep. Your hands are curled
Loosely, like some half-opened, perfumed flower.

An hour ago they burned in mine and sent
Armies with banners charging through my veins.
Now they are cool and white; they rest content,
Curved in a smile. The mystery remains.

A SIDE STREET

On the warm Sunday afternoons
And every evening in the Spring and Summer
When the night hurries the late home-comer
And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes
Float from the open windows and jar
Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;

When the city noises commingle and melt
With a restless something half-seen, half-felt—
I see them always there,
Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;
That row of little girls who sit and stare
Like sparrows on a granite perch.
They come in twittering couples or walk alone
To their gray bough of stone,
Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five—
But always they sit there on the narrow coping
Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping
To see more than what is merely moving and alive....
They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet
Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet....

Before the quiet church that smells of death
They sit.
And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath
And reaches out and plucks them by the hand
And calls them boldly, whispering to each
In some strange speech
They tremble to but cannot understand.
It thrills and troubles them, as one by one,
The days run off like water through a sieve;
While, with a gaze as candid as the sun,
Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive,
They come and sit,—
A part of life and yet apart from it.

_Jean Starr Untermeyer_

Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and educated
at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At sixteen, she
came to New York City, pursuing special studies at Columbia. In 1907
she married Louis Untermeyer and, although she had written some
prose previous to the poetic renascence, her first volume was
published more than ten years later.

_Growing Pains_ (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, the
result of eight years slow and self-critical creation. This careful
and highly selective process does much to bring the volume up to an
unusually high level; a severity of taste and standards maintain the
poet on the same austere plane. Perfection is almost a passion with
her; the first poem in the book declares:

I would rather work in stubborn rock
All the years of my life;
And make one strong thing
And set it in a high, clean place,
To recall the granite strength of my desire.

Acutely self-analytical, there is a stern, uncompromising
relentlessness toward her introspections that keeps them from being
wistful or pathetic. These poems are, as she explains in her
title-poem—

No songs for an idle lute,
No pretty tunes of coddled ills,
But the bare chart of my growing pains.

Intellect is always in the ascendency, even in the most ecstatic
verses. In an almost religious poem, “A Man” (dedicated to her
father), she pictures herself as a child, and expresses the whole
psychology of our juvenile love of poor literature in lines like:

A book held gaping on my knees,
Watering a sterile romance with my thoughts.

But it is not only her keen search for truth and an equally keen eye
for the exact word that make these poems distinctive. A sharp color
sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of the ordinary in
terms of the beautiful, illumine such poems as “Sinfonia Domestica,”
“Clothes,” “Autumn.” In the last named, with its brilliant
combination of painting and housewifery, Mrs. Untermeyer has
reproduced her early environment with a bright pungency;
“Verhaeren’s Flemish _genre_ pictures are no better,” writes Amy
Lowell. Several of her purely pictorial poems establish a swift
kinship between the most romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny
“Moonrise” is an example; so is “High Tide,” that, in one extended
metaphor, turns the mere fact of a physical law into a most
arresting and noble fancy.

_Dreams Out of Darkness_ (1921) is a ripening of this author’s
powers with a richer musical undercurrent. This increase of melody
is manifest on every page, possibly most striking in “Lake Song,”
which, beneath its symbolism, is one of the most liquid unrhymed
lyrics of the period.

HIGH TIDE

I edged back against the night.
The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore.
And the breakers,
Like young and impatient hounds,
Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand.
Sprang—but were drawn back slowly
With a long, relentless pull,
Whimpering, into the dark.

Then I saw who held them captive;
And I saw how they were bound
With a broad and quivering leash of light,
Held by the moon,
As, calm and unsmiling,
She walked the deep fields of the sky.

AUTUMN

(_To My Mother_)

How memory cuts away the years, And how clean the picture comes Of autumn days, brisk and busy; Charged with keen sunshine. And you, stirred with activity, The spirit of those energetic days.

There was our back-yard, So plain and stripped of green, With even the weeds carefully pulled away From the crooked red bricks that made the walk, And the earth on either side so black.

Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air. And winter comforts coming in like a pageant. I shall not forget them:— Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles, Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, Exhaling the pungent dill; And in the very centre of the yard, You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down Like jolly monks in a drunken dance. And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by the wagon-load, Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers. Such feathery whiteness—to come to kraut! And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness under a grey dust, Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire; And enamelled crab-apples that tricked with their fragrance But were bitter to taste. And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces, And long string beans floating in pans of clear water Like slim, green fishes. And there was fish itself, Salted, silver herring from the city....

