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Title: Starved Rock

Author: Edgar Lee Masters

Release date: July 5, 2014 [eBook #46197]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Charlene Taylor, Dianne Nolan, Bryan Ness and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STARVED ROCK ***

STARVED ROCK

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

STARVED ROCK

BY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS

Author of "Spoon River Anthology," "Songs and
Satires," "The Great Valley," "Toward
the Gulf," etc.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1919
All rights reserved

Certain of these poems first appeared in Reedy's Mirror,
Poetry, The Cosmopolitan, The Yale Review and The
New York Sun.

[Pg vii]

	PAGE
Starved Rock	1
Hymn to the Dead	5
Creation	10
The World's Desire	13
Tyrannosaurus: or Burning Letters	16
Lord Byron to Doctor Polidori	22
The Folding Mirror	29
A Woman of Forty	33
Wild Birds	34
A Lady	36
The Negro Ward	40
William Shakspeare	44
For a Play	47
Chicago	49
The Wedding Feast	54
By the Waters of Babylon	58
The Dream of Tasso	60
The Christian Statesman	69
The Lament of Sophonia	77
At Decapolis	79
Winged Victory	83
Oh you Sabbatarians!	88
Pallas Athene	90
[Pg viii]
At Sagamore Hill	95
To Robert Nichols	101
Bonnybell: The Butterfly	103
Hymn to Agni	109
Epitaph for Us	111
Botticelli to Simonetta	114
Flower in the Garden	115
Inexorable Deities	117
Arielle	119
Sounds out of Sorrow	121
Mournin' for Religion	122
Thyamis	124
I Shall Go Down into This Land	126
Spring Lake	128
The Barber of Sepo	138
They'd Never Know Me Now	145
Nel Mezzo Del Cammin	156
The Oak Tree	160
The House on the Hill	162
Washington Hospital	163
Neither Faith nor Beauty Can Remain	170

[Pg 1]

STARVED ROCK

As a soul from whom companionships subside

The meaningless and onsweeping tide

Of the river hastening, as it would disown

Old ways and places, left this stone

Of sand above the valley, to look down

Miles of the valley, hamlet, village, town.

*****

It is a head-gear of a chief whose head,

Down from the implacable brow,

Waiting is held below

The waters, feather decked

With blossoms blue and red,

With ferns and vines;

Hiding beneath the waters, head erect,

His savage eyes and treacherous designs.

*****

It is a musing memory and memorial

Of geologic ages

Before the floods began to fall;

The cenotaph of sorrows, pilgrimages

Of Marquette and LaSalle.

The eagles and the Indians left it here

In solitude, blown clean

[Pg 2]

Of kindred things: as an oak whose leaves are sere

Fly over the valley when the winds are keen,

And nestle where the earth receives

Another generation of exhausted leaves.

*****

Fatigued with age its sleepless eyes look over

Fenced fields of corn and wheat,

Barley and clover.

The lowered pulses of the river beat

Invisibly by shores that stray

In progress and retreat

Past Utica and Ottawa,

And past the meadow where the Illini

Shouted and danced under the autumn moon,

When toddlers and papooses gave a cry,

And dogs were barking for the boon

Of the hunter home again to clamorous tents

Smoking beneath the evening's copper sky.

Later the remnant of the Illini

Climbed up this Rock, to die

Of hunger, thirst, or down its sheer ascents

Rushed on the spears of Pottawatomies,

And found the peace

Where thirst and hunger are unknown.

*****

This is the tragic and the fateful stone

Le Rocher or Starved Rock,

A symbol and a paradigm,

A sphinx of elegy and battle hymn,

[Pg 3]

Whose lips unlock

Life's secret, which is vanishment, defeat,

In epic dirges for the races

That pass and leave no traces

Before new generations driven in the blast

Of Time and Nature blowing round its head.

Renewing in the Present what the Past

Knew wholly, or in part, so to repeat

Warfare, extermination, old things dead

But brought to life again

In Life's immortal pain.

*****

What Destinies confer,

And laughing mock

LaSalle, his dreamings stir

To wander here, depart

The fortress of Creve Coeur,

Of broken heart,

For this fort of Starved Rock?

After the heart is broken then the cliff

Where vultures flock;

And where below its steeps the savage skiff

Cuts with a pitiless knife the rope let down

For water. From the earth this Indian town

Vanished and on this Rock the Illini

Thirsting, their buckets taken with the knife,

Lay down to die.

*****

[Pg 4]

This is the land where every generation

Lets down its buckets for the water of Life.

We are the children and the epigone

Of the Illini, the vanished nation.

And this starved scarp of stone

Is now the emblem of our tribulation,

The inverted cup of our insatiable thirst,

The Illini by fate accursed,

This land lost to the Pottawatomies,

They lost the land to us,

Who baffled and idolatrous,

And thirsting, spurred by hope

Kneel upon aching knees,

And with our eager hands draw up the bucketless rope.

*****

This is the tragic, the symbolic face,

Le Rocher or Starved Rock,

Round which the eternal turtles drink and swim

And serpents green and strange,

As race comes after race,

War after war.

This is the sphinx whose Memnon lips breathe dirges

To empire's wayward star,

And over the race's restless urges,

Whose lips unlock

Life's secret which is vanishment and change.

[Pg 5]

HYMN TO THE DEAD

O, you who have gone from the ways of cities,

From the peopled places, the streets of strife,

From offices, markets, rooms, retreats,

Pastoral ways, hamlets, everywhere from the earth,

And have made of the emptiness of your departure

A land, a country, a realm all your own,

Set above the hills of our vision, an empire

Within, around, above our empire of days,

Of pain and clamorous tongues;

An empire which out of a sovereign silence

Stretches its power over the restless multitude

Of our thoughts, and the ceaseless music of our beings,

And surrounds us even as the air we breathe—

O ye majestic Dead, hear our hymn!

*****

The clown, the wastrel and the fool in life

Are lifted up by you, O Death!

The least of these who has entered in

Your realm, O Death,

Is greater than the greatest of us,

And by a transfiguration has been clothed

With the glory and the wonder of nature.

He has drunk of the purple cup of apotheosis,

And passed through the mystical change,

[Pg 6]

And accomplished the cycle of being.

He has risen from the lowlands of earth

Into the air on wings of breath.

He has rejected the shell of the body, feet and hands,

He has become one with the majesty of Time,

And taken the kingdom of triumph

Whether it be cessation or bliss.

For he has entered into the kingdom of primal powers,

Being or ceasing to be,

Even as he has re-entered the womb of nature.

Or he has found peace,

States of wisdom, or vision—

Hail! realm of Silence,

Whence comes the unheard symphony too deep for strings,

Hail, infinite Light,

Darkness to eyes of flesh—

All hail!

*****

What are we, the living, beside you the dead?

We of daily hunger, daily food, daily ablutions,

The daily rising and lying down,

Waking and sleep;

The daily care of the body's needs;

And daily desire to pass the gift of life;

And daily fears of the morrow to come;

And daily pains for things that are gone;

And daily longing for things that fly us;

And sorrow that follows wherever we go;

[Pg 7]

And love that mocks us, and peace that breaks,

And shame that tracks us, and want that gnaws.

But O ye Dead! Ye great ones,

Triumphant over these, released

From the duties of dust, all chains of desire,

And made inhabitants of breathless spaces,

Immanent in a realm of calm,

Rulers of a sphere of tideless air,

Victors returned from the war of death in life,

Victors over death in death!

*****

For the growing soul turns in

Even as the seed turns in on itself,

And becomes hard, transparent,

An encased life, condensed

In the process of saving itself

From rains that beat in the fall,

And frosts that descend from skies grown cold.

And we who shed away old thoughts and hopes,

Days and dreams of life

Turn in, grow clear like grains of rice,

Until the realm of death

Is as snow delivered land

Luring the seed—

And it becomes our home, our country,

Our native land that calls us back

From this sojourn of adventure,

And place of profit;

For O ye majestic Dead, your absence draws us,

[Pg 8]

If it be naught but absence still you summon,

Your absence has become a very Presence,

A Power, a hierarchy of Life!

*****

Even as leaves enrich the earth

Layer on layer,

Even as bodies of men enrich the soil

Generation on generation,

So do the spirits of those departed

Enrich our soil of life

With delights, wisdoms, purest hopes,

And shapes of beauty.

But oh beyond all these, is our life enriched

With exalted contemplations

Of you, O glorious Dead,

Who have eaten of the tree of life and become gods,

Friendly divinities to us who remain,

Dear familiars, as you were with us

Fathers, children, lovers, friends.

Ye who sense with the inner eye,

Since nothing in our days of living

Moves uncolored of your splendors,

Presences to which all things relate!

*****

O realm of the Dead,

Black Mountain, if you be,

Which darkens heaven,

And shadows earth,

[Pg 9]

Round which our spirits flutter

Like startled moths.

Black mountain with whose blackness

The light of life is mixed,

Whereof all hues are made:

All thoughts, all lofty wanderings of the soul,

All meanings, divinations

Of briefest hours, and frailest joys,

All wonders of the spectrum of the soul

Out of life and death!

*****

Realm of the Dead! Supreme Reality

All Hail!

[Pg 10]

CREATION

Passion flower unfolding in darkness!

Glow-worm under a spray of lilac!

Flame on the altar of love!

Beloved in your chamber!

The phoenix moon rising from the ashes of day

Spreads her wings of saffron fire

Above the enchanted garden.

And I brush away the leaves of night

To find the star of my love.

I part the curtains about the altar,

I enter your chamber, beloved.

*****

I have entered your chamber, beloved,

I have found my star.

Between kisses and whispers

And the silken touch of flesh

Breast to breast, lips to lips,

Our souls are seeking and drifting!

As an albatross hovers and flies

With the running sea ...

Powers of body, powers of spirit,

Divinities

Awakened never before,

Hidden in nerves asleep, in veins without a tide

[Pg 11]

Flow through us.

I give you my life, beloved,

For life of you, given to me—

O bride of love!

*****

O hair of fire! O breasts of light,

Like double stars!

O voice like a lute that whispers

At midnight, in a bower of roses!

O body luminous as the nebulous waste

Across the midnight,

Pour on my breast, my hands, my brow

The sacred fire,

As our flesh becomes one

Upborne by your breasts,

White as bridal blossoms

Where there is yet no milk,

But only eddying blood

Circling in whirlpools of delirious ecstasy

In time with the blood of me.

Our lips together, our bodies together

While the yearning urn of porphyry

Waits to drink the silver stream,

And thirsts to drink,

And poises like a gold fish waiting

For the stream of silver fire....

*****

But oh, hands of me that clasp your sunny head,

Drawing it close to my breast,

[Pg 12]

In rapture of its beauty!

O temple of your spirit!

Spirit of you which I woo and would win,

In rapture without will,

In rapture blind, save for the inspired urge,

In rapture seeking further rapture,

In rapture to wed your spirit fully,

And all your spirit, which my spirit

Through the unity of flesh would reach

And win, and keep—

Bride of lightning!

Bride of Life!

*****

As when the butterfly slowly moves his wings

Drawing from the virgin core of honeysuckles

The sweetest drop of dew:—

So pause his wings spread wide

When all is gained.

*****

Goddess of the white dawn,

Let my beloved sleep—

Robins that sing at dawn,

Wake not my beloved!

I sleep with my beloved,

And she sleeps with me,

And a life sleeps now

That will wake!

[Pg 13]

THE WORLD'S DESIRE

At Philae, in the temple of Isis,

The fruitful and terrible goddess,

Under a running panel of the sacred ibis,

Is pictured the dead body of Osiris

Waiting the resurrection morn.

And a priest is pouring water blue as iris

Out of a pitcher on the stalk of corn

That from the body of the god is growing,

Before the rising tides of the Nile are flowing.

And over the pictured body is this inscription

In the temple of Isis, the Egyptian:

This is the nameless one, whom Isis decrees

Not to be named, the god of life and yearning,

Osiris of the mysteries,

Who springs from the waters ever returning.

At the gate of the Lord's house,

Ezekiel, the prophet, beheld the abomination of Babylon:

Women with sorrow on their brows

In lamentation, weeping

For the bereavement of Ishtar and for Tammuz sleeping,

And for the summer gone.

Tammuz has passed below

To the house of darkness and woe,

[Pg 14]

Where dust lies on the bolt and on the floor

Behind the winter's iron door;

And Ishtar has followed him,

Leaving the meadows gray, the orchards dim

With driving rain and mist,

And winds that mourn.

Ishtar has vanished, and all life has ceased;

No flower blossoms and no child is born.

But not as Mary Magdalen came to the tomb,

The women in the gardens of Adonis,

Crying, "The winter sun is yet upon us,"

Planted in baskets seeds of various bloom,

Which sprouted like frail hopes, then wilted down

For the baskets' shallow soil.

Then for a beauty dead, a futile toil,

For leaves that withered, yellow and brown,

From the gardens of Adonis into the sea,

They cast the baskets of their hope away:

A ritual of the things that cease to be,

Brief loveliness and swift decay.

And O ye holy women, who at Delphi

Roused from sleep the cradled Dionysius,

Who with an April eye

Looked up at them,

Before the adorable god, the infant Jesus,

Was found at Bethlehem!

For at Bethlehem the groaning world's desire

For spring, that burned from Egypt up to Tyre,

[Pg 15]

And from Tyre to Athens beheld an epiphany of fire:

The flesh fade flower-like while the soul kept breath

Beyond the body's death,

Even as nature which revives;

In consummation of the faith

That Tammuz, the Soul, survives,

And is not sacrificed

In the darkness where the dust

Lies on the bolt and on the floor,

And passes not behind the iron door

Save it be followed by the lover Christ,

The Ishtar of the faithful trust,

Who knocks and says: "This soul, which winter knew

In life, in death at last,

Finds spring through me, and waters fresh and blue.

For lo, the winter is past;

The rain is over and gone.

I open! It is dawn!"

[Pg 16]

TYRANNOSAURUS: OR BURNING LETTERS

Trees of the forest ground to pulp,

Rolled into sheets and rabbit tracked

With nut-gall or with nigrosine—

Then look at spirits thrill, or gulp

A lost delight, a rising spleen

For love that grew intense or slacked ...

Here are the letters, torn in bits,

Crammed in the basket, look how full!

Our little fireplace scarce admits

So much that once was beautiful.

Here where we sat and dreamed together

In March, and now when we should be

Friends in the glory of June weather,

We tear our letters up—oh, me!

Call Jane to take the basket down,

And throw these on the furnace fire.

Let ashes drift about the town

Of what was our desire!

What are we to the gods, I wonder?

Perhaps two crickets in the grass,

Who meet and drop their stomachs' plunder

To touch antennæ as they pass.

[Pg 17]

So kissing in such soul communion

The gardener's step is heard, and quick

The crickets break their spirits' union,

Hide under logs or bits of brick.

Does guilty conscience stir the crickets?

What does he care? Why not a snap.

He's trimming out the hazel thickets

For a tennis court and shooting trap....

You are afraid of God! Not that?

Some step has frightened you, I know.

Well, then it's gossip the alley-cat.

At least our hands grow cold as snow,

Relax their touch, and then we come,

Tear up the letters, sit and stare

Some moments, wholly dumb!

If we are crickets, still our breasts

Contain for us things real enough.

The gods may laugh, their interests

Are what? I wonder—not the love

Such as we knew. To be a god

Through love is what I hoped, and rise

Above the level of the clod.

They said it can't be, who are wise,

That's not the way to win the prize:

Or if it be, I don't know how;

Or you are not the one with whom

I might have won it. Well, my brow

Is turned into a whitened tomb

With all uncleanness in it; dreams

[Pg 18]

Rotting away with hopes as fair ...

To me, the liver, nothing seems

Won that is lost. I can't invert,

Sophisticate the facts, or swear

My evil good. A hurt's a hurt,

A loss a loss, a scar a scar,

A spirit frustrate is inert.

To stretch your hands toward a star

And lose the star, or have it die

To ashes like a rocket, alters

The aspect of your being's sky.

You've learned no praise from earthly psalters

Can win the star, or else you've learned

The star you touched was quickly turned

To ashes while it burned.

Hell! Let us face it. Here it is

We had some walks, some precious talks,

Some hours of paradise and bliss.

Our blossom opened, we inhaled

All of its fragrance, now I scowl

Because our wonder blossom paled

For lack of water in the bowl

Tipped over by the alley-cat,

Or what not, change, distrust or fear;

Your pride, your will, a hovering gnat

I struck at striking you, a blear

Of eyes a moment, making blind

My vision, yours.... Or there's the age,

The age is frightful to my mind,

[Pg 19]

Nothing to do but stand it—well

I sit here and say "hell."

For it's really hell to have a will,

It's hell to hope and to believe,

That good can swallow up the ill,

That gods are working, will achieve.

They may be, yet they disregard

Our cricket feelings, so we shrill

Sonnets and elegies round the yard...

Let's talk a bit of chlorophyll:

The sun was useless for our life,

No wine, no beef, no watercress

Until this chlorophyll grew rife

Millions of years since, more or less.

And if no wine or beef, no love,

No pulp, no paper, nigrosine,

No letters which are made thereof.

Think! All we found and lost has been

Through chlorophyll.

And just suppose

Nature should lose the secret power

For making chlorophyll, the rose

We cherished would not come to flower.

No other man and woman more

Would burn their letters grieving—yet

We may be rising, for who knows

There may be something vastly better

Than love to flame and flay and fret,

[Pg 20]

And hate this letter and that letter,

Once rid of chlorophyll, in case

A subtler substance could be given

To this poor globe out of heaven—

We are a weak, if growing race!

Here, then, I think is a moral for us,

Another is tyrannosaurus—

Tyrannosaurus, what of him,

The monarch of this world one time,

Back in the æons wet and dim?

He faded like a pantomime.

And he could, well, step over trees,

Crunch up bowlders like cracking nuts,

Flip horses away like bumble-bees,

Stretch out in valleys as if they were ruts;

And hide a man in his nostril's hole,

And crush young forestry just like weeds.

He came and went, and what's your soul,

And what is mine with their crying needs?

