Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer was born October 1, 1885, in New York City, where he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine and New Jersey, ever since. His education was sketchy; his continued failure to comprehend algebra and geometry kept him from entering college. His one ambition was to become a composer. At sixteen he appeared as a pianist in semi-professional circles; at seventeen he entered his father’s jewelry manufacturing establishment, of which he became designer and factory manager.

306Untermeyer’s first volume was The Younger Quire (1911), a twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology (The Younger Choir). It was issued anonymously and only one hundred copies were printed. Later in the same year, he published a sequence of some seventy lyrics entitled First Love (1911) in which the influences of Heine, Henley and Housman were not only obvious but crippling. With the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume is devoid of character and, in spite of a certain technical facility, wholly undistinguished.

It was with Challenge (1914), now in its fourth edition, that the author first spoke in his own idiom. Although the ghost of Henley still haunts some of these pages, poems like “Summons,” “Landscapes” and “Caliban in the Coal Mines” show “a fresh and lyrical sympathy with the modern world.... His vision” (thus the Boston Transcript) “is a social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of the forces of justice.”

Challenge was succeeded by These Times (1917), evidently an “interval” book which, lacking the concentration and unity of the better known collection, sought (not always successfully) for larger horizons. Certain poems (like “Swimmers,” “The Laughers” and the colloquial sonnets) stand out, but as a whole it has neither the energy of his earlier nor the surety of his later work. The New Adam (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the varied passions are fused in a new heat.

Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published two volumes of critical parodies, “—— and Other Poets” (1917) and Including Horace (1919)—paraphrases of the Latin bard as various classic and modern poets might have rendered him. He has also printed a strict metrical translation of three hundred and twenty-five Poems of Heinrich Heine (1917); a volume of prose criticism, The New Era in American Poetry (1919); and two text-books. He was one of the Associate Editors of The Seven Arts (1916-17) and has lectured at various universities in the Eastern States.

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SUMMONS

The eager night and the impetuous winds,

The hints and whispers of a thousand lures,

And all the swift persuasion of the Spring,

Surged from the stars and stones, and swept me on ...

The smell of honeysuckles, keen and clear,

Startled and shook me, with the sudden thrill

Of some well-known but half-forgotten voice.

A slender stream became a naked sprite,

Flashed around curious bends, and winked at me

Beyond the turns, alert and mischievous.

A saffron moon, dangling among the trees,

Seemed like a toy balloon caught in the boughs,

Flung there in sport by some too-mirthful breeze ...

And as it hung there, vivid and unreal,

The whole world’s lethargy was brushed away;

The night kept tugging at my torpid mood

And tore it into shreds. A warm air blew

My wintry slothfulness beyond the stars;

And over all indifference there streamed

A myriad urges in one rushing wave ...

Touched with the lavish miracles of earth,

I felt the brave persistence of the grass;

The far desire of rivulets; the keen,

Unconquerable fervor of the thrush;

The endless labors of the patient worm;

The lichen’s strength; the prowess of the ant;

The constancy of flowers; the blind belief

Of ivy climbing slowly toward the sun,

308The eternal struggles and eternal deaths—

And yet the groping faith of every root!

Out of old graves arose the cry of life;

Out of the dying came the deathless call.

And, thrilling with a new sweet restlessness,

The thing that was my boyhood woke in me—

Dear, foolish fragments made me strong again;

Valiant adventures, dreams of those to come,

And all the vague, heroic hopes of youth,

With fresh abandon, like a fearless laugh,

Leaped up to face the heaven’s unconcern. ...

And then—veil upon veil was torn aside—

Stars, like a host of merry girls and boys,

Danced gaily ’round me, plucking at my hand;

The night, scorning its stubborn mystery,

Leaned down and pressed new courage in my heart;

The hermit-thrush, throbbing with more than Song,

Sang with a happy challenge to the skies;

Love and the faces of a world of children

Swept like a conquering army through my blood.

And Beauty, rising out of all its forms,

Beauty, the passion of the universe,

Flamed with its joy, a thing too great for tears,

And, like a wine, poured itself out for me

To drink of, to be warmed with, and to go

Refreshed and strengthened to the ceaseless fight;

To meet with confidence the cynic years;

Battling in wars that never can be won,

Seeking the lost cause and the brave defeat.

