Chapter II: Nocturne (1)

My darling, come!--The wings of the dark have wafted
the sunset away,
And there's room for much in a summer night, but no
room for delay.

A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering
moon looks up
From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in
its cup.

The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom--elder,
viburnum, rose;
The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that
sighs of love as it goes.

The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the
greater ones abide,
With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside.

The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower
of the elder gleams,
Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest
dreams.

Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south,
That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy
sweeter mouth.

Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and
have naught to see?
Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say
nothing of thee and me?

--My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are
guiding her way;
There is room for much in a summer night, but no room
for delay!

_Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer_

THE SINGING PLACE

Cold may lie the day,
And bare of grace;
At night I slip away
To the Singing Place.

A border of mist and doubt
Before the gate,
And the Dancing Stars grow still
As hushed I wait.
Then faint and far away
I catch the beat
In broken rhythm and rhyme
Of joyous feet,--
Lifting waves of sound
That will rise and swell
(If the prying eyes of thought
Break not the spell),
Rise and swell and retreat
And fall and flee,
As over the edge of sleep
They beckon me.
And I wait as the seaweed waits
For the lifting tide;
To ask would be to awake,--
To be denied.
I cloud my eyes in the mist
That veils the hem,--
And then with a rush I am past,--
I am Theirs, and of Them!
And the pulsing chant swells up
To touch the sky,
And the song is joy, is life,
And the song am I!
The thunderous music peals
Around, o'erhead--
The dead would awake to hear
If there were dead;
But the life of the throbbing Sun
Is in the song,
And we weave the world anew,
And the Singing Throng
Fill every corner of space--

Over the edge of sleep
I bring but a trace
Of the chants that pulse and sweep
In the Singing Place.

_Lily A. Long_

IMMURED

Within this narrow cell that I call "me",
I was imprisoned ere the worlds began,
And all the worlds must run, as first they ran,
In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free.
I beat my hands against the walls and find
It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!

_Lily A. Long_

NOGI

Great soldier of the fighting clan,
Across Port Arthur's frowning face of stone
You drew the battle sword of old Japan,
And struck the White Tsar from his Asian throne.

Once more the samurai sword
Struck to the carved hilt in your loyal hand,
That not alone your heaven-descended lord
Should meanly wander in the spirit land.

Your own proud way, O eastern star,
Grandly at last you followed. Out it leads
To that high heaven where all the heroes are,
Lovers of death for causes and for creeds.

_Harriet Monroe_

THE JESTER

I have known great gold Sorrows:
Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully
Through the slow-pacing morrows:
I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing
Dim endless voices cried of suffering
Vibrant and far in broken litany:
Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly
Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air--
All things most tragical, most fair,
Have still encompassed me ...

I dance where in the screaming market-place
The dusty world that watches buys and sells,
With painted merriment upon my face,
Whirling my bells,
Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery.

I have known great gold Sorrows ...
Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones,
If it shall make them merry, and forget
That grief shall rise and set
With the unchanging, unforgetting suns
Of their relentless morrows?

_Margaret Widdemer_

THE BEGGARS

The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces,
Begging of Life for Joy!

I saw the little daughters of the poor,
Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay,
Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled
A hideous flushed beggar at the door,
Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed,
Complacent in his profitable mask.
They mocked his horror, but they gave to him
From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in
To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts
Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand
Covered by darkness, to the luring voice
Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings,
Of silks, of feathers, bought--so cheap!--with just
Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant
For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life:
(A frock of satin for an hour's shame,
A coat of fur for two days' servitude;
"And the clothes last," the thought runs on, within
The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days;
"Who cares or knows after the hour is done?")
--Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy!
The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible,
Complacent in the marketable mask
That earned his comforts--and they gave to him!

But ah, the little painted, wistful faces
Questioning Life for Joy!

_Margaret Widdemer_

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

MOODY'S POEMS

_The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody_ will soon be published in two volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our present interest is in the volume of poems, which are themselves an absorbing drama. Moody had a slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness of his young dreams yielded slowly to a man's more definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of life. When he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to think his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner of the great poets of the earth, the world with God. Apparently the unwritten poems cancelled by death would have rounded out, in art of an austere perfection, the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first act of an uncompleted drama, _The Death of Eve_.

Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams of the meaning of life lack the props and pillars of the old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion and despair are a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took the whole scheme of things for his province, as a truly heroic poet should; there are always large spaces on his canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic _Masque of Judgment_ and the shorter poems derived from present-day subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating the case, so to speak, against God. Somewhat in the terms of modern science is his statement--the universe plunging on toward its doom of darkness and lifelessness, divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all away with a vast inscrutable gesture.

This seems to be the mood of the _Masque of Judgment_, a mood against which that very human archangel, Raphael, protests in most appealing lines. The poet broods over the earth--

The earth, that has the blue and little flowers--

with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like his own angel he is

a truant still
While battle rages round the heart of God.

The lamps are spent at the end of judgment day,

and naked from their seats
The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait.

