Edwin Curran
Reading edition
Edwin Curran was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 10, 1892, and was educated at St. Thomas’ School in the city of his birth. After working as an unskilled laborer in various trades, he learned telegraphy in 1914 and has been employed ever since as an operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad Company.
In 1917 he printed a little paper-bound pamphlet of thirty pages (First Poems) with this naïve note: “Price of this book is 35 cents postpaid. Author is 25, unmarried, a beginner and needs publisher. If this volume meets expenses, another, possibly better, will be issued.” Expecting to find poetry of an absurd simplicity, one is startled to find striking images, strange pictures and (in such poems as “Soldier’s Epitaph” and “Sailing of Columbus”) lines like:
We climbed the slippery alleys of the sea
and many a lyric flash like:
The stars, like bells, flash down the silver sky ...
Ringing like chimes on frozen trees, or cry
Along the marble ground.
Second Poems (1920) has a similar beauty mixed with banality. Both booklets are a jumble of passion, platitude, bad 372grammar and exaltation. Curran has absolutely no critical perceptions; he has little control over his music. For better or for worse, his mood controls him.
AUTUMN
The music of the autumn winds sings low,
Down by the ruins of the painted hills,
Where death lies flaming with a marvelous glow,
Upon the ash of rose and daffodils.
But I can find no melancholy here
To see the naked rocks and thinning trees;
Earth strips to grapple with the winter year—
I see her gnarled hills plan for victories!
I love the earth who goes to battle now,
To struggle with the wintry whipping storm
And bring the glorious spring out from the night.
I see earth’s muscles bared, her battle brow,
And am not sad, but feel her marvelous charm
As splendidly she plunges in the fight.
THE PAINTED HILLS OF ARIZONA
The rainbows all lie crumpled on these hills,
The red dawns scattered on their colored sills.
These hills have caught the lightning in its flight,
Caught colors from the skies of day and night
And shine with shattered stars and suns; they hold
Dyed yellow, red and purple, blue and gold.
373Red roses seem within their marble blown,
A painted garden chiseled in the stone;
The rose and violet trickling through their veins,
Where they drop brilliant curtains to the plains—
A ramp of rock and granite, jeweled and brightening,
Like some great colored wall of lightning!