Chapter I: Saw a Man (1)

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never”—

“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.

THE WAYFARER

The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that no one has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

HYMN

A slant of sun on dull brown walls,
A forgotten sky of bashful blue.

Toward God a mighty hymn,
A song of collisions and cries,
Rumbling wheels, hoof-beats, bells,
Welcomes, farewells, love-calls, final moans,
Voices of joy, idiocy, warning, despair,
The unknown appeals of brutes,
The chanting of flowers,
The screams of cut trees,
The senseless babble of hens and wise men—
A cluttered incoherency that says to the stars:
“O God, save us!”

THE BLADES OF GRASS

In Heaven,
Some little blades of grass
Stood before God.
“What did you do?”
Then all save one of the little blades
Began eagerly to relate
The merits of their lives.
This one stayed a small way behind,
Ashamed.
Presently, God said,
“And what did you do?”
The little blade answered, “Oh, my Lord,
Memory is bitter to me,
For, if I did good deeds,
I know not of them.”
Then God, in all his splendor,
Arose from his throne.
“Oh, best little blade of grass!” he said.

_Edwin Ford Piper_

Edwin Ford Piper was born at Auburn, Nebraska, February 8, 1871, and
literally grew up in the saddle. In 1893 he entered the University
of Nebraska, from which he received an A.B. in 1897 and A.M. in
1900. He studied at Harvard (1903–4), was one of the editors of _The
Kiote_ (a magazine published from 1898 to 1902 in Lincoln,
Nebraska), and, since 1905, has been an instructor of English at the
State University of Iowa.

_Piper’s Barbed Wire and Other Poems_ (1918) is saturated with the
color of his environment. His later poems are still more vivid and
racy. “Sweetgrass Range” (with its self-acknowledged debt to Burns’s
“Rattlin’ Roarin’ Willie”) and “Bindlestiff” are fresh evidences of
this author’s creative interest in ballads and folk-lore.

BINDLESTIFF

_Oh, the lives of men, lives of men,
In pattern-molds be run;
But there’s you, and me, and Bindlestiff—
And remember Mary’s Son._

At dawn the hedges and the wheel-ruts ran
Into a brightening sky. The grass bent low
With shimmering dew, and many a late wild rose
Unrolled the petals from its odorous heart
While birds held tuneful gossip. Suddenly,
Each bubbling trill and whistle hid away
As from a hawk; the fragrant silence heard
Only the loving stir of little leaves;
Then a man’s baritone broke roughly in:

_I’ve gnawed my crust of mouldy bread,
Skimmed my mulligan stew;
Laid beneath the barren hedge—
Sleety night-winds blew._

_Slanting rain chills my bones,
Sun bakes my skin;
Rocky road for my limping feet,
Door where I can’t go in._

Above the hedgerow floated filmy smoke
From the hidden singer’s fire. Once more the voice:

_I used to burn the mules with the whip
When I worked on the grading gang;
But the boss was a crook, and he docked my pay—
Some day that boss will hang._

_I used to live in a six by nine,
Try to save my dough—
It’s a bellyful of the chaff of life,
Feet that up and go._

The mesh of leafy branches rustled loud,
Into the road slid Bindlestiff. You’ve seen
The like of the traveller: gaunt humanity
In stained and broken coat, with untrimmed hedge
Of rusty beard and curling sunburnt hair;
His hat, once white, a dull uncertain cone;
His leathery hands and cheeks, his bright blue eyes
That always see new faces and strange dogs;
His mouth that laughs at life and at himself.

_Sometimes they shut you up in jail—
Dark, and a filthy cell;
I hope the fellows built them jails
Find ’em down in hell._

_But up above, you can sleep outdoors—
Feed you like a king;
You never have to saw no wood,
Only job is sing._

The tones came mellower, as unevenly
The tramp limped off trailing the hobo song:

_Good-bye, farewell to Omaha,
K. C., and Denver, too;
Put my foot on the flying freight,
Going to ride her through._

Bindlestiff topped a hillock, against the sky
Showed stick and bundle with his extra shoes
Jauntily dangling. Bird to bird once more
Made low sweet answer; in the wild rose cups
The bee found yellow meal; all softly moved
The white and purple morning-glory bells
As on the gently rustling hedgetop leaves
The sun’s face rested. Bindlestiff was gone.

_Oh, the lives of men, lives of men,
In pattern-molds be run;
But there’s you, and me, and Bindlestiff—
And remember Mary’s Son._

SWEETGRASS RANGE

Come sell your pony, cowboy—
Sell your pony to me;
Braided bridle and your puncher saddle,
And spend your money free.

“If I should sell my pony,
And ride the range no more,
Nail up my hat and my silver spurs
Above my shanty door;

“And let my door stand open wide
To the snow and the rain and sun;
And bury me under the green sweetgrass
Where you hear the river run.”

As I came down the sweetgrass range
And by the cabin door,
I heard a singing in the early dusk
Along the river shore;

I heard a singing to the early stars,
And the tune of a pony’s feet.
The joy of the riding singer
I never shall forget.

_T. A. Daly_

Thomas Augustine Daly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May
28, 1871. He attended Villanova College and Fordham University
(1889), leaving there at the end of his sophomore year to become a
newspaper man. Since 1891 he has been on the staff of various
Philadelphia journals, writing reviews, editorials, travel-notes
and, most of all, running the columns in which his much-quoted verse
originally appeared.

_Canzoni_ (1906) and _Carmina_ (1909) contain the best known of
Daly’s varied dialect verse. Although he has written in half a dozen
different idioms including “straight” English (_vide Songs of
Wedlock_, 1916), his half-humorous, half-pathetic interpretations of
the Irish and Italian immigrants are his _forte_.

