Volume 1 — EDITORIAL COMMENT
Reading edition
A PERFECT RETURN
I t is curious that the influence of Poe upon Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and through them upon English poets, and then through these last upon Americans, comes back to us in this round-about and indirect way. We have here an instance of what Whitman calls a "perfect return." We have denied Poe, we do not give him his full meed of appreciation even today, and yet we accept him through the disciples who have followed or have assimilated his tradition. And now that young Englishmen are beginning to feel the influence of Whitman upon French poetry, it may be that he too, through the imitation of vers libre in America, will begin to experience a "perfect return."
Must we always accept American genius in this round-about fashion? Have we no true perspective that we applaud mediocrity at home, and look abroad for genius, only to find that it is of American origin?
This bit of marginalia, extracted from a note-book of 1909, was relieved of the necessity of further elaboration by supplementary evidence received in one day from two correspondents. One, a brief sentence from Mr. Allen Upward: "It is much to be wished that America should learn to honor her sons without waiting for the literary cliques of London."
The other, the following "news note" from Mr. Paul Scott Mowrer in Paris. The date of Léon Bazalgette's translation, however, is hardly so epochal as it would seem, since Whitman has been known for many years in France, having been partly translated during the nineties.
Mr. Mowrer writes:
"It is significant of American tardiness in the development of a national literary tradition that the name of Walt Whitman is today a greater influence with the young writers of the continent than with our own. Not since France discovered Poe has literary Europe been so moved by anything American. The suggestion has even been made that 'Whitmanism' is rapidly to supersede 'Nietzscheism' as the dominant factor in modern thought. Léon Bazalgette translated Leaves of Grass into French in 1908. A school of followers of the Whitman philosophy and style was an almost immediate consequence. Such of the leading reviews as sympathize at all with the strong 'young' movement to break the shackles of classicism which have so long bound French prosody to the heroic couplet, the sonnet, and the alexandrine, are publishing not only articles on 'Whitmanism' as a movement, but numbers of poems in the new flexible chanting rhythms. In this regard La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, La Renaissance Contemporaine, and L'Effort Libre have been preëminently hospitable.
"The new poems are not so much imitations of Whitman as inspirations from him. Those who have achieved most success in the mode thus far are perhaps Georges Duhamel, a leader of the 'Jeunes,' whose plays are at present attracting national notice; André Spire, who writes with something of the apostolic fervor of his Jewish ancestry; Henri Franck, who died recently, shortly after the publication of his volume, La Danse Devant l'Arche; Charles Vildrac, with Le Livre d'Amour; Philéas Lebesgue, the appearance in collected form of whose Les Servitudes is awaited with keen interest; and finally, Jean Richard Bloch, editor of L'Effort Libre, whose prose, for example in his book of tales entitled Levy, is said to be directly rooted in Whitmanism.
"In Germany, too, the rolling intonations of the singer of democracy have awakened echoes. The Moderne Weltdichtung has announced itself, with Whitman as guide, and such apostles as Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, in Lobegesang des Lebens, and Ernst Lissauer in Der Acker and Der Strom.
"What is it about Whitman that Europe finds so inspiriting? First, his acceptance of the universe as he found it, his magnificently shouted comradeship with all nature and all men. Such a doctrine makes an instant though hardly logical appeal in nations where socialism is the political order of the day. And next, his disregard of literary tradition. Out of books more books, and out of them still more, with the fecundity of generations. But in this process of literary propagation thought, unfortunately, instead of arising like a child ever fresh and vigorous as in the beginning, grows more and more attenuated, paler, more sickly. The acclaim of Whitman is nothing less than the inevitable revolt against the modern flood of book-inspired books. Write from nature directly, from the people directly, from the political meeting, and the hayfield, and the factory—that is what the august American seems to his young disciples across the seas to be crying to them.
"Perhaps it is because America already holds as commonplaces these fundamentals seeming so new to Europe that the Whitman schools have sprung up stronger on the eastern side of the Atlantic than on the western."