This conflict between love and doubt is the motive also of _Gloucester Moors_, _The Daguerreotype_, _Old Pourquoi_--those three noblest, perhaps, of the present-day poems--also of _The Brute_ and _The Menagerie_, and of that fine poem manqué, the _Ode in Time of Hesitation_. _The Fie-Bringer_ is an effort at another theme--redemption, light after darkness. But it is not so spontaneous as the _Masque_; though simpler, clearer, more dramatic in form, it is more deliberate and intellectual, and not so star-lit with memorable lines. _The Fire-Bringer_ is an expression of aspiration; the poet longs for light, demands it, will wrest it from God's right hand like Prometheus. But his triumph is still theory, not experience. The reader is hardly yet convinced.

If one feels a grander motive in such poems as the one-act _Death of Eve_ and _The Fountain_, or the less perfectly achieved _I Am the Woman_, it is not because of the tales they tell but because of the spirit of faith that is in them--a spirit intangible, indefinable, but indomitable and triumphant. At last, we feel, this poet, already under the shadow of death, sees a terrible splendid sunrise, and offers us the glory of it in his art.

_The Fountain_ is a truly magnificent expression of spiritual triumph in failure, and incidentally of the grandeur of Arizona, that tragic wonderland of ancient and future gods. Those Spanish wanderers, dying in the desert, in whose half-madness dreams and realities mingle, assume in those stark spaces the stature of universal humanity, contending to the last against relentless fate. In the two versions of _The Death of Eve_, both narrative and dramatic, one feels also this wild, fierce triumph, this faith in the glory of life. Especially in the dramatic fragment, by its sureness of touch and simple austerity of form, and by the majesty of its figure of the aged Eve, Moody's art reached its most heroic height. We have here the beginning of great things.

The spirit of this poet may be commended to those facile bards who lift up their voices between the feast and the cigars, whose muses dance to every vague emotion and strike their flimsy lutes for every light-o'-love. Here was one who went to his desk as to an altar, resolved that the fire he lit, the sacrifice he offered, should be perfect and complete. He would burn out his heart like a taper that the world might possess a living light. He would tell once more the grandeur of life; he would sing the immortal song.

That such devotion is easy of attainment in this clamorous age who can believe? Poetry like some of Moody's, poetry of a high structural simplicity, strict and bare in form, pure and austere in ornament, implies a grappling with giants and wrestling with angels; it is not to be achieved without deep living and high thinking, without intense persistent intellectual and spiritual struggle.

_H. M._

BOHEMIAN POETRY

_An Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry_, translated by
P. Selver (Henry J. Drane, London).

This is a good anthology of modern Bohemian poetry, accurately translated into bad and sometimes even ridiculous English. Great credit is due the young translator for his care in research and selection. The faults of his style, though deplorable, are not such as to obscure the force and beauty of his originals.

One is glad to be thus thoroughly assured that contemporary Bohemia has a literature in verse, sensitive to the outer world and yet national. Mr. Selver's greatest revelation is Petr Bezruc, poet of the mines.

The poetry of Brezina, Sova and Vrchlicky is interesting, but Bezruc's _Songs of Silesia_ have the strength of a voice coming _de profundis_.

A hundred years in silence I dwelt in the pit,

* * * * *

The dust of the coal has settled upon my eyes--

* * * * *

Bread with coal is the fruit that my toiling bore;--

That is the temper of it. Palaces grow by the Danube nourished by his blood. He goes from labor to labor, he rebels, he hears a voice mocking:

I should find my senses and go to the mine once more--

And in another powerful invective:

I am the first who arose of the people of Teschen.

* * * * *

They follow the stranger's plough, the slaves fare downwards.

He thanks God he is not in the place of the oppressor, and ends:

Thus 'twas done. The Lord wills it. Night sank o'er my people.
Our doom was sealed when the night had passed;
In the night I prayed to the Demon of Vengeance.
The first Beskydian bard and the last.

This poet is distinctly worth knowing. He is the truth where our "red-bloods" and magazine socialists are usually a rather boresome pose.

As Mr. Selver has tried to make his anthology representative of all the qualities and tendencies of contemporary Bohemian work it is not to be supposed that they are all of the mettle of Bezruc.

One hears with deep regret that Vrchlicky is just dead, after a life of unceasing activity. He has been a prime mover in the revival of the Czech nationality and literature. He has given them, besides his own work, an almost unbelievable number of translations from the foreign classics, Dante, Schiller, Leopardi. For the rest I must refer the reader to Mr. Selver's introduction.

_Ezra Pound_

"THE MUSIC OF THE HUMAN HEART"

This title-phrase has not been plucked from the spacious lawn of _Bartlett's Familiar Quotations_. It grew in the agreeable midland yard of Mr. Walt Mason's newspaper verse, and appeared in a tribute of his to Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, whose fifty-ninth birthday anniversary, falling on the seventh of October, has been widely celebrated in the American public libraries and daily press.