And you moved among these mysteries, Absorbed and smiling and sure; Stirring, tasting, measuring, With the precision of a ritual. I like to think of you in your years of power— You, now so shaken and so powerless— High priestess of your home.

SINFONIA DOMESTICA

When the white wave of a glory that is hardly I
Breaks through my mind and washes it clean,
I know at last the meaning of my ecstasy,
And know at last my wish and what it can mean.

To have sped out of life that night—to have vanished
Not as a vision, but as something touched, yet grown
Radiant as the moonlight, circling my naked shoulder;
Wrapped in a dream of beauty, longed for, but never known.

For how with our daily converse, even the sweet sharing
Of thoughts, of food, of home, of common life,
How shall I be that glory, that last desire
For which men struggle? Is Romance in a wife?

Must I bend a heart that is bowed to breaking
With a frustration, inevitable and slow,
And bank my flame to a low hearth fire, believing
You’ll come for warmth and life to its tempered glow?

Shall I mould my hope anew, to one of service,
And tell my uneasy soul “Behold, this is good.”
And meet you (if we do meet), even at Heaven’s threshold,
With ewer and basin, with clothing and with food?

LAKE SONG

The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The weeping of ancient women
Who grieved without rebellion.

The lake falls over the shore
Like tears on their curven bosoms.
Here is languid, luxurious wailing;
The wailing of kings’ daughters.

So do we ever cry,
A soft, unmutinous crying,
When we know ourselves each a princess
Locked fast within her tower.

The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The fertile tears of women
That water the dreams of men.

_John Gould Fletcher_

John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3,
1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts)
and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in
Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to
the United States, he has lived ever since.

In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has
referred to as “his literary wild oats,” five small collections of
experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years later,
Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and far more
arresting poet with _Irradiations—Sand and Spray_ (1915). This
volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through
it, even though it is often a bloodless and bodiless imagination. It
is crowded—even overcrowded—with æsthetic subtleties, a sort of
brilliant and haphazard series of improvisations.

In the following book, _Goblins and Pagodas_ (1916), Fletcher
carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him;
the ambitious set of eleven “color symphonies” is an elaborate
design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned by
color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes
far-fetched, “It contains,” says Conrad Aiken in his appreciative
chapter on Fletcher in _Scepticisms_, “little of the emotion which
relates to the daily life of men and women.... It is a sort of
absolute poetry, a poetry of detached waver and brilliance, a
beautiful flowering of language alone—a parthenogenesis, as if
language were fertilized by itself rather than by thought or
feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is nothing
left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion. But
the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a
fantastic world.”

Meanwhile, Fletcher has been developing. After having appeared in
the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than
surfaces. Beginning with his majestic “Lincoln,” his work has had a
closer relation to humanity; a moving mysticism speaks from _The
Tree of Life_ (1918), the more obviously native _Granite and
Breakers_ (1921) and the later uncollected poems. Although the
unconscious too often dictates Fletcher’s fantasies, a calm music
dominates his shorter poems, a grave and subdued lyricism moves and
enriches them.

THE SWAN

Under a wall of bronze,
Where beeches dip and trail
Their branches in the water;
With red-tipped head and wings—
A beaked ship under sail—
There glides a single swan.

Under the autumn trees
He goes. The branches quiver,
Dance in the wraith-like water,
Which ripples beneath the sedge
With the slackening furrow that glides
In his wake when he is gone:
The beeches bow dark heads.

Into the windless dusk,
Where in mist great towers stand
Guarding a lonely strand,
That is bodiless and dim,
He speeds with easy stride;
And I would go beside,
Till the low brown hills divide
At last, for me and him.

LONDON NIGHTFALL

I saw the shapes that stood upon the clouds:
And they were tiger-breasted, shot with light,
And all of them, lifting long trumpets together,
Blew over the city, for the night to come.
Down in the street, we floundered in the mud;
Above, in endless files, gold angels came
And stood upon the clouds, and blew their horns
For night.

Like a wet petal crumpled,
Twilight fell soddenly on the weary city;
The ’buses lurched and groaned,
The shops put up their doors.
But skywards, far aloft,
The angels, vanishing, waved broad plumes of gold,
Summoning spirits from a thousand hills
To pour the thick night out upon the earth.