It is not that America holds as commonplaces the fundamentals expressed in Whitman that there have been more followers of the Whitman method in Europe than in America, but that American poets, approaching poetry usually through terms of feeling, and apparently loath to apply an intellectual whip to themselves or others, have made no definite analysis of the rhythmic units of Whitman. We have been content to accept the English conception of the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman. The curious mingling of the concrete and the spiritual, which is what certain modern painters, perhaps under the Whitman suggestion, are trying to achieve, was so novel as to be disconcerting, and the vehicle so original as to appear uncouth—uncadenced, unmusical. The hide-bound, antiquated conception of English prosody is responsible for a great deal of dead timber. It is a significant fact that the English first accepted the spirit of Whitman, the French his method. The rhythmic measure of Whitman has yet to be correctly estimated by English and American poets. It has been sifted and weighed by the French poets, and though Whitman's influence upon modern French poetry has been questioned by English critics, the connection between his varied rhythmic units and modern vers libre is too obvious to be discounted. There may be an innate necessity sufficient to cause a breaking-up of forms in a poetic language, but there is no reason to believe that Paris, the great clearing-house of all the arts, would not be quick to adopt a suggestion from without. English poets, certainly, have not been loath to accept suggestions from Paris.
At any rate this international acceptance of the two greatest American poets, and the realization of their international influence upon us, may awaken us to a new sense of responsibility. It would be a valuable lesson, if only we could learn to turn the international eye, in private, upon ourselves. If the American poet can learn to be less parochial, to apply the intellectual whip, to visualize his art, to separate it and see it apart from himself; we may learn then to appreciate the great poet when he is "in our midst." and not wait for the approval of English or French critics.
A. C. H.
TAGORE'S POEMS
The appearance of the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, translated by himself from Bengali into English, is an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry. I do not use these terms with the looseness of contemporary journalism. Questions of poetic art are serious, not to be touched upon lightly or in a spirit of bravura.
Bengal is a nation of fifty million people. The great age of Bengali literature is this age in which we live. And the first Bengali whom I heard singing the lyrics of Tagore said, as simply as one would say it is four o'clock, "Yes, we speak of it as the Age of Rabindranath."
The six poems now published were chosen from a hundred lyrics about to appear in book form. They might just as well have been any other six, for they do not represent a summit of attainment but an average.
These poems are cast, in the original, in metres perhaps the most finished and most subtle of any known to us. If you refine the art of the troubadours, combine it with that of the Pleiade, and add to that the sound-unit principle of the most advanced artists in vers libre, you would get something like the system of Bengali verse. The sound of it when spoken is rather like good Greek, for Bengali is daughter of Sanscrit, which is a kind of uncle or elder brother of the Homeric idiom.
All this series of a hundred poems are made to music, for "Mr." Tagore is not only the great poet of Bengal, he is also their great musician. He teaches his songs, and they are sung throughout Bengal more or less as the troubadours' songs were sung through Europe in the twelfth century.
And we feel here in London, I think, much as the people of Petrarch's time must have felt about the mysterious lost language, the Greek that was just being restored to Europe after centuries of deprivation. That Greek was the lamp of our renaissance and its perfections have been the goal of our endeavor ever since.
I speak with all seriousness when I say that this beginning of our more intimate intercourse with Bengal is the opening of another period. For one thing the content of this first brief series of poems will destroy the popular conception of Buddhism, for we in the Occident are apt to regard it as a religion negative and anti-Christian.
The Greek gave us humanism; a belief in mens sana in corpore sano, a belief in proportion and balance. The Greek shows us man as the sport of the gods; the sworn foe of fate and the natural forces. The Bengali brings to us the pledge of a calm which we need overmuch in an age of steel and mechanics. It brings a quiet proclamation of the fellowship between man and the gods; between man and nature.
It is all very well to object that this is not the first time we have had this fellowship proclaimed, but in the arts alone can we find the inner heart of a people. There is a deeper calm and a deeper conviction in this eastern expression than we have yet attained. It is by the arts alone that one people learns to meet another far distant people in friendship and respect.
I speak with all gravity when I say that world-fellowship is nearer for the visit of Rabindranath Tagore to London.
