James Oppenheim

James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, where he has lived ever since. After a public school education, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls (1904-7). His studies and experiences on the lower East Side of New York furnished the material for his first, and most popular, book of short stories, Doctor Rast (1909).

Oppenheim’s initial venture as a poet, Monday Morning and Other Poems (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, half experimental. In spite of its obvious indebtedness to Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular (though ragged) rhyme. Beauty is sought but seldom captured here; the message is coughed out between bursts of eloquence and fits of stammering.

249With Songs for the New Age (1914) Oppenheim became his own liberator. The stammering has gone, the uncouth dissonances have resolved. One listens to a speech that, echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is strangely Biblical and yet local. It is the expression of an ancient people reacting to modernity, of a race in solution. (See Preface.) This volume, like all of Oppenheim’s subsequent work, is analysis in terms of poetry; a slow searching beneath the musical surface that attempts to diagnose the twisted soul of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as “The Slave,” “We Dead,” “Tasting the Earth”; the music and imagery of the Psalms are heard in “The Flocks,” “The Tree” and “The Runner in the Skies.”

War and Laughter (1916) holds much of its predecessor’s exaltation and an almost ecstatic discontent. The Semitic blend of delight and disillusion—that quality which hates the world for its shams and hypocrisies and loves it in spite of them—is revealed in “Greed,” in the ironic “Report on the Planet Earth” and the brightly affirmative “Laughter.”

The Book of Self (1917) is less notable, an imperfect fusion. Oppenheim’s preoccupation with analytical psychology mars the effect of the long passages which, in themselves, contain flashes of clairvoyance. The Solitary (1919) is a great stride forward; its major section, a long symbolic poem called “The Sea,” breathes the same note that was the burden of the earlier books—“We are flesh on the way to godhood”—with greater strength and still greater control.

Besides his poetry, Oppenheim has published several volumes of short stories, four novels, and two poetic plays. During 1916-17 he was editor of that promising but short-lived magazine, The Seven Arts.

250

THE RUNNER IN THE SKIES

Who is the runner in the skies,

With her blowing scarf of stars,

And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her blossoming heart?

Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep,

Her eyes are nebulous and veiled;

She hurries through the night to a far lover ...

THE SLAVE

They set the slave free, striking off his chains ...

Then he was as much of a slave as ever.

He was still chained to servility,

He was still manacled to indolence and sloth,

He was still bound by fear and superstition,

By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery ...

His slavery was not in the chains,

But in himself....

They can only set free men free ...

And there is no need of that:

Free men set themselves free.

251

TASTING THE EARTH

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

As I lay on my couch in the muffled night, and the rain lashed my window,

And my forsaken heart would give me no rest, no pause and no peace,

Though I turned my face far from the wailing of my bereavement....

Then I said: I will eat of this sorrow to its last shred,

I will take it unto me utterly,

I will see if I be not strong enough to contain it....

What do I fear? Discomfort?

How can it hurt me, this bitterness?

The miracle, then!

Turning toward it, and giving up to it,

I found it deeper than my own self....

O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me ...

It was she with her inexhaustible grief,

Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,

And moan of the forsaken seas,

It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,

It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man ...

It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,

252Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,

And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,

And the dreams that have no waking....

My heart became her ancient heart:

On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:

Wisdom-giving and sombre with the unremitting love of ages....

There was dank soil in my mouth,

And bitter sea on my lips,

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

THE LINCOLN CHILD^[43]

Clearing in the forest,

In the wild Kentucky forest,

And the stars, wintry stars strewn above!

O Night that is the starriest

Since Earth began to roll—

For a Soul

Is born out of Love!

Mother love, father love, love of Eternal God—

Stars have pushed aside to let him through—

Through heaven’s sun-sown deeps

One sparkling ray of God

253Strikes the clod—

(And while an angel-host through wood and clearing sweeps!)

Born in the wild

The Child—

Naked, ruddy, new,

Wakes with the piteous human cry and at the mother-heart sleeps.

To the mother wild berries and honey,

To the father awe without end,

To the child a swaddling of flannel—

And a dawn rolls sharp and sunny

And the skies of winter bend

To see the first sweet word penned

In the godliest human annal.