And love that seemed eternal once,

Given of God to lift, inspire,

Well—now do we see? Was I dunce

Drunk with the wine of soul's desire?

Who made that wine, why did I drink it?

Why did I want it? What's the game?

Are spirits chaos? I scarce can think it.

Why fly for the light and get the flame?

Is love for souls of us chlorophyll

That makes us eatable, sweet and crisp

[Pg 21]

For Gods that raise us to feed their fill?

Who lives, the dreamer, the will o' the wisp?

Do Gods live, vanish, return again?

Who in the devil has love or luck?

One thing is true, there's rapture and pain.

As for the rest, I pass the buck.

Something occurs, and God knows what,

Tyrannosaurus fades like a ghost.

That throws a light on our little lot,

Love that is won, love that is lost.

Even a hundred years from now,

If this poor earth is rolling still,

Hearts will quiver, break or bow—

Provided the plants have chlorophyll.

Oh well! Oh hell! We must be heroic,

And it helps to scan a million of years.

And to think of monstrous beasts mesoic,

Brightens, though it dries no tears.

I'll dream for life of our walks by the river—

That was March and it's now July.

And this remains: I'll love you forever—

Burn up the letters now—Good by!

[Pg 22]

LORD BYRON TO DOCTOR POLIDORI

No more of searching, Doctor—let it go.

It can't be lost. I have a memory

I put it in a drawer, or again

I seem to see me tuck it in a pocket

Of some portmanteau. If you find the letter

Deliver it to Moore. But if it's lost,

The story is not lost. I tell you this

To save the story from my side. Attend!

It was this way:

Allegra had become

A child requiring care, and nutritive

Instruction in religion, morals, well,

They call me blasphemer and sensualist,

But read my poems. Christianity

Was never of rejected things with me.

The Decalogue is good enough, I think.

And Shelley's theories, atheist speculations

I never shared—nor social dreams. The scheme

Of having all things, women, too, in common

Means common women. I have sinned, I know—

I call it sin. The marriage vow I honor,

And woman's virtue. Though I stray, I hold

That women should be chaste, though man is not.

That's why I placed Allegra in a convent....

[Pg 23]

Now to the letter, and my story of it.

The mother, Claire, Claire Claremont, as you know—

Pined for Allegra; would possess the child

And take her from the convent—where? No doubt

To Shelley's nest, where William Godwin's daughter

Raised on free love, and Shelley preaching it,

And Claire in whom 'tis bred, hold sway, who read,

Talk, argue, dream of freedom, all the things

Opposed to what is in the present order.

You know the notes to "Queen Mab." Well, I say

This suits me not.

So Shelley and his wife,

Mary, the planet of an hour, since quenched,

Conceive I keep Allegra where she is

From wounded pride, or pique. Hell fire! They think

I'm hurt for thinking Claire and Shelley join

Their lips in love, and masque my jealousy

By just this pose of morals, make reprisal

Under a lying flag, and keep Allegra

To punish Claire and sate my jealousy

By this hypocrisy—It makes me laugh.

But to pursue. A maid who was discharged

From Shelley's household told the credible tale

That Claire was Shelley's mistress, and the Hoppners

Heard and believed—why not? As she is fair,

And Shelley wrote "Love is like understanding

Which brighter grows gazing on many truths,

[Pg 24]

Increases by division," that himself

Could not accept the code, a man should choose

One woman and leave all the rest, why not?

As for myself, I have not preached this doctrine,

Though living it as men do in the world....

Oh yes, I know this love called spiritual,

Of which old maids, whose milk has gone to brain

And curdled in the process, and who hate me

For taking men and women as they are,

Talk to create belief for self and others.

Denial makes philosophies, religions.

Indulgence leaves one sane, objectifies

The eternal womanly, freeing brain of fumes,

To work with master hands with love and life.

The story rose, however.

Then comes Shelley

Bearing a letter from his wife, denying

That Claire and Shelley loved, you understand—

By the flesh. Sweet, was it not? Naïve!

This letter I should hand the Hoppners, who

Believed the story, and who held a place

Persuasive touching poor Allegra. Well,

So Shelley comes and makes the point, the child

Is in ill health, Claire, too, in a decline,

And hands this letter to me for the Hoppners.

[Pg 25]

And I've misplaced it. Frankly, from the first,

Had no fixed purpose to deliver it.

What principle makes me collaborator

With such fantastic business? To resume:

He acted like the boy he was. I smiled—

Against the flaming rage that burned his face—

My mocking smile, he thought, the Don Juan

Upcurved my lips. I read his very thought

Between words spoken; words that he suppressed:

It was that I was glad that Claire was ill

Because of that male mood when love of man

Finds sustenance where suffering lays low

The object of desire: If she suffers,

The man subdues, devours her. She escapes

If free of love. Oh yes, and this he thought:

That I was glad she suffered, since my glory

Had failed to hold her, failed to satisfy

Her noble heart! God's wounds! Why Shelley thought

She turned to him and with his spirit found

A purity of peace and sweetest friendship,

And faith that saves and serves, as men and women

Are to each other souls to serve and save!

Poor fool! I read it all, or pieced it out

With words that I picked up from time to time....

There was this further thing: I am a man,

So say they, who accepts the dying creed

That woman's love is lawless and a toy

When given if no priest has sanctified it—

Not quite, perhaps. The point is further on.

[Pg 26]

In any case 'tis this: that this belief,

Mine or part mine, and coloring my acts,

Shadowed no whit the brow of Lady Claire.

And that I, greatest lover of my time,

Had won this lady's body but to lose

The lady's soul, a soul that slipped and fled

Out of the hands that clasped her flesh, because

She knew me through her gift, thought less of me,

And no wise felt herself bound to my life

Because she gave her body. Kept her mind,

Soul, free, untouched by that gift, by the gift

Was cognizant of what is false and poor—

(I use some words I heard) in me. And thus

I lost her soul, though earlier I had gained

What seemed all to me, all I had the genius

To comprehend in woman! Then comes Shelley

And finds her soul, the genuine prize, and I

Grow sullen with a consciousness of vision

Inferior to his. All this they thought.

Oh Jesus, what a lie!

I have loved Nature, love her now: and woman

Is Nature, and my love for nature means

Inclusion of the sex. I have not soared

To heights that sickened me and made me laugh

At what I sought—or turned from it. No moons

Behind the clouds; no terrors and no symbols,

No Emilia Vivianni's have I had.

I know, believe me, love for woman calls

[Pg 27]

A man's soul up to heights too rare to live in.

I have not risen, therefore, will not rise

Where thinking stops, because the blood leaves brain

Therefore have had no falls, and no recoils

Chasing the Plato vision, the star, the wonder,

The beauty and the terror, harmony

Of nature's art; the passion that would make

The loved one of the self-same womb with me,

A sister, spouse or angel, dæmon, pilot

Of life and fate.

How much of truth is here?

Dreams seen most vividly by Petrarch, Dante,

Who loved without achievement, balking nature,

Till Passion, like an involute, pressed in

Harder and harder on its starving leaves,

Becomes a fragrance—sublimate of self

Sucked out of sorrow's earth, at last becomes

A meditative madness. All is written

Fairly across my page. "She walks in beauty:"

"When we two parted," "Could love like a river,"

"Bright be the place of thy soul." Lines, lines

In "Harold," "Don Juan." Yes, I have loved,

But saw how far love lures, how far to venture,

Knowing what can and what cannot be made

Of the mystery, the wonder, therefore never

Have had to laugh at self; find Vivianni

A housemaid shelling corn—not threading pearls.

[Pg 28]

Or sit, with idiot eyes, my bones half broken,

Icarus bumped amid a field of stones.

I know the hour of farewell. I have said it

When my heart trembled, stopped as when a horse

Braces its terrored feet to keep from plunging

Over the precipice. Farewell! Farewell!

I know to say, and turn, and pass my way.

Why! For that matter, even now behold!

Do I feel less than Shelley would in this?

I leave the Countess for the war in Greece.

What's done is done. What's lived is lived. Come, Doctor,

Let's practice with the pistols. Mother of God,

What is this thing called Life?

[Pg 29]

THE FOLDING MIRROR

A folding mirror! What may it be?

Nothing? Or something? Let me see!

Its silver chain is hung to the sky

On a planet nail. And it fronts my eye.

No stars reflect themselves at first,

The mirrors are dustless, vacant and clean.

Not even my face shows—am I cursed?

What may the mirrors mean?

*****

I watch like a cat that waits to mangle

A breathless rat in an alley nook.

And a little figure steps into the angle

Made by the folding mirrors. Look!

His thin legs wobble, bend and dangle

Like radish roots. He takes the crook

Out of his arms and raises them up,

As if in panic, or supplication.

He bends and peers, whines like a pup,

Walks to and fro in his desperation,

Pinches his arms and beats his breast;

Runs quivering fingers between his hair,

Wavers for weariness, sighs for rest,

Looks up to the planet that seems to bear

The silver chain like a brad in the wall.

[Pg 30]

Upsprings, searches the mirrors again;

Sees for the first the prodigal

Waste of stars in the black inane.

Stamps with his feet upon the void

He stands on, paces on, why, he wonders

Is he upborned like an asteroid?

Hark! The limitless blackness thunders:

The Infinite growls, he whirls and shivers,

Runs to cover the mirrors to climb.

They yield like the waters of phantom rivers.

He acts like a soul new born that quivers

Before the mirrors of Space and Time.

*****

Now what's to do? He must fill in.

This emptiness with horror is shod.

When did this pageant of things begin?

Somewhere hiding there is a God.

Some one drove that planet nail

Into the blue wall; some one hung

The silver chain. And what is the tale

Of the mirrors here in the blackness swung?

The soul is naked, weak and alone,

And sees its nakedness in the glass.

It must create from wood and stone,

Wire and reeds, color and brass.

It must create though it be but a mime,

Make a reality all its own

Before the mirror of white called Time,

Before the mirror of blue called Space.

[Pg 31]

Clasp the vastness between their folds,

Find laws, raise altars, dream of a face—

Make that real which the hope beholds.

*****

Our terrored manikin commences,

Fattens his littleness with clothes.

With crowns and miters puffs his senses,

Crushes the grape to drown his woes.

Fills full the mirrors with faces. Now

They are dancing before them, age and youth,

Laurels or thorns are bound on a brow.

They hunt and slay for a thing called Truth.

Dig for treasure, toil for riches,

Struggle for place—it is well enough!

Some lift their busts into chosen niches.

All are hungry for peace and love.

And only a few are blind, dispute

The thing is a dream. If there be worth

It lies in the strings of the lyre or lute,

Sounds that never return to earth;

Dreams to seeing eyes reflected,

Caught from infinite realms afar.

How could they be seen, or recollected

Except for the Real—except for a Star?

*****

God in the blackness, whirlwind, lightning,

God in the blinding fire of the sun

Before these empty mirrors brightening

See what we do, what we have done!

[Pg 32]

Out of an astral substance molding

Music and laws for our hearts' control,

Yes, and a hope that the mirrors' folding

Lets slip through a growing soul.

Are you not proud of us, do you not pity?

Is all the glory thine alone?

Then if it be, you must take the city

Builded, demolished stone from stone.

All of our madness, weariness, error,

Blindness, weakness, pain and loss,

Fumbling feebly before the mirror,

Yours is the crown, but yours the cross!

Yours is the juice of grape or poppies

To fill the void with a make believe;

Yours the hope where never a prop is,

The opiates, too, that dull, deceive,

No less than nature that lifts eternal

Vision of Life to quiet the heart:

Verse and color that stamp the infernal

Dragon of Fear with the feet of Art.

Yours and ours the consolations

In loneliness and in terror wrought

Out of our spirits' desolations,

Out of our spirits' love and thought!

[Pg 33]

A WOMAN OF FORTY

Eyes that have long looked on the world,

Taken and stored the soul of outward things,

Dread to look on themselves,

In the mirror to gaze upon their mirrorings!

There to behold what time has done, what thought

Has changed their look and light.

I have lost my face through sorrow and dreams

And dare not find it, lest it smite

This self to-day, since I may not restore

My old self who in gladness without terror

Beheld and knew myself

Each morning in the mirror!

In the long quest of love I may have found

A spirit after whom my passion lusted.

But I had trust not giving love,

I have given love to hearts I have not trusted.

One thing has come that I would never see,

Hidden or trembling in my eyes:

Love in the mirror shown fatigued and mild,

Hopeless and wise.

[Pg 34]

WILD BIRDS

The wild birds among the reeds

Cry, exult and stretch their wings.

Out of the sky they drift

And sink to the water's rushes.

But the wild birds beat their wings and cry

To the newcomer out of the sky!

Is he a stranger, this wild bird out of the sky?

Or do they cry to him because of remembered places

And remembered days

Spent together

In the north-land, or the south-land?

Is this the ecstasy of renewal,

Or the ecstasy of beginning?

For the wild bird touches his bill

Against a mate;

He brushes her wing with his wing;

He quivers with delight

For the cool sky of blue,

And the touch of her wing!

The wild birds fly up from the reeds of the water,

Some for the south,

[Pg 35]

Some for the north.

They are gone—

Lost in the sky!

In what water do these mates of a morning

Exult on the morrow?

What wild birds will cry to them as they sink

Out of an unknown sky?

To whose cry will she quiver

Through her burnished wings to-morrow,

In the north-land,

In the south-land,

Far away?

[Pg 36]

A LADY

She sleeps beneath a canopy of carnation silk,

Embroidered with Venetian lace,

Between linens that crush in the hand

Soft as down.

Waking, she looks through a window

Curtained with carnation silk,

Embroidered with Venetian lace,

The walls are hung with velvet

Embossed with a fleur de lis,

And around her is the silence of richness,

Where foot-falls are like exhalations

From carpets of moss.

Little clocks tinkle.

Medallions priceless as jewels

Lie by jars suspiring like coals of fire.

And a maid prepares the bath,

Tincturing delicious water with exquisite essences.

And she is served with coffee

In cups as thin as petals,

Sitting amid pillows that breathe

The souls of freesia!

All things are hers:

Fishes from all seas,

[Pg 37]

Fruits from all climes.

The city lies at her command,

And is summoned by buttons

Which are pressed for her.

Noiselessly feet move on many floors,

Serving her.

Wheels that turn under coaches

Of crystal and ebony,

And yachts dreaming in strange waters,

And wings—all are hers!

And she is free:

Her husband comes and goes

From his suite below hers.

She never sees him,

Nor knows his ways, nor his days.

But she is very weary

And all alone amid her servants,

And guests that come and go.

Her lips are red,

Her skin is soft and smooth—

But the page blurs before her eyes.

Her eyelids are languid,

And droop from weariness,

Though she will not rest

From the long pursuit of love!

Her hair is white;

The skin of her faultless neck

Edges in creases

[Pg 38]

As she turns her perfect head.

And the days dawn and die.

What day that dawns will bring her love?

And day by day she waits for the dawn

Of a new life, a great love!

But every morning brings its remembrance

Of the increasing years that are gone.

And every evening brings its fear

Of death which must come,

Until her nerves are shaken

Like a woman's hair in the wind—

What must be done?

Some one tells her that God is love.

And when the fears come

She says to self over and over,

"God is love! God is love!

All is well."

And she wins a little oblivion,

Through saying "God is love,"

From the truth in her heart which cries:

"Love is life,

Love is a lover,

And love is God!"

She is a flower

Which the spring has nourished,

And the summer exhausted.

Fall is at hand.

Weird zephyrs stir her leaves and blossoms;

[Pg 39]

And she says to herself, "It is not fall,

For God is love!"

My poor flower!

May this therapy ease you into sleep,

And the folding of jewelless hands!

You are beginning to be sick

Of the incurable disease of age,

And the weariness of futile flesh!

[Pg 40]

THE NEGRO WARD

Scarce had I written: it were best

To crush this love, to give you up,

Drink at one draught the bitter cup,

And kill this new life in my breast,

Than Parker's breathing seemed to give

Ominous sound the end was near.

I did so want this man to live—

This negro soldier, dear.

'Twas three in the morning, all was still

But Parker's rattle in the throat,

Outside I heard the whippoorwill.

The new moon like an Indian boat

Hung just above the darkened grove,

Where you and I had pledged our love,

When you were here. Such precious hours,

Such fleeting moments then were ours ...

Alone here in the silent ward,

With Parker dying, I was scared.

His breath came short, his lips were blue.

I asked him: "Is there something more,

Parker, that I can do for you?"

"Please hold my hand," he said. Before

I took it, it was growing cold—

Death, how quick it comes!

[Pg 41]

Then next I seemed to hear the drums—

For I had fainted for his eyes

That stared with such a wide surprise,

As the lids fell apart they stared,

As if they saw what to behold

Had startled his poor soul which fared

Where it would not. I heard the drums,

The bugle next, lay there so faint

With Parker's eyes still in my view,

Like bubble motes which flit and paint

Themselves upon the heaven's blue.

An orderly had mailed meanwhile

That letter, to you, there I lay

Too weak to write again, unsay

What I had written.

Down the aisle,

Between our beds a step I heard,

A voice: "Our order's here, we leave

In half an hour for France." I stirred

Like a dead thing, could scarce conceive

What tragedy was come. No chance

To write you or to telegraph.

In twelve hours more, as in a trance

I looked from Ellis Island, where

My chums could gayly talk and laugh.

In two hours more we sailed for France.

All this was hard, but still to bear

The knowledge of you, your despair,

[Pg 42]

Or change, or bitterness, if you thought

That letter came from me, was wrought

Out of a heart that could not stake

Its own blood for your sake.

I will come back to you at length

If I but live and have the strength.

How will you like me with hair white,

And wasted cheeks, deep lined and pale?

It all began that dreadful night

Of Parker's death, the strain and fright,

The letter it seemed best to write—

From then to now I have been frail.

Our ship just missed a submarine,

And here the hardships, gas-gangrene,

The horrors and the deaths have stripped

My life of everything. Is it to prove

For duty, you, though bloody-lipped,

And fallen my unconquerable love

For country and for you through all,

Whatever fate befall?

What is my soul's great anguish for?

For what this tragedy of war?

For what the fate that says to us:

Part hands and be magnanimous?