Ezra Pound
REVIEWS
The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson (John Lane.)
This English poet, whose singing ceased a year ago, had a real lyric gift, though a very slight one. The present volume is a collection of all her poems, from the first girlish sheaf Tares, to The Lamp and the Lute, which she was preparing for publication when she died.
Through this whole life-record her poetry ripples along as smoothly and delicately as a meadow rill, with never a pause nor a flurry nor a thrill. She sings prettily of everyone, from the Last Fairy to William Ernest Henley, and of everything, from Death and Justice to the Orchard of the Moon, but she has nothing arresting or important to say of any of these subjects, and no keen magic of phrase to give her warbling that intense vitality which would win for her the undying fame prophesied by her loyal husband in his preface.
Nevertheless, her feeling is genuine, her touch light, and her tune a quiet monotone of gentle soothing music which has a certain soft appeal. Perhaps the secret of it is the fine quality of soul which breathes through these numerous lyrics, a soul too reserved to tell its whole story, and too preoccupied with the little things around and within her to pay much attention to the thinking, fighting, ever-moving world without.
A big-spirited, vital, headlong narrative poem is The Adventures of Young Maverick, by Hervey White, who runs a printing press at Woodstock, N. Y., and bravely publishes The Wild Hawk, his own little magazine. The poem has as many moods as Don Juan, which is plainly, though not tyrannically, its model.
The poem is long for these days—five cantos and nearly six hundred Spenserian stanzas. Yet the most casual reader, one would think, could scarcely find it tedious, even though the satirical passages run heavily at times. The hero is a colt of lofty Arabian lineage, and the poem becomes eloquently pictorial in setting forth his beauty:
Young Maverick in the upland pastures lay Woven as in the grass, while star-like flowers, Shaking their petals down in sweet array Dappled his flanks with gentle breathless showers. The thread green stems, tangled in bending bowers, Their pollen plumes of dust closed over him, Enwoofing through the drowse of summer hours, The pattern of his body, head and limb; His color of pale gold glowed as with sunshine dim.
The spirit of the West is in this poem, its freedom, spaciousness, strong sunshine; also its careless good humor and half sardonic fun. The race between the horse and the Mexican boy is as swift, vivid and rhythmical as a mountain stream; and the Mexican family, even to the fat old Gregorio, are characterized to the life, with a sympathy only too rare among writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Certain other characterizations are equally incisive, this for example:
Sometimes I peep into a modern poet Like Arthur Symons, vaguely beautiful, Who loves but love, not caring who shall know it; I wonder that he never finds it dull.
Mr. White is so profoundly a democrat, and so wholeheartedly a poet of the broad, level average American people, that both social and artistic theories sit very lightly upon him. He achieves beauty as by chance now and then, because he can not help it, but always he achieves a warm vitality, the persuasive illusion of life.
The Iscariot, by Eden Phillpotts (John Lane), is the ingenious effort of a theorist in human nature to unroll the convolutions of the immortal traitor's soul. And it is as ineffectual as any such effort must be to remould characters long fixed in literary or historic tradition. In the art of the world Judas is Judas; anyone who tries to make him over into a pattern of misguided loyalty has his labor for his pains.
The blank verse in which the monologue is uttered is accurately measured and sufficiently sonorous.
H. M.
Interpretations: A Book of First Poems, by Zoë Akins (Mitchell Kennerley).
The poems in this volume are creditable in texture, revealing a conscious sense of artistic workmanship which it is a pleasure to find in a book of first poems by a young American. A certain rhythmic monotony may be mentioned as an impression gained from a consecutive reading, and a prevailing twilight mood, united, in the longer poems, with a vein of the emotionally feminine.
Two short lyrics, however, I Am the Wind and The Tragedienne, stand apart in isolated perfection, even as the two Greek columns in the ruined theater at Arles; an impression recalled by the opening stanza of The Tragedienne:
Upon a hill in Thessaly Stand broken columns in a line About a cold forgotten shrine Beneath a moon in Thessaly.