Seldom descending to caricature, Daly exhibits the features and
foibles of his characters without exploiting them; even the lightest
passages in _McAroni Ballads_ (1919) are done with delicacy and a
not too sentimental appreciation.

THE SONG OF THE THRUSH

Ah! the May was grand this mornin’!
Shure, how could I feel forlorn in
Such a land, when tree and flower tossed their kisses to the
breeze?
Could an Irish heart be quiet
While the Spring was runnin’ riot,
An’ the birds of free America were singin’ in the trees?
In the songs that they were singin’
No familiar note was ringin’,
But I strove to imitate them an’ I whistled like a lad.
Oh, my heart was warm to love them
For the very newness of them—
For the ould songs that they helped me to forget—an’ I was glad.

So I mocked the feathered choir
To my hungry heart’s desire,
An’ I gloried in the comradeship that made their joy my own.
Till a new note sounded, stillin’
All the rest. A thrush was trillin’!
Ah! the thrush I left behind me in the fields about Athlone!
Where, upon the whitethorn swayin’,
He was minstrel of the Mayin’,
In my days of love an’ laughter that the years have laid at rest;
Here again his notes were ringin’!
But I’d lost the heart for singin’—
Ah! the song I could not answer was the one I knew the best.

MIA CARLOTTA

Giuseppe, da barber, ees greata for “mash,”
He gotta da bigga, da blacka mustache,
Good clo’es an’ good styla an’ playnta good cash.

W’enevra Giuseppe ees walk on da street,
Da peopla dey talka, “how nobby! how neat!
How softa da handa, how smalla da feet.”

He raisa hees hat an’ he shaka hees curls,
An’ smila weeth teetha so shiny like pearls;
O! many da heart of da seelly young girls
He gotta.
Yes, playnta he gotta—
But notta
Carlotta!

Giuseppe, da barber, he maka da eye,
An’ lika de steam engine puffa an’ sigh,
For catcha Carlotta w’en she ees go by.

Carlotta she walka weeth nose in da air,
An’ look through Giuseppe weeth far-away stare,
As eef she no see dere ees som’body dere.

Giuseppe, da barber, he gotta da cash,
He gotta da clo’es an’ da bigga mustache,
He gotta da seelly young girls for da “mash,”
But notta—
You bat my life, notta—
Carlotta.
I gotta!

BETWEEN TWO LOVES

I gotta lov’ for Angela,
I lov’ Carlotta, too.
I no can marry both o’ dem,
So w’at I gona do?

O! Angela ees pretta girl,
She gotta hair so black, so curl,
An’ teeth so white as anytheeng.
An’ O! she gotta voice to seeng,
Dat mak’ your hearta feel eet must
Jump up an’ dance or eet weell bust.
An’ alla time she seeng, her eyes
Dey smila like Italia’s skies,
An’ makin’ flirtin’ looks at you—
But dat ees all w’at she can do.

Carlotta ees no gotta song,
But she ees twice so big an’ strong
As Angela, an’ she no look
So beautiful—but she can cook.
You oughta see her carry wood!
I tal you w’at, eet do you good.
When she ees be som’body’s wife
She worka hard, you bat my life!
She never gattin’ tired, too—
But dat ees all w’at she can do.

O! my! I weesh dat Angela
Was strong for carry wood,
Or else Carlotta gotta song
An’ looka pretta good.
I gotta lov’ for Angela,
I lov’ Carlotta, too.
I no can marry both o’ dem,
So w’at I gona do?

_Paul Laurence Dunbar_

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in 1872 at Dayton, Ohio, the son of
negro slaves. He was, before and after he began to write his
interpretative verse, an elevator-boy. He tried newspaper work
unsuccessfully and, in 1899, Dunbar was given a minor position in
the Library of Congress at Washington, D. C.

Although Dunbar wrote several volumes of short stories and two
novels, he is most at home in his verse. And even here, his best
work is not those straight, “literary English” pieces by which he
set such store, but the racy rhymes written in negro dialect,
alternately tender and mocking. Dunbar’s first collection, _Lyrics
of Lowly Life_ (1896), contains many of his most characteristic
poems. In an introduction, in which mention was made of the octoroon
Dumas and the great Russian poet Pushkin, who was a mulatto, William
Dean Howells wrote, “So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the
only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel
the negro life æsthetically and express it lyrically.... His
brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American
negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him—with
humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must
instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness.”

_Lyrics of the Hearthside_ (1899) and _Lyrics of Love and Laughter_
(1903) are two other volumes full of folk-stuff. And though the
final _Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow_ (1905) is less original, being
crowded with echoes of all kinds of poetry from the songs of Robert
Burns to the childhood rhymes of J. W. Riley, it contains a few of
Dunbar’s least-known but keenest interpretations.

Dunbar died in the city of his birth, Dayton, Ohio, February 10,
1906.

THE TURNING OF THE BABIES IN THE BED[27]

Woman’s sho’ a cur’ous critter, an’ dey ain’t no doubtin’ dat. She’s a mess o’ funny capahs f’om huh slippahs to huh hat. Ef yo’ tries to un’erstan’ huh, an’ yo’ fails, des’ up an’ say: “D’ ain’t a bit o’ use to try to un’erstan’ a woman’s way.”

I don’ mean to be complainin’, but I’s jes’ a-settin’ down Some o’ my own obserwations, w’en I cas’ my eye eroun’. Ef yo’ ax me fu’ to prove it, I ken do it mighty fine, Fu’ dey ain’t no bettah ’zample den dis ve’y wife o’ mine.