For what the judgment which decrees

The mother love in me to cease?

For separation, hopeless miles

Of land and water us between?

[Pg 43]

For what the devil force that smiles

At man's immedicable pain?

I have not lost my faith in God.

Life has grown dark, I only say:

Dear God, my feet have lost the way.

Religion, wisdom do not give

A place to stand, a space to live.

I have not lost my faith in love,

That somehow it must rise above

The clouds of earth, I still can rest

In dreams sometimes upon your breast.

But, oh, it seems sometimes a play

Where gods are picking a bouquet:

The blossom of war, my soul or yours

More fragrant grown as it endures....

[Pg 44]

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE

Homer saw nations, armies, multitudes—

You saw them in the intimate interludes

Of Brutus' soul at midnight in a tent

When the infection festers the event.

Ulysses' course is changed by the sea's trough.

You saw an epoch when a hat blows off.

Orestes fled the Furies, won his peace

Through Apollo in old Greece.

But who unbars the mouse traps of your world,

Or kills the ambushed serpent where it's curled?

Your Fates return, and Fortinbras draws in

On Hamlet's impotence and Gertrude's sin.

All oceans in a raindrop, drops of dew

Containing perfect heavens starred and blue;

Angels who mother Calibans, and hopes

Are of your vision—great mosaics hued

With thoughts of princes, poets, misanthropes,

Reveal their minute colors closer viewed.

Atomies, maggots, worms or gilded flies,

Nothing too small or foul is for your eyes.

You made a culture of dreams lost or won

Like Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson.

You looked in heaven when the lightning shone,

Then saw a fairy's whip of cricket bone.

For gods and men bacteriologist

[Pg 45]

Of spiritual microbes hidden which subsist

In moments of red joy—calm satirist

Of worlds forsaken for a woman's hair,

Kings slain, states crumbled, heroes false or fair,

The madness of the flesh, love on the wrack,

A white maid married to a soldier black.

Incests, adulteries and secret sins,

The fall of monarchs and of manikins.

All men at last a rattling empty pod,

All men destroyed like flies for sport of God.

All Life at last an idiot's furious tale—

You had the strength to say this and not quail!

For you what were the unities, the rules

Of Plautus, Corneille or the Grecian schools?

Flame through a pipe will sing, perhaps, when blown

Against the craftsman's silver, but the tone

Of worlds in conflagration, that's to be

The sacred fire with wings outspread and free,

Wherein an Athens falls, a Sidon stands,

And where a freezing clown may warm his hands.

If you could empty out a tiger's brain

And wire up its spinal cord again

To Sappho's brain, it would no doubt devour

The tiger's nerves and sinews in an hour.

Such muscles and such bones could not endure

The avid hunger of a fire so pure.

And you, Will Shakspeare, spirit sensitive,

You lived past fifty, that is long to live

And feed a flame like yours, and let the flame

[Pg 46]

Remake itself and lap at flesh and frame.

I say with Jesus, wisdom's eyes are blind

To seek a poet out and think to find

A slender reed that's shaken by the wind.

Come cyclops of the counter, millionaires,

Lawyers and statesmen in the world's affairs,

And thin away like flesh which acid eats

Under the passion even of John Keats.

But if you felt and saw love, agony,

As Shakspeare knew them you would quickly die.

There is no tragedy like the gift of song,

It keeps you mortal but demands you strong;

It gives you God's eyes blurred with human tears,

And crowns a thousand lives in fifty years.

Enter the breathless silence where God dwells,

See and record all heavens and all hells!

[Pg 47]

FOR A PLAY

Love began with both of them so gently

Meeting, neither thought nor looked intently.

Afterward her breath invoked the fire—

Breath to breath set burning their desire.

Is there aught in flesh or is it spirit

Conscious of its kindred soul when near it?

Woe to flesh or soul that's wholly wakened

While the other's soul-depths lie unshakened!

How could she give him all sacred blisses,

Long embraces, in the darkness kisses,

If she was not his, all else forgetting,

Lovers gone and other loves' regretting?

That was just the place her gold was leadened—

Flesh there too alive, to him all deadened.

She could harp not to his playing wholly,

Yet his heart strings trembled for her solely.

So this love play hastened to the curtain.

Each one spoke his lines in accents certain,

While at times behind the wings her glances

Warmed the prompter's treasonous advances.

[Pg 48]

Is there greater martyrdom than this is?

You have staked your soul where the abyss is.

You have given all—oh sorry barter

You have lit the fire for you the martyr.

You will still love on, or turn to hating,

Days depart, your heart stays in its waiting,

Where's the blame? She gave her heart's half measure,

All she had, for all your soul's full treasure.

What's the half to keep, could you achieve it?

What your treasure if you could retrieve it?

Never more shall you again bestow it ...

Now you have a song if you're a poet.

Now you're ever dumb if song's denied you,

You shall be more dumb than all beside you,

While your soul is shaken by its torrents—

Dante songless in a Dante Florence.

Age shall not make strong, nor deeper learning.

Grief grows clearer with your eye's discerning.

Pass the years, but oh the soil grows faster—

Richer for the roots of your disaster.

Ends the play—for what is life but dying?

What is love but fire forever crying?

What your soul but love's pure carbon fuel?

Love and life make ashes of the jewel!

[Pg 49]

CHICAGO

I

On the gray paper of this mist and fog

With dust for the erasure and with smoke

For drawing crayons, be this charcoal scrawl:

The breed of Gog in the kingdom of Magog,

Skyscrapers, helmeted, stand sentinel

Amid the obscuring fumes of coal and coke,

Raised by enchantment out of the sand and bog.

This sky-line, the Sierras of the lake,

Cuts with dulled teeth,

Which twist and break,

The imponderable and drifting steam.

And restlessly beneath

This man-created mountain chain,

Like the flow of a prairie river

Endlessly by day and night, forever

Along the boulevards pedestrians stream

In a shuffle like dancers to a low refrain:

Forever by day and night

Pursuing as of old the lure of delight,

And the ghosts of pleasure or pain.

Their rhythmic feet sound like the falling of rain,

Or the hush of the waves, when the roar

Is blown by a wind off shore.

[Pg 50]

II

From a tower like a mountain promontory

The cesspool of a railroad lies to view

Fouling the marble of the city's glory:

A crapulous sluice of garbage and of cars

Where engines rush and whistle, smudge the blue

With filth like the trail of slugs.

It is a trench of steel which bars

Free access to the common shore, and hugs

In a coil of lazar arms the boulevard.

Cattle and hogs delivered here for slaughter

Corrupt the loveliness of the water front.

They low and grunt,

Switched back and forth within the tangled yard.

But from this tower the amethystine water,

The water of jade or slate,

Is visible with its importunate

Gestures against the sky to still retreats

In Michigan, of quiet woods and hills

Beyond the simmering passion of these streets,

And all their endless ills....

III

But over the switch yard stands the Institute

Guarded by lions on the avenue,

Colossal lions standing for attack;

Between whose feet luminous and resolute

Children of the city passing through

[Pg 51]

To palettes, compasses, the demoniac

Spirit of the city shall subdue.

Lions are in the loop and jackals too.

They have no trainers but the alderman,

Who uses them to hunt with, but in time

The city shall behold its nobler plan

Achieved by hands that rhyme,

Workers who architect and build,

And out of thought its substance re-arrange,

Till all its prophecies shall be fulfilled.

Through numbers, science and art

The city shall know change,

And win dominion over water and light,

The cyclop's mastery of the mart;

The devils overcome,

Which stalk the squalid ways by night

Of poverty and the slum,

Where the crook is spawned, the burglar and the bum.

These youths who pass the lions shall assuage

The city's thirst and hunger,

And save it from the wastage and the wage

Of the demagogue, the precinct monger.

IV

This is the city of great doges hidden

In guarded offices and country places.

The city strives against the things forbidden

By the doges, on whose faces

The city at large never looks;

[Pg 52]

Doges who could accomplish if they would

In a month the city's beauty and good.

Yet this city in a hundred years has risen

Out of a haunt of foxes, wolves and rooks,

And breaks asunder now the bars of the prison

Of dead days and dying. It has spread

For many a rood its boundaries, like the sprawled

And fallen Hephaestos, and has tenanted

Its neighborhoods increasing and unwalled

With peoples from all lands.

From Milwaukee Avenue to the populous mills

Of South Chicago, from the Sheridan Drive

Through forests where the water smiles

To Harlem for miles and miles.

It reaches out its hands,

Powerful and alive

With dreams to touch tomorrow, which it wills

To dawn and which shall dawn....

And like lights that twinkle through the stench

And putrid mist of abattoirs,

Great souls are here, separate and withdrawn,

Companionless, whom darkness cannot quench.

Seeing they are the chrysalis which must feed

Upon its own thoughts and the life to be,

Its flight among the stars.

Beauty is here, like half protected flowers,

Blooms and will cast its multiplying seed,

Until one mass of color shall succeed

The shaley places of these arid hours.

[Pg 53]

V

Chicago! by this inland sea

In the land of Lincoln, in the state

Of souls who held the nation's fate,

City both old and young, I consecrate

Your future years to truth and liberty.

Be this the record frail and incomplete

Of one who saw you, mingled with the masses

Along these magical mountain passes

With restless yet with hopeful feet.

Could they return to see you who have slept

These fifty years, who laid your first foundations!

And oh! could we behold you who have kept

Their promises for you, when new generations

Shall walk this boulevard made fair

In chiseled marble, looking at the lake

Of clearer water under a bluer air.

We who shall sleep then nor awake,

Have left the labor to you and the care

Ask great fulfillment, for ourselves a prayer!

[Pg 54]

THE WEDDING FEAST

Said the chief of the marriage feast to the groom,

Whence is this blood of the vine?

Men serve at first the best, he said,

And at the last, poor wine.

Said the chief of the marriage feast to the groom,

When the guests have drunk their fill

They drink whatever wine you serve,

Nor know the good from the ill.

How have you kept the good till now

When our hearts nor care nor see?

Said the chief of the marriage feast to the groom,

Whence may this good wine be?

Said the chief of the marriage feast, this wine

Is the best of all by far.

Said the groom, there stand six jars without

And the wine fills up each jar.

Said the chief of the marriage feast, we lacked

Wine for the wedding feast.

How comes it now one jar of wine

To six jars is increased?

[Pg 55]

Who makes our cup to overflow?

And who has the wedding blest?

Said the groom to the chief of the feast, a stranger

Is here as a wedding guest.

Said the groom to the chief of the wedding feast,

Moses by power divine

Smote water at Meribah from the rock,

But this man makes us wine.

Said the groom to the chief of the wedding feast,

Elisha by power divine

Made oil for the widow to sell for bread,

But this man, wedding wine.

He changed the use of the jars, he said,

From an outward rite and sign:

Where water stood for the washing of feet,

For heart's delight there's wine.

So then 'tis he, said the chief of the feast,

Who the wedding feast has blest?

Said the groom to the chief of the feast, the stranger

Is the merriest wedding guest.

He laughs and jests with the wedding guests,

He drinks with the happy bride.

Said the chief of the wedding feast to the groom,

Go bring him to my side.

[Pg 56]

Jesus of Nazareth came up,

And his body was fair and slim.

Jesus of Nazareth came up,

And his mother came with him.

Jesus of Nazareth stands with the dancers

And his mother by him stands.

The bride kneels down to Jesus of Nazareth

And kisses his rosy hands.

The bridegroom kneels to Jesus of Nazareth

And Jesus blesses the twain.

I go a way, said Jesus of Nazareth,

Of darkness, sorrow and pain.

After the wedding feast is labor,

Suffering, sickness, death,

And so I make you wine for the wedding,

Said Jesus of Nazareth.

My heart is with you, said Jesus of Nazareth,

As the grape is one with the vine.

Your bliss is mine, said Jesus of Nazareth,

And so I make you wine.

Youth and love I bless, said Jesus,

Song and the cup that cheers.

The rosy hands of Jesus of Nazareth

Are wet with the young bride's tears.

[Pg 57]

Love one another, said Jesus of Nazareth,

Ere cometh the evil of years.

The rosy hands of Jesus of Nazareth

Are wet with the bridegroom's tears.

Jesus of Nazareth goes with his mother,

The dancers are dancing again.

There's a woman who pauses without to listen,

'Tis Mary Magdalen.

Forth to the street a Scribe from the wedding

Goes with a Sadducee.

Said the Scribe, this shows how loose a fellow

Can come out of Galilee!

[Pg 58]

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

By the waters of Babylon by the sea,

On the sand where the waters died,

The sea wind and the tide

Drowned the words you spoke to me.

The sea fell at our feet. The sand

Hushed the whispering waters, near

The babble of boats by the pier

Was the ictus to the roar on the strand.

By the waters of Babylon a grief to be,

The waiting ships in the bay,

Awed the words we would say

Against the sound of the sea:

For France was below the waters, and the west

Behind me where the rains

Come in November on the window panes,

And the blast shakes the ruined nest

Under the dripping eaves. What then remains

But memory of the waters of Babylon,

And the ships like swan after swan,

Under the drone of angry hydroplanes?

[Pg 59]

By the waters of Babylon we did not weep,

Though love comes and is gone,

As the wind is, as waters drawn

In spray from the deep.

Neither for things foreseen and ominous,

For newer hands that somewhere wait

To thrill afresh, the reblossomed fate

Did we surrender dolorous....

Change now is yours beyond the waters, nights

Of waiting and of doubt have dimmed desire.

Our hands are calm before the dying fire

Of lost delights.

Babylon by the sea knows us no more.

Between the surge's hushes

When on the sand the water rushes

There is no voice of ours upon the shore.

[Pg 60]

THE DREAM OF TASSO

O Earth that walls these prison bars—O Stones

Which shut my body in—could I be free

If these fell and the grated door which groans

For every back scourged hither oped for me?

Freedom were what to travel you, O Earth,

When my heart makes its daily agony?

And longing such as mine cannot ungirth

Its bands and its mortality o'erleap.

Our life is love unsatisfied from birth,

Our life is longing waking or asleep,

And mine has been a vigil of quick pain.

O Leonora, thus it is I keep

Grief in my heart and weariness of brain.

How did I know these chains and bars are wrought

Of frailer stuff than space, that I could gain

In earth no respite, but a vision brought

The truth, O Leonora? It was this:

I dreamed this hopeless love, so long distraught

Was never caged, but from the first was bliss,

And moved like music from the meeting hour

To the rapt moment of the earliest kiss

Bestowed upon your hands, to gathering flower

Of lips so purely yielded, the embrace

Tender as dawn in April when a shower

[Pg 61]

Quenches with gentleness each flowering place;

So were your tears of gladness—so my hands

Which stroked your golden hair, your sunny face,

Even as flying clouds o'er mountain lands

Caress with fleeting love the morning sun.

Now I was with you, and by your commands.

Your love was mine at last completely won,

And waited but the blossom. How you sang,

Laughed, ran about your palace rooms and none

Closed doors against me, desks and closets sprang

To my touch open, all your secrets lay

Revealed to me in gladness—and this pang

Which I had borne in bitterness day by day

Was gone, nor could I bring it back, or think

How it had been, or why—this heart so gay

In sudden sunshine could no longer link

Itself with what it was.

Look! Every room

Had blooms your hands had gathered white and pink,

And drained from precious vases their perfume.

And fruits were heaped for me in golden bowls,

And tapestries from many an Asian loom

Were hung for me, and our united souls

Shone over treasure books—how glad you were

To listen to my epic, from the scrolls

Of Jerusalem, the holy sepulcher.

Still as a shaft of light you sat and heard

With veilèd eyes which tears could scarcely blur,

[Pg 62]

But flowed upon your cheek with every word.

And your hand reached for mine—you did not speak,

But let your silence tell how you were stirred

By love for me and wonder! What to seek

In earth and heaven more? Heaven at last

Was mine on earth, and for a sacred week

This heaven all of heaven.

So it passed

This week with you—you served me ancient wine.

We sat across a table where you cast

A cloth of chikku, or we went to dine

There in the stately room of heavy plate.

Or tiring of the rooms, the day's decline

Beheld us by the river to await

The evening planet, where in elfin mood

You whistled like the robin to its mate,

And won its answering call. Then through the wood

We wandered back in silence hand in hand,

And reached the sacred portal with our blood

Running so swift no ripples stirred the sand

To figures of reflection.

Once again

Within your room of books, upon the stand

The reading lights are brought to us, and then

You read to me from Plato, and my heart

Breathes like a bird at rest; the world of men,

Strife, hate, are all forgotten in this art

Of life made perfect. Or when weariness

[Pg 63]

Comes over us, you dim the lamp and start

The blue light back of Dante's bust to bless

Our twilight with its beauty.

So the time

Passes too quickly—our poor souls possess

Beauty and love a moment—and our rhyme

Which captures it, creates the illusion love

Has permanence, when even at its prime

Decay has taken it from the light above,

Or darkness underneath.

I must recur

To our first sleep and all the bliss thereof.

How did you first come to me, how confer

On me your beauty? That first night it was

The blue light back of Dante, but a blur

Of golden light our spirits, when you pass

Your hand across my brow, our souls go out

To meet each other, leave as wilted grass

Our emptied bodies. Then we grow devout,

And kneel and pray together for the gift

Of love from heaven, and to banish doubt

Of change or faithlessness. Then with a swift

Arising from the prayer you disappear.

I sleep meanwhile, you come again and lift

My head against your bosom, bringing near

A purple robe for me, and say, "Wear this,

And to your chamber go." And thus I hear,

And leave you; on my couch, where calm for bliss

[Pg 64]

I wait for you and listen, hear your feet

Whisper their secret to the tapestries

Of your ecstatic coming—O my sweet!

I touched your silken gown, where underneath

Your glowing flesh was dreaming, made complete

My rapture by upgathering, quick of breath,

Your golden ringlets loosened—and at last

Hold you in love's embrace—would it were Death!...

For soon 'twixt love and sleep the night was past,

And dawn cob-webbed the chamber. Then I heard

One faintest note and all was still—the vast

Spherule of heaven was pecked at by a bird

As it were to break the sky's shell, let the light

Of morning flood the fragments scattered, stirred

By breezes of the dawn with passing night.

