Chapter I: Front Matter

Wampum and Old Gold

HERVEY ALLEN

NEW HAVEN * YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON * HUMPHREY MILFORD * OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCCXXI

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

For permission to reprint poems appearing in this volume, thanks are due to the editors of _The North American Review_, _The New Republic_, _Contemporary Verse_, _Life_, _La France_, _Harvey's Weekly_, _The Southern Review_, _The New York Times_, _The Boston Evening Transcript_.

TO

FRANCIS FOWLER HOGAN

SOLDIER POET

CORPORAL FOURTH UNITED STATES INFANTRY
KILLED IN ACTION IN THE ARGONNE FOREST
OCTOBER SEVENTEENTH
1918

"Though my hands have not learned to model
The dreams of a groping mind,
Though my lips have not spoken their music
And are leaving no songs behind,
Think not that my life has been futile,
Nor grieve for an unsaid word,
For all that my lips might never sing
My singing heart has heard.

"I have etched the light on a willow
With neither a plate nor style;
I have made a song of the crescent moon
And a poem of only a smile;
Are they less because lips could not know them,
These songs that my heart has known?
Am I wholly mute who have sung with my heart
And sung with my heart alone?"

F. F. H.

CONTENTS.

POEMS WRITTEN SINCE 1918:

Confession
Despair
Vale
Aftermath
Hylas
Bacchus Is Gone
Tiger Lilies

Three Landscape Moods:
Youth
High Tide o' Life
Old Age

The Hermitage of Bells

The Seasons:
Spring's Pilgrimage
Summer
Autumn Portents
Autumn Invocation

Dream Fragment
When Shady Avenue Was Shady Lane
Triangles vs. Circles
The Old Judge
Bewitched
The Wingless Victory

POEMS WRITTEN IN FRANCE AT THE FRONT:

The Blindman
Hands Off
Soldier-Poet
Doomed
White Light
Beaumont
Villiers Le Bel Gonnesse
Dragon's Breath
We

POEMS WRITTEN SINCE 1918

CONFESSION.

I think, by God! It is no lie;
I shall go dreaming till I die!
There is no love so real to me
As the cold passion of the sea.
There is no little, wind-swept town
By harbors where the roads go down,
Or headland gray that sits and sips
The cup of ocean at its lips,
And gazes at the far-off ships--
Or tree or house or friend so real
As visions and the dreams I feel.

No--not the windy, vaultless arch
Where all the white stars flame and march,
Nor water at the river fords
Like horses mad among the swords,
Or oaks that lean from winter storms;
These only give my vision forms.

Away! White hands, I will not take!
And kissing mouths that cry, "Awake!"
For you I have no gramercy;
So leave me by my lotus tree,
To dream and gaze into the sky
Where red suns wither up and die,
I know! I know! I do not lie!
I shall go dreaming till I die!

DESPAIR.

You who made me
With first ecstasy
When I was sown,
And lovely things at night
I will not write
And burdened moan,
While veiny labyrinths with mystery ran
Till time and blood were life
And I began--
By holier things than God,
Or any other shibboleth of man,
Dead woman wan,
By the thin, silver scream that winter morn
In the dim, shuttered room where I was born,
Be gone!

Haunt me no more, Shroud Trailer,
Go to bed.
For the swift, golden wings I owe to you
Flap in the dust like some loose, common shoe;
Stay dead, stay dead!
I fear your glimmering bust in utter air,
The transparent eyes with shadowy stare,
The sleepy, sleepy scent of flowers
And the long hands--
They fill me with despair.

Touch me no more at night.
Borrow no form for me
Of sound or sight;
For all my days are spent by cluttered streams,
Distracted by a thousand things and faces,
And all unuttered die great dreams
Among the stagnant places.
I am not what you gave your life to buy,
And God knows what I shall be by and by!
The motes of habit sift down grain by grain,
Till I am what I am in heart and brain,
So young--so old--
Death keep you, darling,
Deaf and blind and cold.

VALE.

I love the little vale between your breasts,
But yet, farewell, for that is never still;
My garden far from you will be at rest
With lakes asleep beside a brooding hill
And cedar swales in hollow valley lands
With S-like streams between the O-shaped ponds,
Where grow frail ferns with upturned Gothic hands
And prayerful fronds.

In gray half-lights 'twill be a lovely thing
By Gypsy paths to wander at hearts-ease
Near campaniles where the bell folk sing
Down terraces of rustling linden trees,
And two hills like your breasts will be in death,
When lamps will cast their shadows silently,
Will rise still blue above the yellow corn
That ripples with a sleepy mystery.

AFTERMATH.

Under the placid surface of the days
So seeming clear,
Back of the habits of old ways,
A quiet fear;
The locked-up memories of war,
Our Bluebeard's room,
Where the blood creeps underneath the door.

Never will come
In streams of days that ring
Like clean coins down the merry grooves of change,
One without grief's alloy,
Struck from pure gold of joy,
Undimmed by unshed tears,
Nor is it strange.

For in the wraith-thronged brain
Are private ghosts of pain,
Aloof, like patient sick men in a crowd
With half-veiled faces and old sorrow bowed--
Ah! The free days can never come again!
They passed with the far, rolling drums,
Died to the moan and thunder of the guns,
And the mad, glad, clear, lyric birdsong never comes.

HYLAS.

_Theocritus, Idyll XIII._

_Where art thou, Hylas,
Of the golden locks?
Where art thou, Argive lad,
That fed thy flocks
In wind-swept Thessaly,
Beside the sea?
Alas! Alas! for thee,
Hylas, Alas!_