Chapter II: Nocturne (3)

Oh I longed, when I went in the woods today,
To see the fauns come out and play,
To see a satyr try to seize
A dryad's waist--and bark his knees,
To see a river-nymph waylay
And shock him with a dash of spray!--
And I teased, like a child, by brooks and trees:
"Come back again! We need you! _Please!_
Come back and teach us how to play!"
But nowhere in the woods were they.

I found, when I went in the town today,
A thousand people on their way
To offices and factories--
And never a single soul at ease;
And how could I help but sigh and say:
"What can it profit them, how can it pay
To strain the eye with rivalries
Until the dark is all it sees?--
Or to manage, more than others may,
To store the wasted gain away?"

But one of the crowd looked up today,
With pointed brows. I heard him say:
"Out of the meadows and rivers and trees
We fauns and many companies
Of nymphs have come. And we are these,
These people, each upon his way,
Looking for work, working for pay--
And paying all our energies
To earn true love ... For, seeming gay,
"Once we were sad," I heard him say.

NEIGHBORS

Neighbors are not neighborly
Who close the windows tight,--
Nor those who fix a peeping eye
For finding things not right.

Let me have faith, is what I pray,
And let my faith be strong!--
But who am I, is what I say,
To think my neighbor wrong?

And though my neighbor may deny
That faith could be so slight,
May call me wrong, yet who am I
To think my neighbor right?

Perhaps we wisely by and by
May learn it of each other,
That he is right and so am I--
And save a lot of bother.

THE HILLS OF SAN JOSÉ

I look at the long low hills of golden brown
With their little wooded canyons
And at the haze hanging its beauty in the air--
And I am caught and held, as a ball is caught and held by a player
Who leaps for it in the field.
And as the heart in the breast of the player beats toward the ball,
And as the heart beats in the breast of him who shouts
toward the player,
So my heart beats toward the hills that are playing ball with the sun,
That leap to catch the sun
And to throw it to other hills--
Or to me!

GRIEVE NOT FOR BEAUTY

Grieve not for the invisible, transported brow
On which like leaves the dark hair grew,
Nor for the lips of laughter that are now
Laughing inaudibly in sun and dew,
Nor for those limbs that, fallen low
And seeming faint and slow,
Shall yet pursue
More ways of swiftness than the swallow dips
Among ... and find more winds than ever blew
The straining sails of unimpeded ships!
Mourn not!--yield only happy tears
To deeper beauty than appears!

THE MYSTIC

By seven vineyards on one hill
We walked. The native wine
In clusters grew beside us two,
For your lips and for mine,

When, "Hark!" you said,--"Was that a bell
Or a bubbling spring we heard?"
But I was wise and closed my eyes
And listened to a bird;

For as summer leaves are bent and shake
With singers passing through,
So moves in me continually
The wingèd breath of you.

You tasted from a single vine
And took from that your fill--
But I inclined to every kind,
All seven on one hill.

PASSING NEAR

I had not till today been sure,
But now I know:
Dead men and women come and go
Under the pure
Sequestering snow.

And under the autumnal fern
And carmine bush,
Under the shadow of a thrush,
They move and learn;
And in the rush

Of all the mountain-brooks that wake
With upward fling
To brush and break the loosening cling
Of ice, they shake
The air with Spring!

I had not till today been sure,
But now I know:
Dead youths and maidens come and go
Below the lure
And undertow

Of cities, under every street
Of empty stress,
Or heart of an adulteress:
Each loud retreat
Of lovelessness.

For only by the stir we make
In passing near
Are we confused, and cannot hear
The ways they take
Certain and clear.

Today I happened in a place
Where all around
Was silence; until, underground,
I heard a pace,
A happy sound.

And people whom I there could see
Tenderly smiled,
While under a wood of silent, wild
Antiquity
Wandered a child,

Leading his mother by the hand,
Happy and slow,
Teaching his mother where to go
Under the snow.
Not even now I understand--
I only know.

_Witter Bynner_

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

_The Story of a Round House and other Poems_,

by JOHN MASEFIELD (Macmillan)

Not long ago I chanced to see upon a well-known page, reflective and sincere, these words: "The invisible root out of which the poetry deepest in and dearest to humanity grows is Friendship."

A recent volume may well serve as a distinguished illustration of the saying's truth. Few persons, I think, will read _The Story of a Round House and other Poems_ without a sense that the invisible root of its deep poetry is that fine power which Whitman called Friendship, the genius of sympathetic imagination.

This is the force that knits the sinews of the chief, the life-size figure of the book. _Dauber_ is the tale of a man and his work. It is the story of an artist in the making. The heroic struggles of an English farmer's son of twenty-one to become a painter of ships and the ocean, form the drama of the poem. The scene is a voyage around the Horn, the ship-board and round-house of a clipper where Dauber spends cruel, grinding months of effort to become an able seaman on the road of his further purpose--

Of beating thought into the perfect line.

His fall from the yard-arm toward the close of the conquered horrors of his testing voyage; the catastrophe of his death after

He had emerged out of the iron time
And knew that he could compass his life's scheme--

these make the end of the tragedy.