This is the first of the monthly volumes of poetry to be issued by Mr. Kennerley. It awakens pleasant anticipation of those to follow.
Lyrical Poems, By Lucy Lyttelton. (Thomas B. Mosher.)
The twilight mood also prevails in the poems of Lucy Lyttelton, although the crest of a fine modern impulse may be traced in A Vision, The Japanese Widow, The Black Madonna, and A Song of Revolution.
"Where is Owen Griffiths?" Broken and alone Crushed he lies in darkness beneath Festiniog stone. "Bring his broken body before me to the throne For a crown. "Oftentimes in secret in prayer he came to me, Now to men and angels I know him openly. I that was beside him when he came to die Fathoms down. "And, Evan Jones, stand forward, whose life was shut in gloom, And a narrow grave they gave you 'twixt marble tomb and tomb. But now the great that trod you shall give you elbow room And renown."
These poems unite delicacy and strength. They convince us of sincerity and intensity of vision.
A. C. H.
NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
It is hardly necessary to introduce to the lovers of lyric and dramatic verse Mr. William Butler Yeats, who honors the Christmas number of Poetry by his presence. A score or more of years have passed since his voice, perfect in quality, began to speak and sing in high loyalty to the beauty of poetic art, especially the ancient poetic art of his own Irish people. His influence, reinforced by the prompt allegiance of Lady Gregory, Mr. Douglass Hyde, the late J. M. Synge, and many other Irish men and women of letters, has sufficed to lift the beautiful old Gaelic literature out of the obscurity of merely local recognition into a position of international importance. This fact alone is a sufficient acknowledgment of Mr. Yeats' genius, and of the enthusiasm which his leadership has inspired among the thinkers and singers of his race.
Mr. George Sterling, of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, is well known to American readers of poetry through his two books of verse, Wine of Wizardry and The House of Orchids.
Mr. Clark Ashton Smith, also of California, is a youth whose talent has been acclaimed quite recently by a few newspapers of his own state, and recognized by one or two eastern publications.
Mr. John Reed, of New York, and Alice Corbin, the wife of William P. Henderson, the Chicago painter, are Americans. The latter has contributed verse and prose to various magazines. The former is a young journalist, born in 1887, who has published little verse as yet.
Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of Bengal, is sufficiently introduced by Mr. Pound's article.
BOOKS RECEIVED
The Vaunt of Man and Other Poems, by William Ellery Leonard. B. W. Huebsch. Romance, Vision and Satire: English Alliterative Poems of the XIV Century, Newly Rendered in the Original Metres, by Jessie L. Weston. Houghton Mifflin Co. Etain The Beloved, by James H. Cousins. Maunsel & Co. Uriel and Other Poems, by Percy MacKaye. Houghton Mifflin Co. The Unconquered Air, by Florence Earle Coates. Houghton Mifflin Co. A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, by Amy Lowell. Houghton Mifflin Co. The Lure of the Sea, by J. E. Patterson. George H. Doran Co. The Roadside Fire, by Amelia Josephine Burr. George H. Doran Co. By the Way. Verses, Fragments and Notes, by William Allingham. Arranged by Helen Allingham. Longmans, Green & Co. Gabriel, A Pageant of Vigil, by Isabelle Howe Fiske. Thomas B. Mosher. Pilgrimage to Haunts of Browning, by Pauline Leavens. The Bowrons, Chicago. The Wind on the Heath, Ballads and Lyrics, by May Byron. George H. Doran. Valley Song and Verse, by William Hutcheson. Fraser, Asher & Co. The Queen of Orplede, by Charles Wharton Stork. Elkin Mathews. Pocahontas, A Pageant, by Margaret Ullman. The Poet Lore Co. Poems, by Robert Underwood Johnson. The Century Co. Songs Before Birth, Isabelle Howe Fiske. Thomas B. Mosher. Book Titles From Shakespeare, by Volney Streamer. Thomas B. Mosher. A Bunch of Blossoms, Little Verses for Little Children, by E. Gordon Browne. Longmans, Green & Co. June on the Miami, by William Henry Venable. Stewart & Kidd. The Tragedy of Etarre, A Poem, by Rhys Carpenter. Sturgis & Walton Co. In Other Words, by Franklin P. Adams. Doubleday, Page & Co. Verses and Sonnets, by Julia Stockton Dinsmore. Doubleday, Page & Co. Anna Marcella's Book of Verses, by Cyrenus Cole. Printed for Personal Distribution. Atala, An American Idyl, by Anna Olcott Commelin. E. P. Dutton & Co. Spring in Tuscany, an Authology. Thos. B. Mosher.