Mr. Riley's fine gift to his public, the special happiness his genius brings to his readers, cannot, for lack of space, be adequately described, or even indicated, here. Perhaps a true, if incomplete, impression of the beauty of his service may be conveyed by repeating a well-known passage of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's _Letters from John Chinaman_--a passage which I can never read without thinking very gratefully of James Whitcomb Riley, and of what his art has done for American poetry-readers.

Mr. Dickinson says:--

In China our poets and literary men have
taught their successors for long generations, to
look for good not in wealth, not in power, not in
miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a
choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most
simple and universal relations of life. To feel,
and in order to feel, to express, or at least to
understand the expression, of all that is lovely
in nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive
in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end....
The pathos of life and death, the long embrace,
the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that
glides forever away, with its freight of music
and light, into the shadow and bush of the
haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes
us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the
gale--to all these things we are trained to
respond, and the response is what we call
literature.

Among Mr. Riley's many distinguished faculties of execution in expressing, in stimulating, "an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life," one faculty has been, in so far as I know, very little mentioned--I mean his mastery in creating character. Mr. Riley has expressed, has incarnated in the melodies and harmonies of his poems, not merely several living, breathing human creatures as they are made by their destinies, but a whole world of his own, a vivid world of country-roads, and country-town streets, peopled with farmers and tramps and step-mothers and children, trailing clouds of glory even when they boast of the superiorities of "Renselaer," a world of hardworking women and hard-luck men, and poverty and prosperity, and drunkards and raccoons and dogs and grandmothers and lovers. To have presented through the medium of rhythmic chronicle, a world so sharply limned, so funny, so tragic, so mean, so noble, seems to us in itself a striking achievement in the craft of verse.

No mere word of criticism can of course evoke, at all as example can, Mr. Riley's genius of identification with varied human experiences, the remarkable concentration and lyric skill of his characterization. Here are two poems of his on the same general theme--grief in the presence of death. We may well speak our pride in the wonderful range of inspiration and the poetic endowment which can create on the same subject musical stories of the soul as diverse, as searching, as fresh and true, as the beloved poems of _Bereaved_ and _His Mother_.

BEREAVED

Let me come in where you sit weeping; aye,
Let me, who have not any child to die,
Weep with you for the little one whose love
I have known nothing of.

The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed
Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used
To kiss. Such arms, such hands I never knew.
May I not weep with you.

Fain would I be of service, say something
Between the tears, that would be comforting;
But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I,
Who have no child to die.

HIS MOTHER

Dead! my wayward boy--my own--
Not _the Law's_, but mine; the good
God's free gift to me alone,
Sanctified by motherhood.

"Bad," you say: well, who is not?
"Brutal"--"With a heart of stone"--
And "red-handed." Ah! the hot
Blood upon your own!

I come not with downward eyes,
To plead for him shamedly:
God did not apologize
When He gave the boy to me.

Simply, I make ready now
For His verdict. You prepare--
You have killed us both--and how
Will you face us There!

_E. W._

THE OPEN DOOR

Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics that POETRY may become a house of refuge for minor poets.

The phrase is somewhat worn. Paragraphers have done their worst for the minor poet, while they have allowed the minor painter, sculptor, actor--worst of all, architect--to go scot-free. The world which laughs at the experimenter in verse, walks negligently through our streets, and goes seriously, even reverently, to the annual exhibitions in our cities, examining hundreds of pictures and statues without expecting even the prize-winners to be masterpieces.

During the past year a score or more of cash prizes, ranging from one hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, were awarded in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Washington, New York and Boston for minor works of modern art. No word of superlative praise has been uttered for one of them: the first prize-winner in Pittsburgh was a delicately pretty picture by a second-rate Englishman; in Chicago it was a clever landscape by a promising young American. If a single prize-winner in the entire list, many of which were bought at high prices by public museums, was a masterpiece, no critic has yet dared to say so.

In fact, such a word would be presumptuous, since no contemporary can utter the final verdict. Our solicitous critics should remember that Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Burns, were minor poets to the subjects of King George the Fourth, Poe and Whitman to the subjects of King Longfellow. Moreover, we might remind them that Drayton, Lovelace, Herrick, and many another delicate lyrist of the anthologies, whose perfect songs show singular tenacity of life, remain minor poets through the slightness of their motive; they created little masterpieces, not great ones.

The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine--may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions. Without muzzles and braces this is manifestly impossible unless all the critical articles are written by one person.

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Mr. Ezra Pound has consented to act as foreign correspondent of POETRY, keeping its readers informed of the present interests of the art in England, France and elsewhere.

The response of poets on both sides of the Atlantic has been most encouraging, so that the quality of the next few numbers is assured. One of our most important contributions is Mr. John G. Neihardt's brief recently finished tragedy, _The Death of Agrippina_, to which an entire number will be devoted within a few months.

Mr. Joseph Campbell is one of the younger poets closely associated with the renaissance of art and letters in Ireland. His first book of poems was _The Gilly of Christ_; a later volume including these is _The Mountainy Singer_ (Maunsel & Co.).

Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, the New York poet and magazine editor, has published three volumes of verse, _The Quiet Singer_ (Rickey), _Manhattan_, and _Youth and Other Poems_; also five song-cycles in collaboration with two composers.

