Chapter C: E. Carryl lived the greater part of his life in New York, but on (2)

Listen to the tawny thief,
Hid beneath the waxen leaf,
Growling at his fairy host,
Bidding her with angry boast
Fill his cup with wine distilled
From the dew the dawn has spilled:
Stored away in golden casks
Is the precious draught he asks.

Who,—who makes this mimic din
In this mimic meadow inn,
Sings in such a drowsy note,
Wears a golden-belted coat;
Loiters in the dainty room
Of this tavern of perfume;
Dares to linger at the cup
Till the yellow sun is up?

Bacchus ’tis, come back again
To the busy haunts of men;
Garlanded and gaily dressed,
Bands of gold about his breast;
Straying from his paradise,
Having pinions angel-wise,—
’Tis the honey-bee, who goes
Reveling within a rose!

TWO QUATRAINS

IVY

Upon the walls the graceful Ivy climbs
And wraps with green the ancient ruin gray:
Romance it is, and these her leafy rhymes
Writ on the granite page of yesterday.

DAWN

Out of the scabbard of the night
By God’s hand drawn,
Flashes his shining sword of light,
And lo—the dawn!

_Charlotte P. S. Gilman_

Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman was born at Hartford, Connecticut,
July 3, 1860. She began public work in 1890, lecturing on ethics,
economics and sociology; identifying herself with the labor question
and the advance of women.

She has written about a dozen books, her best works being _Woman and
Economics_ (1898) and _Human Work_ (1904). Her volume of verse, _In
This Our World_ (1898), hurls many a shaft of ironic wit. Beneath
the whimsical humor of “A Conservative” and the better known
“Similar Cases” (unfortunately too long to quote) there is a
sub-acid satire not easily forgotten.

A CONSERVATIVE

The garden beds I wandered by
One bright and cheerful morn,
When I found a new-fledged butterfly,
A-sitting on a thorn,
A black and crimson butterfly
All doleful and forlorn.

I thought that life could have no sting
To infant butterflies,
So I gazed on this unhappy thing
With wonder and surprise.
While sadly with his waving wing
He wiped his weeping eyes.

Said I, “What can the matter be?
Why weepest thou so sore?
With garden fair and sunlight free
And flowers in goodly store,”—
But he only turned away from me
And burst into a roar.

Cried he, “My legs are thin and few
Where once I had a swarm!
Soft fuzzy fur—a joy to view—
Once kept my body warm,
Before these flapping wing-things grew,
To hamper and deform!”

At that outrageous bug I shot
The fury of mine eye;
Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
“You ignominious idiot!
Those wings are made to fly!”

“I do not want to fly,” said he,
“I only want to squirm!”
And he drooped his wings dejectedly,
But still his voice was firm:
“I do not want to be a fly!
I want to be a worm!”

O yesterday of unknown lack,
To-day of unknown bliss!
I left my fool in red and black;
The last I saw was this,—
The creature madly climbing back
Into his chrysalis.

_Louise Imogen Guiney_

Louise Imogen Guiney was born at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1861.
Although she attended Elmhurst Academy in Providence, most of her
studying was with private tutors. In 1901 she went to England, where
she lived until her death.

Traditional in form and feeling, Miss Guiney’s work has a distinctly
personal vigor; even her earliest collection, _The White Sail and
Other Poems_ (1887), is not without individuality. Her two most
characteristic volumes are _A Roadside Harp_ (1893) and _Patrins_
(1897). A more recent publication, _Happy Ending_, appeared in 1909.

Miss Guiney died at Chirping-Camden, England, November 3, 1920.

THE WILD RIDE

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing._

Let cowards and laggards fall back! But alert to the saddle Weatherworn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion, With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses; There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us: What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding.

Thought’s self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam: Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing.

A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty; We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers.

_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing._

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind; We leap to the infinite dark like sparks from the anvil. Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.

_Bliss Carman_

(William) Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick,
Canada, April 15, 1861, of a long line of United Empire Loyalists
who withdrew from Connecticut at the time of the Revolutionary War.
Carman was educated at the University of New Brunswick (1879–81), at
Edinburgh (1882–3) and Harvard (1886–8). He took up his residence in
the United States about 1889 and, with the exception of short
sojourns in the Maritime Provinces, has lived there ever since.

In 1893, Carman issued his first book, _Low Tide on Grand Pré: A
Book of Lyrics_. It was immediately successful, running quickly into
a second edition. From the outset, it was evident that Carman
possessed the true lyrical power: the ability to fuse thought in
emotion, to interpret the external world through a personal
intensity. Simple and direct in his choice of themes, his passion
made them universal. A vivid buoyancy, new to American literature,
made his worship of Nature frankly pagan as contrasted to the
moralizing tributes of most of his predecessors. This freshness and
irresponsible whimsy made Carman the natural collaborator for
Richard Hovey, and when their first joint _Songs from Vagabondia_
appeared in 1894 Carman’s fame was established. (See Preface.)

