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COLORS OF LIFE
NEW POETRY: FALL 1918
_By Robert Graves_
FAIRIES AND FUSILIERS
_By Gilbert Frankau_
THE OTHER SIDE
_By Max Eastman_
COLORS OF LIFE
_By Kahlil Gibran_
THE MADMAN
COLORS OF LIFE
POEMS AND SONGS AND SONNETS
BY
MAX EASTMAN
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVIII
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A PREFACE
ABOUT AMERICAN POETRY
It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
than my share in the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
being there. I have found that rather in individual experience and in
those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
cruel system of these times, I loved it first for myself. Its
essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth, and it can
not be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle.
Therefore I have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest
friends for some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has
never entered, even so deeply as it might, into those tempests of social
change that are coloring our thoughts today.
Poetry that has life for its subject, and untempered reality, is rather
expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
admiration to Poe, and they were the poets of reality and those who
touched the mood of social revolt. And for my part I think there is a
modern validity in the attitudes of both these poets, and a certain
adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might
propose.
Every one who reads this book will be familiar, I suppose, with Walt
Whitman's ideal of an American poetry so free and strong and
untrammelled of ornamentation that it should go out of the books it was
published in and stand up with the hills and forests on the earth. "The
Poetry of the future," he said.
CONTENTS
AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY--A PREFACE 13
POEMS
COMING TO PORT 43
THE LONELY BATHER 45
IN MY ROOM 46
HOURS 47
FIRE AND WATER 48
YOU MAKE NO ANSWER 49
OUT OF A DARK NIGHT 50
A MORNING 51
ANNIVERSARY 52
AUTUMN LIGHT 53
A MODERN MESSIAH 54
IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL 55
A VISIT 56
TO LOVE 58
CAR-WINDOW 59
LITTLE FISHES 60
INVOCATION 61
SOMETIMES 62
TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN 63
TO AN ACTRESS 65
EYES 66
X RAYS 67
SONNETS
A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS 71
A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT 74
THOSE YOU DINED WITH 75
THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD 76
AS THE CRAG EAGLE 77
TO MY FATHER 78
TO EDWARD S. MARTIN 79
EUROPE--1914 80
ISADORA DUNCAN 81
THE SUN 82
THE NET 83
A DUNE SONNET 84
SONGS
SEA-SHORE 87
RAINY SONG 88
A HYMN TO GOD 90
COMING SPRING 91
DAISIES 92
BOBOLINK 93
DIOGENES 94
EARLIER POEMS
A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY 97
AT THE AQUARIUM 102
EARTH'S NIGHT 103
THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS 104
TO THE ASCENDING MOON 107
LEIF ERICSON 110
MIDNIGHT 116
IN MARCH 117
THE FLOWERS AT CHURCH 118
TO THE LITTLE BED AT NIGHT 120
IN A DUNGEON OF RUSSIA 121
TO A TAWNY THRUSH 125
THE SAINT GAUDENS STATUES 127
SUMMER SUNDAY 129
AMERICAN IDEALS OF POETRY
A PREFACE
It is impossible for me, feeling and watching the eternal tidal currents
of liberty and individual life against tyranny and the type, which are
clashing and rearing up their highest crimsoned waves at this hour, to
publish without some word of deprecation a book of poems so personal for
the most part, and reflecting my own too easy taste of freedom rather
than my sense of the world's struggle towards an age and universe of it.
That struggle has always occupied my thoughts, and often my energies,
and yet I have never identified myself with it or found my undivided
being there. I have found that rather in individual experience, and in
those moments of energetic idleness when the life of universal nature
seemed to come to its bloom of realization in my consciousness. Life is
older than liberty. It is greater than revolution. It burns in both
camps. And life is what I love. And though I love life for all men and
women, and so inevitably stand in the ranks of revolution against the
cruel system of these times, I love it also for myself. And its
essence--the essence of life--is variety and specific depth. It can not
be found in monotonous consecration to a general principle. Therefore I
have feared and avoided this consecration, which earnest friends for
some reason always expect me to exemplify, and my poetry has never
entered even so deeply as it might into those tempests of social change
that are coloring our thoughts today.
Poetry that has life for its subject, and democratic reality, is rather
expected to manifest that irregular flow and exuberance of material over
structure with which Walt Whitman challenged the world. In America at
least the freedom and poignant candor of strong art is associated with
the tradition that he founded, and little is granted to that other
tradition which finds its original in Edgar Allan Poe. There existed in
Europe, however, a succession of poets whose eyes turned back in
admiration to Poe, and they were poets of reality, and those who touched
the mood of democratic revolt. And for my part I think there is a modern
validity in the attitudes of both these poets, a certain adjudication
between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose; and
that is what I should like to discuss with those who may enter
sympathetically into this little volume.
They will all be familiar, I suppose, with Walt Whitman's ideal of an
American poetry so free and strong and untrammelled of ornamentation,
that it should go out of the books it was published in and stand up with
the hills and forests on the earth.