Mr. Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one of the "Imagistes," a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in _vers libre_; trying to attain in English certain subtleties of cadence of the kind which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French. Mr. Aldington has published little as yet, and nothing in America.

Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the well-known writer on art, began comparatively late to publish verse in the magazines. Her volume, _Poems_ (Macmillan), was issued in 1910.

Miss Long and Miss Widdemer are young Americans, some of whose poems have appeared in various magazines.

The last issue of POETRY accredited Mr. Ezra Pound's _Provenca_ to the Houghton-Mifflin Co. This was an error; Small, Maynard & Co. are Mr. Pound's American publishers.

BOOKS RECEIVED

_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts. John Lane.
_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson._ John Lane.
_Lyrical Poems_, by Lucy Lyttelton. Thomas B. Mosher.
_The Silence of Amor_, by Fiona Macleod, Thomas B. Mosher.
_Spring in Tuscany and Other Lyrics._ Thomas B. Mosher.
_Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins.
Mitchell Kennerley.
_A Round of Rimes_, by Denis A. MacCarthy. Little, Brown & Co.
_Voices from Erin and Other Poems_, by Denis A. MacCarthy.
Little, Brown & Co.
_Love and The Year and Other Poems_, by Grace Griswold.
Duffield & Co.
_Songs and Sonnets_, by Webster Ford. The Rooks Press, Chicago.
_The Quiet Courage and Other Songs of the Unafraid_,
by Everard Jack Appleton. Stewart and Kidd Co.
_In Cupid's Chains and Other Poems_, by Benjamin F. Woodcox.
Woodcox & Fanner.
_Maverick_, by Hervey White. Maverick Press.

Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 3

DECEMBER, 1912

THE MOUNTAIN TOMB

Pour wine and dance, if manhood still have pride,
Bring roses, if the rose be yet in bloom;
The cataract smokes on the mountain side.
Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet,
Let there be no foot silent in the room,
Nor mouth with kissing nor the wine unwet.
Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.

In vain, in vain; the cataract still cries,
The everlasting taper lights the gloom,
All wisdom shut into its onyx eyes.
Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.

_William Butler Yeats_

TO A CHILD DANCING UPON THE SHORE

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won.
And he, the best warrior, dead
And all the sheaves to bind!
What need that you should dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

_William Butler Yeats_

FALLEN MAJESTY

Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face
And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone,
Like some last courtier at a gipsy camping place
Babbling of fallen majesty, records what's gone.
The lineaments, the heart that laughter has made sweet,
These, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd
Will gather and not know that through its very street
Once walked a thing that seemed, as it were, a burning cloud.

_William Butler Yeats_

LOVE AND THE BIRD

The moments passed as at a play,
I had the wisdom love can bring,
I had my share of mother wit;
And yet for all that I could say,
And though I had her praise for it,
And she seemed happy as a king,
Love's moon was withering away.

Believing every word I said
I praised her body and her mind,
Till pride had made her eyes grow bright,
And pleasure made her cheeks grow red,
And vanity her footfall light;
Yet we, for all that praise, could find
Nothing but darkness overhead.

I sat as silent as a stone
And knew, though she'd not said a word,
That even the best of love must die,
And had been savagely undone
Were it not that love, upon the cry
Of a most ridiculous little bird,
Threw up in the air his marvellous moon.

_William Butler Yeats_

THE REALISTS

Hope that you may understand.
What can books, of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land;
Paintings of the dolphin drawn;
Sea nymphs, in their pearly waggons,
Do but wake the hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons.

_William Butler Yeats_

SANGAR

TO LINCOLN STEFFENS

Somewhere I read a strange, old, rusty tale
Smelling of war; most curiously named
"The Mad Recreant Knight of the West."
Once, you have read, the round world brimmed with hate,
Stirred and revolted, flashed unceasingly
Facets of cruel splendor. And the strong
Harried the weak ...
Long past, long past, praise God
In these fair, peaceful, happy days.
The Tale:
Eastward the Huns break border,
Surf on a rotten dyke;
They have murdered the Eastern Warder
(His head on a pike).
"Arm thee, arm thee, my father!
"Swift rides the Goddes-bane,
"And the high nobles gather
"On the plain!"

"O blind world-wrath!" cried Sangar,
"Greatly I killed in youth,
"I dreamed men had done with anger
"Through Goddes truth!"
Smiled the boy then in faint scorn,
Hard with the battle-thrill;
"Arm thee, loud calls the war-horn
"And shrill!"

He has bowed to the voice stentorian,
Sick with thought of the grave--
He has called for his battered morion
And his scarred glaive.
On the boy's helm a glove
Of the Duke's daughter--
In his eyes splendor of love
And slaughter.

Hideous the Hun advances
Like a sea-tide on sand;
Unyielding, the haughty lances
Make dauntless stand.
And ever amid the clangor,
Butchering Hun and Hun,
With sorrowful face rides Sangar
And his son....

