Chapter M: C. a

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[1] _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce. New
York: B. W. Huebsch._

The Vers Libre Contest

At last after many months the prize contest has been decided. I know very little about prize contests, but I imagine that there has never been one in the history of poetry which could boast so many really bad poems. Personally I think there are not more than four or five with any suggestion of poetry in them: the rest are either involuntarily humorous, like the one printed at the end, or pompously anachronistic like the one which asks: “Shall I with frantic hands unloose the cord that binds me to this life?”

The judges were Eunice Tietjens, Helen Hoyt, and William Carlos Williams. They came to no unanimous decision as to which two poems were the best, and the only two they voted for mutually are those printed below. _Sea Poppies_ turned out to be by H. D., and _Images of Friendship_ by Maxwell Bodenheim. (The former had not yet been published in H. D.’s book).

Sea Poppies

H. D.

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells,
and slit conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

Images of Friendship

Maxwell Bodenheim

Grey drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edges
Of bending swirls of yellow-white flowers.
So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.

The green shadowed trance of the water
Is splintered to little white-tasseled awakenings
By the beat of long black oars.
So do your words cut the massed smoothness of thoughts of you.

Split, brown-blue clouds press into each-other
Over hills dressed in mute, clinging haze.
So do my thoughts slowly form over the draped mystery of you.

The two prizes of $25 each go therefore to H. D. and Mr. Bodenheim.

But it may be interesting to print some of the others. For instance, not a single judge mentioned the following:

Stream

Richard Aldington

I.

Pebbles, that gleam dully,
white, faint ochre, drab green:
mosaic under pale sliding water.

II.

Foam;
mobile crests leaping, sinking:
thin fingers grasping round cold rocks.

III.

Pines, white ash-trees,
black-thorns, winter grass,
mirrored trembling in you, O vagrant,
bending away from you and towards you:
hesitating, importunate lovers.

IV.

Small blue waves straining to meet,
never touching, always elusive:
mocking, half-virginal lips.

Eunice Tietjens mentioned _Flower_ and _Foam_ with this qualification: “Provided Richard Aldington wrote them. Otherwise not. My point is that if he wrote them they are authentic as well as lovely, but if he did not so flagrant an imitator ought not to be encouraged even if he is a successful copyist.”

Flower

Edward J. O’Brien

Here by the pastures of Hybla
Dreameth in azure stillness Daphne, a maiden.
Her throat was softer than light and honey-haunted.

Foam

Here by the foaming sky with cloud-capped horses,
I, a maiden, lie by the windy ocean,
Dreaming of quiet waters
Guarded by willows.

Dr. Williams’s first choice was _The Master_, “for the reason that it has most imaginative charm while possessing at the same time a fairly even unity of rhythm, a simple straight forward diction and a very subtle depth of thought. The image is progressively developed to a fine and natural conclusion with great simplicity and restraint, without waste of materia, without redundancy of any kind.”

What or where is the subtle depth of thought? Almost every kind of person in the world has had this thought: it is not even a poetic thought. And what is there in the treatment to make it poetry?

The Master

Jeanne D’Orge

In the dusk a child sits playing
Five-finger exercises
Up and down, down and up
Jagged notes and even,
Down and up, up and down
Interminably.
About him all unseen
In the folds of the shadows
Stand the great shades
Bach ... Beethoven ... Brahms ...
Listening with exquisite attention
As to a master.

Helen Hoyt mentioned the following:

Autumn Ballet

Charles Wharton Stork

Oh dancers in yellow!—
Tall, saffron-garmented poplars with arms uplifted,
Slender-limbed beeches
Draped in a modester russet,
Chestnuts, walnuts and sassafrasses,
And ruffle-skirted maples—
Why do ye stand at pause?
When will the music begin
For you, oh dancers in yellow?

Dr. Williams’s fourth choice is a poem of Charles Ashleigh’s which he describes as “a spirited and well-constructed defiance.” I think it is a very trite effort—one of those loose though rather happy expressions of mood that has no more to do with art than a man’s exclamation that he means to tramp in the woods on a bright spring day.

Once More—The Road

Charles Ashleigh

The printed page
Whispers vainly
In my memory....
The locomotive howls!

Limping philosophies
Murmur weakly
And then are silenced
By the laughter of wanderers.

The sadness of creeds
Dies
Under tramps’ ribaldry.

And my road-thirst,
Avid and aching,
Conquers the muttering
Of puling scholarship.

Let my heart blossom in journeying;
And my maw be well stuffed
With delectable incident!

Eunice Tietjens would have been willing to give _Lovescape_ a prize if either of the other judges had chosen it, but they did not. And in spite of its cadenced mounting and falling—which is an attribute of technique, not necessarily of art—it remains merely a slight puff of poetic feeling, not a good poem.

Lovescape

Adolf Wolff

Sky
Deep blue sky
Clouds
Thin clouds
Drifting drifting
Grass
Soft cool grass
Breeze
Soft warm breeze
Hands pressing
Mouths mingling
Love
Passion
Ecstacy
Faintness
Calm
Resting
Sky
Deep blue sky
Clouds
Thin clouds
Drifting drifting.

Helen Hoyt chose the two following for the prizes. Now I hope these judges will not get provoked with me or feel that I am being personal or any of the other things that one is usually accused of when one is most impersonally talking his “cause.” I am simply overflowing with criticism of their valuations and I must speak it out. These two poems are pretty awful, I think. Where are the winged words that make poetry something beyond thoughts or ideas of emotions?

Victory

Sarah Bard Field

When we were lifted high on the crest of the wave
And Passion made you oblivious,
I reached above you for a star
And caught it.
When we sank deep into the trough of the wave
And satisfied desire over-flooded you,
I reached below you for a pearl
And possessed it.
You have nothing left from that night
But a memory, chained to yourself.
I have something left from that night
That will one day fill his eyes with star-dust,
Measuring the heavens,
And tangle his feet in sea-weed,
Searching the Ocean.
Because of that night
A thought stirs in you.
It will grow weaker with Time
It will be dead when you are dead.
Because of that night,
A child stirs in me.
He will grow stronger with Time
He will plant pansies on our graves
When we are dead.

Art Is Born

Miriam van Waters

My leisure has flowered: a new thing has come into my hands,
Time has come. I possess time as though it were a thing.
I lie still in the scented grass and the hours come into my hands.
They float up as little balloons float from the hands of children,—
Like golden, silken spheres sailing high into the air,
One by one they mount slow and as fragile as dreams.
The hours from my hands go up like kites,—
I hold their slender thread,
I move it faintly and they sway,
Rocking in the clear blue of the sky.
They do not return to me, but very gently they vanish....
Somewhere,
While I hold their silken, slender thread in my hands.

My leisure has come sharp, like a crystal:
It glows and is pointed,
The poignancy of weapons has come into my leisure.
I possess time as though it were a thing.
The hours come into my hands like spears—
Flashing crystal spars of light
That is winged.
I seize them as they come to me.
I throw the weight of my body
Into my stroke and boldly
I hurl them into space,—into the heart of my enemy
The Stillness who lurks there in the depths of the dark.

Dr. Williams says of _The Flower Smeller_: “It might have been a very fine thing indeed had the author known how to come to a conclusion properly. Parts of this poem have more promise than anything in the whole batch of manuscript.” It is, obviously, better. But it isn’t a gem by any means; it belongs rather with those almost fine things that make you impatient because they didn’t turn out to be gems.

The Flower Smeller