DAWN

Above the east horizon,
The great red flower of the dawn
Opens slowly, petal by petal;
The trees emerge from darkness
With ghostly silver leaves,
Dew powdered.
Now consciousness emerges
Reluctantly out of tides of sleep;
Finding with cold surprise
No strange new thing to match its dreams,
But merely the familiar shapes
Of bedpost, window-pane, and wall.

Within the city,
The streets which were the last to fall to sleep,
Hold yet stale fragments of the night.
Sleep oozes out of stagnant ash-barrels,
Sleep drowses over litter in the streets.
Sleep nods upon the milkcans by back doors.
And, in shut rooms,
Behind the lowered window-blinds,
Drawn white faces unwittingly flout the day.

But, at the edges of the city,
Sleep is already washed away;
Light filters through the moist green leaves,
It runs into the cups of flowers,
It leaps in sparks through drops of dew,
It whirls against the window-panes
With waking birds;
Blinds are rolled up and chimneys smoke,
Feet clatter past in silent paths,
And down white vanishing ways of steel,
A dozen railway trains converge
Upon night’s stronghold.

LINCOLN[53]

I

Like a gaunt, scraggly pine Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills; And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence, Untended and uncared for, begins to grow.

Ungainly, labouring, huge, The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches; Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds ring the horizon, A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade.

And it shall protect them all, Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence; Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith Shall strike it in an instant down to earth.

II

There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness, Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter; A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth Towards old things; Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God, Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last; Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost, Many bitter winters of defeat; Down to the granite of patience These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking, And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.

Not proud, but humble, Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service; For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.

III

There is silence abroad in the land to-day, And in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence; And, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly open, Those hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light.

Slowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the endless silence Like labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos of rude clay-fields: “I went forward as the light goes forward in early spring, But there were also many things which I left behind.

“Tombs that were quiet; One, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the darkness, One, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long falling, One, only of a child, but it was mine.

“Have you forgot your graves? Go, question them in anguish, Listen long to their unstirred lips. From your hostages to silence, Learn there is no life without death, no dawn without sun-setting, No victory but to Him who has given all.”

IV

The clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth of the battle is silent. The midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes on afresh its bright colours. But he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we scorned and mistrusted, He has descended, like a god, to his rest.

Over the uproar of cities, Over the million intricate threads of life wavering and crossing, In the midst of problems we know not, tangling, perplexing, ensnaring, Rises one white tomb alone.

Beam over it, stars. Wrap it round, stripes—stripes red for the pain that he bore for you— Enfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired through your anguish; Long as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow to your law.

Strew over him flowers; Blue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink arbutus From the east, and from the west rich orange blossoms, But from the heart of the land take the passion-flower. Rayed, violet, dim, With the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and the circlet, And beside it there, lay also one lonely snow-white magnolia, Bitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed.

THE SKATERS

Black swallows swooping or gliding In a flurry of entangled loops and curves; The skaters skim over the frozen river. And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface, Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

“_H. D._”

Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, at Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania. When she was still a child, her father became Director
of the Flower Observatory and the family moved to a suburb in the
outskirts of Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle attended a private school
in West Philadelphia; entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904; and went
abroad, for what was intended to be a short sojourn, in 1911. After
a visit to Italy and France, she came to London, joining Ezra Pound
and helping to organize the Imagists. Her work (signed “H. D.”)
began to appear in a few magazines and its unusual quality was
recognized at once. She married one of the most talented of the
English members of this group (Richard Aldington) in 1913 and
remained in London, creating, through a chiseled verse, her pure and
flawless reproductions of Greek poetry and sculpture. In 1920, she
made her long-deferred visit to America, settling on the Californian
coast, returning, the following year, to England.

“H. D.” is, by all odds, the most important of her group. She is the
only one who has steadfastly held to the letter as well as the
spirit of its _credo_. She is, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her
poems, capturing the firm delicacy of the Greek models, are like a
set of Tanagra figurines. Here, at first glance, the effect is
chilling—beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this
very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves
intensity. What, at first, seemed static becomes fluent; the
arrested moment glows with brimming energy.

Observe the poem entitled “Heat.” Here, in the fewest possible
words, is something beyond the description of heat—here is the
effect of it. In these lines one feels the very weight and solidity
of a midsummer afternoon.