Vol. I No. 4
JANUARY, 1913
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GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN (To be sung to the tune of The Blood Of The Lamb with indicated instruments.)
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? The saints smiled gravely, and they said, "He's come," Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?Bass Drum Walking lepers followed, rank on rank, Lurching bravos from the ditches dank, Drabs from the alleyways and drug-fiends pale— Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail! Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, Unwashed legions with the ways of death— Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Every slum had sent its half-a-score The round world over—Booth had groaned for more. Every banner that the wide world flies
Bloomed with glory and transcendent dyes. Big-voiced lasses made their banjos bang! Tranced, fanatical, they shrieked and sang,Banjo Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Hallelujah! It was queer to see Bull-necked convicts with that land make free! Loons with bazoos blowing blare, blare, blare— On, on, upward through the golden air. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Booth died blind, and still by faith he trod, Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God.Bass drums Booth led boldly and he looked the chief:slower and softer Eagle countenance in sharp relief, Beard a-flying, air of high command Unabated in that holy land.
Jesus came from out the Court-House door, Stretched his hands above the passing poor. Booth saw not, but led his queer ones thereFlutes Round and round the mighty Court-House square. Yet in an instant all that blear review Marched on spotless, clad in raiment new. The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled And blind eyes opened on a new sweet world.
Drabs and vixens in a flash made whole!Bass drums Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl;louder and faster Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean. Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
The hosts were sandalled and their wings were fire— Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.Grand Chorus— Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?tambourines— Oh, shout Salvation! it was good to seeall instruments Kings and princes by the Lamb set free.in full blast The banjos rattled, and the tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of queens!
And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer He saw his Master through the flag-filled air.Reverently sung— Christ came gently with a robe and crownno instruments For Booth the soldier while the throng knelt down. He saw King Jesus—they were face to face, And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Nicholas Vachel Lindsay
WASTE LAND Briar and fennel and chincapin, And rue and ragweed everywhere; The field seemed sick as a soul with sin, Or dead of an old despair, Born of an ancient care. The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr, And the note of a bird's distress, With the rasping sound of the grasshopper, Clung to the loneliness Like burrs to a trailing dress. So sad the field, so waste the ground, So curst with an old despair, A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound, And a chipmunk's stony lair, Seemed more than it could bear. So lonely, too, so more than sad, So droning-lone with bees— I wondered what more could Nature add To the sum of its miseries ... And then—I saw the trees. Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place, Twisted and torn they rose— The tortured bones of a perished race Of monsters no mortal knows, They startled the mind's repose. And a man stood there, as still as moss, A lichen form that stared; With an old blind hound that, at a loss, Forever around him fared With a snarling fang half bared. I looked at the man; I saw him plain; Like a dead weed, gray and wan, Or a breath of dust. I looked again— And man and dog were gone, Like wisps of the graying dawn.... Were they a part of the grim death there— Ragweed, fennel, and rue? Or forms of the mind, an old despair, That there into semblance grew Out of the grief I knew? Madison Cawein