Although the three _Vagabondia_ collections contain Carman’s best
known poems, several of his other volumes (he has published almost
twenty of them) vibrate with the same glowing pulse. An almost
physical radiance rises from _Ballads of Lost Haven_ (1897), _From
the Book of Myths_ (1902) and _Songs of the Sea Children_ (1904).

Carman has also written several volumes of essays and, in
conjunction with Mary Perry King, has devised several poem-dances
(_Daughters of Dawn_, 1913) suggesting Vachel Lindsay’s later
poem-games. In his collection _April Airs_ (1916), although the
strength is diluted and the music somewhat thinned, the old magic
persists; the spell may be overfamiliar but it is not powerless.

A VAGABOND SONG

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—
Touch of manner, hint of mood;
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry
Of bugles going by.
And my lonely spirit thrills
To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills.

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir;
We must rise and follow her,
When from every hill of flame
She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

THE GRAVEDIGGER

Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old,
And well his work is done.
With an equal grave for lord and knave,
He buries them every one.

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;

But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore.

Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre
Went out, and where are they?
In the port they made, they are delayed
With the ships of yesterday.

He followed the ships of England far,
As the ships of long ago;
And the ships of France they led him a dance,
But he laid them all arow.

Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him
Is the sexton of the town;
For sure and swift, with a guiding lift,
He shovels the dead men down.

But though he delves so fierce and grim,
His honest graves are wide,
As well they know who sleep below
The dredge of the deepest tide.

Oh, he works with a rollicking stave at lip,
And loud is the chorus skirled;
With the burly rote of his rumbling throat
He batters it down the world.

He learned it once in his father’s house,
Where the ballads of eld were sung;
And merry enough is the burden rough,
But no man knows the tongue.

Oh, fair, they say, was his bride to see,
And wilful she must have been,
That she could bide at his gruesome side
When the first red dawn came in.

And sweet, they say, is her kiss to those
She greets to his border home;
And softer than sleep her hand’s first sweep
That beckons, and they come.

Oh, crooked is he, but strong enough
To handle the tallest mast;
From the royal barque to the slaver dark,
He buries them all at last.

_Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip,
He makes for the nearest shore;
And God, who sent him a thousand ship,
Will send him a thousand more;
But some he’ll save for a bleaching grave,
And shoulder them in to shore,—
Shoulder them in, shoulder them in,
Shoulder them in to shore._

HEM AND HAW

Hem and Haw were the sons of sin,
Created to shally and shirk;
Hem lay ’round and Haw looked on
While God did all the work.

Hem was a fogy, and Haw was a prig,
For both had the dull, dull mind;
And whenever they found a thing to do,
They yammered and went it blind.

Hem was the father of bigots and bores;
As the sands of the sea were they.
And Haw was the father of all the tribe
Who criticize to-day.

But God was an artist from the first,
And knew what he was about;
While over his shoulder sneered these two,
And advised him to rub it out.

They prophesied ruin ere man was made;
“Such folly must surely fail!”
And when he was done, “Do you think, my Lord,
He’s better without a tail?”

And still in the honest working world,
With posture and hint and smirk,
These sons of the devil are standing by
While man does all the work.

They balk endeavor and baffle reform,
In the sacred name of law;
And over the quavering voice of Hem
Is the droning voice of Haw.

DAISIES

Over the shoulders and slopes of the dune
I saw the white daisies go down to the sea,
A host in the sunshine, an army in June,
The people God sends us to set our hearts free.

The bobolinks rallied them up from the dell,
The orioles whistled them out of the wood;
And all of their singing was, “Earth, it is well!”
And all of their dancing was, “Life, thou art good!”

_Richard Burton_

Richard (Eugene) Burton was born at Hartford, Connecticut, March 14,
1861. He has taught English at various colleges and universities
since 1888, and has been head of the English department of the
University of Minnesota since 1906. His first book, _Dumb in June_
(1895), is, in many ways, his best. It contains a buoyant lyricism,
a more conscious use of the strain developed in Carman and Hovey’s
_Songs from Vagabondia_—a mood which he has never surpassed. Much of
his other verse is far less distinctive, being what might be called
“anonymous poetry”: a poetry that has, in spite of certain excellent
qualities, little trace of the individual and practically no stamp
of personality or place. The succeeding _Lyrics of Brotherhood_
(1899) has a wider vision if a more limited music; several of the
poems in this collection reflect the hungers, dreams and unsung
melodies of the dumb and defeated multitudes. _From the Book of
Life_ (1909) has scarcely as much power and less poetry.

