Willard Wattles
Reading edition
Willard (Austin) Wattles was born at Bayneville, Kansas, July 8, 1888. He received his A.B. at the University of Kansas in 1909 and, since 1910, has divided his time between teaching English and harvesting wheat.
His first book was an anthology, Sunflowers: A Book of Kansas Poems (1914), to which he also contributed. Lanterns in Gethsemane (1918) consists, almost entirely, of mystical and religious poems. There is, however, little of the sermonizing unction and less cant in these fresh pages. There is an unusual 355vibrancy here; a warm buoyance that glows against its theological background. Many of Wattles’s verses have the peculiar grace of a parable joined to a nursery rhyme; “The Builder,” “Jericho” and a few others seem like scraps of the Scripture rendered by Mother Goose.
THE BUILDER[59]
Smoothing a cypress beam
With a scarred hand,
I saw a carpenter
In a far land.
Down past the flat roofs
Poured the white sun;
But still he bent his back,
The patient one.
And I paused surprised
In that queer place
To find an old man
With a haunting face.
“Who art thou, carpenter,
Of the bowed head;
And what buildest thou?”
“Heaven,” he said.
356
CREEDS
How pitiful are little folk—
They seem so very small;
They look at stars, and think they are
Denominational.