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CALIBAN IN THE COAL MINES

God, we don’t like to complain

We know that the mine is no lark—

But—there’s the pools from the rain;

But—there’s the cold and the dark.

God, You don’t know what it is—

You, in Your well-lighted sky—

Watching the meteors whizz;

Warm, with the sun always by.

God, if You had but the moon

Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,

Even You’d tire of it soon,

Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above,

And nothing that moves but the cars. ...

God, if You wish for our love,

Fling us a handful of stars!

SWIMMERS

I took the crazy short-cut to the bay;

Over a fence or two and through a hedge,

Jumping a private road, along the edge

Of backyards full of drying wash it lay.

310I ran, electric with elation,

Sweating, impetuous and wild

For a swift plunge in the sea that smiled,

Quiet and luring, half a mile away.

This was the final thrill, the last sensation

That capped four hours of violence and laughter:

To have, with casual friends and casual jokes,

Hard sport, a cold swim and fresh linen after ...

And now, the last set being played and over,

I hurried past the ruddy lakes of clover;

I swung my racket at astonished oaks,

My arm still tingling from aggressive strokes.

Tennis was over for the day—

I took the leaping short-cut to the bay.

Then the swift plunge into the cool, green dark—

The windy waters rushing past me, through me;

Filled with a sense of some heroic lark,

Exulting in a vigor clean and roomy.

Swiftly I rose to meet the feline sea

That sprang upon me with a hundred claws,

And grappled, pulled me down and played with me.

Then, tense and breathless in the tightening pause

When one wave grows into a toppling acre,

I dived headlong into the foremost breaker;

Pitting against a cold and turbulent strife

The feverish intensity of life.

Out of the foam I lurched and rode the wave,

Swimming, hand over hand, against the wind;

311I felt the sea’s vain pounding, and I grinned

Knowing I was its master, not its slave.

Oh, the proud total of those lusty hours—

The give and take of rough and vigorous tussles

With happy sinews and rejoicing muscles;

The knowledge of my own miraculous powers,

Feeling the force in one small body bent

To curb and tame this towering element.

Back on the curving beach I stood again,

Facing the bath-house, when a group of men,

Stumbling beneath some sort of weight, went by.

I could not see the hidden thing they carried;

I only heard: “He never gave a cry”—

“Who’s going to tell her?”—“Yes, and they just married”—

“Such a good swimmer, too.” ... And then they passed;

Leaving the silence throbbing and aghast.

A moment there my buoyant heart hung slack,

And then the glad, barbaric blood came back

Singing a livelier tune; and in my pulse

Beat the great wave that surges and exults....

Why I was there and whither I must go

I did not care. Enough for me to know

The same unresting struggle and the glowing

Beauty of spendthrift hours, bravely showing

Life, an adventure perilous and gay;

And Death, a long and vivid holiday.

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HANDS

Strange, how this smooth and supple joint can be

Put to so many purposes. It checks

And rears the monsters of machinery

And shapes the idle gallantries of sex.

Those hands that light the fuse and dig the trap,

Fingers that spin the earth or plunge through shame—

And yours, that lie so lightly in your lap,

Are only blood and dust—all are the same.

What mastery directs them through the world

And gives these delicate bones so great a power?

You drop your head. You sleep. Your hands are curled

Loosely, like some half-opened, perfumed flower.

An hour ago they burned in mine and sent

Armies with banners charging through my veins.

Now they are cool and white; they rest content,

Curved in a smile. The mystery remains.

A SIDE STREET

On the warm Sunday afternoons

And every evening in the Spring and Summer

When the night hurries the late home-comer

And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes

Float from the open windows and jar

Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;

313When the city noises commingle and melt

With a restless something half-seen, half-felt—

I see them always there,

Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;

That row of little girls who sit and stare

Like sparrows on a granite perch.

They come in twittering couples or walk alone

To their gray bough of stone,

Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five—

But always they sit there on the narrow coping

Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping

To see more than what is merely moving and alive....

They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet

Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet....

Before the quiet church that smells of death

They sit.

And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath

And reaches out and plucks them by the hand

And calls them boldly, whispering to each

In some strange speech

They tremble to but cannot understand.

It thrills and troubles them, as one by one,

The days run off like water through a sieve;

While, with a gaze as candid as the sun,

Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive,

They come and sit,—

A part of life and yet apart from it.

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