In de ve’y hea’t o’ midnight, w’en I’s sleepin’ good an’ soun’, I kin hyeah a so’t o’ rustlin’ an’ somebody movin’ ’roun’. An’ I say, “Lize, whut yo’ doin’?” But she frown an’ shek huh haid, “Hesh yo’ mouf, I’s only tu’nin’ of de chillun in de bed.

“Don’ yo’ know a chile gits restless, layin’ all de night one way? An’ yo’ got to kind o’ ’range him sev’al times befo’ de day? So de little necks won’t worry, an’ de little backs won’t break; Don’ yo’ t’ink ’cause chillun’s chillun dey haint got no pain an’ ache.”

So she shakes ’em, an’ she twists ’em, an’ she tu’ns ’em ’roun’ erbout, ’Twell I don’ see how de chillun evah keeps f’om hollahin’ out. Den she lif’s ’em up head down’ards, so’s dey won’t git livah-grown, But dey snoozes des’ ez peaceful ez a liza’d on a stone.

W’en hit’s mos’ nigh time fu’ wakin’ on de dawn o’ jedgement day, Seems lak I kin hyeah ol’ Gab’iel lay his trumpet down an’ say, “Who dat walkin’ ’roun’ so easy, down on earf ermong de dead?”— ’T will be Lizy up a-tu’nin’ of de chillun in de bed.

A COQUETTE CONQUERED[28]

Yes, my ha’t’s ez ha’d ez stone—
Go ’way, Sam, an’ lemme ’lone.
No; I ain’t gwine change my min’;
Ain’t gwine ma’y you—nuffin’ de kin’.

Phiny loves you true an’ deah?
Go ma’y Phiny; whut I keer?
Oh, you needn’t mou’n an’ cry—
I don’t keer how soon you die.

Got a present! Whut you got?
Somef’n fu’ de pan er pot!
Huh! Yo’ sass do sholy beat—
Think I don’t git ’nough to eat?

Whut’s dat un’neaf yo’ coat?
Looks des lak a little shoat.
’Tain’t no possum? Bless de Lamb!
Yes, it is, you rascal, Sam!

Gin it to me; whut you say?
Ain’t you sma’t now! Oh, go ’way!
Possum do look mighty nice;
But you ax too big a price.

Tell me, is you talkin’ true,
Dat’s de gal’s whut ma’ies you?
Come back, Sam; now whah’s you gwine?
Co’se you knows dat possum’s mine!

DISCOVERED[29]

Seen you down at chu’ch las’ night,
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.
What I mean? Oh, dat’s all right,
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.
You was sma’t ez sma’t could be,
But you couldn’t hide f’om me.
Ain’t I got two eyes to see!
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.

Guess you thought you’s awful keen;
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.
Evahthing you done, I seen;
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.
Seen him tek yo’ ahm jes’ so,
When he got outside de do’—
Oh, I know dat man’s yo’ beau!
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.

Say now, honey, wha’d he say?—
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.
Keep yo’ secrets—dat’s yo’ way—
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy,
Won’t tell me an’ I’m yo’ pal!
I’m gwine tell his othah gal,—
Know huh, too, huh name is Sal.
Nevah min’, Miss Lucy.

_Guy Wetmore Carryl_

Guy Wetmore Carryl, son of Charles Edward Carryl (see page 34), was
born in New York City, March 4, 1873. He graduated from Columbia
University in 1895, was editor of _Munsey’s Magazine_, 1895–6, and,
during the time he lived abroad (from 1897 to 1902), was the foreign
representative of various American publications.

As a writer of prose he was received with no little acclaim; his
stories _The Transgression of Andrew Vane_ (1902) and _Zut and Other
Parisians_ (1903) held the attention of a restless reading public.
But it was as a writer of light verse that Carryl was preëminent.
Inheriting a remarkable technical gift from his father, young Carryl
soon surpassed him as well as all other rivals in the field of
brilliantly rhymed, brilliantly turned burlesques. Although he wrote
several serious poems (the best of which have been collected in the
posthumously published _The Garden of Years_, 1904), Carryl’s most
characteristic work is to be found in his perversions of the
parables of Æsop, _Fables for the Frivolous_ (1898), the topsy-turvy
interpretations of old nursery rhymes, _Mother Goose for Grownups_
(1900) and the fantastic variations on the fairy tales in _Grimm
Tales Made Gay_ (1903)—all of them with a surprising (and punning)
Moral attached.

This extraordinary versifier died, before reaching the height of his
power, at the age of thirty-one, in the summer of 1904.

HOW JACK FOUND THAT BEANS MAY GO BACK ON A CHAP

Without the slightest basis
For hypochondriasis
A widow had forebodings which a cloud around her flung,
And with expression cynical
For half the day a clinical
Thermometer she held beneath her tongue.

Whene’er she read the papers
She suffered from the vapors,
At every tale of malady or accident she’d groan;
In every new and smart disease,
From housemaid’s knee to heart disease,
She recognized the symptoms as her own!

She had a yearning chronic
To try each novel tonic,
Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm;
And from a homeopathist
Would change to an hydropathist,
And back again, with stupefying calm!
She was nervous, cataleptic,
And anemic, and dyspeptic:
Though not convinced of apoplexy, yet she had her fears.
She dwelt with force fanatical
Upon a twinge rheumatical,
And said she had a buzzing in her ears!

Now all of this bemoaning
And this grumbling and this groaning
The mind of Jack, her son and heir, unconscionably bored.
His heart completely hardening,
He gave his time to gardening,
For raising beans was something he adored.

Each hour in accents morbid
This limp maternal bore bid
Her callous son affectionate and lachrymose good-bys.
She never granted Jack a day
Without some long “Alackaday!”
Accompanied by rolling of the eyes.

