Wind:
Why do you play
that long beautiful adagio,
that archaic air,
to-night
Will it never end?
Or is it the beginning,
some prelude you seek?
Is it a tale you strum?
_Yesterday, yesterday_—
Have you no more for us?
Wind:
Play on.
There is nor hope
nor mutiny
in you.
_Arthur Davison Ficke_
Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883.
He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was
admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years’ service in
France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to
literature exclusively.
Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative
of which are _Sonnets of a Portrait Painter_ (1914), _The Man on the
Hilltop_ (1915) and _An April Elegy_ (1917). In these, the author
has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision
with an intensified seriousness.
Having been an expert collector and student of Japanese prints,
Ficke has written two books on this theme. His intellectual
equipment is reinforced by a strong sense of satire. Writing under
the pseudonym “Anne Knish,” he was one of the co-authors (with
Witter Bynner) of _Spectra_ (1916), which, caricaturing some of the
wilder outgrowths of the new poetry, was taken seriously by a
majority of the critics and proved to be a brilliant hoax.