Her efforts to draw the contemporary world are less happy. She is
best in her reflections of clear-cut loveliness in a quietly pagan
world. Her art, in its precision and polish, is curiously Hellenic;
“H. D.,” in most of her moods, seems less of a contemporary than an
inspired anachronism.

OREAD

Whirl up, sea—
Whirl your pointed pines.
Splash your great pines
On our rocks.
Hurl your green over us—
Cover us with your pools of fir.

PEAR TREE

Silver dust
lifted from the earth,
higher than my arms reach,
you have mounted.
O silver,
higher than my arms reach
you front us with great mass;

no flower ever opened
so staunch a white leaf,
no flower ever parted silver
from such rare silver;

O white pear,
your flower-tufts,
thick on the branch,
bring summer and ripe fruits
in their purple hearts.

HEAT

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut through the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

LETHE

Nor skin nor hide nor fleece
Shall cover you,
Nor curtain of crimson nor fine
Shelter of cedar-wood be over you,
Nor the fir-tree
Nor the pine.

Nor sight of whin nor gorse
Nor river-yew,
Nor fragrance of flowering bush,
Nor wailing of reed-bird to waken you.
Nor of linnet
Nor of thrush.

Nor word nor touch nor sight
Of lover, you
Shall long through the night but for this:
The roll of the full tide to cover you
Without question,
Without kiss.

_William Rose Benét_

William Rose Benét was born at Fort Hamilton, New York Harbor,
February 2, 1886. He was educated at Albany Academy and graduated
from Yale in 1907. After various experiences as free-lance writer,
publisher’s reader, magazine editor and second lieutenant in the U.
S. Air Service, Benét became the Associate Editor of the New York
Post’s _Literary Review_ in 1920.

The outstanding feature of Benét’s verse is its extraordinary
whimsicality; an oriental imagination riots through his pages. Like
the title-poem of his first volume, _Merchants from Cathay_ (1913),
all of Benét’s volumes vibrate with a vigorous music; they are full
of the sonorous stuff that one rolls out crossing wintry fields or
tramping a road alone.

But Benét’s charm is not confined to the lift and swing of
rollicking choruses. His _The Falconer of God_ (1914), _The Great
White Wall_ (1916) and _The Burglar of the Zodiac_ (1918) contain
decorations as bold as they are brilliant; they ring with a strange
and spicy music evoked from seemingly casual words; they glow with a
half-lurid, half-humorous reflection of the grotesque. There are
times when Benét seems to be forcing his ingenuity. The poet
frequently lets his fantastic Pegasus run away with him, and what
started out to be a gallop among the stars ends in a scraping of
shins on the pavement. But he is saved by an acrobatic dexterity
even when his energy betrays him.

_Moons of Grandeur_ (1920) represents the fullest development of
Benét’s unusual gifts; a combination of Eastern phantasy and Western
vigor.

MERCHANTS FROM CATHAY

Their heels slapped their bumping mules; their fat chaps
glowed.[Sidenote: _How that
They came._]
Glory unto Mary, each seemed to wear a crown!
Like sunset their robes were on the wide, white road:
So we saw those mad merchants come dusting into town!

Two paunchy beasts they rode on and two they drove before. [Sidenote:
_Of their
Beasts_,]
May the Saints all help us, the tiger-stripes they had!
And the panniers upon them swelled full of stuffs and ore!
The square buzzed and jostled at a sight so mad.

They bawled in their beards, and their turbans they wried. [Sidenote:
_And their
Boast_,]
They stopped by the stalls with curvetting and clatter.
As bronze as the bracken their necks and faces dyed—
And a stave they sat singing, to tell us of the matter.

_“For your silks, to Sugarmago! For your dyes, to Isfahan! [Sidenote:
_With its
Burthen_]
Weird fruits from the Isle o’ Lamaree.
But for magic merchandise,
For treasure-trove and spice,
Here’s a catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan,
The King of all the Kings across the sea!_

_“Here’s a catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan; [Sidenote: _And Chorus._] For we won through the deserts to his sunset barbican; And the mountains of his palace no Titan’s reach may span Where he wields his seignorie!_

“Red-as-blood skins of Panthers, so bright against the sun [Sidenote: _A
first
Stave
Fearsome_,]
On the walls of the halls where his pillared state is set
They daze with a blaze no man may look upon.
And with conduits of beverage those floors run wet.