Frail Mother of the Wilderness—

How strange the world shines in

And the cabin becomes chapel

And the baby lies secure—

Sweet Mother of the Wilderness,

New worlds for you begin,

You have tasted of the apple

That giveth wisdom sure....

Soon in the wide wilderness,

On a branch blown over a creek,

Up a trail of the wild coon,

In a lair of the wild bee,

254The rugged boy, by danger’s stress,

Learnt the speech the wild things speak,

Learnt the Earth’s eternal tune

Of strife-engendered harmony—

Went to school where Life itself was master,

Went to church where Earth was minister—

And in Danger and Disaster

Felt his future manhood stir!

All about him the land,

Eastern cities, Western prairie,

Wild, immeasurable, grand;

But he was lost where blossomy boughs make airy

Bowers in the forest, and the sand

Makes brook-water a clear mirror that gives back

Green branches and trunks black

And clouds across the heavens lightly fanned.

Yet all the Future dreams, eager to waken,

Within that woodland soul—

And the bough of boy has only to be shaken

That the fruit drop whereby this Earth shall roll

A little nearer God than ever before.

Little recks he of war,

Of national millions waiting on his word—

Dreams still the Event unstirred

In the heart of the boy, the little babe of the wild—

But the years hurry and the tide of the sea

Of Time flows fast and ebbs, and he, even he,

Must leave the wilderness, the wood-haunts wild—

255Soon shall the cyclone of Humanity

Tearing through Earth suck up this little child

And whirl him to the top, where he shall be

Riding the storm-column in the lightning-stroke,

Calm at the peak, while down below worlds rage,

And Earth goes out in blood and battle-smoke,

And leaves him with the sun—an epoch and an age!

And lo, as he grew ugly, gaunt,

And gnarled his way into a man,

What wisdom came to feed his want,

What worlds came near to let him scan!

And as he fathomed through and through

Our dark and sorry human scheme,

He knew what Shakespeare never knew,

What Dante never dared to dream—

That Men are one

Beneath the sun,

And before God are equal souls—

This truth was his,

And this it is

That round him such a glory rolls—

For not alone he knew it as a truth,

He made it of his blood, and of his brain—

He crowned it on the day when piteous Booth

Sent a whole land to weeping with world pain—

When a black cloud blotted the sun

And men stopped in the streets to sob,

To think Old Abe was dead.

256Dead, and the day’s work still undone,

Dead, and war’s ruining heart athrob,

And earth with fields of carnage freshly spread—

Millions died fighting,

But in this man we mourned

Those millions, and one other—

And the States to-day uniting,

North and South,

East and West,

Speak with a people’s mouth

A rhapsody of rest

To him our beloved best,

Our big, gaunt, homely brother—

Our huge Atlantic coast-storm in a shawl,

Our cyclone in a smile—our President,

Who knew and loved us all

With love more eloquent

Than his own words—with Love that in real deeds was spent....

Oh, to pour love through deeds—

To be as Lincoln was!—

That all the land might fill its daily needs

Glorified by a human Cause!

Then were America a vast World-Torch

Flaming a faith across the dying Earth,

Proclaiming from the Atlantic’s rocky porch,

That a New World was struggling at the birth!

O living God, O Thou who living art,

And real, and near, draw, as at that babe’s birth,

257Into our souls and sanctify our Earth—

Let down Thy strength that we endure

Mighty and pure

As mothers and fathers of our own Lincoln-child—

Make us more wise, more true, more strong, more mild,

That we may day by day

Rear this wild blossom through its soft petals of clay;

That hour by hour

We may endow it with more human power

Than is our own—

That it may reach the goal

Our Lincoln long has shown!

O Child, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone,

Soul torn from out our Soul!

May you be great, and pure, and beautiful—

A Soul to search this world

To be a father, brother, comrade, son,

A toiler powerful;

A man whose toil is done

One with God’s Law above:

Work wrought through Love!

NIGHT NOTE

A little moon was restless in Eternity

And, shivering beneath the stars,

Dropped in the hiding arms of the western hill.

258Night’s discord ceased:

The visible universe moved in an endless rhythm:

The wheel of the heavens turned to the pulse of a cricket in the grass.