We woke together, heard together, thrilled

With speechless rapture! Were your spirit's plight

As mine is with this vision, had I willed

To torture you with absence? Would I save

Your spirit if its anguish could be stilled

Only among the worms that haunt the grave?

My dream goes on a little: Day by day,

These seven days we lived together, gave

Our spirits to each other. With dismay

You watched my hour's departure. On you crept

Light shadows after moments sunny, gay.

But when the hour was come, you sat and wept,

And said to me: "I hear the rattling clods

Upon the coffin of our love." You stepped

[Pg 65]

And stood beside the casement, said "A god's

Sarcophagus this room will be as soon

As you have gone, and mine shall be the rod's

Bitterness of memory both night and noon

Amid the silence of this palace." So

I spoke and said, "If you would have the boon—

O Leonora, do I live to know

This hope too passionate made consummate?—

Yet if it be I shall return, nor go

But to return to you, and make our fate

Bound fast for life." How happy was your smile,

Your laughter soon,—and then from door to gate

I passed and left you, to be gone awhile

Around Ferrara.

In three days, it seemed,

I came again, and as I walked each mile

Counting to self—my feet lagged as I dreamed—

And said ten miles, nine miles, eight miles, at last

One mile, so many furlongs, then I dreamed

Your reading lamps were lighted for me, cast

Their yellow beams upon the mid-night air.

But oh my heart which stopped and stood aghast

To see the lamp go out and note the glare

Of blue light set behind the Dante mask!

Who wore my robe of purple false and fair?

Who drank your precious vintage from the flask

Roman and golden whence I drank so late?

Who held you in his arms and thus could ask?

Receive your love? Mother of God! What fate

[Pg 66]

Was mine beneath the darkness of that sky,

There at your door who could not leave or wait,

And heard the bird of midnight's desolate cry?

And saw at last the blue light quenched, and saw

A taper lighted in my chamber—why

This treachery, Leonora? Why withdraw

The love you gave, or eviler, lead me here,

O sorceress, before whom heaven's law

Breaks and is impotent—whose eyes no tear

Of penitence shall know, whose spirit fares

Free, without consequence, as a child could sear

Its fellow's hands with flame, or unawares,

Or with premeditation, and then laugh and turn

Upon its play. For you, light heart, no snares

Or traps of conscience wait, who thus could spurn

A love invited.

Thus about your lawn

I listened till the stars had ceased to burn,

But when I saw the imminence of the dawn

And heard our bird cry, I could stand no more,

My heart broke and I fled and wandered on

Down through the valley by the river's shore.

For when the bird cried, did you wake with him?

Did you two gaze as we had gazed before

Upon that blissful morning? I was dim

Of thought and spirit, by the river lay

Watching the swallows over the water skim,

And plucking leaves from weeds to turn or stay

The madness of my life's futility,

[Pg 67]

Grown blank as that terrific dawn—till day

Flooded upon me, noon came, what should be?

Where should I go? What prison chains could rest

So heavily on the spirit, as that free,

But vast and ruined world?

O arrowed breast

Of me, your Tasso! And you came and drew

The arrows out which kept the blood repressed,

And let my wounds the freer bleed: 'Twas you

By afternoon who walked upon an arm

More lordly than mine is. You stopped nor knew,

I saw him take your body lithe and warm

Close to his breast, yes, even where we had stood

Upon our day, embraced—feed on the charm

Of widened eyes and swiftly coursing blood.

I watched you walk away and disappear

In the deep verdure of the river wood,

Too faint to rise and fly, crushed by the fear

Of madness, sudden death!

This was my dream,

From which I woke and saw again the sheer

Walls of my prison, which no longer seem

The agony they did, even though the cell

Is the hard penalty and the cursed extreme

Hate in return for love. But oh you hell,

You boundless earth to wander in and brood—

Great prison house of grief in which to dwell,

Remembering love forgotten, pride subdued,

[Pg 68]

And love desired and found and lost again.

That is the prison which no fortitude

Can suffer, and the never dying pain

From which the spacious luring of the earth

Tempts flight for spirit freedom, but in vain!

Ah Leonora! Even from our birth

We build our prisons! What are walls like these

Beside the walls of memory, or the dearth

Of hope in all this life, the agonies

Of spiritual chains and gloom? I suffer less,

Imprisoned thus, than if the memories

Of love bestowed and love betrayed should press

Round my unresting steps. And I send up

To heaven thanks that spared that bitterness,

That garden of the soul's reluctant cup!

[Pg 69]

THE CHRISTIAN STATESMAN

He hears his father pray when he's a boy:

"Jesus we know, the Savior, and we ask,

In Thy great plenitude of mercy, grace,

Forgiveness for our waywardness; we invoke

Thy blessing, and may righteousness and peace

Prevail in all the earth. Meekly we rest

Upon the precious promise of Thy word.

Gather us home with Thine own people, Lord,

And all the glory shall be Thine."

So much

To show the father's prayer which he heard.

The father is a saint, a quietist,

Save that he has his hatreds, strong enough:

Turns face of stone and silence to the men

Whose ways of life are laid in sin, he thinks

And calls them dirty dogs and scalawags,

Because they vote a ticket he dislikes,

Or love a game of cards, a glass of beer,

Or go to see the County Fair, where once

A drunken bus-man drives upon a boy

And kills him. Then the saint is all aflame,

And tries to have the fair put out for good.

[Pg 70]

And so the son, who will become at last

The Christian Statesman, hears his father pray,

And prays himself, and takes the lesson in

Of godliness, the Bible as the source

Of truth infallible, divine.

This boy

Is blessed with health, a body without flaw,

His forehead is a little low, perhaps,

And has a transverse dent which keeps the brain

Shaped to the skull; a perfect brain is sphered,

As perfect things are circles; but a brain

Something below perfection, which is fed

By a great body and an obdurate will,

And sense of moral purpose will go far,

Farther than better brains in craft of states,

For some years anyway, if a voice be given

Which reaches to the largest crowded room,

To speak the passionate moralities

Which come into that brain creased straight across

The forehead with a dent.

He goes to school,

And from the first believes he has a mission

To make the world a better place, avows

His mission in the world, bends all his strength

To make his armor ready: health of body,

A blameless life, hard studies, practices

With word and voice.

[Pg 71]

It is a country college

Where he matriculates—the father wished it;

A college where the boys are mostly poor,

And waste no time, have not the cash to buy

Delight, if they desired.

He ruminates

Upon the pebbles and Demosthenes,

And sets his will to be an orator

That he may herald truth and save the world.

After much toil, re-writing, he delivers

A speech he calls, "Ich Dien," and loses out

Against a youth who speaks on Liberty.

And then he uses Gladstone for his theme,

The Christian Statesman; for exordium

Tells of the ermine which will die before

It suffers soilure—that was Gladstone—yes!

But still he cannot win the prize; a boy

Who talks about the labors of Charles Darwin,

His suffering and sacrifice, is awarded

The prize this time—a boy who had the wit

To speak in praise of Darwin's virtues—saying

Nothing about his hellish doctrines, thus

Winning the cautious judges to his theme.

But is our little Gladstone crushed, dismayed?

He plucks up further strength and takes a hint:

A larger subject may bring down the prize.

He thinks of Thomas Jefferson—but then

Jefferson was a deist, took the Bible

[Pg 72]

And cut out everything but Jesus' words.

"Yet I can speak on what was good in him,

His work for liberty, the Declaration,

And close my eyes to all his heterodoxy."

Then something of this plan crept like a snake

Into his brain, he petted it with hands:

Be ye as wise as serpents, and as doves

Harmless, he smiled—and went to work again,

And won the prize.

And now he has stepped forth

Into the world's arena to become

A Savior, an evangel, as he thinks,

In truth a pest. He runs for Congress first

And when his manager takes out a check

And shows him, given by the local brewery,

Another check a bank gives, he maintains

A smiling silence, thinking to himself,

Jesus accepted gifts from publicans,

And if I am elected then this money,

However dirty, will be purified

By what I do.

But then he was defeated.

He thinks the banks and breweries did the trick.

In truth they knew the Christian Statesman, knew

The oleaginous smile and silver voice

Concealed the despot. Did he scourge them then?

Well, scarcely then—he wrote a public letter

And said the people had decided it.

[Pg 73]

And what the people said was law. He nerved

His purpose for another trial—that body

So big and flawless could not be exhausted—

That voice still carried to the farthest corner,

That oily smile deceived the multitude

That he was hurt, embittered, only waited

To see if body, voice and oily smile

Could win by any means; if not, the scourge

Would be brought forth, the smile dropped, the complaints

Against the breweries, what not, opened up,

Unmasked. For when your hope is gone, you're free

To scold and tell your bitterness.

And then

He made a third and last attempt, though edging

Toward the sophistry that moral questions

Make those political, and by this means

Trying to win the churches. Still he stuck

To matters economic, as before

Took what the breweries gave to help his cause,

His campaign fund. By this time many more

Had found him out, and knew him for a voice

And tireless body nourishing a brain

As mediocre as the world contained,

And only making louder noise because

Of body strong and voice mellifluous.

They put him down for good: the Christian Statesman

Had cause to think he was no statesman, or

No Christian, or the electorate not Christian.

[Pg 74]

And so he took the mask off, dropped the smile,

And let his mouth set like a concrete crack

And went about to punish men, while seeming

To save the world.

Out of that indentation,

That fosse of mediocrity, came up

A crocodile with wagging tail upreared,

And smile toothed to the gullet—it was this:

Questions political are moral questions,

And moral questions are political,

And terms convertible are equipollent,

And wholly true. Therefore, I rise to preach

To moral America, draw audiences

In churches, of the churches. If I win

Majorities upon—no matter what—

A law will blossom; as all moral questions

Are equally political, procure

For their adoption the majority.

Upon this fortress I can stand and shoot—

Who can attack me, since I seek for self

Nothing, but for my country righteousness?

And as an instrument of God I punish

My enemies as well.

Who are my enemies?

The intelligencia, as they call themselves,

Who flaunt the Bible wholly or in part,

Or try to say that Darwin's evolution

Honors the Deity more than Genesis.

[Pg 75]

Who are my enemies? The thinkers, yes,

The strivers for a higher culture, yes,

The scorners of old fashioned ways, the things

Really American!—I know the crowd—

That smart minority I overwhelm,

Blot out, drown out, by massing under me

The great majority, the common folk,

Believers in the Bible—first for them!

And on the way the vile saloon I crush,

The abominable brewery—then I take away

From banqueters and diners, diners out,

The seekers after happiness, not God,

The cocktail and the wine they love so well.

This is a moral question, being so

Is also a political—the majority

Can do what they desire. I am consistent,

For from the first I've preached the people's rule,

Abided by the people's voice and taken

Defeat with grace because the people gave it.

So now I say the people have the right

To pass upon all questions. As I said

When starting as a public man, the people

Could have what Government they desired, in fact

A King, or despotism, if they voted for it.

For all this talk of rights, or realms of right,

Or individual preferences, beliefs

And courses in the world is swallowed up

By right of the majority—the serpent

Of Moses, so to speak, which swallowed up

All other serpents.

[Pg 76]

If he thought so much

The Christian Statesman thought this way—at least

He acted out a part which seemed to say

He analyzed so far. He went to work

To make his country just a despotism

Not governed by a King, but by the people

Laying the hand of law on everything

Most intimate and private, having thought

For moral aspects, as all politics

Are moral in their essence, to repeat.

Did not the Christian Statesman have revenge

In building his theocracy, who saw

All bills of right and fruit of revolution

Ground into mortar, made into a throne

For Demos?

And behold King Demos now!

A slouch hat for a crown upon his brow,

Stuffed full of bacon and of apple pie,

The Christian Statesman leaning on his shoulder

A tableau of familiarity.

The Christian Statesman having lost his hair

Betrays the Midas ears—the oily smile

Beams on the republic he has overthrown!

[Pg 77]

THE LAMENT OF SOPHONIA

You who have wasted this June for me,

Bitter be the seed of your love.

Long midnights by the sea

Have I waited for your return,

Counting the stars—

Bitter be the seed of your love.

And as stars go out in the crocus light of dawn,

As waters drip from a failing fountain,

So passed these days of June.

As a boy strips from a stalk of snap-dragons

The perfect blossoms,

And treads them into the earth,

So you have taken the June days from me—

Bitter be the seed of your love.

On my couch by the sea,

My golden curls loosened,

Resting after the cool ablution of evening waters,

My body white as whitecaps, under the moon,

My eyes large as the fox's lurking in darkness,

I have waited for your return.

[Pg 78]

May the scourge of Asia mar your beautiful body,

Beloved!

You have wasted my loveliest June.

As the unheeding wind

Drives the falling cherry blossoms

Into the purple waves,

So you have scattered my days of June—

Bitter be the seed of your love!

I have distilled henbane for you,

Beloved,

And put it in a crystal vial.

The moon of October will shine,

Then you will come to me,

Your wanderings and treasons finished!

And when you slip exhausted from my arms

I will give you wine from a golden cup,

And pour the henbane in it—

I shall give you henbane for the poison of defeated love;

I shall kiss your dead lips, Beloved.

Then I shall drink, too.

Our bodies shall feed the worms

As these June days have fed my writhing sorrow,

Beloved murderer of my June!

[Pg 79]

AT DECAPOLIS
Mark, Chap. V

I
THE ACCUSATION

I am a farmer and live

Two miles from Decapolis.

Where is the magistrate? Tell me

Where the magistrate is!

Here I had made provision

For children and wife,

And now I have lost my all;

I am ruined for life.

I, a believer, too,

In the synagogues.—

What is the faith to me?

I have lost my hogs.

Two thousand hogs as fine

As ever you saw,

Drowned and choked in the sea—

I want the law!

They were feeding upon a hill

When a strolling teacher

[Pg 80]

Came by and scared my hogs—

They say he's a preacher,

And cures the possessed who haunt

The tombs and bogs.

All right; but why send devils

Into my hogs?

They squealed and grunted and ran

And plunged in the sea.

And the lunatic laughed who was healed,

Of the devils free.

Devils or fright, no matter

A fig or straw.

Where is the magistrate, tell me—

I want the law!

II
JESUS BEFORE MAGISTRATE AHAZ

Ahaz, there in the seat of judgment, hear,

If you have wit to understand my plea.

Swine-devils are too much for swine, that's clear,

Poor man possessed of such is partly free,

Is neither drowned, destroyed at once, his chains

May pluck while running, howling through the mire

And take a little gladness for his pains,

Some fury for unsatisfied desire.

[Pg 81]

But hogs go mad at once. All this I knew,—

But then this lunatic had rights. You grant

Swine-devils had him in their clutch and drew

His baffled spirit. How significant,

As they were legion and so named, the point

Is, life bewildered, torn in greed and wrath.

Desire puts a spirit out of joint.

Swine-devils are for swine, who have no path.

But man with many lusts, what is his way,

Save in confusion, through accustomed rooms?

He prays for night to come, and for the day

Amid the miry places and the tombs.

But hogs run to the sea. And there's an end.

Would I might cast the swinish demons out

From man forever. Yet the word attend.

The lesson of the thing what soul can doubt?

What is the loss of hogs, if man be saved?

What loss of lands and houses, man being free?

Clothed in his reason sits the man who raved,

Clean and at peace, your honor. Come and see.

Your honor shakes a frowning head. Not loth,

Speaking more plainly, deeper truth to draw;

Do your judicial duty, yet I clothe

Free souls with courage to transgress the law

[Pg 82]

By casting demons out from self, or those

Like this poor lunatic whom your synagogues

Would leave to battle singly with his woes—

What is a man's soul to a drove of hogs?

Which being lost, men play the hypocrite

And make the owner chief in the affair.

You banish me for witchcraft. I submit.

Work of this kind awaits me everywhere.

And into swine where better they belong,

Casting the swinish devils out of men

The devils have their place at last, and then

The man is healed who had them—where's the wrong

Save to the owner? Well, your synagogues

Make the split hoof and chewing of the cud

The test of lawful flesh. Not so are hogs.

This rule has been the statute from the flood.

Ahaz, your judgment has a fatal flaw.

Is it not so with judges first and last—

You break the law to specialize the law?—

This is the devil that from you I cast.

[Pg 83]

WINGED VICTORY

Icarus, Daedalus, Medea's dragons,

Pegasus, Leonardo, Swedenborg,

Cyrano de Bergerac, with dew-filled flagons,

Bacon, who schemed with chemicals and forge,

Lana, of copper spheres of air exhausted,

Therefore made light to rise

Up where the pathless ways are frosted

In the blue vitriol of the skies.

Montgolfier, Franklin, von Zeppelin, Watt,

Edison, an engine must be, spiral springs,

Nor steam move not these more than condor wings

Of heaven's Argonaut,

Gathering the sun-set clouds for golden fleece.

Santos Dumont and Langley, over these

The Americans, the brothers Wright.

America finds wings for flight.

At last out of the New World wings are born

To wheel far up where cold is, and a light

Dazzling and immaculate,

In the heights where stands the temple of the Morn.

Winged Victory more beautiful than Samothrace's

For the New World opening the gate

Of heaven at last, where mortals enter in

Unconquerably and win

[Pg 84]

The great escape from earth, the measureless spaces

Of air across the inimical abyss

Between ethereal precipice and precipice.

Hail! spirits of the race's

Courage to be free, adventurers

Of infinite desire!

Hail! seed of the ancient wars,

Of burning glasses, catapults, Greek fire!

Hail! final conquerors,

Out of whose vision greater vision springs—

America with wings!

The vulture lags behind, the Gorgones,

Revealed or ambushed in the thunder clouds,

Would tear from heaven these audacities

Of deathless spirit, shatter them and spill

The blasphemy of genius from the sky.

Gods are you, flyers, whom no danger shrouds,

No terror shakes the will.

Gods are you though you suffer and must die,

Men winged as gods who fly!

Borelli, in the centuries that are gone,

With feathers made him wings, but steel

Soars for the petrol demon's toil,

Fed by the sap of trees far under earth

In the long eons past turned into oil.