"The poetry of the future," he said, "aims at the free expression of
emotion, (which means far, far more than appears at first,) and to
arouse and initiate, more than to define or finish....
"In my opinion the time has arrived to essentially break down the
barriers of form between prose and poetry. I say the latter is
henceforth to win and maintain its character regardless of rhyme, and
the measurement-rules of iambic, spondee, dactyl, &c., and that even if
rhyme and those measurements continue to furnish the medium for inferior
writers and themes, (especially for persiflage and the comic, as there
seems henceforward, to the perfect taste, something inevitably comic in
rhyme, merely in itself, and anyhow,) the truest and greatest _Poetry_,
(while subtly and necessarily always rhythmic, and distinguishable
easily enough,) can never again, in the English language, be express'd
in arbitrary and rhyming metre, any more than the greatest eloquence, or
the truest power and passion. While admitting that the venerable and
heavenly forms of chiming versification have in their time play'd great
and fitting parts--that the pensive complaint, the ballads, wars,
amours, legends of Europe, &c., have, many of them, been inimitably
render'd in rhyming verse--that there have been very illustrious poets
whose shapes the mantle of such verse has beautifully and appropriately
envelopt--and though the mantle has fallen, with perhaps added beauty,
on some of our own age--it is, notwithstanding, certain to me, that the
day of such conventional rhyme is ended. In America, at any rate, and as
a medium of highest aesthetic practical or spiritual expression, present
or future, it palpably fails, and must fail, to serve. The Muse of the
Prairies, of California, Canada, Texas, and of the peaks of Colorado,
dismissing the literary, as well as social etiquette of over-sea
feudalism and caste, joyfully enlarging, adapting itself to comprehend
the size of the whole people, with the free play, emotions, pride,
passions, experiences, that belong to them, body and soul--to the
general globe, and all its relations in astronomy, as the savans portray
them to us--to the modern, the busy Nineteenth century, (as grandly
poetic as any, only different,) with steamships, railroads, factories,
electric telegraphs, cylinder presses--to the thought of the solidarity
of nations, the brotherhood and sisterhood of the entire earth--to the
dignity and heroism of the practical labor of farms, factories,
foundries, workshops, mines, or on ship-board, or on lakes and
rivers--resumes that other medium of expression, more flexible, more
eligible--soars to the freer, vast, diviner heaven of prose."
It may surprise some people to see this monumental challenge to the
poets of the future confronted with the pathetic memory of Edgar Allan
Poe. And yet it is natural to place these two poets in contrast, and the
weight neither of genius nor of influence is altogether upon one side.
They are the two American poets of unique distinction, and they are the
fountains of the two strongest influences in all modern poetry of the
occident. And it is worth observing that if Walt Whitman had written as
few pages of poetry as Poe did, his name would hardly be remembered,
whereas Poe would have established a literary tradition if he had
written but five sorrowful lyrics. His individuality was so poignant.
His art was so exquisite. And not only was his art exquisite, but his
philosophy of his art was as unique, assertive, and prodigious in
contempt for his predecessors, as that of Walt Whitman. I have never
read anything about any art more sheer and startling in its kind, than
Poe's essay on "The Philosophy of Composition"; and nothing more
energetically opposite to Walt Whitman could possibly be devised. To
convey the flavor of the contrast, I quote these sentences--inadequate
for any other purpose--from Poe's essay:
"Most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood
that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic
intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public
take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating
crudities of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the
last moment, at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived
not at the maturity of full view, at the fully matured fancies
discarded in despair as unmanageable, at the cautious
selections and rejections, at the painful erasures and
interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the
tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps,
the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches....
"For my own part, I have neither sympathy with the repugnance
alluded to, nor at any time the least difficulty in recalling
to mind the progressive steps of any of my compositions; and,
since the interest of an analysis, or reconstruction, such as I
have considered a _desideratum_, is quite independent of any
real or fancied interest in the thing analyzed, it will not be
regarded as a breach of decorum on my part to show the _modus
operandi_ by which some one of my own works was put together. I
select 'The Raven' as most generally known....
"Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem _per se_, the
circumstance--or say the necessity--which in the first place
gave rise to the intention of composing _a_ poem that should
suit at once the popular and critical taste.
"We commence, then, with this intention.
"The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary
work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content
to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from
unity of impression; for, if two sittings be required, the
affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is
at once destroyed....
"My next thought concerned the choice of an impression, or
effect, to be conveyed: and here I may as well observe that,
throughout the construction, I kept steadily in view the design
of rendering the work _universally_ appreciable. I should be
carried too far out of my immediate topic were I to
demonstrate a point upon which I have repeatedly insisted, and
which with the poetical stands not in the slightest need of
demonstration--the point, I mean, that Beauty is the sole
legitimate province of the poem....