Broken is the wild invader
(Sullied, the whole world's fountains);
They have penned the murderous raider
With his back to the mountains.
Yet tho' what had been mead
Is now a bloody lake,
Still drink swords where men bleed,
Nor slake.

Now leaps one into the press--
The Hell 'twixt front and front--
Sangar, bloody and torn of dress
(He has borne the brunt).
"Hold!" cries "Peace! God's Peace!
"Heed ye what Christus says--"
And the wild battle gave surcease
In amaze.

"When will ye cast out hate?
"Brothers--my mad, mad brothers--
"Mercy, ere it be too late,
"These are sons of your mothers.
"For sake of Him who died on Tree,
"Who of all Creatures, loved the Least,"--
"Blasphemer! God of Battles, He!"
Cried a priest.

"Peace!" and with his two hands
Has broken in twain his glaive.
Weaponless, smiling he stands
(Coward or brave?)
"Traitor!" howls one rank, "Think ye
"The Hun be our brother?"
And "Fear we to die, craven, think ye?"
The other.

Then sprang his son to his side,
His lips with slaver were wet,
For he had felt how men died
And was lustful yet;
(On his bent helm a glove
Of the Duke's daughter,
In his eyes splendor of love
And slaughter)--

Shouting, "Father no more of mine!
"Shameful old man--abhorr'd,
"First traitor of all our line!"
Up the two-handed sword.
He smote--fell Sangar--and then
Screaming, red, the boy ran
Straight at the foe, and again
Hell began ...

Oh, there was joy in Heaven when Sangar came.
Sweet Mary wept, and bathed and bound his wounds,
And God the Father healed him of despair,
And Jesus gripped his hand, and laughed and laughed ...

_John Reed_

A LEGEND OF THE DOVE

Soft from the linden's bough,
Unmoved against the tranquil afternoon,
Eve's dove laments her now:
"Ah, gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?"

That yearning in his voice
Told not to Paradise a sorrow's tale:
As other birds rejoice
He sang, a brother to the nightingale.

By twilight on her breast
He saw the flower sleep, the star awake;
And calling her from rest,
Made all the dawn melodious for her sake.

And then the Tempter's breath,
The sword of exile and the mortal chain--
The heritage of death
That gave her heart to dust, his own to pain ...

In Eden desolate
The seraph heard his lonely music swoon,
As now, reiterate;
"Ah gone! long gone! shall not I find thee soon?"

_George Sterling_

AT THE GRAND CAÑON

Thou settest splendors in my sight, O Lord!
It seems as tho' a deep-hued sunset falls
Forever on these Cyclopean walls--
These battlements where Titan hosts have warred,
And hewn the world with devastating sword,
And shook with trumpets the eternal halls
Where seraphim lay hid by bloody palls
And only Hell and Silence were adored.

Lo! the abyss wherein great Satan's wings
Might gender tempests, and his dragons' breath
Fume up in pestilence. Beneath the sun
Or starry outposts on terrestrial things,
Is no such testimony unto Death
Nor altars builded to Oblivion.

_George Sterling_

KINDRED

Musing, between the sunset and the dark,
As Twilight in unhesitating hands
Bore from the faint horizon's underlands,
Silvern and chill, the moon's phantasmal ark,
I heard the sea, and far away could mark
Where that unalterable waste expands
In sevenfold sapphire from the mournful sands,
And saw beyond the deep a vibrant spark.

There sank the sun Arcturus, and I thought:
Star, by an ocean on a world of thine,
May not a being, born like me to die,
Confront a little the eternal Naught
And watch our isolated sun decline--
Sad for his evanescence, even as I?

_George Sterling_

REMEMBERED LIGHT

The years are a falling of snow,
Slow, but without cessation,
On hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were;
But snow and the crawling night in which it fell
May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame.
Thus it was that some slant of sunset
In the chasms of piled cloud--
Transient mountains that made a new horizon,
Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles--
Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,
Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone.

Clear in the vistas of memory,
The peaks of a world long unremembered,
Soared further than clouds, but fell not,
Based on hills that shook not nor melted
With that burden enormous, hardly to be believed.
Rent with stupendous chasms,
Full of an umber twilight,
I beheld that larger world.

Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine
Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,
Dull as with duskier tincture.
Like whimsical wings outspread but unstirring,
Flowers that seemed spirits of the twilight,
That must pass with its passing--
Too fragile for day or for darkness,
Fed the dusk with more delicate hues than its own.
Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours,
Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.

These things I beheld,
Till the gold was shaken with flight
Of fantastical wings like broken shadows,
Forerunning the darkness;
Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices,
Like pain's last cry ere oblivion.

_Clark Ashton Smith_

SORROWING OF WINDS

O winds that pass uncomforted
Through all the peacefulness of spring,
And tell the trees your sorrowing,
That they must moan till ye are fled!

Think ye the Tyrian distance holds
The crystal of unquestioned sleep?
That those forgetful purples keep
No veiled, contentious greens and golds?

Half with communicated grief,
Half that they are not free to pass
With you across the flickering grass,
Mourns each vibrating bough and leaf.