But Jack, no panic showing,
Just watched his beanstalk growing,
And twined with tender fingers the tendrils up the pole.
At all her words funereal
He smiled a smile ethereal,
Or sighed an absent-minded “Bless my soul!”

That hollow-hearted creature
Would never change a feature:
No tear bedimmed his eye, however touching was her talk.
She never fussed or flurried him,
The only thing that worried him
Was when no bean-pods grew upon the stalk!

But then he wabbled loosely
His head, and wept profusely,
And, taking out his handkerchief to mop away his tears,
Exclaimed: “It hasn’t got any!”
He found this blow to botany
Was sadder than were all his mother’s fears.

_The Moral_ is that gardeners pine
Whene’er no pods adorn the vine.
Of all sad words experience gleans
The saddest are: “It _might_ have beans.”
(I did not make this up myself:
’Twas in a book upon my shelf.
It’s witty, but I don’t deny
It’s rather Whittier than I!)

THE SYCOPHANTIC FOX AND THE GULLIBLE RAVEN

A raven sat upon a tree,
And not a word he spoke, for
His beak contained a piece of Brie,
Or, maybe, it was Roquefort.
We’ll make it any kind you please—
At all events it was a cheese.
Beneath the tree’s umbrageous limb
A hungry fox sat smiling;
He saw the raven watching him,
And spoke in words beguiling:
“_J’admire_,” said he, “_ton beau plumage_,”
(The which was simply persiflage.)

Two things there are, no doubt you know,
To which a fox is used:
A rooster that is bound to crow,
A crow that’s bound to roost;
And whichsoever he espies
He tells the most unblushing lies.

“Sweet fowl,” he said, “I understand
You’re more than merely natty,
I hear you sing to beat the band
And Adelina Patti.
Pray render with your liquid tongue
A bit from ‘Götterdämmerung.’”

This subtle speech was aimed to please
The crow, and it succeeded;
He thought no bird in all the trees
Could sing as well as he did.
In flattery completely doused,
He gave the “Jewel Song” from “Faust.”
But gravitation’s law, of course,
As Isaac Newton showed it,
Exerted on the cheese its force,
And elsewhere soon bestowed it.
In fact, there is no need to tell
What happened when to earth it fell.

I blush to add that when the bird
Took in the situation
He said one brief, emphatic word,
Unfit for publication.
The fox was greatly startled, but
He only sighed and answered “Tut.”

THE MORAL is: A fox is bound
To be a shameless sinner.
And also: When the cheese comes round
You know it’s after dinner.
But (what is only known to few)
The fox is after dinner, too.

HOW A CAT WAS ANNOYED AND A POET WAS BOOTED

A poet had a cat.
There is nothing odd in that—
(I _might_ make a little pun about the _Mews_!)
But what is really more
Remarkable, she wore
A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes.
And I doubt me greatly whether
E’er you heard the like of that:
Pointed shoes of patent-leather
On a cat!

His time he used to pass
Writing sonnets, on the grass—
(I _might_ say something good on _pen_ and _sward_!)
While the cat sat near at hand,
Trying hard to understand
The poems he occasionally roared.
(I myself possess a feline,
But when poetry I roar
He is sure to make a bee-line
For the door.)

The poet, cent by cent,
All his patrimony spent—
(I _might_ tell how he went from _verse_ to _worse_!)
Till the cat was sure she could,
By advising, do him good.
So addressed him in a manner that was terse:
“We are bound toward the scuppers,
And the time has come to act,
Or we’ll both be on our uppers
For a fact!”

On her boot she fixed her eye,
But the boot made no reply—
(I _might_ say: “Couldn’t speak to save its _sole_!”)
And the foolish bard, instead
Of responding, only read
A verse that wasn’t bad upon the whole.
And it pleased the cat so greatly,
Though she knew not what it meant,
That I’ll quote approximately
How it went:—

“If I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree”—
(I _might_ put in: “I think I’d just as _leaf_!”)
“Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough”—
Well, he’d plagiarized it bodily, in brief!
But that cat of simple breeding
Couldn’t read the lines between,
So she took it to a leading
Magazine.

She was jarred and very sore
When they showed her to the door.
(I _might_ hit off the _door_ that was a _jar_!)
To the spot she swift returned
Where the poet sighed and yearned,
And she told him that he’d gone a little far.
“Your performance with this rhyme has
Made me absolutely sick,”
She remarked. “I think the time has
Come to kick!”
I could fill up half the page
With descriptions of her rage—
(I _might_ say that she went a bit _too fur_)!
When he smiled and murmured: “Shoo!”
“There is one thing I can do!”
She answered with a wrathful kind of purr.
“You may shoo me, an’ it suit you,
But I feel my conscience bid
Me, as tit for tat, to boot you!”
(Which she did.)

_The Moral_ of the plot
(Though I say it, as should not!)
Is: An editor is difficult to suit.
But again there’re other times
When the man who fashions rhymes
Is a rascal, and a bully one to boot!

_H. H. Knibbs_

Harry Herbert Knibbs was born at Niagara Falls, October 24, 1874.
After a desultory schooling, he attended Harvard for three years
when he was thirty-four. “Somebody said I took honors in English,”
says Knibbs, “but I never saw them.” He wrote his first book, _Lost
Farm Camp_, a novel, as a class exercise.

Half a dozen volumes followed, _Overland Red_ (1914) and _Tang of
Life_ (1917) being the most popular. In 1911, Knibbs settled in Los
Angeles, California, where he has lived ever since.