Besides his verse, Burton has written several books of essays, a
life of Whittier and various volumes on the drama.

BLACK SHEEP

From their folded mates they wander far,
Their ways seem harsh and wild;
They follow the beck of a baleful star,
Their paths are dream-beguiled.

Yet haply they sought but a wider range,
Some loftier mountain-slope,
And little recked of the country strange
Beyond the gates of hope.

And haply a bell with a luring call
Summoned their feet to tread
Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall
And the lurking snare are spread.

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days
Of outcast liberty,
They’re sick at heart for the homely ways
Where their gathered brothers be.

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark
And the hills loom large and dim,
For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark,
And their souls go out to him.

Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry,
Safe in the inner fold;
And maybe they hear, and wonder why,
And marvel, out in the cold.

_Oliver Herford_

Oliver Herford was born in December, 1863, at Manchester, England.
He studied art in London and at Julien’s in Paris, turned to
literature as a pastime and, about 1890, came to the United States,
where he has lived ever since.

Herford, celebrated as a wit as well as a draughtsman and versifier,
is the author of no less than twenty volumes of light verse, prose
pasquinades and burlesques. His _The Bashful Earthquake_ (1898),
_Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten_ (1904) and _This Giddy Globe_ (1919)
show Herford’s delicate skill and his versatile dexterity. These
volumes, like most of Herford’s, are embellished by his own
drawings, which are fully as graceful as the accompanying verses.

EARTH[15]

If this little world to-night
Suddenly should fall through space
In a hissing, headlong flight,
Shrivelling from off its face,
As it falls into the sun,
In an instant every trace
Of the little crawling things—
Ants, philosophers, and lice,
Cattle, cockroaches, and kings,
Beggars, millionaires, and mice,
Men and maggots all as one
As it falls into the sun....
Who can say but at the same
Instant from some planet far,
A child may watch us and exclaim:
“See the pretty shooting star!”

THE ELF AND THE DORMOUSE

Under a toadstool crept a wee Elf,
Out of the rain to shelter himself.

Under the toadstool, sound asleep,
Sat a big Dormouse all in a heap.

Trembled the wee Elf, frightened and yet
Fearing to fly away lest he get wet.

To the next shelter—maybe a mile!
Sudden the wee Elf smiled a wee smile.

Tugged till the toadstool toppled in two.
Holding it over him, gaily he flew.

Soon he was safe home, dry as could be.
Soon woke the Dormouse—“Good gracious me!

“Where is my toadstool?” loud he lamented.
—And that’s how umbrellas first were invented.

_Richard Hovey_

Richard Hovey was born in 1864 at Normal, Illinois, and graduated
from Dartmouth in 1885. After leaving college, he became, in rapid
succession, a theologian, an actor, a journalist, a lecturer, a
professor of English literature at Barnard, a poet and a dramatist.

His first volume, _The Laurel: An Ode_ (1889), betrayed the
overmusical influence of Lanier and gave promise of that
extraordinary facility which often brought Hovey perilously close to
the pit of mere technique. His exuberant virility found its outlet
in the series of poems published in collaboration with Bliss
Carman—the three volumes of _Songs from Vagabondia_ (1894, 1896,
1900). Here he let himself go completely; nothing remained sober or
static. His lines fling themselves across the page; dance with
intoxicating abandon; shout with a wild irresponsibility; leap,
laugh, carouse and carry off the reader in a gale of high spirits.
The famous _Stein Song_ is but an interlude in the midst of a far
finer and even more rousing poem that, with its flavor of Whitman,
begins:

I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.
I have need of the sky.
I have business with the grass.
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
I will get me away to the waters that glass
The clouds as they pass....”

Hovey’s attitude to his art may be expressed in no better way than
his own words concerning the poet: “It is not his mission,” wrote
Hovey in the _Dartmouth Magazine_, “to write elegant canzonettas for
the delectation of the _dilettanti_, but to comfort the sorrowful
and hearten the despairing, to champion the oppressed and declare to
humanity its inalienable rights, to lay open to the world the heart
of man—all its heights and depths, all its glooms and glories, to
reveal the beauty in things and breathe into his fellows a love of
it.” This almost too conscious awareness of the poet’s “mission”
often marred Hovey’s work; in responding to his program, he
frequently overstressed his ringing enthusiasm, strained his own
muscularity. But his power was as unflagging as his fraternal energy
was persuasive. And in certain quieter moods the poet rose to new
heights. The work on which he was engaged at the time of his death
is significant; _Launcelot and Guenevere: A Poem in Five Dramas_ is
magnificent in its restrained vitality.