MY LADY OF THE BEECHES Here among the beeches Winds and wild perfume, That the twilight pleaches Into gleam and gloom, Build for her a room. Her, whose Beauty cometh, Misty as the morn, When the wild bee hummeth, At its honey-horn, In the wayside thorn. As the wood grows dimmer, With the drowsy night, Like a moonbeam glimmer Here she walks in white, With a firefly-light. Moths around her flitting, Like a moth she goes; Here a moment sitting By this wilding rose, With my heart's repose. Every bough that dances Has assumed the grace Of her form: and Fancies, Flashed from eye and face, Brood about the place. And the water, shaken In its plunge and poise, To itself has taken Quiet of her voice, And restrains its joys. Would that these could tell me What and whence she is; She, who doth enspell me, Fill my soul with bliss Of her spirit kiss. Though the heart beseech her, And the soul implore, Who is it may reach her— Safe behind the door Of all woodland lore? Madison Cawein
THE WAYFARERS Earth, I dare not cling to thee Lest I should lose my precious soul. 'Tis not more wondrous than the fluff Within the milkweed's autumn boll. Earth, shall my sacred essences But sink into thy senseless dust? The springtide takes its way with them— And blossoms blow as blossoms must. Earth, I swear with solemn vow, I feel a greatness in my breath! The grass-seed hath its dream of God, Its visioning of life and death. Anita Fitch
LES CRUELS AMOUREUX Two lovers wakened in their tombs— They had been dead a hundred years— And in the langue of old Provence They spoke of ancient tears. "M'amour," she called, "I've pardoned you;" (How sad her dreaming seemed to be!) "When I had kissed your dead face once Love's sweet returned to me." "M'amour," he called, "it was too late." (How dreary seemed his ghostly sighs!) "Blessed the soul that love forgives," He whispered, "ere it dies." And then they turned again and slept With must and mold in ancient way; And so they'll sleep and wake, 'tis told, Until the Judgment Day. ENVOI O damoiseau et damoiselle, Guard ye your loving while ye live! Sin not against love's sacred flame— While yet ye may, forgive. Anita Fitch
LOVE-SONGS OF THE OPEN ROAD MORNING The morning wind is wooing me; her lips have swept my brow. Was ever dawn so sweet before? the land so fair as now? The wanderlust is luring to wherever roads may lead, While yet the dew is on the hedge. So how can I but heed? The forest whispers of its shades; of haunts where we have been,— And where may friends be better made than under God's green inn? Your mouth is warm and laughing and your voice is calling low, While yet the dew is on the hedge. So how can I but go? NOON The bees are humming, humming in the clover; The bobolink is singing in the rye; The brook is purling, purling in the valley, And the river's laughing, radiant, to the sky! The buttercups are nodding in the sunlight; The winds are whispering, whispering to the pine; The joy of June has found me; as an aureole it's crowned me Because, oh best belovèd, you are mine! NIGHT In Arcady by moonlight, (Where only lovers go), There is a pool where only The fairest roses grow. Why are the moonlit roses So sweet beyond compare? Among their purple shadows My love is waiting there. ———————— To Arcady by moonlight The roads are open wide, But only joy can enter And only joy abide. There is the peace unending That perfect faith can know— In Arcady by moonlight, Where only lovers go. Kendall Banning
SYMPATHY As one within a moated tower, I lived my life alone; And dreamed not other granges' dower, Nor ways unlike mine own. I thought I loved. But all alone As one within a moated tower I lived. Nor truly knew One other mortal fortune's hour. As one within a moated tower, One fate alone I knew. Who hears afar the break of day Before the silvered air Reveals her hooded presence gray, And she, herself, is there? I know not how, but now I see The road, the plain, the pluming tree, The carter on the wain. On my horizon wakes a star. The distant hillsides wrinkled far Fold many hearts' domain. On one the fire-worn forests sweep, Above a purple mountain-keep And soar to domes of snow. One heart has swarded fountains deep Where water-lilies blow: And one, a cheerful house and yard, With curtains at the pane, Board-walks down lawns all clover-starred, And full-fold fields of grain. As one within a moated tower I lived my life alone; And dreamed not other granges' dower Nor ways unlike mine own. But now the salt-chased seas uncurled And mountains trooped with pine Are mine. I look on all the world And all the world is mine. Edith Wyatt