In _Riders of the Stars_ (1916) and _Songs of the Trail_ (1920),
Knibbs carries on the tradition of Bret Harte and the Pike County
Ballads. High-hearted verse this is, with more than an occasional
flash of poetry. To the typical Western breeziness, Knibbs adds a
wider whimsicality, a rough-shod but nimble imagination.

THE VALLEY THAT GOD FORGOT

Out in the desert spaces, edged by a hazy blue,
Davison sought the faces of the long-lost friends he knew:
They were there, in the distance dreaming
Their dreams that were worn and old;
They were there, to his frenzied seeming,
Still burrowing down for gold.

Davison’s face was leather; his mouth was a swollen blot,
His mind was a floating feather, in The Valley That God Forgot;
Wild as a dog gone loco,
Or sullen or meek, by turns,
He mumbled a “Poco! Poco!”
And whispered of pools and ferns.

Gold! Why his, for the finding! But water was never found,
Save in deep caverns winding miles through the underground:
Cool, far, shadowy places
Edged by the mirrored trees,
When—Davison saw the faces!
And fear let loose his knees.

There was Shorty who owed him money, and Billing who bossed the crowd;
And Steve whom the boys called “Sunny,” and Collins who talked so loud:
Miguel with the handsome daughter,
And the rustler, Ed McCray;
Five—and they begged for water,
And offered him gold, in pay.

Gold? It was never cheaper. And Davison shook his head:
“The price of a drink is steeper out here than in town,” he said.
He laughed as they mouthed and muttered
Through lips that were cracked and dried;
The pulse in his ear-drum fluttered:
“I’m through with the game!” he cried.

“I’m through!” And he knelt and fumbled the cap of his dry canteen
Then, rising, he swayed and stumbled into a black ravine:
His ghostly comrades followed,
For Davison’s end was near,
And a shallow grave they hollowed,
When up from it, cool and clear

Bubbled the water—hidden a pick-stroke beneath the sand;
Davison, phantom-ridden, scooped with a shaking hand ...
Davison swears they made it,
The Well where we drank to-day.
Davison’s game? He played it
And won—so the town-folk say:

Called it, The Morning-Glory—near those abandoned stamps,
And Davison’s crazy story was told in a hundred camps:
Time and the times have tamed it,
His yarn—and this desert spot,
But I’m strong for the man who named it,
The Valley That God Forgot.

ROLL A ROCK DOWN

Oh, out in the West where the riders are ready,
They sing an old song and they tell an old tale,
And its moral is plain: Take it easy, go steady,
While riding a horse on the Malibu Trail.

It’s a high, rocky trail with its switch-backs and doubles,
It has no beginning and never an end:
It’s risky and rough and it’s plumb full of troubles,
From Shifty—that’s shale—up to Powder Cut Bend.

Old-timers will tell you the rangers who made it,
Sang “Roll A Rock Down,” with a stiff upper lip,
And cussed all creation, but managed to grade it;
With a thousand-foot drop if a pony should slip.

Oh, the day it was wet and the sky it was cloudy,
The trail was as slick as an oil-rigger’s pants,
When Ranger McCabe on his pony, Old Rowdy,
Came ridin’ where walkin’ was takin’ a chance.

“Oh, Roll A Rock Down!” picks and shovels was clangin’,
And Rowdy a-steppin’ that careful and light,
When the edge it gave way and McCabe was left hangin’
Clean over the rim—with no bottom in sight.

I shook out a loop—bein’ crowded for throwin’;
I flipped a fair noose for a rope that was wet:
It caught just as Mac lost his holt and was goin’,
And burned through my fingers: it’s burnin’ them yet.

For Ranger McCabe never knuckled to danger;
My pardner in camp, on the trail, or in town:
And he slid into glory, a true forest-ranger,
With: “Hell! I’m a-goin’! Just roll a rock down.”

So, roll a rock down where a ranger is sleepin’
Aside of his horse below Powder Cut Bend:
I ride and I look where the shadows are creepin’,
And roll a rock down—for McCabe was my friend.

I’ve sung you my song and I’ve told you my story,
And all that I ask when I’m done with the show,
Is, roll a rock down when I slide into glory,
And say that I went like a ranger should go.

THE TRAIL-MAKERS

North and west along the coast among the misty islands,
Sullen in the grip of night and smiling in the day:
Nunivak and Akutan, with Nome against the highlands,
On we drove with plated prow agleam with frozen spray.

_Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested;
Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers;
Named a friend and clasped a hand—a compact sealed, attested;
Shared tobacco, yarns, and drink, and planned surpassing years._

Then—the snow that locked the trail where famine’s shadow followed
Out across the blinding white and through the stabbing cold,
Past tents along the tundra over faces blotched and hollowed;
Toothless mouths that babbled foolish songs of hidden gold.

Wisdom, lacking sinews for the toil, gave over trying;
Fools, with thews of iron, blundered on and won the fight;
Weaklings drifted homeward; else they tarried—worse than dying—
With the painted lips and wastrels on the edges of the night.

Berries of the saskatoon were ripening and falling;
Flowers decked the barren with its timber scant and low;
All along the river-trail were many voices calling,
And e’en the whimpering Malemutes they heard—and whined to go.

Eyelids seared with fire and ice and frosted parka-edges;
Firelight like a spray of blood on faces lean and brown;
Shifting shadows of the pines across our loaded sledges,
And far behind the fading trail, the lights and lures of town.

So we played the bitter game nor asked for praise or pity:
Wind and wolf they found the bones that blazed out lonely trails....
Where a dozen shacks were set, to-day there blooms a city;
Now where once was empty blue, there pass a thousand sails.

Scarce a peak that does not mark the grave of those who perished
Nameless, lost to lips of men who followed, gleaning fame
From the soundless triumph of adventurers who cherished
Naught above the glory of a chance to play the game.