Although the varied lyrics in _Songs from Vagabondia_ are the best
known examples of Hovey, a more representative collection of his
riper work may be found in _Along the Trail_ (1898). This volume
contains “Spring” and the stirring “Comrades” in full as well as the
best of his vivid fragments.

Hovey died, during his thirty-sixth year, in 1900.

AT THE CROSSROADS

You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever—
And it well may be for a day and a night,
And it well may be forever.
But whether we meet or whether we part
(For our ways are past our knowing),
A pledge from the heart to its fellow heart
On the ways we all are going!
Here’s luck!
For we know not where we are going.

Whether we win or whether we lose
With the hands that life is dealing,
It is not we nor the ways we choose
But the fall of the cards that’s sealing.
There’s a fate in love and a fate in fight,
And the best of us all go under—
And whether we’re wrong or whether we’re right,
We win, sometimes, to our wonder.
Here’s luck!
That we may not yet go under!

With a steady swing and an open brow
We have tramped the ways together,
But we’re clasping hands at the crossroads now
In the Fiend’s own night for weather;
And whether we bleed or whether we smile
In the leagues that lie before us
The ways of life are many a mile
And the dark of Fate is o’er us.
Here’s luck!
And a cheer for the dark before us!

You to the left and I to the right,
For the ways of men must sever,
And it well may be for a day and a night
And it well may be forever!
But whether we live or whether we die
(For the end is past our knowing),
Here’s two frank hearts and the open sky,
Be a fair or an ill wind blowing!
_Here’s luck!_
In the teeth of all winds blowing.

UNMANIFEST DESTINY

To what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star
Compelled to what unchosen end,

Across the sea that knows no beach,
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!

The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that God was planning then
The trumpet word of Jefferson
To bugle forth the rights of men.

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,
What was it but despair and shame?
Who saw behind the cloud the sun?
Who knew that God was in the flame?

Had not defeat upon defeat,
Disaster on disaster come,
The slave’s emancipated feet
Had never marched behind the drum.

There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned;
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves It’s dark command.
I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall be high,
I only know it shall be great.

LOVE IN THE WINDS

When I am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray.
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight.

Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,—
No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew,
But hale and hardy as the highland heather,
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.

A STEIN SONG

(From “_Spring_”)

Give a rouse, then, in the Maytime
For a life that knows no fear!
Turn night-time into daytime
With the sunlight of good cheer!
For it’s always fair weather
When good fellows get together,
With a stein on the table and a good song ringing clear.

When the wind comes up from Cuba,
And the birds are on the wing,
And our hearts are patting juba
To the banjo of the spring,
Then it’s no wonder whether
The boys will get together,
With a stein on the table and a cheer for everything.

For we’re all frank-and-twenty
When the spring is in the air;
And we’ve faith and hope a-plenty,
And we’ve life and love to spare:
And it’s birds of a feather
When we all get together,
With a stein on the table and a heart without a care.

For we know the world is glorious,
And the goal a golden thing,
And that God is not censorious
When his children have their fling;
And life slips its tether
When the boys get together,
With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring.

_Madison Cawein_

Madison (Julius) Cawein was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865,
and spent most of his life in the state of his birth. He wrote an
enormous quantity of verse, publishing more than twenty volumes of
pleasant, sometimes exuberant but seldom distinguished poetry.
_Lyrics and Idyls_ (1890) and _Vale of Tempe_ (1905) contain his
most characteristic stanzas, packed with the lush, adjectival love
of Nature that led certain of his admirers to call him (and, one
must admit, the alliteration was tempting) “the Keats of Kentucky.”

Cawein’s work divides itself into two distinct veins. In the one, he
dealt with the scenes and incidents of his mountain environment: the
sag of an old house in the hills, the echoes of a feud, rumblings of
the Ku Klux Klan, the ghastly details of a lynching. In his other
mood (the one which unfortunately possessed him the greater part of
the time) he spent page after page romanticizing Nature, touching up
his already painted lilies, polishing his thinly-plated
artificialities until the base metal showed through. He pictured all
outdoors with painstaking detail. And yet it is somehow unreal,
prettified, remote. Every now and then, with an irritating
frequency, he tries to transport his audience to a literary
Fairyland; but the reader is quickly wearied by the almost
interminable procession of fays, gnomes, nixies, elves, dryads,
sprites, pucks, fauns—be they ever so lyrical.

In spite of Cawein’s too profuse lyricism, several of his pieces
will doubtless remain, though it is not likely that the survivors
will be the sugared sweetmeats by which his champions (including
William Dean Howells) set such store.