Tragedy? Yes. But a tragedy of the same temper as that of the great Dane, where the pursuit of a mortal soul's intention is more, far more, than his mortality. Unseen forever by the world, part of its unheard melodies, are all the lines and colors of the Dauber's dreaming. At Elsinore rules Fortinbras, the foe: the fight is lost; the fighter has been slain. These are great issues, hard, unjust and wrong. But the greatest issue of all is that men should be made of the stuff of magnificence. You close the poem, you listen to the last speech of its deep sea-music, thinking: Here is death, the real death we all must die; here is futility, and who knows what we all are here for? But here is glory.

Only less powerful than the impression of the strain of Dauber's endeavor, is the impression of its loneliness. The sneers of the reefers, their practical jokes, the dulness, the arrogance, the smugness and endless misunderstanding, the meanness of man on the apprentice journey, has a keener tooth than the storm-wind.

The verities of _Dauber_ are built out of veracities. The reader must face the hardship of labor at sea. He must face the squalors, the miseries. If he cannot find poetry in a presentment of the cruel, dizzying reality of a sailor's night on a yard-arm in the icy gale off Cape Horn, then he will not perhaps feel in the poem the uncompromising raciness inherent in romances that are true. For the whole manner of this sea-piece is that of bold, free-hand drawing of things as they are. Its final event presents a genuinely epic subject from our contemporary history--the catastrophic character of common labor, and one of its multitudinous fatalities.

Epic rather than lyric, the verse of _Dauber_ has an admirable and refreshing variety in its movement. It speaks the high, wild cry of an eagle:

--the eagle's song
Screamed from her desolate screes and splintered scars.

It speaks thick-crowding discomforts on the mast with a slapping, frozen sail:

His sheath-knife flashed,
His numb hand hacked with it to clear the strips;
The flying ice was salt upon his lips.
The ice was caking on his oil-skins; cold
Struck to his marrow, beat upon him strong,
The chill palsied his blood, it made him old;
The frosty scatter of death was being flung.

Some of the lines, such as--

The blackness crunched all memory of the sun--

have the hard ring, the thick-packed consonantal beauty of stirring Greek.

_Dauber_ will have value to American poetry-readers if only from its mere power of revealing that poetry is not alone the mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells, though it be that also, but may have music of innumerable kinds.

_Biography_, the next poem in the book, sings with a different voice and sees from a different point of view, the difficulty of re-creating in expression--here expression through words, not through colors--

This many-pictured world of many passions.

_Biography_, too, rises from the invisible root of friendship and bears with wonderfully vivid arborescence an appreciative tale of the fine contribution of different companionships to a life.

Among the two-score shorter lyrics of the collection are songs of the sea or of the country-side; chants of coast-town bells and ports, marine ballads, and love-poems. This is, however, the loosest entitling of their kinds; nothing but the work itself in its entirety, can ever tell the actual subject of any true poem. Of these kinds it is not to the marine ballads that one turns back again and again, not to the story of "Spanish Waters" nor to any of the jingling-gold, the clinking-glass, the treasure-wreck verses of the book. Their tunes are spirited, but not a tenth as spirited as those of "The Pirates of Penzance." Indeed, to the conventionally villainous among fictive sea-faring persons of song, Gilbert and Sullivan seem to have done something that cannot now ever be undone.

The poems in the volume one does turn back to again and again are those with the great singing tones, that pour forth with originality, with inexpressible free grace and native power. Again and again you will read _A Creed_, _C. L. M._, _Born for Nought Else_, _Roadways_, _Truth_, _The Wild Duck_, _Her Heart_, and--

But at the falling of the tide
The golden birds still sing and gleam.
The Atlanteans have not died,
Immortal things still give us dream.

The dream that fires man's heart to make,
To build, to do, to sing or say
A beauty Death can never take,
An Adam from the crumbled clay.

Wonderful, wonderful it is that in the hearing of our own generation, one great voice after another has called and sung to the world from the midst of the sea-mists of England. From the poetry of Swinburne, of Rudyard Kipling, of John Masefield immortal things still give us dream.

Among the poems of this new book, more than one appear as incarnations of the beauty Death can never take. Of these, perhaps, none is more characteristic of the poet, nor will any more fittingly evince his volume's quality than _Truth_.

Man with his burning soul
Has but an hour of breath
To build a ship of Truth
In which his soul may sail,
Sail on the sea of death.
For death takes toll
Of beauty, courage, youth,
Of all but Truth.

Life's city ways are dark,
Men mutter by, the wells
Of the great waters moan.
O death, O sea, O tide,
The waters moan like bells.
No light, no mark,
The soul goes out alone
On seas unknown.

Stripped of all purple robes,
Stripped of all golden lies,
I will not be afraid.
Truth will preserve through death;
Perhaps the stars will rise,
The stars like globes.
The ship my striving made
May see night fade.

_Edith Wyatt_

_Présences_, par P. J. Jouve: Georges Crès, Paris.

I take pleasure in welcoming, in Monsieur Jouve, a contemporary. He writes the new jargon and I have not the slightest doubt that he is a poet.

Whatever may be said against automobiles and aeroplanes and the modernist way of speaking of them, and however much one may argue that this new sort of work is mannered, and that its style will pass, still it is indisputable that the vitality of the time exists in such work.

