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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Colors of Life
+       Poems and Songs and Sonnets
+
+Author: Max Eastman
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2011 [EBook #36051]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLORS OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  COLORS OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+  NEW POETRY: FALL 1918
+
+
+  _By Robert Graves_
+    FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS
+
+  _By Gilbert Frankau_
+    THE OTHER SIDE
+
+  _By Max Eastman_
+    COLORS OF LIFE
+
+  _By Kahlil Gibran_
+    THE MADMAN
+
+
+
+
+  COLORS OF LIFE
+
+  POEMS AND SONGS AND SONNETS
+
+  BY
+  MAX EASTMAN
+
+
+  NEW YORK     ALFRED A. KNOPF     MCMXVIII
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+
+  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE
+
+ABOUT AMERICAN POETRY
+
+
+It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my share in the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. Its
+essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth, and it can
+not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle.
+Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest
+friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has
+never entered, even so deeply as it might, into those tempests of social
+change that are coloring our thoughts today.
+
+Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who
+touched the mood of social revolt. And for my part I think there is a
+modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, and a certain
+adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might
+propose.
+
+Every one who reads this book will be familiar, I suppose, with Walt
+Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and
+untrammelled of ornamentation that it should go out of the books it was
+published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. "The
+Poetry of the future," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY--A PREFACE  13
+
+
+POEMS
+
+  COMING TO PORT                        43
+
+  THE LONELY BATHER                     45
+
+  IN MY ROOM                            46
+
+  HOURS                                 47
+
+  FIRE AND WATER                        48
+
+  YOU MAKE NO ANSWER                    49
+
+  OUT OF A DARK NIGHT                   50
+
+  A MORNING                             51
+
+  ANNIVERSARY                           52
+
+  AUTUMN LIGHT                          53
+
+  A MODERN MESSIAH                      54
+
+  IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL               55
+
+  A VISIT                               56
+
+  TO LOVE                               58
+
+  CAR-WINDOW                            59
+
+  LITTLE FISHES                         60
+
+  INVOCATION                            61
+
+  SOMETIMES                             62
+
+  TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN         63
+
+  TO AN ACTRESS                         65
+
+  EYES                                  66
+
+  X RAYS                                67
+
+
+SONNETS
+
+  A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS               71
+
+  A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT                 74
+
+  THOSE YOU DINED WITH                  75
+
+  THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD               76
+
+  AS THE CRAG EAGLE                     77
+
+  TO MY FATHER                          78
+
+  TO EDWARD S. MARTIN                   79
+
+  EUROPE--1914                          80
+
+  ISADORA DUNCAN                        81
+
+  THE SUN                               82
+
+  THE NET                               83
+
+  A DUNE SONNET                         84
+
+
+SONGS
+
+  SEA-SHORE                             87
+
+  RAINY SONG                            88
+
+  A HYMN TO GOD                         90
+
+  COMING SPRING                         91
+
+  DAISIES                               92
+
+  BOBOLINK                              93
+
+  DIOGENES                              94
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+  A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY      97
+
+  AT THE AQUARIUM                      102
+
+  EARTH'S NIGHT                        103
+
+  THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS            104
+
+  TO THE ASCENDING MOON                107
+
+  LEIF ERICSON                         110
+
+  MIDNIGHT                             116
+
+  IN MARCH                             117
+
+  THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH                118
+
+  TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT           120
+
+  IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA               121
+
+  TO A TAWNY THRUSH                    125
+
+  THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES            127
+
+  SUMMER SUNDAY                        129
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY
+
+A PREFACE
+
+
+It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its
+essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It can not
+be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I
+have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for
+some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never
+entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change
+that are coloring our thoughts today.
+
+
+Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched
+the mood of democratic revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern
+validity in the attitudes of both these poets, a certain adjudication
+between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose; and
+that is what I should like to discuss with those who may enter
+sympathetically into this little volume.
+
+They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an
+American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation,
+that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with
+the hills and forests on the earth.
+
+
+"The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at the free expression of
+emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to
+arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish....
+
+"In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the
+barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is
+henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and
+the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if
+rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior
+writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there
+seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in
+rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_,
+(while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable
+easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd
+in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or
+the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and
+heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great
+and fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars,
+amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably
+render'd in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets
+whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
+envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
+on some of our own age--it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the
+day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as
+a medium of highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present
+or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the
+Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado,
+dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea
+feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend
+the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride,
+passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to the
+general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray
+them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as grandly
+poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories,
+electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of the solidarity
+of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the
+dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories,
+foundries, workshops, mines, or on ship-board, or on lakes and
+rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more
+eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose."
+
+
+It may surprise some people to see this monumental challenge to the
+poets of the future confronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan
+Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two poets in contrast, and the
+weight neither of genius nor of influence is altogether upon one side.
+They are the two American poets of unique distinction, and they are the
+fountains of the two strongest influences in all modern poetry of the
+occident. And it is worth observing that if Walt Whitman had written as
+few pages of poetry as Poe did, his name would hardly be remembered,
+whereas Poe would have established a literary tradition if he had
+written but five sorrowful lyrics. His individuality was so poignant.
+His art was so exquisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but his
+philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, and prodigious in
+contempt for his predecessors, as that of Walt Whitman. I have never
+read anything about any art more sheer and startling in its kind, than
+Poe's essay on "The Philosophy of Composition"; and nothing more
+energetically opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be devised. To
+convey the flavor of the contrast, I quote these sentences--inadequate
+for any other purpose--from Poe's essay:
+
+     "Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood
+     that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic
+     intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public
+     take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating
+     crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the
+     last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived
+     not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies
+     discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious
+     selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and
+     interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the
+     tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps,
+     the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches....
+
+     "For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance
+     alluded to, nor at any time the least difficulty in recalling
+     to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and,
+     since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I
+     have considered a _desideratum_, is quite independent of any
+     real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be
+     regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the _modus
+     operandi_ by which some one of my own works was put together. I
+     select 'The Raven' as most generally known....
+
+     "Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem _per se_, the
+     circumstance--or say the necessity--which in the first place
+     gave rise to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should
+     suit at once the popular and critical taste.
+
+     "We commence, then, with this intention.
+
+     "The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary
+     work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content
+     to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from
+     unity of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the
+     affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is
+     at once destroyed....
+
+     "My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or
+     effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that,
+     throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design
+     of rendering the work _universally_ appreciable. I should be
+     carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to
+     demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and
+     which with the poetical stands not in the slightest need of
+     demonstration--the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole
+     legitimate province of the poem....
+
+     "But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however
+     vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness
+     or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are
+     invariably required: first, some amount of complexity, or more
+     properly, adaptation; and, second, some amount of
+     suggestiveness, some under-current, however indefinite, of
+     meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a
+     work of art so much of that _richness_ (to borrow from colloquy
+     a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with _the
+     ideal_."
+
+The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete. Upon
+the one side a vast preoccupation with human meaning and morals, with
+health and the common reality and love and democracy, a grand contempt
+for beauty, and for the effort to attract or gratify a reader with
+"verbal melody," a contempt for everything that savors of deliberate
+technique in art. Upon the other side also contempt--contempt like a
+piece of cold analytical steel for every pretense that the technique of
+art is not deliberate, that poets are not seeking to attract and
+gratify, that truth or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the portent
+of a poem--a disposition to seek beauty in unique and even unhealthy
+places, a lonely aristocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with
+"verbal melody" never before or since equalled in poetry. The details of
+this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what
+will illumine the modern problems about poetry. To Edgar Allan Poe a
+poem was an objective thing, to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of
+subjective expression. Poe would take sounds and melodies of words
+almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had
+formed a beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and imaginations
+out of his heart and weave and inlay them in that vessel, and even the
+crimson out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he would seek out
+in his mind the hue of some meaning or moral to pour over it until it
+was perfect. And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for view and
+purchase, standing aside from them like a creative trader, proud, but no
+more identified with them than as though he had made them out of the
+colors of shells. To Walt Whitman a poem was not a thing. His poetry
+was himself. His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and wonder of
+life, filled him and he overflowed in language--without "art," without
+purpose but to communicate his being. So he maintained. His poem was
+never an object to him, even after it had flowed full and he sought to
+perfect its contours. His emendations were not often objective
+improvements; they were private remodellings to make the language a more
+direct and fluent identity with what he considered himself. This was the
+task upon which he labored as the poet of democracy and social love.
+
+Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon
+human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average
+American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should
+remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe--even with the
+handful of poems he wrote--may be said to be acceptable to the
+generality of men. The Raven, or Helen, or Annabelle Lee, or some sad
+musical echo of the death of beauty, might be found in illuminated
+covers on the most "average" of American parlor tables, but never
+anything there of Walt Whitman--unless it be "Captain, My Captain!" the
+one rather weak metrical poem he deigned to write. And there is
+something deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and something which
+only an adequate science of verse can explain. For the emotions and the
+meanings of Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones that interest
+simple and thoughtful people who have leisure to feel. His realizations
+of life would be acceptable and be honored, as much at least as great
+art is ever honored, by the "divine average," if they had been conveyed,
+as Poe's were, in vessels of light, which would make them objective, and
+from which they might brim over with excess of subjective meaning and
+emotion.
+
+I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whitman had conveyed them so,
+or the opinion that he could have been a more stupendous poetic and
+moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he did. His propulsive
+determination to put forth in this facile nineteenth century culture,
+sweet with the decay and light with the remnant fineries of feudal
+grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished substance of man, was a
+phenomenon like the rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the
+sea. No word but the words in his book can portray the magnitude of his
+achievement; no critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and by
+its own standard. But as a prophetic example of the poems of the
+future, and especially the poems of democracy and social love, it
+suffers a weakness--the weakness that Walt Whitman's character suffered.
+It is egocentric and a little inconsiderate of the importance of other
+people. Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages about universal social
+love, but he could not be the universal poet exactly because he was not
+social enough. He was not humble enough to be social. The rebel egoism
+of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his
+love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that
+gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others.
+
+There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural
+companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he
+"kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally
+appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes
+his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of
+talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even
+though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are
+really in social communion with humanity. For that is what the word
+_objective_ means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from
+other elements of our experience only in that it can be experienced in
+the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an
+object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that
+various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. Therefore
+one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his
+solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which
+Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours
+out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory
+that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each
+rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will
+comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to
+build poems out of phrases poured out. And whatever we may wish were
+true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed.
+Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the
+poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less
+clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an
+object of art.
+
+It could be established, I believe, with mechanical precision, that the
+rhythmic values most cherished by the social rebels who now write so
+much "free verse," are values practically incommunicable to others, and
+absolutely incommunicable by the method usually adopted, that of
+printing words on a page. A little of that icy matter-of-fact realism
+with which Poe used to scatter the sweet foggy thoughts of the
+literarious, while it might not affect the art of these poets, would
+surely reduce the volume of what they have to say about it. For
+instance, here is the answer of one of them to an assertion that the
+line division in free-verse is "arbitrary," and that if we copied one of
+these long poems in solid prose, the poet himself could hardly ever
+divide it again as it was:
+
+"Free verse that is free verse is _not_ arbitrary. Much of it is, of
+course--so are many canvases mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But
+there is free verse that resolves itself into just those lines--a little
+more subtly than sonnets or triolets--by virtue of pauses, of
+heart-beats, of the quickness or slowness of your breath, and maybe of
+your pulse itself.... It tries to give the rhythm value of those
+hesitations, those quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, the
+flutterings--it is _closer to the breath_, as modern music and modern
+dance are, or as primitive music and primitive dance were."
+
+It is impossible not to respond to such assertions, for we know in
+ourselves what these exquisite differential experiences are. Any one who
+has ever written love-letters--which are a kind of aboriginal
+free-verse--knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not
+demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated
+even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the
+same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of
+ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in
+another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. And while this
+fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is
+better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it
+would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much
+alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these
+minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of
+being served round in paper and ink.
+
+There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which
+exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other
+values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can
+not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings
+are too much their own. There are other values, still less delicate,
+which he might communicate by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture,
+taking possession as it were of the very pulse and respiration of
+others. But poetry which is composed for publication ought to occupy
+itself with those rhythmic values which may be communicated to other
+rhythmic minds through the printing of words on a page. It ought to do
+this, at least, if it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most
+minute degree social.
+
+A mature science of rhythm might be imagined to stride into the room
+where these poets are discussing the musical values of their verse,
+seize two or three of the most "free" and subtle among them, lock them
+into separate sound-proof chambers, and allow them to read one of their
+favorite passages into the ear of an instrument designed to record in
+spatial outline the pulsations of vocal accent. It is safe to assert
+that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than
+if the same two were reading a passage of highly wrought English
+prose.[1] And the reason for this is that free verse imports into
+English prose a form of punctuation that is exceedingly gross and yet
+absolutely inconsequential. Its line division has neither a metrical
+nor a logical significance that exists objectively. It can mean at any
+time anything that is desirable to the whims, or needful to the
+difficulties, of the reader or the writer. It is a very sign and
+instrument of subjectivity. To incorporate in a passage of printed
+symbols an indeterminate element so marked and so frequent as that, is
+to say to the reader--"Take the passage and organize it into whatever
+rhythmical pattern may please yourself." And that is what the reader of
+free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great
+difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift
+the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who
+is rhythmically gifted to organize _any indeterminate series of
+impressions whatever_ into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces
+a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and,
+having made it himself, is not unable to admire. Thus a good many poets
+who could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, are enabled by the
+gullibility and talent of their readers to come forward in this kind of
+writing as musicians of special and elaborate skill. The "freedom" that
+it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in
+prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous
+rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry,
+and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will
+certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not
+too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. But
+as an object of the effort of ambitious artists I can not believe it
+will widely survive the knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a
+form of mumble and indetermination in their art.
+
+Walt Whitman, however he may have been deceived about the social and
+democratic character of his form, was not deceived, as the modern
+eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He thought that he had
+gained in volume and directness of communion, but he knew that he was
+discarding subtlety, discarding in advance all those beautiful and
+decadent wonders of microscopic and morbid audacity that developed in
+France among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples of his form,
+however, are materially of Poe's persuasion, and like to believe that
+they have in free verse an instrument expressly fitted for the
+communication of those wonders, and of the most delicate modulations of
+that "verbal melody" that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true
+standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a commanding advantage over them,
+and what can be said of free-verse in general can not be said of his
+poems. He did achieve the predominant thing that he aimed to achieve--he
+made his poetry rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. He
+made it like the universe and like the presence of a man. In that
+triumph it will stand. In that character it will mould and influence the
+literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all
+literature in all lands.
+
+     "Who touches this book touches a man."
+
+There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused
+with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he
+exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is
+predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of
+being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the
+tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with
+nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of
+this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner
+heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in
+America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more
+large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear
+science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from
+its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in
+its complexity, its subtle and refined _dissimulation_ of the
+fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied,
+in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the
+rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or
+intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around
+which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and
+syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that
+they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its
+momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There
+is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable
+to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are
+akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why,
+almost as though it were a chemical thing--a stimulant and narcotic--it
+takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.
+
+Poetry only naïvely acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in
+the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly
+weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more
+natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive
+of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is
+but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not
+"ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called
+"rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed
+and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the
+refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment--a
+thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or
+cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of
+poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is
+so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer
+be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
+
+Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to
+nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman
+and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a
+celestial telescope. There is something more properly savage--something
+at least truly barbarous--in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's
+insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the
+poem--beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate
+"excitement of the soul"--he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance.
+Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see
+in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere
+syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more
+intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It
+is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this
+intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too,
+and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It
+is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than
+priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's
+attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that--whatever great things
+may come of it--he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective
+and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated,
+as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the
+eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their
+eyes upon the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration,
+the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic
+temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of
+Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and
+exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of
+life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain
+in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly
+willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to
+let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf
+and invite their souls," to be "satisfied--see, dance, laugh, sing."
+They were so maturely naïve that they would hardly understand what Walt
+Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to
+recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that
+we can most surely go back to nature.
+
+And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural--a
+mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make
+out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that
+mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time,
+then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that
+belongs to the people. For people are, in the depths of them and on the
+average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no
+doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more
+serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She
+meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of
+their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of
+universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we
+modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient
+China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of
+being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an
+immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be
+loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with
+nature, were at play. And in Japan even today--surviving from that
+time--there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a
+making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative
+realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly
+popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.
+
+If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing--the same
+love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart--we enter somewhat
+irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure and
+not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find
+poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for
+the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza,
+and once for the whole poem--"When I heard at the close of the
+day"--Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of
+image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a
+chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to
+all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of
+freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his
+most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is
+truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple
+people--the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect
+existence of a thing.
+
+
+HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS
+
+  Hush'd be the camps today;
+  And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;
+  And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate,
+  Our dear commander's death.
+
+  No more for him life's stormy conflicts;
+  Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
+  Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
+
+
+RECONCILIATION
+
+  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
+  Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in
+      time be utterly lost;
+  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly
+      softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world....
+
+These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic and still clarity of
+form, if they had been the end and essence of his art, and not only a
+by-accident of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not perhaps to
+a great national poetry for America, but beyond that into something
+international and belonging to the universe of man. The step forward
+from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and
+subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an
+increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and
+breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart
+naturally. I chose them, not only because they are among the most
+musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whitman wrote, but also because
+in bringing a mood that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's
+agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. And so it will not be
+thought that when I say the poet of democracy will be a child who is at
+play with the making of things, I desire to narrow the range and
+poignancy of the things he will make. He will be free, and he will move
+with a knowing and profound mind among all the experiences and the
+dreams of men. But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration,
+or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose
+clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and
+never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison Patterson's
+account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading of her poems in his
+laboratory. It constitutes the preface of the second edition of his
+book, "The Rhythm of Prose"--a book which, upon the true basis of
+experimentation, analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time
+the nature of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it is
+derived by the reader both from prose and metrical poetry. Until it is
+amplified or improved by further investigation, this book will surely be
+the basis of every scientific discussion of the questions involved
+here.
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+
+
+
+COMING TO PORT
+
+
+  Our motion on the soft still misty river
+  Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
+  That rise and follow one another ever,
+  Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom
+  And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.
+
+  From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,
+  And your heart is still; and like a sound
+  In silence is your stillness in the streaming
+  Of light-whispered laughter all around,
+  Where happy passengers are homeward bound.
+
+  Their sunny journey is in safety ending,
+  But for you no journey has an end.
+  The tears that to your eyes their light are lending
+  Shine in softness to no waiting friend;
+  Beyond the search of any eye they tend.
+
+  There is no nest for the unresting fever
+  Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;
+  There is no rest nor blessedness forever
+  That can clasp you, quivering and pained,
+  Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.
+
+  Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,
+  Flowing though the ship has come to rest,
+  Your love is passing through the mist and going,
+  Going infinitely from your breast,
+  Surpassing time on its immortal quest.
+
+  The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,
+  All flush forward with a joyful aim,
+  And while their hands with happy hands are mating,
+  Lips are laughing out a happy name--
+  You pause, and pass among them like a flame.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONELY BATHER
+
+
+  Loose-veined and languid as the yellow mist
+  That swoons along the river in the sun,
+  Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed
+  With years of heat that through your veins have run,
+
+  You lie with aching memories of love
+  Alone and naked by the weeping tree,
+  And indolent with inward longing move
+  Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.
+
+  If love came warm and burning to your dream,
+  And filled you all your avid veins require,
+  You would lie sadly still beside the stream,
+  Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;
+
+  The same low sky would weave its fading blue,
+  The river still exhale its misty rain,
+  The willow trail its waving over you,
+  Your longing only quickened into pain.
+
+  Bed your desire among the pressing grasses;
+  Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts
+  Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes,
+  Till the undulation of your longing rests.
+
+
+
+
+IN MY ROOM
+
+
+  In this high room, my room of quiet space,
+  Sun-yellow softened for my happiness,
+  I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves;
+  Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude
+  Beneath a willow by the river stream;
+  Your agéd plum tree bearing lonely bloom
+  Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds
+  Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo.
+  My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei,
+  Your tranquil and creative-fingered love
+  So many mounds of mournful years ago
+  In that cool valley where the colors lived.
+  My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains.
+  Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th century.
+
+
+
+
+HOURS
+
+
+  Hours when I love you, are like tranquil pools,
+  The liquid jewels of the forest, where
+  The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools
+  His fevered ankles, and the ferny air
+  Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast,
+  Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.
+
+
+
+
+FIRE AND WATER
+
+
+  Flame-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure
+  And poignant as the dagger to the mark,
+  Your will is burning ever; it is pure.
+  Mine is vague water welling through the dark,
+  Holding all substances--except the spark.
+
+  Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream
+  When some clear striding naked-footed girl
+  Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam
+  Across its bosom ambling and aswirl
+  With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;
+
+  Such was our meeting--fatefully so brief.
+  I have no purpose and no power to clutch.
+  Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief;
+  And I more sadly flow, remembering much,
+  Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.
+
+
+
+
+YOU MAKE NO ANSWER
+
+
+  You make no answer. You have stolen away
+  Deliberately in that twilight sorrow
+  Where the dark flame that is your being shines
+  So well. Mysterious and deeply tender
+  In your motion you have softly left me,
+  And the little path along the house is still.
+  And I, a child forsaken of its mother,
+  I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend,
+  Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that
+  My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you--
+  More than friend and slender-bodied mother--
+  O sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!
+
+
+
+
+OUT OF A DARK NIGHT
+
+
+  Death is more tranquil than the life of love,
+  More calm, more sure, and more unanguished.
+  O the path among the trees is far more tranquil to the dead
+  Than to these anxious hearts, uptroubled from their beds,
+  Who pace in pallid darkness on the leaves,
+  For no good reason--for no reason
+  But because their limbs will not lie still upon the sheet.
+  Their limbs will not lie still. O how I pity them.
+  Sad hearts--their marrow is a-quiver,
+  And they can not lie them down in tranquil sadness like the dead.
+
+
+
+
+A MORNING
+
+
+  Again this morning the bold autumn,
+  Spreading through the woods her sacred fire,
+  Brings the rich color of your presence
+  Warmly luminous to my desire--
+
+  Brings to my heart the dear wild worship,
+  High and wayward as the windy air,
+  And to my pulse the hot sweet passion
+  Burning crimson like a poison there.
+
+
+
+
+ANNIVERSARY
+
+
+  The flowers we planted in the tender spring,
+  And through the summer watched their blossoming,
+  Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,
+  Died and dropped downward altogether.
+
+  Today in April in the vivid grass
+  They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,
+  They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,
+  Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.
+
+  But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,
+  He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,
+  And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,
+  He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.
+
+
+
+
+AUTUMN LIGHT
+
+
+  So bright and soft is the sweet air of morning,
+  And so tenderly the light descends,
+  And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers
+  All the leaves unto the valley's ends--
+
+  It brings them all to being when it touches
+  With its paleness every glowing vein;
+  The wild and flaming hollows of the forest
+  Kindle all their crimson in its rain;
+
+  And every curve receives its share of morning,
+  Every little shadow softly grows,
+  And motion finds a melody more tender
+  That like a phantom through the branches goes--
+
+  So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering,
+  And quiet in its giving, as though love,
+  The morning dream of life, were born of longing,
+  And really poured its being from above.
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN MESSIAH
+
+
+  Scarred with sensuality and pain
+  And weary labor in a mind not hard
+  Enough to think, a heart too always tender,
+  Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers.
+  They are wiser than his parables,
+  But he more potent, for he has the gift
+  Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.
+
+
+
+
+IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL
+
+
+  Today I saw a face--it was a beak,
+  That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes,
+  Above the bloody muck that had been lips
+  And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured
+  Some water through a rubber down a hole
+  He made in that black bag of horny blood.