"But in subjects so handled, however skilfully, or with however
vivid an array of incident, there is always a certain hardness
or nakedness, which repels the artistical eye. Two things are
invariably required: first, some amount of complexity, or more
properly, adaptation; and, second, some amount of
suggestiveness, some under-current, however indefinite, of
meaning. It is this latter, in especial, which imparts to a
work of art so much of that _richness_ (to borrow from colloquy
a forcible term) which we are too fond of confounding with _the
ideal_."
The opposition of these two characters and attitudes is complete. Upon
the one side a vast preoccupation with human meaning and morals, with
health and the common reality and love and democracy, a grand contempt
for beauty, and for the effort to attract or gratify a reader with
"verbal melody," a contempt for everything that savors of deliberate
technique in art. Upon the other side also contempt--contempt like a
piece of cold analytical steel for every pretense that the technique of
art is not deliberate, that poets are not seeking to attract and
gratify, that truth or moral or meaning instead of beauty is the portent
of a poem--a disposition to seek beauty in unique and even unhealthy
places, a lonely aristocratic heart of pain, and a preoccupation with
"verbal melody" never before or since equalled in poetry. The details of
this difference are fascinating, but the generalization of it is what
will illumine the modern problems about poetry. To Edgar Allan Poe a
poem was an objective thing, to Walt Whitman poetry was an act of
subjective expression. Poe would take sounds and melodies of words
almost actually into his hands, and carve and model them until he had
formed a beautiful vessel, and he would take emotions and imaginations
out of his heart and weave and inlay them in that vessel, and even the
crimson out of his blood, and finally for "enrichment" he would seek out
in his mind the hue of some meaning or moral to pour over it until it
was perfect. And these beautiful vessels he would set forth for view and
purchase, standing aside from them like a creative trader, proud, but no
more identified with them than as though he had made them out of the
colors of shells. To Walt Whitman a poem was not a thing. His poetry
was himself. His meanings, emotions, experiences, love and wonder of
life, filled him and he overflowed in language--without "art," without
purpose but to communicate his being. So he maintained. His poem was
never an object to him, even after it had flowed full and he sought to
perfect its contours. His emendations were not often objective
improvements; they were private remodellings to make the language a more
direct and fluent identity with what he considered himself. This was the
task upon which he labored as the poet of democracy and social love.
Now, it is not merely an accident, or a reflection upon America or upon
human nature, that Walt Whitman, with all his yearnings over the average
American and his offering of priesthood and poetry to the people, should
remain the poet of a rather esoteric few, whereas Poe--even with the
handful of poems he wrote--may be said to be acceptable to the
generality of men. The Raven, or Helen, or Annabelle Lee, or some sad
musical echo of the death of beauty, might be found in illuminated
covers on the most "average" of American parlor tables, but never
anything there of Walt Whitman--unless it be "Captain, My Captain!" the
one rather weak metrical poem he deigned to write. And there is
something deeply and really pathetic in this fact, and something which
only an adequate science of verse can explain. For the emotions and the
meanings of Walt Whitman's poetry are actually the ones that interest
simple and thoughtful people who have leisure to feel. His realizations
of life would be acceptable and be honored, as much at least as great
art is ever honored, by the "divine average," if they had been conveyed,
as Poe's were, in vessels of light, which would make them objective, and
from which they might brim over with excess of subjective meaning and
emotion.
I do not mean to express a wish that Walt Whitman had conveyed them so,
or the opinion that he could have been a more stupendous poetic and
moral hero of nature by writing otherwise than he did. His propulsive
determination to put forth in this facile nineteenth century culture,
sweet with the decay and light with the remnant fineries of feudal
grandeur, the original, vast, unfinished substance of man, was a
phenomenon like the rising of a volcanic continent amid ships on the
sea. No word but the words in his book can portray the magnitude of his
achievement; no critic but Envy could judge it except as itself and by
its own standard. But as a prophetic example of the poems of the
future, and especially the poems of democracy and social love, it
suffers a weakness--the weakness that Walt Whitman's character suffered.
It is egocentric and a little inconsiderate of the importance of other
people. Walt Whitman composed wonderful passages about universal social
love, but he could not be the universal poet exactly because he was not
social enough. He was not humble enough to be social. The rebel egoism
of democracy was in him the lordly and compelling thing, and though his
love for the world was prodigious, it was not the kind of love that
gives attention instinctively to the egoism of others.