Cawein died in Kentucky in 1914.

SNOW

The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.

The wind has sunk to a sigh,
And the waters are stern with frost;
And gray, in the eastern sky,
The last snow-cloud is lost.

White fields, that are winter-starved,
Black woods, that are winter-fraught,
Cold, harsh as a face death-carved,
With the iron of some black thought.

THE MAN HUNT[16]

The woods stretch wild to the mountain side,
And the brush is deep where a man may hide.

They have brought the bloodhounds up again
To the roadside rock where they found the slain.

They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they
Have taken the trail to the mountain way.

Three times they circled the trail and crossed,
And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.

Now straight through the pines and the underbrush
They follow the scent through the forest’s hush.

And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear
In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.

The man who crouches among the trees
From the stern-faced men that follow these.

A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed—
And the trail of the hunted again is lost.

An upturned pebble; a bit of ground
A heel has trampled—the trail is found.

And the woods re-echo the bloodhounds’ bay
As again they take to the mountain way.

A rock; a ribbon of road; a ledge,
With a pine-tree clutching its crumbling edge.

A pine, that the lightning long since clave,
Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave.

A shout; a curse; and a face aghast,
And the human quarry is laired at last.

The human quarry, with clay-clogged hair
And eyes of terror, who waits them there;

That glares and crouches and rising then
Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men.

Until the blow of a gun-butt lays
Him stunned and bleeding upon his face.

A rope, a prayer, and an oak-tree near.
And a score of hands to swing him clear.

A grim black thing for the setting sun
And the moon and the stars to look upon.

PENURY

Above his misered embers, gnarled and gray,
With toil-twitched limbs he bends; around his hut,
Want, like a hobbling hag, goes night and day,
Scolding at windows and at doors tight-shut.

DESERTED

The old house leans upon a tree
Like some old man upon a staff:
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:
The starlight flitting in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now
A fox-hound howls: and through the night,
Like some old ghost from out its grave,
The moon comes misty white.

_Bert Leston Taylor_

Bert Leston Taylor was born at Goshen, Massachusetts, November 13,
1866, and educated at the College of the City of New York. He had
been engaged in journalism since 1895, conducting his column “A Line
o’ Type or Two” in the Chicago _Daily Tribune_. He was the author of
two novels as well as _A Line-o’-Verse or Two_ (1911) and _Motley
Measures_ (1913), a pair of delightful light verse collections.

Taylor died of pneumonia March 19, 1921.

CANOPUS

When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,
I like to think about that star Canopus,
So far, so far away.

Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list ’em;
To weigh it, science almost must despair.
Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system,
Nor even know ’twas there.

When temporary chairmen utter speeches,
And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns,
My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches
To where Canopus swims.

When men are calling names and making faces,
And all the world’s ajangle and ajar,
I meditate on interstellar spaces
And smoke a mild seegar.

For after one has had about a week of
The argument of friends as well as foes,
A star that has no parallax to speak of
Conduces to repose.

_William Vaughn Moody_

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 1, 1869, and
was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining
eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study—he taught,
for eight years, at the University of Chicago—his death coming at
the very height of his creative power.

_The Masque of Judgment_, his first work, was published in 1900. A
richer and more representative collection appeared the year
following; in _Poems_ (1901) Moody effected that mingling of
challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and
more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, and
particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating “On a Soldier
Fallen in the Philippines” and the majestic, uncompleted “The Death
of Eve,” Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and
preacher. “Gloucester Moors” is an outcry against the few exploiting
the many; “The Quarry” and “An Ode in Time of Hesitation” are
passionate with prophecy. His last, extended works have an epic
quality which, with their too-crowded details and difficult diction,
will effectually prevent them from ever becoming popular. But their
importance will grow even as Moody’s place in our literature will
eventually be a higher one than that which has yet been accorded
him.

His prose play _The Great Divide_ (1907) was strikingly successful
when produced by Henry Miller. _The Faith Healer_ (1909), another
play in prose, because of its more exalted tone, did not win the
favor of the theatre-going public. A complete edition of _The Poems
and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn Moody_ was published in 1912 in
two volumes.

In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness from which
he never recovered. He died in October, 1910.

FROM “JETSAM”

Once at a simple turning of the way
I met God walking; and although the dawn
Was large behind Him, and the morning stars
Circled and sang about his face as birds
About the fieldward morning cottager,
My coward heart said faintly, “Let us haste!
Day grows and it is far to market-town.”
Once where I lay in darkness after fight,
Sore smitten, thrilled a little thread of song
Searching and searching all my muffled sense
Until it shook sweet pangs through all my blood,
And I beheld one globed in ghostly fire
Singing, star-strong, her golden canticle;
And her mouth sang, “The hosts of Hate roll past,
A dance of dust-motes in the sliding sun;
Love’s battle comes on the wide wings of storm,
From east to west one legion! Wilt thou strive?”