The petrol demon in the enchanted coil

Of lightning howls and spins the invisible wheel

Which had its birth

[Pg 85]

In the rapt vision of Archimides.

Borelli, in the centuries that are gone,

With feathers made him wings. But now a swan,

A steel-borne beetle cleaves the immensities,

Fed with fire of amber and oil of trees,

And soars against the sun,

And over mountains, seas!

Flight more auspicious than the flight of cranes

In Homer's Troyland, or than eagles flying

Toward Imaus when the midnight wanes.

Victorious flight! symbol of man defying

Low dungeons of the spirit, darkness, chains.

Flight beyond superstition and the reigns

Of tyrannies where thought of man should be

Swift as his thought is free.

Flight of an era born to-day

That puts the past and all its dead away.

Locusts of the new Jehovah sent to scourge

All Pharaohs who enslave.

Hornets with multiple eyes,

Scorning surprise,

And armed to purge

The despot and the knave

Out of the fairer land where men shall live,

Winning all things which were so fugitive

Of wisdom, happiness and peace,

Of hope, of spiritual release

[Pg 86]

From fear of life, life's mean significance,

Till life be ordered, not a thing of chance.

The hopelessness of him who cried

Vanity of Vanities

Was justified,

But now no longer must abide.

Failure was his, and failure filled the hours

Of our fathers in the past—let it depart.

Triumph is come, and triumph must be ours.

The archangels of earth through Israel,

Through India and Greece

Shall find us wings for life and for increase

Of living, and shall battle down the hell

Whose fires still smolder and profane.

Life and the human heart

In living must become the aeroplane,

Not the yoked oxen and the cart.

Let but the thought of East and West be blent,

Europe, America, the Orient,

To give life wings as Time's last great event:

The final glory of wings to the soul of man

In an order of life human, but divine,

Fashioned in carefulest thought, powerful but of delicate design,

As the wings of the aeroplane are.

Where spirit of man is used to the full, but saved,

As the petrol demon, in this dragon of war,

Uses and saves his power.

[Pg 87]

Where neither thought, truth, love nor gifts, nor any flower

Of spirit of man, so mangled or enslaved

In the eras gone, is wasted or depraved.

Man shall no longer crawl, the curse is raised

With winning of his wings.

Dust he no more shall eat,

Who crawls not, but from feet

Has risen to wings!

Man shall no longer python be.

These wings are prophecies of a world made free!

Man shall no longer crawl, the curse is raised.

He has soared to the gate of heaven and gazed

Into the meadows of infinity,

Winged and with lightning shod,

Beyond the old day's lowering cloud and murk.

The heavens declare the glory of God,

Man shows His handiwork!

[Pg 88]

OH YOU SABBATARIANS!

Oh you sabbatarians, methodists and puritans;

You bigots, devotees and ranters;

You formalists, pietists and fanatics,

Teetotalers and hydropots,

You thin ascetics, androgynous souls,

Chaste and epicene spirits,

Eyes blind to color, ears deaf to sound,

Fingers insensitive,

Do what you will,

Make what laws you choose—

Yet there are high spaces of rapture

Which you can never touch,

They are beyond you and hidden from you.

We leave you to the dull assemblies,

Charades, cantatas and lectures;

The civic meetings where you lie and act

And work up business;

The teas of forced conversation,

And receptions of how-de-dos,

And stereotyped smiles;

The church sociables;

And the calls your young men of clammy hands

And fetid breath

Pay to anæmic virgins—

[Pg 89]

These are yours;

Take them—

But I tell you

In places you know not of,

We, the free spirits, the livers,

Guests at the wedding feast of life,

Drinkers of the wine made by Jesus,

Worshipers of fire and of God,

Who made the grape,

And filled the veins of His legitimate children

With ethereal flame—

We the lovers of life in unknown places

Shall taste of ancient wine,

And put flowers in golden vases,

And open precious books of song,

And look upon dreaming Buddhas,

And marble masks of genius.

We shall hear the sound of stringed instruments,

Voicing the dreams of great spirits.

We shall know the rapture of kisses

And long embraces,

And the sting of folly.

We shall entwine our arms in voluptuous sleep,

And in the misery of your denials

And your cowardice and your fears

You shall not even dream that we exist.

Unintelligible weeds! We, the blossoms of life's garden,

Flourish on the hills of variable winds—

We perish, but you never live.

[Pg 90]

PALLAS ATHENE

Athene! Virgin! Goddess! Queen! descend,

Come to us and befriend.

Set up your shrine among us and defend

Our realm against corruptions which impend.

*****

Divinity of order and of law,

Most powerful and wise,

Our land reclaim.

Patron of the assemblies of the free,

Our cities shame!

Dethrone our bastard Demos, partisans

Of Moody, Campbell, all the Wesleyans.

Come down with awe,

Enceladus and Pallas strike, who rise

Against your father and his hierarchy.

Smite the giants Superstition, Force,

Fanaticism, Ignorance and Faith

In village gods, and bury them beneath

Volcanic mountains. Yoke them to the course

And labor of your wisdom. Fling your shield,

Medusa faced, before the brows of clay,

Who rule our clattering day;

Flash it before their brows and make

Stones for the pavement of the way

[Pg 91]

Whereon you drive your chariot, golden-wheeled.

Descend, O Goddess, for the memory's sake

And for the hope's sake of your son,

Franklin, your herald, Washington,

Who dreamed to make perpetual

Our Parthenon, column, court and hall.

And save it from the donjon, minaret,

The cross, the spire, the vane, the parapet!

*****

We have no god but Jesus,

No god but Billiken.

Nature and Dionysius

Come back again!

Jehovah is an alien tyrant, rules us

From arid Palestine,

Who mouths a heaven that fools us,

And curses the olive and vine,

And the smiles of the lyric nine.

Gods are they, hard and full of wrath

Who drive us on the unintelligible path.

Gods are they, and unreckoning of their work

Too puerile or despotic, or with feet

That drip blood on a mercy seat.

They nerve our hands with hatred's dirk,

Or weaken us with poison sweet.

Drug us to mumble this is life, who feel

In our delirium, no less, that life

Is an ocean that breaks the grist stones and the wheel

Set up to feed this world of strife

[Pg 92]

By Mary's son, Mary the wife——

Come from the Islands of the Blest,

Goddess, and give us wisdom, vision, rest.

Reveal a Beauty for our hearts to love.

The wooden ark of Moses, overlaid

With strips of gold,

And all the spurious covenant thereof

By which our life is obelised

We would no more behold,

Who have so vainly with it temporized.

Fruitless our spirits have these centuries prayed

Before the Janus cross,

The oracle that speaks in riddles, asks

Penitence, obedience, tasks

Which nature interdicts.

We are the body on the crucifix,

Not Jesus; we, the race, are crucified,

And die upon the cross,

For centuries have died.

Come and restore our loss

Of truth, the eyes of spirits undeceived,

Courage with nature, strike the opiate joss

To ruin with your sword,

O most adored!

Give us Reality, O lover of men,

Republics, cities, lands.

Uplift our eyes to Beauty, once perceived

We may rebuild the Areopagus,

With wiser eyes and hands.

Bring Thought, the Argus, consciousness

[Pg 93]

That looks before and after,

And grace perpetual of Mnemosyne—

Remembering we shall be free!

Save us, O Goddess, from the drifting crowd,

Wondering, witless, loud,

The lovers of the minute who possess

No reverence and no laughter!

*****

Goddess! with silver helmet, guardian

You may be, if we worship at your shrine,

Before the gates of Boston and New York,

Chicago, San Francisco, through the span

Of continents and isles; your heart incline

Toward our turbulent blood from many climes,

Worships and times.

Lift from our necks the brass and jeweled torque

Of restless zealots and of idiot mouths;

The locusts swarm, the land is cursed with drouths,

Bring rain and dew,

Plant olive trees,

Set on our hills the emblem of the vine;

Bring to our hearts the lofty purities

Of song and laughter, wisdom, and renew

Temples of beauty and academies!

*****

Set up your golden altar

In Parthenons in every village and shire.

The crucifix and psalter,

The ikons and the toys of vain desire

[Pg 94]

We cast into the fire.

We keep the lover Jesus, for his hope,

His humanism and his flaming zeal.

He will approach your altar, he will kneel

At last before you, for the horoscope

Of life misread in youth

And youthful dreams and faith.

Goddess! our globe that hungers for the truth

Between the roar of life, silence of death

Cannot be stayed or cowed. But, oh, descend

First to our soil, Atlantis, and befriend.

Make us a light across the fathomless sea

Of centuries to be,

Even as Athens is, divinity!

[Pg 95]

AT SAGAMORE HILL

All things proceed as though the stage were set

For acts arranged. I have not learned the part,

The day enacts itself. I take the tube,

Find daylight at Jamaica, know the place

Through some rehearsal, all the country know

Which glides along the window, is not seen

For definite memory. At Oyster Bay

A taxi stands in readiness; in a trice

We circle strips of water, slopes of hills,

Climb where a granite wall supports a hill,

A mass of blossoms, ripening berries, too,

And enter at a gate, go up a drive,

Shadowed by larches, cedars, silver willows.

This taxi just ahead is in the play,

Is here in life as I had seen it in

The crystal of prevision, reaches first

The porte cochere. This moment from the door

Comes Roosevelt, and greets the man who leaves

The taxi just ahead, then waits for me,

Puts a strong hand that softens into mine,

And says, O, this is bully!

We go in.

He leaves my antecessor in a room

Somewhere along the hall, and comes to me

[Pg 96]

Who wait him in the roomy library.

How are those lovely daughters? Oh, by George!

I thought I might forget their names, I know—

It's Madeline and Marcia. Yes, you know

Corinne adores the picture which you sent

Of Madeline—your boy, too? In the war!

That's bully—tea is coming—we must talk,

I have five hundred things to ask you—set

The tea things on this table, Anna—now,

Do you take sugar, lemon? O, you smoke!

I'll give you a cigar.

The talk begins.

He's dressed in canvas khaki, flannel shirt,

Laced boots for farming, chopping trees, perhaps;

A stocky frame, curtains of skin on cheeks

Drained slightly of their fat; gash in the neck

Where pus was emptied lately; one eye dim,

And growing dimmer; almost blind in that.

And when he walks he rolls a little like

A man whose youth is fading, like a cart

That rolls when springs are old. He is a moose,

Scarred, battered from the hunters, thickets, stones;

Some finest tips of antlers broken off,

And eyes where images of ancient things

Flit back and forth across them, keeping still

A certain slumberous indifference

Or wisdom, it may be.

[Pg 97]

But then the talk!

Bronze dolphins in a fountain cannot spout

More streams at once: Of course the war, the emperor,

America in the war, his sons in France,

The dangers, separation, let them go!

The fate has been appointed—to our task,

Live full our lives with duty, go to sleep!

For I say, he exclaims, the man who fears

To die should not be born, nor left to live.

It's Celtic poetry, free verse. He says:

You nobly celebrate in your Spoon River

The pioneers, the soldiers of the past,

Why do you flout our Philippine adventure?

No difference, Colonel, in the stock, the difference

Lies in the causes. Well, another stream:

Mark Hanna, Quay and others, what I hate,

He says to me, is the Pharisee—I can stand

All other men. And you will find the men

So much maligned had gentle qualities,

And noble dreams. Poor Quay, he loved the Indians,

Sent for me when he lay there dying, said,

Look after such a tribe when I am dead.

I want to crawl upon a sunny rock

And die there like a wolf. Did he say that,

Colonel, to you? Yes! and you know, a man

Who says a thing like that has in his soul

An orb of light to flash that meaning forth

Of heroism, nature.

Time goes on,

The play is staged, must end; my taxi comes

[Pg 98]

In half an hour or so. Before it comes,

Let's walk about the farm and see my corn.

A fellow on the porch is warming heels

As we go by. I'll see him when you go,

The Colonel says.

The rail fence by the corn

Is good to lean on as we stand and talk

Of farming, cattle, country life. We turn,

Sit for some moments in a garden house

On which a rose vine clambers all in bloom,

And from this hilly place look at the strips

Of water from the bay a mile beyond,

Below some several terraces of hills

Where firs and pines are growing. This resembles

A scene in Milton that I've read. He knows,

Catches the reminiscence, quotes the lines—and then

Something of country silence, look of grass

Where the wind stirs it, mystical little breaths

Coming between the roses; something, too,

In Vulcan's figure; he is Vulcan, too,

Deprived his shop, great bellows, hammer, anvil,

Sitting so quietly beside me, hands

Spread over knees; something of these evokes

A pathos, and immediately in key

With all of this he says: I have achieved

By labor, concentration, not at all

By gifts or genius, being commonplace

In all my faculties.

[Pg 99]

Not all, I say.

One faculty is not, your over-mind,

Eyed front and back to see all faculties,

Govern and watch them. If we let you state

Your case against you, timid born, you say,

Becoming brave, asthmatic, growing strong:

No marksman, yet becoming skilled with guns;

No gift of speech, yet winning golden speech;

No gift of writing, writing books, no less

Of our America to thrill and live—

If, as I say, we let you state your case

Against you as you do, there yet remains

This over-mind, and that is what—a gift

Of genius or of what? By George, he says,

What are you, a theosophist? I don't know.

I know some men achieve a single thing,

Like courage, charity, in this incarnation;

You have achieved some twenty things. I think

That this is going some for a man whose gifts

Are commonplace and nothing else.

We rise

And saunter toward the house—and there's the man

Still warming heels; my taxi, too, has come.

We are to meet next Wednesday in New York

And finish up some subjects—he has thoughts

How I can help America, if I drop

This line or that a little, all in all.

[Pg 100]

*****

But something happens; I have met a loss;

Would see no one, and write him I am off.

And on that Wednesday flashes from the war

Say Quentin has been killed: we had not met

If I had stayed to meet him.

So, good-by

Upon the lawn at Sagamore was good-by,

Master of Properties, you stage the scene

And let us speak and pass into the wings!

One thing was fitting—dying in your sleep—

A touch of Nature, Colonel, you who loved

And were beloved of Nature, felt her hand

Upon your brow at last to give to you

A bit of sleep, and after sleep perhaps

Rest and rejuvenation; you will wake

To newer labors, fresher victories

Over those faculties not disciplined

As you desired them in these sixty years.

[Pg 101]

TO ROBERT NICHOLS

England has found another voice in you

Of beauty and of truth,

True to their soul, as you are true—

Singer and soldier, yet a youth.

Out of the trenches and the rage of blood,

The hatred and the lies

You, like a wounded sky-lark, in a flood

Pour forth these melodies,

Of a spirit which has suffered, yet has soared

Above the stench of hell and death's defeats.

I look at you, as often I have pored

On the death mask of Keats.

Or the face of him quickly and gladly going

The waves of the sea under,

To the land of man's unknowing,

Or the land of wonder.

And the war had you! what can it give

In return for souls like yours

Mangled or blotted out?—who shall forgive

The war while time endures?

[Pg 102]

Back of the shouting mob, the brazen bands,

The soldiers marching well,

Gangrene cries out and Rupert Brooke's hands

Clutch in a hemorrhage of hell.

Yet you found God through this? through war,

Through love found vision, perhaps peace?

Keep them in your breast like the morning star—

May their light increase.

Waves on the sea's breast catch the light

While the hollows between

Are dark—you are a wave whose height

Is smitten by the Light unseen,

Urged by the Sea's power to the glory

Of the christening sun.

When the calm comes and darkness, transitory

Be your doubt, or none.

These words from me who have the hard way traveled

Of pain and thought,

In a weaving never wholly unraveled,

Or wholly wrought,

For your spirit and your songs, gladness

For the hope of you, and praise

To life, who gave you out of the world's madness

In these our days.

[Pg 103]

BONNYBELL: THE BUTTERFLY

As I shall die, let your belief

Find in these words too poor and brief

My soul's essential self.

My grief

Down to the day I knew you locks

Its secret word in paradox:

I who loved truth could not be true,

Could only love the truth and glow

With words of truth who loved it so,

Even while I dishonored you.

I who loved constancy was false,

And heeded but in part the calls

Of loveliness for love and you.

I am but half of that I hoped,

And that half hardly more than words

I cheered my soul with as it groped:

As from their bowers of rain the birds

Sing feebly, pining for the sun.

As I am all of this, by fate

Lose what I could so well have won,

Life leaves me half articulate,

My failure, nature half-expressed,

Or wholly hidden in my breast.

Yes, dear, the secret of me lies

[Pg 104]

Where words scarce come to analyze.

Yet who knows why he is this or that?

What moves, defeats him, works him ill?

What blood ancestral of the bat

Narrows his music to the shrill

Squeak of a flitting thing that hunts

For gnats, which never singing, fronts

The full moon flooding down the vale,

The perfect soul, the nightingale!

You have wooed music all your life,

And I have sought for love. I think

My soul was marked, dear, by a wife

Who loved a man immersed in drink,

Who crushed her love which would not die.

If this be true, my soul's great thirst

Was blended with a fault accursed.

My mother's love is my soul's cry.

My father's vileness, lies and lusts,

His cruel heart, inconstancy

That kept my mother with the crusts

Of life to gnaw, are in my blood.

My rainbow wings I scarce can loose,

Or if I free them, there's the mud

That weighs and mars their use.

You have wooed music. But suppose

The hampered hours and poverty

Broke down your spirit's harmony,

Then if you found you could achieve

[Pg 105]

The music in you, if you could

But pick a pocket or deceive,

Which would you call the greater good—

The music or a sin withstood?

Suppose you passed a window where

The violin of your despair

Lay ready for your hands! At last

You stole it as you hurried past,

And hid it underneath your rags

Until you reached your attic room,

Then tuned the strings and burned the tags.

And drew the bow till lyric fire

Should all your thieving thoughts consume:

In such case what is your desire—

The music or the violin?

And what in such case is your sin?

And if they caught you in your theft,

Would you, just to be honest, dear,

Forefront your thief-self as your deft

And dominant genius, or the ear

Which tortured you?

Would you not say,

Music intrigues me night and day?

My soul is the musician's. First

In my soul's love is music. Would

You falsify to keep your good?