Here is a book that you can read without being dead sure of what you will find on the next page, or at the end of the next couplet. There is no doubt that M. Jouve sees with his own eyes and feels with his own nerves. Nothing is more boresome than an author who pretends to know less about things than he really does know. It is this silly sort of false naïveté that rots the weaker productions of Maeterlinck. Thank heaven the advance guard is in process of escaping it.

It is possible that the new style will grow as weak in the future in the hands of imitators as has, by now, the Victorian manner, but for the nonce it is refreshing. Work of this sort can not be produced by the yard in stolid imitation of dead authors.

I defy anyone to read it without being forced to think, immediately, about life and the nature of things. I have perused this volume twice, and I have enjoyed it.

_E. P._

THE POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Poetry Society of America, organized in 1910, was a natural response, perhaps at the time unconscious, to the reawakened interest in poetry, now so widely apparent.

There seemed no reason why poetry, one of the noblest of the arts, should not take to itself visible organization as well as its sister arts of music and painting, since it was certain that such organization contributed much to their advancement and appreciation. Poetry alone remained an isolated art, save through the doubtful value of coteries dedicated to the study of some particular poet. In the sense of fellowship, of the creative sympathy of contact, of the keener appreciation which must follow the wider knowledge of an art, poetry stood alone, detached from these avenues open from the beginning to other arts.

The Society was therefore founded, with a charter membership of about fifty persons, which included many of the poets doing significant work to-day, together with critics and representatives of other arts, the purpose from the outset being to include the appreciators of poetry as well as its producers. It has grown to nearly two hundred members, distributed from coast to coast, and eventually it will probably resolve itself into branch societies, with the chief organization, as now, in New York. Such societies should have a wide influence upon their respective communities in stimulating interest in the work of living poets, to which the Poetry Society as an organization is chiefly addressed.

Since the passing of the nineteenth-century poets, the art of poetry, like the art of painting, has taken on new forms and become the vehicle of a new message. The poet of to-day speaks through so different a medium, his themes are so diverse from those of the elder generation, that he cannot hope to find his public in their lingering audience. He must look to his contemporaries, to those touched by the same issues and responsive to the same ideals. To aid in creating this atmosphere for the poet, to be the nucleus of a movement for the wider knowledge of contemporaneous verse, the Poetry Society of America took form and in its brief period has, I think, justified the idea of its promoters.

Its meetings are held once a month at the National Arts Club in New York, with which it is affiliated, and are given chiefly to the reading and discussion of poetry, both of recently published volumes and of poems submitted anonymously. This feature has proved perhaps the most attractive, and while criticism based upon one hearing of a poem cannot be taken as authoritative, it is often constructive and valuable.

The Society is assembling an interesting collection of books, a twentieth century library of American poetry. Aside from its own collection, it is taking steps to promote a wider representation of modern poets in public libraries.

_Jessie B. Rittenhouse._

NOTES

"THAT MASS OF DOLTS"

Mr. Pound's phrase in his poem _To Whistler, American_, has aroused more or less resentment, some of it quite emphatic. Apparently we of "these states" have no longing for an Ezekiel; our prophets must give us, not the bitter medicine which possibly we need, but the sugar-and-water of compliment which we can always swallow with a smile.

Perhaps we should examine our consciences a little, or at least step down from our self-erected pedestals long enough to listen to this accusation. What has become of our boasted sense of humor if we cannot let our young poets rail, or our sense of justice if we cannot cease smiling and weigh their words? In certain respects we Americans are a "mass of dolts," and in none more than our huge stolid, fundamental indifference to our own art. Mr. Pound is not the first American poet who has stood with his back to the wall, and struck out blindly with clenched fists in a fierce impulse to fight. Nor is he the first whom we, by this same stolid and indifferent rejection, have forced into exile and rebellion.

After a young poet has applied in vain to the whole list of American publishers and editors, and learned that even though he were a genius of the first magnitude they could not risk money or space on his poetry because the public would not buy it--after a series of such rebuffs our young aspirant goes abroad and succeeds in interesting some London publisher. The English critics, let us say, praise his book, and echoes of their praises reach our astonished ears. Thereupon the poet in exile finds that he has thus gained a public, and editorial suffrages, in America, and that the most effective way of increasing that public and those suffrages is, to remain in exile and guard his foreign reputation.

Meantime it is quite probable that a serious poet will have grown weary of such open and unashamed colonialism, that he will prefer to stay among people who are seriously interested in aesthetics and who know their own minds. For nothing is so hard to meet as indifference; blows are easier for a live man to endure than neglect. The poet who cries out his message against a stone wall will be silenced in the end, even though he bear a seraph's wand and speak with the tongues of angels.

* * * * *

One phase of our colonialism in art, the singing of opera in foreign languages, has been persistently opposed by Eleanor E. Freer, who has set to music of rare distinction many of the finest English lyrics, old and new. She writes:

In the Basilikon Doron, King James I of
England writes to his son: "And I would, also,
advise you to write in your own language; for
there is nothing left to be said in Greek and
Latin already--and besides that, it best becometh
a King to purify and make famous his own tongue."
Might we add, it best becometh the kings of art
in America and England to sing their own language
and thus aid in the progress of their national
music and poetry?

