Let me live out my years in heat of blood!
Let me die drunken with the dreamer’s wine!
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud
Go toppling to the dust—a vacant shrine.
Let me go quickly, like a candle light
Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow.
Give me high noon—and let it then be night!
Thus would I go.
And grant that when I face the grisly Thing,
My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps.
Let me be as a tune-swept fiddlestring
That feels the Master Melody—and snaps!
_Witter Bynner_
Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 1881. He
was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been assistant editor of
various periodicals as well as adviser to publishers. Recently, he
has spent much of his time lecturing on poetry and travelling in the
Orient.
_Young Harvard_ (1907), the first of Bynner’s volumes, was, as the
name implies, a celebration of his _alma mater. The New World_
(1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. In this
extended poem, Bynner sought—almost too determinedly—to translate
the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of these volumes
displays its author’s gifts at their best, for Bynner is, first of
all, a lyric poet. _Grenstone Poems_ (1917) and _A Canticle of Pan_
(1920) reveal a more natural singing voice. Bynner harmonizes in
many keys; transposing, modulating and shifting from one tonality to
another. This very ease is his chief defect, for Bynner’s facility
leads him not only to write too much but in too many different
styles. Many of his poems seem like sounding-boards that echo the
tones of every poet except the composer of them. Instead of a fusion
of gifts we have, too often, a disintegration.
When Bynner is least dexterous he is most ingratiating. When he does
not try to sound the whole gamut of modern poetry from the lyrics of
A. E. Housman to the attenuated epigrams of Ezra Pound, he can
strike his own note with clarity and precision. Even in _The Beloved
Stranger_ (1919), where the borrowed accents of his _alter ego_ are
only too apparent, one is arrested by lines of musical charm and
fluency.
Under the pseudonym “Emanuel Morgan,” Bynner was coauthor with
Arthur Davison Ficke (writing under the name of “Anne Knish”) of
_Spectra_ (1916). _Spectra_ was a serious burlesque of some of the
extreme manifestations of modern poetic tendencies—a remarkable hoax
that deceived many of the radical propagandists as well as most of
the conservative critics.