“His wives stiff with riches, they sit before him there. [Sidenote: _And
a second
Right hard
To stomach_]
Bird and beast at his feast make song and clapping cheer.
And jugglers and enchanters, all walking on the air,
Make fall eclipse and thunder—make moons and suns appear!

“Once the Chan, by his enemies soreprest, and sorely spent, [Sidenote:
_And a third,
Which is a
Laughable
Thing._]
Lay, so they say, in a thicket ’neath a tree
Where the howl of an owl vexed his foes from their intent:
Then that fowl for a holy bird of reverence made he!

_“A catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan! [Sidenote: _We gape to Hear them end_,] Pastmasters of disasters, our desert caravan Won through all peril to his sunset barbican, Where he wields his seignorie! And crowns he gave us! We end where we began: A catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan, The King of all the Kings across the sea!_”

Those mad, antic Merchants!... Their stripèd beasts did beat [Sidenote:
_And are in
Terror_,]
The market-square suddenly with hooves of beaten gold!
The ground yawned gaping and flamed beneath our feet!
They plunged to Pits Abysmal with their wealth untold!

And some say the Chan himself in anger dealt the stroke— [Sidenote: _And dread it is Devil’s Work!_] For sharing of his secrets with silly, common folk: But Holy, Blessed Mary, preserve us as you may Lest once more those mad Merchants come chanting from Cathay!

NIGHT[54]

Let the night keep
What the night takes,
Sighs buried deep,
Ancient heart-aches,
Groans of the lover,
Tears of the lost;
Let day discover not
All the night cost!

Let the night keep
Love’s burning bliss,
Drowned in deep sleep
Whisper and kiss,
Thoughts like white flowers
In hedges of May;
Let such deep hours not
Fade with the day!

Monarch is night
Of all eldest things,
Pain and affright,
Rapturous wings;
Night the crown, night the sword
Lifted to smite.
Kneel to your overlord,
Children of night!

HOW TO CATCH UNICORNS

Its cloven hoofprint on the sand
Will lead you—where?
Into a phantasmagoric land—
Beware!

There all the bright streams run up-hill.
The birds on every tree are still.
But from stocks and stones, clear voices come
That should be dumb.

If you have taken along a net,
A noose, a prod,
You’ll be waiting in the forest yet ...
_Nid—nod!_

In a virgin’s lap the beast slept sound,
_They say_ ... but I—
I think (Is anyone around?)
_That’s just a lie_!

If you have taken a musketoon
To flinders ’twill flash ’neath the wizard moon.
So I should take browned batter-cake,
Hot-buttered inside, like foam to flake.

And I should take an easy heart
And a whimsical face,
And a tied-up lunch of sandwich and tart,
And spread a cloth in the open chase.
And then I should pretend to snore ...

And I’d hear a snort and I’d hear a roar,
The wind of a mane and a tail, and four
Wild hoofs prancing the forest-floor.

And I’d open my eyes on a flashing horn—
And see the Unicorn!

Paladins fierce and virgins sweet ...
_But he’s never had anything to eat!_
Knights have tramped in their iron-mong’ry ...
But nobody thought—that’s all!—_he’s hungry!_

ADDENDUM

_Really_ hungry! Good Lord deliver us,
The Unicorn is not _carnivorous_!

_John Hall Wheelock_

John Hall Wheelock was born at Far Rockaway, Long Island, in 1886.
He was graduated from Harvard, receiving his B.A. in 1908, and
finished his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin,
1908-10.

Wheelock’s first book is, in many respects, his best. _The Human
Fantasy_ (1911) sings with the voice of youth—a youth which is
vibrantly, even vociferously, in love with existence. Rhapsodic and
obviously influenced by Whitman and Henley, these lines beat
bravely; a singing buoyance arrests one upon opening the volume. A
headlong ecstasy rises from pages whose refrain is “Splendid it is
to live and glorious to die.” _The Beloved Adventure_ (1912) is less
powerful but scarcely less passionate. Lyric after lyric moves one
by its athletic music and spiritual intensity.

Wheelock’s subsequent volumes are less individualized. _Love and
Liberation_ (1913) and _Dust and Light_ (1919) are long dilutions of
the earlier strain. The music is still here, but most of the magic
has gone. Wheelock has allowed himself to be exploited by his own
fluency, and the result is unbelievably monotonous. Yet even vast
stretches of two hundred and thirty unvaried love songs cannot bury
a dozen or more vivid poems which lie, half-concealed, in a waste of
verbiage.