* * * * *

Messrs. Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner belong to the younger group of American poets, both having been born since 1880, the former in Davenport, Iowa, and the latter in Brooklyn. Both were graduated from Harvard early in this century, after which Mr. Ficke was admitted to the bar, and Mr. Bynner became assistant editor of McClure's.

Mr. Ficke has published _From the Isles_, _The Happy Princess_, _The Earth Passion_ and _The Breaking of Bonds_; also _Mr. Faust_, a dramatic poem, and a series of poems called _Twelve Japanese Painters_, will be published this year. Mr. Bynner has published _An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems_, and _An Immigrant_. His play, _His Father's House_, was recently produced in California.

The March number of _Poetry_ will contain _The Silent House_, a one-act play, by Agnes Lee, and poems by Alice Meynell, Alfred Noyes, Fannie Stearns Davis and others.

BOOKS RECEIVED

_Bugle Notes of Courage and Love_, by Althea A. Ogden.
Unity Publishing Co.
_Altar-Side Messages_, by Evelyn H. Walker. Unity Publishing Co.
_Dream Harbor_, by J. W. Vallandingham. Privately printed.
_Hopeful Thoughts_, by Eleanor Hope. Franklin Hudson Publishing Co.
_The Youth Replies_, by Louis How. Sherman, French & Co.
_Songs of the Love Unending_, A Sonnet Sequence,
by Kendall Banning. Brothers of the Book.
_William Allingham_, The Golden Treasury Series. The Macmillan Co.
_Idylls Beside the Strand_, by Franklin F. Phillips.
Sherman, French & Co.
_The Minstrel with the Self-Same Song_, by Charles A. Fisher.
The Eichelberger Book Co.
_The Wife of Potiphar_, with Other Poems, by Harvey M. Watts.
The John C. Winston Co.
_A Scroll of Seers_, A Wall Anthology. Peter Paul & Son.

Poetry VOL. I
A Magazine of Verse NO. 6

MARCH, 1913

THE SILENT HOUSE

_David._ [_Re-reading a letter._] How may a letter bring
such darkness down--
With this: "She dallied with your love too long!"
And this: "It is the word of all the town:
"Corinna has no soul, for all her song!"

_Martha._ [_Entering with flowers._] O sir, I bring you
flaming bergamot,
And early asters, for your window-sill.
And where I found them? Now you'll guess it not.
I visited the garden on the hill,
And gathered till my arms could hold no more.

_David._ The garden of the little silent house!

_Martha._ The city lured her from her viny door.
But see, the flowers have stayed!

_David._ They seem to drowse
And dream of one they lost, a paler-blown.
How fares the house upon the hill?

_Martha._ The blinds
Are fast of late, and all are intergrown
With weedy havoc tossed by searching winds.

_David._ How somber suddenly the sky! A shower
Is in the air.

_Martha._ I'll light the lamps.

_David._ Not yet.
Leave me the beauty of the twilit hour.

_Martha._ Hear the wind rising! How the moorings fret!
More than a shower is on its way through space.
I would not be aboard of yonder barque.
[_She goes out._]
_David._ Corinna! Now may I recall her face.
It is my light to think by in the dark.
Yes, all my years of study, all the will
Tenacious to achieve, the tempered strife,
The victories attained through patient skill,
Lie at the door of one dear human life.
And yet ... the letter ...
Often have I read
How love relumes the flowers and the trees.
True! For my world is newly garmented:
Rewards seem slight, and slighter penalties.
Daily companionship is more and more.
To make one little good more viable,
To lift one load, is worth the heart's outpour.
And she--she has made all things wonderful.
And yet ... the letter ...
O to break a spell
Wherein the stars are crumbling unto dust!
There never was a hope--I know it well,
And struggle on, and love because I must.
Never a hope? Shall ever any scheme,
Her silence, or alarm of written word,
Or voiced asseveration, shake my dream?
She loves me! By love's anguish, I have heard!
We two from our soul-towers across a vale
Are calling each to each, alert, aware.
Shall one of us one day the other hail,
And no reply be borne upon the air?
Corinna, come to light my heart's dim place!
O come to me, Belovèd and Besought,
O'er grief, o'er gladness,--even o'er death apace,--
For I could greet your phantom, so it brought
Love's own reality!...
A song of hers
Seems striving hither, a faint villanelle
Half smothered by the gale's mad roisterers.
She used to sing it in the bracken dell.
Here is the rain against the window beating
In heavy drops that presage wilder storm.
The lake is lost within a lurid sheeting;
The house upon the hill has changed its form.
The melancholy pine-trees weep in rocking.
And what's that clamor at the outer door?
Martha! O Martha! Somebody is knocking! [_Calling._]

_Martha._ [_Re-entering._] You hear the rills that down
the gutters roar.

_David._ And are you deaf? The door--go open it!
This is no night to leave a man outside!

