WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
Reading edition
William Stanley Braithwaite was born in Boston Dec. 6, 1878. He inherited the incentives and ideals of the intellect from an ancestry of British gentlemen. He has written verse and prose and was for many years leading reviewer of books in the Boston Transcript. He has published twenty volumes, and his yearly anthology of verse establishes for each year the best poetry printed in the magazines.
SCINTILLA
I kissed a kiss in youth Upon a dead man’s brow; And that was long ago,— And I’m a grown man now. It’s lain there in the dust, Thirty years and more;— My lips that set a light At a dead man’s door.
RYE BREAD
Father John’s bread was made of rye, Felicite’s bread was white; Father John loved the sun noon-high, Felicite, the moon at night. Father John drank wine with his bread; Felicite drank sweet milk; Father John loved flowers, pungent and red; Felicite, lilies soft as silk. Father John’s soul was made of bronze, That God’s salt was corroding; Felicite’s soul was a wind that runs With a blue flame of foreboding. Between these two was the shadow of a dome That cut their lives in twain; But Dionysus led them home In a chariot of pain.
OCTOBER XXIX, 1795
(Keats’ Birthday)
Time sitting on the throne of Memory Bade all her subject Days the past had known Arise and say what thing gave them renown Unforgetable, ‘Rising from the sea, I gave the Genoese his dreams to be;’ ‘I saw the Corsican’s Guards swept down;’ ‘Colonies I made free from a tyrant’s crown;’— So each Day told its immortality. And with these blazing triumphs spoke one voice Whose wistful speech no vaunting did employ: ‘I know not if ’twere by Fate’s chance or choice I hold the lowly birth of an English boy; I only know he made man’s heart rejoice Because he played with Beauty for a toy!’
DEL CASCAR
Del Cascar, Del Cascar Stood upon a flaming star, Stood and let his feet hang down Till in China the toes turned brown. And he reached his fingers over The rim of the sea, like sails from Dover, And caught a Mandarin at prayer, And tickled his nose in Orion’s hair. The sun went down through crimson bars, And left his blind face battered with stars— But the brown toes in China kept Hot the tears Del Cascar wept.