Deny your theft, or put the worst

Construction on your soul, obscure

Thereby your soul's investiture

[Pg 106]

Of music's gift and music's lure?

If you were flame you would pretend

What you would fain be to the end,

Keep your good name and keep as well

The violin. May this not be

In some realm an integrity?

Now for myself, dear, though I lack

The gift of utterance to explain

My life's pursuit and passion, pain,

Or why I acted thus, concealed

Thoughts that you hold were best revealed,

Your eyes to heal themselves must track

And find my soul's way in its quest

Followed from girlhood without rest.

Music is not its hope, but love....

And I saw somehow I could lift

My life through you, and rise above

What I had been. And since your gift

Of love saw me as truthful, true

I kept that best side to your view,

And hoped to be what you desired

If I but struggled, still aspired.

And as for lapses, even while

I fooled you with the wanton's smile,

He was my lover till you came

To light my life with purer flame.

Was it, beloved, so great a sin?

He was a practice violin.

Oh, how I knew this when your strings

[Pg 107]

Sang to me afterward when I slept

Upon your breast again. I wept,

Do you remember? I was grieving

Neither for him, nor your deceiving,

Rather (how strange is life) that he

Was prelude to your harmony;

Rather that while I walked with him,

With you I found the cherubim,

Left my old self at last with wings,

Saw beauty clear where it was dim

Before through my imaginings.

Do you suppose the primrose knows

What skill adds petals to its crown?

How many failures laugh and frown

Upon the hand that crosses, sows?

The hand is ignorant of the power

Obedient in the primrose flower

To the hand's skill that toils to add

New petals till the flower be clad

In fuller glory. What's the bond

Between us two, that I respond

To what you are? Nor do you know

What lies within me fain to grow

Under your hand.

But if the worm

Should call itself the butterfly,

Since it will soon become one, I

Better to be myself affirm

[Pg 108]

That I am Beauty, Truth—for you

I would be Beauty, Truth, imbue

Your life with love and loveliness.

And you can make me Beauty, Truth,

And I can bring you soul success

If you but train my flower whose youth

Still may be governed, keep erect

My hope in this poor earthen sod.

I think this is a task which God

Appoints for us. We may neglect

The task in this life, but to find

It is a task we leave behind,

Only to meet it, till we see

Our fate worked out in lives to be.

O, from my lesser self to spread

My golden wings above your head,

Through love of love and you discard

The sting, the rings of green, the shard.

Oh, to be Psyche, passion tried

Through flesh, desire, purified!

Love is my lode-star, music yours—

Souls must go where the lode-star lures.

[Pg 109]

HYMN TO AGNI

God of fire,

God of the flame of our love,

Beyond whose might no God is,

And none in the realm of birth,

Agni! Adored one,

May we never suffer in thy friendship!

Thou, who art re-born each day,

And whose symbol is the sacred drill

Wherewith fire is made for the temple,

Morning by morning,

Freshly create our love as the sun awakes,

Preserve our love, O Agni!

The crocuses, the dandelions,

The golden forsythia

Perished in May.

But roses burn on the altar of earth,

Bridal blossoms, whitest of fire,

Dance in the winds of June.

Agni, remember us,

Remember our love!

We have prayed to you, powerful one—

Thou whose name is first

[Pg 110]

In the first of the sacred hymns;

Thou to whom sacrifices pass

To the Gods, thou messenger of the Gods,

Thou who art born a little lower than the most high Indra

Hast heard our prayer—

Hear still our prayer:

Abide with us, O Agni, and befriend;

Make our hearts as temples,

And our desire as the drill,

Wherewith fire is created

For the sacred sacrifice of love,

And for a light to our spirits—

Turn not away from our prayers,

O Agni!

Here before the fire of the Sun of June

Kneeling

Hand in hand,

Our eyes closed before the splendor of your spirit

Hear our prayer, O Agni:

May we never suffer in thy friendship.

[Pg 111]

EPITAPH FOR US

One with the turf, one with the tree

As we are now, you soon shall be,

As you are now, so once were we.

The hundred years we looked upon

Were Goethe and Napoleon.

Now twice a hundred years are gone,

And you gaze back and contemplate,

Lloyd George and Wilson, William's hate,

And Nicholas of the bloody fate;

Us, too, who won the German war,

Who knew less what the strife was for

Than you, now that the conqueror

Lies with the conquered. You will say:

"Here sleep the brave, the grave, the gay,

The wise, the blind, who lost the way."

But for us English, for us French,

Americans who held the trench,

You will not grieve, though the rains drench

[Pg 112]

The hills and valleys, being these.

Who pities stocks, or pities trees?

Or stones, or meadows, rivers, seas?

We are with nature, we have grown

At one with water, earth, and stone—

Man only is separate and alone,

Earth sundered, left to dream and feel

Illusion still in pain made real,

The hope a mist, but fire the wheel.

But what was love, and what was lust,

Memory, passion, pain or trust,

Returned to clay and blown in dust,

Is nature without memory—

Yet as you are, so once were we,

As we are now, you soon shall be,

Blind fellows of the indifferent stars

Healed of your bruises, of your scars

In love and living, in the wars.

Come to us where the secret lies

Under the riddle of the skies,

Surrender fingers, speech, and eyes.

Sink into nature and become

The mystery that strikes you dumb,

Be clay and end your martyrdom.

[Pg 113]

Rise up as thought, the secret know.

As passionless as stars bestow

Your glances on the world below,

As a man looks at hand or knee.

What is the turf of you, what the tree?

Earth is a phantom—let it be.

[Pg 114]

BOTTICELLI TO SIMONETTA

I would give you all my heart, and I have given

All my heart to you to have and keep

With your heart, where my heart has found its heaven

In a light immortal, and a peace like sleep.

Here is my heart, for you to have and treasure,

Your woman's heart will treasure it,

For a love that only love may find a measure,

And only love like yours can measure it.

In absence and in separation praying

Before your love, my heart receive,

My heart which kneels to you, so gently laying

Hands of deep prayer, too reverent to grieve

For lives divided, yet compassionate,

As my poor heart is pitiful for yours.

These hearts of ours, that know so deep a fate,

Even as a heart that silently endures,

Lie on an altar of consuming fire,

Our hearts together, taking life thereof.

Ashes must come of two hearts which aspire

To God, who has given love.

[Pg 115]

FLOWER IN THE GARDEN

Flower in the garden,

Wholly itself and free,

Yearning and joyous,

Breathing its charm

To the passer-by

On the sighing air—

Beloved flower!

Flower desired for something beyond

Itself as a flower;

Giving the promise of ecstasy

Beyond its own being,

Its place in the garden—

A shadowed flame

Of an absolute!

Flower that I have taken

From its place in the garden

To realize the ultimate Beauty;

Flower in the vase at my side,

Breathing a sweeter life

Into the air I breathe,

A spirit that makes me faint,

Sorrowful with a strange languor.

Flower no less beautiful,

But revealing an essence

[Pg 116]

That changes my flower.

O, my flower that is with me but lost,

Lost in the disclosure of other hues,

Other scents!

Flower of passion, flower of love,

Flower that I have won and lost,

Mystical flower!

[Pg 117]

INEXORABLE DEITIES

Deities!

Inexorable revealers,

Give me strength to endure

The gifts of the Muses,

Daughters of Memory.

When the sky is blue as Minerva's eyes

Let me stand unshaken;

When the sea sings to the rising sun

Let me be unafraid;

When the meadow lark falls like a meteor

Through the light of afternoon,

An unloosened fountain of rapture,

Keep my heart from spilling

Its vital power;

When at the dawn

The dim souls of crocuses hear the calls

Of waking birds,

Give me to live but master the loveliness.

Keep my eyes unharmed from splendors

Unveiled by you,

And my ears at peace

Filled no less with the music

Of Passion and Pain, growth and change.

[Pg 118]

*****

But O ye sacred and terrible powers,

Reckless of my mortality,

Strengthen me to behold a face,

To know the spirit of a beloved one

Yet to endure, yet to dare!

[Pg 119]

ARIELLE

Arielle! Arielle!

Gracious and fanciful,

Laughing and joyous!

Arielle girlish, queenly, majestical;

Deep eyed for memory,

Pensive for dreams.

Arielle crowned with the light of thought,

Mystical, reverent,

Musing on the splendor of life,

And the blossom of love

Pressed into her hands—

Arielle!

Music awakes in the hall!

Shadowy pools and glistening willows,

And elfin shapes amid silver shadows

Are made into sound!

Arielle listens with hidden eyes,

Sitting amid her treasures,

A presence like a lamp of alabaster,

A yearning gardenia

That broods in a shaft of light...

Arielle clapping hands and running

About her rooms,

Arranging cloths of gold and jars of crystal,

[Pg 120]

And vases of ruby cloisonne.

Arielle matching blues and reds:

Pomegranates, apples in bowls of jade.

Arielle reposing, lost in Plato,

In the contemplation of Agni.

Arielle, the cup to her lips,

A laughing Thalia!

Arielle!

The breath of morning moves through the casement window—

Arielle taking the cool of it on her brow,

And the ecstasy of the robin's song into her heart.

Arielle in prayer at dawn

Laying hands upon secret powers:

Lead me in the path of love to my love.

Arielle merging the past and the present,

As light increases light—

Arielle adored—

Arielle!

[Pg 121]

SOUNDS OUT OF SORROW

Of all sounds out of the soul of sorrow

These I would hear no more:

The cry of a new-born child at midnight;

The sound of a closing door,

That hushes the echo of departing feet

When the loneliness of the room

Is haunted with the silence

Of a dead god's tomb;

The songs of robins at the white dawn,

Since I may never see

The eyes they waked in the April

Now gone from me;

Music into whose essence entered

The soul of an hour:—

A face, a voice, the touch of a hand,

The scent of a flower.

[Pg 122]

MOURNIN' FOR RELIGION

Brothers and sisters, I'm mournin' for religion,

But I can't get religion, it's my woman interferin'.

I sing and I pray, and I'm real perseverin',

But I can't get religion,

That's all I have to say.

I know there is a fountain, a Jesus, a comforter,

A heaven, a Jerusalem, a day of Pentecost,

Salvation for the wishin', blood for sin's remission,

A covenant, a promise for souls that are lost.

But I can't get religion, the salvation feelin',

The vision of the Lamb, forgiveness and healin'.

I have a sort of numbness

When I see the mourners kneelin'.

I have a kind of dumbness

When the preacher is appealin'.

I have a kind of wariness, even contrariness,

Even while I'm fearin'

The bottomless pit and the shut gates of heaven.

It's my woman interferin'—

For you see when they say:

Come to the mercy seat, come, come,

The spirit and the bride

Say come, come,

[Pg 123]

I think of my woman who bore so many children;

I think of her a cookin' for harvesters in summer;

I think of her a lyin' there, a dyin' there, the neighbors

Who came in to fan her and how she never murmured;

And then I seem to grow number and number,

And something in me says:

Why didn't Jesus help her for to die,

Why did Jesus always pass her by,

Let her break her health down as I was growing poorer,

Let her lie and suffer with no medicine to cure her,

I wouldn't treat a stray dog as Jesus acted to her.

If these are devil words, I'm a child of the devil.

And this is why I'm dumb

As the spirit and the bride say come!

*****

I am old and crippled—sixty in December.

And I wonder if it's God that stretches out and hands us

Troubles we remember?

I'm alone besides, I need the Comforter,

All the children's grown up, livin' out in Kansas.

My old friend Billy died of lung fever....

But the worst of it is I'm really a believer,

Expect to go to hell if I don't get religion.

And I need this religion to stop this awful grievin'

About my woman lyin' there in the cemetery,

And you can't stop that grievin' simply by believin'.

So I mourn for religion,

I mourn for religion,

My old heart breaks for religion!

[Pg 124]

THYAMIS

Thyamis, a gallant of Memphis,

Where melons were served

Iced with snow from the Mountains of the Moon;

Thyamis, a philanderer in Alexandris

Rich in parchments and terebinth,

Lies here in the museum.

His lips are brown as peach leather,

Through which his teeth are sticking,

White as squash seeds.

*****

Knowing that he must die and leave her

He slew the lovely Chariclea

Who sailed with him on the Nile

Under the moon of Egypt.

This is the body of Chariclea

Undesiring the arms of Thyamis.

This is the remnant of Chariclea,

Wrapped in a gunny sack,

Rotted with gums and balsams.

*****

As the sands of the desert are stirred

By the wind when the sun sets,

The open door of the museum

Lets in the wind to shake

[Pg 125]

The cerements of Chariclea,

And the stray hairs on the forsaken head

Of Thyamis.

*****

Of desire long dead;

Of a murder done in the days of Pharaoh;

Of Thyamis dying who took to death

The lovely Chariclea;

Of Chariclea who shrank

From the love death of Thyamis

The multitude passes, unknowing.

[Pg 126]

I SHALL GO DOWN INTO THIS LAND

I shall go down into this land

Of the great Northwest:

This land of the free ordinance,

This land made free for the free

By the patriarchs.

*****

Shall it be Michigan,

Or Illinois,

Or Indiana?

These are my people,

These are my lovers, my friends—

Mingle my dust with theirs,

Ye sacred powers!

*****

Clouds, like convoys on infinite missions,

Bound for infinite harbors

Float over the length of this land.

And in the centuries to come

The rocks and trees of this land will turn,

These fields and hills will turn

Under unending convoys of clouds—

O ye clouds!

Drench my dust and mingle it

With the dust of the pioneers;

[Pg 127]

My mates, my friends,

Toilers and sufferers,

Builders and dreamers,

Lovers of freedom.

*****

O Earth that looks into space,

As a man in sleep looks up,

And is voiceless, at peace,

Divining the secret—

I shall know the secret

When I go down into this land

Of the great Northwest!

*****

Draw my dust

With the dust of my beloved

Into the substance of a great rock,

Upon whose point a planet flames,

Nightly, in a thrilling moment

Of divine revelation

Through endless time!

[Pg 128]

SPRING LAKE

Βη δἑ κατ'Ουλὑμπιο καρἡνων χωομενυς κηρ.

—Iliad.

I

Some thought a bomb hit

Trotter's garage.

Some thought a comet

Blew up the Lodge.

Milem Alkire was riding in a Dodge,

Saw the water splashing, and a great light flashing,

And a thousand arrows flying from the heaven's glow;

And heard a great banging and a howling clanging

Of a bull-hide's string to a monstrous bow.

II

Milem Alkire became a changed man,

So the thing began, guess it if you can.

He turned in an hour from a man who was sour

To a singing, dancing satyr like Pan.

He hobbled and clattered as if nothing mattered

Down in his cellar for any strange fellow,

Bringing up the bottles, clinking, winking,

For the crowd that was drinking.

All against the statutes in such case provided.

[Pg 129]

Drew well water to cool the wine off,

Polished up the glasses with a humorous cough.

Milem Alkire for years had resided

A quiet, pious, law abiding citizen

Turned in an hour to a wag who derided

The feelings of the people, the village steeple,

And the ways that befit a man—

This Spring Lake citizen.

III

And about the time

That Milem Alkire

Became a wine seller,

And begetter of crime,

With parties on his lawn

From mid-night to dawn,

Making the wine free

Under the pine tree,

Starling Turner's wife ran away,

A woman who before was anything but gay.

Never had a lover in her life, so they say,

But like other clay, had the longing to stray.

She saw a cornet player,

An idler, a strayer,

And left her husband furious threatening to slay her,

And cursing musicians who have no honest missions.

So Starling Turner, a belated learner

Of life as music, laughter, folly,

Grew suddenly jolly, forgot his melancholy,

[Pg 130]

Became a dancer and rounded up the fiddlers,

Got up a contest of fifty old fiddlers,

With prizes for fiddling from best to middling:

A set of fine harness for the best piece of fiddling.

Work stopped, business stopped, all went mad,

Mad about music, the preachers looked sad

For music, the like of which the village never had....

The children in the street were shockingly bad,

And danced like pixies scantily clad;

Knocked away the crutches from venerable hobblers,

Threw pebbles at the windows of grocers and cobblers,

Made fun of the preachers, the grammar school teachers,

Stole spring chickens and turkey gobblers,

Roasted hooked geese in front of the police.

Till the quidnuncs decided it wasn't any use,

The devil had let a thousand devils loose.

IV

Then folks began to read old books forbidden.

Carpenters orated and expatiated

On Orphic doctrines and wisdoms long hidden,

A Swede who couldn't speak began to talk Greek.

There were meetings in the park from dawn to dark.

And wild talk of razing the village, effacing

The plain little houses and the town replacing

With carved stone, columns and temples gracing

Gardens and vistas the water front embracing.

And others would create a brand new state.

So fire broke out in the strangest places.

[Pg 131]

The belated traveler beheld elfin faces

Springing from nothing, to vanish in a second.

Potatoes unthrown went whizzing round corners.

Voices were heard and white fingers beckoned,

Till all the wise ones, doubters and scorners

Although they winced, in some way evinced

That their minds were convinced.

Something was wrong,

The evidence was strong,

The air was full of song:

You woke out of sleep and heard a violin,

A harp or a horn;

And rose up and followed the sound growing thin

At the break of morn.

V

Music, music, music was blown

Over the waters, out of the woodlands,

Grassy valleys and sunny meadow lands

In the mid spaces, tone on tone.

The pasturing flocks were sleeker grown

And multiplied in a way unknown....

And little Alice bright of eye

Dreamed and began to prophesy:

And said the strayer, the cornet player,

Who took Starling Turner's wife away,

Is coming back at an early day:

Look out, said Alice, to Imogene,

Red-lipped, bright-eyed, turned eighteen,

[Pg 132]

You have danced too much on the village green.

Look out for the cornet player, I mean.

I know who he is for my eyes are keen.

Your blood is desiring, but yet serene.

I know his face and his bright desire,

Laurel leaves are around his brow;

He carries a horn, but sometimes a lyre.

His eyes are blue and his face is fire.

Look out, said Alice, his touch is dire,

Keep to the house, or the church's spire.

VI

And what was next? The girl disappeared.

As Alice feared, no fate interfered.