+  The beak revived, it smiled--as chickens smile.
+  The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue
+  To tell with, what he used to be.
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT
+
+
+  You came with your small tapering flame of passion
+  Thinly burning like a nun's desire,
+  Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion
+  Faintly painting what your veins require
+  With little pallid pyramids of fire.
+
+  So very small and unfulfilled you sat,
+  Building a little talk to keep you there,
+  Your face and body pointed like a cat,
+  Your legs not reaching down from any chair,
+  Your thoughts not really reaching anywhere;
+
+  So dumb and tiny--yet Love guessed your mood,
+  And pressed his phial in its fervent bed,
+  And poured his thrilling philtre in my blood,
+  And all his lustre on your body shed,
+  And hot enamel on the words you said;
+
+  Your littleness became a monstrous thing,
+  A rank retort, a hot and waiting vat,
+  Your eyes green-copper like a snake in spring,
+  And lusty-bold your laying off your hat,
+  And fell your purpose like a hungry cat;
+
+  The dark fell on us through our narrowed eyes,
+  The heat lashed up around us from the floor,
+  Encrimsoning the lips of our surprise
+  To sway like music, and like burning pour
+  Across the truth that parted us before.
+
+
+
+
+TO LOVE
+
+
+  Love, often your delicate fingers beckon,
+  And always I follow.
+  Oh, if I could stay, and possess your beauty
+  Beckoning always!
+
+
+
+
+CAR-WINDOW
+
+
+  A light is laughing thro' the scattered rain,
+  A color quickens in the meadow;
+  Drops are still, upon the window-pane--
+  They cast a silver shadow.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE FISHES
+
+
+  A myriad curious fishes,
+  Tiny and pink and pale,
+  All swimming north together
+  With rhythmical fin and tail--
+
+  A mountain surges among them,
+  They dart and startle and float,
+  Mere wiggling minutes of terror,
+  Into that mountain's throat.
+
+
+
+
+INVOCATION
+
+
+  Truth, be more precious to me than the eyes
+  Of happy love; burn hotter in my throat
+  Than passion; and possess me like my pride;
+  More sweet than freedom; more desired than joy;
+  More sacred than the pleasing of a friend.
+
+
+
+
+SOMETIMES
+
+
+  Sometimes a child's voice crying on the street
+  Comes winging like an arrow through the wind
+  To pierce my breast with you, my baby, and
+  My pen is weak, and all my thinking dreams
+  Are mist of yearning for the touch of you.
+
+
+
+
+TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN
+
+
+    In your lips moving fervently,
+    Your eyes hot with fire,
+  Life seems immortally young with desire,
+    Life seems impetuous,
+    Hungrily free,
+  Having no faith but its burning to be.
+
+    You could dance laughingly,
+    Draw where you move,
+  Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.
+    Youth be a carnival,
+    Life be the queen,
+  You could go dancing and singing and seen!
+
+    Whence came that tenderness
+    Cruel and wild,
+  Arming with murder the hand of a child?
+    Whence came that breaking fire,
+    Nursed and caressed
+  With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?
+
+    In your soul sacredly,
+    Deeper than fear,
+  Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?
+    Virgin of murder,
+    Was it God's breath,
+  Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?
+
+
+
+
+TO AN ACTRESS
+
+
+  You walk as vivid as a sunny storm
+  Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes
+  Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,
+  Making passionate and making young.
+  You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,
+  And in the sultry place of custom raise
+  The naked colors of abounding life,
+  And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.
+
+
+
+
+EYES
+
+
+  My heart is sick because of all the eyes
+  That look upon you drinkingly.
+  They almost touch you with their fever look!
+  O keep your beauty like a mystic gem,
+  Clear-surfaced--give no fibre grain of hold
+  To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!
+  My heart is sick!
+
+                    O love, let not my heart
+  Corrupt the flower of your liberty--
+  Go spend your beauty like the summer sky
+  That makes a radius of every glance,
+  And with your morning color light them all!
+
+
+
+
+X RAYS
+
+
+  Your eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber
+  Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,
+  With yellow ghostly globes of intense æther
+  Potent as the rays of pure desire.
+
+  Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,
+  When the winged wild whining mystic wheel
+  Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings
+  Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.
+
+  Your flesh was never warmer to my passion
+  Than when, moving in that lumor green,
+  We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured
+  Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.
+
+  You seemed so virginal and so undreaming
+  Of the burning hunger in my eyes,
+  To peer more fever-deeply in your being
+  Than the very death of passion lies.
+
+  The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,
+  Fashioned through the ages for the sun,
+  Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern
+  Where you walked a naked skeleton;
+
+  Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,
+  Living to the tip of every bone,
+  And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
+  Ever to lie wanly down alone--
+
+  To lie forever down so still and slender,
+  Tracing on the ancient screen of night
+  That naked and pale writing of the wonder
+  Of your beauty breathing in the light.
+
+
+
+
+SONNETS
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS
+
+
+Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always
+seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason
+lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is
+not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a
+division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable
+instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its
+closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance
+it has--the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural
+convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager
+horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden
+grain.
+
+This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness
+of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express
+themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often they
+are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they
+have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the
+writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry
+seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a
+concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably
+equal to its more temperate pretensions.
+
+The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a
+dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for
+persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the
+hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They
+get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds
+and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not
+make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and
+get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always
+with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received
+in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.
+
+This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a
+sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own--the clarity, the running
+and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of song. And to
+these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional
+relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a
+conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more
+important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I
+offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those
+high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely
+reliquary of their god.
+
+
+
+
+A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT
+
+
+  You love me not as I love, or when I
+  Grow listless of the crimson of your lips,
+  And turn not to your burning finger-tips,
+  You would show fierce and feverish your eye,
+  And hotly my numb wilfulness decry,
+  Holding your virtues over me like whips,
+  And stinging with the visible eclipse
+  Of that sweet poise of life I crucify!
+
+  How can you pass so proudly from my face,
+  With all the tendrils of your passion furled,
+  So adequate and animal in grace,
+  As one whose mate is only all the world!
+  I never taste the sweet exceeding thought
+  That you might love me, though I loved you not!
+
+
+
+
+THOSE YOU DINED WITH
+
+
+  They would have made you like a pageant, bold
+  And nightly festive, lustre-lit for them,
+  And round your beauty, like a dusky gem,
+  Have poured the glamour of the pride of gold;
+  And you would lie in life as in her bed
+  The mistress of a pale king, indolent,
+  Though hot her limbs and strong her languishment,
+  And her deep spirit is unvisited.
+
+  But I would see you like a gypsy, free
+  As windy morning in the sunny air,
+  Your wild warm self, your vivid self, to be,
+  A miracle of nature's liberty,
+  Giving your gift of being kind and fair,
+  High, gay and careless-handed everywhere!
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD
+
+
+  The passions of a child attend his dreams.
+  He lives, loves, hopes, remembers, is forlorn
+  For legendary creatures, whom he deems
+  Not too unreal--until one golden morn
+  The gracious, all-awaking sun shines in
+  Upon his tranquil pillow, and his eyes
+  Are touched, and opened greatly, and begin
+  To drink reality with rich surprise.
+
+  I loved the impetuous souls of ancient story--
+  Heroic characters, kings, queens, whose wills
+  Like empires rose, achieved, and fell, in glory.
+  I was a child, until the radiant dawn,
+  Thy beauty, woke me--O thy spirit fills
+  The stature of those heroes, they are gone!
+
+
+
+
+AS THE CRAG EAGLE
+
+
+  As the crag eagle to the zenith's height
+  Wings his pursuit in his exalted hour
+  Of her the tempest-reared, whose airy power
+  Of plume and passion challenges his flight
+  To that wild altitude, where they unite,
+  In mutual tumultuous victory
+  And the swift sting of nature's ecstasy,
+  Their shuddering pinions and their skyward might--
+  As they, the strong, to the full height of heaven
+  Bear up that joy which to the strong is given,
+  Thus, thus do we, whose stormy spirits quiver
+  In the bold air of utter liberty,
+  Clash equal at our highest, I and thee,
+  Unconquered and unconquering forever!
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FATHER
+
+
+  The eastern hill hath scarce unveiled his head,
+  And the deliberate sky hath but begun
+  To meditate upon a future sun,
+  When thou dost rise from thy impatient bed.
+  Thy morning prayer unto the stars is said.
+  And not unlike a child, the penance done
+  Of sleep, thou goest to thy serious fun,
+  Exuberant--yet with a whisper tread.
+
+  And when that lord doth to the world appear,
+  The jovial sun, he leans on his old hill,
+  And levels forth to thee a golden smile--
+  Thee in his garden, where each warming year
+  Thou toilest in all joy with him, to fill
+  And flood the soil with Summer for a while.
+
+
+
+
+TO EDWARD S. MARTIN
+
+FROM A PROFESSIONAL HOBO
+
+
+  How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
+  Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
+  The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
+  And on this gripped and mortal-sweating den
+  And battle-pit of hunger now and then
+  Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
+  The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
+  Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen!
+
+  How long have art and wit and poetry,
+  With all their power, been content, like you,
+  To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
+  To filmy-curtain what they dare not see,
+  In multitudinous reality,
+  The rough and bloody soul of what is true!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     (In an editorial in _Life_, Mr. Martin had described as
+     "professional hoboes" a number of revolutionary agitators whom
+     he did not like--Pancho Villa, William D. Haywood, Wild Joe
+     O'Carroll--and he did me the honor to include me among them.)
+
+
+
+
+EUROPE--1914
+
+
+  Since Athens died, the life that is a light
+  Has never shone in Europe. Alien moods,
+  The oriental morbid sanctitudes,
+  Have darkened on her like the fear of night.
+  In happy augury we dared to guess
+  That her pure spirit shot one sunny glance
+  Of paganry across the fields of France,
+  Clear startling this dim fog of soulfulness.
+
+  But now, with arms and carnage and the cries
+  Of Holy Murder, rolling to the clouds
+  Her bloody-shadowed smoke of sacrifice,
+  The Superstition conquers, and the shrouds
+  Of sick black wonder lay their murky blight
+  Where shone of old the immortal-seeming light.
+
+
+
+
+ISADORA DUNCAN
+
+
+  You bring the fire and terror of the wars
+  Of infidels in thunder-running hordes,
+  With spears like sun-rays, shields, and wheeling swords
+  Flame shape, death shape and shaped like scimitars,
+  With crimson eagles and blue pennantry,
+  And teeth and armor flashing, and white eyes
+  Of battle horses, and the silver cries
+  Of trumpets unto storm and victory!
+
+  Who is this naked-footed lovely girl
+  Of summer meadows dancing on the grass?
+  So young and tenderly her footsteps pass,
+  So dreamy-limbed and lightly wild and warm--
+  The bugles murmur and the banners furl,
+  And they are lost and vanished like a storm!
+
+
+
+
+THE SUN
+
+
+  Now autumn, and that sadness as of love
+  Heroic in immortal solitude;
+  Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;
+  But in the blue and infinite above
+  A shining circle like the light of truth,
+  Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,
+  Whose motion is the measurement of time,
+  Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.
+
+  No passion burns upon the livid earth
+  Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry
+  Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.
+  All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth
+  To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,
+  All flows beneath the sanction of his light.
+
+
+
+
+THE NET
+
+
+  The net brings up, how long and languidly,
+  A million vivid quiverings of life,
+  Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,
+  All colors, green and silver of the sea,
+  All forms of skill and eagerness to be--
+  They die and wither of the very breath
+  That sounds your pity of their lavish death
+  While they are leaping, star-like, to be free.
+
+  They die and wither, but the agéd sea,
+  Insane old salty womb of mystery,
+  Is pregnant with a million million more,
+  Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,
+  Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,
+  While onward her immortal currents pour.
+
+
+
+
+A DUNE SONNET
+
+
+  I was so lonely on the dunes to-day;
+    The shadow of a bird passed o'er the sand,
+    And I, a driftwood relic in my hand....
+  Sea winds are not more lonely when they stray
+  A little fitful and bewildered way
+    In this wan acre, whose dry billows stand
+    So pitilessly still of curve, so bland,
+  And wide, and waiting, infinitely grey.
+
+  In hollows I could almost hear them say,
+  The misty breezes--Run, we will not stay
+    In this unreal and spiritual land!
+    Our soul of life is calling from the strand,
+  Whose blue and breathing bosom leapt or lay
+  Or laughed to us in shots of silver spray!
+
+
+
+
+SONGS
+
+
+
+
+SEA-SHORE
+
+
+  The wind blows in along the sea--
+    Its salty wet caresses
+  Impart to all the ships that be
+    A thrill before it passes.
+
+  The tide is never at a stand,
+    A mountain in its motion,
+  Forever homing to the land,
+    And ever to the ocean.
+
+  And on its fickle, mighty breast
+    The waters still are moving,
+  With love in every running crest
+    And laughter in the loving--
+
+  Light love to touch the prows of ships
+    That slip along so slenderly.
+  I would as lightly touch your lips,
+    And your heart as tenderly,
+
+  If you would move with all that move,
+    The flowing and caressing,
+  Who have no firmness in their love,
+    No sorrow in its passing.
+
+
+
+
+RAINY SONG
+
+
+  Down the dripping pathway dancing through the rain,
+  Brown eyes of beauty, laugh to me again!
+
+  Eyes full of starlight, moist over fire,
+  Full of young wonder, touch my desire!
+
+  O like a brown bird, like a bird's flight,
+  Run through the rain drops lithely and light.
+
+  Body like a gypsy, like a wild queen,
+  Slim brown dress to slip through the green--
+
+  The little leaves hold you as soft as a child,
+  The little path loves you, the path that runs wild.
+
+  Who would not love you, seeing you move,
+  Warm-eyed and beautiful through the green grove?
+
+  Let the rain kiss you, trickle through your hair,
+  Laugh if my fingers mingle with it there,
+
+  Laugh if my cheek too is misty and drips--
+  Wetness is tender--laugh on my lips
+
+  The happy sweet laughter of love without pain,
+  Young love, the strong love, burning in the rain.
+
+
+
+
+A HYMN TO GOD
+
+IN TIME OF STRESS
+
+
+  Lift, O dark and glorious Wonder,
+  Once again thy gleaming sword,
+  Cleave this killing doubt asunder
+  With one sheer and sacred word!
+
+  For my heart is weak and broken,
+  And the struggle runs too high,
+  And there is no burning token
+  In the new immortal sky.
+
+  Oh, not curb or courage only
+  Does my hour demand of me,
+  It is thought supreme and lonely
+  And responsible and free!
+
+  And I quail before the danger
+  As a bark before the blast,
+  When the beacon star's a stranger
+  In the mountains piling fast,
+
+  And there is no light but reason
+  And the compass of the ship.
+  God, a word of thine in season!
+  God, a motion of thy lip!
+
+
+
+
+COMING SPRING
+
+
+  Ice is marching down the river,
+    Gaily out to sea!
+  Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver,
+    Setting torrents free!
+
+  Yellow are the water-willows,
+    Yellow clouds are they,
+  Rising where the laden billows
+    Swell along their way!
+
+  Arrows of the sun are flying!
+    Winter flees the light,
+  And his chilly horn is sighing
+    All the moisty night!
+
+  Lovers of the balmy weather,
+    Lovers of the sun!
+  Drifts and duty melt together--
+    Get your labors done!
+
+  Ice is marching down the river,
+    Gaily out to sea!
+  Sing the healthy-hearted ever,
+    Spring is liberty!
+
+
+
+
+DAISIES
+
+
+  Daisies, daisies, all surprise!
+  Open wide your sunny eyes!
+  See the linnet on the wing;
+  See the crimson feather!
+  See the life in every thing,
+  Sun, and wind, and weather!
+  Shadow of the passer-by,
+  Bare-foot skipping over,
+  Meadow where the heifers lie,
+  Butter-cup, and clover!
+  All is vivid, all is real,
+  All is high surprising!
+  Ye are pure to see and feel;
+  Ye the gift are prizing
+  Men and gods would perish for--
+  Gods with all their thunder!--
+  Could they have the thing ye are,
+  Everlasting wonder!
+
+
+
+
+BOBOLINK
+
+
+  Bright little bird with a downward wing,
+  How many birds within you sing?
+
+  Two or three at the least it seems,
+  Overflowing golden streams.
+
+  If I could warble on a wing so strong,
+  Filling five acres full of song,
+
+  I'd never sit on the grey rail fence,
+  I'd never utter a word of sense,
+
+  I'd float forever in a light blue sky,
+  Uttering joy to the passers-by!
+
+
+
+
+DIOGENES
+
+
+      A hut, and a tree,
+      And a hill for me,
+  And a piece of a weedy meadow.
+
+      I'll ask no thing,
+      Of God or King,
+  But to clear away His shadow.
+
+
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are
+selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the titles, "The
+Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much--I meant to convey in that
+phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my
+life are drawn--that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning
+here with a word of confession.
+
+An attitude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my
+mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal
+character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some
+absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide
+ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having
+of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and
+eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of
+opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I
+suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of
+Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of
+ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded
+investigation and formulation of "isms," in Sextus Empiricus and the
+little group of Alexandrian scientists--the last light to go out in the
+darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages
+of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it
+appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in
+history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation,
+as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to
+escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in
+human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief
+recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic
+opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance.
+Spinoza follows him, the God-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other
+monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once
+more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and noble enquiry about
+Human Understanding, the sceptic wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that
+would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those
+mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with
+their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the
+mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again
+issuing awakened--for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no
+individual. The awakener is science--empirical science turning its brave
+eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive
+pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world
+has been saved--or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home
+is in these ages of sacred doubt.
+
+Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete
+things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in
+an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a
+brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of
+science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which
+are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the
+subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their
+universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern
+counterpart of the thought of Protagoras, summarized for the ancients
+in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."
+
+This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia
+University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we
+gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a
+scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself
+emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of
+the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my
+poem--that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so
+ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities
+corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity,
+that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the
+concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves;
+and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber
+to annihilate the event of the individual idea--the only actual thing
+denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import.
+In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the
+imagination the thought of Protagoras.
+
+In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy
+and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful sailor
+out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of
+ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example
+to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature
+with moral courage and abandon.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE AQUARIUM
+
+
+  Serene the silver fishes glide,
+  Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;
+  As through the agéd deeps of ocean,
+  They glide with wan and wavy motion.
+  They have no pathway where they go,
+  They flow like water to and fro.
+  They watch with never winking eyes,
+  They watch with staring, cold surprise,
+  The level people in the air,
+  The people peering, peering there,
+  Who wander also to and fro,
+  And know not why or where they go,
+  Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
+  Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.
+
+
+
+
+EARTH'S NIGHT
+
+
+  Sombre,
+  Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed
+  With smoky exhalations of the earth,
+  Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind
+  In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.
+  O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!
+  Thou art waving the long grass over thy graves;
+  Murmuring over all thy resting children,
+  That have run and wandered and gone down
+  Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him
+  Who looketh now a moment on these stars,
+  And in the moving boughs of this dark night
+  Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.
+
+
+
+
+THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS
+
+
+  My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,
+  Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought
+  That will to sorrow move all minds forever--
+  All that love to know. It was the hour
+  When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,
+  And the hurriers go home to rest;
+  And we whose task was meditation rose
+  And wound a murmuring way among the books
+  And effigies, the fading fragrance, of
+  A vaulted library--a place to me
+  Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds
+  All the world hath of musty memory
+  In sombre convolutions that are dying.
+  There at our faithful table every day,
+  In the great shadow of this dissolution,
+  We would speak of things eternal, things
+  Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one
+  Who was a leader of the way to them;
+  A man born regal to the realms of thought.
+  High, pale, and sculptural his brow,
+  And high his concourse with the kings of old,
+  Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew--
+  The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber
+  Fell in love with God. It was of him,
+  And that unhungering love of his, he told us;
+  And with soft and stately melody,
+  The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us
+  Sublime above the very motions of
+  Our mortal being, and we walked with him
+  The heights of meditation like the gods.
+  I have no memory surpassing this.
+  And yet--strange pity of our natures or
+  Of his--there ran a rumor poisonous.
+  Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.
+  And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,
+  We whispered things not all philosophy
+  When he was gone. We knew but little where
+  He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,
+  That there was other love in him than what
+  He taught us--love that makes more quickly pale!
+  Ay, even he was tortured with the lure
+  Of mortal motion in the eyes--and lips
+  And limbs that were not warm to him alone
+  Were warm to him. He drank mortality.
+  Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat
+  In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper
+  In the shadow of our meditations.
+  Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour
+  Advancing--livid painting of a thought!
+  He spoke of Substance,--strangely--on that day--
+  Eternal, self-existent, infinite--
+  He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.
+  And as he spoke there came on me that trance
+  Of inattention, when the words would seem
+  To drop their magic of containing things,
+  And, by a shift, become but things themselves--
+  Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.
+  I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till
+  I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and
+  I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things,
+  Are merely modes of but one attribute,
+  Of what is infinite in attributes,
+  And may be called----" He spoke to there, and then--
+  His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped--A crack
+  Behind us--A quick step among the books--
+  His hand, his head, his body all collapsed
+  And fell, or settled utterly, before
+  The fact came on us--he was shot and killed.
+  But little I remember after that.
+  What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed
+  Was done, and all his speculations vanished
+  Like a sound.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE ASCENDING MOON
+
+
+  Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky
+  With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash
+  With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer
+  Thy flight high up into the purple blue,
+  Where faint the stars beholding--rain from there
+  Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!
+    I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!
+  With thy deliberate magic thou of old
+  Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped,
+  And scared, and lacerated for their cure--
+  Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them,
+  Give to their minds a curvéd emptiness
+  Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in;
+  Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light,
+  Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds
+  The very sons of Prudence, maniacs
+  To wander forth among the bushes, howl
+  Abroad like eager wolves, and snatch the air!
+  Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs
+  Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling
+  In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy,
+  And thou didst palely peer among them, and
+  Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!
+  I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!
+  For thou hast still thy alien influence;
+  Thou dost sow forth thro' all the fields and hills,
+  And in all chambers of the natural earth,
+  A difference most strange and luminous.
+  This tree, that was the river sycamore,
+  Is in thy pensive effluence become
+  But the mind's mystic essence of a tree,
+  Upright luxuriance thought upon--the stream
+  Is liquid timeless motion undefined--
+  The world's a gesture dim. Like rapturous thought,
+  Which can the rigorous concrete obscure
+  Unto annihilation, and create
+  Upon the dark a universal vision,
+  Thou--even on this bold and local earth,
+  The site of the obtruding actual--
+  Thou dost erect in awful purity
+  The filmy architecture of all dreams.
+  And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light
+  Perfection, and a vision give to man
+  Of things superior to the tough act,
+  Existence, and almost co-equals of
+  His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!
+  Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!
+    Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth--
+  The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!
+  Shine in the children's eyes. They drink thy light,
+  And laugh in innocence of sorcery,
+  And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze
+  With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.
+  Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill,
+  I lean not forth, I hide myself in tasks,
+  Even to the blunt comfort of routine
+  I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm,
+  Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!
+
+
+
+
+LEIF ERICSON
+
+
+  Through the murk of the ocean of history northward and far,
+  I descry thee, O Sailor! Thy deed like the dive of a star
+  Doth startle the ages of darkness through which it is hurled,
+  Doth flash, and flare out, and is gone from the eyes of the world!
+
+  What watchers beheld thee, and heralding followed thy lead,
+  Or bugled the nations into the track of thy deed?
+  What continent soundeth thy name, what people thy praise?
+  Who sendeth the signal of gratitude back to the days
+  When thou in thy boat didst put forth from the world, and defy
+  Infinity, ignorance, tempest, and ocean, and sky?