There may be no grand passion for the idea, but there is a natural
companionship with the fact of "democracy," in Poe's statement that he
"kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally
appreciable," and that statement more characteristically distinguishes
his attitude from Walt Whitman's than the different ways they had of
talking about beauty. All poets who mould their poems objectively, even
though they may conceive themselves to be utterly alone with beauty, are
really in social communion with humanity. For that is what the word
_objective_ means. An object, or as we say, a "thing," differs from
other elements of our experience only in that it can be experienced in
the same form at different times and by different persons. And for an
object to be beautiful is for it to hold value in itself, so that
various perceivers may come from all sides and find it there. Therefore
one who moulds an object towards external perfection, however sad his
solitude, enters directly into the "universal friendship" toward which
Walt Whitman directed so much of the longing of his words. One who pours
out phrases direct from his emotion may experience a relief and glory
that implies listeners, and he may win listeners, but they will each
rebuild out of his phrases their own different poem, and they will
comprise in their number only those endowed with the special power to
build poems out of phrases poured out. And whatever we may wish were
true of the world, it is not true that the majority are so endowed.
Therefore the poetry that is highly subjective is almost inevitably the
poetry of a few; and the "direct expression of emotion" achieves a less
clear and general social communion than the embodiment of emotion in an
object of art.
It could be established, I believe, with mechanical precision, that the
rhythmic values most cherished by the social rebels who now write so
much "free verse," are values practically incommunicable to others, and
absolutely incommunicable by the method usually adopted, that of
printing words on a page. A little of that icy matter-of-fact realism
with which Poe used to scatter the sweet foggy thoughts of the
literarious, while it might not affect the art of these poets, would
surely reduce the volume of what they have to say about it. For
instance, here is the answer of one of them to an assertion that the
line division in free-verse is "arbitrary," and that if we copied one of
these long poems in solid prose, the poet himself could hardly ever
divide it again as it was:
"Free verse that is free verse is _not_ arbitrary. Much of it is, of
course--so are many canvases mere splashy imitations of Matisse. But
there is free verse that resolves itself into just those lines--a little
more subtly than sonnets or triolets--by virtue of pauses, of
heart-beats, of the quickness or slowness of your breath, and maybe of
your pulse itself.... It tries to give the rhythm value of those
hesitations, those quickenings and slowings of the flow of ideas, the
flutterings--it is _closer to the breath_, as modern music and modern
dance are, or as primitive music and primitive dance were."
It is impossible not to respond to such assertions, for we know in
ourselves what these exquisite differential experiences are. Any one who
has ever written love-letters--which are a kind of aboriginal
free-verse--knows what they are. And yet I believe it is obvious, if not
demonstrable, that most of them are too individual to be communicated
even to a lover. Human nature is too various for it to be true that the
same hesitations, the same quickenings and slowings of the flow of
ideas, flutterings of the breath or pulse, will reproduce themselves in
another upon the perception of the same visible symbols. And while this
fact may make the art of composition seem a little monotonous, it is
better that art should be monotonous than that the world should. And it
would be a monotonous world in which different people were so much
alike, or we ourselves so much alike at different moments, that these
minute filigrees of feeling should be altogether durable and capable of
being served round in paper and ink.
There are values of verbal rhythm in a flow of thought and feeling which
exist for one individual alone, and for him once only. There are other
values less delicate which he can reproduce in himself at will, but can
not altogether communicate to other minds whose thoughts and feelings
are too much their own. There are other values, still less delicate,
which he might communicate by vocal utterance and rhythmic gesture,
taking possession as it were of the very pulse and respiration of
others. But poetry which is composed for publication ought to occupy
itself with those rhythmic values which may be communicated to other
rhythmic minds through the printing of words on a page. It ought to do
this, at least, if it pretends to an attitude that is even in the most
minute degree social.
A mature science of rhythm might be imagined to stride into the room
where these poets are discussing the musical values of their verse,
seize two or three of the most "free" and subtle among them, lock them
into separate sound-proof chambers, and allow them to read one of their
favorite passages into the ear of an instrument designed to record in
spatial outline the pulsations of vocal accent. It is safe to assert
that there would be less identity in the actual pulsations recorded than
if the same two were reading a passage of highly wrought English
prose.[1] And the reason for this is that free verse imports into
English prose a form of punctuation that is exceedingly gross and yet
absolutely inconsequential. Its line division has neither a metrical
nor a logical significance that exists objectively. It can mean at any
time anything that is desirable to the whims, or needful to the
difficulties, of the reader or the writer. It is a very sign and
instrument of subjectivity. To incorporate in a passage of printed
symbols an indeterminate element so marked and so frequent as that, is
to say to the reader--"Take the passage and organize it into whatever
rhythmical pattern may please yourself." And that is what the reader of
free verse usually does, knowing that if he comes into any great
difficulty, he can make a full stop at the end of some line, and shift
the gears of his rhythm altogether. And since it is possible for one who
is rhythmically gifted to organize _any indeterminate series of
impressions whatever_ into an acceptable rhythm, he frequently produces
a very enjoyable piece of music, which he attributes to the author and,
having made it himself, is not unable to admire. Thus a good many poets
who could hardly beat a going march on a base drum, are enabled by the
gullibility and talent of their readers to come forward in this kind of
writing as musicians of special and elaborate skill. The "freedom" that
it gives them is not a freedom to build rhythms that are impossible in
prose, but a freedom from the necessity to build actual and continuous
rhythms. Free verse avails itself of the rhythmic appearance of poetry,
and it avoids the extreme rhythmic difficulties of prose, and so it will
certainly live as a supremely convenient way to write, among those not
too strongly appealed to by the greater convenience of not writing. But
as an object of the effort of ambitious artists I can not believe it
will widely survive the knowledge that it is merely a convenience, a
form of mumble and indetermination in their art.
