Christopher Morley
Reading edition
Christopher (Darlington) Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania, May 5, 1890. He graduated from Haverford College in 1910 and was Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, England, 1910-13.
Since 1914 he has been on the staff of various periodicals, coming to New York in 1920 to run his column (“The Bowling Green”) on the New York Evening Post.
Morley is the author of ten dissimilar volumes of essays, skits, gossip, travel-notes, light verse and serious poetry. The Rocking Horse (1919) and Hide and Seek (1920) sink too often in their own sentiment; their sweetness is frequently cloying, their charm a little too conscious. But Morley’s vigor energizes his lines and prevents his verses—especially those in the latter volume—from becoming tawdry with oversweetness.
QUICKENING[60]
Such little, puny things are words in rhyme:
Poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs;
You see them printed here, and mark their chime,
And turn to your more durable affairs.
Yet on such petty tools the poet dares
To run his race with mortar, bricks and lime,
And draws his frail stick to the point, and stares
To aim his arrow at the heart of Time.
Intangible, yet pressing, hemming in,
This measured emptiness engulfs us all,
And yet he points his paper javelin
And sees it eddy, waver, turn, and fall,
And feels, between delight and trouble torn,
The stirring of a sonnet still unborn.
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