_Martha._ [_Muttering and going toward the door._] And
is it I am growing deaf a bit,
And blind a bit, with other ill-betide!
Well, I can see to thread a needle still,
And I can hear the ticking of the clock,
And I can fetch a basket from the mill.
But hallow me if ever I heard knock!
[_She throws the door open. David starts up and rushes
forward with outstretched arms._]
_David._ Corinna! You, Corinna! Drenched and cold!
At last, at last! But how in all the rain!
Martha!
[_Martha stands motionless, unseeing._]
Good Martha, you are growing old!
Draw fast the shades--shut out the hurricane.
Here, take the dripping cloak from out the room;
Bring cordial from the purple damson pressed,
And light the lamps, the candles--fire the gloom.
Why stand you gaping? See you not the guest?

_Martha._ I opened wide the door unto the storm.
But never heard I step upon the sill.
All the black night let in no living form.
I see no guest. Look hard as e'er I will,
I see none here but you and my poor self.

_David._ The room that was my mother's room prepare.
Spread out warm garments on the oaken shelf--
Her gown, the little shawl she used to wear.
[_Martha, wide-eyed, bewildered, lights the lamps and
candles and goes out, raising her hands._]
_Corinna._ The moments I may tarry fade and press.
Something impelled me hither, some clear flame.
They said I had no soul! O David, yes,
They said I had no soul! And so I came.
I have been singing, singing, all the way,
O, singing ever since the darkness grew
And I grew chill and followed the small ray.
Lean close, and let my longing rest in you!

_David._ Dear balm of light, I never thought to win
From out the pallid hours for ever throbbing!
How did you know the sorrow I was in?

_Corinna._ A flock of leaves came sobbing, sobbing, sobbing.

_David._ O, now I hold you fast, my love, my own,
My festival upleaping from an ember!
But, timid child, how could you come alone
Across the pathless woods?

_Corinna._ Do you remember?--
Over the summer lake one starry, stilly,
Sweet night, when you and I were drifting, dear,
I frighted at the shadow of a lily!
It is all strange, but now I have no fear.

_David._ Your eyes are weary, drooping. Sleep, then, sleep.

_Corinna._ I must go over to the silent house.

_David._ The dwelling stands forsaken up the steep,
With never beast nor human to arouse!

_Corinna._ Soon will the windows gleam with many lamps.
Hark!--heavy wheels are toiling to the north.

_David._ I will go with you where the darkness ramps.

_Corinna._ Strong arms are in the storm to bear me forth.

_David._ Not in these garments dripping as the trees!
Not in these clinging shadows!

_Corinna._ Ah, good-night!
Dear love, dear love, I must go forth in these.
Tomorrow you shall see me all in white.

_Agnes Lee_

THE ORACLE

(_To the New Telescope on Mt. Wilson_)

Of old sat one at Delphi brooding o'er
The fretful earth;--ironically wise,
Veiling her prescience in dark replies,
She shaped the fates of men with mystic lore.
The oracle is silent now. No more
Fate parts the cloud that round omniscience lies.
But thou, O Seer, dost tease our wild surmise
With portents passing all the wealth of yore.
For thou shalt spell the very thoughts of God!
Before thy boundless vision, world on world
Shall multiply in glit'ring sequence far;
And all the little ways which men have trod
Shall be as nothing by His star-dust whirled
Into the making of a single star.

A GARGOYLE ON NOTRE DAME

With angel's wings and brutish-human form,
Weathered with centuries of sun and storm,
He crouches yonder on the gallery wall,
Monstrous, superb, indifferent, cynical:
And all the pulse of Paris cannot stir
Her one immutable philosopher.

_Edmund Kemper Broadus_

SANTA BARBARA BEACH

Now while the sunset offers,
Shall we not take our own:
The gems, the blazing coffers,
The seas, the shores, the throne?

The sky-ships, radiant-masted,
Move out, bear low our way.
Oh, Life was dark while it lasted,
Now for enduring day.

Now with the world far under,
To draw up drowning men
And show them lands of wonder
Where they may build again.

There earthly sorrow falters,
There longing has its wage;
There gleam the ivory altars
Of our lost pilgrimage.

--Swift flame--then shipwrecks only
Beach in the ruined light;
Above them reach up lonely
The headlands of the night.

A hurt bird cries and flutters
Her dabbled breast of brown;
The western wall unshutters
To fling one last rose down.

A rose, a wild light after--
And life calls through the years,
"Who dreams my fountains' laughter
Shall feed my wells with tears."

_Ridgely Torrence_

MATERNITY

One wept, whose only babe was dead,
New-born ten years ago.
"Weep not; he is in bliss," they said.
She answered, "Even so.

"Ten years ago was born in pain
A child, not now forlorn;
But oh, ten years ago in vain
A mother, a mother was born."

_Alice Meynell_

PROFITS

Yes, stars were with me formerly.
(I also knew the wind and sea;
And hill-tops had my feet by heart.
Their shaggéd heights would sting and start
When I came leaping on their backs.
I knew the earth's queer crooked cracks,
Where hidden waters weave a low
And druid chant of joy and woe.)

But stars were with me most of all.
I heard them flame and break and fall.
Their excellent array, their free
Encounter with Eternity,
I learned. And it was good to know
That where God walked, I too might go.

Now, all these things are passed. For I
Grow very old and glad to die.
What did they profit me, say you,
These distant bloodless things I knew?
Profit? What profit hath the sea
Of her deep-throated threnody?
What profit hath the sun, who stands
Staring on space with idle hands?
And what should God Himself acquire
From all the aeons' blood and fire?