Walt Whitman, however he may have been deceived about the social and
democratic character of his form, was not deceived, as the modern
eulogists of free verse are, about its subtlety. He thought that he had
gained in volume and directness of communion, but he knew that he was
discarding subtlety, discarding in advance all those beautiful and
decadent wonders of microscopic and morbid audacity that developed in
France among the admirers of Poe. The modern disciples of his form,
however, are materially of Poe's persuasion, and like to believe that
they have in free verse an instrument expressly fitted for the
communication of those wonders, and of the most delicate modulations of
that "verbal melody" that Whitman scorned. In this, from the true
standpoint of criticism, Whitman has a commanding advantage over them,
and what can be said of free-verse in general can not be said of his
poems. He did achieve the predominant thing that he aimed to achieve--he
made his poetry rough and artless in spite of his fineness and art. He
made it like the universe and like the presence of a man. In that
triumph it will stand. In that character it will mould and influence the
literature of democracy, because it will mould and influence all
literature in all lands.
"Who touches this book touches a man."
There is, however, another ideal of poetry that Walt Whitman confused
with this one, and that he no more exemplified in his form than he
exemplified democratic and social communion. And this ideal is
predominant too in the minds of his modern followers. It is the ideal of
being natural, of being primitive, dismissing "refinements" and the
tricks of literary sophistication. He wanted his poetry to sound with
nature and the untutored heart of humanity. It was in the radiance of
this desire that he spoke of rhythmical prose as a "vast diviner
heaven," toward which poetry would move in its future development in
America. Prose seemed diviner to him because it seemed more simple, more
large with candor and directness. But here again a cool and clear
science will show that his nature led him in a contrary direction from
its ideal. The music of prose is only dissimilar to that of poetry in
its complexity, its subtle and refined _dissimulation_ of the
fundamental monotonous meter that exists, either expressed or implied,
in the heart of all rhythmical experience. Persons who can read the
rhythm of prose can do so because they have in their own breast, or
intellect, a subdued or tacit perpetual standard pulse-beat, around
which by various instinctive-mathematical tricks of substitution and
syncopation they so arrange the accents of the uttered syllables that
they fall in with its measure, and become one with it, increasing its
momentum and its effect of entrancement upon the nerves and body. There
is no rhythm without this metrical basis, no value in rhythm comparable
to the trance that its thrilling monotony engenders. Its undulations are
akin to the intrinsic character of neural motion, and that is why,
almost as though it were a chemical thing--a stimulant and narcotic--it
takes possession of our state-of-being and controls it.
Poetry only naively acknowledges this ecstatic monotony that lives in
the heart of all rhythm, brings it out into the light, and there openly
weaves upon it the patterns of melodic sound. Poetry is thus the more
natural, and both historically and psychologically, the more primitive
of the two arts. It is the more simple. Meter, and even rhyme, which is
but a colored, light drum-beat, accentuating the meter, are not
"ornaments" or "refinements" of something else which may be called
"rhythmical speech." They are the heart of rhythmical speech expressed
and exposed with a perfectly childlike and candid grandeur. Prose is the
refinement. Prose is the sophisticated and studio accomplishment--a
thing that vast numbers of people have not the fineness of endowment or
cultivation either to write or read. Prose is a civilized sublimation of
poetry, in which the original healthy intoxicant note of the tom-tom is
so laid over with fine traceries of related sound, that it can no longer
be identified at all except by the analytical eye of science.
Walt Whitman was not really playful and childlike enough to go back to
nature. His poetry was less primitive and savage, than it was superhuman
and sublime. His emotions were as though they came to him through a
celestial telescope. There is something more properly savage--something
at least truly barbarous--in a poem like Poe's "Bells." And in Poe's
insistence upon "beauty" as the sole legitimate province of the
poem--beauty, which he defines as a special and dispassionate
"excitement of the soul"--he is nearer to the mood of the snake dance.
