Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,
A glory; but a negligible sight,
For you had often seen a mountain-peak
But not my paper. So we came to speak ...
A smoke, a smile,—a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!
You a young engineer, five feet eleven,
Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,
Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,
Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track
The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,—
And I a poet, wistful of my betters,
Reading George Meredith’s high-hearted letters,
Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each
Absorbing to himself—as I to me
And you to you—a glad identity!
After a time, when others went away,
A curious kinship made us choose to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time
You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,
Until we found that we were college men
And smoked more easily and smiled again;
And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
“I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill
At Berkeley!” With your happy Grecian head
Upraised, “I never saw the place,” you said—
“Once I was free of class, I always went
Out to the field.”
Young engineer, you meant
As fair a tribute to the better part
As ever I did. Beauty of the heart
Is evident in temples. But it breathes
Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.
You are a poet quite as much as I,
Though differences appear in what we do,
And I an athlete quite as much as you.
Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.
Who knows but we shall look again and find
The circus-man and drummer, not behind
But leading in our visible estate—
As discus-thrower and as laureate?
_James Oppenheim_
James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 1882. Two
years later his family moved to New York City, where he has lived
ever since. After a public school education, he took special courses
at Columbia University (1901-3) and engaged in settlement work,
acting in the capacity of assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild
Settlement, and superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for
Girls (1904-7). His studies and experiences on the lower East Side
of New York furnished the material for his first, and most popular,
book of short stories, _Doctor Rast_ (1909).
Oppenheim’s initial venture as a poet, _Monday Morning and Other
Poems_ (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, half
experimental. In spite of its obvious indebtedness to Whitman, most
of the verses are in formal meters and regular (though ragged)
rhyme. Beauty is sought but seldom captured here; the message is
coughed out between bursts of eloquence and fits of stammering.
With _Songs for the New Age_ (1914) Oppenheim became his own
liberator. The stammering has gone, the uncouth dissonances have
resolved. One listens to a speech that, echoing the Whitmanic
sonority, develops a music that is strangely Biblical and yet local.
It is the expression of an ancient people reacting to modernity, of
a race in solution. (See Preface.) This volume, like all of
Oppenheim’s subsequent work, is analysis in terms of poetry; a slow
searching beneath the musical surface that attempts to diagnose the
twisted soul of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old
Isaiah note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as
“The Slave,” “We Dead,” “Tasting the Earth”; the music and imagery
of the Psalms are heard in “The Flocks,” “The Tree” and “The Runner
in the Skies.”
_War and Laughter_ (1916) holds much of its predecessor’s exaltation
and an almost ecstatic discontent. The Semitic blend of delight and
disillusion—that quality which hates the world for its shams and
hypocrisies and loves it in spite of them—is revealed in “Greed,” in
the ironic “Report on the Planet Earth” and the brightly affirmative
“Laughter.”
_The Book of Self_ (1917) is less notable, an imperfect fusion.
Oppenheim’s preoccupation with analytical psychology mars the effect
of the long passages which, in themselves, contain flashes of
clairvoyance. _The Solitary_ (1919) is a great stride forward; its
major section, a long symbolic poem called “The Sea,” breathes the
same note that was the burden of the earlier books—“We are flesh on
the way to godhood”—with greater strength and still greater control.
Besides his poetry, Oppenheim has published several volumes of short
stories, four novels, and two poetic plays. During 1916-17 he was
editor of that promising but short-lived magazine, _The Seven Arts_.