My profit is as theirs: to be
Made proof against mortality:
To know that I have companied
With all that shines and lives, amid
So much the years sift through their hands,
Most mortal, windy, worthless sands.

This day I have great peace. With me
Shall stars abide eternally!

TWO SONGS OF CONN THE FOOL

MOON FOLLY

I will go up the mountain after the Moon:
She is caught in a dead fir-tree.
Like a great pale apple of silver and pearl,
Like a great pale apple is she.

I will leap and will clasp her in quick cold hands
And carry her home in my sack.
I will set her down safe on the oaken bench
That stands at the chimney-back.
And then I will sit by the fire all night,
And sit by the fire all day.
I will gnaw at the Moon to my heart's delight,
Till I gnaw her slowly away.

And while I grow mad with the Moon's cold taste,
The World may beat on my door,
Crying "Come out!" and crying "Make haste!
And give us the Moon once more!"
But I will not answer them ever at all;
I will laugh, as I count and hide
The great black beautiful seeds of the Moon
In a flower-pot deep and wide.
Then I will lie down and go fast asleep,
Drunken with flame and aswoon.
But the seeds will sprout, and the seeds will leap:
The subtle swift seeds of the Moon.

And some day, all of the world that beats
And cries at my door, shall see
A thousand moon-leaves sprout from my thatch
On a marvellous white Moon-tree!
Then each shall have moons to his heart's desire:
Apples of silver and pearl:
Apples of orange and copper fire,
Setting his five wits aswirl.
And then they will thank me, who mock me now:
"Wanting the Moon is he!"
Oh, I'm off to the mountain after the Moon,
Ere she falls from the dead fir-tree!

WARNING

You must do nothing false
Or cruel-lipped or low;
For I am Conn the Fool,
And Conn the Fool will know.

I went by the door
When Patrick Joyce looked out.
He did not wish for me
Or any one about.

He thought I did not see
The fat bag in his hand.
But Conn heard clinking gold,
And Conn could understand.

I went by the door
Where Michael Kane lay dead.
I saw his Mary tie
A red shawl round her head.

I saw a dark man lean
Across her garden-wall.
They did not know that Conn
Walked by at late dusk-fall.

You must not scold or lie,
Or hate or steal or kill,
For I shall tell the wind
That leaps along the hill;

And he will tell the stars
That sing and never lie;
And they will shout your sin
In God's face, bye and bye.

And God will not forget,
For all He loves you so.--
He made me Conn the Fool,
And bade me always know!

STORM DANCE

The water came up with a roar,
The water came up to me.
There was a wave with tusks of a boar,
And he gnashed his tusks on me.
I leaned, I leapt, and was free.
He snarled and struggled and fled.
Foaming and blind he turned to the sea,
And his brothers trampled him dead.

The water came up with a shriek,
The water came up to me.
There was a wave with a woman's cheek,
And she shuddered and clung to me.
I crouched, I cast her away.
She cursed me and swooned and died.
Her green hair tangled like sea-weed lay
Tossed out on the tearing tide.

Challenge and chase me, Storm!
Harry and hate me, Wave!
Wild as the wind is my heart, but warm,
Sudden and merry and brave.
For the water comes up with a shout,
The water comes up to me.
And oh, but I laugh, laugh out!
And the great gulls laugh, and the sea!

_Fannie Stearns Davis_

DIRGE FOR A DEAD ADMIRAL

What woman but would be
Rid of thy mastery,
Thou bully of the sea?

No more the gray sea's breast
Need answer thy behest;
No more thy sullen gun
Shall greet the risen sun,
Where the great dreadnaughts ride
The breast of thy cold bride;
Thou hast fulfilled thy fate:
Need trade no more with hate!

Nay, but I celebrate
Thy long-to-be-lorn mate,
Thy mistress and her state,
Thy lady sea's lorn state.
She hath her empery
Not only over thee
But o'er _our_ misery.

Hark, doth she mourn for thee?

Nay, what hath she of grief?
She knoweth not the leaf
That on her bosom falls,
Thou last of admirals!

Under the winter moon
She singeth that fierce tune,
Her immemorial rune;
Knoweth not, late or soon,
Careth not
Any jot
For her withholden boon
To all thy spirit's pleas
For infinite surcease!

If, on this winter night,
O thou great admiral
That in thy sombre pall
Liest upon the land,
Thy soul should take his flight
And leave the frozen sand,
And yearn above the surge,
Think'st thou that any dirge,
Grief inarticulate
From thy bereaved mate,
Would answer to thy soul
Where the waste waters roll?

Nay, thou hast need of none!
Thy long love-watch is done!

SPRING-SONG

Early some morning in May-time
I shall awaken
When the breeze blowing in at the window
Shall bathe me
With the delicate scents
Of the blossoms of apples,
Filling my room with their coolness
And beauty and fragrance--
As of old, as of old,
When your spirit dwelt with me,
My heart shall be pure
As the heart that you gave me.