Poetry was to him a deliberate perpetration of ecstasy. And one can see
in reading his verses how he was attuned to sway and quiver to the mere
syllabic singing of a kettledrum, until his naked visions grew more
intense and lovely than the passions and real meanings of his life. It
is actually primitive, as well as childlike, to play with poetry in this
intense and yet unsanctimonious way that Poe did, and Baudelaire too,
and Swinburne. Play is nearer to the heart of nature than aspiration. It
is healthier perhaps too, and more to the taste of the future, than
priesthood. I think the essence of what we call classical in an artist's
attitude is his quite frank acknowledgment that--whatever great things
may come of it--he is at play. The art of the Athenians was objective
and overt about being what it is, because the Athenians were educated,
as all free men should be, for play. They were making things, and the
eagerness of their hearts flowed freely out like a child's through their
eyes upon the things that they made. That pearl of adult degeneration,
the self, was very little cultivated in Athens; the "artistic
temperament" was unborn; and sin, and the perpetual yearning beyond of
Christians, had not been thought of. A little group of isolated and
exclusive miracles had not reduced all the true and current glories of
life to a status of ignobility, so that every great thing must contain
in itself intimations of otherness. The Athenians were radiantly
willing, without any cosmical preparation or blare of moral resolve, to
let the constellations stay where they are. It was their custom to "loaf
and invite their souls," to be "satisfied--see, dance, laugh, sing."
They were so maturely naive that they would hardly understand what Walt
Whitman, with his declarations of animal independence, was trying to
recover from. And so it is by way of their happy and sun-loved city that
we can most surely go back to nature.
And when we have arrived at a mood that is really and childly natural--a
mood that will play, even with aspiration, and will spontaneously make
out of interesting materials "things" to play with, and when in that
mood we give our interest to the materials of reality in our own time,
then perhaps we shall find that we have arrived also at a poetry that
belongs to the people. For people are, in the depths of them and on the
average as they are born, still natural, still savage. And there is no
doubt that nature never fashioned them to work harder, or be more
serious, or filled with self-conscious purports, than was necessary. She
meant them to live and flow out upon the world with the bright colors of
their interest. And it will seem rather a fever in the light of
universal history, this hot subjective meaningfulness of everything we
modern occidentals value. The poets and the poet-painters of ancient
China knew that all life and nature was so sacred with the miracle of
being that only the lucid line and color was needed to command an
immortal reverence. They loved perfection devoutly, as it will rarely be
loved, but they too, with their gift of delicate freedom in kinship with
nature, were at play. And in Japan even today--surviving from that
time--there is a form of poetry that is objective and childlike, a
making of toys, or of exquisite metrical gems of imaginative
realization, and this is the only poetry in the world that is truly
popular, and is loved and cultivated by a whole nation.
If with this pagan and oriental love for the created thing--the same
love that kept a light in Poe's sombre heart--we enter somewhat
irreverently into Walt Whitman's volume, seeking our own treasure and
not hesitating to remove it from its bed of immortal slag, we do find
poems in new forms of exquisite and wonderful definition. Sometimes for
the length of one or two or three lines, and occasionally for a stanza,
and once for the whole poem--"When I heard at the close of the
day"--Walt Whitman seems to love and achieve the carved concentration of
image and emotion, the definite and thrilling chime of syllables along a
chain that begins and ends and has a native way of uttering itself to
all minds that are in tune. He seems, without losing that large grace of
freedom from the pose and elegance of words in a book, which was his
most original gift to the world, to possess himself of the mood that is
truly primitive, and social, and intelligible to the hearts of simple
people--the mood that loves with a curious wonder the poised and perfect
existence of a thing.
HUSH'D BE THE CAMPS
Hush'd be the camps today;
And, soldiers, let us drape our war-worn weapons;
And each with musing soul retire, to celebrate,
Our dear commander's death.
No more for him life's stormy conflicts;
Nor victory, nor defeat--no more time's dark events,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.
RECONCILIATION
Word over all, beautiful as the sky!
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in
time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly
softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world....
These sculptural sentences, with their rhythmic and still clarity of
form, if they had been the end and essence of his art, and not only a
by-accident of inevitable genius, might have led the way, not perhaps to
a great national poetry for America, but beyond that into something
international and belonging to the universe of man. The step forward
from them would not have been towards a greater sprawling and
subjectifying of rhythmic and poetic character, but towards an
increasing objective perfection which should still cling to the new and
breathless thing, the presence of one who lives and speaks his heart
naturally. I chose them, not only because they are among the most
musical and imaginative lines that Walt Whitman wrote, but also because
in bringing a mood that is calm and a lulling of wind in the world's
agonies of hate, they show themselves to be deep. And so it will not be
thought that when I say the poet of democracy will be a child who is at
play with the making of things, I desire to narrow the range and
poignancy of the things he will make. He will be free, and he will move
with a knowing and profound mind among all the experiences and the
dreams of men. But to whatever heights of rhapsody, or moral aspiration,
or now unimaginable truth, he may come, he will come as a child, whose
clear eyes and deliberate creative purposes are always appropriate and
never to be apologized for, because they are the purposes of nature.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] This statement is borne out by Mr. William Morrison Patterson's
account of the records of Amy Lowell's reading of her poems in his
laboratory. It constitutes the preface of the second edition of his
book, "The Rhythm of Prose"--a book which, upon the true basis of
experimentation, analyzes and defines convincingly for the first time
the nature of rhythmical experience, and the manner in which it is
derived by the reader both from prose and metrical poetry. Until it is
amplified or improved by further investigation, this book will surely be
the basis of every scientific discussion of the questions involved
here.