Then, since the splendor of her sword-bright gaze
Was heavy on me with yearning and with scorn,
My sick heart muttered, “Yea, the little strife,
Yet see, the grievous wounds! I fain would sleep.”

O heart, shalt thou not once be strong to go
Where all sweet throats are calling, once be brave
To slake with deed thy dumbness? Let us go
The path her singing face looms low to point,
Pendulous, blanched with longing, shedding flames
Of silver on the brown grope of the flood;
For all my spirit’s soilure is put by
And all my body’s soilure, lacking now
But the last lustral sacrament of death
To make me clean for those near-searching eyes
That question yonder whether all be well,
And pause a little ere they dare rejoice.

Question and be thou answered, passionate face!
For I am worthy, worthy now at last
After so long unworth; strong now at last
To give myself to beauty and be saved.

PANDORA’S SONG

(From “_The Fire-Bringer_”)

I stood within the heart of God;
It seemed a place I had known:
(I was blood-sister to the clod,
Blood-brother to the stone.)

I found my love and labor there,
My house, my raiment, meat and wine,
My ancient rage, my old despair,—
Yea, all things that were mine.

I saw the spring and summer pass,
The trees grow bare, and winter come;
All was the same as once it was
Upon my hills at home.

Then suddenly in my own heart
I felt God walk and gaze about;
He spoke; his words seemed held apart
With gladness and with doubt.

“Here is my meat and wine,” He said,
“My love, my toil, my ancient care;
Here is my cloak, my book, my bed,
And here my old despair.

“Here are my seasons: winter, spring,
Summer the same, and autumn spills
The fruits I look for; everything
As on my heavenly hills.”

ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Streets of the roaring town,
Hush for him; hush, be still!
He comes, who was stricken down
Doing the word of our will.
Hush! Let him have his state.
Give him his soldier’s crown,
The grists of trade can wait
Their grinding at the mill.
But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown.
Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone.

Toll! Let the great bells toll
Till the clashing air is dim,
Did we wrong this parted soul?
We will make it up to him.
Toll! Let him never guess
What work we sent him to.
Laurel, laurel, yes.
He did what we bade him do.
Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good;
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country’s own
heart’s-blood.

A flag for a soldier’s bier
Who dies that his land may live;
O banners, banners here,
That he doubt not nor misgive!
That he heed not from the tomb
The evil days draw near
When the nation robed in gloom
With its faithless past shall strive.
Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island
mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in
the dark.

_George Sterling_

George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, December 1, 1869,
and educated at various private schools in the Eastern States. He
moved to the far West about 1895 and has lived in California ever
since.

Of Sterling’s ten volumes of poetry, _The Testimony of the Suns_
(1903), _A Wine of Wizardry_ (1908) and _The House of Orchids and
Other Poems_ (1911) are the most characteristic. As their titles
indicate, this is poetry of a flamboyant and rhetorical type; of
luxuriant sentences and emotions decorated in “the grand manner.”
Yet Sterling has added a definite vigor to his ornate tropes and
verbal prodigality. Nor is he always extravagant. His simpler
verses, though not in his most familiar vein, are among his best.

THE BLACK VULTURE

Aloof upon the day’s immeasured dome,
He holds unshared the silence of the sky.
Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry
The eagle’s empire and the falcon’s home—
Far down, the galleons of sunset roam;
His hazards on the sea of morning lie;
Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh
Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam.
And least of all he holds the human swarm—
Unwitting now that envious men prepare
To make their dream and its fulfillment one,
When, poised above the caldrons of the storm,
Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare
His roads between the thunder and the sun.

THE MASTER MARINER

My grandsire sailed three years from home,
And slew unmoved the sounding whale:
Here on a windless beach I roam
And watch far out the hardy sail.

The lions of the surf that cry
Upon this lion-colored shore
On reefs of midnight met his eye:
He knew their fangs as I their roar.

My grandsire sailed uncharted seas,
And toll of all their leagues he took:
I scan the shallow bays at ease,
And tell their colors in a book.

The anchor-chains his music made
And wind in shrouds and running-gear:
The thrush at dawn beguiles my glade,
And once, ’tis said, I woke to hear.

My grandsire in his ample fist
The long harpoon upheld to men:
Behold obedient to my wrist
A grey gull’s-feather for my pen!

Upon my grandsire’s leathern cheek
Five zones their bitter bronze had set:
Some day their hazards I will seek,
I promise me at times. Not yet.