A SWEETHEART: THOMPSON STREET

Queen of all streets, Fifth Avenue
Stretches her slender limbs
From the great Arch of Triumph, on,--
On, where the distance dims

The splendors of her jewelled robes,
Her granite draperies;
The magic, sunset-smitten walls
That veil her marble knees;

For ninety squares she lies a queen,
Superb, bare, unashamed,
Yielding her beauty scornfully
To worshippers unnamed.

But at her feet her sister glows,
A daughter of the South:
Squalid, immeasurably mean,--
But oh! her hot, sweet mouth!

My Thompson Street! a Tuscan girl,
Hot with life's wildest blood;
Her black shawl on her black, black hair,
Her brown feet stained with mud;

A scarlet blossom at her lips,
A new babe at her breast;
A singer at a wine-shop door,
(Her lover unconfessed).

Listen! a hurdy-gurdy plays--
Now alien melodies:
She smiles, she cannot quite forget
The mother over-seas.

But she no less is mine alone,
Mine, mine!... Who may I be?
Have _I_ betrayed her from her home?
I am called Liberty!

THE OFF-SHORE WIND

The skies are sown with stars tonight,
The sea is sown with light,
The hollows of the heaving floor
Gleam deep with light once more,
The racing ebb-tide flashes past
And seeks the vacant vast,
A wind steals from a world asleep
And walks the restless deep.

It walks the deep in ecstasy,
It lives! and loves to free
Its spirit to the silent night,
And breathes deep in delight;
Above the sea that knows no coast,
Beneath the starry host,
The wind walks like the souls of men
Who walk with God again.

The souls of men who walk with God!
With faith's firm sandals shod,
A lambent passion, body-free,
Fain for eternity!
O spirit born of human sighs,
Set loose 'twixt sea and skies,
Be thou an Angel of mankind,
Thou night-unfettered wind!

Bear thou the dreams of weary earth,
Bear thou Tomorrow's birth,
Take all our longings up to Him
Until His stars grow dim;
A moving anchorage of prayer,
Thou cool and healing air,
Heading off-shore till shoreless dawn
Breaks fair and night is gone.

_Samuel McCoy_

"THE HILL-FLOWERS"

"_I will lift up mine eyes to the hills._"

I

_Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Ere I waken in the city--Life, thy dawn makes all things new!
And up a fir-clad glen, far from all the haunts of men,
Up a glen among the mountains, oh my feet are wings again!_

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
O mountains of my boyhood, I come again to you,
By the little path I know, with the sea far below,
And above, the great cloud-galleons with their sails of rose and snow;

As of old, when all was young, and the earth a song unsung
And the heather through the crimson dawn its Eden incense flung
From the mountain-heights of joy, for a careless-hearted boy,
And the lavrocks rose like fountain sprays of bliss
that ne'er could cloy,

From their little beds of bloom, from the golden gorse and broom,
With a song to God the Giver, o'er that waste of wild perfume;
Blowing from height to height, in a glory of great light,
While the cottage-clustered valleys held the lilac last of night,

So, when dawn is in the skies, in a dream, a dream, I rise,
And I follow my lost boyhood to the heights of Paradise.
Life, thy dawn makes all things new! Hills of Youth, I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.

II

Moving through the dew, moving through the dew,
Floats a brother's face to meet me! Is it you? Is it you?
For the night I leave behind keeps these dazzled eyes still blind!
But oh, the little hill-flowers, their scent is wise and kind;

And I shall not lose the way from the darkness to the day,
While dust can cling as their scent clings to memory for aye;
And the least link in the chain can recall the whole again,
And heaven at last resume its far-flung harvests, grain by grain.

To the hill-flowers clings my dust, and tho' eyeless Death may thrust
All else into the darkness, in their heaven I put my trust;
And a dawn shall bid me climb to the little spread of thyme
Where first I heard the ripple of the fountain-heads of rhyme.

And a fir-wood that I know, from dawn to sunset-glow,
Shall whisper to a lonely sea, that swings far, far below.
Death, thy dawn makes all things new. Hills of Youth, I come to you,
Moving through the dew, moving through the dew.

_Alfred Noyes_

EDITORIAL COMMENT

THE SERVIAN EPIC

Poetry as the inspiration of the Balkan war was the theme of a recent talk given by Madame Slavko Grouitch before the Friday Club in Chicago, and elsewhere, during her brief sojourn in her native country. Madame Grouitch was a student at the American School of Archaeology in Athens when she married the young Servian diplomat who now represents his nation in London.

According to the speaker, the Servian national songs have kept alive the heroic spirit of the people during more than four centuries of Turkish oppression. Through them each generation of the illiterate peasantry has fought once more the ancient wars, and followed once more the ancient leaders even to the final tragedy of the battle of Kossovo, where in 1377 they made their last brave stand against the Mohammedan invader. Whenever a few people assemble for a festival, some local bard, perhaps an old shepherd or soldier, a blind beggar or reformed brigand, will chant the old songs to the monotonous music of the _gusle_, while the people dance the _Kolo_.

"There are thousands of songs in the Servian epic," says Mme. Grouitch, "and each has many variants according to whether it is sung in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, Dalmatia, Servia, Bulgaria or Macedonia; for all these political divisions are peopled by the Servian race descended from the heroes whose deeds are the theme of such unwearied narration. The bard is called the Guslar from his one-stringed instrument, whose melancholy cadence--a sighing-forth of sound--affects the emotions and increases the pathos of the words. For the story is usually sad, even when it proclaims the triumph of great deeds."