POEMS
COMING TO PORT
Our motion on the soft still misty river
Is like rest; and like the hours of doom
That rise and follow one another ever,
Ghosts of sleeping battle-cruisers loom
And languish quickly in the liquid gloom.
From watching them your eyes in tears are gleaming,
And your heart is still; and like a sound
In silence is your stillness in the streaming
Of light-whispered laughter all around,
Where happy passengers are homeward bound.
Their sunny journey is in safety ending,
But for you no journey has an end.
The tears that to your eyes their light are lending
Shine in softness to no waiting friend;
Beyond the search of any eye they tend.
There is no nest for the unresting fever
Of your passion, yearning, hungry-veined;
There is no rest nor blessedness forever
That can clasp you, quivering and pained,
Whose eyes burn ever to the Unattained.
Like time, and like the river's fateful flowing,
Flowing though the ship has come to rest,
Your love is passing through the mist and going,
Going infinitely from your breast,
Surpassing time on its immortal quest.
The ship draws softly to the place of waiting,
All flush forward with a joyful aim,
And while their hands with happy hands are mating,
Lips are laughing out a happy name--
You pause, and pass among them like a flame.
THE LONELY BATHER
Loose-veined and languid as the yellow mist
That swoons along the river in the sun,
Your flesh of passion pale and amber-kissed
With years of heat that through your veins have run,
You lie with aching memories of love
Alone and naked by the weeping tree,
And indolent with inward longing move
Your slim and sallow limbs despondently.
If love came warm and burning to your dream,
And filled you all your avid veins require,
You would lie sadly still beside the stream,
Sobbing in torture of that vivid fire;
The same low sky would weave its fading blue,
The river still exhale its misty rain,
The willow trail its waving over you,
Your longing only quickened into pain.
Bed your desire among the pressing grasses;
Lonely lie, and let your thirsting breasts
Lie on you, lonely, till the fever passes,
Till the undulation of your longing rests.
IN MY ROOM
In this high room, my room of quiet space,
Sun-yellow softened for my happiness,
I learn of you, Wang Wei, and of your loves;
Your rhythmic fisher sweet with solitude
Beneath a willow by the river stream;
Your aged plum tree bearing lonely bloom
Beside the torrent's thunder; misty buds
Among your saplings; delicate-leaved bamboo.
My room is sweet because of you, Wang Wei,
Your tranquil and creative-fingered love
So many mounds of mournful years ago
In that cool valley where the colors lived.
My ceiling slopes a little like far mountains.
Your delicate-leaved bamboo can flourish here.
* * * * *
Wang Wei was a great Chinese painter and poet, of the 8th century.
HOURS
Hours when I love you, are like tranquil pools,
The liquid jewels of the forest, where
The hunted runner dips his hand, and cools
His fevered ankles, and the ferny air
Comes blowing softly on his heaving breast,
Hinting the sacred mystery of rest.
FIRE AND WATER
Flame-Heart, take back your love. Swift, sure
And poignant as the dagger to the mark,
Your will is burning ever; it is pure.
Mine is vague water welling through the dark,
Holding all substances--except the spark.
Picture the pleasure of the meadow stream
When some clear striding naked-footed girl
Cuts swift and straightly as a gleam
Across its bosom ambling and aswirl
With mooning eddies and soft lips acurl;
Such was our meeting--fatefully so brief.
I have no purpose and no power to clutch.
Gleam onward, maiden, to your goal of grief;
And I more sadly flow, remembering much,
Yet doomed to take the form of all I touch.
YOU MAKE NO ANSWER
You make no answer. You have stolen away
Deliberately in that twilight sorrow
Where the dark flame that is your being shines
So well. Mysterious and deeply tender
In your motion you have softly left me,
And the little path along the house is still.
And I, a child forsaken of its mother,
I, a pilgrim leaning for a friend,
Grow faint, and tell myself in terror that
My love reborn and burning shall yet bring you--
More than friend and slender-bodied mother--
O sweet-passioned spirit, shining home!
OUT OF A DARK NIGHT
Death is more tranquil than the life of love,
More calm, more sure, and more unanguished.
O the path among the trees is far more tranquil to the dead
Than to these anxious hearts, uptroubled from their beds,
Who pace in pallid darkness on the leaves,
For no good reason--for no reason
But because their limbs will not lie still upon the sheet.
Their limbs will not lie still. O how I pity them.
Sad hearts--their marrow is a-quiver,
And they can not lie them down in tranquil sadness like the dead.
A MORNING
Again this morning the bold autumn,
Spreading through the woods her sacred fire,
Brings the rich color of your presence
Warmly luminous to my desire--
Brings to my heart the dear wild worship,
High and wayward as the windy air,
And to my pulse the hot sweet passion
Burning crimson like a poison there.
