Don Marquis
Reading edition
Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born at Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois, July 29, 1878. Since his boyhood he has been actively connected with various newspapers, his chief metropolitan success being due to his pungent column, “The Sun Dial” in the New York Evening Sun.
Many of Marquis’s most penetrating and satiric skits have been collected in his prose volumes, Hermione (1916) and Prefaces (1919). Besides his burlesque verse, Marquis has written a quantity of serious poetry, the best of which he published in Dreams and Dust (1915).
UNREST
A fierce unrest seethes at the core
Of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar
That gave the gods their wings.
From what flat wastes of cosmic slime,
And stung by what quick fire,
Sunward the restless races climb!—
Men risen out of mire!
There throbs through all the worlds that are
This heart-beat hot and strong
And shaken systems, star by star,
Awake and glow in song.
But for the urge of this unrest
These joyous spheres are mute;
But for the rebel in his breast
Had man remained a brute.
212When baffled lips demanded speech,
Speech trembled into birth—
(One day the lyric word shall reach
From earth to laughing earth.)—
When man’s dim eyes demanded light,
The light he sought was born—
His wish, a Titan, scaled the height
And flung him back the morn!
From deed to dream, from dream to deed,
From daring hope to hope,
The restless wish, the instant need,
Still lashed him up the slope!
· · · · · ·
I sing no governed firmament,
Cold, ordered, regular—
I sing the stinging discontent
That leaps from star to star!