Half the toil—and we had won to wealth in other station; Rusted out as useless ere our worth was tried and known. But the Hand that made us caught us up and hewed a nation From the frozen fastness that so long was His alone.

· · · · · ·

_Loud we sang adventuring and lustily we jested; Quarreled, fought, and then forgot the taunt, the blow, the jeers; Sinned and slaved and vanished—we, the giant-men who wrested Truth from out a dream wherein we planned surpassing years._

_Anna Hempstead Branch_

Anna Hempstead Branch was born at New London, Connecticut. She
graduated from Smith College in 1897 and has devoted herself to
literature ever since.

Her two chief volumes, _The Shoes That Danced_ (1905) and _Rose of
the Wind_ (1910), show a singer who is less fanciful than
philosophic. Often, indeed, she weighs down her simple melodies with
a heavy intellectuality, but, even more often, she attains a high
level of lyricism. Her lines are admirably condensed, rich in
personal value as well as poetic revelation; they maintain a high
and austere level. A typical poem is “The Monk in the Kitchen,”
which, with its spiritual loveliness and verbal felicity, is a
celebration of cleanness that gives order an almost mystical
nobility.

THE MONK IN THE KITCHEN

I

Order is a lovely thing;
On disarray it lays its wing,
Teaching simplicity to sing.
It has a meek and lowly grace,
Quiet as a nun’s face.
Lo—I will have thee in this place!
Tranquil well of deep delight,
All things that shine through thee appear
As stones through water, sweetly clear.
Thou clarity,
That with angelic charity
Revealest beauty where thou art,
Spread thyself like a clean pool.
Then all the things that in thee are,
Shall seem more spiritual and fair,
Reflection from serener air—
Sunken shapes of many a star
In the high heavens set afar.

II

Ye stolid, homely, visible things,
Above you all brood glorious wings
Of your deep entities, set high,
Like slow moons in a hidden sky.
But you, their likenesses, are spent
Upon another element.
Truly ye are but seemings—
The shadowy cast-off gleamings
Of bright solidities. Ye seem
Soft as water, vague as dream;
Image, cast in a shifting stream.

III

What are ye?
I know not.
Brazen pan and iron pot,
Yellow brick and gray flag-stone
That my feet have trod upon—
Ye seem to me
Vessels of bright mystery.
For ye do bear a shape, and so
Though ye were made by man, I know
An inner Spirit also made,
And ye his breathings have obeyed.

IV

Shape, the strong and awful Spirit,
Laid his ancient hand on you.
He waste chaos doth inherit;
He can alter and subdue.
Verily, he doth lift up
Matter, like a sacred cup.
Into deep substance he reached, and lo
Where ye were not, ye were; and so
Out of useless nothing, ye
Groaned and laughed and came to be.
And I use you, as I can,
Wonderful uses, made for man,
Iron pot and brazen pan.

V

What are ye?
I know not;
Nor what I really do
When I move and govern you.
There is no small work unto God.
He required of us greatness;
Of his least creature
A high angelic nature,
Stature superb and bright completeness.
He sets to us no humble duty.
Each act that he would have us do
Is haloed round with strangest beauty;
Terrific deeds and cosmic tasks
Of his plainest child he asks.
When I polish the brazen pan
I hear a creature laugh afar
In the gardens of a star,
And from his burning presence run
Flaming wheels of many a sun.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
When I cleanse this earthen floor
My spirit leaps to see
Bright garments trailing over it,
A cleanness made by me.
Purger of all men’s thoughts and ways,
With labor do I sound Thy praise,
My work is done for Thee.
Whoever makes a thing more bright,
He is an angel of all light.
Therefore let me spread abroad
The beautiful cleanness of my God.

VI

One time in the cool of dawn
Angels came and worked with me.
The air was soft with many a wing.
They laughed amid my solitude
And cast bright looks on everything.
Sweetly of me did they ask
That they might do my common task.
And all were beautiful—but one
With garments whiter than the sun
Had such a face
Of deep, remembered grace;
That when I saw I cried—“Thou art
The great Blood-Brother of my heart.
Where have I seen thee?”—And he said,
“When we are dancing round God’s throne,
How often thou art there.
Beauties from thy hands have flown
Like white doves wheeling in mid air.
Nay—thy soul remembers not?
Work on, and cleanse thy iron pot.”

VII

What are we? I know not.

WHILE LOVELINESS GOES BY

Sometimes when all the world seems grey and dun
And nothing beautiful, a voice will cry,
“Look out, look out! Angels are drawing nigh!”
Then my slow burdens leave me one by one,
And swiftly does my heart arise and run
Even like a child while loveliness goes by—
And common folk seem children of the sky,
And common things seem shapèd of the sun.
Oh, pitiful! that I who love them, must
So soon perceive their shining garments fade!
And slowly, slowly, from my eyes of trust
Their flaming banners sink into a shade!
While this earth’s sunshine seems the golden dust
Slow settling from that radiant cavalcade.

_Amy Lowell_

Amy Lowell was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, February 9, 1874,
of a long line of noted publicists and poets, the first colonist (a
Percival Lowell) arriving in Newburyport in 1637. James Russell
Lowell was a cousin of her grandfather; Abbott Lawrence, her
mother’s father, was minister to England; and Abbott Lawrence
Lowell, her brother, is president of Harvard University.

Miss Lowell obtained her early education through private tuition and
travel abroad. These European journeys were the background upon
which much of Miss Lowell’s later work is unconsciously woven; her
visits to France, Egypt, Turkey and Greece bore fruit, many years
later, in the exotic colors of her verse. As a young girl, she had
vague aspirations toward being a writer; but it was not until 1902,
when she was twenty-eight years old, that she definitely determined
to be a poet. For eight years she served a rigorous and solitary
apprenticeship, reading the classics of all schools and countries,
studying the technique of verse, exercising her verbal power—but
never attempting to publish a single line. In 1910 her first verse
was printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; two years later her first
book appeared.

This volume, _A Dome of Many-colored Glass_ (1912), was a strangely
unpromising first book. The subjects were as conventional as the
treatment of them; the influence of Keats and Tennyson was evident;
the tone was soft and sentimental, almost without a trace of
personality. It was a queer prologue to the vivid _Sword Blades and
Poppy Seed_ (1914), which marked not only an extraordinary advance
but a totally new individuality. This second volume contained many
distinctive poems written in the usual forms, a score of pictorial
pieces illustrating Miss Lowell’s identification with the Imagists
(see Preface) and, possibly most important from a technical
standpoint, the first appearance in English of “polyphonic prose.”
Of this extremely flexible form, which has only begun to be
exploited, Miss Lowell, in an essay on John Gould Fletcher, has
written, “‘Polyphonic’ means ‘many-voiced,’ and the form is
so-called because it makes use of the ‘voices’ of poetry, namely:
meter, _vers libre_, assonance, alliteration, rhyme and return. It
employs every form of rhythm, even prose rhythm at times.”

It was because of such experiments in form and technique that Miss
Lowell first attracted attention and is still best known. But,
beneath her preoccupation with theories and novelty of utterance,
one listens to the skilled story-teller, to the designer of
arabesques, to the narrator who (_vide_ such poems as “A Lady,”
“Vintage” and the later “Bronze Horses”) revivifies history with
creative excitement.

_Men, Women and Ghosts_ (1916) brims with this contagious vitality;
it is richer in variety than its predecessors, swifter in movement,
surer in artistry. It is, in common with all of Miss Lowell’s work,
best in its portrayal of the colors and sounds of physical rather
than the reactions of emotional experience. She is, preëminently,
the poet of the external world; her pictures are as “hard and clear”
as the most uncompromising Imagist could desire. The colors with
which her works are studded seem like bits of bright enamel; every
leaf and flower has a lacquered brilliance. To compensate for the
lack of personal warmth, Miss Lowell feverishly agitates all she
touches; nothing remains quiescent. Whether she writes about a fruit
shop, or a flower-garden in Roxbury, or a window-full of red
slippers, or a string quartet, or a Japanese print—everything
flashes, leaps, startles, spins and burns with an almost savage
intensity; a dynamic speed dizzies one. Here motion frequently takes
the place of emotion.

In _Can Grande’s Castle_ (1918), Miss Lowell achieves a broader
line; the teller of stories, the bizarre decorator and the
experimentalist are finally fused. The poems in this volume are only
four in number—four polyphonic prose poems of almost epic length,
but they are extraordinarily varied in music, sweeping in their
sense of magnitude and time. _Pictures of the Floating World_ (1919)
which followed is, in many ways, Miss Lowell’s most personal
revelation. Although there are several pages devoted to the merely
dazzling and grotesque, most of these poems are in a quieter key; a
new restraint gives unsuspected overtones to stanzas that have much
in common with the earlier “Patterns” where the narrative, the
character and the thing observed are inextricably knit.

Besides Miss Lowell’s original poetry, she has made many studies in
Japanese and Chinese poetry reflecting, even in her own work, their
Oriental colors and contours. She has also written two volumes of
critical essays: _Six French Poets_ (1915) and _Tendencies in Modern
American Poetry_ (1917), both of them invaluable aids to the student
of contemporary literature.

SOLITAIRE[30]

When night drifts along the streets of the city,
And sifts down between the uneven roofs,
My mind begins to peek and peer.
It plays at ball in odd, blue Chinese gardens,
And shakes wrought dice-cups in Pagan temples
Amid the broken flutings of white pillars.
It dances with purple and yellow crocuses in its hair,
And its feet shine as they flutter over drenched grasses.
How light and laughing my mind is,
When all good folk have put out their bedroom candles,
And the city is still.

MEETING-HOUSE HILL

I must be mad, or very tired,
When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track
Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune,
And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square
Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Clear, reticent, superbly final,
With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance,
It dominates the weak trees,
And the shot of its spire
Is cool and candid,
Rising into an unresisting sky.
Strange meeting-house
Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.
I watch the spire sweeping the sky,
I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast
With its royals set full
Straining before a two-reef breeze.
I might be sighting a tea-clipper,
Tacking into the blue bay,
Just back from Canton
With her hold full of green and blue porcelain
And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail
Gazing at the white spire
With dull, sea-spent eyes.

A LADY[31]

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust
That its sparkle may amuse you.

FREE FANTASIA ON JAPANESE THEMES[32]

All the afternoon there has been a chirping of birds, And the sun lies warm and still on the western sides of swollen branches, There is no wind; Even the little twigs at the ends of the branches do not move, And the needles of the pines are solid Bands of inarticulated blackness Against the blue-white sky. Still, but alert; And my heart is still and alert, Passive with sunshine, Avid of adventure. I would experience new emotions, Submit to strange enchantments, Bend to influences Bizarre, exotic, Fresh with burgeoning.

I would climb a sacred mountain, Struggle with other pilgrims up a steep path through pine-trees, Above to the smooth, treeless slopes, And prostrate myself before a painted shrine, Beating my hands upon the hot earth, Quieting my eyes upon the distant sparkle Of the faint spring sea.

