Chapter I: Am the Woman

I am the Woman, ark of the law and its breaker,
Who chastened her steps and taught her knees to be meek,
Bridled and bitted her heart and humbled her cheek,
Parcelled her will, and cried "Take more!" to the taker,
Shunned what they told her to shun, sought what they bade her seek,
Locked up her mouth from scornful speaking: now it is open to speak.

I am she that is terribly fashioned, the creature
Wrought in God's perilous mood, in His unsafe hour.
The morning star was mute, beholding my feature,
Seeing the rapture I was, the shame, and the power,
Scared at my manifold meaning; he heard me call
"O fairest among ten thousand, acceptable brother!"
And he answered not, for doubt; till he saw me crawl
And whisper down to the secret worm, "O mother,
Be not wroth in the ancient house; thy daughter forgets not at all!"
I am the Woman, fleër away,
Soft withdrawer back from the maddened mate,
Lurer inward and down to the gates of day
And crier there in the gate,
"What shall I give for thee, wild one, say!
The long, slow rapture and patient anguish of life,
Or art thou minded a swifter way?
Ask if thou canst, the gold, but oh if thou must,
Good is the shining dross, lovely the dust!
Look at me, I am the Woman, harlot and heavenly wife;
Tell me thy price, be unashamed; I will assuredly pay!"

I am also the Mother: of two that I bore
I comfort and feed the slayer, feed and comfort the slain.
Did they number my daughters and sons? I am mother of more!
Many a head they marked not, here in my bosom has lain,
Babbling with unborn lips in a tongue to be,
Far, incredible matters, all familiar to me.
Still would the man come whispering,
"Wife!" but many a time my breast
Took him not as a husband: I soothed him and laid him to rest
Even as the babe of my body, and knew him for such.
My mouth is open to speak, that was dumb too much!
I say to you I am the Mother; and under the sword
Which flamed each way to harry us forth from the Lord,
I saw Him young at the portal, weeping and staying the rod,
And I, even I was His mother, and I yearned as the mother of God.

I am also the Spirit. The Sisters laughed
When I sat with them dumb in the portals, over my lamp,
Half asleep in the doors: for my gown was raught
Off at the shoulder to shield from the wind and the rain
The wick I tended against the mysterious hour
When the Silent City of Being should ring with song,
As the Lord came in with Life to the marriage bower.
"Look!" laughed the elder Sisters; and crimson with shame
I hid my breast away from the rosy flame.
"Ah!" cried the leaning Sisters, pointing, doing me wrong,
"Do you see?" laughed the wanton Sisters,
"She will get her lover ere long!"
And it was but a little while till unto my need
He was given indeed,
And we walked where waxing world after world went by;
And I said to my lover, "Let us begone,
"Oh, let us begone, and try
"Which of them all the fairest to dwell in is,
"Which is the place for us, our desirable clime!"
But he said, "They are only the huts and the little villages,
Pleasant to go and lodge in rudely over the vintage-time!"
Scornfully spake he, being unwise,
Being flushed at heart because of our walking together.
But I was mute with passionate prophecies;
My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,
While universe drifted by after still universe.
Then I cried, "Alas, we must hasten and lodge therein,
One after one, and in every star that they shed!
A dark and a weary thing is come on our head--
To search obedience out in the bosom of sin,
To listen deep for love when thunders the curse;
For O my love, behold where the Lord hath planted
In every star in the midst His dangerous Tree!
Still I must pluck thereof and bring unto thee,
Saying, "The coolness for which all night we have panted;
Taste of the goodly thing, I have tasted first!"
Bringing us noway coolness, but burning thirst,
Giving us noway peace, but implacable strife,
Loosing upon us the wounding joy and the wasting sorrow of life!

I am the Woman, ark of the Law and sacred arm to upbear it,
Heathen trumpet to overthrow and idolatrous sword to shear it:
Yea, she whose arm was round the neck of the morning star at song,
Is she who kneeleth now in the dust and cries at the secret door,
"Open to me, O sleeping mother! The gate is heavy and strong.
"Open to me, I am come at last; be wroth with thy child no more.
"Let me lie down with thee there in the dark, and be slothful
with thee as before!"

_William Vaughan Moody_

TO WHISTLER, AMERICAN

_On the loan exhibit of his paintings at the Tate Gallery._

You also, our first great,
Had tried all ways;
Tested and pried and worked in many fashions,
And this much gives me heart to play the game.

Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong,
And much of little moment, and some few
Perfect as Dürer!

"In the Studio" and these two portraits,[A] if I had my choice!
And then these sketches in the mood of Greece?

You had your searches, your uncertainties,
And this is good to know--for us, I mean,
Who bear the brunt of our America
And try to wrench her impulse into art.

You were not always sure, not always set
To hiding night or tuning "symphonies";
Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried
And stretched and tampered with the media.