And I, with soul disquieted,
Shall find within the haunted spring
No peace, till your strange sorrowing
Is down the Tyrian distance fled.

_Clark Ashton Smith_

AMERICA

_I hear America singing_ ...
And the great prophet passed,
Serene, clear and untroubled
Into the silence vast.

When will the master-poet
Rise, with vision strong,
To mold her manifold music
Into a living song?

_I hear America singing_ ...
Beyond the beat and stress,
The chant of her shrill, unjaded,
Empiric loveliness.

Laughter, beyond mere scorning,
Wisdom surpassing wit,
Love, and the unscathed spirit,
These shall encompass it.

_Alice Corbin_

SYMBOLS

Who was it built the cradle of wrought gold?
A druid, chanting by the waters old.
Who was it kept the sword of vision bright?
A warrior, falling darkly in the fight.
Who was it put the crown upon the dove?
A woman, paling in the arms of love.
Oh, who but these, since Adam ceased to be,
Have kept their ancient guard about the Tree?

_Alice Corbin_

THE STAR

I saw a star fall in the night,
And a grey moth touched my cheek;
Such majesty immortals have,
Such pity for the weak.

_Alice Corbin_

NODES

The endless, foolish merriment of stars
Beside the pale cold sorrow of the moon,
Is like the wayward noises of the world
Beside my heart's uplifted silent tune.

The little broken glitter of the waves
Beside the golden sun's intense white blaze,
Is like the idle chatter of the crowd
Beside my heart's unwearied song of praise.

The sun and all the planets in the sky
Beside the sacred wonder of dim space,
Are notes upon a broken, tarnished lute
That God will someday mend and put in place.

And space, beside the little secret joy
Of God that sings forever in the clay,
Is smaller than the dust we can not see,
That yet dies not, till time and space decay.

And as the foolish merriment of stars
Beside the cold pale sorrow of the moon,
My little song, my little joy, my praise,
Beside God's ancient, everlasting rune.

_Alice Corbin_

POEMS

I

Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not. Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own. Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger. I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter; I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest.

Through birth and death, in this world or in others, wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same, the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar. When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

II

No more noisy, loud words from me, such is my master's will. Henceforth I deal in whispers. The speech of my heart will be carried on in murmurings of a song.

Men hasten to the King's market. All the buyers and sellers are there. But I have my untimely leave in the middle of the day, in the thick of work.

Let then the flowers come out in my garden, though it is not their time, and let the midday bees strike up their lazy hum.

Full many an hour have I spent in the strife of the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate of the empty days to draw my heart on to him, and I know not why is this sudden call to what useless inconsequence!

III

On the day when the lotus bloomed, alas, my mind was straying, and I knew it not. My basket was empty and the flower remained unheeded.

Only now and again a sadness fell upon me, and I started up from my dream and felt a sweet trace of a strange smell in the south wind.

That vague fragrance made my heart ache with longing, and it seemed to me that it was the eager breath of the summer seeking for its completion.

I knew not then that it was so near, that it was mine, and this perfect sweetness had blossomed in the depth of my own heart.

IV

By all means they try to hold me secure who love me in this world. But it is otherwise with thy love, which is greater than theirs, and thou keepest me free. Lest I forget them they never venture to leave me alone. But day passes by after day and thou are not seen.

If I call not thee in my prayers, if I keep not thee in my heart--thy love for me still waits for my love.

V

I was not aware of the moment when I first crossed the threshold of this life. What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery like a bud in the forest at midnight? When in the morning I looked upon the light I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world, that the inscrutable without name and form had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother. Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me. And because I love this life, I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when from the right breast the mother takes it away to find in the very next moment its consolation in the left one.

VI

Thou art the sky and thou art the nest as well. Oh, thou beautiful, there in the nest it is thy love that encloses the soul with colours and sounds and odours. There comes the morning with the golden basket in her right hand bearing the wreath of beauty, silently to crown the earth. And there comes the evening over the lonely meadows deserted by herds, through trackless paths, carrying cool draughts of peace in her golden pitcher from the western ocean of rest.

But there, where spreads the infinite sky for the soul to take her flight in, reigns the stainless white radiance. There is no day nor night, nor form nor colour, and never never a word.

_Rabindranath Tagore_

EDITORIAL COMMENT

A PERFECT RETURN

It is curious that the influence of Poe upon Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and through them upon English poets, and then through these last upon Americans, comes back to us in this round-about and indirect way. We have here an instance of what Whitman calls a "perfect return." We have denied Poe, we do not give him his full meed of appreciation even today, and yet we accept him through the disciples who have followed or have assimilated his tradition. And now that young Englishmen are beginning to feel the influence of Whitman upon French poetry, it may be that he too, through the imitation of _vers libre_ in America, will begin to experience a "perfect return."

Must we always accept American genius in this round-about fashion? Have we no true perspective that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look abroad for genius, only to find that it is of American origin?