+  No, history brags not of God, nor doth history brag
+  Of thee, sailor, who carried thy sail and thy sea-colored flag
+  Clear over His seas, drove into His mystery old
+  The prow of thy sixty-foot skerry, whose quivering hold
+  Could dip but a cupful out of His watery wrath,
+  That stormed thee, and snatched at thy bowsprit, and licked up thy path!
+
+  When mythical rumor sky-carried ran over the earth,
+  With the whisper of lands that were dreamed of beyond the red birth
+  Of the west-wind, the blood of thy body took running fire
+  To launch and be swift o'er the sea as a man's desire!
+
+  O rare is the northern morning that shineth for thee!
+  A million silvering crests on the cold blue sea--
+  And the wind drives in from the jubilant sea to the land,
+  And, catching thy laughter, it tosses the cloak in thy hand,
+  As taunting thee forth to thy sails in the frosty air,
+  Where thousands surround thee with awe and a wondering prayer.
+  And they that stand with thee--tumultuous-hearted they stand!
+  They bend at thy word--I hear the boat sing on the sand--
+  And they slip to their oars as the boat leaps aloft on a wave,
+  With thee at the windy helm, joyful and joyfully brave!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The depth of the billows is awful, the depth of the sky
+  Is silent as God. Silent the dark on high.
+  Naught sings to thy heart save thy heart and the wind, the wild giant
+  Of ocean, agrin in the darkness, who rattles defiant
+  A laugh through thy rigging, and howls from the clouds at thee,
+  And moans in a mimic of pain and a murmurous glee.
+  Still stern I behold thee, thy stature dim through the dark,
+  Unmoved, unreleasing the helm of thy storm-driven bark.
+  "O God of our fathers, give signs to our sea-worn eyes!
+  Give sight to Thy sailors! Give but the sun to arise
+  In the morn on an island pale in the haze of the west!
+  O beam of the star in the north, is thy only behest
+  To gesture me onward eternally unto no shore
+  Of these high and wild waters, famed for their hunger of yore?
+  Then give to thy sailor for life the courage of death,
+  To encounter the taunt of this wind with a rougher breath
+  Of gigantic contempt in the soul for where and when,
+  So it be onward impetuous, living, onward again!
+  He saileth safe who carrieth death on board,
+  He flieth a laughing sail in the wrath of the Lord!"
+  So sang thy heart to thy heart, and so to the swinging sea
+  In a lull of the wind, the song of a spirit free!
+
+  Serene adventurer, lover of distance divine,
+  Pursuing thy love forever though never thine,
+  O sun-tanned king with thy blue eyes over the sea,
+  Who dares to sing, and live, the praise of thee?
+
+  Not they that safe in a haven of certainty, steer
+  From mooring to mooring with faith and with fear,
+  And pray for a map of the universe, pointer, and plan,
+  When all the blue waves of the ocean the courage of man
+  Challenge to venture, not they are the praisers of thee!
+  Nor they who sail for the cargo, and dream that the sea,
+  In its wanton wild infinite wonder of motion and sound,
+  Is bound by a purpose, as their little breathing is bound.
+  The profit of thy great sailing to thee was small,
+  And unto the world it was nothing--a man, that was all,
+  And his deed like a star, to flame in the dull old sky!
+  Of the story of apathy, age after decorous age going by!
+  Grapes were thy import, winey and luscious to eat,
+  Grapes, and a story--"The dew in the west was sweet!"
+  Wine of the distance ever the reddest seems,
+  And sweet is the world to the dreamer and doer of dreams!
+  Weigh them, O pale-headed merchant--little ye know!
+  Compute, O desk-dwellers, ye will not measure him so,
+  For ye know only knowledge, ye know not the drive of the will
+  That brought it with passion to birth--it driveth still
+  Through the hearts of the kindred of earth, the forward fleeing,
+  The kin of the stormy soul at the helm of all-being!
+  Sailors, unreefed, and high-masted, and wet, and free,
+  Who sail in the love of the billows, whose port is the sea--
+  They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime,
+  And launch with thee, glad as with God, on the ocean of time!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Leif Ericson, the Norse adventurer, sailed to America 500 years
+     before Columbus.
+
+
+
+
+MIDNIGHT
+
+
+                Midnight is come,
+  And thinly in the deepness of the gloom
+  Truth rises startle-eyed out of a tomb,
+                And we are dumb.
+
+                A death-bell tolls,
+  And we still shudder round the too smooth bed,
+  For Truth makes pallid watch above the dead,
+                Freezing our souls.
+
+                But day returns,
+  Light and the garish life, and we are brave,
+  For Truth sinks wanly down into her grave.
+                Yet the heart yearns.
+
+
+
+
+IN MARCH
+
+
+  On a soaked fence-post a little blue-backed bird,
+  Opening her sweet throat, has stirred
+  A million music-ripples in the air
+  That curl and circle everywhere.
+  They break not shallow at my ear,
+  But quiver far within. Warm days are near!
+
+
+
+
+TO THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH
+
+
+  Soft little daughters of the mead,
+  The random bush, the wanton weed,
+  That lived to love, and loved to breed,
+      Who hither bound you?
+  You're innocent of all the screed
+      That blows around you.
+
+  Sweet daffodils so laughing yellow,
+  Beneath a bending pussy-willow,
+  You need not try to gulp and swallow
+      The Apostles' Creed,
+  Or shudder at the fates that follow
+      Adam's deed.
+
+  Big bloody hymns the choir sings,
+  And blows it to the King of Kings,
+  The while you dream of humble things
+      That wander there
+  Where first you spread your golden wings
+      On summer air;
+
+  Like Jesus, simple and divine,
+  In beauty, not in raiment fine,
+  Who asked no high or holier shrine
+      In which to pray,
+  Than garden groves of Palestine
+      'Neath olives gray.
+
+  His name, I think, would still be bright
+  Though churches were unbuilded quite,
+  And they whose hearts are toward the height
+      Should simple be,
+  And lift their heads into the light
+      As straight as ye.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT
+
+
+  Good-night, little bed, with your patient white pillow,
+  Your light little spread, and your blanket of yellow!
+  I wonder what leaves you so pensive to-night--
+  The breezes are tender, the stars are so bright,
+  I should think you would wrinkle a little and smile,
+  And be happy to think we can sleep for a while.
+  Are you waiting for something? Or are you just seeming
+  To listen so breathlessly, hushed, as though dreaming
+  A form that is fresher than breezes so light,
+  A coming more precious than stars to the night,
+  Who shall mould you as soft as the breast of a billow,
+  And crown with all beauty your patient white pillow?
+  Good-night, little bed--are you lonely so late?
+  We will lie down together, together we'll wait.
+
+
+
+
+IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA
+
+_Scene_: A cell leading to the gallows.
+
+_Characters_: A noble lady, who is an assassin.
+              A common murderer.
+
+
+  The chilling gray, a ghost of mortal dawn,
+  Has touched them, and they know the hour. The guard
+  Shifts guiltily his shoes upon the stone.
+  They raise their eyes in languid terror; but
+  The moment passes, and 'tis still again--
+  Save, in some piteous way she moves her throat.
+  There is a wandering of her burning eyes,
+  Until they fix, and strangely stare upon
+  The face of her companion. They would plead
+  Against the heavy horror of his look;
+  For not an idiot's corpse could strike the soul
+  More sick with wonder.
+                            "O look up and speak
+  To me!"--Her voice is startling to the walls--
+  "Speak any word against this gloom!"
+
+                                            He moves
+  A blood-deserted eye, but answers not.
+  "Tell if 'twas cold and filthy where you lay!"
+
+  "Ay, filthy cold! 'Twas cold enough to keep
+  The carrion from rotting on these bones!
+  They never kill us--never 'til we hang!"
+
+  He spoke a brutal tongue against the gloom.
+  And there was heard far off a step, a voice.
+  The guard stood up; a quiver moved her limbs.
+
+  "Give me some simple word. Give me your hand
+  In comradeship. We die together--and
+  The while we breathe--we are each other's world."
+
+  "No--not your world, my lady! Though we die,
+  I have no grace to give a hand to you.
+  My hand is thick and dirty--yours is pale!"
+
+  "You say 'my lady' in the very tomb!
+  Will even death not laugh this weakness off
+  Your tongue? To think nobility abides
+  This hour! _My lady!_ O, it is a curse
+  That whips me at the grave! I was not born--
+  Can I not even die, a human soul?"
+  "Yes, you can die! And better--you can kill!
+  'Tis not your ladyship--the gallows' rope
+  Snaps that to nothing! Death? Not death alone
+  Can laugh at your nobility--I laugh.
+  No--not your piteous ladyship--that dies.
+  It is your crime that daunts me--That shall live!
+  To plant, with this fine delicate little hand,
+  Small heavy death into the very heart
+  Of time-defended tyranny--that lives!
+  The future is all life for you. For me--
+  A glassy look, a yell into the air,
+  And I am gone! No life springs up from me!
+  I am the dirt that drank the drippings of
+  A guilty murder--that is why I sit
+  Like sickness here, and goad you with my shame!
+  I'll take your hand. I'll tell you I was starved,
+  Wrecked, shattered to the bones with drunken hunger,
+  And I killed for gold. I'll tell you this--
+  Your crime shall live to blot the memory
+  Of mine, and me, and all the insane tribe
+  Of us, who having strength in poverty
+  Will not lie down and starve--blot off the world
+  Our having been--the crime of our killed hopes,
+  And gradual infamy!"
+
+                              The fever gleam
+  Was in his eyes--the future! There it burned
+  A moment, while he stood to see the door
+  Swing darkly open, and the guard salute.
+  She stood beside him. And together in
+  High union of their fainting hearts, they faced
+  The hour that brought them to their level graves.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  March, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+TO A TAWNY THRUSH
+
+
+  Pine spirit!
+  Breath and voice of a wild glade!
+  In the wild forest near it,
+  In the cool hemlock or the leafy limb,
+  Whereunder
+  Thou didst run and wander
+  Thro' the sun and shade,
+  An elvish echo and a shadow dim,
+  There in the twilight thou dost lift thy song,
+  And give the stilly woods a silver tongue.
+  Out of what liquid is thy laughing made?
+  A sister of the water thou dost seem,
+  The quivering cataract thou singest near,
+  Whose glistening stream,
+  Unto the listening ear,
+  Thou dost outrun with thy cascade
+  Of music beautiful and swift and clear--
+  A joy unto the mournful forest given!
+  As when afar
+  A travelling star
+  Across our midnight races,
+  A moving gleam that quickly ceases,
+  Lost in the blue black abyss of heaven,
+  So doth thy light and silver singing
+  Start and thrill
+  The silence round thy piney hill,
+  Unto the sober hour a jewel bringing--
+  A mystery--a strain of rhythm fleeing--
+  A vagrant echo winging
+  Back to the unuttered theme of being!
+
+
+
+
+THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES
+
+
+  Poet, thy dreams are grateful to the air
+  And the light loves them. Tho' they murmur not,
+  Their carven stillness is a music rare,
+  And like the song of one whose tongue hath caught
+  The clear ethereal essence of his thought.
+
+  I hear the talkers come, the changing throngs
+  That with the fashions of a day surround
+  Thy visions, and I hear them quell their tongues,
+  And hush their querulous shoes upon the ground;
+  Thy dreams are with the crown of silence crowned--
+
+  Though they feel not the glowing diadem,
+  Who sleep for aye in their cool shapes of stone.
+  Nor ever will the sunlight waken them,
+  Nor ever will they turn their eyes and moan,
+  To think that their brief Poet's life is gone.
+
+  The tender and the lofty soul is gone,
+  Who eyed them forth from darkness, and confessed
+  His spirit's motion in unmoving stone.
+  His praise upon no mortal tongue doth rest;
+  By these unwhispering lips it is expressed.
+
+  Soon will the ample arms of night withdraw
+  Her shuffling children from the twilit hall--
+  From that heroic presence, in dim awe
+  Of whom the dark withholds a while her pall,
+  And leaves him luminous above them all.
+
+  Then are ye lost in darkness and alone,
+  Ye ghostly spirits! And the moment rare
+  Doth quicken that too sad and nameless stone,
+  To move her robe, and spill her sable hair,
+  And be in silence mingled with the air;
+
+  For she is one with the dim glimmering hour,
+  And the white spirits beautiful and still,
+  And the veiled memory of the vanished power
+  That moulded them, the high and infinite will
+  That earth begets and earth does not fulfil.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     These statues were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum after
+     the sculptor's death. The figures alluded to are the famous
+     statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the monument in memory of Mrs.
+     Henry Adams, the original of which is in the Rock Creek
+     Cemetery at Washington.
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER SUNDAY
+
+
+  Borne on the low lake wind there floats to me,
+  Out of the distant hill, a sigh of bells,
+  Mystic, worshipful, almost unheard,
+  As though the past should answer me, and I
+  In pagan solitude bow down my head.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+  Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+  Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+  Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained
+  from the original.
+
+  It is not always possible to determine if a new stanza begins at
+  the top of a printed page, but every effort has been made by the
+  transcriber to retain stanza breaks where appropriate.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
+
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+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman.
+    </title>
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+blockquote {margin-left: 12%; margin-right: 12%;}
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Colors of Life
+       Poems and Songs and Sonnets
+
+Author: Max Eastman
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2011 [EBook #36051]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLORS OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
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+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">COLORS OF LIFE</span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/colophon.png" alt="" /></div>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">NEW POETRY: FALL 1918</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td><i>By Robert Graves</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>By Gilbert Frankau</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE OTHER SIDE</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>By Max Eastman</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">COLORS OF LIFE</span><br />
+<br />
+<i>By Kahlil Gibran</i><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE MADMAN</span><br /></td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">COLORS OF LIFE</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">POEMS AND SONGS AND SONNETS</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">BY</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">MAX EASTMAN</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/logo.png" alt="" /></div>
+<p class="center">NEW YORK&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ALFRED A. KNOPF&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MCMXVIII</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY</p>
+<p class="center">ALFRED A. KNOPF, <span class="smcap">Inc.</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge"><a name="A_PREFACE" id="A_PREFACE"></a>A PREFACE</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">ABOUT AMERICAN POETRY</span></p>
+
+
+<p>It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my share in the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. Its
+essence&mdash;the essence of life&mdash;is variety and specific depth, and it can
+not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle.
+Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest
+friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has
+never entered, even so deeply as it might, into those tempests of social
+change that are coloring our thoughts today.</p>
+
+<p>Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who
+touched the mood of social revolt. And for my part I think there is a
+modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, and a certain
+adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might
+propose.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>Every one who reads this book will be familiar, I suppose, with Walt
+Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and
+untrammelled of ornamentation that it should go out of the books it was
+published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. "The
+Poetry of the future," he said.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge"><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS"></a>CONTENTS</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY&mdash;A PREFACE</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td><span class="big">POEMS</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">COMING TO PORT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE LONELY BATHER</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">IN MY ROOM</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">HOURS</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_47">47</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">FIRE AND WATER</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">YOU MAKE NO ANSWER</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_49">49</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">OUT OF A DARK NIGHT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A MORNING</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">ANNIVERSARY</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">AUTUMN LIGHT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A MODERN MESSIAH</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_54">54</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A VISIT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_56">56</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO LOVE</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_58">58</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">CAR-WINDOW</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">LITTLE FISHES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">INVOCATION</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">SOMETIMES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_62">62</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO MARIE SUKLOFF&mdash;AN ASSASSIN</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_63">63</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO AN ACTRESS</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_65">65</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">EYES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_66">66</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">X RAYS</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="big">SONNETS</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_74">74</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THOSE YOU DINED WITH</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">AS THE CRAG EAGLE</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO MY FATHER</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO EDWARD S. MARTIN</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_79">79</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">EUROPE&mdash;1914</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">ISADORA DUNCAN</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE SUN</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_82">82</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE NET</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_83">83</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A DUNE SONNET</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="big">SONGS</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">SEA-SHORE</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_87">87</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">RAINY SONG</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_88">88</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A HYMN TO GOD</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">COMING SPRING</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_91">91</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">DAISIES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_92">92</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">BOBOLINK</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">DIOGENES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_94">94</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span class="big">EARLIER POEMS</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_97">97</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">AT THE AQUARIUM</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_102">102</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">EARTH'S NIGHT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_104">104</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO THE ASCENDING MOON</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">LEIF ERICSON</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_110">110</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">MIDNIGHT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">IN MARCH</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_118">118</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_120">120</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_121">121</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">TO A TAWNY THRUSH</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_125">125</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_127">127</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 2em;">SUMMER SUNDAY</span></td>
+       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_129">129</a></td></tr></table>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">A PREFACE</span></p>
+
+
+<p>It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and so inevitably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its
+essence&mdash;the essence of life&mdash;is variety and specific depth. It can not
+be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I
+have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for
+some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never
+entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change
+that are coloring our thoughts today.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched
+the mood of democratic revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern
+validity in the attitudes of both these poets, a certain adjudication
+between them which a perfectly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> impersonal science might propose; and
+that is what I should like to discuss with those who may enter
+sympathetically into this little volume.</p>
+
+<p>They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an
+American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation,
+that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with
+the hills and forests on the earth.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>"The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at the free expression of
+emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to
+arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish....</p>
+
+<p>"In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the
+barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is
+henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and
+the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &amp;c., and that even if
+rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior
+writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there
+seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in
+rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest <i>Poetry</i>,
+(while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable
+easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>
+in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or
+the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and
+heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great
+and fitting parts&mdash;that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars,
+amours, legends of Europe, &amp;c., have, many of them, been inimitably
+render'd in rhyming verse&mdash;that there have been very illustrious poets
+whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
+envelopt&mdash;and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
+on some of our own age&mdash;it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the
+day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as
+a medium of highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present
+or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the
+Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado,
+dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea
+feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend
+the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride,
+passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul&mdash;to the
+general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray
+them to us&mdash;to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as grandly
+poetic as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories,
+electric telegraphs, cylinder presses&mdash;to the thought of the solidarity
+of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth&mdash;to the
+dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories,
+foundries, workshops, mines, or on ship-board, or on lakes and
+rivers&mdash;resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more
+eligible&mdash;soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose."</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>It may surprise some people to see this monumental challenge to the
+poets of the future confronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan
+Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two poets in contrast, and the
+weight neither of genius nor of influence is altogether upon one side.
+They are the two American poets of unique distinction, and they are the
+fountains of the two strongest influences in all modern poetry of the
+occident. And it is worth observing that if Walt Whitman had written as
+few pages of poetry as Poe did, his name would hardly be remembered,
+whereas Poe would have established a literary tradition if he had
+written but five sorrowful lyrics. His individuality was so poignant.
+His art was so exquisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but his
+philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> prodigious in
+contempt for his predecessors, as that of Walt Whitman. I have never
+read anything about any art more sheer and startling in its kind, than
+Poe's essay on "The Philosophy of Composition"; and nothing more
+energetically opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be devised. To
+convey the flavor of the contrast, I quote these sentences&mdash;inadequate
+for any other purpose&mdash;from Poe's essay:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Most writers&mdash;poets in especial&mdash;prefer having it understood
+that they compose by a species of fine frenzy&mdash;an ecstatic
+intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public
+take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating
+crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the
+last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived
+not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies
+discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious
+selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and
+interpolations&mdash;in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the
+tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps,
+the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches....</p>
+
+<p>"For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance
+alluded to, nor at any time the least<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> difficulty in recalling
+to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and,
+since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I
+have considered a <i>desideratum</i>, is quite independent of any
+real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be
+regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the <i>modus
+operandi</i> by which some one of my own works was put together. I
+select 'The Raven' as most generally known....</p>
+
+<p>"Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem <i>per se</i>, the
+circumstance&mdash;or say the necessity&mdash;which in the first place
+gave rise to the intention of composing <i>a</i> poem that should
+suit at once the popular and critical taste.</p>
+
+<p>"We commence, then, with this intention.</p>
+
+<p>"The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary
+work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content
+to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from
+unity of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the
+affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is
+at once destroyed....</p>
+
+<p>"My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or
+effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that,
+throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design
+of rendering the work <i>universally</i> appreciable. I should be
+carried<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> too far out of my immediate topic were I to
+demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and
+which with the poetical stands not in the slightest need of
+demonstration&mdash;the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole
+legitimate province of the poem....</p>
+
+<p>"But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however
+vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness
+or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are
+invariably required: first, some amount of complexity, or more
+properly, adaptation; and, second, some amount of
+suggestiveness, some under-current, however indefinite, of
+meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a
+work of art so much of that <i>richness</i> (to borrow from colloquy
+a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with <i>the
+ideal</i>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete. Upon
+the one side a vast preoccupation with human meaning and morals, with
+health and the common reality and love and democracy, a grand contempt
+for beauty, and for the effort to attract or gratify a reader with
+"verbal melody," a contempt for everything that savors of deliberate
+technique in art. Upon the other side<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> also contempt&mdash;contempt like a
+piece of cold analytical steel for every pretense that the technique of
+art is not deliberate, that poets are not seeking to attract and
+gratify, that truth or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the portent
+of a poem&mdash;a disposition to seek beauty in unique and even unhealthy
+places, a lonely aristocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with
+"verbal melody" never before or since equalled in poetry. The details of
+this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what
+will illumine the modern problems about poetry. To Edgar Allan Poe a
+poem was an objective thing, to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of
+subjective expression. Poe would take sounds and melodies of words
+almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had
+formed a beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and imaginations
+out of his heart and weave and inlay them in that vessel, and even the
+crimson out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he would seek out
+in his mind the hue of some meaning or moral to pour over it until it
+was perfect. And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for view and
+purchase, standing aside from them like a creative trader, proud, but no
+more identified with them than as though he had made them out of the
+colors<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> of shells. To Walt Whitman a poem was not a thing. His poetry
+was himself. His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and wonder of
+life, filled him and he overflowed in language&mdash;without "art," without
+purpose but to communicate his being. So he maintained. His poem was
+never an object to him, even after it had flowed full and he sought to
+perfect its contours. His emendations were not often objective
+improvements; they were private remodellings to make the language a more
+direct and fluent identity with what he considered himself. This was the
+task upon which he labored as the poet of democracy and social love.</p>
+
+<p>Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon
+human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average
+American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should
+remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe&mdash;even with the
+handful of poems he wrote&mdash;may be said to be acceptable to the
+generality of men. The Raven, or Helen, or Annabelle Lee, or some sad
+musical echo of the death of beauty, might be found in illuminated
+covers on the most "average" of American parlor tables, but never
+anything there of Walt Whitman&mdash;unless it be "Captain, My Captain!" the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>
+one rather weak metrical poem he deigned to write. And there is
+something deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and something which
+only an adequate science of verse can explain. For the emotions and the
+meanings of Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones that interest
+simple and thoughtful people who have leisure to feel. His realizations
+of life would be acceptable and be honored, as much at least as great
+art is ever honored, by the "divine average," if they had been conveyed,
+as Poe's were, in vessels of light, which would make them objective, and
+from which they might brim over with excess of subjective meaning and
+emotion.</p>
+
+<p>I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whitman had conveyed them so,
+or the opinion that he could have been a more stupendous poetic and
+moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he did. His propulsive
+determination to put forth in this facile nineteenth century culture,
+sweet with the decay and light with the remnant fineries of feudal
+grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished substance of man, was a
+phenomenon like the rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the
+sea. No word but the words in his book can portray the magnitude of his
+achievement; no critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and by
+its own standard. But as a prophetic example of the poems of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+future, and especially the poems of democracy and social love, it
+suffers a weakness&mdash;the weakness that Walt Whitman's character suffered.