In spite of his lapses and lack of selective taste, Wheelock is
often a stirring lyricist. _The Human Fantasy_ is one of the most
remarkable “first” books of the period.

SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON

Look—on the topmost branches of the world
The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick;
Over the huddled rows of stone and brick,
A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled
Like ghosts, languid and sick.

One breathless moment now the city’s moaning
Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim;
There is no sound around the whole world’s rim,
Save in the distance a small band is droning
Some desolate old hymn.

Van Wyck, how often have we been together
When this same moment made all mysteries clear;
—The infinite stars that brood above us here,
And the gray city in the soft June weather,
So tawdry and so dear!

BEAUTY

The old, familiar Beauty,
Caressed by the world’s dead hands,
Beauty, so old and weary,
Beloved of a thousand lovers,
Worn with a thousand kisses,
Surprising—beneficent—holy—
Comes to us all in the end.

LOVE AND LIBERATION

Lift your arms to the stars
And give an immortal shout;
Not all the veils of darkness
Can put your beauty out!

You are armed with love, with love,
Nor all the powers of Fate
Can touch you with a spear,
Nor all the hands of hate.

What of good and evil,
Hell and Heaven above—,
Trample them with love!
Ride over them with love!

NIRVANA

Sleep on, I lie at heaven’s high oriels,
Over the stars that murmur as they go
Lighting your lattice-window far below;
And every star some of the glory spells
Whereof I know.

I have forgotten you long, long ago,
Like the sweet silver singing of thin bells
Vanished, or music fading faint and low.
Sleep on, I lie at heaven’s high oriels,
Who loved you so.

_Joyce Kilmer_

(Alfred) Joyce Kilmer was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey,
December 6, 1886. He was graduated from Rutgers College in 1904 and
received his A.B. from Columbia in 1906. After leaving Columbia he
became, in rapid succession, instructor of Latin at Morristown High
School, editor of a journal for horsemen, book salesman,
book-reviewer, lexicographer, æsthete, interviewer, socialist and
churchman.

After Kilmer became converted to Catholicism, his conception of the
church was the Church Militant. “His thought,” writes his
biographer, Robert Cortes Holliday, “dwelt continually on
warrior-saints.... As he saw it, there was no question as to his
duty.” In 1917 Kilmer joined the Officers’ Reserve Training Corps,
but he soon resigned from this. In less than three weeks after
America entered the world war, he enlisted as a private in the
Seventh Regiment, National Guard, New York. Shortly before the
regiment left New York for Spartanburg, South Carolina, Kilmer was
transferred at his own request to the 165th Infantry. In spite of
his avowed militancy, Kilmer was “a poet trying to be a soldier;” he
made no effort to glorify war; his one hope was to wring some
spiritual satisfaction out of the brutality.

On July 28, 1918, the five-day battle for the mastery of the heights
beyond the river Ourcq was begun. Two days later, Sergeant Kilmer
was killed in action.

Death came before the poet had developed or even matured his gifts.
His first volume, _Summer of Love_ (1911), is wholly imitative; it
is full of reflections of a dozen other sources, “a broken bundle of
mirrors.” _Trees and Other Poems_ (1914) contains the title-poem by
which Kilmer is best known and, though various influences are still
strong (one cannot miss the borrowed accents of Patmore, Belloc,
Chesterton, Housman and—_vide_ “Martin”—E. A. Robinson), a
refreshing candor lights up the lines. _Main Street and Other Poems_
(1917) is less derivative; the simplicity is less self-conscious,
the ecstasy more spontaneous.

Besides his own poetry, Kilmer edited a selection of _Verses_ by
Hilaire Belloc (1916) and _Dreams and Images_, An Anthology of
Catholic poets (1917).

TREES[55]

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

MARTIN[56]

When I am tired of earnest men,
Intense and keen and sharp and clever,
Pursuing fame with brush or pen
Or counting metal disks forever,
Then from the halls of shadowland
Beyond the trackless purple sea
Old Martin’s ghost comes back to stand
Beside my desk and talk to me.

Still on his delicate pale face
A quizzical thin smile is showing,
His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace,
His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing.
He wears a brilliant-hued cravat,
A suit to match his soft gray hair,
A rakish stick, a knowing hat,
A manner blithe and debonair.