You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts
Show us there's chance at least of winning through.

_Ezra Pound_

[Footnote A:

"Brown and Gold--de Race."
"Grenat et Or--Le Petit Cardinal."

]

MIDDLE-AGED

A STUDY IN AN EMOTION

"'Tis but a vague, invarious delight
As gold that rains about some buried king.

As the fine flakes,
When tourists frolicking
Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light
Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes
And start to inspect some further pyramid;

As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath
Their transitory step and merriment,
Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus
Gains yet another crust
Of useless riches for the occupant,
So I, the fires that lit once dreams
Now over and spent,
Lie dead within four walls
And so now love
Rains down and so enriches some stiff case,
And strews a mind with precious metaphors,

And so the space
Of my still consciousness
Is full of gilded snow,

The which, no cat has eyes enough
To see the brightness of."

_Ezra Pound_

FISH OF THE FLOOD

Fish of the flood, on the bankèd billow
Thou layest thy head in dreams;
Sliding as slides thy shifting pillow,
One with the streams
Of the sea is thy spirit.

Gean-tree, thou spreadest thy foaming flourish
Abroad in the sky so grey;
It not heeding if it thee nourish,
Thou dost obey,
Happy, its moving.

So, God, thy love it not needeth me,
Only thy life, that I blessèd be.

_Emilia Stuart Lorimer_

TO ONE UNKNOWN

I have seen the proudest stars
That wander on through space,
Even the sun and moon,
But not your face.

I have heard the violin,
The winds and waves rejoice
In endless minstrelsy,
Yet not your voice.

I have touched the trillium,
Pale flower of the land,
Coral, anemone,
And not your hand.

I have kissed the shining feet
Of Twilight lover-wise,
Opened the gates of Dawn--
Oh not your eyes!

I have dreamed unwonted things,
Visions that witches brew,
Spoken with images,
Never with you.

_Helen Dudley_

SYMPHONY OF A MEXICAN GARDEN

1. THE GARDEN _Poco sostenuto_ in A major
The laving tide of inarticulate air.

_Vivace_ in A major
The iris people dance.

2. THE POOL _Allegretto_ in A minor
Cool-hearted dim familiar of the doves.

3. THE BIRDS _Presto_ in F major
I keep a frequent tryst.

_Presto meno assai_
The blossom-powdered orange-tree.

4. TO THE MOON _Allegro con brio_ in A major
Moon that shone on Babylon.

TO MOZART

_What junipers are these, inlaid
With flame of the pomegranate tree?
The god of gardens must have made
This still unrumored place for thee
To rest from immortality,
And dream within the splendid shade
Some more elusive symphony
Than orchestra has ever played._

I In A major
_Poco sostenuto_

The laving tide of inarticulate air
Breaks here in flowers as the sea in foam,
But with no satin lisp of failing wave:
The odor-laden winds are very still.
An unimagined music here exhales
In upcurled petal, dreamy bud half-furled,
And variations of thin vivid leaf:
Symphonic beauty that some god forgot.
If form could waken into lyric sound,
This flock of irises like poising birds
Would feel song at their slender feathered throats,
And pour into a grey-winged aria
Their wrinkled silver fingermarked with pearl;
That flight of ivory roses high along
The airy azure of the larkspur spires
Would be a fugue to puzzle nightingales
With too-evasive rapture, phrase on phrase.
Where the hibiscus flares would cymbals clash,
And the black cypress like a deep bassoon
Would hum a clouded amber melody.

But all across the trudging ragged chords
That are the tangled grasses in the heat,
The mariposa lilies fluttering
Like trills upon some archangelic flute,
The roses and carnations and divine
Small violets that voice the vanished god,
There is a lure of passion-poignant tone
Not flower-of-pomegranate--that finds the heart
As stubborn oboes do--can breathe in air,
Nor poppies, nor keen lime, nor orange-bloom.

What zone of wonder in the ardent dusk
Of trees that yearn and cannot understand,
Vibrates as to the golden shepherd horn
That stirs some great adagio with its cry
And will not let it rest?
O tender trees,
Your orchid, like a shepherdess of dreams,
Calls home her whitest dream from following
Elusive laughter of the unmindful god!

_Vivace_

The iris people dance
Like any nimble faun:
To rhythmic radiance
They foot it in the dawn.
They dance and have no need
Of crystal-dripping flute
Or chuckling river-reed,--
Their music hovers mute.
The dawn-lights flutter by
All noiseless, but they know!
Such children of the sky
Can hear the darkness go.
But does the morning play
Whatever they demand--
Or amber-barred bourrée
Or silver saraband?

THE POOL
II. In A minor
_Allegretto_

Cool-hearted dim familiar of the doves,
Thou coiled sweet water where they come to tell
Their mellow legends and rehearse their loves,
As what in April or in June befell
And thou must hear of,--friend of Dryades
Who lean to see where flower should be set
To star the dusk of wreathed ivy braids,
They have not left thy trees,
Nor do tired fauns thy crystal kiss forget,
Nor forest-nymphs astray from distant glades.

Thou feelest with delight their showery feet
Along thy mossy margin myrtle-starred,
And thine the heart of wildness quick to beat
At imprint of shy hoof upon thy sward:
Yet who could know thee wild who art so cool,
So heavenly-minded, templed in thy grove
Of plumy cedar, larch and juniper?
O strange ecstatic Pool,
What unknown country art thou dreaming of,
Or temple than this garden lovelier?

Who made thy sky the silver side of leaves,
And poised its orchid like a swan-white moon
Whose disc of perfect pallor half deceives
The mirror of thy limpid green lagoon,
He loveth well thy ripple-feathered moods,
Thy whims at dusk, thy rainbow look at dawn!
Dream thou no more of vales Olympian:
Where pale Olympus broods
There were no orchid white as moon or swan,
No sky of leaves, no garden-haunting Pan!

THE BIRDS
III. In F major
_Presto_

I keep a frequent tryst
With whirr and shower of wings:
Some inward melodist
Interpreting all things
Appoints the place, the hours.
Dazzle and sense of flowers,
Though not the least leaf stir,
May mean a tanager:
How rich the silence is until he sings!

The smoke-tree's cloudy white
Has fire within its breast.
What winged mere delight
There hides as in a nest
And fashions of its flame
Music without a name?
So might an opal sing
If given thrilling wing,
And voice for lyric wildness unexpressed.

In grassy dimness thatched
With tangled growing things,
A troubadour rose-patched,
With velvet-shadowed wings,
Seeks a sustaining fly.
Who else unseen goes by
Quick-pattering through the hush?
Some twilight-footed thrush
Or finch intent on small adventurings?

I have no time for gloom,
For gloom what time have I?
The orange is in bloom;
Emerald parrots fly
Out of the cypress-dusk;
Morning is strange with musk.
The wild canary now
Jewels the lemon-bough,
And mocking-birds laugh in the rose's room.

THE ORANGE TREE
In D Major
_Presto meno assai_

The blossom-powdered orange tree,
For all her royal speechlessness,
Out of a heart of ecstasy
Is singing, singing, none the less!

Light as a springing fountain, she
Is spray above the wind-sleek turf:
Dream-daughter of the moon's white sea
And sister to its showered surf!

TO THE MOON
IV. In A major
_Allegro con brio_

Moon that shone on Babylon,
Searching out the gardens there,
Could you find a fairer one
Than this garden, anywhere?
Did Damascus at her best
Hide such beauty in her breast?

When you flood with creamy light
Vines that net the sombre pine,
Turn the shadowed iris white,
Summon cactus stars to shine,
Do you free in silvered air
Wistful spirits everywhere?

Here they linger, there they pass,
And forget their native heaven:
Flit along the dewy grass
Rare Vittoria, Sappho, even!
And the hushed magnolia burns
Incense in her gleaming urns.

When the nightingale demands
Word with Keats who answers him,
Shakespeare listens--understands--
Mindful of the cherubim;
And the South Wind dreads to know
Mozart gone as seraphs go.

Moon of poets dead and gone,
Moon to gods of music dear,
Gardens they have looked upon
Let them re-discover here:
Rest--and dream a little space
Of some heart-remembered place!

_Grace Hazard Conkling_

EDITORIAL COMMENT

AS IT WAS

Once upon a time, when man was new in the woods of the world, when his feet were scarred with jungle thorns and his hands were red with the blood of beasts, a great king rose who gathered his neighbors together, and subdued the wandering tribes. Strange cunning was his, for he ground the stones to an edge together, and bound them with thongs to sticks; and he taught his people to pry apart the forest, and beat back the ravenous beasts. And he bade them honeycomb the mountainside with caves, to dwell therein with their women. And the most beautiful women the king took for his own, that his wisdom might not perish from the earth. And he led the young men to war and conquered all the warring tribes from the mountains to the sea. And when fire smote a great tree out of heaven, and raged through the forest till the third sun, he seized a burning brand and lit an altar to his god. And there, beside the ever-burning fire, he sat and made laws and did justice. And his people loved and feared him.

And the king grew old. And for seven journeys of the sun from morn to morn he moved not, neither uttered word. And the hearts of the people were troubled, but none dared speak to the king's despair; neither wise men nor warriors dared cry out unto him.

Now the youngest son of the king was a lad still soft of flesh, who had never run to battle not sat in council nor stood before the king. And his heart yearned for his father, and he bowed before his mother and said, "Give me thy blessing, for I have words within me for the king; yea, as the sea sings to the night with waves will my words roll in singing unto his grief." And his mother said, "Go, my son; for thou hast words of power and soothing, and the king shall be healed."

So the youth went forth and bowed him toward the king's seat. And the wise men and warriors laid hands upon him, and said, "Who art thou, that thou shouldst go in ahead of us to him who sitteth in darkness?" And the king's son rose, and stretched forth his arms, and said, "Unhand me and let me go, ye silent ones, who for seven sun-journeys have watched in darkness and uttered no word of light! Unhand me, for as a fig-tree with fruit, so my heart is rich with words for the king."

Then he put forth his strength and strode on singing softly, and bowed him before the king. And he spake the king's great deeds in cunning words--his wars and city-carvings and wise laws, his dominion over men and beasts and the thick woods of the earth; his greeting of the gods with fire.

And lo, the king lifted up his head and stretched forth his arms and wept. "Yea, all these things have I done," he said, "and they shall perish with me. My death is upon me, and I shall die, and the tribes I have welded together shall be broken apart, and the beasts shall win back their domain, and the green jungle shall overgrow my mansions. Lo, the fire shall go out on the altar of the gods, and my glory shall be as a crimson cloud that the night swallows up in darkness."

Then the young man lifted up his voice and cried: "Oh, king, be comforted! Thy deeds shall not pass as a cloud, neither shall thy laws be strewn before the wind. For I will carve thy glory in rich and rounded words--yea, I will string thy deeds together in jewelled beads of perfect words that thy sons shall wear on their hearts forever."

"Verily thy words are rich with song," said the king; "but thou shalt die, and who will utter them? Like twinkling foam is the speech of man's mouth; like foam from a curling wave that vanishes in the sun."

"Nay, let thy heart believe me, oh king my father," said the youth. "For the words of my mouth shall keep step with the ripple of waves and the beating of wings; yea, they shall mount with the huge paces of the sun in heaven, that cease not for my ceasing. Men shall sound them on suckling tongues still soft with milk, they shall run into battle to the tune of thy deeds, and kindle their fire with the breath of thy wisdom. And thy glory shall be ever living, as a jewel of jasper from the earth--yea, as the green jewel of jasper carven into a god for the rod of thy power, oh king, and of the power of thy sons forever."

The king sat silent till the going-down of the sun. Then lifted he his head, and stroked his beard, and spake: "Verily the sun goes down, and my beard shines whiter than his, and I shall die. Now therefore stand at my right hand, O son of my wise years, child of my dreams. Stand at my right hand, and fit thy speech to music, that men may hold in their hearts thy rounded words. Forever shalt thou keep thy place, and utter thy true tale in the ears of the race. And woe be unto them that hear thee not! Verily that generation shall pass as a cloud, and its glory shall be as a tree that withers. For thou alone shalt win the flying hours to thee, and keep the beauty of them for the joy of men forever."

_H. M._

ON THE READING OF POETRY

In the brilliant pages of his essay on Jean François Millet, Romain Rolland says that Millet, as a boy, used to read the Bucolics and the Georgics "with enchantment" and was "seized by emotion--when he came to the line, 'It is the hour when the great shadows seek the plain.'

Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant
Majoresque cadunt altis de montibus umbrae?"

To the lover and student of poetry, this incident has an especial charm and significance. There is something fine in the quick sympathy of an artist in one kind, for beauty expressed by the master of another medium. The glimpse M. Rolland gives us of one of the most passionate art-students the world has ever known, implies with fresh grace a truth Anglo-Saxons are always forgetting--that poetry is one of the great humanities, that poetry is one of the great arts of expression.

Many of our customs conspire to cause, almost to force, this forgetting. Thousands of us have been educated to a dark and often permanent ignorance of classic poetry, by being taught in childhood to regard it as written for the purpose of illustrating Hadley's Latin, or Goodwin's Greek grammar, and composed to follow the rules of versification at the end of the book. It seems indeed one of fate's strangest ironies that the efforts of these distinguished grammarians to unveil immortal masterpieces are commonly used in schools and colleges to enshroud, not to say swaddle up, the images of the gods "forever young," and turn them into mummies. In our own country, far from perceiving in Vergil's quiet music the magnificent gesture of nature that thrilled his Norman reader--far from conceiving of epic poetry as the simplest universal tongue, one early acquires a wary distrust of it as something one must constantly labor over.

Aside from gaining in childhood this strong, practical objection to famous poetry, people achieve the deadly habit of reading metrical lines unimaginatively. After forming--generally in preparation for entering one of our great universities--the habit of blinding the inner eye, deafening the inner ear, and dropping into a species of mental coma before a page of short lines, it is difficult for educated persons to read poetry with what is known as "ordinary human intelligence."

It does not occur to them simply to listen to the nightingale. But poetry, I believe, never speaks her beauty--certainly never her scope and variety, except on the condition that in her presence one sits down quietly with folded hands, and truly listens to her singing voice.

"So for one the wet sail arching through the rainbow round the bow,
And for one the creak of snow-shoes on the crust."

Many people do not like poetry, in this way, as a living art to be enjoyed, but rather as an exact science to be approved. To them poetry may concern herself only with a limited number of subjects to be presented in a predetermined and conventional manner and form. To such readers the word "form" means usually only a repeated literary effect: and they do not understand that every "form" was in its first and best use an originality, employed not for the purpose of following any rule, but because it said truly what the artist wished to express. I suppose much of the monotony of subject and treatment observable in modern verse is due to this belief that poetry is merely a fixed way of repeating certain meritorious though highly familiar concepts of existence--and not in the least the infinite music of words meant to speak the little and the great tongues of the earth.

It is exhilarating to read the pages of Pope and of Byron, whether you agree with them or not, because here poetry does speak the little and the great tongues of the earth, and sings satires, pastorals and lampoons, literary and dramatic criticism, all manner of fun and sparkling prettiness, sweeping judgments, nice discriminations, fashions, politics, the ways of gentle and simple--love and desire and pain and sorrow, and anguish and death.

The impulse which inspired, and the appreciation which endowed this magazine, has been a generous sympathy with poetry as an art. The existence of a gallery for poems and verse has an especially attractive social value in its power of recalling or creating the beautiful and clarifying pleasure of truly reading poetry in its broad scope and rich variety. The hospitality of this hall will have been a genuine source of happiness if somehow it tells the visitors, either while they are here, or after they have gone to other places, what a delight it is to enjoy a poem, to realize it, to live in the vivid dream it evokes, to hark to its music, to listen to the special magic grace of its own style and composition, and to know that this special grace will say as deeply as some revealing hour with a friend one loves, something nothing else can say--something which is life itself sung in free sympathy beyond the bars of time and space.

_E. W._

THE MOTIVE OF THE MAGAZINE

In the huge democracy of our age no interest is too slight to have an organ. Every sport, every little industry requires its own corner, its own voice, that it may find its friends, greet them, welcome them.

The arts especially have need of each an entrenched place, a voice of power, if they are to do their work and be heard. For as the world grows greater day by day, as every member of it, through something he buys or knows or loves, reaches out to the ends of the earth, things precious to the race, things rare and delicate, may be overpowered, lost in the criss-cross of modern currents, the confusion of modern immensities.

Painting, sculpture, music are housed in palaces in the great cities of the world; and every week or two a new periodical is born to speak for one or the other of them, and tenderly nursed at some guardian's expense. Architecture, responding to commercial and social demands, is whipped into shape by the rough and tumble of life and fostered, willy-nilly, by men's material needs. Poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself in a world unaware of its immediate and desperate need of her, a world whose great deeds, whose triumphs over matter, over the wilderness, over racial enmities and distances, require her ever-living voice to give them glory and glamour.

Poetry has been left to herself and blamed for inefficiency, a process as unreasonable as blaming the desert for barrenness. This art, like every other, is not a miracle of direct creation, but a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. The people must do their part if the poet is to tell their story to the future; they must cultivate and irrigate the soil if the desert is to blossom as the rose.

The present venture is a modest effort to give to poetry her own place, her own voice. The popular magazines can afford her but scant courtesy--a Cinderella corner in the ashes--because they seek a large public which is not hers, a public which buys them not for their verse but for their stories, pictures, journalism, rarely for their literature, even in prose. Most magazine editors say that there is no public for poetry in America; one of them wrote to a young poet that the verse his monthly accepted "must appeal to the barber's wife of the Middle West," and others prove their distrust by printing less verse from year to year, and that rarely beyond page-end length and importance.

We believe that there is a public for poetry, that it will grow, and that as it becomes more numerous and appreciative the work produced in this art will grow in power, in beauty, in significance. In this belief we have been encouraged by the generous enthusiasm of many subscribers to our fund, by the sympathy of other lovers of the art, and by the quick response of many prominent poets, both American and English, who have sent or promised contributions.

We hope to publish in _Poetry_ some of the best work now being done in English verse. Within space limitations set at present by the small size of our monthly sheaf, we shall be able to print poems longer, and of more intimate and serious character, than the popular magazines can afford to use. The test, limited by ever-fallible human judgment, is to be quality alone; all forms, whether narrative, dramatic or lyric, will be acceptable. We hope to offer our subscribers a place of refuge, a green isle in the sea, where Beauty may plant her gardens, and Truth, austere revealer of joy and sorrow, of hidden delights and despairs, may follow her brave quest unafraid.

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

In order that the experiment of a magazine of verse may have a fair trial, over one hundred subscriptions of fifty dollars annually for five years have been promised by the ladies and gentlemen listed below. In addition, nearly twenty direct contributions of smaller sums have been sent or promised. To all these lovers of the art the editors would express their grateful appreciation.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor
Mr. Howard Shaw
Mr. Arthur T. Aldis
Mr. Edwin S. Fechheimer
Mrs. Charles H. Hamill
[B]Mr. D. H. Burnham
Mrs. Emmons Blaine (2)
Mr. Wm. S. Monroe
Mr. E. A. Bancroft
Mrs. Burton Hanson
Mr. John M. Ewen
Mr. C. L. Hutchinson
Mrs. Wm. Vaughan Moody
Hon. Wm. J. Calhoun
{Miss Anna Morgan
{Mrs. Edward A. Leicht
Mrs. Louis Betts
Mr. Ralph Cudney
Mrs. George Bullen
Mrs. P. A. Valentine
Mr. P. A. Valentine
Mr. Charles R. Crane
Mr. Frederick Sargent
Mrs. Frank G. Logan
Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus
Mrs. Emma B. Hodge
Mr. Wallace Heckman
Mr. Edward B. Butler (2)
Miss Elizabeth Ross
Mrs. Bryan Lathrop
Mr. Martin A. Ryerson
Mrs. La Verne Noyes
Mrs. E. Norman Scott (2)
Mr. Wm. O. Goodman
Mrs. Charles Hitchcock
Hon. John Barton Payne
Mr. Thomas D. Jones
Mr. H. H. Kohlsaat
Mr. Andrew M. Lawrence
Miss Juliet Goodrich
Mr. Henry H. Walker
Mr. Charles Deering
Mr. Jas. Harvey Peirce
Mr. Charles L. Freer
Mrs. W. F. Dummer
Mr. Jas. P. Whedon
Mr. Arthur Heun
Mr. Edward F. Carry
Mrs. George M. Pullman
Mr. Cyrus H. McCormick (2)
Mr. F. Stuyvesant Peabody
Mrs. F. S. Winston
Mr. J. J. Glessner
{Mr. C. C. Curtiss
{Mrs. Hermon B. Butler
Mr. Will H. Lyford
Mr. Horace S. Oakley
Mr. Eames Mac Veagh
Mrs. K. M. H. Besly
Mr. Charles G. Dawes
Mr. Clarence Buckingham
Mrs. Potter Palmer
Mr. Owen F. Aldis
Mr. Albert B. Dick
Mr. Albert H. Loeb
The Misses Skinner
Mr. Potter Palmer
Miss Mary Rozet Smith
Misses Alice E. and Margaret D. Moran
{Mrs. James B. Waller
{Mr. John Borden
Mr. Victor F. Lawson
{Mrs. H. M. Wilmarth
{Mrs. Norman F. Thompson
{Mrs. William Blair
{Mrs. Clarence I. Peck
Mr. Clarence M. Woolley
Mr. Edward P. Russell
Mrs. Frank O. Lowden
Mr. John S. Miller
Miss Helen Louise Birch
Nine members of the Fortnightly
Six members of the Friday Club
Seven members of the Chicago Woman's Club
Mr. William L. Brown
Mr. Rufus G. Dawes
Mr. Gilbert E. Porter
Mr. Alfred L. Baker
Mr. George A. McKinlock
Mr. John S. Field
Mrs. Samuel Insull
Mr. William T. Fenton
Mr. A. G. Becker
Mr. Honoré Palmer
Mr. John J. Mitchell
Mrs. F. A. Hardy
Mr. Morton D. Hull
Mr. E. F. Ripley
Mr. Ernest MacDonald Bowman
Mr. John A. Kruse
Mr. Frederic C. Bartlett
Mr. Franklin H. Head
Mrs. Wm. R. Linn

[Footnote B: _Deceased._]

* * * * *

Through the generosity of five gentlemen, _Poetry_ will give two hundred and fifty dollars in one or two prizes for the best poem or poems printed in its pages the first year. In addition a subscriber to the fund offers twenty-five dollars for the best epigram.

* * * * *

Mr. Maurice Browne, director of the Chicago Little Theatre, offers to produce, during the season of 1913-14, the best play in verse published in, or submitted to, _Poetry_ during its first year; provided that it may be adequately presented under the requirements and limitations of his stage.

* * * * *

We are fortunate in being able, through the courtesy of the Houghton-Mifflin Co., to offer our readers a poem, hitherto unprinted, from advance sheets of the complete works of the late William Vaughan Moody, which will be published in November. The lamentable death of this poet two years ago in the early prime of his great powers was a calamity to literature. It is fitting that the first number of a magazine published in the city where for years he wrote and taught, should contain an important poem from his hand.

Mr. Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose recent distinguished success in London led to wide recognition in his own country, authorizes the statement that at present such of his poetic work as receives magazine publication in America will appear exclusively in _Poetry_. That discriminating London publisher, Mr. Elkin Mathews, "discovered" this young poet from over seas, and published "Personae," "Exultations" and "Canzoniere," three small volumes of verse from which a selection has been reprinted by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. under the title "Provença." Mr. Pound's latest work is a translation from the Italian of "Sonnets and Ballate," by Guido Cavalcanti.

Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke, another contributor, is a graduate of Harvard, who studied law and entered his father's office in Davenport, Iowa. He is the author of "The Happy Princess" and "The Breaking of Bonds," and a contributor to leading magazines. An early number of _Poetry_ will be devoted exclusively to Mr. Ficke's work.

Mrs. Roscoe P. Conkling is a resident of the state of New York; a young poet who has contributed to various magazines.

Miss Lorimer is a young English poet resident in Oxford, who will publish her first volume this autumn. The London _Poetry Review_, in its August number, introduced her with a group of lyrics which were criticized with some asperity in the _New Age_ and praised with equal warmth in other periodicals.

* * * * *

Miss Dudley, who is a Chicagoan born and bred, is still younger in the art, "To One Unknown" being the first of her poems to be printed.

* * * * *

_Poetry_ will acknowledge the receipt of books of verse and works relating to the subject, and will print brief reviews of those which seem for any reason significant. It will endeavor also to keep its readers informed of the progress of the art throughout the English-speaking world and continental Europe. The American metropolitan newspaper prints cable dispatches about post-impressionists, futurists, secessionists and other radicals in painting, sculpture and music, but so far as its editors and readers are concerned, French poetry might have died with Victor Hugo, and English with Tennyson, or at most Swinburne.

NOTE.--Eight months after the first general
newspaper announcement of our efforts to secure a
fund for a magazine of verse, and three or four
months after our first use of the title _Poetry_,
a Boston firm of publishers announced a
forthcoming periodical of the same kind, to be
issued under the same name. The two are not to be
confused.

THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR COMPANY
PRINTERS CHICAGO

Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 2

NOVEMBER, 1912

THE PIPER

George Borrow in his _Lavengro_
Tells us of a Welshman, who
By some excess of mother-wit
Framed a harp and played on it,
Built a ship and sailed to sea,
And steered it home to melody
Of his own making. I, indeed,
Might write for Everyman to read
A thaumalogue of wonderment
More wonderful, but rest content
With celebrating one I knew
Who built his pipes, and played them, too:
No more.
Ah, played! Therein is all:
The hounded thing, the hunter's call;
The shudder, when the quarry's breath
Is drowned in blood and stilled in death;
The marriage dance, the pulsing vein,
The kiss that must be given again;
The hope that Ireland, like a rose,
Sees shining thro' her tale of woes;
The battle lost, the long lament
For blood and spirit vainly spent;
And so on, thro' the varying scale
Of passion that the western Gael
Knows, and by miracle of art
Draws to the chanter from the heart
Like water from a hidden spring,
To leap or murmur, weep or sing.

I see him now, a little man
In proper black, whey-bearded, wan,
With eyes that scan the eastern hills
Thro' thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles.
His hand is on the chanter. Lo,
The hidden spring begins to flow
In waves of magic. (He is dead
These seven years, but bend your head
And listen.) Rising from the clay
The Master plays _The Ring of Day_.
It mounts and falls and floats away
Over the sky-line ... then is gone
Into the silence of the dawn!

_Joseph Campbell_

BEYOND THE STARS

Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead,
(It was so strange to me that they should weep!)
Tall candles burned about me in the dark,
And a great crucifix was on my breast,
And a great silence filled the lonesome room.

I heard one whisper, "Lo! the dawn is breaking,
And he has lost the wonder of the day."
Another came whom I had loved on earth,
And kissed my brow and brushed my dampened hair.
Softly she spoke: "Oh that he should not see
The April that his spirit bathed in! Birds
Are singing in the orchard, and the grass
That soon will cover him is growing green.
The daisies whiten on the emerald hills,
And the immortal magic that he loved
Wakens again--and he has fallen asleep."
Another said: "Last night I saw the moon
Like a tremendous lantern shine in heaven,
And I could only think of him--and sob.
For I remembered evenings wonderful
When he was faint with Life's sad loveliness,
And watched the silver ribbons wandering far
Along the shore, and out upon the sea.
Oh, I remembered how he loved the world,
The sighing ocean and the flaming stars,
The everlasting glamour God has given--
His tapestries that wrap the earth's wide room.
I minded me of mornings filled with rain
When he would sit and listen to the sound
As if it were lost music from the spheres.
He loved the crocus and the hawthorn-hedge,
He loved the shining gold of buttercups,
And the low droning of the drowsy bees
That boomed across the meadows. He was glad
At dawn or sundown; glad when Autumn came
With her worn livery and scarlet crown,
And glad when Winter rocked the earth to rest.
Strange that he sleeps today when Life is young,
And the wild banners of the Spring are blowing
With green inscriptions of the old delight."