+It is egocentric and a little inconsiderate of the importance of other
+people. Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages about universal social
+love, but he could not be the universal poet exactly because he was not
+social enough. He was not humble enough to be social. The rebel egoism
+of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his
+love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that
+gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others.</p>
+
+<p>There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural
+companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he
+"kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally
+appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes
+his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of
+talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even
+though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are
+really in social communion with humanity. For that is what the word
+<i>objective</i> means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from
+other elements of our experience only in that it can be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> experienced in
+the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an
+object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that
+various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. Therefore
+one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his
+solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which
+Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours
+out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory
+that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each
+rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will
+comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to
+build poems out of phrases poured out. And whatever we may wish were
+true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed.
+Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the
+poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less
+clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an
+object of art.</p>
+
+<p>It could be established, I believe, with mechanical precision, that the
+rhythmic values most cherished by the social rebels who now write so
+much "free verse," are values practically incommunicable to others, and
+absolutely incommunicable by the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> method usually adopted, that of
+printing words on a page. A little of that icy matter-of-fact realism
+with which Poe used to scatter the sweet foggy thoughts of the
+literarious, while it might not affect the art of these poets, would
+surely reduce the volume of what they have to say about it. For
+instance, here is the answer of one of them to an assertion that the
+line division in free-verse is "arbitrary," and that if we copied one of
+these long poems in solid prose, the poet himself could hardly ever
+divide it again as it was:</p>
+
+<p>"Free verse that is free verse is <i>not</i> arbitrary. Much of it is, of
+course&mdash;so are many canvases mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But
+there is free verse that resolves itself into just those lines&mdash;a little
+more subtly than sonnets or triolets&mdash;by virtue of pauses, of
+heart-beats, of the quickness or slowness of your breath, and maybe of
+your pulse itself.... It tries to give the rhythm value of those
+hesitations, those quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, the
+flutterings&mdash;it is <i>closer to the breath</i>, as modern music and modern
+dance are, or as primitive music and primitive dance were."</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible not to respond to such assertions, for we know in
+ourselves what these exquisite differential experiences are. Any one who
+has ever written love-letters&mdash;which are a kind of aboriginal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>
+free-verse&mdash;knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not
+demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated
+even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the
+same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of
+ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in
+another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. And while this
+fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is
+better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it
+would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much
+alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these
+minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of
+being served round in paper and ink.</p>
+
+<p>There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which
+exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other
+values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can
+not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings
+are too much their own. There are other values, still less delicate,
+which he might communicate by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture,
+taking possession as it were of the very pulse and respiration of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+others. But poetry which is composed for publication ought to occupy
+itself with those rhythmic values which may be communicated to other
+rhythmic minds through the printing of words on a page. It ought to do
+this, at least, if it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most
+minute degree social.</p>
+
+<p>A mature science of rhythm might be imagined to stride into the room
+where these poets are discussing the musical values of their verse,
+seize two or three of the most "free" and subtle among them, lock them
+into separate sound-proof chambers, and allow them to read one of their
+favorite passages into the ear of an instrument designed to record in
+spatial outline the pulsations of vocal accent. It is safe to assert
+that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than
+if the same two were reading a passage of highly wrought English
+prose.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> And the reason for this is that free verse imports into
+English prose a form of punctuation that is exceedingly gross and yet
+absolutely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> inconsequential. Its line division has neither a metrical
+nor a logical significance that exists objectively. It can mean at any
+time anything that is desirable to the whims, or needful to the
+difficulties, of the reader or the writer. It is a very sign and
+instrument of subjectivity. To incorporate in a passage of printed
+symbols an indeterminate element so marked and so frequent as that, is
+to say to the reader&mdash;"Take the passage and organize it into whatever
+rhythmical pattern may please yourself." And that is what the reader of
+free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great
+difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift
+the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who
+is rhythmically gifted to organize <i>any indeterminate series of
+impressions whatever</i> into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces
+a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and,
+having made it himself, is not unable to admire. Thus a good many poets
+who could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, are enabled by the
+gullibility and talent of their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> readers to come forward in this kind of
+writing as musicians of special and elaborate skill. The "freedom" that
+it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in
+prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous
+rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry,
+and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will
+certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not
+too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. But
+as an object of the effort of ambitious artists I can not believe it
+will widely survive the knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a
+form of mumble and indetermination in their art.</p>
+
+<p>Walt Whitman, however he may have been deceived about the social and
+democratic character of his form, was not deceived, as the modern
+eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He thought that he had
+gained in volume and directness of communion, but he knew that he was
+discarding subtlety, discarding in advance all those beautiful and
+decadent wonders of microscopic and morbid audacity that developed in
+France among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples of his form,
+however, are materially of Poe's persuasion, and like to believe that
+they have in free verse an instrument<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> expressly fitted for the
+communication of those wonders, and of the most delicate modulations of
+that "verbal melody" that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true
+standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a commanding advantage over them,
+and what can be said of free-verse in general can not be said of his
+poems. He did achieve the predominant thing that he aimed to achieve&mdash;he
+made his poetry rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. He
+made it like the universe and like the presence of a man. In that
+triumph it will stand. In that character it will mould and influence the
+literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all
+literature in all lands.</p>
+
+<p class="center">"Who touches this book touches a man."<br/></p>
+
+<p>There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused
+with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he
+exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is
+predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of
+being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the
+tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with
+nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of
+this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in
+America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more
+large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear
+science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from
+its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in
+its complexity, its subtle and refined <i>dissimulation</i> of the
+fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied,
+in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the
+rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or
+intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around
+which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and
+syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that
+they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its
+momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There
+is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable
+to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are
+akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why,
+almost as though it were a chemical thing&mdash;a stimulant and narcotic&mdash;it
+takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>Poetry only naïvely acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in
+the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly
+weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more
+natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive
+of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is
+but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not
+"ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called
+"rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed
+and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the
+refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment&mdash;a
+thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or
+cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of
+poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is
+so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer
+be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.</p>
+
+<p>Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to
+nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman
+and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a
+celestial telescope. There<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> is something more properly savage&mdash;something
+at least truly barbarous&mdash;in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's
+insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the
+poem&mdash;beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate
+"excitement of the soul"&mdash;he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance.
+Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see
+in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere
+syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more
+intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It
+is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this
+intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too,
+and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It
+is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than
+priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's
+attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that&mdash;whatever great things
+may come of it&mdash;he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective
+and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated,
+as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the
+eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their
+eyes upon<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration,
+the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic
+temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of
+Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and
+exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of
+life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain
+in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly
+willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to
+let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf
+and invite their souls," to be "satisfied&mdash;see, dance, laugh, sing."
+They were so maturely naïve that they would hardly understand what Walt
+Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to
+recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that
+we can most surely go back to nature.</p>
+
+<p>And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural&mdash;a
+mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make
+out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that
+mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time,
+then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that
+belongs to the people. For people are, in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> depths of them and on the
+average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no
+doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more
+serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She
+meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of
+their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of
+universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we
+modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient
+China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of
+being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an
+immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be
+loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with
+nature, were at play. And in Japan even today&mdash;surviving from that
+time&mdash;there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a
+making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative
+realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly
+popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.</p>
+
+<p>If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing&mdash;the same
+love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart&mdash;we enter somewhat
+irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> and
+not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find
+poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for
+the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza,
+and once for the whole poem&mdash;"When I heard at the close of the
+day"&mdash;Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of
+image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a
+chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to
+all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of
+freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his
+most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is
+truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple
+people&mdash;the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect
+existence of a thing.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Hush'd be the camps today;<br />
+And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;<br />
+And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate,<br />
+Our dear commander's death.<br />
+<br />
+No more for him life's stormy conflicts;<br />
+Nor victory, nor defeat&mdash;no more time's dark events,<br />
+Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.<br /></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">RECONCILIATION</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Word over all, beautiful as the sky!<br />
+Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;<br />
+That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world....<br />
+</td></tr></table>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<p>These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic and still clarity of
+form, if they had been the end and essence of his art, and not only a
+by-accident of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not perhaps to
+a great national poetry for America, but beyond that into something
+international and belonging to the universe of man. The step forward
+from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and
+subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an
+increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and
+breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart
+naturally. I chose them, not only because they are among the most
+musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whitman wrote, but also because
+in bringing a mood that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's
+agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. And so it will not be
+thought that when I say the poet of democracy will be a child who is at
+play with the making of things,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> I desire to narrow the range and
+poignancy of the things he will make. He will be free, and he will move
+with a knowing and profound mind among all the experiences and the
+dreams of men. But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration,
+or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose
+clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and
+never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span><br/></p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">POEMS</span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">COMING TO PORT</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Our motion on the soft still misty river<br />
+Is like rest; and like the hours of doom<br />
+That rise and follow one another ever,<br />
+Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom<br />
+And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.<br />
+<br />
+From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,<br />
+And your heart is still; and like a sound<br />
+In silence is your stillness in the streaming<br />
+Of light-whispered laughter all around,<br />
+Where happy passengers are homeward bound.<br />
+<br />
+Their sunny journey is in safety ending,<br />
+But for you no journey has an end.<br />
+The tears that to your eyes their light are lending<br />
+Shine in softness to no waiting friend;<br />
+Beyond the search of any eye they tend.<br />
+<br />
+There is no nest for the unresting fever<br />
+Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;<br />
+There is no rest nor blessedness forever<br />
+That can clasp you, quivering and pained,<br />
+Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.<br />
+<br />
+Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span><br />
+Flowing though the ship has come to rest,<br />
+Your love is passing through the mist and going,<br />
+Going infinitely from your breast,<br />
+Surpassing time on its immortal quest.<br />
+<br />
+The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,<br />
+All flush forward with a joyful aim,<br />
+And while their hands with happy hands are mating,<br />
+Lips are laughing out a happy name&mdash;<br />
+You pause, and pass among them like a flame.<br /></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE LONELY BATHER</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>
+Loose-veined and languid as the yellow mist<br />
+That swoons along the river in the sun,<br />
+Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed<br />
+With years of heat that through your veins have run,<br />
+<br />
+You lie with aching memories of love<br />
+Alone and naked by the weeping tree,<br />
+And indolent with inward longing move<br />
+Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.<br />
+<br />
+If love came warm and burning to your dream,<br />
+And filled you all your avid veins require,<br />
+You would lie sadly still beside the stream,<br />
+Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;<br />
+<br />
+The same low sky would weave its fading blue,<br />
+The river still exhale its misty rain,<br />
+The willow trail its waving over you,<br />
+Your longing only quickened into pain.<br />
+<br />
+Bed your desire among the pressing grasses;<br />
+Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts<br />
+Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes,<br />
+Till the undulation of your longing rests.<br /></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">IN MY ROOM</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>In this high room, my room of quiet space,<br />
+Sun-yellow softened for my happiness,<br />
+I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves;<br />
+Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude<br />
+Beneath a willow by the river stream;<br />
+Your agéd plum tree bearing lonely bloom<br />
+Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds<br />
+Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo.<br />
+My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei,<br />
+Your tranquil and creative-fingered love<br />
+So many mounds of mournful years ago<br />
+In that cool valley where the colors lived.<br />
+My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains.<br />
+Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.<br /></td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="center"><small>Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th
+century.</small></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">HOURS</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Hours when I love you, are like tranquil pools,<br />
+The liquid jewels of the forest, where<br />
+The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools<br />
+His fevered ankles, and the ferny air<br />
+Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast,<br />
+Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">FIRE AND WATER</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Flame-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure<br />
+And poignant as the dagger to the mark,<br />
+Your will is burning ever; it is pure.<br />
+Mine is vague water welling through the dark,<br />
+Holding all substances&mdash;except the spark.<br />
+<br />
+Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream<br />
+When some clear striding naked-footed girl<br />
+Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam<br />
+Across its bosom ambling and aswirl<br />
+With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;<br />
+<br />
+Such was our meeting&mdash;fatefully so brief.<br />
+I have no purpose and no power to clutch.<br />
+Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief;<br />
+And I more sadly flow, remembering much,<br />
+Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">YOU MAKE NO ANSWER</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>You make no answer. You have stolen away<br />
+Deliberately in that twilight sorrow<br />
+Where the dark flame that is your being shines<br />
+So well. Mysterious and deeply tender<br />
+In your motion you have softly left me,<br />
+And the little path along the house is still.<br />
+And I, a child forsaken of its mother,<br />
+I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend,<br />
+Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that<br />
+My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you&mdash;<br />
+More than friend and slender-bodied mother&mdash;<br />
+O sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">OUT OF A DARK NIGHT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Death is more tranquil than the life of love,<br />
+More calm, more sure, and more unanguished.<br />
+O the path among the trees is far more tranquil to the dead<br />
+Than to these anxious hearts, uptroubled from their beds,<br />
+Who pace in pallid darkness on the leaves,<br />
+For no good reason&mdash;for no reason<br />
+But because their limbs will not lie still upon the sheet.<br />
+Their limbs will not lie still. O how I pity them.<br />
+Sad hearts&mdash;their marrow is a-quiver,<br />
+And they can not lie them down in tranquil sadness like the dead.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A MORNING</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Again this morning the bold autumn,<br />
+Spreading through the woods her sacred fire,<br />
+Brings the rich color of your presence<br />
+Warmly luminous to my desire&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+Brings to my heart the dear wild worship,<br />
+High and wayward as the windy air,<br />
+And to my pulse the hot sweet passion<br />
+Burning crimson like a poison there.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">ANNIVERSARY</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>The flowers we planted in the tender spring,<br />
+And through the summer watched their blossoming,<br />
+Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,<br />
+Died and dropped downward altogether.<br />
+<br />
+Today in April in the vivid grass<br />
+They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,<br />
+They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,<br />
+Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.<br />
+<br />
+But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,<br />
+He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,<br />
+And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,<br />
+He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">AUTUMN LIGHT</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>So bright and soft is the sweet air of morning,<br />
+And so tenderly the light descends,<br />
+And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers<br />
+All the leaves unto the valley's ends&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+It brings them all to being when it touches<br />
+With its paleness every glowing vein;<br />
+The wild and flaming hollows of the forest<br />
+Kindle all their crimson in its rain;<br />
+<br />
+And every curve receives its share of morning,<br />
+Every little shadow softly grows,<br />
+And motion finds a melody more tender<br />
+That like a phantom through the branches goes&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering,<br />
+And quiet in its giving, as though love,<br />
+The morning dream of life, were born of longing,<br />
+And really poured its being from above.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A MODERN MESSIAH</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Scarred with sensuality and pain<br />
+And weary labor in a mind not hard<br />
+Enough to think, a heart too always tender,<br />
+Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers.<br />
+They are wiser than his parables,<br />
+But he more potent, for he has the gift<br />
+Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Today I saw a face&mdash;it was a beak,<br />
+That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes,<br />
+Above the bloody muck that had been lips<br />
+And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured<br />
+Some water through a rubber down a hole<br />
+He made in that black bag of horny blood.<br />
+The beak revived, it smiled&mdash;as chickens smile.<br />
+The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue<br />
+To tell with, what he used to be.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A VISIT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>
+You came with your small tapering flame of passion<br />
+Thinly burning like a nun's desire,<br />
+Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion<br />
+Faintly painting what your veins require<br />
+With little pallid pyramids of fire.<br />
+<br />
+So very small and unfulfilled you sat,<br />
+Building a little talk to keep you there,<br />
+Your face and body pointed like a cat,<br />
+Your legs not reaching down from any chair,<br />
+Your thoughts not really reaching anywhere;<br />
+<br />
+So dumb and tiny&mdash;yet Love guessed your mood,<br />
+And pressed his phial in its fervent bed,<br />
+And poured his thrilling philtre in my blood,<br />
+And all his lustre on your body shed,<br />
+And hot enamel on the words you said;<br />
+<br />
+Your littleness became a monstrous thing,<br />
+A rank retort, a hot and waiting vat,<br />
+Your eyes green-copper like a snake in spring,<br />
+And lusty-bold your laying off your hat,<br />
+And fell your purpose like a hungry cat;<br />
+<br/>
+The dark fell on us through our narrowed eyes,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span><br />
+The heat lashed up around us from the floor,<br />
+Encrimsoning the lips of our surprise<br />
+To sway like music, and like burning pour<br />
+Across the truth that parted us before.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO LOVE</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Love, often your delicate fingers beckon,<br />
+And always I follow.<br />
+Oh, if I could stay, and possess your beauty<br />
+Beckoning always!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">CAR-WINDOW</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>
+A light is laughing thro' the scattered rain,<br />
+A color quickens in the meadow;<br />
+Drops are still, upon the window-pane&mdash;<br />
+They cast a silver shadow.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">LITTLE FISHES</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>A myriad curious fishes,<br />
+Tiny and pink and pale,<br />
+All swimming north together<br />
+With rhythmical fin and tail&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+A mountain surges among them,<br />
+They dart and startle and float,<br />
+Mere wiggling minutes of terror,<br />
+Into that mountain's throat.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">INVOCATION</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Truth, be more precious to me than the eyes<br />
+Of happy love; burn hotter in my throat<br />
+Than passion; and possess me like my pride;<br />
+More sweet than freedom; more desired than joy;<br />
+More sacred than the pleasing of a friend.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">SOMETIMES</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Sometimes a child's voice crying on the street<br />
+Comes winging like an arrow through the wind<br />
+To pierce my breast with you, my baby, and<br />
+My pen is weak, and all my thinking dreams<br />
+Are mist of yearning for the touch of you.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO MARIE SUKLOFF&mdash;AN ASSASSIN</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td><span style="margin-left: 1em;">In your lips moving fervently,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Your eyes hot with fire,</span><br />
+Life seems immortally young with desire,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Life seems impetuous,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Hungrily free,</span><br />
+Having no faith but its burning to be.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">You could dance laughingly,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Draw where you move,</span><br />
+Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Youth be a carnival,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Life be the queen,</span><br />
+You could go dancing and singing and seen!<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whence came that tenderness</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Cruel and wild,</span><br />
+Arming with murder the hand of a child?<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Whence came that breaking fire,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Nursed and caressed</span><br />
+With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In your soul sacredly,</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Deeper than fear,</span><br />
+Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Virgin of murder,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was it God's breath,</span><br />
+Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO AN ACTRESS</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>You walk as vivid as a sunny storm<br />
+Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes<br />
+Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,<br />
+Making passionate and making young.<br />
+You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,<br />
+And in the sultry place of custom raise<br />
+The naked colors of abounding life,<br />
+And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">EYES</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>My heart is sick because of all the eyes<br />
+That look upon you drinkingly.<br />
+They almost touch you with their fever look!<br />
+O keep your beauty like a mystic gem,<br />
+Clear-surfaced&mdash;give no fibre grain of hold<br />
+To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!<br />
+My heart is sick!<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 7em;">O love, let not my heart</span><br />
+Corrupt the flower of your liberty&mdash;<br />
+Go spend your beauty like the summer sky<br />
+That makes a radius of every glance,<br />
+And with your morning color light them all!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">X RAYS</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Your eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber<br />
+Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,<br />
+With yellow ghostly globes of intense æther<br />
+Potent as the rays of pure desire.<br />
+<br />
+Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,<br />
+When the winged wild whining mystic wheel<br />
+Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings<br />
+Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.<br />
+<br />
+Your flesh was never warmer to my passion<br />
+Than when, moving in that lumor green,<br />
+We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured<br />
+Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.<br />
+<br />
+You seemed so virginal and so undreaming<br />
+Of the burning hunger in my eyes,<br />
+To peer more fever-deeply in your being<br />
+Than the very death of passion lies.<br />
+<br />
+The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,<br />
+Fashioned through the ages for the sun,<br />
+Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern<br />
+Where you walked a naked skeleton;<br />
+<br />
+Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span><br />
+Living to the tip of every bone,<br />
+And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving<br />
+Ever to lie wanly down alone&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+To lie forever down so still and slender,<br />
+Tracing on the ancient screen of night<br />
+That naked and pale writing of the wonder<br />
+Of your beauty breathing in the light.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span><br/></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">SONNETS</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS</span></p>
+
+<p>Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always
+seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason
+lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is
+not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a
+division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable
+instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its
+closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance
+it has&mdash;the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural
+convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager
+horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden
+grain.</p>
+
+<p>This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness
+of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express
+themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> they
+are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they
+have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the
+writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry
+seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a
+concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably
+equal to its more temperate pretensions.</p>
+
+<p>The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a
+dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for
+persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the
+hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They
+get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds
+and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not
+make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and
+get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always
+with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received
+in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.</p>
+
+<p>This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a
+sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own&mdash;the clarity, the running
+and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> song. And to
+these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional
+relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a
+conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more
+important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I
+offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those
+high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely
+reliquary of their god.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>You love me not as I love, or when I<br />
+Grow listless of the crimson of your lips,<br />
+And turn not to your burning finger-tips,<br />
+You would show fierce and feverish your eye,<br />
+And hotly my numb wilfulness decry,<br />
+Holding your virtues over me like whips,<br />
+And stinging with the visible eclipse<br />
+Of that sweet poise of life I crucify!<br />
+<br />
+How can you pass so proudly from my face,<br />
+With all the tendrils of your passion furled,<br />
+So adequate and animal in grace,<br />
+As one whose mate is only all the world!<br />
+I never taste the sweet exceeding thought<br />
+That you might love me, though I loved you not!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THOSE YOU DINED WITH</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>They would have made you like a pageant, bold<br />
+And nightly festive, lustre-lit for them,<br />
+And round your beauty, like a dusky gem,<br />
+Have poured the glamour of the pride of gold;<br />
+And you would lie in life as in her bed<br />
+The mistress of a pale king, indolent,<br />
+Though hot her limbs and strong her languishment,<br />
+And her deep spirit is unvisited.<br />
+<br />
+But I would see you like a gypsy, free<br />
+As windy morning in the sunny air,<br />
+Your wild warm self, your vivid self, to be,<br />
+A miracle of nature's liberty,<br />
+Giving your gift of being kind and fair,<br />
+High, gay and careless-handed everywhere!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>The passions of a child attend his dreams.<br />
+He lives, loves, hopes, remembers, is forlorn<br />
+For legendary creatures, whom he deems<br />
+Not too unreal&mdash;until one golden morn<br />
+The gracious, all-awaking sun shines in<br />
+Upon his tranquil pillow, and his eyes<br />
+Are touched, and opened greatly, and begin<br />
+To drink reality with rich surprise.<br />
+<br />
+I loved the impetuous souls of ancient story&mdash;<br />
+Heroic characters, kings, queens, whose wills<br />
+Like empires rose, achieved, and fell, in glory.<br />
+I was a child, until the radiant dawn,<br />
+Thy beauty, woke me&mdash;O thy spirit fills<br />
+The stature of those heroes, they are gone!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">AS THE CRAG EAGLE</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>As the crag eagle to the zenith's height<br />
+Wings his pursuit in his exalted hour<br />
+Of her the tempest-reared, whose airy power<br />
+Of plume and passion challenges his flight<br />
+To that wild altitude, where they unite,<br />
+In mutual tumultuous victory<br />
+And the swift sting of nature's ecstasy,<br />
+Their shuddering pinions and their skyward might&mdash;<br />
+As they, the strong, to the full height of heaven<br />
+Bear up that joy which to the strong is given,<br />
+Thus, thus do we, whose stormy spirits quiver<br />
+In the bold air of utter liberty,<br />
+Clash equal at our highest, I and thee,<br />
+Unconquered and unconquering forever!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO MY FATHER</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>The eastern hill hath scarce unveiled his head,<br />
+And the deliberate sky hath but begun<br />
+To meditate upon a future sun,<br />
+When thou dost rise from thy impatient bed.<br />
+Thy morning prayer unto the stars is said.<br />
+And not unlike a child, the penance done<br />
+Of sleep, thou goest to thy serious fun,<br />
+Exuberant&mdash;yet with a whisper tread.<br />
+<br />
+And when that lord doth to the world appear,<br />
+The jovial sun, he leans on his old hill,<br />
+And levels forth to thee a golden smile&mdash;<br />
+Thee in his garden, where each warming year<br />
+Thou toilest in all joy with him, to fill<br />
+And flood the soil with Summer for a while.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO EDWARD S. MARTIN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">FROM A PROFESSIONAL HOBO</p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen<br />
+Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace<br />
+The maiden maxims of your writing-place,<br />
+And on this gripped and mortal-sweating den<br />
+And battle-pit of hunger now and then<br />
+Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,<br />
+The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race<br />
+Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen!<br />
+<br />
+How long have art and wit and poetry,<br />
+With all their power, been content, like you,<br />
+To gild the smiling fineness of the few,<br />
+To filmy-curtain what they dare not see,<br />
+In multitudinous reality,<br />
+The rough and bloody soul of what is true!</td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="blockquot"><small>(In an editorial in <i>Life</i>, Mr. Martin had described as
+"professional hoboes" a number of revolutionary agitators whom
+he did not like&mdash;Pancho Villa, William D. Haywood, Wild Joe
+O'Carroll&mdash;and he did me the honor to include me among them.)</small></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">EUROPE&mdash;1914</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Since Athens died, the life that is a light<br />
+Has never shone in Europe. Alien moods,<br />
+The oriental morbid sanctitudes,<br />
+Have darkened on her like the fear of night.<br />
+In happy augury we dared to guess<br />
+That her pure spirit shot one sunny glance<br />
+Of paganry across the fields of France,<br />
+Clear startling this dim fog of soulfulness.<br />
+<br />
+But now, with arms and carnage and the cries<br />
+Of Holy Murder, rolling to the clouds<br />
+Her bloody-shadowed smoke of sacrifice,<br />
+The Superstition conquers, and the shrouds<br />
+Of sick black wonder lay their murky blight<br />
+Where shone of old the immortal-seeming light.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">ISADORA DUNCAN</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>You bring the fire and terror of the wars<br />
+Of infidels in thunder-running hordes,<br />
+With spears like sun-rays, shields, and wheeling swords<br />
+Flame shape, death shape and shaped like scimitars,<br />
+With crimson eagles and blue pennantry,<br />
+And teeth and armor flashing, and white eyes<br />
+Of battle horses, and the silver cries<br />
+Of trumpets unto storm and victory!<br />
+<br />
+Who is this naked-footed lovely girl<br />
+Of summer meadows dancing on the grass?<br />
+So young and tenderly her footsteps pass,<br />
+So dreamy-limbed and lightly wild and warm&mdash;<br />
+The bugles murmur and the banners furl,<br />
+And they are lost and vanished like a storm!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE SUN</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Now autumn, and that sadness as of love<br />
+Heroic in immortal solitude;<br />
+Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;<br />
+But in the blue and infinite above<br />
+A shining circle like the light of truth,<br />
+Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,<br />
+Whose motion is the measurement of time,<br />
+Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.<br />
+<br />
+No passion burns upon the livid earth<br />
+Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry<br />
+Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.<br />
+All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth<br />
+To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,<br />
+All flows beneath the sanction of his light.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE NET</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>The net brings up, how long and languidly,<br />
+A million vivid quiverings of life,<br />
+Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,<br />
+All colors, green and silver of the sea,<br />
+All forms of skill and eagerness to be&mdash;<br />
+They die and wither of the very breath<br />
+That sounds your pity of their lavish death<br />
+While they are leaping, star-like, to be free.<br />
+<br />
+They die and wither, but the agéd sea,<br />
+Insane old salty womb of mystery,<br />
+Is pregnant with a million million more,<br />
+Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,<br />
+Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,<br />
+While onward her immortal currents pour.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A DUNE SONNET</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>I was so lonely on the dunes to-day;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The shadow of a bird passed o'er the sand,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And I, a driftwood relic in my hand....</span><br />
+Sea winds are not more lonely when they stray<br />
+A little fitful and bewildered way<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In this wan acre, whose dry billows stand</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">So pitilessly still of curve, so bland,</span><br />
+And wide, and waiting, infinitely grey.<br />
+<br />
+In hollows I could almost hear them say,<br />
+The misty breezes&mdash;Run, we will not stay<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In this unreal and spiritual land!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Our soul of life is calling from the strand,</span><br />
+Whose blue and breathing bosom leapt or lay<br />
+Or laughed to us in shots of silver spray!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span><br/></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">SONGS</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">SEA-SHORE</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>The wind blows in along the sea&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Its salty wet caresses</span><br />
+Impart to all the ships that be<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A thrill before it passes.</span><br />
+<br />
+The tide is never at a stand,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A mountain in its motion,</span><br />
+Forever homing to the land,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And ever to the ocean.</span><br />
+<br />
+And on its fickle, mighty breast<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The waters still are moving,</span><br />
+With love in every running crest<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And laughter in the loving&mdash;</span><br />
+<br />
+Light love to touch the prows of ships<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That slip along so slenderly.</span><br />
+I would as lightly touch your lips,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And your heart as tenderly,</span><br />
+<br />
+If you would move with all that move,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The flowing and caressing,</span><br />
+Who have no firmness in their love,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">No sorrow in its passing.</span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">RAINY SONG</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Down the dripping pathway dancing through the rain,<br />
+Brown eyes of beauty, laugh to me again!<br />
+<br />
+Eyes full of starlight, moist over fire,<br />
+Full of young wonder, touch my desire!<br />
+<br />
+O like a brown bird, like a bird's flight,<br />
+Run through the rain drops lithely and light.<br />
+<br />
+Body like a gypsy, like a wild queen,<br />
+Slim brown dress to slip through the green&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+The little leaves hold you as soft as a child,<br />
+The little path loves you, the path that runs wild.<br />
+<br />
+Who would not love you, seeing you move,<br />
+Warm-eyed and beautiful through the green grove?<br />
+<br />
+Let the rain kiss you, trickle through your hair,<br />
+Laugh if my fingers mingle with it there,<br />
+<br />
+Laugh if my cheek too is misty and drips&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span><br />
+Wetness is tender&mdash;laugh on my lips<br />
+<br />
+The happy sweet laughter of love without pain,<br />
+Young love, the strong love, burning in the rain.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A HYMN TO GOD</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">In Time of Stress</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Lift, O dark and glorious Wonder,<br />
+Once again thy gleaming sword,<br />
+Cleave this killing doubt asunder<br />
+With one sheer and sacred word!<br />
+<br />
+For my heart is weak and broken,<br />
+And the struggle runs too high,<br />
+And there is no burning token<br />
+In the new immortal sky.<br />
+<br />
+Oh, not curb or courage only<br />
+Does my hour demand of me,<br />
+It is thought supreme and lonely<br />
+And responsible and free!<br />
+<br />
+And I quail before the danger<br />
+As a bark before the blast,<br />
+When the beacon star's a stranger<br />
+In the mountains piling fast,<br />
+<br />
+And there is no light but reason<br />
+And the compass of the ship.<br />
+God, a word of thine in season!<br />
+God, a motion of thy lip!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">COMING SPRING</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Ice is marching down the river,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gaily out to sea!</span><br />
+Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Setting torrents free!</span><br />
+<br />
+Yellow are the water-willows,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Yellow clouds are they,</span><br />
+Rising where the laden billows<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Swell along their way!</span><br />
+<br />
+Arrows of the sun are flying!<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Winter flees the light,</span><br />
+And his chilly horn is sighing<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">All the moisty night!</span><br />
+<br />
+Lovers of the balmy weather,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lovers of the sun!</span><br />
+Drifts and duty melt together&mdash;<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Get your labors done!</span><br />
+<br />
+Ice is marching down the river,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Gaily out to sea!</span><br />
+Sing the healthy-hearted ever,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Spring is liberty!</span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">DAISIES</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Daisies, daisies, all surprise!<br />
+Open wide your sunny eyes!<br />
+See the linnet on the wing;<br />
+See the crimson feather!<br />
+See the life in every thing,<br />
+Sun, and wind, and weather!<br />
+Shadow of the passer-by,<br />
+Bare-foot skipping over,<br />
+Meadow where the heifers lie,<br />
+Butter-cup, and clover!<br />
+All is vivid, all is real,<br />
+All is high surprising!<br />
+Ye are pure to see and feel;<br />
+Ye the gift are prizing<br />
+Men and gods would perish for&mdash;<br />
+Gods with all their thunder!&mdash;<br />
+Could they have the thing ye are,<br />
+Everlasting wonder!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">BOBOLINK</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Bright little bird with a downward wing,<br />
+How many birds within you sing?<br />
+<br />
+Two or three at the least it seems,<br />
+Overflowing golden streams.<br />
+<br />
+If I could warble on a wing so strong,<br />
+Filling five acres full of song,<br />
+<br />
+I'd never sit on the grey rail fence,<br />
+I'd never utter a word of sense,<br />
+<br />
+I'd float forever in a light blue sky,<br />
+Uttering joy to the passers-by!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">DIOGENES</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">A hut, and a tree,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">And a hill for me,</span><br />
+And a piece of a weedy meadow.<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">I'll ask no thing,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Of God or King,</span><br />
+But to clear away His shadow.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span><br/></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="huge">EARLIER POEMS</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span></p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">EARLIER POEMS</span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY</span></p>
+
+
+<p>Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are
+selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the titles, "The
+Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much&mdash;I meant to convey in that
+phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my
+life are drawn&mdash;that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning
+here with a word of confession.</p>
+
+<p>An attitude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my
+mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal
+character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some
+absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide
+ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having
+of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and
+eternal truth, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> nothing is eternally true except the variety of
+opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I
+suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of
+Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of
+ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded
+investigation and formulation of "isms," in Sextus Empiricus and the
+little group of Alexandrian scientists&mdash;the last light to go out in the
+darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages
+of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it
+appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in
+history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation,
+as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to
+escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in
+human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief
+recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic
+opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance.
+Spinoza follows him, the God-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other
+monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once
+more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and noble enquiry about
+Human Understanding, the sceptic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that
+would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those
+mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with
+their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the
+mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again
+issuing awakened&mdash;for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no
+individual. The awakener is science&mdash;empirical science turning its brave
+eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive
+pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world
+has been saved&mdash;or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home
+is in these ages of sacred doubt.</p>
+
+<p>Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete
+things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in
+an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a
+brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of
+science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which
+are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the
+subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their
+universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern
+counterpart of the thought of Protagoras,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> summarized for the ancients
+in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."</p>
+
+<p>This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia
+University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we
+gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a
+scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself
+emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of
+the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my
+poem&mdash;that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so
+ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities
+corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity,
+that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the
+concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves;
+and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber
+to annihilate the event of the individual idea&mdash;the only actual thing
+denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import.
+In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the
+imagination the thought of Protagoras.</p>
+
+<p>In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy
+and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span> sailor
+out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of
+ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example
+to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature
+with moral courage and abandon.</p>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">AT THE AQUARIUM</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Serene the silver fishes glide,<br />
+Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;<br />
+As through the agéd deeps of ocean,<br />
+They glide with wan and wavy motion.<br />
+They have no pathway where they go,<br />
+They flow like water to and fro.<br />
+They watch with never winking eyes,<br />
+They watch with staring, cold surprise,<br />
+The level people in the air,<br />
+The people peering, peering there,<br />
+Who wander also to and fro,<br />
+And know not why or where they go,<br />
+Yet have a wonder in their eyes,<br />
+Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">EARTH'S NIGHT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Sombre,<br />
+Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed<br />
+With smoky exhalations of the earth,<br />
+Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind<br />
+In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.<br />
+O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!<br />
+Thou art waving the long grass over thy graves;<br />
+Murmuring over all thy resting children,<br />
+That have run and wandered and gone down<br />
+Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him<br />
+Who looketh now a moment on these stars,<br />
+And in the moving boughs of this dark night<br />
+Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,<br />
+Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought<br />
+That will to sorrow move all minds forever&mdash;<br />
+All that love to know. It was the hour<br />
+When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,<br />
+And the hurriers go home to rest;<br />
+And we whose task was meditation rose<br />
+And wound a murmuring way among the books<br />
+And effigies, the fading fragrance, of<br />
+A vaulted library&mdash;a place to me<br />
+Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds<br />
+All the world hath of musty memory<br />
+In sombre convolutions that are dying.<br />
+There at our faithful table every day,<br />
+In the great shadow of this dissolution,<br />
+We would speak of things eternal, things<br />
+Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one<br />
+Who was a leader of the way to them;<br />
+A man born regal to the realms of thought.<br />
+High, pale, and sculptural his brow,<br />
+And high his concourse with the kings of old,<br />
+Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew&mdash;<br />
+The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber<br />
+Fell in love with God. It was of him,<br />
+And that unhungering love of his, he told us;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span><br />
+And with soft and stately melody,<br />
+The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us<br />
+Sublime above the very motions of<br />
+Our mortal being, and we walked with him<br />
+The heights of meditation like the gods.<br />
+I have no memory surpassing this.<br />
+And yet&mdash;strange pity of our natures or<br />
+Of his&mdash;there ran a rumor poisonous.<br />
+Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.<br />
+And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,<br />
+We whispered things not all philosophy<br />
+When he was gone. We knew but little where<br />
+He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,<br />
+That there was other love in him than what<br />
+He taught us&mdash;love that makes more quickly pale!<br />
+Ay, even he was tortured with the lure<br />
+Of mortal motion in the eyes&mdash;and lips<br />
+And limbs that were not warm to him alone<br />
+Were warm to him. He drank mortality.<br />
+Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat<br />
+In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper<br />
+In the shadow of our meditations.<br />
+Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour<br />
+Advancing&mdash;livid painting of a thought!<br />
+He spoke of Substance,&mdash;strangely&mdash;on that day&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span><br />
+Eternal, self-existent, infinite&mdash;<br />
+He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.<br />
+And as he spoke there came on me that trance<br />
+Of inattention, when the words would seem<br />
+To drop their magic of containing things,<br />
+And, by a shift, become but things themselves&mdash;<br />
+Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.<br />
+I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till<br />
+I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and<br />
+I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things,<br />
+Are merely modes of but one attribute,<br />
+Of what is infinite in attributes,<br />
+And may be called&mdash;&mdash;" He spoke to there, and then&mdash;<br />
+His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped&mdash;A crack<br />
+Behind us&mdash;A quick step among the books&mdash;<br />
+His hand, his head, his body all collapsed<br />
+And fell, or settled utterly, before<br />
+The fact came on us&mdash;he was shot and killed.<br />
+But little I remember after that.<br />
+What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed<br />
+Was done, and all his speculations vanished<br />
+Like a sound.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO THE ASCENDING MOON</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky<br />
+With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash<br />
+With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer<br />
+Thy flight high up into the purple blue,<br />
+Where faint the stars beholding&mdash;rain from there<br />
+Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!</span><br />
+With thy deliberate magic thou of old<br />
+Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped,<br />
+And scared, and lacerated for their cure&mdash;<br />
+Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them,<br />
+Give to their minds a curvéd emptiness<br />
+Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in;<br />
+Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light,<br />
+Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds<br />
+The very sons of Prudence, maniacs<br />
+To wander forth among the bushes, howl<br />
+Abroad like eager wolves, and snatch the air!<br />
+Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs<br />
+Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling<br />
+In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy,<br />
+And thou didst palely peer among them, and<br />
+Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!<br />
+I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!<br />
+For thou hast still thy alien influence;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span><br />
+Thou dost sow forth thro' all the fields and hills,<br />
+And in all chambers of the natural earth,<br />
+A difference most strange and luminous.<br />
+This tree, that was the river sycamore,<br />
+Is in thy pensive effluence become<br />
+But the mind's mystic essence of a tree,<br />
+Upright luxuriance thought upon&mdash;the stream<br />
+Is liquid timeless motion undefined&mdash;<br />
+The world's a gesture dim. Like rapturous thought,<br />
+Which can the rigorous concrete obscure<br />
+Unto annihilation, and create<br />
+Upon the dark a universal vision,<br />
+Thou&mdash;even on this bold and local earth,<br />
+The site of the obtruding actual&mdash;<br />
+Thou dost erect in awful purity<br />
+The filmy architecture of all dreams.<br />
+And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light<br />
+Perfection, and a vision give to man<br />
+Of things superior to the tough act,<br />
+Existence, and almost co-equals of<br />
+His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!<br />
+Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth&mdash;</span><br />
+The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!<br />
+Shine in the children's eyes. They drink thy light,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span><br />
+And laugh in innocence of sorcery,<br />
+And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze<br />
+With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.<br />
+Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill,<br />
+I lean not forth, I hide myself in tasks,<br />
+Even to the blunt comfort of routine<br />
+I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm,<br />
+Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">LEIF ERICSON</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Through the murk of the ocean of history northward and far,<br />
+I descry thee, O Sailor! Thy deed like the dive of a star<br />
+Doth startle the ages of darkness through which it is hurled,<br />
+Doth flash, and flare out, and is gone from the eyes of the world!<br />
+<br />
+What watchers beheld thee, and heralding followed thy lead,<br />
+Or bugled the nations into the track of thy deed?<br />
+What continent soundeth thy name, what people thy praise?<br />
+Who sendeth the signal of gratitude back to the days<br />
+When thou in thy boat didst put forth from the world, and defy<br />
+Infinity, ignorance, tempest, and ocean, and sky?<br />
+No, history brags not of God, nor doth history brag<br />
+Of thee, sailor, who carried thy sail and thy sea-colored flag<br />
+Clear over His seas, drove into His mystery old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span><br />
+The prow of thy sixty-foot skerry, whose quivering hold<br />
+Could dip but a cupful out of His watery wrath,<br />
+That stormed thee, and snatched at thy bowsprit, and licked up thy path!<br />
+<br />
+When mythical rumor sky-carried ran over the earth,<br />
+With the whisper of lands that were dreamed of beyond the red birth<br />
+Of the west-wind, the blood of thy body took running fire<br />
+To launch and be swift o'er the sea as a man's desire!<br />
+<br />
+O rare is the northern morning that shineth for thee!<br />
+A million silvering crests on the cold blue sea&mdash;<br />
+And the wind drives in from the jubilant sea to the land,<br />
+And, catching thy laughter, it tosses the cloak in thy hand,<br />
+As taunting thee forth to thy sails in the frosty air,<br />
+Where thousands surround thee with awe and a wondering prayer.<br />
+And they that stand with thee&mdash;tumultuous-hearted they stand!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span><br />
+They bend at thy word&mdash;I hear the boat sing on the sand&mdash;<br />
+And they slip to their oars as the boat leaps aloft on a wave,<br />
+With thee at the windy helm, joyful and joyfully brave!<br />
+<hr style="width: 30%;" />
+The depth of the billows is awful, the depth of the sky<br />
+Is silent as God. Silent the dark on high.<br />
+Naught sings to thy heart save thy heart and the wind, the wild giant<br />
+Of ocean, agrin in the darkness, who rattles defiant<br />
+A laugh through thy rigging, and howls from the clouds at thee,<br />
+And moans in a mimic of pain and a murmurous glee.<br />
+Still stern I behold thee, thy stature dim through the dark,<br />
+Unmoved, unreleasing the helm of thy storm-driven bark.<br />
+"O God of our fathers, give signs to our sea-worn eyes!<br />
+Give sight to Thy sailors! Give but the sun to arise<br />
+In the morn on an island pale in the haze of the west!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span><br />
+O beam of the star in the north, is thy only behest<br />
+To gesture me onward eternally unto no shore<br />
+Of these high and wild waters, famed for their hunger of yore?<br />
+Then give to thy sailor for life the courage of death,<br />
+To encounter the taunt of this wind with a rougher breath<br />
+Of gigantic contempt in the soul for where and when,<br />
+So it be onward impetuous, living, onward again!<br />
+He saileth safe who carrieth death on board,<br />
+He flieth a laughing sail in the wrath of the Lord!"<br />
+So sang thy heart to thy heart, and so to the swinging sea<br />
+In a lull of the wind, the song of a spirit free!<br />
+<br />
+Serene adventurer, lover of distance divine,<br />
+Pursuing thy love forever though never thine,<br />
+O sun-tanned king with thy blue eyes over the sea,<br />
+Who dares to sing, and live, the praise of thee?<br />
+<br />
+Not they that safe in a haven of certainty, steer<br />
+From mooring to mooring with faith and with fear,<br />
+And pray for a map of the universe, pointer, and plan,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span><br />
+When all the blue waves of the ocean the courage of man<br />
+Challenge to venture, not they are the praisers of thee!<br />
+Nor they who sail for the cargo, and dream that the sea,<br />
+In its wanton wild infinite wonder of motion and sound,<br />
+Is bound by a purpose, as their little breathing is bound.<br />
+The profit of thy great sailing to thee was small,<br />
+And unto the world it was nothing&mdash;a man, that was all,<br />
+And his deed like a star, to flame in the dull old sky!<br />
+Of the story of apathy, age after decorous age going by!<br />
+Grapes were thy import, winey and luscious to eat,<br />
+Grapes, and a story&mdash;"The dew in the west was sweet!"<br />
+Wine of the distance ever the reddest seems,<br />
+And sweet is the world to the dreamer and doer of dreams!<br />
+Weigh them, O pale-headed merchant&mdash;little ye know!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span><br />
+Compute, O desk-dwellers, ye will not measure him so,<br />
+For ye know only knowledge, ye know not the drive of the will<br />
+That brought it with passion to birth&mdash;it driveth still<br />
+Through the hearts of the kindred of earth, the forward fleeing,<br />
+The kin of the stormy soul at the helm of all-being!<br />
+Sailors, unreefed, and high-masted, and wet, and free,<br />
+Who sail in the love of the billows, whose port is the sea&mdash;<br />
+They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime,<br />
+And launch with thee, glad as with God, on the ocean of time!</td></tr></table>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><small>Leif Ericson, the Norse adventurer, sailed to America 500 years
+before Columbus.</small></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">MIDNIGHT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Midnight is come,</span><br />
+And thinly in the deepness of the gloom<br />
+Truth rises startle-eyed out of a tomb,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">And we are dumb.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">A death-bell tolls,</span><br />
+And we still shudder round the too smooth bed,<br />
+For Truth makes pallid watch above the dead,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Freezing our souls.</span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">But day returns,</span><br />
+Light and the garish life, and we are brave,<br />
+For Truth sinks wanly down into her grave.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">Yet the heart yearns.</span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">IN MARCH</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>On a soaked fence-post a little blue-backed bird,<br />
+Opening her sweet throat, has stirred<br />
+A million music-ripples in the air<br />
+That curl and circle everywhere.<br />
+They break not shallow at my ear,<br />
+But quiver far within. Warm days are near!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Soft little daughters of the mead,<br />
+The random bush, the wanton weed,<br />
+That lived to love, and loved to breed,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Who hither bound you?</span><br />
+You're innocent of all the screed<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">That blows around you.</span><br />
+<br />
+Sweet daffodils so laughing yellow,<br />
+Beneath a bending pussy-willow,<br />
+You need not try to gulp and swallow<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">The Apostles' Creed,</span><br />
+Or shudder at the fates that follow<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Adam's deed.</span><br />
+<br />
+Big bloody hymns the choir sings,<br />
+And blows it to the King of Kings,<br />
+The while you dream of humble things<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">That wander there</span><br />
+Where first you spread your golden wings<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">On summer air;</span><br />
+<br />
+Like Jesus, simple and divine,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span><br />
+In beauty, not in raiment fine,<br />
+Who asked no high or holier shrine<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">In which to pray,</span><br />
+Than garden groves of Palestine<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">'Neath olives gray.</span><br />
+<br />
+His name, I think, would still be bright<br />
+Though churches were unbuilded quite,<br />
+And they whose hearts are toward the height<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">Should simple be,</span><br />
+And lift their heads into the light<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">As straight as ye.</span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Good-night, little bed, with your patient white pillow,<br />
+Your light little spread, and your blanket of yellow!<br />
+I wonder what leaves you so pensive to-night&mdash;<br />
+The breezes are tender, the stars are so bright,<br />
+I should think you would wrinkle a little and smile,<br />
+And be happy to think we can sleep for a while.<br />
+Are you waiting for something? Or are you just seeming<br />
+To listen so breathlessly, hushed, as though dreaming<br />
+A form that is fresher than breezes so light,<br />
+A coming more precious than stars to the night,<br />
+Who shall mould you as soft as the breast of a billow,<br />
+And crown with all beauty your patient white pillow?<br />
+Good-night, little bed&mdash;are you lonely so late?<br />
+We will lie down together, together we'll wait.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>
+<br/>
+<i>Scene</i>: A cell leading to the gallows.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Characters</i>: A noble lady, who is an assassin.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 5em;">A common murderer.</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+The chilling gray, a ghost of mortal dawn,<br />
+Has touched them, and they know the hour. The guard<br />
+Shifts guiltily his shoes upon the stone.<br />
+They raise their eyes in languid terror; but<br />
+The moment passes, and 'tis still again&mdash;<br />
+Save, in some piteous way she moves her throat.<br />
+There is a wandering of her burning eyes,<br />
+Until they fix, and strangely stare upon<br />
+The face of her companion. They would plead<br />
+Against the heavy horror of his look;<br />
+For not an idiot's corpse could strike the soul<br />
+More sick with wonder.<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">"O look up and speak</span><br />
+To me!"&mdash;Her voice is startling to the walls&mdash;<br />
+"Speak any word against this gloom!"<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 15em;">He moves</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span><br />
+A blood-deserted eye, but answers not.<br />
+"Tell if 'twas cold and filthy where you lay!"<br />
+<br />
+"Ay, filthy cold! 'Twas cold enough to keep<br />
+The carrion from rotting on these bones!<br />
+They never kill us&mdash;never 'til we hang!"<br />
+<br />
+He spoke a brutal tongue against the gloom.<br />
+And there was heard far off a step, a voice.<br />
+The guard stood up; a quiver moved her limbs.<br />
+<br />
+"Give me some simple word. Give me your hand<br />
+In comradeship. We die together&mdash;and<br />
+The while we breathe&mdash;we are each other's world."<br />
+<br />
+"No&mdash;not your world, my lady! Though we die,<br />
+I have no grace to give a hand to you.<br />
+My hand is thick and dirty&mdash;yours is pale!"<br />
+<br />
+"You say 'my lady' in the very tomb!<br />
+Will even death not laugh this weakness off<br />
+Your tongue? To think nobility abides<br />
+This hour! <i>My lady!</i> O, it is a curse<br />
+That whips me at the grave! I was not born&mdash;<br />
+Can I not even die, a human soul?"<br />
+<br/>
+"Yes, you can die! And better&mdash;you can kill!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span><br />
+'Tis not your ladyship&mdash;the gallows' rope<br />
+Snaps that to nothing! Death? Not death alone<br />
+Can laugh at your nobility&mdash;I laugh.<br />
+No&mdash;not your piteous ladyship&mdash;that dies.<br />
+It is your crime that daunts me&mdash;That shall live!<br />
+To plant, with this fine delicate little hand,<br />
+Small heavy death into the very heart<br />
+Of time-defended tyranny&mdash;that lives!<br />
+The future is all life for you. For me&mdash;<br />
+A glassy look, a yell into the air,<br />
+And I am gone! No life springs up from me!<br />
+I am the dirt that drank the drippings of<br />
+A guilty murder&mdash;that is why I sit<br />
+Like sickness here, and goad you with my shame!<br />
+I'll take your hand. I'll tell you I was starved,<br />
+Wrecked, shattered to the bones with drunken hunger,<br />
+And I killed for gold. I'll tell you this&mdash;<br />
+Your crime shall live to blot the memory<br />
+Of mine, and me, and all the insane tribe<br />
+Of us, who having strength in poverty<br />
+Will not lie down and starve&mdash;blot off the world<br />
+Our having been&mdash;the crime of our killed hopes,<br />
+And gradual infamy!"<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 10em;">The fever gleam</span><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span><br />
+Was in his eyes&mdash;the future! There it burned<br />
+A moment, while he stood to see the door<br />
+Swing darkly open, and the guard salute.<br />
+She stood beside him. And together in<br />
+High union of their fainting hearts, they faced<br />
+The hour that brought them to their level graves.<br/>
+<br/>
+<br/>
+<span style="margin-left: 3em;">March, 1912.</span></td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">TO A TAWNY THRUSH</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Pine spirit!<br />
+Breath and voice of a wild glade!<br />
+In the wild forest near it,<br />
+In the cool hemlock or the leafy limb,<br />
+Whereunder<br />
+Thou didst run and wander<br />
+Thro' the sun and shade,<br />
+An elvish echo and a shadow dim,<br />
+There in the twilight thou dost lift thy song,<br />
+And give the stilly woods a silver tongue.<br />
+Out of what liquid is thy laughing made?<br />
+A sister of the water thou dost seem,<br />
+The quivering cataract thou singest near,<br />
+Whose glistening stream,<br />
+Unto the listening ear,<br />
+Thou dost outrun with thy cascade<br />
+Of music beautiful and swift and clear&mdash;<br />
+A joy unto the mournful forest given!<br />
+As when afar<br />
+A travelling star<br />
+Across our midnight races,<br />
+A moving gleam that quickly ceases,<br />
+Lost in the blue black abyss of heaven,<br />
+So doth thy light and silver singing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span><br />
+Start and thrill<br />
+The silence round thy piney hill,<br />
+Unto the sober hour a jewel bringing&mdash;<br />
+A mystery&mdash;a strain of rhythm fleeing&mdash;<br />
+A vagrant echo winging<br />
+Back to the unuttered theme of being!</td></tr></table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES</span></p>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+
+<tr><td>Poet, thy dreams are grateful to the air<br />
+And the light loves them. Tho' they murmur not,<br />
+Their carven stillness is a music rare,<br />
+And like the song of one whose tongue hath caught<br />
+The clear ethereal essence of his thought.<br />
+<br />
+I hear the talkers come, the changing throngs<br />
+That with the fashions of a day surround<br />
+Thy visions, and I hear them quell their tongues,<br />
+And hush their querulous shoes upon the ground;<br />
+Thy dreams are with the crown of silence crowned&mdash;<br />
+<br />
+Though they feel not the glowing diadem,<br />
+Who sleep for aye in their cool shapes of stone.<br />
+Nor ever will the sunlight waken them,<br />
+Nor ever will they turn their eyes and moan,<br />
+To think that their brief Poet's life is gone.<br />
+<br />
+The tender and the lofty soul is gone,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span><br />
+Who eyed them forth from darkness, and confessed<br />
+His spirit's motion in unmoving stone.<br />
+His praise upon no mortal tongue doth rest;<br />
+By these unwhispering lips it is expressed.<br />
+<br />
+Soon will the ample arms of night withdraw<br />
+Her shuffling children from the twilit hall&mdash;<br />
+From that heroic presence, in dim awe<br />
+Of whom the dark withholds a while her pall,<br />
+And leaves him luminous above them all.<br />
+<br />
+Then are ye lost in darkness and alone,<br />
+Ye ghostly spirits! And the moment rare<br />
+Doth quicken that too sad and nameless stone,<br />
+To move her robe, and spill her sable hair,<br />
+And be in silence mingled with the air;<br />
+<br />
+For she is one with the dim glimmering hour,<br />
+And the white spirits beautiful and still,<br />
+And the veiled memory of the vanished power<br />
+That moulded them, the high and infinite will<br />
+That earth begets and earth does not fulfil.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<p class="blockquot"><small>These statues were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum after
+the sculptor's death. The figures alluded to are the famous
+statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the monument in memory of Mrs.
+Henry Adams, the original of which is in the Rock Creek
+Cemetery at Washington.</small></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span></p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">SUMMER SUNDAY</span></p>
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" summary="table">
+<tr><td>Borne on the low lake wind there floats to me,<br />
+Out of the distant hill, a sigh of bells,<br />
+Mystic, worshipful, almost unheard,<br />
+As though the past should answer me, and I<br />
+In pagan solitude bow down my head.</td></tr></table>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+
+<p class="center"><span class="big">FOOTNOTE:</span></p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison
+Patterson's account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading of her poems
+in his laboratory. It constitutes the preface of the second edition of
+his book, "The Rhythm of Prose"&mdash;a book which, upon the true basis of
+experimentation, analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time
+the nature of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it is
+derived by the reader both from prose and metrical poetry. Until it is
+amplified or improved by further investigation, this book will surely be
+the basis of every scientific discussion of the questions involved
+here.</p></div>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center"><span class="big">Transcriber's Notes:</span></p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Punctuation has been corrected without note.<br/></p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from the
+original.<br/></p>
+
+<p>It is not always possible to determine if a new stanza begins at the top
+of a printed page, but every effort has been made by the transcriber to
+retain stanza breaks where appropriate.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Colors of Life
+       Poems and Songs and Sonnets
+
+Author: Max Eastman
+
+Release Date: May 7, 2011 [EBook #36051]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLORS OF LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David E. Brown, Bryan Ness and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  COLORS OF LIFE
+
+
+
+
+  NEW POETRY: FALL 1918
+
+
+  _By Robert Graves_
+    FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS
+
+  _By Gilbert Frankau_
+    THE OTHER SIDE
+
+  _By Max Eastman_
+    COLORS OF LIFE
+
+  _By Kahlil Gibran_
+    THE MADMAN
+
+
+
+
+  COLORS OF LIFE
+
+  POEMS AND SONGS AND SONNETS
+
+  BY
+  MAX EASTMAN
+
+
+  NEW YORK     ALFRED A. KNOPF     MCMXVIII
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
+  ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
+
+
+  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE
+
+ABOUT AMERICAN POETRY
+
+
+It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my share in the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. Its
+essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth, and it can
+not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle.
+Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest
+friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has
+never entered, even so deeply as it might, into those tempests of social
+change that are coloring our thoughts today.
+
+Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who
+touched the mood of social revolt. And for my part I think there is a
+modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, and a certain
+adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might
+propose.
+
+Every one who reads this book will be familiar, I suppose, with Walt
+Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and
+untrammelled of ornamentation that it should go out of the books it was
+published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. "The
+Poetry of the future," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY--A PREFACE  13
+
+
+POEMS
+
+  COMING TO PORT                        43
+
+  THE LONELY BATHER                     45
+
+  IN MY ROOM                            46
+
+  HOURS                                 47
+
+  FIRE AND WATER                        48
+
+  YOU MAKE NO ANSWER                    49
+
+  OUT OF A DARK NIGHT                   50
+
+  A MORNING                             51
+
+  ANNIVERSARY                           52
+
+  AUTUMN LIGHT                          53
+
+  A MODERN MESSIAH                      54
+
+  IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL               55
+
+  A VISIT                               56
+
+  TO LOVE                               58
+
+  CAR-WINDOW                            59
+
+  LITTLE FISHES                         60
+
+  INVOCATION                            61
+
+  SOMETIMES                             62
+
+  TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN         63
+
+  TO AN ACTRESS                         65
+
+  EYES                                  66
+
+  X RAYS                                67
+
+
+SONNETS
+
+  A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS               71
+
+  A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT                 74
+
+  THOSE YOU DINED WITH                  75
+
+  THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD               76
+
+  AS THE CRAG EAGLE                     77
+
+  TO MY FATHER                          78
+
+  TO EDWARD S. MARTIN                   79
+
+  EUROPE--1914                          80
+
+  ISADORA DUNCAN                        81
+
+  THE SUN                               82
+
+  THE NET                               83
+
+  A DUNE SONNET                         84
+
+
+SONGS
+
+  SEA-SHORE                             87
+
+  RAINY SONG                            88
+
+  A HYMN TO GOD                         90
+
+  COMING SPRING                         91
+
+  DAISIES                               92
+
+  BOBOLINK                              93
+
+  DIOGENES                              94
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+  A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY      97
+
+  AT THE AQUARIUM                      102
+
+  EARTH'S NIGHT                        103
+
+  THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS            104
+
+  TO THE ASCENDING MOON                107
+
+  LEIF ERICSON                         110
+
+  MIDNIGHT                             116
+
+  IN MARCH                             117
+
+  THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH                118
+
+  TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT           120
+
+  IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA               121
+
+  TO A TAWNY THRUSH                    125
+
+  THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES            127
+
+  SUMMER SUNDAY                        129
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY
+
+A PREFACE
+
+
+It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
+of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
+clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
+publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
+the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
+than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
+That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
+and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
+being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in
+those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
+seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
+older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
+camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
+women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
+cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its
+essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It can not
+be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I
+have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for
+some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never
+entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change
+that are coloring our thoughts today.
+
+
+Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather
+expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
+structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
+least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
+the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
+tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
+Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
+admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched
+the mood of democratic revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern
+validity in the attitudes of both these poets, a certain adjudication
+between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose; and
+that is what I should like to discuss with those who may enter
+sympathetically into this little volume.
+
+They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an
+American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation,
+that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with
+the hills and forests on the earth.
+
+
+"The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at the free expression of
+emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to
+arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish....
+
+"In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the
+barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is
+henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and
+the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if
+rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior
+writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there
+seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in
+rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_,
+(while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable
+easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd
+in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or
+the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and
+heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great
+and fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars,
+amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably
+render'd in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets
+whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
+envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
+on some of our own age--it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the
+day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as
+a medium of highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present
+or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the
+Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado,
+dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea
+feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend
+the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride,
+passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to the
+general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray
+them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as grandly
+poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories,
+electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of the solidarity
+of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the
+dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories,
+foundries, workshops, mines, or on ship-board, or on lakes and
+rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more
+eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose."
+
+
+It may surprise some people to see this monumental challenge to the
+poets of the future confronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan
+Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two poets in contrast, and the
+weight neither of genius nor of influence is altogether upon one side.
+They are the two American poets of unique distinction, and they are the
+fountains of the two strongest influences in all modern poetry of the
+occident. And it is worth observing that if Walt Whitman had written as
+few pages of poetry as Poe did, his name would hardly be remembered,
+whereas Poe would have established a literary tradition if he had
+written but five sorrowful lyrics. His individuality was so poignant.
+His art was so exquisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but his
+philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, and prodigious in
+contempt for his predecessors, as that of Walt Whitman. I have never
+read anything about any art more sheer and startling in its kind, than
+Poe's essay on "The Philosophy of Composition"; and nothing more
+energetically opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be devised. To
+convey the flavor of the contrast, I quote these sentences--inadequate
+for any other purpose--from Poe's essay:
+
+     "Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood
+     that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic
+     intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public
+     take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating
+     crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the
+     last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived
+     not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies
+     discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious
+     selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and
+     interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the
+     tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps,
+     the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches....
+
+     "For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance
+     alluded to, nor at any time the least difficulty in recalling
+     to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and,
+     since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I
+     have considered a _desideratum_, is quite independent of any
+     real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be
+     regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the _modus
+     operandi_ by which some one of my own works was put together. I
+     select 'The Raven' as most generally known....
+
+     "Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem _per se_, the
+     circumstance--or say the necessity--which in the first place
+     gave rise to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should
+     suit at once the popular and critical taste.
+
+     "We commence, then, with this intention.
+
+     "The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary
+     work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content
+     to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from
+     unity of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the
+     affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is
+     at once destroyed....
+
+     "My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or
+     effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that,
+     throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design
+     of rendering the work _universally_ appreciable. I should be
+     carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to
+     demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and
+     which with the poetical stands not in the slightest need of
+     demonstration--the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole
+     legitimate province of the poem....
+
+     "But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however
+     vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness
+     or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are
+     invariably required: first, some amount of complexity, or more
+     properly, adaptation; and, second, some amount of
+     suggestiveness, some under-current, however indefinite, of
+     meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a
+     work of art so much of that _richness_ (to borrow from colloquy
+     a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with _the
+     ideal_."
+
+The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete. Upon
+the one side a vast preoccupation with human meaning and morals, with
+health and the common reality and love and democracy, a grand contempt
+for beauty, and for the effort to attract or gratify a reader with
+"verbal melody," a contempt for everything that savors of deliberate
+technique in art. Upon the other side also contempt--contempt like a
+piece of cold analytical steel for every pretense that the technique of
+art is not deliberate, that poets are not seeking to attract and
+gratify, that truth or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the portent
+of a poem--a disposition to seek beauty in unique and even unhealthy
+places, a lonely aristocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with
+"verbal melody" never before or since equalled in poetry. The details of
+this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what
+will illumine the modern problems about poetry. To Edgar Allan Poe a
+poem was an objective thing, to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of
+subjective expression. Poe would take sounds and melodies of words
+almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had
+formed a beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and imaginations
+out of his heart and weave and inlay them in that vessel, and even the
+crimson out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he would seek out
+in his mind the hue of some meaning or moral to pour over it until it
+was perfect. And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for view and
+purchase, standing aside from them like a creative trader, proud, but no
+more identified with them than as though he had made them out of the
+colors of shells. To Walt Whitman a poem was not a thing. His poetry
+was himself. His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and wonder of
+life, filled him and he overflowed in language--without "art," without
+purpose but to communicate his being. So he maintained. His poem was
+never an object to him, even after it had flowed full and he sought to
+perfect its contours. His emendations were not often objective
+improvements; they were private remodellings to make the language a more
+direct and fluent identity with what he considered himself. This was the
+task upon which he labored as the poet of democracy and social love.
+
+Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon
+human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average
+American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should
+remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe--even with the
+handful of poems he wrote--may be said to be acceptable to the
+generality of men. The Raven, or Helen, or Annabelle Lee, or some sad
+musical echo of the death of beauty, might be found in illuminated
+covers on the most "average" of American parlor tables, but never
+anything there of Walt Whitman--unless it be "Captain, My Captain!" the
+one rather weak metrical poem he deigned to write. And there is
+something deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and something which
+only an adequate science of verse can explain. For the emotions and the
+meanings of Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones that interest
+simple and thoughtful people who have leisure to feel. His realizations
+of life would be acceptable and be honored, as much at least as great
+art is ever honored, by the "divine average," if they had been conveyed,
+as Poe's were, in vessels of light, which would make them objective, and
+from which they might brim over with excess of subjective meaning and
+emotion.
+
+I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whitman had conveyed them so,
+or the opinion that he could have been a more stupendous poetic and
+moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he did. His propulsive
+determination to put forth in this facile nineteenth century culture,
+sweet with the decay and light with the remnant fineries of feudal
+grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished substance of man, was a
+phenomenon like the rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the
+sea. No word but the words in his book can portray the magnitude of his
+achievement; no critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and by
+its own standard. But as a prophetic example of the poems of the
+future, and especially the poems of democracy and social love, it
+suffers a weakness--the weakness that Walt Whitman's character suffered.
+It is egocentric and a little inconsiderate of the importance of other
+people. Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages about universal social
+love, but he could not be the universal poet exactly because he was not
+social enough. He was not humble enough to be social. The rebel egoism
+of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his
+love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that
+gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others.
+
+There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural
+companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he
+"kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally
+appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes
+his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of
+talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even
+though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are
+really in social communion with humanity. For that is what the word
+_objective_ means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from
+other elements of our experience only in that it can be experienced in
+the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an
+object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that
+various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. Therefore
+one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his
+solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which
+Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours
+out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory
+that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each
+rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will
+comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to
+build poems out of phrases poured out. And whatever we may wish were
+true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed.
+Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the
+poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less
+clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an
+object of art.
+
+It could be established, I believe, with mechanical precision, that the
+rhythmic values most cherished by the social rebels who now write so
+much "free verse," are values practically incommunicable to others, and
+absolutely incommunicable by the method usually adopted, that of
+printing words on a page. A little of that icy matter-of-fact realism
+with which Poe used to scatter the sweet foggy thoughts of the
+literarious, while it might not affect the art of these poets, would
+surely reduce the volume of what they have to say about it. For
+instance, here is the answer of one of them to an assertion that the
+line division in free-verse is "arbitrary," and that if we copied one of
+these long poems in solid prose, the poet himself could hardly ever
+divide it again as it was:
+
+"Free verse that is free verse is _not_ arbitrary. Much of it is, of
+course--so are many canvases mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But
+there is free verse that resolves itself into just those lines--a little
+more subtly than sonnets or triolets--by virtue of pauses, of
+heart-beats, of the quickness or slowness of your breath, and maybe of
+your pulse itself.... It tries to give the rhythm value of those
+hesitations, those quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, the
+flutterings--it is _closer to the breath_, as modern music and modern
+dance are, or as primitive music and primitive dance were."
+
+It is impossible not to respond to such assertions, for we know in
+ourselves what these exquisite differential experiences are. Any one who
+has ever written love-letters--which are a kind of aboriginal
+free-verse--knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not
+demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated
+even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the
+same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of
+ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in
+another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. And while this
+fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is
+better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it
+would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much
+alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these
+minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of
+being served round in paper and ink.
+
+There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which
+exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other
+values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can
+not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings
+are too much their own. There are other values, still less delicate,
+which he might communicate by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture,
+taking possession as it were of the very pulse and respiration of
+others. But poetry which is composed for publication ought to occupy
+itself with those rhythmic values which may be communicated to other
+rhythmic minds through the printing of words on a page. It ought to do
+this, at least, if it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most
+minute degree social.
+
+A mature science of rhythm might be imagined to stride into the room
+where these poets are discussing the musical values of their verse,
+seize two or three of the most "free" and subtle among them, lock them
+into separate sound-proof chambers, and allow them to read one of their
+favorite passages into the ear of an instrument designed to record in
+spatial outline the pulsations of vocal accent. It is safe to assert
+that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than
+if the same two were reading a passage of highly wrought English
+prose.[1] And the reason for this is that free verse imports into
+English prose a form of punctuation that is exceedingly gross and yet
+absolutely inconsequential. Its line division has neither a metrical
+nor a logical significance that exists objectively. It can mean at any
+time anything that is desirable to the whims, or needful to the
+difficulties, of the reader or the writer. It is a very sign and
+instrument of subjectivity. To incorporate in a passage of printed
+symbols an indeterminate element so marked and so frequent as that, is
+to say to the reader--"Take the passage and organize it into whatever
+rhythmical pattern may please yourself." And that is what the reader of
+free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great
+difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift
+the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who
+is rhythmically gifted to organize _any indeterminate series of
+impressions whatever_ into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces
+a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and,
+having made it himself, is not unable to admire. Thus a good many poets
+who could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, are enabled by the
+gullibility and talent of their readers to come forward in this kind of
+writing as musicians of special and elaborate skill. The "freedom" that
+it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in
+prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous
+rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry,
+and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will
+certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not
+too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. But
+as an object of the effort of ambitious artists I can not believe it
+will widely survive the knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a
+form of mumble and indetermination in their art.
+
+Walt Whitman, however he may have been deceived about the social and
+democratic character of his form, was not deceived, as the modern
+eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He thought that he had
+gained in volume and directness of communion, but he knew that he was
+discarding subtlety, discarding in advance all those beautiful and
+decadent wonders of microscopic and morbid audacity that developed in
+France among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples of his form,
+however, are materially of Poe's persuasion, and like to believe that
+they have in free verse an instrument expressly fitted for the
+communication of those wonders, and of the most delicate modulations of
+that "verbal melody" that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true
+standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a commanding advantage over them,
+and what can be said of free-verse in general can not be said of his
+poems. He did achieve the predominant thing that he aimed to achieve--he
+made his poetry rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. He
+made it like the universe and like the presence of a man. In that
+triumph it will stand. In that character it will mould and influence the
+literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all
+literature in all lands.
+
+     "Who touches this book touches a man."
+
+There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused
+with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he
+exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is
+predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of
+being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the
+tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with
+nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of
+this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner
+heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in
+America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more
+large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear
+science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from
+its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in
+its complexity, its subtle and refined _dissimulation_ of the
+fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied,
+in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the
+rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or
+intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around
+which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and
+syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that
+they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its
+momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There
+is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable
+to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are
+akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why,
+almost as though it were a chemical thing--a stimulant and narcotic--it
+takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.
+
+Poetry only naively acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in
+the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly
+weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more
+natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive
+of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is
+but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not
+"ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called
+"rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed
+and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the
+refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment--a
+thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or
+cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of
+poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is
+so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer
+be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
+
+Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to
+nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman
+and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a
+celestial telescope. There is something more properly savage--something
+at least truly barbarous--in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's
+insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the
+poem--beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate
+"excitement of the soul"--he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance.
+Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see
+in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere
+syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more
+intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It
+is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this
+intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too,
+and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It
+is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than
+priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's
+attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that--whatever great things
+may come of it--he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective
+and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated,
+as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the
+eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their
+eyes upon the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration,
+the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic
+temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of
+Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and
+exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of
+life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain
+in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly
+willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to
+let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf
+and invite their souls," to be "satisfied--see, dance, laugh, sing."
+They were so maturely naive that they would hardly understand what Walt
+Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to
+recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that
+we can most surely go back to nature.
+
+And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural--a
+mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make
+out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that
+mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time,
+then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that
+belongs to the people. For people are, in the depths of them and on the
+average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no
+doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more
+serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She
+meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of
+their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of
+universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we
+modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient
+China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of
+being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an
+immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be
+loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with
+nature, were at play. And in Japan even today--surviving from that
+time--there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a
+making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative
+realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly
+popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.
+
+If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing--the same
+love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart--we enter somewhat
+irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure and
+not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find
+poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for
+the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza,
+and once for the whole poem--"When I heard at the close of the
+day"--Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of
+image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a
+chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to
+all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of
+freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his
+most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is
+truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple
+people--the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect
+existence of a thing.
+
+
+HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS
+
+  Hush'd be the camps today;
+  And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;
+  And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate,
+  Our dear commander's death.
+
+  No more for him life's stormy conflicts;
+  Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
+  Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
+
+
+RECONCILIATION
+
+  Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
+  Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in
+      time be utterly lost;
+  That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly
+      softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world....
+
+These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic and still clarity of
+form, if they had been the end and essence of his art, and not only a
+by-accident of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not perhaps to
+a great national poetry for America, but beyond that into something
+international and belonging to the universe of man. The step forward
+from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and
+subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an
+increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and
+breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart
+naturally. I chose them, not only because they are among the most
+musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whitman wrote, but also because
+in bringing a mood that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's
+agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. And so it will not be
+thought that when I say the poet of democracy will be a child who is at
+play with the making of things, I desire to narrow the range and
+poignancy of the things he will make. He will be free, and he will move
+with a knowing and profound mind among all the experiences and the
+dreams of men. But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration,
+or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose
+clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and
+never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature.
+
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[1] This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison Patterson's
+account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading of her poems in his
+laboratory. It constitutes the preface of the second edition of his
+book, "The Rhythm of Prose"--a book which, upon the true basis of
+experimentation, analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time
+the nature of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it is
+derived by the reader both from prose and metrical poetry. Until it is
+amplified or improved by further investigation, this book will surely be
+the basis of every scientific discussion of the questions involved
+here.
+
+
+
+
+POEMS
+
+
+
+
+COMING TO PORT
+
+
+  Our motion on the soft still misty river
+  Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
+  That rise and follow one another ever,
+  Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom
+  And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.
+
+  From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,
+  And your heart is still; and like a sound
+  In silence is your stillness in the streaming
+  Of light-whispered laughter all around,
+  Where happy passengers are homeward bound.
+
+  Their sunny journey is in safety ending,
+  But for you no journey has an end.
+  The tears that to your eyes their light are lending
+  Shine in softness to no waiting friend;
+  Beyond the search of any eye they tend.
+
+  There is no nest for the unresting fever
+  Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;
+  There is no rest nor blessedness forever
+  That can clasp you, quivering and pained,
+  Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.
+
+  Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,
+  Flowing though the ship has come to rest,
+  Your love is passing through the mist and going,
+  Going infinitely from your breast,
+  Surpassing time on its immortal quest.
+
+  The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,
+  All flush forward with a joyful aim,
+  And while their hands with happy hands are mating,
+  Lips are laughing out a happy name--
+  You pause, and pass among them like a flame.
+
+
+
+
+THE LONELY BATHER
+
+
+  Loose-veined and languid as the yellow mist
+  That swoons along the river in the sun,
+  Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed
+  With years of heat that through your veins have run,
+
+  You lie with aching memories of love
+  Alone and naked by the weeping tree,
+  And indolent with inward longing move
+  Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.
+
+  If love came warm and burning to your dream,
+  And filled you all your avid veins require,
+  You would lie sadly still beside the stream,
+  Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;
+
+  The same low sky would weave its fading blue,
+  The river still exhale its misty rain,
+  The willow trail its waving over you,
+  Your longing only quickened into pain.
+
+  Bed your desire among the pressing grasses;
+  Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts
+  Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes,
+  Till the undulation of your longing rests.
+
+
+
+
+IN MY ROOM
+
+
+  In this high room, my room of quiet space,
+  Sun-yellow softened for my happiness,
+  I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves;
+  Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude
+  Beneath a willow by the river stream;
+  Your aged plum tree bearing lonely bloom
+  Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds
+  Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo.
+  My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei,
+  Your tranquil and creative-fingered love
+  So many mounds of mournful years ago
+  In that cool valley where the colors lived.
+  My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains.
+  Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th century.
+
+
+
+
+HOURS
+
+
+  Hours when I love you, are like tranquil pools,
+  The liquid jewels of the forest, where
+  The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools
+  His fevered ankles, and the ferny air
+  Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast,
+  Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.
+
+
+
+
+FIRE AND WATER
+
+
+  Flame-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure
+  And poignant as the dagger to the mark,
+  Your will is burning ever; it is pure.
+  Mine is vague water welling through the dark,
+  Holding all substances--except the spark.
+
+  Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream
+  When some clear striding naked-footed girl
+  Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam
+  Across its bosom ambling and aswirl
+  With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;
+
+  Such was our meeting--fatefully so brief.
+  I have no purpose and no power to clutch.
+  Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief;
+  And I more sadly flow, remembering much,
+  Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.
+
+
+
+
+YOU MAKE NO ANSWER
+
+
+  You make no answer. You have stolen away
+  Deliberately in that twilight sorrow
+  Where the dark flame that is your being shines
+  So well. Mysterious and deeply tender
+  In your motion you have softly left me,
+  And the little path along the house is still.
+  And I, a child forsaken of its mother,
+  I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend,
+  Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that
+  My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you--
+  More than friend and slender-bodied mother--
+  O sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!
+
+
+
+
+OUT OF A DARK NIGHT
+
+
+  Death is more tranquil than the life of love,
+  More calm, more sure, and more unanguished.
+  O the path among the trees is far more tranquil to the dead
+  Than to these anxious hearts, uptroubled from their beds,
+  Who pace in pallid darkness on the leaves,
+  For no good reason--for no reason
+  But because their limbs will not lie still upon the sheet.
+  Their limbs will not lie still. O how I pity them.
+  Sad hearts--their marrow is a-quiver,
+  And they can not lie them down in tranquil sadness like the dead.
+
+
+
+
+A MORNING
+
+
+  Again this morning the bold autumn,
+  Spreading through the woods her sacred fire,
+  Brings the rich color of your presence
+  Warmly luminous to my desire--
+
+  Brings to my heart the dear wild worship,
+  High and wayward as the windy air,
+  And to my pulse the hot sweet passion
+  Burning crimson like a poison there.
+
+
+
+
+ANNIVERSARY
+
+
+  The flowers we planted in the tender spring,
+  And through the summer watched their blossoming,
+  Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,
+  Died and dropped downward altogether.
+
+  Today in April in the vivid grass
+  They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,
+  They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,
+  Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.
+
+  But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,
+  He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,
+  And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,
+  He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.
+
+
+
+
+AUTUMN LIGHT
+
+
+  So bright and soft is the sweet air of morning,
+  And so tenderly the light descends,
+  And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers
+  All the leaves unto the valley's ends--
+
+  It brings them all to being when it touches
+  With its paleness every glowing vein;
+  The wild and flaming hollows of the forest
+  Kindle all their crimson in its rain;
+
+  And every curve receives its share of morning,
+  Every little shadow softly grows,
+  And motion finds a melody more tender
+  That like a phantom through the branches goes--
+
+  So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering,
+  And quiet in its giving, as though love,
+  The morning dream of life, were born of longing,
+  And really poured its being from above.
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN MESSIAH
+
+
+  Scarred with sensuality and pain
+  And weary labor in a mind not hard
+  Enough to think, a heart too always tender,
+  Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers.
+  They are wiser than his parables,
+  But he more potent, for he has the gift
+  Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.
+
+
+
+
+IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL
+
+
+  Today I saw a face--it was a beak,
+  That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes,
+  Above the bloody muck that had been lips
+  And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured
+  Some water through a rubber down a hole
+  He made in that black bag of horny blood.
+  The beak revived, it smiled--as chickens smile.
+  The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue
+  To tell with, what he used to be.
+
+
+
+
+A VISIT
+
+
+  You came with your small tapering flame of passion
+  Thinly burning like a nun's desire,
+  Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion
+  Faintly painting what your veins require
+  With little pallid pyramids of fire.
+
+  So very small and unfulfilled you sat,
+  Building a little talk to keep you there,
+  Your face and body pointed like a cat,
+  Your legs not reaching down from any chair,
+  Your thoughts not really reaching anywhere;
+
+  So dumb and tiny--yet Love guessed your mood,
+  And pressed his phial in its fervent bed,
+  And poured his thrilling philtre in my blood,
+  And all his lustre on your body shed,
+  And hot enamel on the words you said;
+
+  Your littleness became a monstrous thing,
+  A rank retort, a hot and waiting vat,
+  Your eyes green-copper like a snake in spring,
+  And lusty-bold your laying off your hat,
+  And fell your purpose like a hungry cat;
+
+  The dark fell on us through our narrowed eyes,
+  The heat lashed up around us from the floor,
+  Encrimsoning the lips of our surprise
+  To sway like music, and like burning pour
+  Across the truth that parted us before.
+
+
+
+
+TO LOVE
+
+
+  Love, often your delicate fingers beckon,
+  And always I follow.
+  Oh, if I could stay, and possess your beauty
+  Beckoning always!
+
+
+
+
+CAR-WINDOW
+
+
+  A light is laughing thro' the scattered rain,
+  A color quickens in the meadow;
+  Drops are still, upon the window-pane--
+  They cast a silver shadow.
+
+
+
+
+LITTLE FISHES
+
+
+  A myriad curious fishes,
+  Tiny and pink and pale,
+  All swimming north together
+  With rhythmical fin and tail--
+
+  A mountain surges among them,
+  They dart and startle and float,
+  Mere wiggling minutes of terror,
+  Into that mountain's throat.
+
+
+
+
+INVOCATION
+
+
+  Truth, be more precious to me than the eyes
+  Of happy love; burn hotter in my throat
+  Than passion; and possess me like my pride;
+  More sweet than freedom; more desired than joy;
+  More sacred than the pleasing of a friend.
+
+
+
+
+SOMETIMES
+
+
+  Sometimes a child's voice crying on the street
+  Comes winging like an arrow through the wind
+  To pierce my breast with you, my baby, and
+  My pen is weak, and all my thinking dreams
+  Are mist of yearning for the touch of you.
+
+
+
+
+TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN
+
+
+    In your lips moving fervently,
+    Your eyes hot with fire,
+  Life seems immortally young with desire,
+    Life seems impetuous,
+    Hungrily free,
+  Having no faith but its burning to be.
+
+    You could dance laughingly,
+    Draw where you move,
+  Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.
+    Youth be a carnival,
+    Life be the queen,
+  You could go dancing and singing and seen!
+
+    Whence came that tenderness
+    Cruel and wild,
+  Arming with murder the hand of a child?
+    Whence came that breaking fire,
+    Nursed and caressed
+  With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?
+
+    In your soul sacredly,
+    Deeper than fear,
+  Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?
+    Virgin of murder,
+    Was it God's breath,
+  Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?
+
+
+
+
+TO AN ACTRESS
+
+
+  You walk as vivid as a sunny storm
+  Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes
+  Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,
+  Making passionate and making young.
+  You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,
+  And in the sultry place of custom raise
+  The naked colors of abounding life,
+  And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.
+
+
+
+
+EYES
+
+
+  My heart is sick because of all the eyes
+  That look upon you drinkingly.
+  They almost touch you with their fever look!
+  O keep your beauty like a mystic gem,
+  Clear-surfaced--give no fibre grain of hold
+  To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!
+  My heart is sick!
+
+                    O love, let not my heart
+  Corrupt the flower of your liberty--
+  Go spend your beauty like the summer sky
+  That makes a radius of every glance,
+  And with your morning color light them all!
+
+
+
+
+X RAYS
+
+
+  Your eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber
+  Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,
+  With yellow ghostly globes of intense aether
+  Potent as the rays of pure desire.
+
+  Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,
+  When the winged wild whining mystic wheel
+  Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings
+  Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.
+
+  Your flesh was never warmer to my passion
+  Than when, moving in that lumor green,
+  We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured
+  Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.
+
+  You seemed so virginal and so undreaming
+  Of the burning hunger in my eyes,
+  To peer more fever-deeply in your being
+  Than the very death of passion lies.
+
+  The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,
+  Fashioned through the ages for the sun,
+  Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern
+  Where you walked a naked skeleton;
+
+  Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,
+  Living to the tip of every bone,
+  And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
+  Ever to lie wanly down alone--
+
+  To lie forever down so still and slender,
+  Tracing on the ancient screen of night
+  That naked and pale writing of the wonder
+  Of your beauty breathing in the light.
+
+
+
+
+SONNETS
+
+
+
+
+A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS
+
+
+Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always
+seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason
+lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is
+not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a
+division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable
+instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its
+closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance
+it has--the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural
+convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager
+horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden
+grain.
+
+This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness
+of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express
+themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often they
+are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they
+have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the
+writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry
+seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a
+concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably
+equal to its more temperate pretensions.
+
+The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a
+dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for
+persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the
+hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They
+get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds
+and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not
+make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and
+get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always
+with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received
+in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.
+
+This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a
+sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own--the clarity, the running
+and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of song. And to
+these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional
+relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a
+conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more
+important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I
+offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those
+high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely
+reliquary of their god.
+
+
+
+
+A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT
+
+
+  You love me not as I love, or when I
+  Grow listless of the crimson of your lips,
+  And turn not to your burning finger-tips,
+  You would show fierce and feverish your eye,
+  And hotly my numb wilfulness decry,
+  Holding your virtues over me like whips,
+  And stinging with the visible eclipse
+  Of that sweet poise of life I crucify!
+
+  How can you pass so proudly from my face,
+  With all the tendrils of your passion furled,
+  So adequate and animal in grace,
+  As one whose mate is only all the world!
+  I never taste the sweet exceeding thought
+  That you might love me, though I loved you not!
+
+
+
+
+THOSE YOU DINED WITH
+
+
+  They would have made you like a pageant, bold
+  And nightly festive, lustre-lit for them,
+  And round your beauty, like a dusky gem,
+  Have poured the glamour of the pride of gold;
+  And you would lie in life as in her bed
+  The mistress of a pale king, indolent,
+  Though hot her limbs and strong her languishment,
+  And her deep spirit is unvisited.
+
+  But I would see you like a gypsy, free
+  As windy morning in the sunny air,
+  Your wild warm self, your vivid self, to be,
+  A miracle of nature's liberty,
+  Giving your gift of being kind and fair,
+  High, gay and careless-handed everywhere!
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD
+
+
+  The passions of a child attend his dreams.
+  He lives, loves, hopes, remembers, is forlorn
+  For legendary creatures, whom he deems
+  Not too unreal--until one golden morn
+  The gracious, all-awaking sun shines in
+  Upon his tranquil pillow, and his eyes
+  Are touched, and opened greatly, and begin
+  To drink reality with rich surprise.
+
+  I loved the impetuous souls of ancient story--
+  Heroic characters, kings, queens, whose wills
+  Like empires rose, achieved, and fell, in glory.
+  I was a child, until the radiant dawn,
+  Thy beauty, woke me--O thy spirit fills
+  The stature of those heroes, they are gone!
+
+
+
+
+AS THE CRAG EAGLE
+
+
+  As the crag eagle to the zenith's height
+  Wings his pursuit in his exalted hour
+  Of her the tempest-reared, whose airy power
+  Of plume and passion challenges his flight
+  To that wild altitude, where they unite,
+  In mutual tumultuous victory
+  And the swift sting of nature's ecstasy,
+  Their shuddering pinions and their skyward might--
+  As they, the strong, to the full height of heaven
+  Bear up that joy which to the strong is given,
+  Thus, thus do we, whose stormy spirits quiver
+  In the bold air of utter liberty,
+  Clash equal at our highest, I and thee,
+  Unconquered and unconquering forever!
+
+
+
+
+TO MY FATHER
+
+
+  The eastern hill hath scarce unveiled his head,
+  And the deliberate sky hath but begun
+  To meditate upon a future sun,
+  When thou dost rise from thy impatient bed.
+  Thy morning prayer unto the stars is said.
+  And not unlike a child, the penance done
+  Of sleep, thou goest to thy serious fun,
+  Exuberant--yet with a whisper tread.
+
+  And when that lord doth to the world appear,
+  The jovial sun, he leans on his old hill,
+  And levels forth to thee a golden smile--
+  Thee in his garden, where each warming year
+  Thou toilest in all joy with him, to fill
+  And flood the soil with Summer for a while.
+
+
+
+
+TO EDWARD S. MARTIN
+
+FROM A PROFESSIONAL HOBO
+
+
+  How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
+  Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
+  The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
+  And on this gripped and mortal-sweating den
+  And battle-pit of hunger now and then
+  Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
+  The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
+  Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen!
+
+  How long have art and wit and poetry,
+  With all their power, been content, like you,
+  To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
+  To filmy-curtain what they dare not see,
+  In multitudinous reality,
+  The rough and bloody soul of what is true!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     (In an editorial in _Life_, Mr. Martin had described as
+     "professional hoboes" a number of revolutionary agitators whom
+     he did not like--Pancho Villa, William D. Haywood, Wild Joe
+     O'Carroll--and he did me the honor to include me among them.)
+
+
+
+
+EUROPE--1914
+
+
+  Since Athens died, the life that is a light
+  Has never shone in Europe. Alien moods,
+  The oriental morbid sanctitudes,
+  Have darkened on her like the fear of night.
+  In happy augury we dared to guess
+  That her pure spirit shot one sunny glance
+  Of paganry across the fields of France,
+  Clear startling this dim fog of soulfulness.
+
+  But now, with arms and carnage and the cries
+  Of Holy Murder, rolling to the clouds
+  Her bloody-shadowed smoke of sacrifice,
+  The Superstition conquers, and the shrouds
+  Of sick black wonder lay their murky blight
+  Where shone of old the immortal-seeming light.
+
+
+
+
+ISADORA DUNCAN
+
+
+  You bring the fire and terror of the wars
+  Of infidels in thunder-running hordes,
+  With spears like sun-rays, shields, and wheeling swords
+  Flame shape, death shape and shaped like scimitars,
+  With crimson eagles and blue pennantry,
+  And teeth and armor flashing, and white eyes
+  Of battle horses, and the silver cries
+  Of trumpets unto storm and victory!
+
+  Who is this naked-footed lovely girl
+  Of summer meadows dancing on the grass?
+  So young and tenderly her footsteps pass,
+  So dreamy-limbed and lightly wild and warm--
+  The bugles murmur and the banners furl,
+  And they are lost and vanished like a storm!
+
+
+
+
+THE SUN
+
+
+  Now autumn, and that sadness as of love
+  Heroic in immortal solitude;
+  Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;
+  But in the blue and infinite above
+  A shining circle like the light of truth,
+  Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,
+  Whose motion is the measurement of time,
+  Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.
+
+  No passion burns upon the livid earth
+  Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry
+  Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.
+  All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth
+  To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,
+  All flows beneath the sanction of his light.
+
+
+
+
+THE NET
+
+
+  The net brings up, how long and languidly,
+  A million vivid quiverings of life,
+  Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,
+  All colors, green and silver of the sea,
+  All forms of skill and eagerness to be--
+  They die and wither of the very breath
+  That sounds your pity of their lavish death
+  While they are leaping, star-like, to be free.
+
+  They die and wither, but the aged sea,
+  Insane old salty womb of mystery,
+  Is pregnant with a million million more,
+  Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,
+  Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,
+  While onward her immortal currents pour.
+
+
+
+
+A DUNE SONNET
+
+
+  I was so lonely on the dunes to-day;
+    The shadow of a bird passed o'er the sand,
+    And I, a driftwood relic in my hand....
+  Sea winds are not more lonely when they stray
+  A little fitful and bewildered way
+    In this wan acre, whose dry billows stand
+    So pitilessly still of curve, so bland,
+  And wide, and waiting, infinitely grey.
+
+  In hollows I could almost hear them say,
+  The misty breezes--Run, we will not stay
+    In this unreal and spiritual land!
+    Our soul of life is calling from the strand,
+  Whose blue and breathing bosom leapt or lay
+  Or laughed to us in shots of silver spray!
+
+
+
+
+SONGS
+
+
+
+
+SEA-SHORE
+
+
+  The wind blows in along the sea--
+    Its salty wet caresses
+  Impart to all the ships that be
+    A thrill before it passes.
+
+  The tide is never at a stand,
+    A mountain in its motion,
+  Forever homing to the land,
+    And ever to the ocean.
+
+  And on its fickle, mighty breast
+    The waters still are moving,
+  With love in every running crest
+    And laughter in the loving--
+
+  Light love to touch the prows of ships
+    That slip along so slenderly.
+  I would as lightly touch your lips,
+    And your heart as tenderly,
+
+  If you would move with all that move,
+    The flowing and caressing,
+  Who have no firmness in their love,
+    No sorrow in its passing.
+
+
+
+
+RAINY SONG
+
+
+  Down the dripping pathway dancing through the rain,
+  Brown eyes of beauty, laugh to me again!
+
+  Eyes full of starlight, moist over fire,
+  Full of young wonder, touch my desire!
+
+  O like a brown bird, like a bird's flight,
+  Run through the rain drops lithely and light.
+
+  Body like a gypsy, like a wild queen,
+  Slim brown dress to slip through the green--
+
+  The little leaves hold you as soft as a child,
+  The little path loves you, the path that runs wild.
+
+  Who would not love you, seeing you move,
+  Warm-eyed and beautiful through the green grove?
+
+  Let the rain kiss you, trickle through your hair,
+  Laugh if my fingers mingle with it there,
+
+  Laugh if my cheek too is misty and drips--
+  Wetness is tender--laugh on my lips
+
+  The happy sweet laughter of love without pain,
+  Young love, the strong love, burning in the rain.
+
+
+
+
+A HYMN TO GOD
+
+IN TIME OF STRESS
+
+
+  Lift, O dark and glorious Wonder,
+  Once again thy gleaming sword,
+  Cleave this killing doubt asunder
+  With one sheer and sacred word!