A SONG OF HAPPINESS Ah Happiness: Who called you "Earandel"? (Winter-star, I think, that is); And who can tell the lovely curve By which you seem to come, then swerve Before you reach the middle-earth? And who is there can hold your wing, Or bind you in your mirth, Or win you with a least caress, Or tear, or kiss, or anything— Insensate happiness? Once I thought to have you Fast there in a child: All her heart she gave you, Yet you would not stay. Cruel, and careless, Not half reconciled, Pain you cannot bear; When her yellow hair Lay matted, every tress; When those looks of hers, Were no longer hers, You went: in a day She wept you all away. Once I thought to give You, plighted, holily— No more fugitive, Returning like the sea: But they that share so well Heaven must portion Hell In their copartnery: Care, ill fate, ill health, Came we know not how And broke our commonwealth. Neither has you now. Some wait you on the road, Some in an open door Look for the face you show'd Once there—no more. You never wear the dress You danced in yesterday; Yet, seeming gone, you stay, And come at no man's call: Yet, laid for burial, You lift up from the dead Your laughing, spangled head. Yes, once I did pursue You, unpursuable; Loved, longed for, hoped for you— Blue-eyed and morning brow'd. Ah, lovely happiness! Now that I know you well, I dare not speak aloud Your fond name in a crowd; Nor conjure you by night, Nor pray at morning-light, Nor count at all on you: But, at a stroke, a breath, After the fear of death, Or bent beneath a load; Yes, ragged in the dress, And houseless on the road, I might surprise you there. Yes: who of us shall say When you will come, or where? Ask children at their play, The leaves upon the tree, The ships upon the sea, Or old men who survived, And lived, and loved, and wived. Ask sorrow to confess Your sweet improvidence, And prodigal expense And cold economy, Ah, lovely happiness! Ernest Rhys
HELEN IS ILL When she is ill my laughter cowers; An exile with a broken rhyme, My head upon the breast of time, I hear the heart-beat of the hours; I close my eyes without a sigh; The vision of her flutters by As glints the light of Mary's eyes Upon the lakes in Paradise. I seem to reach an olden town And enter at the sunset gate; And as the streets I hurry down, I find the men are all elate, As if an angel of the Lord Had passed with dearest word and nod, Remembered like a yearning chord Of songs the people sing to God; I come upon the sunrise gate— As silent as her listless room— There seven beggers sing and wait And this the song that breaks the gloom: God a 'mercy is most kind; She the fairest passed this way; We the lowest were not blind; God a 'mercy bless the day. Roscoe W. Brink
VERSES, TRANSLATIONS, AND REFLECTIONS FROM "The Anthology"
HERMES OF THE WAYS The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it. But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth. Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east Weathers sea-wind; Fronts the great dunes. Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse, salt-crusted grass Answers. Heu, It whips round my ankles! II Small is This white stream, Flowing below ground From the poplar-shaded hill, But the water is sweet. Apples on the small trees Are hard, Too small, Too late ripened By a desperate sun That struggles through sea-mist. The boughs of the trees Are twisted By many bafflings; Twisted are The small-leafed boughs. But the shadow of them Is not the shadow of the mast head Nor of the torn sails. Hermes, Hermes, The great sea foamed, Gnashed its teeth about me; But you have waited, Where sea-grass tangles with Shore-grass. H. D.
PRIAPUS Keeper-of-Orchards I saw the first pear As it fell. The honey-seeking, golden-banded, The yellow swarm Was not more fleet than I, (Spare us from loveliness!) And I fell prostrate, Crying, Thou hast flayed us with thy blossoms; Spare us the beauty Of fruit-trees! The honey-seeking Paused not, The air thundered their song, And I alone was prostrate. O rough-hewn God of the orchard, I bring thee an offering; Do thou, alone unbeautiful (Son of the god), Spare us from loveliness. The fallen hazel-nuts, Stripped late of their green sheaths, The grapes, red-purple, Their berries Dripping with wine, Pomegranates already broken, And shrunken fig, And quinces untouched, I bring thee as offering. H. D.
EPIGRAM (After the Greek) The golden one is gone from the banquets; She, beloved of Atimetus, The swallow, the bright Homonoea: Gone the dear chatterer; Death succeeds Atimetus. H. D., "Imagiste."