I would recline upon a balcony In purple curving folds of silk, And my dress should be silvered with a pattern Of butterflies and swallows, And the black band of my obi Should flash with gold circular threads, And glitter when I moved. I would lean against the railing While you sang to me of wars Past and to come— Sang, and played the samisen. Perhaps I would beat a little hand drum In time to your singing; Perhaps I would only watch the play of light Upon the hilt of your two swords. I would sit in a covered boat, Rocking slowly to the narrow waves of a river, While above us, an arc of moving lanterns, Curved a bridge, A hiss of gold Blooming out of darkness, Rockets exploded, And died in a soft dripping of colored stars. We would float between the high trestles, And drift away from other boats, Until the rockets flared soundless, And their falling stars hung silent in the sky, Like wistaria clusters above the ancient entrance of a temple.

I would anything Rather than this cold paper; With outside, the quiet sun on the sides of burgeoning branches, And inside, only my books.

MADONNA OF THE EVENING FLOWERS[33]

All day long I have been working, Now I am tired. I call: “Where are you?” But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind. The house is very quiet, The sun shines in on your books, On your scissors and thimble just put down, But you are not there. Suddenly I am lonely: Where are you? I go about searching.

Then I see you, Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur, With a basket of roses on your arm. You are cool, like silver, And you smile. I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes, You tell me that the peonies need spraying, That the columbines have overrun all bounds, That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded. You tell me these things. But I look at you, heart of silver, White heart-flame of polished silver, Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur, And I long to kneel instantly at your feet, While all about us peal the loud, sweet _Te Deums_ of the Canterbury bells.

WIND AND SILVER

Greatly shining,
The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;
And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon scales
As she passes over them.

_Ridgely Torrence_

(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27,
1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For
several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City
(1897-1901) and has been on several editorial staffs since then.

His first volume, _The House of a Hundred Lights_ (1900), bears the
grave subtitle “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of
Bidpai” and is a half-whimsical, half-searching hodge-podge of
philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of
Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is obvious but not too dominant;
Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and
rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face.

Torrence’s subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper force, a
more concentrated fire. In “The Bird and the Tree” and
“Eye-Witness,” he has caught something more than the colors of
certain localities—particularly of the dark belt. They are as
eloquent and moving as his _Granny Maumee and Other Plays_ (1917),
which owe their power not only to Torrence’s gift as a poet but to
his sympathy as a folk-lyrist.

THE BIRD AND THE TREE

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There’s something wrong to-night.
Far off the sheriff’s footfall dies,
The minutes crawl like last year’s flies
Between the bars, and like an age
The hours are long to-night.

The sky is like a heavy lid
Out here beyond the door to-night.
What’s that? A mutter down the street.
What’s that? The sound of yells and feet
For what you didn’t do or did
You’ll pay the score to-night.

No use to reek with reddened sweat,
No use to whimper and to sweat.
They’ve got the rope; they’ve got the guns,
They’ve got the courage and the guns;
An’ that’s the reason why to-night
No use to ask them any more.
They’ll fire the answer through the door—
You’re out to die to-night.

There where the lonely cross-road lies,
There is no place to make replies;
But silence, inch by inch, is there,
And the right limb for a lynch is there;
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes,
Blackbird.

Perhaps you’ll meet again some place.
Look for the mask upon the face;
That’s the way you’ll know them there—
A white mask to hide the face.
And you can halt and show them there
The things that they are deaf to now,
And they can tell you what they meant—
To wash the blood with blood. But how
If you are innocent?

Blackbird singer, blackbird mute,
They choked the seed you might have found.
Out of a thorny field you go—
For you it may be better so—
And leave the sowers of the ground
To eat the harvest of the fruit,
Blackbird.

THE SON

(_Southern Ohio Market Town_)

I heard an old farm-wife,
Selling some barley,
Mingle her life with life
And the name “Charley.”

Saying: “The crop’s all in,
We’re about through now;
Long nights will soon begin,
We’re just us two now.

“Twelve bushels at sixty cents,
It’s all I carried—
He sickened making fence;
He was to be married—

“It feels like frost was near—
His hair was curly.
The spring was late that year,
But the harvest early.”

_Robert Frost_

Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England,
Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26,
1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where,
for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating
from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost
entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The
routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his
mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and
became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already
begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in _The
Independent_. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then
distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the
very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous,
rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost
continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the
discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown.

In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final
determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the
cut-and-dried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that
period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three
years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in
1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven
years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills
with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground
refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain
oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment
and, after a few years’ teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New
Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children,
sailed for England in September, 1912.

For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world.
London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and
separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air.
Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes,
went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other
matters. A few months later _A Boy’s Will_ (1913), his first
collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of
the few authentic voices of modern poetry.

_A Boy’s Will_, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective;
original in outlook and idiom in spite of certain reminiscences of
Browning. Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated
emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to
the following book, which has become a contemporary classic. Early
in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his
neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In
the spring of the same year, _North of Boston_ (1914), one of the
most intensely American books ever printed, was published in
England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of
people.” And it is more than that—it is a book of backgrounds as
living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a
stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten
wood-pile left

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow, smokeless burning of decay.

_North of Boston_, like its successor, contains much of the finest
poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual
values, every line moves with the double force of observation and
implication. The first poem in the book illustrates this power of
character and symbolism. Although Frost is not arguing for anything
in particular, one senses here something more than the subterranean
enemies of walls. In “Mending Wall,” we see two elemental and
opposed forces. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,”
insists the seeker after causes; “Good fences make good neighbors,”
doggedly maintains the literal-minded lover of traditions. Here,
beneath the whimsical turns and pungency of expression, we have the
essence of nationalism versus the internationalist; the struggle
between a blind responsibility and a pagan iconoclasm.