* * * * *

This bit of marginalia, extracted from a note-book of 1909, was relieved of the necessity of further elaboration by supplementary evidence received in one day from two correspondents. One, a brief sentence from Mr. Allen Upward: "It is much to be wished that America should learn to honor her sons without waiting for the literary cliques of London."

The other, the following "news note" from Mr. Paul Scott Mowrer in Paris. The date of Léon Bazalgette's translation, however, is hardly so epochal as it would seem, since Whitman has been known for many years in France, having been partly translated during the nineties.

Mr. Mowrer writes:

"It is significant of American tardiness in the development of a national literary tradition that the name of Walt Whitman is today a greater influence with the young writers of the continent than with our own. Not since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so moved by anything American. The suggestion has even been made that 'Whitmanism' is rapidly to supersede 'Nietzscheism' as the dominant factor in modern thought. Léon Bazalgette translated _Leaves of Grass_ into French in 1908. A school of followers of the Whitman philosophy and style was an almost immediate consequence. Such of the leading reviews as sympathize at all with the strong 'young' movement to break the shackles of classicism which have so long bound French prosody to the heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine, are publishing not only articles on 'Whitmanism' as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new flexible chanting rhythms. In this regard _La Nouvelle Revue Francaise_, _La Renaissance Contemporaine_, and _L'Effort Libre_ have been preëminently hospitable.

"The new poems are not so much imitations of Whitman as inspirations from him. Those who have achieved most success in the mode thus far are perhaps Georges Duhamel, a leader of the 'Jeunes,' whose plays are at present attracting national notice; André Spire, who writes with something of the apostolic fervor of his Jewish ancestry; Henri Franck, who died recently, shortly after the publication of his volume, _La Danse Devant l'Arche_; Charles Vildrac, with _Le Livre d'Amour_; Philéas Lebesgue, the appearance in collected form of whose _Les Servitudes_ is awaited with keen interest; and finally, Jean Richard Bloch, editor of _L'Effort Libre_, whose prose, for example in his book of tales entitled _Levy_, is said to be directly rooted in Whitmanism.

"In Germany, too, the rolling intonations of the singer of democracy have awakened echoes. The _Moderne Weltdichtung_ has announced itself, with Whitman as guide, and such apostles as Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, in _Lobegesang des Lebens_, and Ernst Lissauer in _Der Acker_ and _Der Strom_.

"What is it about Whitman that Europe finds so inspiriting? First, his acceptance of the universe as he found it, his magnificently shouted comradeship with all nature and all men. Such a doctrine makes an instant though hardly logical appeal in nations where socialism is the political order of the day. And next, his disregard of literary tradition. Out of books more books, and out of them still more, with the fecundity of generations. But in this process of literary propagation thought, unfortunately, instead of arising like a child ever fresh and vigorous as in the beginning, grows more and more attenuated, paler, more sickly. The acclaim of Whitman is nothing less than the inevitable revolt against the modern flood of book-inspired books. Write from nature directly, from the people directly, from the political meeting, and the hayfield, and the factory--that is what the august American seems to his young disciples across the seas to be crying to them.

"Perhaps it is because America already holds as commonplaces these fundamentals seeming so new to Europe that the Whitman schools have sprung up stronger on the eastern side of the Atlantic than on the western."

It is not that America holds as commonplaces the fundamentals expressed in Whitman that there have been more followers of the Whitman method in Europe than in America, but that American poets, approaching poetry usually through terms of feeling, and apparently loath to apply an intellectual whip to themselves or others, have made no definite analysis of the rhythmic units of Whitman. We have been content to accept the English conception of the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman. The curious mingling of the concrete and the spiritual, which is what certain modern painters, perhaps under the Whitman suggestion, are trying to achieve, was so novel as to be disconcerting, and the vehicle so original as to appear uncouth--uncadenced, unmusical. The hide-bound, antiquated conception of English prosody is responsible for a great deal of dead timber. It is a significant fact that the English first accepted the spirit of Whitman, the French his method. The rhythmic measure of Whitman has yet to be correctly estimated by English and American poets. It has been sifted and weighed by the French poets, and though Whitman's influence upon modern French poetry has been questioned by English critics, the connection between his varied rhythmic units and modern _vers libre_ is too obvious to be discounted. There may be an innate necessity sufficient to cause a breaking-up of forms in a poetic language, but there is no reason to believe that Paris, the great clearing-house of all the arts, would not be quick to adopt a suggestion from without. English poets, certainly, have not been loath to accept suggestions from Paris.

At any rate this international acceptance of the two greatest American poets, and the realization of their international influence upon us, may awaken us to a new sense of responsibility. It would be a valuable lesson, if only we could learn to turn the international eye, in private, upon ourselves. If the American poet can learn to be less parochial, to apply the intellectual whip, to visualize his art, to separate it and see it apart from himself; we may learn then to appreciate the great poet when he is "in our midst." and not wait for the approval of English or French critics.

_A. C. H._

TAGORE'S POEMS

The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry. I do not use these terms with the looseness of contemporary journalism. Questions of poetic art are serious, not to be touched upon lightly or in a spirit of bravura.