I heard them whisper in the quiet room.
I longed to open then my sealèd eyes,
And tell them of the glory that was mine.
There was no darkness where my spirit flew,
There was no night beyond the teeming world.
Their April was like winter where I roamed;
Their flowers were like stones where now I fared.
Earth's day! it was as if I had not known
What sunlight meant!... Yea, even as they grieved
For all that I had lost in their pale place,
I swung beyond the borders of the sky,
And floated through the clouds, myself the air,
Myself the ether, yet a matchless being
Whom God had snatched from penury and pain
To draw across the barricades of heaven.
I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon;
In flight on flight I touched the highest star;
I plunged to regions where the Spring is born,
Myself (I asked not how) the April wind,
Myself the elements that are of God.
Up flowery stairways of eternity
I whirled in wonder and untrammeled joy,
An atom, yet a portion of His dream--
His dream that knows no end....
I was the rain,
I was the dawn, I was the purple east,
I was the moonlight on enchanted nights,
(Yet time was lost to me); I was a flower
For one to pluck who loved me; I was bliss,
And rapture, splendid moments of delight;
And I was prayer, and solitude, and hope;
And always, always, always I was love.
I tore asunder flimsy doors of time,
And through the windows of my soul's new sight
I saw beyond the ultimate bounds of space.
I was all things that I had loved on earth--
The very moonbeam in that quiet room,
The very sunlight one had dreamed I lost,
The soul of the returning April grass,
The spirit of the evening and the dawn,
The perfume in unnumbered hawthorn-blooms.
There was no shadow on my perfect peace,
No knowledge that was hidden from my heart.
I learned what music meant; I read the years;
I found where rainbows hide, where tears begin;
I trod the precincts of things yet unborn.

Yea, while I found all wisdom (being dead),
They grieved for me ... I should have grieved for them!

_Charles Hanson Towne_

[Greek: CHORIKOS]

The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.

Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,
Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings--
Symbols of ancient songs
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges,
Watched of none
Save the frail sea-birds
And the lithe pale girls,
Daughters of Okeanos.

And the songs pass
From the green land
Which lies upon the waves as a leaf
On the flowers of hyacinth;
And they pass from the waters,
The manifold winds and the dim moon,
And they come,
Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk,
To the quiet level lands
That she keeps for us all,
That she wrought for us all for sleep
In the silver days of the earth's dawning--
Proserpine, daughter of Zeus.

And we turn from the Kuprian's breasts,
And we turn from thee,
Phoibos Apollon,
And we turn from the music of old
And the hills that we loved and the meads,
And we turn from the fiery day,
And the lips that were over-sweet;
For silently
Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,
With purple robe
Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.

And of all the ancient songs
Passing to the swallow-blue halls
By the dark streams of Persephone,
This only remains:
That in the end we turn to thee,
Death,
That we turn to thee, singing
One last song.

O Death,
Thou art an healing wind
That blowest over white flowers
A-tremble with dew;
Thou art a wind flowing
Over long leagues of lonely sea;
Thou art the dusk and the fragrance;
Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling;
Thou art the pale peace of one
Satiate with old desires;
Thou art the silence of beauty,
And we look no more for the morning;
We yearn no more for the sun,
Since with thy white hands,
Death,
Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets,
The slim colorless poppies
Which in thy garden alone
Softly thou gatherest.

And silently;
And with slow feet approaching;
And with bowed head and unlit eyes,
We kneel before thee:
And thou, leaning towards us,
Caressingly layest upon us
Flowers from thy thin cold hands,
And, smiling as a chaste woman
Knowing love in her heart,
Thou sealest our eyes
And the illimitable quietude
Comes gently upon us.

_Richard Aldington_

TO A GREEK MARBLE

[Greek: Photnia, photnia],
White grave goddess,
Pity my sadness,
O silence of Paros.

I am not of these about thy feet,
These garments and decorum;
I am thy brother,
Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee,
And thou hearest me not.

I have whispered thee in thy solitudes
Of our loves in Phrygia,
The far ecstasy of burning noons
When the fragile pipes
Ceased in the cypress shade,
And the brown fingers of the shepherd
Moved over slim shoulders;
And only the cicada sang.

I have told thee of the hills
And the lisp of reeds
And the sun upon thy breasts,

And thou hearest me not,
[Greek: Photnia, photnia],
Thou hearest me not.

_Richard Aldington_

AU VIEUX JARDIN.

I have sat here happy in the gardens,
Watching the still pool and the reeds
And the dark clouds
Which the wind of the upper air
Tore like the green leafy boughs
Of the divers-hued trees of late summer;
But though I greatly delight
In these and the water-lilies,
That which sets me nighest to weeping
Is the rose and white color of the smooth flag-stones,
And the pale yellow grasses
Among them.

_Richard Aldington_

UNDER TWO WINDOWS