I think my grandsire now would turn
A mild but speculative eye
On me, my pen and its concern,
Then gaze again to sea—and sigh.

_Edwin Arlington Robinson_

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village
of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family
moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in
Robinson’s poetry as “Tilbury Town.” In 1891 he entered Harvard
College. A little collection of verse was privately printed in 1896
and the following year marked the appearance of his first
representative work, _The Children of the Night_ (1897).

Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities to make a
living in New York, five years passing before the publication of
_Captain Craig_ (1902). This fine piece of psychology, in the
cryptic vein of Browning but in Robinson’s own idiom, was brought to
the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United
States), who became interested in the work of the poet and, a few
years later, offered him a place in the New York Custom House.
Robinson held this position from 1905 to 1910, leaving it the same
year which marked the appearance of his most characteristic volume,
_The Town down the River_. Robinson’s three books, up to this time,
showed his clean, firmly-drawn quality; but, in spite of their
excellences, they seem little more than a succession of preludes for
the dynamic volume that was to establish him in the first rank of
American poets. _The Man Against the Sky_, Robinson’s fullest and
most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.)

In all of these books there is manifest that searching for truth,
the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere acceptance.
As the work of a verbal portrait painter nothing, with the exception
of some of Frost’s pictures, has been produced that is at once so
keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, half-mystical etchings like
“Cliff Klingenhagen,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Richard Cory”—lines where
Robinson’s irony is inextricably mixed with tenderness—his art is at
its height.

Technically, Robinson is as precise as he is dexterous; there is
never a false image or a blurred line in any of his verses which,
while adhering to the strictest models and executed according to
traditional forms, are made fresh and surprising. It is interesting
to observe how the smoothness of his rhymes, playing against the
hard outlines of his verse, emphasizes the terse, epigrammatic vigor
of poems like “The Gift of God,” “The Field of Glory” and “The
Master,” one of the finest evocations of Lincoln which is, at the
same time, a bitter commentary on the commercialism of the times and
the “shopman’s test of age and worth.”

Robinson’s blank verse is scarcely less individual. It is, in spite
of a certain unblinking seriousness, always modern, always packed
with the instant. In “Ben Johnson Entertains a Man from Stratford”
we have the clearest and most human portrait of Shakespeare ever
attempted; the lines run as fluently as good conversation, as
inevitable as a perfect melody. In his two reanimations of the
Arthurian legends, _Merlin_ (1917) and _Launcelot_ (1920), Robinson,
shaming the tea-table idyls of Tennyson, has colored the tale with
somber reflections of the collapse of old orders, the darkness of an
age in ashes.

Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude toward
life, Robinson’s philosophy is essentially positive; a dogged if
never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater light. It is a
philosophy expressed in _Captain Craig_:

... Take on yourself
But your sincerity, and you take on
Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth
And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight,
No laughter to vex down your loyalty.

A collection of the poet’s later verse, _The Three Taverns_ (1920),
reflects the same high standards of conciseness and craftsmanship.
Robinson lives in Peterboro, New Hampshire, during the summer; his
home in the winter is in Brooklyn, New York.

MINIVER CHEEVY[17]

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

THE GIFT OF GOD[18]

Blessed with a joy that only she
Of all alive shall ever know,
She wears a proud humility
For what it was that willed it so,—

That her degree should be so great
Among the favored of the Lord
That she may scarcely bear the weight
Of her bewildering reward.

As one apart, immune, alone,
Or featured for the shining ones,
And like to none that she has known
Of other women’s other sons,—
The firm fruition of her need,
He shines anointed; and he blurs
Her vision, till it seems indeed
A sacrilege to call him hers.

She fears a little for so much
Of what is best, and hardly dares
To think of him as one to touch
With aches, indignities, and cares;
She sees him rather at the goal,
Still shining; and her dream foretells
The proper shining of a soul
Where nothing ordinary dwells.

Perchance a canvass of the town
Would find him far from flags and shouts,
And leave him only the renown
Of many smiles and many doubts;
Perchance the crude and common tongue
Would havoc strangely with his worth;
But she, with innocence unwrung,
Would read his name around the earth.

And others, knowing how this youth
Would shine, if love could make him great,
When caught and tortured for the truth
Would only writhe and hesitate;
While she, arranging for his days
What centuries could not fulfil,
Transmutes him with her faith and praise,
And has him shining where she will.

She crowns him with her gratefulness,
And says again that life is good;
And should the gift of God be less
In him than in her motherhood,
His fame, though vague, will not be small,
As upward through her dream he fares,
Half clouded with a crimson fall
Of roses thrown on marble stairs.

THE MASTER[19][20]

(_Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries shortly
after the Civil War_)

A flying word from here and there
Had sown the name at which we sneered,
But soon the name was everywhere,
To be reviled and then revered:
A presence to be loved and feared,
We cannot hide it, or deny
That we, the gentlemen who jeered,
May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous
And hearts of men were sore beguiled;
And having made his note of us,
He pondered and was reconciled.
Was ever master yet so mild
As he, and so untamable?
We doubted, even when he smiled,
Not knowing what he knew so well.

He knew that undeceiving fate
Would shame us whom he served unsought;
He knew that he must wince and wait—
The jest of those for whom he fought;
He knew devoutly what he thought
Of us and of our ridicule;
He knew that we must all be taught
Like little children in a school.

We gave a glamour to the task
That he encountered and saw through,
But little of us did he ask,
And little did we ever do.
And what appears if we review
The season when we railed and chaffed?
It is the face of one who knew
That we were learning while we laughed.

The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold,
The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.

For he, to whom we have applied
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,
As he was ancient at his birth:
The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic—and Olympian.

The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;
The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:
With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept Icarian wings.

For we were not as other men:
’Twas ours to soar and his to see.
But we are coming down again,
And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,
But flourish in our perigee
And have one Titan at a time.

AN OLD STORY[21]

Strange that I did not know him then,
That friend of mine!
I did not even show him then
One friendly sign;

But cursed him for the ways he had
To make me see
My envy of the praise he had
For praising me.

I would have rid the earth of him
Once, in my pride!...
I never knew the worth of him
Until he died.

RICHARD CORY[21]

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

VAIN GRATUITIES

Never was there a man much uglier
In the eyes of other women, or more grim:
“The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim,
So let us pray she’s a philosopher,”
They said; and there was more they said of her—
Deeming it, after twenty years with him,
No wonder that she kept her figure slim
And always made you think of lavender.

But she, demure as ever, and as fair,
Almost, as they remembered her before
She found him, would have laughed had she been there;
And all they said would have been heard no more
Than foam that washes on an island shore
Where there are none to listen or to care.

THE DARK HILLS

Dark hills at evening in the west,
Where sunset hovers like a sound
Of golden horns that sang to rest
Old bones of warriors under ground,
Far now from all the bannered ways
Where flash the legions of the sun,
You fade—as if the last of days
Were fading, and all wars were done.

_Edgar Lee Masters_

Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of
old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the
family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he
studied law in his father’s office at Lewiston. For a year he
practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became
a successful and prominent attorney.

Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of
verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the
time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems,
revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of
Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the
publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, was derivative and
undistinguished. In 1895 he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict
Arnold. In 1898 he published _A Book of Verses_, a selection of some
sixty of the early four hundred. In 1902 _Maximilian_, another blank
verse play, appeared, causing no more comment than the others.
Nothing daunted, Masters published several volumes in rapid
succession (three books of poetry appearing, under various
pseudonyms, between 1905 and 1912), _The New Star Chamber and Other
Essays_ (1904), _Blood of the Prophets_ (1905), _Althea_, a play
(1907), _The Trifler_, another play (1908).

In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion
Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began
to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have
made him famous. Taking as his model _The Greek Anthology_, which
Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved _Spoon River Anthology_,
that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed
epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to
have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank
revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for
us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues,
hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The
crippling monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of
ideals, the struggle toward higher goals—all is synthesized in these
crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard
here—even Masters’s, who explains the reason for his medium and the
selection of his form through “Petit, the Poet.”

The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every
new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its
readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of
yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American Comédie Humaine.”
Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a
landmark in American literature.

With _Spoon River Anthology_ Masters arrived—and left. He went back
to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier
trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley,
archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of
Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all
of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the
stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known
characterizations.

_Songs and Satires_ (1916) contains the startling “All Life in a
Life” and the gravely moving “Silence.” _The Great Valley_ (1916) is
packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In _Toward
the Gulf_ (1918), the Browning influence predominates, although
there are such splendid individual monologues as “The World Saver,”
“St. Deseret” and “Front the Ages with a Smile.” _Starved Rock_
(1919) and _Domesday Book_ (1920) are, like all Masters’s later
books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse.
And yet, for all of this poet’s borrowings, in spite of his cynicism
and disillusion, Masters’s work is a continual searching for some
key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.

PETIT, THE POET[22]

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel—
Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens—
But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;
And what is love but a rose that fades?
Life all around me here in the village:
Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,
Courage, constancy, heroism, failure—
All in the loom, and oh what patterns!
Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers—
Blind to all of it all my life long.
Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,
Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,
Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,
While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

LUCINDA MATLOCK[23]

I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed—
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you—
It takes life to love Life.

ANNE RUTLEDGE[24][25]