Bengal is a nation of fifty million people. The great age of Bengali literature is this age in which we live. And the first Bengali whom I heard singing the lyrics of Tagore said, as simply as one would say it is four o'clock, "Yes, we speak of it as the Age of Rabindranath."

The six poems now published were chosen from a hundred lyrics about to appear in book form. They might just as well have been any other six, for they do not represent a summit of attainment but an average.

These poems are cast, in the original, in metres perhaps the most finished and most subtle of any known to us. If you refine the art of the troubadours, combine it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that the sound-unit principle of the most advanced artists in _vers libre_, you would get something like the system of Bengali verse. The sound of it when spoken is rather like good Greek, for Bengali is daughter of Sanscrit, which is a kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric idiom.

All this series of a hundred poems are made to music, for "Mr." Tagore is not only the great poet of Bengal, he is also their great musician. He teaches his songs, and they are sung throughout Bengal more or less as the troubadours' songs were sung through Europe in the twelfth century.

And we feel here in London, I think, much as the people of Petrarch's time must have felt about the mysterious lost language, the Greek that was just being restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections have been the goal of our endeavor ever since.

I speak with all seriousness when I say that this beginning of our more intimate intercourse with Bengal is the opening of another period. For one thing the content of this first brief series of poems will destroy the popular conception of Buddhism, for we in the Occident are apt to regard it as a religion negative and anti-Christian.

The Greek gave us humanism; a belief in _mens sana in corpore sano_, a belief in proportion and balance. The Greek shows us man as the sport of the gods; the sworn foe of fate and the natural forces. The Bengali brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship between man and the gods; between man and nature.

It is all very well to object that this is not the first time we have had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the arts alone can we find the inner heart of a people. There is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction in this eastern expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts alone that one people learns to meet another far distant people in friendship and respect.

I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship is nearer for the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to London.

_Ezra Pound_

REVIEWS

_The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson_ (John Lane.)

This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago, had a real lyric gift, though a very slight one. The present volume is a collection of all her poems, from the first girlish sheaf _Tares_, to _The Lamp and the Lute_, which she was preparing for publication when she died.

Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples along as smoothly and delicately as a meadow rill, with never a pause nor a flurry nor a thrill. She sings prettily of everyone, from the _Last Fairy_ to William Ernest Henley, and of everything, from _Death and Justice_ to the _Orchard of the Moon_, but she has nothing arresting or important to say of any of these subjects, and no keen magic of phrase to give her warbling that intense vitality which would win for her the undying fame prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.

Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light, and her tune a quiet monotone of gentle soothing music which has a certain soft appeal. Perhaps the secret of it is the fine quality of soul which breathes through these numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole story, and too preoccupied with the little things around and within her to pay much attention to the thinking, fighting, ever-moving world without.

* * * * *

A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is _The Adventures of Young Maverick_, by Hervey White, who runs a printing press at Woodstock, N. Y., and bravely publishes _The Wild Hawk_, his own little magazine. The poem has as many moods as _Don Juan_, which is plainly, though not tyrannically, its model.

The poem is long for these days--five cantos and nearly six hundred Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most casual reader, one would think, could scarcely find it tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage, and the poem becomes eloquently pictorial in setting forth his beauty:

Young Maverick in the upland pastures lay
Woven as in the grass, while star-like flowers,
Shaking their petals down in sweet array
Dappled his flanks with gentle breathless showers.
The thread green stems, tangled in bending bowers,
Their pollen plumes of dust closed over him,
Enwoofing through the drowse of summer hours,
The pattern of his body, head and limb;
His color of pale gold glowed as with sunshine dim.

The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom, spaciousness, strong sunshine; also its careless good humor and half sardonic fun. The race between the horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and rhythmical as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family, even to the fat old Gregorio, are characterized to the life, with a sympathy only too rare among writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.

Certain other characterizations are equally incisive, this for example:

Sometimes I peep into a modern poet
Like Arthur Symons, vaguely beautiful,
Who loves but love, not caring who shall know it;
I wonder that he never finds it dull.

Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly a poet of the broad, level average American people, that both social and artistic theories sit very lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance now and then, because he can not help it, but always he achieves a warm vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.

* * * * *

_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the ingenious effort of a theorist in human nature to unroll the convolutions of the immortal traitor's soul. And it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to remould characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition. In the art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries to make him over into a pattern of misguided loyalty has his labor for his pains.

The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered is accurately measured and sufficiently sonorous.

_H. M._

_Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins (Mitchell Kennerley).

The poems in this volume are creditable in texture, revealing a conscious sense of artistic workmanship which it is a pleasure to find in a book of first poems by a young American. A certain rhythmic monotony may be mentioned as an impression gained from a consecutive reading, and a prevailing twilight mood, united, in the longer poems, with a vein of the emotionally feminine.

Two short lyrics, however, _I Am the Wind_ and _The Tragedienne_, stand apart in isolated perfection, even as the two Greek columns in the ruined theater at Arles; an impression recalled by the opening stanza of _The Tragedienne_: