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+Project Gutenberg's Giant Hours With Poet Preachers, by William L. Stidger
+
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+Title: Giant Hours With Poet Preachers
+
+Author: William L. Stidger
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7115]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: EDWIN MARKHAM ]
+
+
+GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM L. STIDGER
+
+Introduction by
+Edwin Markham
+
+
+
+
+
+To
+WHITE-SOULED
+EDWIN MARKHAM
+DEMOCRACY'S VOICE, HUMANITY'S FRIEND
+I DEDICATE THIS BOOK
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+FOREWORD.
+
+
+AMERICAN POETS:
+
+I. EDWIN MARKHAM.
+
+II. VACHEL LINDSAY.
+
+III. JOAQUIN MILLER.
+
+IV. ALAN SEEGER.
+
+
+ENGLISH POETS
+
+V. JOHN OXENHAM.
+
+VI. ALFRED NOYES.
+
+VII. JOHN MASEFIELD.
+
+VIII. ROBERT SERVICE.
+
+IX. RUPERT BROOKE.
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF PORTRAITS:
+
+EDWIN MARKHAM.
+
+VACHEL LINDSAY.
+
+JOAQUIN MILLER.
+
+ALAN SEEGER.
+
+JOHN OXENHAM.
+
+ALFRED NOYES.
+
+JOHN MASEFIELD.
+
+ROBERT SERVICE.
+
+RUPERT BROOKE.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+In writing to the readers of Mr. Stidger's book I feel as though I were
+writing to old friends, friends who may have an interest in knowing
+some of the thoughts that I hold regarding questions of the hour and
+questions of the future.
+
+The Christian as he looks out upon the battling and broken world sees
+much to sadden his heart. Thinkers are everywhere asking, "Is
+Christianity a failure?" I hasten to assure you that Christianity has
+not failed, for Christianity has nowhere been tried yet, nowhere been
+tried in a large social sense. Christianity has been tried by
+individuals, and it has been found to be comforting and transforming.
+But it has never been tried by any large group of people in any one
+place--never by a whole city--never by a whole kingdom---never by a
+whole people. It is for this trial that the watching angels are
+waiting.
+
+Our holy religion is not a saving power merely for individuals; it is
+also a saving power for society in its industrial order. We have
+applied it to the individual in the past, but we have never made any
+wholehearted effort to make religion the working principle of society.
+Religion is always cooperative and brotherly, but we have not yet made
+any earnest effort to apply the cooperative and brotherly principle
+to business. We have tried to persuade the individual to express the
+ideals of the Sermon on the Mount, but we have made no earnest effort
+to urge society to express the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount.
+
+Therefore, while it is true that we have individual Christians--men and
+women who make noble sacrifices in their effort to live the good
+life--it is also true that we have no Christian society anywhere on
+earth, no Christian civilization anywhere under the stars. Sometimes
+a careless talker will refer to our social order as "a Christian
+civilization." All such references, dear friends, disturb our hearts;
+for they prove that the speaker has no conception of what a Christian
+civilization would be, how noble and brotherly it would be. Five
+minutes' reading of the Sermon on the Mount will convince any alert
+mind that we are yet thousands of miles from a Christian civilization.
+To speak of only one thing, it is certain that in a Christian
+civilization these cruel riches we see standing side by side with these
+cruel poverties could not exist; they would all crumble and vanish away
+in the fire of the social passion of the Christ.
+
+If we have not a Christian civilization, what have we? We have a
+civilization that is half barbaric; we have a social order with a light
+sprinkling of Christians in it. It is the hope of the future that this
+body of earnest Christian men and women will awaken to the call of the
+social Christ, awake determined to infuse his spirit into the
+industrial order, and thus extend the power of the cross down into the
+material ground of our existence. Men are not fully saved until tools
+are saved, till industries are saved. They must all be lit with the
+brother spirit of Christ the Artisan.
+
+All of this transformation is implied in the Sermon on the Mount. For
+that sermon may be taken to be the first draft of the constitution of
+the new social order that the Christ has in his heart for men. It was
+this new order that he had in mind when he uttered the great
+invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
+will give you rest." All the work-worn toilers of the world were to
+find rest in the new brotherly order about to be established on the
+earth. The Master has laid one great duty upon his followers--to
+embrother men and to emparadise the world.
+
+This is a great labor, for it demands that the spirit of the brother
+Christ shall sing in all the wheels and sound in all the steps of our
+industrial life. It means that the Golden Rule shall become the working
+principle in our social order. This is the salvation that Christ came
+to bring to the world; this is the glad tidings; this the good news to
+men!
+
+This is only a glimpse of the great social truth of the Lord that is
+beginning to break like a new morning upon the world. And what I
+have said in this letter I have tried a thousand times to say in my
+poems that have gone out into the world. And this new note I catch in
+the lines of the poets everywhere in modern poets, especially in the
+poets discussed in the following pages.
+
+Yours in the Fellowship of the great hopes,
+
+[Signature: Edwin Markham]
+
+West New Brighton, N. Y.
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+Vachel Lindsay, one of the modern Christian poets, whose writings are
+discussed in this book, has expressed the reason for the book itself in
+these four lines:
+
+ "I wish that I had learned by heart
+ Some lyrics read that day;
+ I knew not 'twas a giant hour
+ That soon would pass away."
+
+The author of this book makes no assumption that the "Giant Hours" are
+in the setting he has given these literary gems, but in the "lyrics"
+themselves.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN POETS
+
+
+EDWIN MARKHAM
+
+VACHEL LINDSAY
+
+JOAQUIN MILLER
+
+ALAN SEEGER
+
+
+
+
+EDWIN MARKHAM
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission of the publishers, Doubleday, Page & Co., and are taken
+from the following works: The Shoes of Happiness and The Man with the
+Hoe.]
+
+A STUDY OF HAPPINESS IN POVERTY, IN SERVICE, IN LOWLINESS; AND A BIT OF
+"SCRIPT" FOR THE JOURNEY OF LIFE
+
+
+Edwin Markham is the David of modern poetry. He is biblical in the
+simplicity of his style. He, like the poet of old, tended sheep on "The
+Suisün Hills," and of it he speaks:
+
+ "Long, long ago I was a shepherd boy,
+ My young heart touched with wonder and wild joy."
+
+
+THE SHOES OF HAPPINESS.
+
+None less than William Dean Howells has said of him, "Excepting always
+my dear Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Markham is the first of the Americans."
+"The greatest poet of the century" is the estimate of Ella Wheeler
+Wilcox; and Francis Grierson adds, "Edwin Markham is one of the
+greatest poets of the age, and the greatest poet of democracy." Dr.
+David G. Downey makes his estimate of the poet, in his book, Modern
+Poets and Christian Teaching, a little broader and deeper in the two
+phrases: "He is not more poet than prophet," and, "He is the poet of
+humanity--of man in relations." And of them all I feel that the latter
+estimate is best put, for Edwin Markham is more than "the poet of
+democracy"; he is the poet of all humanity, down on the earth where
+humanity lives. And that Dr. Downey was right in calling him "prophet"
+one needs but to read some lines from "The Man with the Hoe" in the
+light of the Russian revolution, and proof is made:
+
+ "O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
+ Is this the handiwork you give to God,
+ This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
+ How will you ever straighten up this shape?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
+ When those who shaped him to the thing he is--
+ When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
+ After the silence of the centuries?"
+
+
+THE MAN WITH THE HOE.
+
+"How will it be with kingdoms and with kings?" the "Man with the Hoe"
+is answering in Russia this star-lit night and sun-illumined day. Yes,
+Markham is prophet as well as poet. And to this humble writer's way of
+reading poetry there were never four lines for pure poetry more
+beautifully writ, neither across the seas, nor here at home, neither
+east nor west, than these four from "Virgilia":
+
+ "Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled
+ And the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
+ Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
+ And the springs of the seas run dust."
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+Prophetic? Yes! But ah, the music of it! Here rings and here sings
+David the shepherd; the sweet lute, the harp, the wind in the trees,
+the surge of the ocean-reef. It is music of a high and holy kind.
+
+Which reminds me that I am to treat in this chapter on Markham only of
+what he has written since 1906, the preceding period, best known
+through his "Man with the Hoe," having been discussed by Dr. Downey in
+the book heretofore mentioned. I have the joy-task in these brief lines
+to bring to you Markham's "The Shoes of Happiness," which seems to me
+the strongest book he has written, not forgetting, either, "The Hoe"
+book, as he himself calls it.
+
+If you have the privilege of personal friendship with this "Father
+Poet," he will write for you somewhere, some time, some place, these
+four favorite lines, with a twinkle in his eyes that is half boy and
+half sage, but all love, which quatrain he calls "Outwitted":
+
+ "He drew a circle that shut me out--
+ Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
+ But Love and I had the wit to win:
+ We drew a circle that took him in!"
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+And with these four lines he introduces the new book of poems, "The
+Shoes of Happiness."
+
+
+THE HAPPINESS OF POVERTY
+
+One wonders where "The Shoes of Happiness" may be found, and the answer
+is forthcoming in the first of "Six Stories," when he finds that the
+Sultan Mahmoud is near unto death, and that there is just one thing
+that will make him well, and that is that he may wear the shoes of a
+perfectly happy man:
+
+ "For only by this can you break the ban:
+ You must wear the shoes of a happy man."
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+The Vizier was sent to find these shoes or lose his own head:
+
+ "Go forth, Vizier, when the dawn is red,
+ And bring me the shoes, or send instead,
+ By the hand of this trusted slave, your head!"
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+He first found a crowd of idle rich going forth for a day's outing
+among the fields and flowers, a "swarm of the folk of high degree," and
+thought to find the shoes here, but, alas! he found that
+
+ "In each glad heart was a wistful cry;
+ Behind each joy was a secret sigh."
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+He turned from the rich and sought the homes of the poor, and the
+Father in the home of the poor said unto him:
+
+ "Ah, Vizier,
+ I have seven sweet joys, but I have one fear:
+ The dread of to-morrow ever is here!"
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+A Poet was found weaving a song of happiness, and the Vizier thought
+that surely here would he find the man with the "happy shoes," but the
+Poet cried:
+
+ "No," sighed the poet; "you do me wrong,
+ For sorrow is ever the nest of song."
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+Everywhere that he wandered in search he found some touch of
+unhappiness. He tried Youth and Age, but,
+
+ "The young were restless that youth should stay,
+ The old were sad that it went away."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+He thought to find the shoes on the feet of the Lover, but heard the
+Lover say:
+
+ "Yes, yes; but love is a tower of fears,
+ A joy half torment, a heaven half tears!"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+He had heard of a wise old Sage, who had been to Mecca, and sought him
+only to hear, "I am not glad; I am only wise." At last he heard of a
+man from far Algiers. With hurried steps he sought in vain. At last one
+day he found a man lying in a field:
+
+ "'Ho,' cried Halil, 'I am seeking one
+ Whose days are all in a brightness run.'--
+ 'Then I am he, for I have no lands,
+ Nor have any gold to crook my hands.
+ Favor, nor fortune, nor fame have I,
+ And I only ask for a road and a sky--
+ These, and a pipe of the willow-tree
+ To whisper the music out of me.'
+
+ "Out into the field the vizier ran.
+ 'Allah-il-Allah! but you are the man;
+ Your shoes then, quick, for the great sultan--
+ Quick, and all fortunes are yours to choose!'
+ 'Yes, mighty Vizier,... but I have no shoes!'"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+
+THE HAPPINESS OF LOWLINESS
+
+And just as this opening poem teaches the happiness of poverty, so the
+next, "The Juggler of Touraine," teaches the happiness of lowliness.
+
+Poor Barnabas, just a common juggler, when winter came, because he had
+been spending the summer amusing people, had no place to go, and a
+sympathetic monk took him into the monastery to live. Barnabas was
+happy for a time; but after a while, as he saw everybody else
+worshiping the Beautiful Mother with lute and brush, viol, drum,
+talent, and prayer, he began to feel that his talents were
+worthless:
+
+ "But I, poor Barnabas, nothing can I,
+ But drone in the sun as a drowsy fly."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+Then came a thought that leaped like flame over his being, and an hour
+later the monks found him, kneeling in the sacred altar place. What he
+was doing chagrined them. They were shocked just as many people of this
+day, to see a man worshiping with a different bend of the knee than
+that to which they had been accustomed. How prone we are to judge those
+who do not worship just as we have worshiped! This seems such a common
+human weakness that Alfred Noyes, with a touch of kindly indignation,
+speaks a word in "The Forest of Wild Thyme" that may be interjected
+just here in this study of Barnabas the juggler, whom the monks
+indignantly found worshiping the Virgin by juggling his colored balls
+in the air, and speaking thus as he juggled:
+
+ "'Lady,' he cried again, 'look, I entreat:
+ I worship with fingers, and body, and feet!"
+
+ "And they heard him cry at Our Lady's shrine:
+ 'All that I am, Madame, all is thine!
+ Again I come with spangle and ball
+ To lay at your altar my little, my all!'"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+But the poor old monks were indignant. They, and some others of more
+modern days, had never caught the real gist of the "Judge not" of the
+New Testament; nor had they read Noyes:
+
+ "How foolish, then, you will agree,
+ Are those who think that all must see
+ The world alike, or those who scorn
+ Another, who perchance, was born
+ Where--in a different dream from theirs--
+ What they called sins to him are prayers!
+ We cannot judge; we cannot know;
+ All things mingle, all things flow;
+ There's only one thing constant here--
+ Love--that untranscended sphere:
+ Love, that while all ages run
+ Holds the wheeling worlds in one;
+ Love, that, as your sages tell,
+ Soars to heaven and sinks to hell."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+No, we have no right to judge one another. The monks condemned poor
+Barnabas because he was not worshiping as they had always worshiped.
+They too forgot the real spirit of worship as they condemned him:
+
+"'Nothing like this do the rules provide!
+ This is scandal, this is a shame,
+ This madcap prank in Our Lady's name.
+ Out of the doors with him; back to the street:
+ He has no place at Our Lady's feet!'"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+However, then, as now, men are not the final judges:
+
+ "But why do the elders suddenly quake,
+ Their eyes a-stare and their knees a-shake?
+ Down from the rafters arching high,
+ Her blowing mantle blue with the sky--
+ Lightly down from the dark descends
+ The Lady of Beauty and lightly bends
+ Over Barnabas stretched in the altar place,
+ And wipes the dew from his shining face;
+ Then touching his hair with a look of light,
+ Passes again from the mortal sight.
+ An odor of lilies hallows the air,
+ And sounds as of harpings are everywhere.
+
+ "'Ah,' cry the elders, beating the breast,
+ 'So the lowly deed is the lofty test!
+ And whatever is done from the heart to Him
+ Is done from the height of the Seraphim!'"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+
+"HOW THE GREAT GUEST CAME"
+
+A STUDY OF COMPLETE HAPPINESS IN SERVICE
+
+I have never found a poem which more truly pictures the Christ and how
+he comes to human beings than this one of Markham's. Conrad the cobbler
+had a dream, when he had grown old, that the Master would come "His
+guest to be." He arose at dawn on that day of great expectations,
+decorated his simple shop with boughs of green and waited:
+
+ "His friends went home; and his face grew still
+ As he watched for the shadow across the sill;
+ He lived all the moments o'er and o'er,
+ When the Lord should enter the lowly door--
+ The knock, the call, the latch pulled up,
+ The lighted face, the offered cup.
+ He would wash the feet where the spikes had been;
+ He would kiss the hands where the nails went in;
+ And then at last he would sit with him
+ And break the bread as the day grew dim."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+But the Master did not come. Instead came a beggar and the cobbler gave
+him shoes; instead came an old crone with a heavy load of faggots. He
+gave her a lift with her load and some of the food that he had prepared
+for the Christ when he should come. Finally a little child came, crying
+along the streets, lost. He pitied the child and left his shop to take
+it to its mother; such was his great heart of love. He hurried back
+that he might not miss the Great Guest when he came. But the Great
+Guest did not come. As the evening came and the shadows were falling
+through the window of his shop, more and more the truth, with all
+its weight of sadness, bore in upon him, that the dream was not to come
+true; that he had made a mistake; that Christ was not to come to his
+humble shop. His heart was broken and he cried out in his
+disappointment:
+
+ "Why is it, Lord, that your feet delay?
+ Did you forget that this was the day?"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+Then what sweeter scene in all the lines of the poetry of the world
+than this that follows? Where is Christ more wonderfully and simply
+summed up; his spirit of love, and care?
+
+ "Then soft in the silence a voice he heard:
+ 'Lift up your heart, for I kept my word.
+ Three times I came to your friendly door;
+ Three times my shadow was on your floor.
+ I was the beggar with bruised feet;
+ I was the woman you gave to eat;
+ I was the child on the homeless street!'"
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+One is reminded here of Masefield's "The Everlasting Mercy," wherein he
+speaks as Markham speaks about the child:
+
+ "And he who gives a child a treat
+ Makes joy-bells ring in Heaven's street;
+ And he who gives a child a home
+ Builds palaces in Kingdom Come;
+ And she who gives a baby birth
+ Brings Saviour Christ again to earth."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these my
+brethren, ye have done it unto me," another great-hearted Poet once
+said; and these words Markham, in "How the Great Guest Came," has made
+real.
+
+
+"SCRIPT FOR THE JOURNEY"
+
+"Script for the Journey" is all that it claims to be. Markham is not
+doing what Lindsay did. Lindsay started out on a long journey with only
+his poems for money. He meant to make his way buying his food with a
+verse. And he did that very thing. But Markham had a different idea, an
+idea that all of us need script for that larger journey, script that is
+not money and script that does not buy mere material food, but food for
+the soul. He means it to be script that will help us along the hard
+way. And he who has this script is rich indeed, in his inner life.
+
+
+"THE PLACE OF PEACE"
+
+One would pay much for peace at any time, but especially when one on
+the journey of life is wearied unto death with sin, and bickering,
+and trouble and hurt and pain. Life holds so much heartache and
+heartbreak. Markham has herein the answer:
+
+ "At the heart of the cyclone tearing the sky,
+ And flinging the clouds and the towers by,
+ Is a place of central calm;
+ So here in the roar of mortal things,
+ I have a place where my spirit sings,
+ In the hollow of God's palm."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+And when we learn to put our business ventures there as Abbey has his
+Sir Galahad do in the Vigil panel of "The Search for the Holy Grail,"
+in Boston Library; and when we have learned to put our homes, and our
+children, and our souls "In the hollow of God's palm," there will be
+peace on the journey of life. Yes, that is good script.
+
+
+"ANCHORED TO THE INFINITE"
+
+What a lesson the poet brings us from the great swinging bridge at
+Niagara, as he tells of the tiny thread that was flown from a kite
+from shore to shore; and then a larger string, and then a heavy cord,
+and then a rope, and finally the great cable, and the mighty bridge.
+And this he applies to life!
+
+ "So we may send our little timid thought
+ Across the void out to God's reaching hands--Send
+ out our love and faith to thread the deep--
+ Thought after thought until the little cord
+ Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
+ And--we are anchored to the Infinite."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+Who does not need to know how simple a thing will lead to infinite
+anchorage? Who does not need to know that just the tiny threads of
+love and faith will draw greater cords and greater, stronger ropes
+until at last the chasm between man and God on the journey is bridged,
+and we may be anchored to him forever. This indeed is good script for
+the journey of life Godward.
+
+
+"THERE IS NO TIME FOR HATE"
+
+The world is full of hate these days. War-mad Germany produced "The
+Hymn of Hate," the lowest song that ever was written in the history of
+the world. It seems impossible that a censorship so strict could ever
+let such a mass of mire out to the world. But when one reads this
+Markham poem, he somehow feels that life is so big, and yet so brief,
+that even in war we are all brother-men and, as the opening lines say,
+
+ "There is no time for hate, O wasteful friend:
+ Put hate away until the ages end.
+ Have you an ancient wound? Forget the wrong.
+ Out in my West, a forest loud with song
+ Towers high and green over a field of snow,
+ Over a glacier buried far below."
+
+ The Shoes of Happiness.
+
+And if all the world would learn the meaning of this great phrase,
+"There is no time for hate," the world would happier be. Good script
+for the journey? The best there is, is to know "There is no time for
+hate."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+VACHEL LINDSAY, POET OF TOWN; AND CITY TOO
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Congo, and
+General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, Published by the Macmillan
+Company, New York.]
+
+A STUDY OF CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES IN VILLAGE AND CITY; ON TEMPERANCE,
+MISSIONS, AND RACES
+
+
+Vachel Lindsay is not only a poet but he is also a preacher. I do not
+know whether he is ordained or not, but in a leaflet that he recently
+sent me, he says, "Mr. Lindsay offers the following sermons to be
+preached on short notice and without a collection, in any chapel that
+will open its doors as he passes by: 'The Gospel of the Hearth,' 'The
+Gospel of Voluntary Poverty,' 'The Holiness of Beauty.'"
+
+His truly great book, "The Congo," that poem which so sympathetically
+catches the spirit of the uplift of the Negro race through
+Christianity, that weird, musical, chanting, swinging, singing,
+sweeping, weeping, rhythmic, flowing, swaying, clanging, banging,
+leaping, laughing, groaning, moaning book of the elementals, was
+inspired suddenly, one Sabbath evening, as the poet sat in church
+listening to a returned missionary speaking on "The Congo." Nor a Poe
+nor a Lanier ever wrote more weirdly or more musically.
+
+[Illustration: VACHEL LINDSAY]
+
+The poet himself, Christian to the bone, suggests that his poetry must
+be chanted to get the full sweep and beauty. This I have done, alone
+by my wood fire of a long California evening, and have found it
+strangely, beautifully, wonderfully full of memories of church. I think
+that it is the echo of old hymns that I catch in his poetry. Biblical
+they are, in their simplicity, Christian until they drip with love.
+
+
+CHRIST AND THE CITY SOUL
+
+I think that no Christian poet has so caught the soul of the real city.
+One phrase that links Christ with the city is the old-fashioned yet
+ever thrilling phrase, "The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the
+Holy Spirit."
+
+An electrical sign suggests prayer to him. It is a unique thought in "A
+Rhyme About An Electrical Advertising Sign," the lines of which startle
+one almost with their newness:
+
+ "Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies,
+ As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise.
+ And we shall be lifted rejoicing by night,
+ Till we join with the planets who choir their delight.
+ The signs in the street and the signs in the skies
+ Shall make a new Zodiac guiding the wise,
+ And Broadway make one, with that marvelous stair
+ That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer."
+
+ The Congo.
+
+He looks straight up above the signs to heaven. But he does not forget
+to look down also, where the people are, the folks that walk and live
+and crawl under the electric signs. In "Galahad, Knight Who Perished"
+(a poem dedicated to all crusaders against the international and
+interstate traffic in young girls), this phrase rings and rings its way
+into Christian consciousness:
+
+ "Galahad--knight who perished--awaken again,
+ Teach us to fight for immaculate ways among men."
+
+ The Congo.
+
+And again and again one is rudely awakened from his ease by such lines
+as "The leaden-eyed" children of the city which he pictures:
+
+ "Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
+ Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
+ Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
+ Not that they die, but that they die like sheep."
+
+ The Congo.
+
+Who has not seen factory windows in village, town, and city, and who
+has not known that "Factory windows are always broken"? How this smacks
+of pall, and smoke, and dirt, and grind, and hurt and little weak
+children, slaves of industry! Thank God, Vachel Lindsay, that the
+Christian Church has found an ally in you; and poet and preacher
+together--for they are both akin--pray God we may soon abolish forever
+child slavery. Yes, no wonder "Factory windows are always broken." The
+children break them because they hate a prison.
+
+The "Coal Heaver," "The Scissors Grinder," "The Mendicant," "The
+Tramp," all so smacking of the city, have their interpretation.
+
+I wish in these pages might be quoted all of "The Soul of the City
+Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit," for it daringly, beautifully,
+and strongly carries into the new philosophy which Mr. Lindsay is
+introducing the thought that every village, every town, every city has
+a community soul that must be saved, through Christian influence. But
+the ring of it and the swing of it will suggest itself in a few verses:
+
+ "Censers are swinging
+ Over the town;
+ Censers are swinging,
+ Look overhead!
+ Censers are swinging,
+ Heaven comes down.
+ City, dead city,
+ Awake from the dead!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Soldiers of Christ
+ For battle grow keen.
+ Heaven-sent winds
+ Haunt alley and lane.
+ Singing of life
+ In town-meadows green
+ After the toil
+ And battle and pain.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Builders, toil on,
+ Make all complete.
+ Make Springfield wonderful.
+ Make her renown
+ Worthy this day,
+ Till at God's feet,
+ Tranced, saved forever,
+ Waits the white town."
+
+ The Congo.
+
+Ah, if we could but catch this vision of not only the individuals but
+the city itself receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, we would have
+therein a new and a tremendous force for good.
+
+One might quote from "The Drunkards in the Street":
+
+ "Within their gutters, drunkards dream of Hell.
+ I say my prayers by my white bed to-night,
+ With the arms of God about me, with the angels singing, singing
+ Until the grayness of my soul grows white."
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+He goes to the bottom of the social evil, down to its economic causes,
+and blames the state for "The Trap," and this striking couplet rings
+in one's heart long after the book is laid down:
+
+ "In liberty's name we cry
+ For these women about to die!"
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+The poet who speaks in "The City That Will Not Repent" is only feeling
+over again, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,... how often would I have gathered
+thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
+wings, and ye would not!" The "Old Horse in the City," "To Reformers
+in Despair," "The Gamblers"--it is all there: the heartaches, the
+struggle for existence, the fallen woman, the outcast man, the sound of
+drums, the tambourines, the singing of the mission halls. You find it
+all, especially in "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven." Here is
+life--the very life of life in the city.
+
+
+FOREIGN MISSIONS
+
+They who have found opposition to foreign missions will discover with a
+thrill a new helper in Poet Lindsay, he who has won the ear of the
+literary world. It is good to hear one of his worth, singing the battle
+challenge of missions, just as it is good to hear him call the modern
+village, town, and city to "The Gift of the Holy Spirit." "Foreign
+Fields in Battle Array" brings this thrillingly prophetic, Isaiahanic
+verse:
+
+ "What is the final ending?
+ The issue can we know?
+ Will Christ outlive Mohammed?
+ Will Kali's altar go?
+ This is our faith tremendous---
+ Our wild hope, who shall scorn--
+ That in the name of Jesus,
+ The world shall be reborn!"
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+"Reborn"--does not that phrase sound familiar to Methodist ears, as
+does that other phrase, "The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the
+Holy Spirit"? Or, again, hear two lines from "Star of My Heart":
+
+ "All hearts of the earth shall find _new birth_
+ And wake no more to sin."
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+
+TEMPERANCE
+
+In these days, when the world is being swept clean with the besom of
+temperance, the poet who sings the song of temperance is the "poet
+that sings to battle." Lindsay has done this in some lines in his
+"General William Booth Enters Into Heaven," which he admits having
+written while a field worker in the Anti-Saloon League in Illinois. At
+the end of each verse we have one of these three couplets:
+
+ "But spears are set, the charge is on,
+ Wise Arthur shall be King!"
+
+ "Fierce Cromwell builds the flower-bright towns
+ And a more sunlit land;"
+
+and,
+
+ "Our God establishes his arm
+ And makes the battle sure!"
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+He puts the temperance worker in the "Round Table" under the heading,
+"King Arthur's Men Have Come Again." He lifts the battle to a high
+realm. "To go about redressing human wrongs," as King Arthur's
+Knights were sworn to do, would certainly be a most appropriate motto
+for the modern Christian temperance worker, and Lindsay is the only
+poet acknowledged by the literary world who has sung this Galahad's
+praise with keen insight.
+
+But his greatest poem, "The Congo," that poem which has captured the
+imagination of the literary world and which is so little known to the
+Christian world--where it ought to be known best of all--will give a
+glimpse of the new Christian influence on the races. The poet suggests
+that it be chanted to the tune of the old hymn, "Hark, ten thousand
+harps and voices."
+
+It is a strange poem. It is so new that it is startling, but it has
+won. Listen to its strange swing, and see its stranger pictures.
+Through the thin veneer of a new civilization, back of the
+Christianized Negro race, the poet sees, under the inspiration of a
+missionary sermon delivered in a modern church, the race that was:
+
+ "Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
+ Barrel-house kings with feet unstable,
+ Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
+ Pounded on the table,
+ Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
+ Hard as they were able,
+ Boom, boom, BOOM
+ With a silk umbrella, and the handle of a broom,
+ Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM
+ Then I had religion, then I had a vision.
+ I could not turn from their revel in derision.
+ THEN I SAW THE CONGO CREEPING
+ THROUGH THE BLACK,
+ CUTTING THROUGH THE FORESTS WITH
+ A GOLDEN TRACK!"
+
+ The Congo.
+
+Then follows as vital, vivid, and vigorous a description as ever was
+written by pen, inspired of God, tipped with fire, of the uplift and
+redemption of the Negro race, through Jesus Christ.
+
+The "General William Booth" title poem to the second Lindsay book shook
+the literary world awake with its perfect interpretation of The
+Salvation Army leader. It is a poem to be chanted at first with "Bass
+drums beaten loudly" and then "with banjos"; then softly with "sweet
+flute music," and finally, as the great General comes face to face with
+Christ, with a "Grand chorus of all instruments; tambourines to the
+foreground." Running through this poem is the refrain of "Are you
+washed in the blood of the Lamb?" and the last lines catch the tender,
+yet absolutely unique spirit of the entire poem:
+
+ "And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer
+ He saw his Master thro' the flag-filled air.
+ Christ came gently with a robe and crown
+ For Booth the soldier, while the throng knealt down.
+ He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,
+ And he knealt a-weeping in that holy place,
+ Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+But one could not get Lindsay to the hearts of folks, one could not
+make the picture complete, without putting Lincoln in, any more than he
+could make Lindsay complete without putting into these pages "The Soul
+of the City Receives the Gift of the Holy Spirit," or "General William
+Booth Enters Into Heaven," or "The Congo." Lincoln seems to be as much
+a part of Lindsay as he is a part of Springfield. Lindsay and Lincoln,
+to those who love both, mean Springfield, and Springfield means Lincoln
+and Lindsay. And what Lindsay is trying to do for city, for village,
+for town, for the Negro, for every human being, is voiced in his poem,
+"Lincoln."
+
+ "Would I might rouse the Lincoln in you all,
+ That which is gendered in the wilderness,
+ From lonely prairies and God's tenderness."
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+Let this poem "Heart of God" be the benediction of this chapter on
+Lindsay:
+
+ "O great heart of God,
+ Once vague and lost to me,
+ Why do I throb with your throb to-night,
+ In this land, eternity?
+
+ "O, little heart of God,
+ Sweet intruding stranger,
+ You are laughing in my human breast,
+ A Christ-child in a manger.
+
+ "Heart, dear heart of God,
+ Beside you now I kneel,
+ Strong heart of faith. O heart not mine,
+ Where God has set His seal.
+
+ "Wild, thundering heart of God,
+ Out of my doubt I come,
+ And my foolish feet with prophets' feet
+ March with the prophets' drum!"
+
+ General William Booth.
+
+[Illustration: JOAQUIN MILLER]
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+JOAQUIN MILLER
+[Footnote: The quotations from the poems of Joaquin Miller appearing in
+this chapter are used by permission of the Harr Wagner Publishing
+Company, owners of copyright.]
+
+A STUDY OF HOME, FATHER LOVE, GREAT MOMENTS WITH JESUS CHRIST, HEAVEN,
+AND GOD
+
+
+It was a warm, sunny May California day; and the day stands out, even
+above California days. A climb up the Piedmont hills back of Oakland,
+California, brought us to "The Heights," the unique home of Joaquin
+Miller, poet of the West and poet of the world.
+
+A visit to the homes of the New England poets is always interesting
+because of historic and literary associations, but none of them has
+the touch of the unique personality of Miller.
+
+Most people interested in things literary know that Miller, with a
+great desire to emphasize the freedom of the individual, built a half
+dozen separate houses, one for himself, one for his wife, one for his
+daughter Juanita, several for guests from all over the world who were
+always visiting him, and a little chapel. Literary men from every
+nation on the planet visited Miller at "The Heights." Most people
+interested knew also that Miller, with his own hands, had built
+monuments of stone to Fremont, the explorer, to Moses, and to Browning.
+There was also a granite funeral pyre for himself, within sight of the
+little "God's Acre," in which he had buried some eighteen or twenty
+outcasts and derelicts of earth who had no other plot to call their own
+in which to take their last long sleep.
+
+We expected to find this strange group of buildings deserted, but after
+inspecting the chapel, which was modeled after Newstead Abbey, and
+after rambling through the old-fashioned garden that Miller himself had
+planted--a garden with a perfect riot of colors--suddenly a little
+woman with a sweet face walked up to us out of the bushes and said,
+"Are you lovers of the poet?"
+
+I humbly replied that we were. Then she said: "I am Mrs. Miller, and
+you are welcome. When you have looked around, come into Mr. Miller's
+own room and be refreshed. After that I will read to you from his
+writings."
+
+It sounded stagey at first, but the more we knew of this sweet-faced
+widow of the poet the less we found about her that was not simple and
+sweet and natural.
+
+After wandering around, through the fascinating paths, under the great
+cross of a thousand pine trees, among the roses, and flowers that he
+had planted with his own hands, we came at last to the little house
+that Mrs. Miller had called "The poet's own room," and there were we
+refreshed with cool lemonade and cakes. In the littleness of my soul I
+wondered when we were to pay for these favors, but the longer we
+remained the more was I shamed as I saw that this hospitality was just
+the natural expression of a woman, and a beautiful daughter's desire to
+extend the hospitality of the dead poet himself, to any who loved his
+writings.
+
+There was the bed on which Miller lay for months writing many of his
+greatest poems, including the famous "Columbus." There was his
+picturesque sombrero, still hanging where he had put it last on the
+post of the great bed. His pen was at hand; his writing pad, his chair,
+his great fur coat, his handkerchief of many colors which in life he
+always wore about his neck; his great heavy, high-topped boots. And
+it was sunset.
+
+Then Mrs. Miller began to read. As the slanting rays of as crimson a
+sunset as God ever painted were falling through the great cross of pine
+trees, Mrs. Miller's dramatic, sweet, sympathetic voice interpreted his
+poems for us. I sat on the bed from which Miller had, just a few months
+previous to that, heard the great call. The others sat in his great
+rockers. Mrs. Miller stood as she read. I am sure that "Columbus" will
+never be lifted into the sublime as it was when she read it that late
+May afternoon, with its famous, and thrilling phrase "Sail on! Sail on!
+And on! And on!"
+
+
+A STUDY OF HOME
+
+I had thought before hearing Mrs. Miller read "The Greatest Battle that
+Ever was Fought" that I had caught all the subtle meanings of it, but
+after her reading that great tribute to womanhood I knew that I had
+never dreamed the half of its inner meaning:
+
+ "The greatest battle that ever was fought---
+ Shall I tell you where and when?
+ On the maps of the world you will find it not:
+ It was fought by the Mothers of Men.
+
+ "Not with cannon or battle shot,
+ With sword or nobler pen;
+ Not with eloquent word or thought
+ From the wonderful minds of men;
+
+ "But deep in a walled up woman's heart;
+ A woman that would not yield;
+ But bravely and patiently bore her part;
+ Lo! there is that battlefield.
+
+ "No marshaling troops, no bivouac song,
+ No banner to gleam and wave;
+ But Oh these battles they last so long--From
+ babyhood to the grave!
+
+ "But faithful still as a bridge of stars
+ She fights in her walled up town;
+ Fights on, and on, in the endless wars;
+ Then silent, unseen goes down I
+
+ "Ho! ye with banners and battle shot,
+ With soldiers to shout and praise,
+ I tell you the kingliest victories fought
+ Are fought in these silent ways."
+
+Then, as if to give us another illustration of her great poet husband's
+home love, she read for us "Juanita":
+
+ "You will come, my bird, Bonita?
+ Come, for I by steep and stone,
+ Have built such nest, for you, Juanita,
+ As not eagle bird hath known.
+ . . . . . . . . .
+ All is finished! Roads of flowers
+ Wait your loyal little feet.
+ All completed? Nay, the hours
+ Till you come are incomplete!"
+
+Who that hath the blessing of little children will not understand this
+waiting, yearning love of Miller for his ten-year-old girl, who was
+at that time in New York with her mother waiting until "The Heights"
+should be finished? Who does not understand how incomplete the hours
+were until she came?
+
+ "You will come, my dearest, truest?
+ Come, my sovereign queen of ten:
+ My blue sky will then be bluest;
+ My white rose be whitest then."
+
+
+GREAT MOMENTS WITH CHRIST
+
+Miller had a profound, deep, sincere love for Christ, and more than any
+poet I know did he express with deep insight and with deeper sweetness
+the great moments in Christ's life. He made these great moments human.
+He brings them near to us, so that we see them more clearly. He makes
+them warm our hearts, and we feel that Christ's words are truly our
+words in this, our own day. In that great scene where Christ blessed
+little children, who has ever made it sweeter and nearer and warmer
+with human touch?
+
+ "Then reaching his hands, he said, lowly,
+ 'Of such is my Kingdom,' and then
+ Took the little brown babes in the holy
+ White hands of the Saviour of Men;
+
+ "Held them close to his heart and caressed them,
+ Put his face down to theirs as in prayer,
+ Put their hands to his neck and so blessed them
+ With baby-hands hid in his hair."
+
+The scene with the woman taken in adultery he has also made human and
+near in these lines, called "Charity":
+
+ "Who now shall accuse and arraign us?
+ What man shall condemn and disown?
+ Since Christ has said only the stainless
+ Shall cast at his fellows a stone?"
+
+That Jesus Christ died for the world, that Calvary had more meaning for
+humanity than anything else that has ever happened, Miller put in four
+lines:
+
+ "Look starward! stand far, and unearthy,
+ Free souled as a banner unfurled.
+ Be worthy! O, brother, be worthy!
+ For a God was the price of the world!"
+
+He caught Christ's teaching, and the whole gist of the New Testament
+expressed in that immortal phrase "Judge not," and he wrote some lines
+that have been on the lips of man the world over, and shall continue to
+be as long as men speak poetry. A unique pleasure was mine on this
+afternoon. I had noticed something that Mrs. Miller had not noticed in
+this great poem. She quoted it to us:
+
+ "In men whom men condemn as ill
+ I find so much of goodness still;
+ In men whom men pronounce Divine
+ I find so much of sin and blot,
+ I hesitate to draw the line
+ Between the two, where God has not!"
+
+Miller wrote it that way when he first wrote it, in his younger days.
+It was natural for Mrs. Miller to quote it that way. But I had
+discovered in his revised and complete poems that he had changed a
+significant phrase in that great verse. He had said, "I do not dare,"
+in the fifth line, instead of "I hesitate." His mature years had made
+him say, "I do not dare to draw the line!"
+
+
+GOD AND HEAVEN
+
+He knew that heaven and God were near to humanity and earth. He was not
+afraid of death. He teaches us all Christian courage in this line of
+thought. He knew that his "Greek Heights" were very near to heaven
+because he knew that anywhere is near to heaven to the believer:
+
+ "Be this my home till some fair star
+ Stoops earthward and shall beckon me;
+ For surely God-land lies not far
+ From these Greek Heights and this great sea!"
+
+He yearned to teach men to believe in this God and his nearness; this
+God in whom he believed with all his heart. This cry out of his soul,
+written just a few days before his death, is like Tennyson's "Crossing
+The Bar" in that it was his swan song:
+
+ "Could I but teach man to believe,
+ Could I but make small men to grow,
+ To break frail spider webs that weave
+ About their thews and bind them low.
+ Could I but sing one song and lay
+ Grim Doubt; I then could go my way
+ In tranquil silence, glad, serene,
+ And satisfied from off the scene.
+ But Ah! this disbelief, this doubt,
+ This doubt of God, this doubt of God
+ The damned spot will not out!
+ Wouldst learn to know one little flower,
+ Its perfume, perfect form, or hue?
+ Yea, wouldst thou have one perfect hour
+ Of all the years that come to you?
+ Then grow as God hath planted, grow
+ A lovely oak, or daisy low,
+ As he hath set his garden; be
+ Just what thou art, or grass or tree.
+ Thy treasures up in heaven laid
+ Await thy sure ascending soul:
+ Life after life--be not afraid I"
+
+Yes, Miller believed in home, in Christ, and God and immortality. He
+believed that heaven and God were near to man, and in his last days
+there was no doubt. Thus his own writings confirm what Mrs. Miller, on
+that memorable afternoon, made certain by her warm, tear-wet, personal
+testimony. And as she quoted these last lines, and the sun had set
+behind the Golden Gate, which we could even then see from the room in
+which we sat, we felt as though Miller himself were near, listening as
+she read, listening with us. And these are the last verses that she
+quoted, which seem fit verses with which to close this chapter study of
+Joaquin Miller:
+
+ "I will my ashes to my steeps,
+ I will my steeps, green cross, red rose,
+ To those who love the beautiful,
+ Come, learn to be of those."
+
+And is it any wonder that, as we sat in the twilight listening to that
+invitation to his home, these words made the red roses and the green
+cross of Christ against the hill our very own? And is it any wonder
+that, as she quoted these last verses we felt him near to us?
+
+ "Enough to know that I and you
+ Shall breathe together there as here
+ Some clearer, sweeter atmosphere,
+ Shall walk, high, wider ways above
+ Our petty selves, shall learn to lead
+ Man up and up in thought and deed.
+
+and,
+
+ "Come here when I am far away,
+ Fond lovers of this lovely land,
+ And sit quite still and do not say,
+ 'Turn right or left and lend a hand,'
+ But sit beneath my kindly trees
+ And gaze far out yon sea of seas.
+ These trees, these very stones could tell
+ How much I loved them and how well,
+ And maybe I shall come and sit
+ Beside you; sit so silently
+ You will not reck of it."
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ALAN SEEGER]
+
+IV
+
+ALAN SEEGER
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from poems by Alan Seeger. Published by
+Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. ]
+
+POET OF YOUTH, BEAUTY, FAME, JOY, LOVE, DEATH, AND GOD
+
+
+Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger--so shall their names be linked together
+forever by those who love poetry. In the first place, they were much
+alike: buoyant, young; loving life, living life; and both dying for the
+great cause of humanity in the world's greatest war. Brooke the
+Englishman; Seeger the American; so are they linked. Both were but lads
+in their twenties; both vivid as lightning and as warm as summer
+sunshine in their personalities; both truly great poets, who had, even
+in the short time they lived, run a wide gamut of poetic expression.
+
+I am not saying that either Brooke or Seeger may be called a Christian
+poet; nor am I saying that they may not be called that. This war in
+which they have given their lives will make a vast difference in the
+definition of what a Christian is. I can detect no orthodox Christian
+message in either of their dreamings, but I do find in both poets a
+clean, high moral message, and therefore give them place in this pulpit
+of the poets.
+
+The wide range of this young American's writing astonishes the reader.
+He died very young: while the morning sun was just lifting its head
+above the eastern horizon of life; while the heavens were still
+crimson, and gold, and rose, and fire. What he might have written in
+the steady white heat of noontime and in life's glorious afternoon of
+experience, and in its subtle charm of "sunset and the evening star,"
+one can only guess. But while he lived he lived; and, living, wrote. He
+dipped his pen in that same gold and fire of the only part of life he
+knew, its daybreak, and wrote. No wonder his writing was warm; no
+wonder he wrote of Youth, Beauty, Fame, Joy, Love, Death, and God.
+
+
+THE SONG OF YOUTH
+
+Nor Byron, nor Shelley, nor Keats, nor Swinburne, nor Brooke, nor any
+other poet ever sounded the heights and depths and glory of Youth as
+did Seeger. He sang it as he breathed it and lived it, and just as
+naturally. His singing of it was as rhythmic as breathing, and as sweet
+as the first song of an oriole in springtime. In his fifth sonnet, a
+form in which he loved to write and of which he was a master, he sings
+youth in terms "almost divine":
+
+ "Phantoms of bliss that beckon and recede--,
+ Thy strange allurements, City that I love,
+ Maze of romance, where I have followed too
+ The dream Youth treasures of its dearest need
+ And stars beyond thy towers bring tidings of."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+He loved New York; he loved Paris; he loved any city because youth and
+life and romance and love were there. He drank all of these into his
+soul like a thirsty desert drinks rain; to spring to flowers and life
+and color again. He drank of life and youth as a flower drinks of dew,
+or a bird at a city fountain, with fluttering joy, drinks, singing as
+it drinks. You feel all of that eagerness in "Sonnet VI" where he says:
+
+ "Where I drank deep the bliss of being young,
+ The strife and sweet potential flux of things
+ I sought Youth's dream of happiness among!"
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+
+THE SONG OF BEAUTY
+
+And closely akin to Youth always is Beauty. Beauty and Youth walk arm
+in arm everywhere, and one may even go so far as to say anywhere. Youth
+cares not where he goes as long as Beauty walks beside him. He will
+walk to the ends of the earth. Indeed, he prefers the long way home.
+Anybody who has known both Youth and Beauty knows this, and it need not
+be argued about much, thank God. And so it is most natural to find this
+young poet singing the lyric of Beauty even as he sings the lyric of
+Youth. How understandingly he addresses Beauty, and how reverently in
+"An Ode to Natural Beauty"!
+
+ "Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
+ Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
+ Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
+ With shafts of sensible divinity,
+ Light of the World, essential loveliness."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+Then, talking about the "Wanderer" as though that character were some
+far off person no kin to the poet (a way that poets have to hide the
+pulsing of their own hearts), Seeger writes of Beauty. But we who know
+him cannot be made to think that this "Wanderer" is a fellow we do not
+know; "nor Launcelot, nor another." It is he, the poet of whom we
+write. It bears his imprint. It bears his trade mark. It is stamped
+"with the image of the king." He cannot hide from us in this:
+
+ "His heart the love of Beauty held as hides
+ One gem most pure a casket of pure gold.
+ It was too rich a lesser thing to hold;
+ It was not large enough for aught besides."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+
+THE SONG OF FAME
+
+Fame always lures Youth. Perhaps later experience proves that it is
+indeed a hollow thing, hardly worth striving for. But to Youth there is
+no goal that calls more insistently than Fame. Youth and Beauty and
+Fame--how closely akin they are! If Beauty and Fame keep him company,
+Youth is next the stars with delight. And so it is natural that this
+young poet shall sing the song of Fame with exuberant enthusiasm. He
+says in "The Need to Love":
+
+ "And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
+ And kept no real ambition but to see
+ Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean
+ My dream of palpable divinity."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And while we are listening to the music of these human stars, the music
+of the celestial spheres set down in human words, let us catch again
+the poetic echo of that third line and let it linger long as we listen,
+"Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean," and
+
+ "Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled,
+ Till the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
+ Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
+ And the Springs of the seas run dust,"
+
+that, as Edwin Markham sings, this echo is the echo of the eternal
+poetic music.
+
+With these wondrous lines he answers the question which he himself asks
+in "Fragments," "What is Success?"
+
+ "Out of the endless ore
+ Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold
+ Of passionate memory: to have lived so well
+ That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more
+ Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build
+ And apple trees unfold,
+ Find not of that dear need that all things tell
+ The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+Joy comes next in our treatment of the outstanding singings of this
+singing poet, and he himself has given us the connecting link in the
+following lines:
+
+ "He has drained as well
+ Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried:
+ Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And thus smoothly we pass from Fame to Joy and hear him sing of this
+fourth high peak of Youth.
+
+
+THE SONG OF JOY
+
+Whatever he did, whatever he sang, whatever he lived, this man swept
+all things else aside and plunged in over head. He loved to swim and he
+loved to dive. Perhaps into his living and his writing he carried this
+athletic joy also, and as he lived he lived to the full. It seems so as
+one reads in "I Loved" these impassioned lines:
+
+ "From a boy
+ I gloated on existence. Earth to me
+ Seemed all sufficient and my sojourn there
+ One trembling opportunity for joy."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And then one pauses to weep awhile, and the lines grow dim as he reads
+them again to know that this man, who so loved to live, who gloated on
+existence, who saw life as a trembling opportunity for Joy, must leave
+it so soon. And yet he left it nobly. Again in "An Ode to Antares" he
+sings of Joy:
+
+ "What clamor importuning from every booth!
+ At Earth's great market where Joy is trafficked in
+ Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!"
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+Kindly Age, Age who had not lost his love, always sings like that to
+Youth; always tells Youth to live while he may, play while the
+playworld is his. Every poet who has older grown, from Shakespeare to
+Lowell, and yet retained his love, has told us this. We expect it of
+older poets, but here a young poet sees it all clearly; that Youth must
+buy Joy while his purse is full with Youth. And ye who rob Youth of
+playtime, of Joy, ye capitalists, ye money makers and life destroyers,
+listen to this dead poet who yet lives in these words. Fathers,
+mothers, let childhood spend its all for Joy while the purse of Youth
+is full. It will be empty after while and it shall never be filled
+again with Youth. So says the Poet.
+
+
+THE SONG OF LOVE
+
+The discriminating reader of Seeger soon sees, however, that, while he
+sings as needs he must, because of the springs that are within him
+bubbling over, sings of Youth, and Beauty, and Fame, and Joy, yet he
+knows that these are not all of life. He knows that there are higher
+things than these. These higher things are Love, Death, God--what a
+trilogy!
+
+Love is all. He is sure of this. He is true to this. Romantic love he
+knows--love of comrade, love of God. In this same "An Ode to Natural
+Beauty" his final conclusion is that Love is best after all:
+
+ "On any venture set, but 'twas the first
+ For Beauty willed them, yea whatever be
+ The faults I wanted wings to rise above;
+ I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly
+ I have been loyal to the love of Love!"
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+This is more than romantic love; it is the "love of Love."
+
+And lest this be not strong enough, he sings in "The Need to Love" as
+great a song as man ever heard on this great theme:
+
+ "The need to love that all the stars obey
+ Entered my heart and banished all beside.
+ Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
+ Faded the flowers that one time satisfied."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+Then, not content, he sets up an altar of poetry and dedicates it to
+Love and lights a fire of worship there, and leaves it not, nor night
+nor day:
+
+ "All that's not love is the dearth of my days,
+ The leaves of the volume with rubric unwrit,
+ The temple in times without prayer, without praise,
+ The altar unset and the candle unlit."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+If Love be not queen to him, the palace is cold and barren; the "altar
+unset and the candle unlit"
+
+
+THE SONG OF DEATH
+
+Like Brooke, a victim of the Hun, so Seeger, also a victim of the
+barbarian, seemed to feel the constant presence of Death, an unseen
+guest at the Feast of Youth and Joy and Fame and Love. Perhaps the war
+made these two imaginative poets think of Death sooner than Youth
+usually gives him heed. But most men will think of Death when they are
+face to face with the shadow day and night as were these
+soldier-crusading poets; when they see him stalking in every trench, in
+every wood, on every hill and road, and in every field and village. But
+how bravely he spoke of Death!--
+
+ "Learn to drive fear, then, from your heart.
+ If you must perish, know, O man,
+ 'Tis an inevitable part
+ Of the predestined plan."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And again in this same poem, "Makatooh," he sings of Death:
+
+ "Guard that, not bowed nor blanched with fear
+ You enter, but serene, erect,
+ As you would wish most to appear
+ To those you most respect.
+
+ "So die, as though your funeral
+ Ushered you through the doors that led
+ Into a stately banquet hall
+ Where heroes banqueted;
+
+ "And it shall all depend therein
+ Whether you come as slave or lord,
+ If they acclaim you as their kin
+ Or spurn you from their board."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+What a challenge this is to all who must die in this war, to all lads
+who are giving their lives heroically in God's great cause of liberty
+in his world--this challenge to die so that you may be welcomed into
+the fraternity of heroes!
+
+Without doubt Seeger's best-known poem, and one which illustrates also
+most strongly his attitude toward Death, is that poem entitled "I Have
+a Rendezvous With Death," from which we quote:
+
+ "I have a rendezvous with Death
+ At some disputed barricade;
+ When Spring comes back with rustling shade
+ And apple blossoms fill the air--
+ I have a rendezvous with Death
+ When Spring brings back blue days and fair.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "God knows, 'twere better to be deep
+ Pillowed in silk and scented down,
+ Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
+ Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
+ Where hushed awakenings are dear,...
+ But I've a rendezvous with Death
+ At midnight in some flaming town;
+ When Spring trips north again this year,
+ And I to my pledged word am true,
+ I shall not fail that rendezvous."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+
+THE SONG OF GOD
+
+From the lighter thoughts of Youth, Joy, Fame, Beauty, through the
+"long, long thoughts of Youth"; through Love and Death it is not a long
+way to climb to God. We would not expect this young poet to be thinking
+much in this direction, but he does just the same. I have even found
+those who say that he was not a God-man, but these poems refute that
+slander on a dead man and poet. I find him singing in "The Nympholept":
+
+ "I think it was the same: some piercing sense
+ Of Deity's pervasive immanence,
+ The life that visible Nature doth indwell
+ Grown great and near and all but palpable
+ He might not linger but with winged strides
+ Like one pursued, fled down the mountainsides."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+This reminds one instantly of the haunting Christ of Thompson's "The
+Hound of Heaven." And again in the presence of War's death the poet
+felt that other and greater presence without doubt, as these words
+prove:
+
+ "When to the last assault our bugles blow:
+ Reckless of pain and peril we shall go,
+ Heads high and hearts aflame and bayonets bare,
+ And we shall brave eternity as though
+ Eyes looked on us in which we would see fair--
+ One waited in whose presence we would wear,
+ Even as a lover who would be well-seen,
+ Our manhood faultless and our honor clean."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And with magnificent acknowledgment of the divine plan of it all, of
+life and war and all, he sweeps that truly great poem, "The Hosts,"
+to a swinging climax in its last tremendous stanza; which, fitting too,
+shall be the closing lines of this chapter on our dead American,
+martyred poet.
+
+He first speaks of the marching columns of soldiers as "Big with the
+beauty of cosmic things. Mark how their columns surge!"
+
+ "With bayonets bare and flags unfurled,
+ They scale the summits of the world--"
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+And then:
+
+ "There was a stately drama writ
+ By the hand that peopled the earth and air
+ And set the stars in the infinite
+ And made night gorgeous and morning fair,
+ And all that had sense to reason knew
+ That bloody drama must be gone through."
+
+ Poems by Alan Seeger.
+
+
+
+
+
+ENGLISH POETS
+
+
+JOHN OXENHAM
+
+ALFRED NOYES
+
+JOHN MASEFIELD
+
+ROBERT SERVICE
+
+RUPERT BROOKE
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN OXENHAM.]
+
+V
+
+JOHN OXENHAM
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from the following works The Vision
+Splendid, All's Well, and The Fiery Cross Published by George H. Doran
+Company, New York.]
+
+WHO MAKES ARTICULATE THE VOICE OF WAR, PEACE, THE CROSS, THE CHRIST.
+
+
+In the first volume of The Student in Arms, that widely read book of
+the war, Donald Hankey has a chapter on "The Religion of the
+Inarticulate," in which he shows that the "Tommy" who for so long has
+been accused of having no religion, really has a very definite one. He
+has a religion that embraces all the Christian virtues, such as love,
+sacrifice, brotherhood, and comradeship, but he has never connected
+these with either Christ or the church. His religion is the "Religion
+of the Inarticulate." Hankey then shows that this war is articulating
+religion as never before.
+
+John Oxenham, Poet-Preacher, is giving articulation to the voice of
+Christianity--a voice ringing out from over and above the thunder of
+the guns, the blare, the flare, the outcry, the hurt, the pain and
+anguish of the most awful war that earth has ever suffered. Some of us
+have been thinking of this war in terms of Christian hope. We have
+thought that we see in it a new Calvary out of which shall come a new
+resurrection to the spiritual world. We have dreamed that men are being
+redeemed through the sacrifice, through the spirit of service and
+brotherhood thrust upon the world by war's supreme demands. We have
+thought all of this, but we have not been able to make it articulate.
+Now comes a poet to do it for us.
+
+What magnificent hope sings out, even in the titles that Oxenham has
+selected for his books in these days of darkness, anguish and
+lostness. After his first book, Bees in Amber, comes that warm
+handclasp of strength: that thrill of hope; that word of a watchman in
+the night, like a sentinel crying through the very title of his second
+book, "All's Well." Then came The Vision Splendid, and soon we are to
+have The Fiery Cross. The publishers were kind enough to let me examine
+this last book while it was still in the proof sheets. It is the one
+great hope book of the war. Every mother and father who has a boy in
+the war, every wife who has a husband, every child who has a father
+will thrill with a new pride and a new dignity after reading The Fiery
+Cross.
+
+
+WAR AND ITS VOICE
+
+No poet has voiced America's reasons for being in the war as has
+Oxenham, and nowhere does he do it better than in "Where Are You
+Going, Great-Heart?" the concluding stanza of which sums up compactly
+America's high purposes:
+
+ "Where are you going, Great-Heart?
+ 'To set all burdened peoples free;
+ To win for all God's liberty;
+ To 'stablish His sweet Sovereignty.'
+ God goeth with you, Great-Heart!"
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+To those who go to die in war the poet addresses himself in lines which
+he titles "On Eagle Wings":
+
+ "Higher than most, to you is given
+ To live--or in His time, to die;
+ So, bear you as White Knights of Heaven--
+ The very flower of chivalry!
+ Take Him as Pilot by your side,
+ And 'All is well' whate'er betide."
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+"If God be with you, who can be against you?" is the echo that we hear
+going and coming behind these great Christian lines. Indeed, behind
+every poem that Oxenham writes we can hear the echoes of some great
+scriptural word of promise, or hope or faith or courage. The Christian,
+as well as those who never saw the Bible or a church, will feel at home
+with this poet anywhere. The advantage that the Christian will have in
+reading him is that he will understand him better.
+
+Turning to those who stay at home and have lost loved ones, with what
+sympathy and deep, tender understanding does he write in "To You Who
+Have Lost." You may almost see a great kindly father standing by your
+side, his warm hand in yours as he sings:
+
+ "I know! I know!--
+ The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe--
+ The pang of loss--
+ The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross.
+ 'Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
+ And leaves me broken,... Oh, my son I my son!'"
+
+ "Yea--think of this!--
+ Yea, rather think on this!--
+ He died as few men get the chance to die--
+ Fighting to save a world's morality.
+ He died the noblest death a man may die,
+ Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty--
+ And such a death is Immortality."
+
+ All's Well.
+
+If those who have lost loved ones "Over There" cannot be buoyed by
+that, I know not what will buoy them, what will comfort.
+
+Oxenham too gives us a picture of a battlefield where birds sing and
+roses bloom, just as do Service and several other poets who have been
+in the midst of the conflict. We have become familiar with this
+picture, but no writer yet has caught its full, eternal meaning and
+pressed it down into three lines for the world as has this man; in
+"Here, There, and Everywhere":
+
+ "Man proposes--God disposes;
+ Yet our hope in Him reposes
+ Who in war-time still makes roses."
+
+ The Fiery Cross.
+
+But this poet in his interpretation of war does not forget peace; does
+not forget that it is coming; does not forget that the world is hungry
+for it; does not forget that it is the duty of the poets and the
+thinking men and women of the world not only to get ready for it, but
+to lead the way to it.
+
+
+PEACE AND ITS VOICE
+
+In a remarkable poem called "Watchman! What of the Night?" we see this
+great heart standing sentinel on the walls of the world, watching the
+midnight skies red with the blaze and glow of carnage:
+
+ "Watchman! What of the night?
+ No light we see;
+ Our souls are bruised and sickened with the sight
+ Of this foul crime against humanity.
+ The Ways are dark---
+ 'I SEE THE MORNING LIGHT!'
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Beyond the war-clouds and the reddened ways,
+ I see the promise of the Coming Days!
+ I see His sun rise, new charged with grace,
+ Earth's tears to dry and all her woes efface!
+ Christ lives! Christ loves! Christ rules!
+ No more shall Might,
+ Though leagued with all the forces of the Night,
+ Ride over Right. No more shall Wrong
+ The world's gross agonies prolong.
+ Who waits His time shall surely see
+ The triumph of His Constancy;
+ When, without let, or bar, or stay,
+ The coming of His Perfect Day
+ Shall sweep the Powers of Night away;
+ And Faith replumed for nobler flight,
+ And Hope aglow with radiance bright,
+ And Love in loveliness bedight
+ SHALL GREET THE MORNING LIGHT."
+
+ All's Well.
+
+Then, as is most fair and logical, the poet tells us how we are to
+build again after peace comes. We must needs know that. The newspapers
+are full of a certain popular move--and success to it--to rebuild the
+destroyed cities of France and Belgium. But the rebuilding that the
+poet speaks of in "The Winnowing" is a deeper thing. It is a spiritual
+rebuilding without which there is no permanent peace in the world and
+no permanent safety for the material world.
+
+ "How shall we start, Lord, to build life again,
+ Fairer and sweeter, and freed from its pain?
+ 'Build ye in Me and your building shall be
+ Builded for Time and Eternity.'"
+
+ All's Well.
+
+There is the answer to the world's cry in short, sharp, succinct lines;
+compact as a biblical phrase; and as meaningful. Hearken it, ye world!
+Only in Him can the new spiritual world be built for "Time and
+Eternity." And only to those who so believe and hold shall the world
+belong henceforth. At least so says our poet:
+
+ "To whom shall the world henceforth belong
+ And who shall go up and possess it?"
+
+which question he himself answers in the same verse:
+
+ "To the Men of Good Fame
+ Who everything claim--
+ This world and the next--in their Master's great name--
+
+ "To these shall the world henceforth belong,
+ And they shall go up and possess it;
+ Overmuch, overlong, has the world suffered wrong,
+ We are here by God's help to redress it."
+
+ The Fiery Cross.
+
+And finally in this fight for peace he does not forget prayer, and in
+"The Prayer Immortal," which is introduced, as are so many of Oxenham's
+poems, by a phrase from the Bible, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be
+done," he admonishes those who seek peace:
+
+ "So--to your knees--And,
+ with your heart and soul, pray God
+ That wars may cease,
+ And earth, by His good will,
+ Through these rough ways, find peace!"
+
+ The Fiery Cross.
+
+
+THE CROSS AND ITS VOICE
+
+The voice of the cross of Calvary is being heard this day of war as it
+has never been heard before. The world is resonant with its message.
+Every soldier, every nation, every home, every mother and father and
+child and wife who has suffered because of this war, shall henceforth
+understand the Christ and his cross the better. All through this
+writer's interpretations of the war we find the cross to the fore. To
+him the cross symbolizes the war. This war is the cross in a deep and
+abiding sense. In "Through the Valley" he says:
+
+ "And there of His radiant company,
+ Full many a one I see,
+ Who has won through the Valley of Shadows
+ To the larger liberty.
+ Even there in the grace of the heavenly place,
+ It is joy to meet mine own,
+ And to know that not one but has valiantly won,
+ By the way of the Cross, his crown."
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+Thank God for that hope! Thank God for that word!
+
+In "The Ballad of Jim Baxter" this same thought is more vividly and
+strongly set forth. It is the story of one type of German cruelty of
+which we have heard in the war dispatches several times and that have
+been confirmed on the spot; the story of the Germans nailing men to
+crosses. Jim Baxter suffered this experience:
+
+ "When Jim came to, he found himself
+ Nailed to a cross of wood,
+ Just like the Christs you find out there
+ On every country road.
+
+ "He wondered dully if he'd died,
+ And so, become a Christ;
+ 'Perhaps,' he thought, 'all men are Christs
+ When they are crucified.'"
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+And in this homely lad's homely way of putting his cruel experience who
+knows but that there may be such truth as yet we cannot see in the dark
+chaos of war?
+
+
+THE CHRIST AND HIS VOICE
+
+It isn't a far step from the cross to the Christ of the cross, and in
+this man's poetry the two mingle and commingle so closely that one
+overlaps the other. But always these two things stand out--the cross
+and the Christ. And in the new volume, The Fiery Cross, one finds
+many pages devoted to this great thought alone.
+
+Of the tenderness of the Christ he speaks most sympathetically, having
+in mind again the lads that war has taken. In "The Master's Garden"
+hear him:
+
+ "And some, with wondrous tenderness,
+ To His lips He gently pressed,
+ And fervent blessings breathed on them,
+ And laid them in His breast."
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+And then of his sweetness, referring again to the "Jim Baxter," we have
+a wonderful picture of the oft mentioned Comrade in White, who is so
+real to the wounded soldiers:
+
+ "His face was wondrous pitiful,
+ But still more wondrous sweet;
+ And Jim saw holes just like his own
+ In His white hands and feet;
+ But His look it was that won Jim's heart,
+ It was so wondrous sweet.
+
+ "'Christ!'--said the dying man once more,
+ With accent reverent,
+ He had never said it so before,
+ But he knew now what Christ meant--"
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+Oxenham has great faith in humanity. From time to time we find him
+expressing man's kinship with the stars and with God and Christ.
+"Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels" this poet takes
+seriously, thank God. This word from the Book means something to
+him. And so it is in a poem called "In Every Man" we see him finding
+Christ in every man:
+
+ "In every soul of all mankind
+ Somewhat of Christ I find,
+ Somewhat of Christ--and Thee;
+ For in each one there surely dwells
+ That something which most surely spells
+ Life's immortality.
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "And so, for love of Christ--and Thee,
+ I will not cease to seek and find,
+ In all mankind,
+ That hope of immortality
+ Which dwells so sacramentally
+ In Christ--and Thee."
+
+ The Fiery Cross.
+
+He feels Christ's eternity so much that he cries out for him
+continually and will not be satisfied without him. He knows that he
+must have the Christ if he wants to grow great enough to meet life's
+demands. In a poem, "A Prayer for Enlargement," which I quote in full
+because of its brevity, one feels this dependence:
+
+ "Shrive me of all my littleness and sin!
+ Open your great heart wide!
+ Open it wide and take me in,
+ For the sake of Christ who died!
+
+ "Was I grown small and strait?--
+ Then shalt Thou make me wide.
+ Through the love of Christ who died,
+ Thou--thou shalt make me great."
+
+ The Fiery Cross.
+
+To the Christian the following quotation will mean much. In it we hear
+the echo of Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy; or of that marvelous
+story of the regeneration of a human soul in Tolstoy's The
+Resurrection; an old-fashioned conversion of a human being; a
+Paul's on the road to Damascus experience. And the tragedy is that just
+about the time that the world of literature is being fascinated with
+this story of "Rebirth" the church seems to be forgetting it. It is
+told in the first verse of Ex Tenebris--"The Lay of the King Who Rose
+Again":
+
+ "Take away my rage!
+ Take away my sin!
+ Strip me all bare
+ Of that I did wear--
+ The foul rags, the base rags,
+ The rude and the mean!
+ Strip me, yea strip me
+ Right down to my skin!
+ Strip me all bare
+ Of that I have been!
+ Then wash me in water,
+ In fair running water,
+ Wash me without,
+ And wash me within,
+ In fair running water,
+ In fresh running water,
+ Wash me, ah wash me,
+ And make me all clean!
+ --Clean of the soilure
+ And clean of the sin,
+ --Clean of the soul-crushing
+ Sense of defilure,
+ --Clean of the old self,
+ And clean of the sin!
+ In fair running water,
+ In fresh running water,
+ In sun-running water,
+ All sweet and all pure,
+ Wash me, ah wash me,
+ And I shall be clean."
+
+ The Fiery Cross
+
+
+GOD AND HIS VOICE
+
+From the voice of Christ and the voice of the cross it is not far to
+hear the voice of God either in life or in John Oxenham's books. Behind
+the cross and behind the Christ stands the Father, and a treatment of
+this great poet's writings would not be complete if one did not quote a
+few excerpts from his writings to show that God was ever present
+"keeping watch above his own."
+
+The first note we catch of the Father's voice is in "The Call of the
+Dead":
+
+ "One way there is--one only--
+ Whereby ye may stand sure;
+ One way by which ye may understand
+ All foes, and Life's High Ways command,
+ And make your building sure.---
+ Take God once more as Counselor,
+ Work with Him, hand in hand,
+ Build surely, in His Grace and Power,
+ The nobler things that shall endure,
+ And, having done all--STAND!"
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+And as the poet has walked the streets of America and elsewhere and has
+seen the service flag, which in "Each window shrines a name," he has
+felt God everywhere. In "The Leaves of the Golden Book" he comforts
+those who mourn:
+
+ "God will gather all these scattered
+ Leaves into His Golden Book,
+ Torn and crumpled, soiled and battered,
+ He will heal them with a look.
+ Not one soul of them has perished;
+ No man ever yet forsook
+ Wife and home, and all he cherished,
+ And God's purpose undertook,
+ But he met his full reward
+ In the 'Well Done' of his Lord!"
+
+ The Vision Splendid.
+
+So it is that over and over we hear this note, wrung from the
+experiences of war, that those who give up all, to die for God's plan,
+to take the cross in suffering that the world may be better; these
+shall have life eternal. And who dares to dispute it?
+
+In "Our Share" we are admonished that we must find God anew:
+
+ "Heads of sham gold and feet of crumbling clay,
+ If we would build anew and build to stay,
+ We must find God again,
+ And go His way."
+
+ All's Well.
+
+Oxenham does not claim to fully understand the world cataclysm any more
+than some of the rest of us. If we all had to understand, we might find
+ourselves ineligible for the Kingdom, but the Book says everywhere, "He
+that believeth on me shall have everlasting life." And we can believe
+whether we understand or no. So voices the poet in "God's Handwriting":
+
+ "He writes in characters too grand
+ For our short sight to understand;
+ We catch but broken strokes, and try
+ To fathom all the mystery
+ Of withered hopes, of deaths, of life,
+ The endless war, the useless strife,--
+ But there, with larger, clearer sight,
+ We shall see this--
+ HIS WAY WAS RIGHT."
+
+ All's Well,
+
+What better way to close this brief interpretation of our poet in this
+day of darkness and hate and hurt and war and woe and want, of seeing
+hopelessness and helplessness, than with these heartening lines from
+"God Is":
+
+ "God is;
+ God sees;
+ God loves;
+ God knows.
+ And Right is Right;
+ And Right is Might.
+ In the full ripeness of His Time,
+ All these His vast prepotencies
+ Shall round their grace-work to the prime
+ Of full accomplishment,
+ And we shall see the plan sublime
+ Of His beneficent intent.
+ Live on in hope!
+ Press on in faith!
+ Love conquers all things,
+ Even Death."
+
+ All's Well.
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ALFRED NOYES.]
+
+
+VI
+
+ALFRED NOYES
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes, two
+volumes, copyright, 1913, by the Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York.]
+
+A STUDY OF CHILDHOOD, OF MANHOOD, CHRISTHOOD, AND GODHOOD
+
+
+If one wants to find the tenderest, most completely sympathetic study
+of childhood, one that finds echo not only in the heart of the
+grown-up, but in the heart of children the world over, he must this day
+go to Alfred Noyes. If you want proof of this, read "The Forest of Wild
+Thyme" or "The Flower of Old Japan" to your children and watch them sit
+with open mouths and open hearts to hear these wonder fairy tales. And,
+further, if you are too grown-up to want to read Noyes for his complete
+sympathy with childhood, more universal even than our beloved Riley;
+and you want a poet that challenges you to a more vigorous manhood, a
+poet who calls man to his highest and deepest virility, read Noyes. Or,
+if you happen to need a clearer, firmer insight into the man of Galilee
+and Calvary, read Noyes; and, finally, if you want firmer, more
+rocklike foundations to plant your faith in God upon, read Noyes, for
+herein one finds all of these. From childhood to Godhood is, indeed,
+a wide range for a poet to take, and yet they are akin.
+
+As another poet has said, none less than Edwin Markham, "Know man and
+you will know the deep of God." And as Noyes himself says in the
+introduction to "The Forest of Wild Thyme":
+
+ "Husband, there was a happy day,
+ Long ago in love's young May,
+ When, with a wild-flower in your hand
+ You echoed that dead poet's cry--
+ 'Little flower, but if I could understand!'
+ And you saw it had roots in the depth of the sky,
+ And there in that smallest bud lay furled
+ The secret and meaning of all the world."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And when we know that the mother was talking about "Little Peterkin,"
+their lost baby, we know that she meant that in a little child there
+lay furled "The secret and meaning of all the world."
+
+And so, beginning with childhood, through those intermediate steps of
+manhood and Christhood, with Noyes leading us, as he literally leads
+the little tots through the mysteries of Old Japan and the Wild Thyme,
+let us go from tree to tree, and flower to flower, and hope to hope,
+and pain to pain, up to God, from whence we came. It is a clear sweet
+pathway that he leads us.
+
+
+CHILDHOOD AND ITS GLORY
+
+Noyes assumes something that we all know for truth: that "Grown-ups do
+not understand" childhood. But after reading this sweet poet we know
+that he does understand; and we thank God for him. In Part II of "The
+Forest of Wild Thyme" one sees this clearly.
+
+ "O, grown-ups cannot understand,
+ And grown-ups never will,
+ How short's the way to fairyland
+ Across the purple hill:
+ They smile: their smile is very bland,
+ Their eyes are wise and chill;
+ And yet--at just a child's command--
+ The world's an Eden still."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Thank the stars that watch over us in love that the great-hearted
+poets, and the children of the world--at least those little ones that a
+half-way Christian civilization has not robbed of childhood--know that
+"The world's an Eden still."
+
+From the prelude to "The Flower of Old Japan" comes that same note,
+like a bluebird in springtime, that note of belief, of trust, of hope:
+
+ "Do you remember the blue stream;
+ The bridge of pale bamboo;
+ The path that seemed a twisted dream
+ Where everything came true;
+ The purple cheery-trees; the house
+ With jutting eaves below the boughs;
+ The mandarins in blue,
+ With tiny tapping, tilted toes,
+ With curious curved mustachios?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Ah, let us follow, follow far
+ Beyond the purple seas;
+ Beyond the rosy foaming bar,
+ The coral reef, the trees,
+ The land of parrots and the wild
+ That rolls before the fearless child
+ In ancient mysteries:
+ Onward, and onward if we can,
+ To Old Japan, to Old Japan."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And "The Forest of Wild Thyme" is full of the echos of fairy tales and
+childhood rhymes heard the world over. Little Peterkin, who went with
+the children to "Old Japan," is dead now:
+
+ "Come, my brother pirates, I am tired of play;
+ Come and look for Peterkin, little brother Peterkin,
+ Our merry little comrade that the fairies took away."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And so, they go to the last place they saw him, the old God's Acre, and
+fall asleep amid the wild thyme blooming there. As they dream the thyme
+grows to the size of trees, and they wander about in the forest hunting
+for Peterkin.
+
+As they hunted they found out who killed Cock Robin. They appeal to
+Little Boy Blue to help them hunt for Peterkin:
+
+ "Little Boy Blue, you are gallant and brave,
+ There was never a doubt in those clear, bright eyes.
+ Come, challenge the grim, dark Gates of the Grave
+ As the skylark sings to those infinite skies!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+The King of Fairyland gives command to Pease-Blossom:
+
+ "And cried, Pease-blossom, Mustard-Seed! You know the old command;
+ Well; these are little children; you must lead them on to Peterkin!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+They even discovered, as they were led on by Pease-Blossom and Mustard-
+Seed, how fairies were born:
+
+ "Men upon earth
+ Bring us to birth
+ Gently at even and morn!
+ When as brother and brother
+ They greet one another
+ And smile--then a fairy is born!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And, too, they found why fairies die:
+
+ "But at each cruel word
+ Upon earth that is heard,
+ Each deed of unkindness or hate,
+ Some fairy must pass
+ From the games in the grass
+ And steal through the terrible Gate."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And they learned what it took to make a rose:
+
+ "'What is there hid in the heart of a rose,
+ Mother-mine?'
+ 'Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows?
+ A man that died on a lonely hill
+ May tell you perhaps, but none other will,
+ Little child.'
+
+ "'What does it take to make a rose,
+ Mother-mine?'
+ 'The God that died to make it knows.
+ It takes the world's eternal wars,
+ It takes the moon and all the stars,
+ It takes the might of heaven and hell
+ And the everlasting Love as well,
+ Little child.'"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And they heard the old tales over:
+
+ "And 'See-Saw; Margery Daw,' we heard a rollicking shout,
+ As the swing boats hurtled over our heads to the tune of the
+ roundabout;
+ And 'Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn,' we heard the showmen
+ cry,
+ And 'Dickery Dock, I'm as good as a clock,' we heard the swings
+ reply."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Then at last they found their little brother Peterkin in "The Babe of
+Bethlehem."
+
+And if this were not enough to make the reader see how completely and
+wholly and sympathetically Noyes understood the child heart, hear this
+word from his great soul:
+
+ "Kind little eyes that I love,
+ Eyes forgetful of mine,
+ In a dream I am bending above
+ Your sleep and you open and shine;
+ And I know as my own grow blind
+ With a lonely prayer for your sake,
+ He will hear--even me--little eyes that were kind,
+ God bless you, asleep or awake!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+
+MANHOOD AND ITS VIGOR
+
+Virility like unto steel is the very mark of Noyes. But as this study
+of Childhood has shown, it is a virility touched with tenderness. As
+Bayard Taylor sings:
+
+ "The bravest are the tenderest,
+ The loving are the daring!"
+
+And this is Noyes. Noyes knew Manhood, he sang it, he challenged it
+too, he crowned it in "Drake"; he placed it a little lower than the
+gods. Hear this supreme word, enough to lift man to the skies:
+
+ "Where, what a dreamer yet, in spite of all,
+ Is man, that splendid visionary child
+ Who sent his fairy beacon through the dusk!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+This tribute to Marlow--how eaglelike it is! How suggestive of heights,
+and mountain peaks and blue skies and far-flung stars!
+
+ "But he who dared the thunder-roll,
+ Whose eagle-wings could soar,
+ Buffeting down the clouds of night,
+ To beat against the Light of Light,
+ That great God-blinded eagle-soul,
+ We shall not see him more!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Then he makes us one with all that is granite and flower and high and
+holy in "The Loom of the Years":
+
+ "One with the flower of a day, one with the withered moon,
+ One with the granite mountains that melt into the noon,
+ One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres,
+ We come from the Loom of the Weaver, that weaves the Web of the
+ years."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+From "Drake" again this ringing word:
+
+ "His face was like a king's face as he spake,
+ For sorrows that strike deep reveal the deep;
+ And through the gateways of a ragged wound
+ Sometimes a God will drive his chariot wheels
+ From some deep heaven within the hearts of men!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+
+CHRISTHOOD AND ITS CALVARY
+
+From childhood to manhood through Christhood to Godhood is a
+progression that Noyes sees clearly and makes us see as clearly.
+Somehow Christ is very real to Noyes. He is not a historical character
+far off. He is the Christ of here and now; the Christ that meets our
+every need; as real as a dearly beloved friend next door to us. No poet
+sees the Christ more clearly.
+
+First he caught the meanings of Christ's gospel of new birth. He was
+not confused on that. He knows:
+
+ "The task is hard to learn
+ While all the songs of Spring return
+ Along the blood and sing.
+
+ "Yet hear--from her deep skies,
+ How Art, for all your pain, still cries,
+ _Ye must be born again_!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And who could put his worship more beautifully than the poet does in
+"The Symbolist"?
+
+ "Help me to seek that unknown land!
+ I kneel before the shrine.
+ Help me to feel the hidden hand
+ That ever holdeth mine.
+
+ "I kneel before the Word, I kneel
+ Before the Cross of flame.
+ I cry, as through the gloom I steal,
+ The glory of the Name."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Christ's face, and his life experiences, here and there slip out of the
+lines of this English poet with an insistence that cannot but win the
+heart of the world, especially the heart of the Christian. Here and
+there in the most unexpected places his living presence stands before
+you, with, to use another of the poet's own lines, "Words that would
+make the dead arise," as in "Vicisti, Galilee":
+
+ "Poor, scornful Lilliputian souls,
+ And are ye still too proud
+ To risk your little aureoles
+ By kneeling with the crowd?
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "And while ye scoff, on every side
+ Great hints of Him go by,--Souls
+ that are hourly crucified
+ On some new Calvary!"
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "In flower and dust, in chaff and grain,
+ He binds Himself and dies!
+ We live by His eternal pain,
+ His hourly sacrifice."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "And while ye scoff from shore to shore
+ From sea to moaning sea,
+ 'Eloi, eloi,' goes up once more,
+ 'Lama sabachthani!'
+ The heavens are like a scroll unfurled,
+ The writing flames above--
+ This is the King of all the World
+ Upon His Cross of Love!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And there in the very midst of "Drake," that poem of a great sea
+fighter, comes this quatrain unexpectedly, showing the Christ always in
+the background of the poet's mind. He uses the Christ eagerly as a
+figure, as a help to his thought. He always puts the Christ and his
+cross to the fore:
+
+ "Whence came the prentice carpenter whose voice
+ Hath shaken kingdoms down, whose menial gibbet
+ Rises triumphant o'er the wreck of Empires
+ And stretches out its arms amongst the Stars?"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Then in "The Old Skeptic" we hear these of the Christ in the concluding
+lines:
+
+ "I will go back to my home and look at the wayside flowers,
+ And hear from the wayside cabin the kind old hymns again,
+ Where Christ holds out His arms in the quiet evening hours,
+ And the light of the chapel porches broods on the peaceful lane.
+
+ "And there I shall hear men praying the deep old foolish prayers,
+ And there I shall see once more, the fond old faith confessed,
+ And the strange old light on their faces who hear as a blind
+ man hears--
+ 'Come unto me, ye weary, and I will give you rest.'
+
+ "I will go back and believe in the deep old foolish tales,
+ And pray the simple prayers that I learned at my mother's knee,
+ Where the Sabbath tolls its peace, through the breathless
+ mountain-vales,
+ And the sunset's evening hymn hallows the listening sea."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+
+GODHOOD AT LAST AND SURELY
+
+He finds God. There is no uncertainty about it. From childhood to
+Godhood has the poet come, and we have come with him. It has been
+a triumphant journey upward. But we have not been afraid. Even the
+blinding light of God's face has not made us tremble. We have
+learned to know him through this climb upward and upward to his throne.
+
+At first it was uncertain. The poet had to challenge us to one great
+end in "The Paradox":
+
+ "But one thing is needful; and ye shall be true
+ To yourself and the goal and the God that ye seek;
+ Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you
+ If ye love one another, if your love be not weak!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+For he knew the heart hunger for God that was in every human breast:
+
+ "I am full-fed, and yet
+ I hunger!
+ Who set this fiercer famine in my maw?
+ Who set this fiercer hunger in my heart?"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+From "Drake" comes that scintillating line: "A scribble of God's finger
+in the sky"; and an admonition to the preacher: "Thou art God's
+minister, not God's oracle!"
+
+Nor did he forget that man, in his search for God, is, after all, but
+man, and weak! So from "Tales of a Mermaid Tavern":
+
+ "... and of that other Ocean
+ Where all men sail so blindly, and misjudge
+ Their friends, their charts, their storms, their stars, their
+ _God!_"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+Even like unto "Bo'sin Bill," who was and is a prevalent type, but not
+a serious type--that man who claims to be an atheist, but in times of
+stress, like unto us all, turns to God. And what humorous creatures we
+are! Enough to make God smile, if he did not love us so much:
+
+ "But our bo'sin Bill was an atheist still
+ Ex-cept--sometimes--in the dark!"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And again from "The Paradox":
+
+ "Flashing forth as a flame,
+ The unnameable Name,
+ The ineffable Word,
+ _I am the Lord_!"
+
+ "I am the End to which the whole world strives:
+ Therefore are ye girdled with a wild desire and shod
+ With sorrow; for among you all no soul
+ Shall ever cease, or sleep, or reach its goal
+ Of union and communion with the Whole
+ Or rest content with less than being God."
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+And thus we find God, with Noyes. And I have saved for the last
+quotation one from "The Origin of Life," which the poet says is
+"Written in answer to certain scientific theories." I save it for the
+last because, strangely, it sums up all the journey that we have passed
+through, from childhood to God-hood:
+
+ "Watched the great hills like clouds arise and set,
+ And one--named Olivet;
+ When you have seen as a shadow passing away,
+ One child clasp hands and pray;
+ When you have seen emerge from that dark mire
+ One martyr ringed with fire;
+ Or, from that Nothingness, by special grace
+ One woman's love-lit face...."
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Dare you re-kindle then,
+ One faith for faithless men,
+ And say you found, on that dark road you trod,
+ In the beginning, _God_?"
+
+ Collected Poems by Alfred Noyes.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: JOHN MASEFIELD.]
+
+
+VII
+
+JOHN MASEFIELD, POET FOR THE PULPIT
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Everlasting
+Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street, Salt Water Poems and Ballads,
+and Good Friday, published by The Macmillan Company, New York.]
+
+
+To climb is to achieve. We like to see men achieve; and the harder that
+achievement is, the more we thrill to it. For that reason we all have a
+hope to climb a Shasta, or a Whitney, or a Hood to its whitest peak,
+and glory in the achievement. And because of this human delight in the
+climb we thrill to see a man climb out of sin, or out of difficulty, or
+out of defeat to triumph.
+
+From "bar-boy" to poet is a great achievement, a great climb, or leap,
+or lift, whichever figure you may prefer, but that is exactly what
+John Masefield did.
+
+Perhaps Hutton's figure may describe it better--"The Leap to God." At
+least ten years ago John Masefield, a wanderer on the face of the
+earth, found himself in New York city without friends and without
+means, and it was not to him an unusual thing to accept the position of
+"bar-boy" in a New York saloon. This particular profession has within
+its scope the duties of wiping the beer bottles, sweeping the floor,
+and other menial tasks.
+
+And now John Masefield has within recent months come to New York city
+to be the lauded and feted. Newspaper reporters met him as his boat
+landed, eager for his every word; Carnegie Hall was crowded to hear him
+read from his own poetry; and his journey across the country was just a
+great triumph from New York to San Francisco.
+
+Something had happened in those ten years. This man had achieved. This
+poet had climbed to God. This man had experienced the "Soul's Leap to
+God." He had found that Man of all men who once said, "If I be lifted
+up, I will draw all men unto me." He always lifts men out of nothing
+into the glory of the greatest achievement. Yes, something had happened
+in those ten years.
+
+And the things that had happened in those ten years are perfectly
+apparent in his writings if one follow them from the beginning to the
+end. And the things that had happened I shall trace through this poet's
+writings from the first, boyhood verses of "Salt Water Ballads" to
+"Good Friday"; and therein lies the secret; and incidentally therein
+lies some of the most thrilling human touches, vivid illustrations for
+the preacher; some of the most intensely interesting religious
+experiences that any biography ever revealed consciously or
+unconsciously.
+
+
+I. THE SOUL PSYCHOLOGY OF HIS YOUTH IN "SALT WATER BALLADS"
+
+One may search these "Salt Water Ballads" through from the opening line
+of "Consecration" to "The Song At Parting" and find no faint suggestion
+of that deep religious glory of "The Everlasting Mercy." This book was
+written, even as Masefield says, "in my boyhood; all of it in my
+youth." He has not caught the deeper meaning of life yet--the spiritual
+meaning--although he has caught the social meaning, just as Markham has
+caught it.
+
+1. _Social Consciousness_
+
+Even in "Consecration" we hear the challenging ring of a young voice
+who has wandered over the face of the earth and has taken his place
+with the "Outcast," has cast his lot with the sailor, the stoker, the
+tramp.
+
+ "Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
+ The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the goad,
+ The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.
+ "Others may sing of the wine and the wealth, and the mirth,
+ The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth;
+ Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust, and the scum of the earth!
+
+ * * * * *
+
+ "Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould.
+ Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and the cold--
+ Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. Amen."
+
+ Salt Water Poems and Ballads.
+
+And it is a most fascinating story to see him climb from his boyhood,
+purely social, sympathetic interest in the outcast to that higher, that
+highest social consciousness, vitalized with religion. Here, seems it
+to me, that those who possess true social consciousness must come at
+last if they do their most effective work for the social regeneration
+of the world. Many have tremendous social consciousness, but no Christ.
+Christ himself is the very pulse beat of the social regeneration.
+Without him it must fail.
+
+One feels, even here in his youth poems, however, a promise of that
+deeper Masefield that later finds his soul in "The Everlasting Mercy."
+
+2. _Faith in Immortality_
+
+In "Rest Her Soul," these haunting lines with that expression of a deep
+faith found in "All that dies of her," we find a ray of light, which
+slants through a small window of the man that is to be:
+
+ "On the black velvet covering her eyes
+ Let the dull earth be thrown;
+ Her's is the mightier silence of the skies,
+ And long, quiet rest alone.
+ Over the pure, dark, wistful eyes of her,
+ O'er all the human, all that dies of her,
+ Gently let flowers be strown."
+
+ Salt Water Poems and Ballads.
+
+But most of these ballads, as their title suggests, are nothing more
+than the very sea foam of which they speak, and whose tale they tell;
+as compared with that later, deeper verse of Christian hope and
+regeneration.
+
+And then pass those ten years; ten years following the period of "The
+Salt Water Ballads"; and ten years following the time when he was a
+"bar-boy" in New York; ten years in which he climbs from a simple
+"social consciousness" to a social consciousness that has the heart
+beat of Christ in its every line. The poems he writes in this period
+are all of the Christ. "Good Friday," perhaps the strongest poem
+dealing with this great day in Christ's life, is full of a close
+knowledge of the spirit of the Man of Galilee. But it is in "The
+Everlasting Mercy" and not "The Story of a Round House" that we find
+Masefield at his big best, battering at the very doors of eternity with
+the fist of a giant and the tender love of a woman, and the plea of a
+penitent sinner.
+
+Something had happened to Masefield in those ten years. A man's entire
+life had been revolutionized; and his poetry with it. He still feels
+the want and need of the world, and the social injustice; but he has
+found the cure. In a word, he has been converted. I do not care whether
+or no Masefield means to tell his own story in "The Everlasting Mercy,"
+but I do know that he tells, in spite of himself, a story that fits
+curiously into, and marvelously explains, the strange revolution and
+change in his own life from "Salt Water Ballads" to "Good Friday."
+
+
+II. CONVERSION
+
+It is an old-fashioned Methodist conversion of which he tells, which
+links itself up with the New Testament gospel of the regeneration of
+a human soul in such a fascinating way that it gives those of us who
+preach this gospel an impelling, modern, dramatic putting of the old,
+old story, that will thrill our congregations and grip the hearts of
+men who know not the Christ.
+
+1. _Conviction of Sin_
+
+Saul Kane was an amateur prizefighter. He and his friend Bill have a
+fight in the opening lines of the tale, and Saul wins. This victory
+is followed by the usual debauch, which lasts until all the drunken
+crowd are asleep on the floor of the "Lion." No Russian novelist, nor
+a Dostoievesky, nor another, ever dared such realism as Masefield has
+given us in his picture of this night's sin. He makes sin all that it
+is--black and hideous:
+
+ "From three long hours of gin and smokes,
+ And two girls' breath and fifteen blokes,
+ A warmish night and windows shut
+ The room stank like a fox's gut.
+ The heat, and smell, and drinking deep
+ Began to stun the gang to sleep."
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+But this was too much for Saul Kane. He had still enough decency left
+to be ashamed. He wanted air. He went to a window and threw it open:
+
+ "I opened window wide and leaned
+ Out of that pigsty of the fiend,
+ And felt a cool wind go like grace
+ About the sleeping market-place.
+ The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
+ The bells chimed, Holy, Holy, Holy;
+ And in a second's pause there fell
+ The cold note of the chapel bell,
+ And then a cock crew flapping wings,
+ And summat made me think of things!"
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+There it is: sin, and conviction of sin. Perhaps he thought of another
+man who had virtually betrayed the Christ, and the cock crew and made
+that other "think o' things."
+
+Then came the reaction from that conviction; the battle against that
+same conviction that he must give up sin and surrender to the Christ;
+and a terrific battle it is, and a terrific description of that battle
+Masefield gives us, lightninglike in its vividness until there comes
+the little woman of God, Miss Bourne (a deaconess, if you please), who
+has always known the better man in Saul, who has followed him with her
+Christly love like "The Hound of Heaven." And how tenderly, yet how
+insistently, how pleadingly she speaks:
+
+ "'Saul Kane,' she said, 'when next you drink,
+ Do me the gentleness to think
+ That every drop of drink accursed
+ Makes Christ within you die of thirst;
+ That every dirty word you say
+ Is one more flint upon His way,
+ Another thorn about His head,
+ Another mock by where He tread;
+ Another nail another cross;
+ All that you are is that Christ's loss.'"
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+These searching words were beyond defeat. They went home to his already
+convicted heart and mind like arrows. They hurt. They cut. They
+awakened. They called. They pierced. They pounded with giant fists.
+They lashed like spiked whips. They burned like a soul on fire. They
+clamored, and they whispered like a mother's love, and at last his
+heart opened:
+
+2. _Forgiveness_
+
+ "I know the very words I said,
+ They bayed like bloodhounds in my head.
+ 'The water's going out to sea
+ And there's a great moon calling me;
+ But there's a great sun calls the moon,
+ And all God's bells will carol soon
+ For joy and glory, and delight
+ Of some one coming home to-night.'"
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+And then came the consciousness that he was "done with sin" forever:
+
+ "I knew that I had done with sin,
+ I knew that Christ had given me birth
+ To brother all the souls on earth,"
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+which was followed by two "glories"--the "Glory of the Lighted Mind"
+and the "Glory of the Lighted Soul." I think that perhaps in our
+preaching on conversion we make too little of the regeneration of the
+"mind." Masefield does not miss one whit of a complete regeneration.
+
+3. _The Joy of Conversion_
+
+ "O glory of the lighted mind.
+ How dead I'd been, how dumb, how blind!
+ The station brook to my new eyes
+ Was babbling out of Paradise,
+ The waters rushing from the rain
+ Were singing, 'Christ has risen again!'"
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+And then the soul glory:
+
+ "O glory of the lighted Soul.
+ The dawn came up on Bradlow Knoll,
+ The dawn with glittering on the grasses,
+ The dawn which pass and never passes."
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+But that wasn't all. Masefield knows that the other self must be
+completely eradicated, so he makes Saul Kane change his environment
+entirely. He goes to the country. He plows, and as he plows he learns
+the lesson of the soil and cries:
+
+ "O Jesus, drive the coulter deep
+ To plow my living man from sleep."
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+And more word from Christ as he plowed:
+
+ "I knew that Christ was there with Callow,
+ That Christ was standing there with me,
+ That Christ had taught me what to be,
+ That I should plow and as I plowed
+ My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,
+ And as I drove the clods apart
+ Christ would be plowing in my heart,
+ Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,
+ Through all my bad life's rotten fruits."
+
+ The Everlasting Mercy and the Widow in the Bye Street.
+
+And so it is, that beginning with his poems of youth, John Masefield
+starts out with a sympathetic social consciousness, but nothing more
+apparently. He brothers with the outcast and frankly prefers it. Then
+comes the great regenerating influence in his life, which we surely
+find in his expression of faith that the soul is immortal, and finally
+that upheaval which we call conversion with all of its incident steps
+from conviction of sin to repentance; and then to the consciousness of
+forgiveness; to the lighted mind and the lighted soul; and then to the
+uprooting of evil and the planting of good in the soil of his life. And
+so through Saul Kane we see John Masefield and have an explanation of
+that subtle yet revolutionary change in his life and his poetry,
+pregnant with illustrations that, to quote another English poet, Noyes,
+"Would make the dead arise!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY
+[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
+by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the
+Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New
+York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New
+York.]
+
+A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES;
+OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD
+
+
+A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this
+sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of
+this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you
+quoted--they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were
+from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's
+turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and
+high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death.
+
+And the lines that gripped the layman were:
+
+ "I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
+ That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
+ I've watched the big husky sun wallow
+ In crimson and gold, and grow dim;
+ Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming
+ And the stars tumbled out neck and crop;
+ And I've thought that I surely was dreaming
+ With the peace o' the world piled on top."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+[Illustration: ROBERT SERVICE.]
+
+Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to
+him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his
+own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who
+read:
+
+ "The summer--no sweeter was ever,
+ The sunshiny woods all athrill;
+ The grayling aleap in the river,
+ The bighorn asleep on the hill;
+ The strong life that never knows harness,
+ The wilds where the caribou call;
+ The freedom, the freshness, the farness;
+ O God! how I'm stuck on it all!"
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows
+that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to
+love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with
+a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for
+the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:
+
+ "Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro,
+ Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know
+ That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be
+ the last to go.
+
+ "Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand
+ Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand,
+ Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God:
+
+ "But the stars throng out in their glory,
+ And they sing of the God in man;
+ They sing of the Mighty Master,
+ Of the loom his fingers span,
+ Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,
+ And weft in the wondrous plan.
+
+ "Here by the camp-fire's flicker,
+ Deep in my blanket curled,
+ I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
+ Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
+ And the wind and the wave are silent,
+ And world is singing to world."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call
+of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the
+great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths
+which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the
+soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:
+
+ "Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down,
+ yet grasped at glory,
+ Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
+ 'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
+ See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do
+things!"--the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great
+needs:
+
+ "The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things--."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+
+SIN AND DEATH
+
+The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the
+father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel
+northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he
+learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material
+quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're
+wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"
+
+ "There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
+ It's luring me on as of old;
+ Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
+ So much as just finding the gold.
+ It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
+ It's the forests where silence has lease;
+ It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
+ It's the stillness that fills me with peace."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+Or another verse:
+
+ "I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
+ I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
+ Was it famine or scurvy--I fought it;
+ I hurled my youth into a grave.
+ I wanted the gold, and I got it--
+ Came out with a fortune last fall--
+ Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
+ And somehow the gold isn't all."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl
+our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come
+to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,
+
+ "All you can take in your cold, dead hand
+ Is what you have given away."
+
+And how the warning against sin hurtles its
+way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:
+
+ "It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
+ It twists you from foe to a friend;
+ It seems it's been since the beginning;
+ It seems it will be to the end."
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the
+guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting
+Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you."
+Service says the same thing in "It grips you."
+
+
+GOD AND HEAVEN
+
+Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and
+Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the
+trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God
+out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the
+gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who
+know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?
+
+ "I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring
+ wings;
+ It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the
+ timeless things,
+ And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in
+ my heart-strings!"
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+This God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:
+
+ "Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond
+ For us who are true to the trail;
+ A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
+ A farness that never will fail;
+ A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
+ A manhood that irks at a bond,
+ And try how we will, unattainable still,
+ Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"
+
+ Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.
+
+And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he
+is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at
+every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail:
+
+
+JUST THINK!
+
+ "Just think! some night the stars will gleam
+ Upon a cold, grey stone,
+ And trace a name with silver beam,
+ And lo! 'twill be your own,
+
+ "That night is speeding on to greet
+ Your epitaphic rhyme.
+ Your life is but a little beat
+ Within the heart of Time.
+
+ "A little gain, a little pain,
+ A laugh lest you may moan;
+ A little blame, a little fame,
+ A star-gleam on a stone."
+
+ Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.
+
+Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death
+and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical
+rules of conduct that they do, expressed in Service's "The Woman and
+the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and
+withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning
+woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him:
+
+ "Then sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled:
+ 'You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.
+ We have outlived the old standards; we have burst like an overtight
+ thong
+ The ancient outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"
+ "Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His
+ side,
+ For O, the woman was wondrous, and O, the angel was tried!
+ And deep in his hell sang the devil, and this was the strain of his
+ song:
+ 'The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"
+
+ The Spell of the Yukon.
+
+And I doubt not, but that we all need that warning not to give up "The
+ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."
+
+
+RHYMES OF A RED CROSS MAN
+
+Here it is that we find a consciousness of the Eternal creeping through
+the smoke and din and glare. Here, like the hard, dangerous life of the
+Alaskan trails, only harder and more dangerous; here amid war in "The
+Fool" we catch six last lines that thrill us:
+
+ "He died with the glory of faith in his eyes,
+ And the glory of love in his heart.
+ And though there's never a grave to tell,
+ Nor a cross to mark his fall,
+ Thank God we know that he "batted well"
+ In the last great Game of all."
+
+ Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.
+
+And even amid the terrible thunder of war the "Lark" sings, as Service
+reminds us in his poem of that name, sings and points to heaven:
+
+ "Pure heart of song! do you not know
+ That we are making earth a hell?
+ Or is it that you try to show
+ Life still is joy and all is well?
+ Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain
+ You beat into that bit of blue:
+ Lo! we who pant in war's red rain
+ Lift shining eyes, see Heaven too!"
+
+ Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.
+
+To close this study of Service, which has run from the hard battle
+ground of the Alaskan trails to the harder battle ground of France;
+which has run from a study of white peaks and white lives, to high
+peaks and high hopes, through sin and death to heaven and the Father
+himself, I quote the closing lines of Service's "The Song of the Wage
+Slave," which will remind the reader in tone and spirit of Markham's
+"The Man with the Hoe":
+
+ "Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in thy many lands;
+ Not by my sins wilt thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
+ Master, I've done thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
+ And the long, long shift is over--Master, I've earned it--Rest."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: RUPERT BROOKE.]
+
+IX
+
+RUPERT BROOKE
+[Footnote: The poetical selections from the writings of Rupert Brooke
+appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from
+The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, published by John Lane Company,
+New York.]
+
+PREACHER OF FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, COUNTRY, GODS, AND GOD
+
+
+Wilfred Gibson expressed it for us all; voiced the sorrow and the
+hope in the death of Rupert Brooke, a victim of the Hun as well as that
+other giant of art, the Rheims Cathedral; expressed it in these lines
+written shortly after Rupert Brooke died:
+
+ "He's gone.
+ I do not understand.
+ I only know
+ That, as he turned to go
+ And waved his hand,
+ In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
+ And I was dazzled by a sunset glow--
+ And he was gone,"
+
+Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the
+downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with
+sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines,
+and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also
+beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our
+friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from
+eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.
+
+And you yourself, war-dead poet, you sang your end, full knowing that
+it would come, as it did on foreign soil, far from the England that you
+loved and voiced so wondrously. And now these lines that you wrote of
+your own possible passing have new meaning for us who remain to mourn
+your going:
+
+ "If I should die, think only this of me:
+ That there's some corner of a foreign field
+ That is forever England. There shall be
+ In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
+ A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
+ Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
+ A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
+ Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a
+striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love
+of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your
+place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger--a quartette of
+immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland,
+"faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a
+youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a
+gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough
+to save the world.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL OF FRIENDSHIP
+
+Among the few definite, outstanding gospels that Brooke preached is
+seen the gospel of friendship. In "The Jolly Company" he says:
+
+ "O white companionship! You only
+ In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
+ Friends, radiant and inseparable!"
+
+ "Light-hearted and glad they seemed to me
+ And merry comrades, even so
+ God out of heaven may laugh to see.--"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+Then, again, in a poem which he called "Lines Written in the Belief
+That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia," he
+voices in an even more striking quatrain the immortality of friendship.
+What a thrill of hope runs through us here as we, who believe that life
+brings no richer gold than friendship, read this poet's thought that
+friendship too shall last beyond the years!
+
+ "And I know, one night, on some far height,
+ In the tongue I never knew,
+ I yet shall hear the tidings clear
+ From them that were friends of you.--"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL OF LOVE
+
+And where Friendship sweeps into love who shall tell, or where the
+dividing line is? But while Brooks lived he forgot not love. His was a
+throbbing, beating love whose light was a beacon night and day; a
+beacon of which he was not ashamed. He set the fires of romantic love
+burning and when he went away he left them burning so that their light
+might light the way for other poets and other lovers and other
+travelers when they came. He believed, like Noyes, that love should not
+be weak; that that was the great hope. Noyes said:
+
+ "But one thing is needful, and ye shall be true
+ To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek;
+ Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you
+ If ye love one another if your love be not weak."
+
+ From Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.
+
+Now I do not mean to suggest that the love that Brooke sang was exactly
+the type that Noyes sang in these four lines. In fact, one feels a
+difference as he reads the two English poets, but they are alike in
+that each agreed that Love should not be weak, whatever it was. Brooke
+sang of romantic love, high and holy as that is; love of Youth for
+Maiden, lad for lass, and man for woman; and thank God for the high
+clean song that he gave to it in such lines as in "The Great Lover":
+
+ "Love is a flame;--we have beaconed the world's night.
+ A city:--and we have built it, these and I.
+ An emperor:--we have taught the world to die."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+And again in that same great poem:
+
+ "--Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
+ And give what's left of love again, and make
+ New friends, now strangers...."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL OF LOVE FOR ONE'S COUNTRY
+
+And who shall say where the line of cleavage is between that love which
+clings to Friends; and that greater or conjugal love which moulds man
+and woman into one; and love for children, blood of one's blood, and
+love of country; and love of God? I say that those who are truly the
+great Lovers of the world love all of these and that not one is
+omitted. At least the truly great Lovers have the capacity for love
+of all these types. I have found no expression of paternal love in
+Brooke, for he had not come to that great experience of life before
+Death claimed him. And because Death robbed him of that experience
+Death robbed us of a rare interpretation of that special type of Love.
+But of all these other types which I have mentioned we have a clear
+expression in the slender volume of poems that he left us as our
+heritage from his estate. And, since we have already read one beautiful
+expression of this love for his country in the opening paragraphs of
+this chapter, we will add here another stanza of that noble expression
+of his love for old England.
+
+ "And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
+ A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
+ Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
+ Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
+ And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
+ In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+What a voice for the times! What a voice for America! Would that some
+American Brooke might arise to sing this same deep song.
+
+
+A GOSPEL OF THE GODS
+
+Rupert Brooke had a wide range of interests as indeed any great Lover
+of Life and living must have. He expressed the hopelessness of the
+heathen gods in a poem which he called "On the Death of Smet-Smet, the
+Hippopotomus-Goddess" in lines that fairly sparkle with the electricity
+of destruction and sarcasm:
+
+ "She was wrinkled and huge and hideous? She was our Mother.
+ She was lustful and lewd?--but a God; we had none other.
+ In the day She was hidden and dumb, but at nightfall moaned in the
+ shade;
+ We shuddered and gave Her Her will in the darkness; we were afraid.
+
+ (The People without)
+
+ "She sent us pain,
+ And we bowed before Her;
+ She smiled again
+ And bade us adore Her.
+ She solaced our woe
+ And soothed our sighing;
+ And what shall we do
+ Now God is dying?"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+And so it was that with the deepest sense of understanding, with the
+deepest sympathy, without intolerance Brooke, in this one verse sets
+the Heathen gods where they belong and sets us where we belong in our
+relations to those who worship these gods and goddesses. It is all they
+have. We have no right to sneer and scorn until we are able to give
+them better. These poor Egyptians knew no other God. They said
+plaintively "but a God; we have none other"; and "And what shall we do
+now God is dying?" The crime of destroying faith in a lesser god until
+one has seen and can make seeable the real God is the greatest crime of
+civilization. And to this writer's way of thinking there is no greater
+sin than that of Intolerance; a sin to which a certain portion of the
+institutionalized church is prone. Noyes shot the fist of indignation
+at this type of intolerance straight from a manly shoulder when he
+said:
+
+ "How foolish, then, you will agree
+ Are those who think that all must see
+ The world alike, or those who scorn
+ Another who, perchance, was born
+ Where in a different dream from theirs
+ What they called Sin to him were prayers?"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.
+
+Brooke saw the same thing and had great tolerance for those who
+worshipped the "unknown gods"; worshipped the best they knew, although
+it were a feeble worship. He understood their outcry that they knew not
+what to do, now that their god was dying:
+
+ "She was so strong;
+ But death is stronger.
+ She ruled us long;
+ But time is longer.
+ She solaced our woe
+ And soothed our sighing;
+ And what shall we do
+ Now God is dying?"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+
+THE GOSPEL OF ONE GOD
+
+Then sweeping upward, although one must admit, with groping, reaching
+eagerness, this young poet tried to find, and at last did find, the one
+God. He mentions this God that he found more than any other one thing
+about which he wrote, so far as I can find. In one slender volume are
+more than a dozen striking references. Take for example the last
+fifteen lines of "The Song of the Pilgrims":
+
+ "O Thou,
+ God of all long desirous roaming,
+ Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,
+ And crying after lost desire.
+ Hearten us onward! as with fire
+ Consuming dreams of other bliss.
+ The best Thou givest, giving this
+ Sufficient thing--to travel still
+ Over the plain, beyond the hill,
+ Unhesitating through the shade,
+ Amid the silence unafraid,
+ Till, at some hidden turn, one sees
+ Against the black and muttering trees
+ Thine altar, wonderfully white,
+ Among the Forests of the Night."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+Or again, from "Ambarvalia":
+
+ "But laughing and half-way up to heaven,
+ With wind and hill and star,
+ I yet shall keep before I sleep,
+ Your Ambarvalia."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+Immortality, which goes hand in hand with the God of immortality, the
+God of the "Everlasting Arms," is voiced in "Dining-Room Tea," a poem
+addressed to one whom he loved:
+
+ "For suddenly, and other whence,
+ I looked on your magnificence.
+ I saw the stillness and the light,
+ And you, august, immortal, white,
+ Holy and strange; and every glint,
+ Posture and jest and thought and tint
+ Freed from the mask of transiency,
+ Triumphant in eternity,
+ Immote, immortal."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+Then, speaking of the war and peace with great yearning and great
+faith, the young poet cried a new glory in what he calls "God's
+Hour" in a poem on "Peace":
+
+ "Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
+ And caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping,
+ With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
+ To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+And who has not felt this, but has not been able to thus express it?
+And who has not seen that somehow, strangely, mysteriously, wondrously,
+the youth not only of England, but of America has leaped to "God's
+Hour," as Brooke calls this war; leaped from play, and from
+listlessness in spiritual things; leaped from indifference to things of
+the eternities; leaped to a magnificent heroism, selflessness,
+sacrifice, brotherhood; leaped to a new and Godlike nobility.
+
+To all who mourn for their dead lads comes the cheering word of Brooke,
+who himself paid the great debt of love. It comes out of a poem called
+"Safety." Read it, you who mourn, and be comforted:
+
+ "Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
+ He who has found our hid security,
+ Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
+ And hear our word, 'Who is so safe as we?'
+ 'We have found safety with all things undying!'"
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+"We have found safety with all things undying." Brooke heard God's word
+as did the prophet of old crying, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,
+saith the Lord," and this sonnet comes as a personal message to
+mourning mother and father in America. As they listen they hear the
+voices of those they loved crying: "Who is so safe as we? We have
+found safety with all things undying." Thank God that this poet, though
+young, lived long enough, and saw enough of war and death to give this
+heartening word to a world which weeps and wearies with war and woe and
+want! Thus in this new immortality we shall
+
+ "Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
+ What this tumultuous body now denies:
+ And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
+ And see, no longer blinded by our eyes."
+
+ The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Giant Hours With Poet Preachers
+by William L. Stidger
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS ***
+
+This file should be named 7115-8.txt or 7115-8.zip
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