+
+  For my heart is weak and broken,
+  And the struggle runs too high,
+  And there is no burning token
+  In the new immortal sky.
+
+  Oh, not curb or courage only
+  Does my hour demand of me,
+  It is thought supreme and lonely
+  And responsible and free!
+
+  And I quail before the danger
+  As a bark before the blast,
+  When the beacon star's a stranger
+  In the mountains piling fast,
+
+  And there is no light but reason
+  And the compass of the ship.
+  God, a word of thine in season!
+  God, a motion of thy lip!
+
+
+
+
+COMING SPRING
+
+
+  Ice is marching down the river,
+    Gaily out to sea!
+  Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver,
+    Setting torrents free!
+
+  Yellow are the water-willows,
+    Yellow clouds are they,
+  Rising where the laden billows
+    Swell along their way!
+
+  Arrows of the sun are flying!
+    Winter flees the light,
+  And his chilly horn is sighing
+    All the moisty night!
+
+  Lovers of the balmy weather,
+    Lovers of the sun!
+  Drifts and duty melt together--
+    Get your labors done!
+
+  Ice is marching down the river,
+    Gaily out to sea!
+  Sing the healthy-hearted ever,
+    Spring is liberty!
+
+
+
+
+DAISIES
+
+
+  Daisies, daisies, all surprise!
+  Open wide your sunny eyes!
+  See the linnet on the wing;
+  See the crimson feather!
+  See the life in every thing,
+  Sun, and wind, and weather!
+  Shadow of the passer-by,
+  Bare-foot skipping over,
+  Meadow where the heifers lie,
+  Butter-cup, and clover!
+  All is vivid, all is real,
+  All is high surprising!
+  Ye are pure to see and feel;
+  Ye the gift are prizing
+  Men and gods would perish for--
+  Gods with all their thunder!--
+  Could they have the thing ye are,
+  Everlasting wonder!
+
+
+
+
+BOBOLINK
+
+
+  Bright little bird with a downward wing,
+  How many birds within you sing?
+
+  Two or three at the least it seems,
+  Overflowing golden streams.
+
+  If I could warble on a wing so strong,
+  Filling five acres full of song,
+
+  I'd never sit on the grey rail fence,
+  I'd never utter a word of sense,
+
+  I'd float forever in a light blue sky,
+  Uttering joy to the passers-by!
+
+
+
+
+DIOGENES
+
+
+      A hut, and a tree,
+      And a hill for me,
+  And a piece of a weedy meadow.
+
+      I'll ask no thing,
+      Of God or King,
+  But to clear away His shadow.
+
+
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+
+
+
+EARLIER POEMS
+
+A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY
+
+
+Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are
+selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the titles, "The
+Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much--I meant to convey in that
+phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my
+life are drawn--that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning
+here with a word of confession.
+
+An attitude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my
+mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal
+character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some
+absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide
+ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having
+of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and
+eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of
+opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I
+suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of
+Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of
+ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded
+investigation and formulation of "isms," in Sextus Empiricus and the
+little group of Alexandrian scientists--the last light to go out in the
+darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages
+of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it
+appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in
+history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation,
+as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to
+escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in
+human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief
+recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic
+opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance.
+Spinoza follows him, the God-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other
+monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once
+more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and noble enquiry about
+Human Understanding, the sceptic wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that
+would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those
+mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with
+their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the
+mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again
+issuing awakened--for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no
+individual. The awakener is science--empirical science turning its brave
+eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive
+pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world
+has been saved--or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home
+is in these ages of sacred doubt.
+
+Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete
+things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in
+an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a
+brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of
+science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which
+are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the
+subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their
+universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern
+counterpart of the thought of Protagoras, summarized for the ancients
+in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."
+
+This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia
+University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we
+gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a
+scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself
+emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of
+the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my
+poem--that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so
+ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities
+corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity,
+that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the
+concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves;
+and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber
+to annihilate the event of the individual idea--the only actual thing
+denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import.
+In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the
+imagination the thought of Protagoras.
+
+In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy
+and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful sailor
+out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of
+ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example
+to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature
+with moral courage and abandon.
+
+
+
+
+AT THE AQUARIUM
+
+
+  Serene the silver fishes glide,
+  Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;
+  As through the aged deeps of ocean,
+  They glide with wan and wavy motion.
+  They have no pathway where they go,
+  They flow like water to and fro.
+  They watch with never winking eyes,
+  They watch with staring, cold surprise,
+  The level people in the air,
+  The people peering, peering there,
+  Who wander also to and fro,
+  And know not why or where they go,
+  Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
+  Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.
+
+
+
+
+EARTH'S NIGHT
+
+
+  Sombre,
+  Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed
+  With smoky exhalations of the earth,
+  Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind
+  In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.
+  O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!
+  Thou art waving the long grass over thy graves;
+  Murmuring over all thy resting children,
+  That have run and wandered and gone down
+  Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him
+  Who looketh now a moment on these stars,
+  And in the moving boughs of this dark night
+  Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.
+
+
+
+
+THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS
+
+
+  My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,
+  Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought
+  That will to sorrow move all minds forever--
+  All that love to know. It was the hour
+  When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,
+  And the hurriers go home to rest;
+  And we whose task was meditation rose
+  And wound a murmuring way among the books
+  And effigies, the fading fragrance, of
+  A vaulted library--a place to me
+  Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds
+  All the world hath of musty memory
+  In sombre convolutions that are dying.
+  There at our faithful table every day,
+  In the great shadow of this dissolution,
+  We would speak of things eternal, things
+  Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one
+  Who was a leader of the way to them;
+  A man born regal to the realms of thought.
+  High, pale, and sculptural his brow,
+  And high his concourse with the kings of old,
+  Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew--
+  The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber
+  Fell in love with God. It was of him,
+  And that unhungering love of his, he told us;
+  And with soft and stately melody,
+  The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us
+  Sublime above the very motions of
+  Our mortal being, and we walked with him
+  The heights of meditation like the gods.
+  I have no memory surpassing this.
+  And yet--strange pity of our natures or
+  Of his--there ran a rumor poisonous.
+  Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.
+  And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,
+  We whispered things not all philosophy
+  When he was gone. We knew but little where
+  He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,
+  That there was other love in him than what
+  He taught us--love that makes more quickly pale!
+  Ay, even he was tortured with the lure
+  Of mortal motion in the eyes--and lips
+  And limbs that were not warm to him alone
+  Were warm to him. He drank mortality.
+  Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat
+  In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper
+  In the shadow of our meditations.
+  Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour
+  Advancing--livid painting of a thought!
+  He spoke of Substance,--strangely--on that day--
+  Eternal, self-existent, infinite--
+  He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.
+  And as he spoke there came on me that trance
+  Of inattention, when the words would seem
+  To drop their magic of containing things,
+  And, by a shift, become but things themselves--
+  Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.
+  I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till
+  I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and
+  I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things,
+  Are merely modes of but one attribute,
+  Of what is infinite in attributes,
+  And may be called----" He spoke to there, and then--
+  His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped--A crack
+  Behind us--A quick step among the books--
+  His hand, his head, his body all collapsed
+  And fell, or settled utterly, before
+  The fact came on us--he was shot and killed.
+  But little I remember after that.
+  What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed
+  Was done, and all his speculations vanished
+  Like a sound.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE ASCENDING MOON
+
+
+  Rise, rise, aerial creature, fill the sky
+  With supreme wonder, and the bleak earth wash
+  With mystery! Pale, pale enchantress, steer
+  Thy flight high up into the purple blue,
+  Where faint the stars beholding--rain from there
+  Thy lucent influence upon this sphere!
+    I fear thee, sacred mother of the mad!
+  With thy deliberate magic thou of old
+  Didst soothe the perplexed brains of idiots whipped,
+  And scared, and lacerated for their cure--
+  Ay, thou didst spread the balm of sleep on them,
+  Give to their minds a curved emptiness
+  Of silence like the heaven thou dwellest in;
+  Yet didst thou also, with thy rayless light,
+  Make mad the surest, draw from their smooth beds
+  The very sons of Prudence, maniacs
+  To wander forth among the bushes, howl
+  Abroad like eager wolves, and snatch the air!
+  Oft didst thou watch them prowl among the tombs
+  Inviolate of the patient dead, toiling
+  In deeds obscure with stealthy ecstasy,
+  And thou didst palely peer among them, and
+  Expressly shine into their unhinged eyes!
+  I fear thee, languid mother of the mad!
+  For thou hast still thy alien influence;
+  Thou dost sow forth thro' all the fields and hills,
+  And in all chambers of the natural earth,
+  A difference most strange and luminous.
+  This tree, that was the river sycamore,
+  Is in thy pensive effluence become
+  But the mind's mystic essence of a tree,
+  Upright luxuriance thought upon--the stream
+  Is liquid timeless motion undefined--
+  The world's a gesture dim. Like rapturous thought,
+  Which can the rigorous concrete obscure
+  Unto annihilation, and create
+  Upon the dark a universal vision,
+  Thou--even on this bold and local earth,
+  The site of the obtruding actual--
+  Thou dost erect in awful purity
+  The filmy architecture of all dreams.
+  And they are perfect. Thou dost shed like light
+  Perfection, and a vision give to man
+  Of things superior to the tough act,
+  Existence, and almost co-equals of
+  His own unnamed, and free, and infinite wish!
+  Phantoms, phantoms of the transfixed mind!
+    Pour down, O moon, upon the listening earth--
+  The earth unthinking, thy still eloquence!
+  Shine in the children's eyes. They drink thy light,
+  And laugh in innocence of sorcery,
+  And love thy silver. I laugh not, nor gaze
+  With half-closed lids upon the awakened night.
+  Nay, oft when thou art hailed above the hill,
+  I lean not forth, I hide myself in tasks,
+  Even to the blunt comfort of routine
+  I cling, to drowse my soul against thy charm,
+  Yearning for thee, ethereal miracle!
+
+
+
+
+LEIF ERICSON
+
+
+  Through the murk of the ocean of history northward and far,
+  I descry thee, O Sailor! Thy deed like the dive of a star
+  Doth startle the ages of darkness through which it is hurled,
+  Doth flash, and flare out, and is gone from the eyes of the world!
+
+  What watchers beheld thee, and heralding followed thy lead,
+  Or bugled the nations into the track of thy deed?
+  What continent soundeth thy name, what people thy praise?
+  Who sendeth the signal of gratitude back to the days
+  When thou in thy boat didst put forth from the world, and defy
+  Infinity, ignorance, tempest, and ocean, and sky?
+  No, history brags not of God, nor doth history brag
+  Of thee, sailor, who carried thy sail and thy sea-colored flag
+  Clear over His seas, drove into His mystery old
+  The prow of thy sixty-foot skerry, whose quivering hold
+  Could dip but a cupful out of His watery wrath,
+  That stormed thee, and snatched at thy bowsprit, and licked up thy path!
+
+  When mythical rumor sky-carried ran over the earth,
+  With the whisper of lands that were dreamed of beyond the red birth
+  Of the west-wind, the blood of thy body took running fire
+  To launch and be swift o'er the sea as a man's desire!
+
+  O rare is the northern morning that shineth for thee!
+  A million silvering crests on the cold blue sea--
+  And the wind drives in from the jubilant sea to the land,
+  And, catching thy laughter, it tosses the cloak in thy hand,
+  As taunting thee forth to thy sails in the frosty air,
+  Where thousands surround thee with awe and a wondering prayer.
+  And they that stand with thee--tumultuous-hearted they stand!
+  They bend at thy word--I hear the boat sing on the sand--
+  And they slip to their oars as the boat leaps aloft on a wave,
+  With thee at the windy helm, joyful and joyfully brave!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  The depth of the billows is awful, the depth of the sky
+  Is silent as God. Silent the dark on high.
+  Naught sings to thy heart save thy heart and the wind, the wild giant
+  Of ocean, agrin in the darkness, who rattles defiant
+  A laugh through thy rigging, and howls from the clouds at thee,
+  And moans in a mimic of pain and a murmurous glee.
+  Still stern I behold thee, thy stature dim through the dark,
+  Unmoved, unreleasing the helm of thy storm-driven bark.
+  "O God of our fathers, give signs to our sea-worn eyes!
+  Give sight to Thy sailors! Give but the sun to arise
+  In the morn on an island pale in the haze of the west!
+  O beam of the star in the north, is thy only behest
+  To gesture me onward eternally unto no shore
+  Of these high and wild waters, famed for their hunger of yore?
+  Then give to thy sailor for life the courage of death,
+  To encounter the taunt of this wind with a rougher breath
+  Of gigantic contempt in the soul for where and when,
+  So it be onward impetuous, living, onward again!
+  He saileth safe who carrieth death on board,
+  He flieth a laughing sail in the wrath of the Lord!"
+  So sang thy heart to thy heart, and so to the swinging sea
+  In a lull of the wind, the song of a spirit free!
+
+  Serene adventurer, lover of distance divine,
+  Pursuing thy love forever though never thine,
+  O sun-tanned king with thy blue eyes over the sea,
+  Who dares to sing, and live, the praise of thee?
+
+  Not they that safe in a haven of certainty, steer
+  From mooring to mooring with faith and with fear,
+  And pray for a map of the universe, pointer, and plan,
+  When all the blue waves of the ocean the courage of man
+  Challenge to venture, not they are the praisers of thee!
+  Nor they who sail for the cargo, and dream that the sea,
+  In its wanton wild infinite wonder of motion and sound,
+  Is bound by a purpose, as their little breathing is bound.
+  The profit of thy great sailing to thee was small,
+  And unto the world it was nothing--a man, that was all,
+  And his deed like a star, to flame in the dull old sky!
+  Of the story of apathy, age after decorous age going by!
+  Grapes were thy import, winey and luscious to eat,
+  Grapes, and a story--"The dew in the west was sweet!"
+  Wine of the distance ever the reddest seems,
+  And sweet is the world to the dreamer and doer of dreams!
+  Weigh them, O pale-headed merchant--little ye know!
+  Compute, O desk-dwellers, ye will not measure him so,
+  For ye know only knowledge, ye know not the drive of the will
+  That brought it with passion to birth--it driveth still
+  Through the hearts of the kindred of earth, the forward fleeing,
+  The kin of the stormy soul at the helm of all-being!
+  Sailors, unreefed, and high-masted, and wet, and free,
+  Who sail in the love of the billows, whose port is the sea--
+  They sing thee, O Leif the Lucky, they sing thee sublime,
+  And launch with thee, glad as with God, on the ocean of time!
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     Leif Ericson, the Norse adventurer, sailed to America 500 years
+     before Columbus.
+
+
+
+
+MIDNIGHT
+
+
+                Midnight is come,
+  And thinly in the deepness of the gloom
+  Truth rises startle-eyed out of a tomb,
+                And we are dumb.
+
+                A death-bell tolls,
+  And we still shudder round the too smooth bed,
+  For Truth makes pallid watch above the dead,
+                Freezing our souls.
+
+                But day returns,
+  Light and the garish life, and we are brave,
+  For Truth sinks wanly down into her grave.
+                Yet the heart yearns.
+
+
+
+
+IN MARCH
+
+
+  On a soaked fence-post a little blue-backed bird,
+  Opening her sweet throat, has stirred
+  A million music-ripples in the air
+  That curl and circle everywhere.
+  They break not shallow at my ear,
+  But quiver far within. Warm days are near!
+
+
+
+
+TO THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH
+
+
+  Soft little daughters of the mead,
+  The random bush, the wanton weed,
+  That lived to love, and loved to breed,
+      Who hither bound you?
+  You're innocent of all the screed
+      That blows around you.
+
+  Sweet daffodils so laughing yellow,
+  Beneath a bending pussy-willow,
+  You need not try to gulp and swallow
+      The Apostles' Creed,
+  Or shudder at the fates that follow
+      Adam's deed.
+
+  Big bloody hymns the choir sings,
+  And blows it to the King of Kings,
+  The while you dream of humble things
+      That wander there
+  Where first you spread your golden wings
+      On summer air;
+
+  Like Jesus, simple and divine,
+  In beauty, not in raiment fine,
+  Who asked no high or holier shrine
+      In which to pray,
+  Than garden groves of Palestine
+      'Neath olives gray.
+
+  His name, I think, would still be bright
+  Though churches were unbuilded quite,
+  And they whose hearts are toward the height
+      Should simple be,
+  And lift their heads into the light
+      As straight as ye.
+
+
+
+
+TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT
+
+
+  Good-night, little bed, with your patient white pillow,
+  Your light little spread, and your blanket of yellow!
+  I wonder what leaves you so pensive to-night--
+  The breezes are tender, the stars are so bright,
+  I should think you would wrinkle a little and smile,
+  And be happy to think we can sleep for a while.
+  Are you waiting for something? Or are you just seeming
+  To listen so breathlessly, hushed, as though dreaming
+  A form that is fresher than breezes so light,
+  A coming more precious than stars to the night,
+  Who shall mould you as soft as the breast of a billow,
+  And crown with all beauty your patient white pillow?
+  Good-night, little bed--are you lonely so late?
+  We will lie down together, together we'll wait.
+
+
+
+
+IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA
+
+_Scene_: A cell leading to the gallows.
+
+_Characters_: A noble lady, who is an assassin.
+              A common murderer.
+
+
+  The chilling gray, a ghost of mortal dawn,
+  Has touched them, and they know the hour. The guard
+  Shifts guiltily his shoes upon the stone.
+  They raise their eyes in languid terror; but
+  The moment passes, and 'tis still again--
+  Save, in some piteous way she moves her throat.
+  There is a wandering of her burning eyes,
+  Until they fix, and strangely stare upon
+  The face of her companion. They would plead
+  Against the heavy horror of his look;
+  For not an idiot's corpse could strike the soul
+  More sick with wonder.
+                            "O look up and speak
+  To me!"--Her voice is startling to the walls--
+  "Speak any word against this gloom!"
+
+                                            He moves
+  A blood-deserted eye, but answers not.
+  "Tell if 'twas cold and filthy where you lay!"
+
+  "Ay, filthy cold! 'Twas cold enough to keep
+  The carrion from rotting on these bones!
+  They never kill us--never 'til we hang!"
+
+  He spoke a brutal tongue against the gloom.
+  And there was heard far off a step, a voice.
+  The guard stood up; a quiver moved her limbs.
+
+  "Give me some simple word. Give me your hand
+  In comradeship. We die together--and
+  The while we breathe--we are each other's world."
+
+  "No--not your world, my lady! Though we die,
+  I have no grace to give a hand to you.
+  My hand is thick and dirty--yours is pale!"
+
+  "You say 'my lady' in the very tomb!
+  Will even death not laugh this weakness off
+  Your tongue? To think nobility abides
+  This hour! _My lady!_ O, it is a curse
+  That whips me at the grave! I was not born--
+  Can I not even die, a human soul?"
+  "Yes, you can die! And better--you can kill!
+  'Tis not your ladyship--the gallows' rope
+  Snaps that to nothing! Death? Not death alone
+  Can laugh at your nobility--I laugh.
+  No--not your piteous ladyship--that dies.
+  It is your crime that daunts me--That shall live!
+  To plant, with this fine delicate little hand,
+  Small heavy death into the very heart
+  Of time-defended tyranny--that lives!
+  The future is all life for you. For me--
+  A glassy look, a yell into the air,
+  And I am gone! No life springs up from me!
+  I am the dirt that drank the drippings of
+  A guilty murder--that is why I sit
+  Like sickness here, and goad you with my shame!
+  I'll take your hand. I'll tell you I was starved,
+  Wrecked, shattered to the bones with drunken hunger,
+  And I killed for gold. I'll tell you this--
+  Your crime shall live to blot the memory
+  Of mine, and me, and all the insane tribe
+  Of us, who having strength in poverty
+  Will not lie down and starve--blot off the world
+  Our having been--the crime of our killed hopes,
+  And gradual infamy!"
+
+                              The fever gleam
+  Was in his eyes--the future! There it burned
+  A moment, while he stood to see the door
+  Swing darkly open, and the guard salute.
+  She stood beside him. And together in
+  High union of their fainting hearts, they faced
+  The hour that brought them to their level graves.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+  March, 1912.
+
+
+
+
+TO A TAWNY THRUSH
+
+
+  Pine spirit!
+  Breath and voice of a wild glade!
+  In the wild forest near it,
+  In the cool hemlock or the leafy limb,
+  Whereunder
+  Thou didst run and wander
+  Thro' the sun and shade,
+  An elvish echo and a shadow dim,
+  There in the twilight thou dost lift thy song,
+  And give the stilly woods a silver tongue.
+  Out of what liquid is thy laughing made?
+  A sister of the water thou dost seem,
+  The quivering cataract thou singest near,
+  Whose glistening stream,
+  Unto the listening ear,
+  Thou dost outrun with thy cascade
+  Of music beautiful and swift and clear--
+  A joy unto the mournful forest given!
+  As when afar
+  A travelling star
+  Across our midnight races,
+  A moving gleam that quickly ceases,
+  Lost in the blue black abyss of heaven,
+  So doth thy light and silver singing
+  Start and thrill
+  The silence round thy piney hill,
+  Unto the sober hour a jewel bringing--
+  A mystery--a strain of rhythm fleeing--
+  A vagrant echo winging
+  Back to the unuttered theme of being!
+
+
+
+
+THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES
+
+
+  Poet, thy dreams are grateful to the air
+  And the light loves them. Tho' they murmur not,
+  Their carven stillness is a music rare,
+  And like the song of one whose tongue hath caught
+  The clear ethereal essence of his thought.
+
+  I hear the talkers come, the changing throngs
+  That with the fashions of a day surround
+  Thy visions, and I hear them quell their tongues,
+  And hush their querulous shoes upon the ground;
+  Thy dreams are with the crown of silence crowned--
+
+  Though they feel not the glowing diadem,
+  Who sleep for aye in their cool shapes of stone.
+  Nor ever will the sunlight waken them,
+  Nor ever will they turn their eyes and moan,
+  To think that their brief Poet's life is gone.
+
+  The tender and the lofty soul is gone,
+  Who eyed them forth from darkness, and confessed
+  His spirit's motion in unmoving stone.
+  His praise upon no mortal tongue doth rest;
+  By these unwhispering lips it is expressed.
+
+  Soon will the ample arms of night withdraw
+  Her shuffling children from the twilit hall--
+  From that heroic presence, in dim awe
+  Of whom the dark withholds a while her pall,
+  And leaves him luminous above them all.
+
+  Then are ye lost in darkness and alone,
+  Ye ghostly spirits! And the moment rare
+  Doth quicken that too sad and nameless stone,
+  To move her robe, and spill her sable hair,
+  And be in silence mingled with the air;
+
+  For she is one with the dim glimmering hour,
+  And the white spirits beautiful and still,
+  And the veiled memory of the vanished power
+  That moulded them, the high and infinite will
+  That earth begets and earth does not fulfil.
+
+         *       *       *       *       *
+
+     These statues were exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum after
+     the sculptor's death. The figures alluded to are the famous
+     statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the monument in memory of Mrs.
+     Henry Adams, the original of which is in the Rock Creek
+     Cemetery at Washington.
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER SUNDAY
+
+
+  Borne on the low lake wind there floats to me,
+  Out of the distant hill, a sigh of bells,
+  Mystic, worshipful, almost unheard,
+  As though the past should answer me, and I
+  In pagan solitude bow down my head.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+  Passages in italics are indicated by _italics_.
+
+  Punctuation has been corrected without note.
+
+  Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained
+  from the original.
+
+  It is not always possible to determine if a new stanza begins at
+  the top of a printed page, but every effort has been made by the
+  transcriber to retain stanza breaks where appropriate.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Colors of Life, by Max Eastman
+
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