ANNIVERSARY
The flowers we planted in the tender spring,
And through the summer watched their blossoming,
Died with our love in autumn's thoughtful weather,
Died and dropped downward altogether.
Today in April in the vivid grass
They flash again their laughter, pink and yellow,
They wake before the frosty sunbeams pass,
Gay bold to leave their chilly pillow.
But love sleeps longer in his wintry bed,
He sleeps as though the lifting light were dead,
And spring poured not her colors on the meadow,
He sleeps in his cold sober shadow.
AUTUMN LIGHT
So bright and soft is the sweet air of morning,
And so tenderly the light descends,
And blesses with its gentle-falling fingers
All the leaves unto the valley's ends--
It brings them all to being when it touches
With its paleness every glowing vein;
The wild and flaming hollows of the forest
Kindle all their crimson in its rain;
And every curve receives its share of morning,
Every little shadow softly grows,
And motion finds a melody more tender
That like a phantom through the branches goes--
So bright and soft and tranquil-rendering,
And quiet in its giving, as though love,
The morning dream of life, were born of longing,
And really poured its being from above.
A MODERN MESSIAH
Scarred with sensuality and pain
And weary labor in a mind not hard
Enough to think, a heart too always tender,
Sits the Christ of failure with his lovers.
They are wiser than his parables,
But he more potent, for he has the gift
Of hopelessness, and want of faith, and love.
IN A RED CROSS HOSPITAL
Today I saw a face--it was a beak,
That peered, with pale round yellow vapid eyes,
Above the bloody muck that had been lips
And teeth and chin. A plodding doctor poured
Some water through a rubber down a hole
He made in that black bag of horny blood.
The beak revived, it smiled--as chickens smile.
The doctor hopes he'll find the man a tongue
To tell with, what he used to be.
A VISIT
You came with your small tapering flame of passion
Thinly burning like a nun's desire,
Your eyes in slim and half-expectant fashion
Faintly painting what your veins require
With little pallid pyramids of fire.
So very small and unfulfilled you sat,
Building a little talk to keep you there,
Your face and body pointed like a cat,
Your legs not reaching down from any chair,
Your thoughts not really reaching anywhere;
So dumb and tiny--yet Love guessed your mood,
And pressed his phial in its fervent bed,
And poured his thrilling philtre in my blood,
And all his lustre on your body shed,
And hot enamel on the words you said;
Your littleness became a monstrous thing,
A rank retort, a hot and waiting vat,
Your eyes green-copper like a snake in spring,
And lusty-bold your laying off your hat,
And fell your purpose like a hungry cat;
The dark fell on us through our narrowed eyes,
The heat lashed up around us from the floor,
Encrimsoning the lips of our surprise
To sway like music, and like burning pour
Across the truth that parted us before.
TO LOVE
Love, often your delicate fingers beckon,
And always I follow.
Oh, if I could stay, and possess your beauty
Beckoning always!
CAR-WINDOW
A light is laughing thro' the scattered rain,
A color quickens in the meadow;
Drops are still, upon the window-pane--
They cast a silver shadow.
LITTLE FISHES
A myriad curious fishes,
Tiny and pink and pale,
All swimming north together
With rhythmical fin and tail--
A mountain surges among them,
They dart and startle and float,
Mere wiggling minutes of terror,
Into that mountain's throat.
INVOCATION
Truth, be more precious to me than the eyes
Of happy love; burn hotter in my throat
Than passion; and possess me like my pride;
More sweet than freedom; more desired than joy;
More sacred than the pleasing of a friend.
SOMETIMES
Sometimes a child's voice crying on the street
Comes winging like an arrow through the wind
To pierce my breast with you, my baby, and
My pen is weak, and all my thinking dreams
Are mist of yearning for the touch of you.
TO MARIE SUKLOFF--AN ASSASSIN
In your lips moving fervently,
Your eyes hot with fire,
Life seems immortally young with desire,
Life seems impetuous,
Hungrily free,
Having no faith but its burning to be.
You could dance laughingly,
Draw where you move,
Hearts, hands and voices pouring you love.
Youth be a carnival,
Life be the queen,
You could go dancing and singing and seen!
Whence came that tenderness
Cruel and wild,
Arming with murder the hand of a child?
Whence came that breaking fire,
Nursed and caressed
With passion's white fingers for tyranny's breast?
In your soul sacredly,
Deeper than fear,
Burns there a miracle dreadful to hear?
Virgin of murder,
Was it God's breath,
Begetting a savior, that filled you with Death?
TO AN ACTRESS
You walk as vivid as a sunny storm
Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes
Of stricken men, with light and fury mingled,
Making passionate and making young.
You drive the mists, and lift the drooping heads,
And in the sultry place of custom raise
The naked colors of abounding life,
And sound the crimson windy call of liberty.
EYES