A posse collected, hunted and peered,

Raced through the night till their eyes were bleared,

And looked for Imogene, cried and cheered

When a clew was found, or a doubt was cleared.

A posse with pitch-forks, scythes and axes,

Shot-guns, pistols, knives and rifles,

Hunts for Imogene, never relaxes,

Runs over meadows for luring trifles:

The wave of grain or a weed that tosses;

And curse and say what a terrible loss is

Come to Spring Lake: a wife's enticed,

And then this fairest maid is abducted.

Why are the innocent sacrificed?

We are a people well conducted.

What is the curse, or is it the war?

[Pg 133]

Why is it every one here is housing

Fiddlers, idlers, fancy dancers.

At Milem Alkire's why carousing;

Everything that the good abhor

In lovers and romancers?

The world is mad, the village is mad,

Even the cattle bellow and run.

Old maid, young maid, man and lad

Have eaten of something half insane;

Such antics never before were done

And never it seems may be again

Under the shining sun.

And now comes villainy out of the fun.

Come with the torch, come with the halter,

Gather the posse, stay nor falter,

Catch the scoundrel who spoiled our peace

And hang him up in the maple tree's

Highest branch. For what is the law

If it can't slip the noose and draw

This minstrel man to a thing of awe?

VII

Then the pastor said: Talk of the gallows

Is just the thing for it's righteous malice;

And we need hearts with piety callous

For work like this, I might say salus

Populi, but bright-eyed Alice

Can help us in this matter kinetic

Who has grown psychic and grown prophetic,

[Pg 134]

Sees round corners, and looks through doors

And spies old treasure under the floors.

And I have heard that Alice averred,

The cornet player's the self-same bird

Who enticed the wife of Starling Turner

And kidnapped Imogene; he will spurn her

Later for some one else, unless we

Capture and hang the vile sojourner;

So now for Alice, he said, and bless me!

VIII

Alice came out to lead the mob

Catch the scoundrel and finish the job.

Down to Fruitport before it is dark

Come, said Alice, Joan of Arc.

Farmers, butchers, cobblers, dentists,

Lawyers, doctors, preachers, druggists

Hustled and ran in the afternoon,

Following Alice who led the way

Chanting an ancient roundelay,

A wild and haunting tune.

Her hair streamed over her little shoulders

Back in the wind for all beholders.

And her little feet were as swift and white

As waves that dance in the noonday light.

Youths were panting, middle aged men

Had to rest and resume again.

She ran the posse almost to death,

All were gasping and out of breath.

[Pg 135]

At last they halted upon the ridge.

There! said Alice, beside the bridge

Under its shadow. Look, he's there

Weaving lilies in Imogene's hair;

His musical instrument laid aside

Now he has charmed the maiden pride

Of Imogene who is not his bride,

Come, said Alice, before they hide.

IX

They ran from the ridge,

Looked under the bridge.

There! he escapes, said Alice, the fay.

Where? Howled the mob! which is the way?

There's Imogene wrapped as if in a trance,

Said the preacher, there where the waters dance.

I saw as it were a shaft of light

Steal from her side, vanish from sight.

The cobbler said: it was like a comet;

The druggist, water by a bomb hit.

Yes, said the lawyer, I heard a splashing

And saw a light as of waters flashing

Or a thousand arrows of splendor flying

I heard a booming, banging, clanging

Of a bull's hide string, it was terrifying.

No, said Alice, this form of light,

That stole away and vanished from sight,

That was the fellow, said Alice, the sprite.

[Pg 136]

Go after him, follow through meadow and hollow

The God Apollo, the great Apollo!

X

They went to Imogene then and took her,

Spoke to her, slapped her hands and shook her,

Asked her who it was that forsook her,

Why she had left her home and wandered,

What was the dream she sat and pondered,

And Imogene said, it's a dream of dread,

Now that the glory of it is fled.

Where am I now, where is my lover?

God of my dreams, singer and rover.

I danced with the muses in flowering meadows;

We lay on lawns of whispering shadows;

We walked by moonlight where pine trees stood

Feathery clear in the crystal flood;

He gave me honey and grapes for food.

We rode on the clouds and counted the stars.

He sang me songs of the ancient wars.

He told me of cities and temples builded

Under his hand, we waded rivers

By star-light and by sun-light gilded;

By shades where the green of the laurel shivers.

But it came to this, and this I see:

Life is beautiful if you are free,

If you live yourself like the laurel tree.

[Pg 137]

XI

Then some of them teased her, the posse seized her,

They tore the lilies out of her hair.

Back to the village, exclaimed the preacher,

Back to your home, exclaimed the teacher.

You've been befooled, said Alice, the fay,

And back went Imogene in despair,

Weeping all the way!

[Pg 138]

THE BARBER OF SEPO

Trimmed but not cut too short; the temples shaved,

Neck clipped around, not shaved, an oil shampoo,

You have a world of time before the train

And when it comes it stops ten minutes—then

The depot's just a block away.

Oh yes,

This is my own, my native town. But when

I earn the money to get out, I go.

I've had my share of bad luck—seems to me

Without my fault, as least life's actinism

Makes what we call our luck or lack of luck....

Go down this street a block, find Burney Cole

And ask him why I was not graduated

From Sepo's High School at the time he was.

It was this way: I fell in love that spring

With Lillie Balzer, and it ended us,

Lillie and me, for finishing that year.

I thought of Lillie morning, noon and night

And Lillie thought of me, and so we flunked.

That thinned the class to Burney Cole, and he

Stood up and spoke twelve minutes scared to death.

Progress of Science was his theme, committed

[Pg 139]

To memory, the gestures timed, they trained him

Out in the woods near Big Creek.

Lil and I

Sat there and laughed—the town was in the hall,

Applause terrific, bouquets thick as hops.

And when they handed Burney his diploma

The crowd went wild.

How does this razor work?

Not shaving you too close? I try to please ...

Burney was famous for a night, you see.

They thought his piece was wonderful, such command

Of language, depth of thought beyond his years.

Next morning with his ears and cheeks still burning,

Flushed like a god, as Keats says, Burney stood

Behind the counter in the grocery store

Beginning then to earn the means to take

A course in Science—when a customer

Came in and said: a piece of star tobacco,

Young fellow, hurry! Such is fame—one night

You're on a platform gathering in bouquets,

Next morning without honor and forgotten,

Commanded like a boot-black.

Five years now

Burney has clerked, some say has given up

The course in science, and I hate to ask him ...

But as for me, there was a lot of talk,

And Lillie went away, began to sport.

She's been around the world, is living now

[Pg 140]

In Buenos Ayres. Love's a funny thing:

It levels ranks, puts monarch or savant

Beside the chorus girl and in her hands.

I stayed here, did not have to leave for shame,

But Lillie changed my life.

When she was gone

My conscience hurt me, and that very fall

When I was most susceptible, responsive,

And penitent, we had a great revival.

And just to use the lingo: after much

Wrestling at the Seat of Mercy, prayers

And ministrations then I saw the light,

Became converted, got the ecstasy.

I wrote to Lillie who was in Chicago

To seek salvation, told her of myself.

She wrote back, you are cracked—go take a pill....

I know you've come to get your hair trimmed, shaved,

Also to hear my story—you shall hear.

The elders saw in me a likely man

And said there is a preacher. First I knew

They had a purse made up to send me off

To learn theology, and so I went.

I plunged into the stuff that preachers learn:

The Hebrew language, Aramaic and Syriac;

The Hebrew ideas—rapid survey—oh, yes,

Rapid survey, that was the usual thing.

Histories of Syria and Palestine;

Theology of the Synoptics, eschatology.

[Pg 141]

Doctrine of the Trinity, Docetism,

And Christian writings to Eusebius.

Well, in the midst of all of this what happens?

A fellow shows me Draper and this stuff

Went up like shale and soft rock in a blast.

My room mate was John Smith, he handed me

This book of Draper's. What do you suppose?

This scamp was there to get at secret things,

Was laughing in his sleeve, had no belief.

He used to say: "They'd never know me now."

By which he meant he was a different person

In some round dozen places, and each place

Was different from the others, he was native

To each place, played his part there, was unknown

As fitted to another, hence his words

"They'd never know me now."

And so it was

This John Smith acted through the course, came through

A finished preacher. But they found me out

As soon as Draper gnawed my faith in two.

The good folks back in Sepo took away

The purse they lent and left me high and dry.

So I came back and learned the barber's trade,

And here I am. But when I save enough

I mean to start a little magazine

To show what is the matter. Do you know?

It's something on the shelf—not booze or jam:

It's that old bible, precious family bible,

[Pg 142]

That record of the Hebrew thought and life—

That book that takes a course of years to study,

Requires Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Coptic

And epigraphy, metaphysics, not

Because the book itself is rich in these

But just because when you would know a book

In every character and turn of phrase

And know what's back of it and went into it

You draw the learning of the world, that's all.

Take Plato, if you will, and study him

After this manner, you will travel far

In every land and realm. But this is nothing.

The preachers are a handful to the world.

They eat this dead stuff like bacteria

That clean away decay. The harm is here

Among the populace, the country, all

That makes for life as life.

See what I mean?

We have three thousand people in this town.

Say in this state there are a thousand towns,

And say in every town on every Sunday

In every year this book is taught and preached

To every human being from the time

It's five years old as long as it will stand

And let itself be taught—what have you done?

You have created, kept intact a body,

An audience and voting strength—for whom,

The reformer, the fanatic, non-conformist,

The man of principle who wants a law

[Pg 143]

And those who, whether consciously or not,

Live in the illusion that there is an end,

A consummation, fifth act to this world,

Millennium, as they say; and at the last

When you get rid of sin (but they must say

What sin is) then the world will be at peace,

Life finished, perfect, nothing more to do

But tend to business and enjoy yourself

And die in peace, reach heaven. Don't you see?

These people are deluded. For this stuff

Called life is like a pan of bread you knead:

You push it down one place and up it puffs

In another place. And so while they control

The stuff of life through Hebrew influence

Of duty, business, fear, ascetism

And yes, materialism, for it is that,

The dough escaped, puffs out, the best of it,

Its greater, part escapes us. So I say

That bible taught in every village, hamlet

And all its precepts, curses, notables,

Preached fifty times a year creates the crowd

That runs the country at the bidding of

Your mediocrities, your little statesmen,

Your little editors and moralists.

And that's your culture, your American

Kultur....

I'll finish you with eggs, it's better

Than soap is for the hair. You've lots of time.

I think I'll start my magazine next year.

[Pg 144]

Step down this way—over the bowl, that's it—

A moment while I ring this money up.

As I was saying—is the water cold?—

Now back into the chair—as I was saying

That book upon the shelf has made our culture.

We must undo it....

Yes, your train is whistling—so long!

[Pg 145]

THEY'D NEVER KNOW ME NOW

Let's sit here very quiet, self-controlled,

Talk quietly, under this glorious tree,

The internes are too far away to hear.

They will stand there if we are calm.

You look

Much better than you did. And as for me,

Since I tried leaping from my window, I

Seem on the mend, sleep better, do not feel

So much like running, flying from the fears

As I did three weeks since. Here is my tale:

My first step in this world was as a soldier,

Turned seventeen and off to free the Cubans.

I landed at Matanzas, served my time.

Oh Liberty! Oh! struggles to make free

All peoples, everywhere! And when I saw

The American republic move to strike

The chains of tyranny, I said: I die

For such a cause, or live to see it won—

How glorious! My youthful mind was full

Of Byron, Shelley, Paine, and many more—

And when I saw my republic go to war,

Just as a good Samaritan, I said,

[Pg 146]

This is my hour, I'm on the pinnacle,

Life is divine at last.

But on a sudden

A north wind froze my waters, caught my stars

To points of vision which before had been

Mixed in the fluent time. We up and stole

The Philippines, spit on our sacred charter,

Turned all the thing to guts, until I heard

Their growl alone which I thought spirit voices

When we had warred for Cuba! 'Twas enough;

What was my country? Just a mass of slickers

Talking philanthropy and five per cent,

A pious, blundering booby lodged at last

In a great cæcum mouthing Destiny.

God, with a leader just an actor-man,

Clean shaven, shifty, shallow, whored upon

By mercantilists and their butcher creed.

I mean McKinley, Hanna. Write it down:

They barbarized our Grecian temple, placed

Cheap colored windows in its marble walls—

May history be their hell.

But as for me,

They talked of God so much, I said at last

I'll learn all they can teach concerning God.

This restless soldier spirit led me on,

And just because I sensed the faithless age,

Loveless and purposeless except for gold,

The adventurer in me began to crop.

[Pg 147]

Oh yes, the Cuban business started me.

And so I went to college to prepare

For the ministry, as they thought, go through the course

Called theological, saying for the first:

"They'd never know me now."

I see at last

I am not one but many minds at once,

And many personalities. As a boy

I took the color of the leaves or wall

Where I was resting, climbing. If in truth

I lived three months with an uncle, then they said

You look just like your uncle. When I worked

Under a lawyer's tutelage, they said:

How much your face resembles his. I knew

My face and voice and gestures simulated

Those I admired or lived with. But besides

I took a certain pleasure, impish, maybe,

In egging on, agreeing with, the souls

Whom I sought out; I used to tell my uncle,

A man of firmest piety, what I heard

Of blasphemy about the village, just

To hear him deprecate it, look with dark

And flashing eyes upon such sin, while I,

With serious face and earnest sympathy

With what he felt, was laughing in my sleeve.

Here is the germ then of my after life:

The faculty that harmonized my hue

Of spirit with the place, the person, while

[Pg 148]

Something in me, perhaps supremest self,

Stood quite aloof and smiled.

But, as I said,

When our Republic left its hill of vision,

Descended to the place of herding hogs,

This self of me, the adventurer, rose up

And led me forth to play with life, and first

To try theology, as I have said ...

I was a wonder bred among the crew

Of quiet, gate-toothed, crook-nosed psychopaths,

The foul-breathed, thick-lipped onanists who filled

The seminary, stared at me to see

How I learned Sanscrit, could defend and rout

The atheistic speculations. Well,

What I enjoyed most was to get a crowd

Of celibates and talk of chastity,

And get them in a glow, and say to them:

The mind is fortified by abstinence,

The spirit clarified and lifted up—

I got a thrill somehow. But all the time

I knew a girl named Ella. Oftentimes

Lying beside her I would shriek with laughter

And she would ask, what is the matter, John?

And I would say: I'm thinking of a song

I heard one time: "They'd never know me now."

And Ella said: If Dr. Simpson knew

That you were here with me, you'd take a fall

Out of the Seminary's second floor....

[Pg 149]

But I went through and didn't fall. And thought

This is a way to live, I'll preach awhile,

And see what comes. I took a church and preached,

Was known as Smith the eloquent, the earnest.

But all the time I heard a voice that said:

"They'd never know me now." When I came in

The Sunday School and little children flocked

About my knees and patient teachers looked

With white, pure faces at me, then that voice

"They'd never know me now" was in my ear....

Well, to go on, a widow in my church

Young, beautiful and rich began to beat

Her wings around my flame, and on the Sunday

I preached about the rich young man, she came,

Invited me to dinner. We commenced,

Were married in six months. And to conserve

Her properties I studied law, at last

Was spending days with brokers, business men,

Began to tell her that my health was failing,

Saw doctors frequently to play the part.

And then she said: You must resign your charge,

Your health is breaking, dear. And I resigned

To spend the time in checking mortgages,

Collecting rents:—"They'd never know me now"...

We went the round of summer places, travel,

Saw Europe, China, India and the Isles.

Near Florence had a villa for a time,

Met people of all kinds, when I was forty

[Pg 150]

I had a thousand selves, but if I had

A self in truth it was submerged or scrawled

Like a palimpsest all over and so lost.

I didn't know myself, was anything

To every one, and everything to all.

I felt the walking age come on me now:

A polar bear in a terrible rhythm swings

His body back and forth behind the bars,

And I would walk in restlessness or think

Of other skies and places, teased and stung

By memories of my other selves, by wonder

About what may be happening here or there;

What are they doing now? What is she doing?

There were a dozen shes to wonder about,

And if you think of one you wish to see,

And dream she knows delight apart from you,

You simply thrill, the wings you lost revolve,

Like thumbs, vestigial stubs—but there you sit.

Thank God the aeroplane came on to help,

And wipe out distance, for you find at last

Distance is tragedy, terrifies the soul

With space which must be mastered by the soul.

And so I bought a hydroplane. Perhaps

Would be upon my lawn at sun-down holding

These children on my knees, a lovely picture!

Then as a fish darts out of darkened water

Into a water sun-lit, there would come

A thought—we'll say of Alice—in two hours

I'd be upon her little sleeping porch

[Pg 151]

Two hundred miles away, beneath the stars

Of middle summer, having killed that space,

And found the hour I wanted—hearing too

"They'd never know me now" sung in my ears.

And I remember when we were in Florence

My tribe had gone to Milan for some weeks,

And I was quite alone, too bored to live.

One listless afternoon who should come in?

My wife's friend Constance—but to tell the truth

More friend of mine than hers, for all my life

I seemed to have these secret understandings,

And was two persons to a twain who thought

They were the bond, whereas the bond existed

Between myself and one, and to the other

Was not so much as dreamed.

And Constance brought

A certain Countess with her. In a glance

We two, the Countess and myself, beheld

A flame that joined our hands. And in a week

The Countess took me on her yacht to Capri,

And round the Mediterranean. No one knew,

Not Constance, nor my wife, for I returned

Before she came from Milan.

Oh that week!

That breeze that sung the port-holes, waters blue

And stars at night and music; and the Countess

Whose voice was like a lute of gold, who lived,

[Pg 152]

Knew life, was unafraid. She heard me say

"They'd never know me now." And softly murmured

Smiling the while: il lupo cangia

Il pelo ma non il vizio

Adding, Qual matto! Something yet remains

That makes you charming! Oh the feasts and wine,

The songs and poems, till at last too soon

We anchored in the bay of Naples. When

I saw Vesuvius, then I felt again

That sinking of the heart that I had known,

That sickness, strange, nostalgia, from a boy,

Of which a word again. But now it was

Precursive of the end, the finished idyll.