These songs invariably begin:

Once it was so; now it is told.

And they as invariably end:

From me the song; from God health to you.

A number of poems were read from Mme. Mijatovich's rather uninspired translation of the Kossovo series, published in London in 1881. Extreme simplicity and vividness characterize the old epic, which follows the hopeless struggle of the noble Czar Lazar against the foe without, and suspicions, dissensions, blunders, even treacheries, within. Certain characters stand out with the uncompromising exactness of some biblical story: the Czar himself; his over-zealous Vojvode; Milosh Obilich, whose murder of Sultan Murad precipitated the disaster; and certain haughty and passionate women, like the Empress Militza and her two daughters. Also "Marko, the King's son," whose half-mythical figure is of the race of Achilles.

"There was one thing," said Mme. Grouitch, "which the Turk could not take away from the Serb--the heavenly gift of poetry; that continued to dwell hidden in the breast of the southern Slav. His body was enslaved, but his soul was not; his physical life was oppressed, but his spiritual being remained free. In the eighteenth century Europe re-discovered the Servian national poetry, and became conscious that the race survived as well as its ideals. Then Serb and Bulgar again appeared in current history, and began to retrace the ancient boundaries.

"All the conferences of all the powers can never diminish the hopes, nor eclipse the glory of the Serb race in the minds of the Balkan peoples; because the Guslar, who is their supreme national leader, is forever telling them of that glory, and urging them to concerted action against all outside foes. It was the Guslar who led the Montenegrin Serbs from one heroic victory to another, so that 'their war annals,' as Gladstone said, 'are more glorious than those of all the rest of the world.' It was the Guslar who inspired Kara George and his heroic band of Servian peasants to keep up their battle until free Servia was born.

"Amid the roar of cannon at Lule Burgas and Monastir, I could hear the mighty voice of the Guslar reminding Serb and Bulgar that their fight was for 'the honored cross and golden liberty.' And they obeyed because it was the voice of their nation. It is this irresistible national spirit which leads their armies, and beside it the spirit of German training behind the Turk is a lifeless shadow. The Ottoman power in Europe is in ruins now, a wreck in the path of a national earthquake which the Guslar has prophesied for five hundred years. The Guslar has done his duty, and he stands today in a blaze of glory at the head of the united and victorious nations of the Balkans."

The speaker told of an impressive ceremony at the Servian legation in London. Young Servians, recalled home for military service last autumn, met there on the eve of departure. Wine being served, the minister and his young patriots rose with lifted glasses, and chanted the ancient summons of Czar Lazar to his people:

Whoever born of Serbian blood or kin
Comes not to fight the Turk on Kossovo,
To him be never son or daughter born,
No child to heir his lands or bear his name!
For him no grape grow red, no corn grow white;
In his hands nothing prosper!
May he live
Alone, unloved! and die unmourned, alone!

_H. M._

IMAGISME[C]

Some curiosity has been aroused concerning _Imagisme_, and as I was unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an _imagiste_, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew anything about the "movement." I gleaned these facts.

[Footnote C: Editor's Note--In response to many requests for information regarding _Imagism_ and the _Imagistes_, we publish this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with further exemplification by Mr. Pound. It will be seen from these that _Imagism_ is not necessarily associated with Hellenic subjects, or with _vers libre_ as a prescribed form.]

The _imagistes_ admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,--in Sappho, Catullus, Villon. They seemed to be absolutely intolerant of all poetry that was not written in such endeavor, ignorance of the best tradition forming no excuse. They had a few rules, drawn up for their own satisfaction only, and they had not published them. They were:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective
or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute
to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

By these standards they judged all poetry, and found most of it wanting. They held also a certain 'Doctrine of the Image,' which they had not committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion.

The devices whereby they persuaded approaching poetasters to attend their instruction were:

1. They showed him his own thought already
splendidly expressed in some classic (and the school
musters altogether a most formidable erudition).
2. They re-wrote his verses before his eyes, using
about ten words to his fifty.

Even their opponents admit of them--ruefully--"At least they do keep bad poets from writing!"

I found among them an earnestness that is amazing to one accustomed to the usual London air of poetic dilettantism. They consider that Art is all science, all religion, philosophy and metaphysic. It is true that _snobisme_ may be urged against them; but it is at least _snobisme_ in its most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy behind it; and they are stricter with themselves than with any outsider.

_F. S. Flint_

A FEW DONT'S BY AN IMAGISTE

An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term "complex" rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DONT'S for those beginning to write verses. But I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.

To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma--never consider anything as dogma--but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else's contemplation, may be worth consideration.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

LANGUAGE

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Don't use such an expression as "dim lands _of peace_." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the _adequate_ symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was "pearl-pale," I can not remember.

Use either no ornament or good ornament.

RHYTHM AND RHYME

Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare--if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.

It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.

Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose.

Don't be "viewy"--leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.

When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad" he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has _discovered_ something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are "all over the shop." Is it any wonder "the public is indifferent to poetry?"