The Countess took my hand, with misty eyes—

They let me off and rowed me to the dock,

I caught the train to Florence, magically

Before I had forgotten, seemed to be

Upon the yacht still, was in truth alone

Amid the silence of my dining room,

Supping alone—"They'd never know me now!"

Later I had the fever, was delirious

And saw myself receding as if backing

Into a funnel toward the little end,

And growing smaller as the funnel narrowed

Until I was so small I held myself

Within the palm's hand of my other self,

Laughed like a devil, scared the nurse to death,

Saying "They'd never know me now—just look!"

My wife too had the fever. I awoke

[Pg 153]

Out of this illness, found that she was gone,

Had died a week before and for a week

Had been entombed while I was raving—then

If any real self of me ever was it came

Back to me then. I bowed my head and wept

And scanned my life back:

What was that in me

Which made me homesick from a boy right through

This life of mine, not for my home, for something,

Some place, some hand, some scene, which made me dread

All partings, overwhelmed me with a grief

For ended raptures, kept my brain too full

Of memories, never lost, that grew until

I lost myself, and seemed a thousand selves

Wandering through a thousand years, how restless!

Then mutterings shook our skies! Another war,

France, Germany and England, so it seemed

Best to return here to America.

I gathered up the children—all but one,

The boy eighteen escaped me, ran away

And joined the English army. Now I saw

One self of me repeated, that which went

To free the Cubans! Curse these freedom wars!

They shipped him off to India, soon he had

His fill of liberty. But I came back

And here I am. "They'd never know me now!"

[Pg 154]

For what is left of me, what ever was

To be peeled off to realest core? The soldier

Gone out of me entirely; long ago,

The dreamer of a better world; the self

That said I'm on the pinnacle, took arms

To free the Cubans; self of me that hungered

For pyramids and mountains, ancient streams,

Nile and the Ganges; self of me that turned

To be a father holding on his knees

A romping bevy; self of me that dreamed

One heart, one hand enough, oh even the self

That dreamed there is a hand a heart for me,

Who found in truth no solace in the wife

But only a teasing, torturing recollection

That I had missed the one, or missed the many.

So I was in America again,

Had fled the war and plunged into the war:—

The waves roared yonder, but the shores were here

Where wreckage, putrid monsters were thrown up,

Corpses of ancient liberties and bones

Of treasured beauty; and I saw the Land

Don every despot weapon, as it did

When I fought for the Cubans, even worse.

They shipped my boy to Africa; in spite

Of censorship I pieced the picture out,

Knew what he suffered, how they took his faith

And dimmed its flame with ordure. Then came forth

That father self of me. I brooded on

His blue eyes, gentle ways, sat terrified

[Pg 155]

And tried to trace the days through and the years

When he had slipped from just a little boy

Into a stripling, soldier finally—

While I—what was I doing? Oh, my God,

Living these other selves, oblivious

That this boy was. I'd jump from soundest sleep

Thinking of him in Africa, and seized

With dreams that I must fly to him. O years

Wherein I lost that boy. How could I live

So many lives and not lose out of some,

Some precious thing? Well, then I broke at last,

They brought me here: "They'd never know me now."

[Pg 156]

NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN

You call this a world! Cloud cuckoo town,

Nephelo coccygia, warp and woof,

Now at the last I write it down,

Since I no longer have the proof

To show it isn't opera bouffe,

A moving picture film and scene;

Stage world, with the glue between

The angels' feathers, the devil's hoof

Neither violent nor venene.

*****

Eheu! The middle of the way too—

Gethsemane and left in the lurch.

Storms frowning up the dying day too,

Bending a weed that was a birch.

I can step right over the tallest church.

Trumpets have shrunk to trumpet toys,

Tottle-te-toot! I hear the clocks

Ticking in paper breasts. What noise!

Gorges and towering rocks

Are just the canvas He employs,

With gelatine rivers and candy lochs,

Shored in with painted blocks.

I passed through a jungle where smoky mosses

Hung from the trees, the crocodile

[Pg 157]

Slept or clambered about the fosses;

Buzzards roosting, not very vile;

Rivers of red-ink shed for crosses.

Centaurs with arrows file on file

Drew and shouted: he seems to smile

Let's make him weep a while.

Look out for the lion! Said I, with a scowl,

Let the lion growl:

Cat-gut scraped in the painted wings.

Does the terrible tiger howl:

Tin cans and resined strings.

Do the dead gibber and does the owl

Hoot where the shroud is slipping, clings?

Who pressed the squeaky springs

In the death bird that it sings?

And you, sir! Well, one time I was sure

You carried a poisoned dart!

And now you're empty space as pure

As the sky when clouds are blown apart.

Ether! Radium! Nothing! A cure

For grit and dust which start

Grief in this Waterbury heart.

For I had trod the cobra, found

He is but calico, cotton stuffed.

The boa chased me round and round,

Hyenas tracked me, licked and snuffed,

[Pg 158]

And made my poor heart flutter and pound,

Until I saw the mirror is all,

And the wood became a rare-bit dream

With monstrous faces and figures packed.

And then you ask: Is the mirror cracked,

Or is it so bright that it casts a beam

Through all the shadow scheme?

One time I saw a river's bank

Shaved down with spades as sheer as a wall,

Wasp holes, snake holes cut in two

Brought these molds of earth to view.

I turned away where the air was blank

And here was a thing fantastical:

Space was cored like the honey comb

With forms of things that crawl and roam,

Animals, men. As I am alive

I saw the form of a horse and cow

Edged with air and hollow as space.

But a horse and cow began to thrive

In just a second, a drifting mist

Flowed into the molds before my face.

And the animals moved, I don't know how,

Out of the all surrounding mesh,

Creatures of bone and flesh!

And it was just the same with men. I vow

I saw an astral stuff poured in

Pockets of air and men became

Voices talking of good and evil,

[Pg 159]

Virtue, courage, vice and sin,

God and the devil.

For the all unfolding Air is what?

The Great Idea, if so I may say,

A sort of Ocean leaping to waves.

And what do you care if they pass away?

They sink to their source, not into graves.

Beasts may vanish, races decay,

The Ocean will always remain the same;

With new waves rising, no two alike;

Waves that are little and waves that rise

In storms and touch the skies.

R. Browning, you were a man of power,

But I don't think much of your tower.

And I see no use of blowing a horn,

The tower is merely papier-maché,

And comes no higher than to my knees.

I step right over it—pick a flower,

Purple, it may be, called heart's ease

And go with the way of the seas.

For I am an optimist better than you:

This dream is hell, but it's all to the good:

The Ocean is water in calm or flood.

There's nothing wrecked, or wrongly wrought,

There's nothing real but Thought!

[Pg 160]

THE OAK TREE

The oak in later August,

Before his leaves are strewn,

And the sky is blue as June,

Trembles from trunk to branches

For frosts that will be soon

From the valleys of the moon!

For breezes blown in August

Veer north with cold and rain;

And the oak tree sighs and shivers

For lights that shift and wane:

As a strong man sees the specters

Of age, disease and pain,

The oak flings up to heaven

His branches in the rain.

September comes, September

Spreads out a sky that chills.

The owl hoots and the cricket

Beside the roadway shrills,

And on the stricken hills.

But the oak tree, the oak tree

Still flaunts his shining leaves.

No change has come but swallows

Who fled the summer eaves!

[Pg 161]

But when October breezes,

And cold November gales

Descend upon the oak tree

What strength of him avails,

Grown naked to the tempest,

For life that sleeps and fails?

O oak tree, oak tree,

The winter snow prevails!

It cannot be your branches,

It is the wind that wails!

[Pg 162]

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

Eagle, your broken wings are tangled

Among the mountain ferns

On a ledge of rock on high.

Below the yawning chasm turns

To blackness, but the evening planet burns

Above the gulf in a gold and purple sky!

Vultures and kites

Fly to their rookeries

In the rocks

With swift and ragged wings against the lights.

From levels and from leas

Haste the returning flocks.

Foxes have holes and serpents the grass for flight.

Eagle, arise! It is night.

The world's wanderer finds you

As he climbs the mountains

In the unending quest.

Can you spread wings across the darkening chasm

To the craggy nest,

Where the foreboding mate lies still?

Croak for the evening star,

And beat your shattered wings against your breast!

Across the gulf the wanderer sees afar

A light in the house on the hill!

[Pg 163]

WASHINGTON HOSPITAL

That's right, sponge off his face. My name? Oh, yes,

James Frothingham, a reverend, have the church

At the corner of Ayer and Knox Streets, Methodist.

As I was passing by a vile saloon

Some men were entering the back room, saying

Is he dead or drunk, and such things. I looked in,

Went in at last and saw this fellow there,

Hunched, doubled down into a chair asleep,

Mud on his face as you saw, clothes bespattered,

The smell of drink upon him. Then we took him

And brought him here, I helped, a Christian duty.

But more important, if he wakes I'm here

To bring his soul to Christ before he dies—

And he is dying. Yes, it's plain enough

The snows of death are falling. Sponge his face,

And wash his hands! I never saw such hands

Slender and beautiful! Now you have sponged

His face, look at that brow—it terrifies—

He looks now like a god—who is this man?

I'll tell you all I know: These men were talking

And this is what they said: This is the fellow

They voted yesterday from booth to booth,

They voted him twenty times, and kept him drunk

To vote him. First they found him at the station,

A little tipsy, talking of his griefs.

[Pg 164]

The conductor put him off here, being drunk.

And so these fellows for election day

Took him in hand and voted him around,

This was the talk.

Look at the curse of drink!

If he had touched no drink, he had not been

Tipsy to fall into these ruffian hands,

Who gave him drink and drink and used him thus

To violate the suffrage, lose his life

Through drink, as he will lose it. He is dying,

Death comes of Sin—what plainer truth than this?

Sin blinds, too, for that brow could comprehend

All things by using what God gave to it.

I do not know his name, with your permission

I'll search his pockets—yes, here is a letter—

No signature, looks like a draught—I'll read:

"Why have you wounded me with words like these:

'He has great genius but no moral sense,'

And written to another! Oh my love!

By this love which I bear you, by the God

Who reigns in heaven do I swear to you

My soul is like a wandering star, consumed

By its own passion, fire, and the eternal

Longing for the eternal, wandering, erring,

But flaming, loving light, aspiring to

The Light of Lights, some sun, I do not know.

It is incapable of aught but honor.

And save for follies, trifles in excess,

[Pg 165]

Which I lament, but which in men of wealth,

Or worldly power would never raise a word,

I can recall no act of mine to bring

A blush to your cheek or to mine.

My love,

My erring which has counted, by the test

Of strength or weakness for the game of life,

Has been Quixotic honor, chivalry.

And to indulge this feeling I have paid,

Though it has been my true voluptuousness,

My highest, purest pleasure. Yes, for this

I threw away a fortune, glad to throw it,

Rather than suffer wrong, though trivial,

As worldly men would count it:—for a father's

Laughter at my writing turned away

To follow voices, and defied his will

To harness me to business. So it is

To keep my spirit spotless from the world,

As I have visioned things, I came at last

By this deserted shore, alone, alone,

Now quite alone since you withdrew yourself,

Took back your hand and left me to my way,

Traveled so long that I can see the tomb

At the vista's end not very far.

Oh, love,

Why is there not a heart that loves but mine?

If you had been a Magdalen, I had pressed

Your head against my breast and kept you there—

[Pg 166]

But you—my spirit drifts with stricken wings—

But you because of gossip, crawling words

About my drinking, lies as I shall prove,

Can hold a handkerchief upon your eyes

To hide tumultuous tears, extend your hand

And say farewell forever, cut our lives

Of days or months, fragile and trivial

Asunder—when your hand, your faith, your love

Had cured me of my spirit's desolation,

My terror of this solitude in life—

Or if it cured me not, I had been eased,

And you had gained for giving—what have you

For your decision? Sorrow, if you love me,

Perhaps a conscience whisper that you failed

In justice, sacrifice; perhaps the thought

Life with me drinking, to the excess you thought,

Is better than a life where I am not.

What have you gained? In a few years we two

Will be at one with earth—before it comes

Are not sweet hours together worth the cost

Of a little drink? You who have riches, need not

My labors for your bread, but need my love,

Which you crush out. But as to drink, I swear

I do not drink."

Ahem! the fellow stirs

But will not wake, I fear. You heard that last:

He swears he does not drink. Drink and untruth

Go always hand in hand. This letter's long—

Let's see what he comes up with at the last:

[Pg 167]

"But as to drink, I swear I do not drink—

How if I drank could I produce the works

I have produced? A giant's task, when drink

Sustains me not, is not my nutriment

As hock and soda water were for Byron,

But sets me flaming wild, a little drink

Will set me flaming, poisons me, I know.

And yet I must partake of drink sometimes

For life is flying, is recession, we

Are shrinking back into ourselves, at last

The arms we shrank from close about us—death's.

And there are souls born lonely; I am one.

And gifted with the glance of looking through

The shams, the opera bouffe, and I am one.

Often after a stretch of toil when I

Come out of the trance of writing spent and wracked,

I used to walk to High Bridge, sit and muse,

(For this brain never stops and that's my curse,)

Upon this monstrous world and why it is;

And why the souls who love the beautiful,

And love it only and are doomed to speak

Its wonder and its terror are alone,

Misunderstood and hunted, fouled by falsehood,

Have crumbs upon the steps, are licked by dogs,

Or else are starved. And why it is that I

Must go about, a beggar, with my songs

Exchanging them for bread. And then it is

When this poor brain like the creative stuff,

The central purpose, whirls, as I have written,

And will not stop—drink! for oblivion,

[Pg 168]

For rest, to get away from self, back faster

From the pursuing Nothing.

Yet, my love,

Think out what causes judgments, standards, tastes;

And why it was that Southey, Wordsworth won

The organic national praise and Shelley lost,

And Byron lost it—Southey the sycophant,

Wordsworth the dull adherent, renegade—

These two against these spirits who came here

To sing of Liberty—and look at me,

A wanderer and a poor, rejected man,

While usurers, slave owners rule the land,

And the cities reek with hypocrites, who step

On Freedom and on Beauty, are rewarded,

Praised, fed and honored for it. Then behold

Your friend who loves you, hunted, buffeted,

For a little drink, when in spite of drink and even

Because of drink, who knows? I have achieved,

Written these books. And what is life beside,

Whether with drink or whether with abstinence,

Except to sing your song and die, what course

Can stave the event, the wage of life, not sin?

Oh if you knew what love I have for you!

All of my powers are not enough to tell

How all my heart is yours, how I have found

Eternal things through you, cannot surrender

Your love, your heart, without I lose some life,

Some vital part of me—and yet farewell,

For you have willed it so, and I submit.

[Pg 169]

I rise up in my loneliness, seek the sun

To shine about me in my loneliness,

Submit and say farewell."

He spoke some words!

What was it that he said? His head rolls over.

The man is dead! What was it that he said?

Something about "no more" it seemed to me.

Whom shall we notify? Go tell the police!

Here! wait, I overlooked some writing—yes,

A name is on this letter—why, look here,

It's Edgar Allan Poe!—I know that name—

He wrote a poem once about sleigh bells—

His brow looks whiter, bigger than it did.

Cover him with a sheet—I'll tell the police!

[Pg 170]

NEITHER FAITH NOR BEAUTY CAN REMAIN

Neither faith nor beauty can remain:

Change is our life from hour to hour,

Pain follows after pain,

As ruined flower lies down with ruined flower.

*****

Now you are mine. But in a day to be

Beyond the seas, in cities strange and new

To-day will be a memory

Of a day ephemerally true.

*****

Last night with cheek pressed close to cheek

Through the brief hours we slept.

It must be always so, I heard you speak,

Love found, forever must be kept.

*****

But already we were changed, even as the day

Invisibly transforms its light.

We prayed together then for dawn's delay,

Praying, praying through the night.

*****

Against the change which takes all loveliness,

The truth our desperate hearts would keep,

[Pg 171]

The memory to be, when comfortless,

Save for the memory we shall yearn for sleep;

*****

Against the sinking flame which no more lights

Our faces, neither any more desired

Through desireless days and nights,

And senses fast expiring and expired.

THE END.

Printed in the United States of America.

Transcriber's Notes:

Inconsistent hyphenation left as is.
pg vii Shakespeare changed to Shakspeare for consistency
pg 48 martydom changed to martyrdom

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Starved Rock

STARVED ROCK BY EDGAR LEE MASTERS

CONTENTS

STARVED ROCK

HYMN TO THE DEAD

CREATION

THE WORLD'S DESIRE

TYRANNOSAURUS: OR BURNING LETTERS

LORD BYRON TO DOCTOR POLIDORI

THE FOLDING MIRROR

A WOMAN OF FORTY

WILD BIRDS

A LADY

THE NEGRO WARD

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE

FOR A PLAY

CHICAGO

I

II

III

IV

V

THE WEDDING FEAST

BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON

THE DREAM OF TASSO

THE CHRISTIAN STATESMAN

THE LAMENT OF SOPHONIA

AT DECAPOLIS Mark, Chap. V

I THE ACCUSATION

II JESUS BEFORE MAGISTRATE AHAZ

WINGED VICTORY

OH YOU SABBATARIANS!

PALLAS ATHENE

AT SAGAMORE HILL

TO ROBERT NICHOLS

BONNYBELL: THE BUTTERFLY

HYMN TO AGNI

EPITAPH FOR US

BOTTICELLI TO SIMONETTA

FLOWER IN THE GARDEN

INEXORABLE DEITIES

ARIELLE

SOUNDS OUT OF SORROW

MOURNIN' FOR RELIGION

THYAMIS

I SHALL GO DOWN INTO THIS LAND

SPRING LAKE

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

THE BARBER OF SEPO

THEY'D NEVER KNOW ME NOW

NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN

THE OAK TREE

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

WASHINGTON HOSPITAL

NEITHER FAITH NOR BEAUTY CAN REMAIN

Transcriber's Notes:

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE

STARVED ROCK

BY
EDGAR LEE MASTERS

AT DECAPOLIS
Mark, Chap. V

I
THE ACCUSATION

II
JESUS BEFORE MAGISTRATE AHAZ