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THE NEW POETRY
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO
THE NEW POETRY
AN ANTHOLOGY
EDITED BY
HARRIET MONROE
AND
ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON
EDITORS OF “POETRY”
_WITH REVISED BIBLIOGRAPHY_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1917.
Norwood Press:
Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
INTRODUCTION
During the last three or four years there has been a remarkable
renascence of poetry in both America and England, and an equally
extraordinary revival of public interest in the art.
The editors of this anthology wish to present in convenient form
representative work of the poets who are to-day creating what is
commonly called “the new poetry,”—a phrase no doubt rash and most
imperfectly descriptive, since the new in art is always the elder old,
but one difficult to replace with any form of words more exact. Much
newspaper controversy, and a number of special magazines, testify to the
demand for such a book; also many letters to the editors of _Poetry_
asking for information—letters not only from individual lovers of the
art, but also from college professors and literary clubs or groups, who
have begun to feel that the poetry of to-day is a vital force no longer
to be ignored. Indeed, many critics feel that poetry is coming nearer
than either the novel or the drama to the actual life of to-day. The
magazine _Poetry_, ever since its foundation in October, 1912, has
encouraged this new spirit in the art, and the anthology is a further
effort on the part of its editors to present the new spirit to the
public.
What is the new poetry? and wherein does it differ from the old? The
difference is not in mere details of form, for much poetry infused with
the new spirit conforms to the old measures and rhyme-schemes. It is not
merely in diction, though the truly modern poet rejects the so-called
“poetic” shifts of language—the _deems_, _’neaths_, _forsooths_, etc.,
the inversions and high-sounding rotundities, familiar to his
predecessors: all the rhetorical excesses through which most Victorian
poetry now seems “over-apparelled,” as a speaker at a _Poetry_ dinner—a
lawyer, not a poet—put it in pointing out what the new movement is
aiming at. These things are important, but the difference goes deeper
than details of form, strikes through them to fundamental integrities.
The new poetry strives for a concrete and immediate realization of life;
it would discard the theory, the abstraction, the remoteness, found in
all classics not of the first order. It is less vague, less verbose,
less eloquent, than most poetry of the Victorian period and much work of
earlier periods. It has set before itself an ideal of absolute
simplicity and sincerity—an ideal which implies an individual,
unstereotyped diction; and an individual, unstereotyped rhythm. Thus
inspired, it becomes intensive rather than diffuse. It looks out more
eagerly than in; it becomes objective. The term “exteriority” has been
applied to it, but this is incomplete. In presenting the concrete object
or the concrete environment, whether these be beautiful or ugly, it
seeks to give more precisely the emotion arising from them, and thus
widens immeasurably the scope of the art.
All this implies no disrespect for tradition. The poets of to-day do not
discard tradition because they follow the speech of to-day rather than
that of Shakespeare’s time, or strive for organic rhythm rather than use
a mold which has been perfected by others. On the contrary, they follow
the great tradition when they seek a vehicle suited to their own epoch
and their own creative mood, and resolutely reject all others.
Great poetry has always been written in the language of contemporary
speech, and its theme, even when legendary, has always borne a direct
relation with contemporary thought, contemporary imaginative and
spiritual life. It is this direct relation which the more progressive
modern poets are trying to restore. In this effort they discard not only
archaic diction but also the shop-worn subjects of past history or
legend, which have been through the centuries a treasure-trove for the
second-rate.
This effort at modern speech, simplicity of form, and authentic vitality
of theme, is leading our poets to question the authority of the accepted
laws of English verse, and to study other languages, ancient and modern,
in the effort to find out what poetry really is. It is a strange fact
that, in the common prejudice of cultivated people during the four
centuries from just before 1400 to just before 1800, nothing was
accepted as poetry in English that did not walk in the iambic measure.
Bits of Elizabethan song and of Dryden’s two musical odes, both beating
four-time instead of the iambic three, were outlandish intrusions too
slight to count. To write English poetry, a man must measure his paces
according to the iambic foot-rule; and he must mark off his lines with
rhymes, or at least marshal them in the pentameter movement of blank
verse.
The first protest against this prejudice, which long usage had hardened
into law, came in the persons of four or five great poets—Burns,
Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron—who puzzled the ears of their
generation with anapæsts and other four-time measures, and who carried
into their work a certain immediacy of feeling and imagery—a certain
modern passion of life—which even Cowper, Thompson and a few others of
their time, though they had written of things around them, had scarcely
attained. Quarterly critics and London moralists blinked and gasped, but
at last the bars had to go down for these great radicals. And before
long the extreme virtuosity of Swinburne had widened still further the
musical range of the English language.
By the time Whitman appeared, the ear of the average reader—that
formidable person—was attuned to anapæsts, dactyls, choriambics,
sapphics, rhymed or unrhymed. He could not call them by name, but he was
docile to all possible intricacies of pattern in any closely woven
metrical scheme. But Whitman gave him a new shock. Here was a so-called
poet who discarded all traditional patterns, and wove a carpet of his
own. Once more the conservatives protested: was this poetry? and, if so,
why? If poetry was not founded on the long-accepted metrical laws, then
how could they distinguish it from prose, and thus keep the labels and
catalogues in order? What was Whitman’s alleged poetry but a kind of
freakish prose, invented to set forth a dangerous anarchistic
philosophy?
It would take too long to analyze the large rhythms of Whitman’s free
verse; but the mere fact that he wrote free verse and called it poetry,
and that other poets—men like Rossetti, Swinburne, Symonds, even the
reluctant Emerson—seemed to agree that it was poetry, this fact alone
was, in the opinion of the conservatives, a challenge to four centuries
of English poets. And this challenge, repeated by later poets, compels
us to inquire briefly into the origins of English poetry, in the effort
to get behind and underneath the instinctive prejudice that English
poetry, to be poetry, must conform to prescribed metres.
Chaucer, great genius that he was, an aristocrat by birth and breeding,
and a democrat by feeling and sympathy—Chaucer may have had it in his
power to turn the whole stream of English poetry into either the French
or the Anglo-Saxon channel. Knowing and loving the old French epics
better than the Norse sagas, he naturally chose the French channel, and
he was so great and so beloved that his world followed him. Thus there
was no longer any question—the iambic measure and rhyme, both dear to
the French-trained ears of England’s Norman masters, became fixed as the
standard type of poetic form.
But it was possibly a toss-up—the scale hung almost even in that
formative fourteenth century. If Chaucer’s contemporary Langland—the
great democrat, revolutionist, mystic—had had Chaucer’s authority and
universal sympathy, English poetry might have followed his example
instead of Chaucer’s; and Shakespeare, Milton and the rest might have
been impelled by common practice to use—or modify—the curious, heavy,
alliterative measure of _Piers Ploughman_, which now sounds so strange
to our ears:
In a somer seson,
When softe was the sonne,
I shoop me into shroudes
As I a sheep weere;
In habite as an heremite
Unholy of werkes,
Wente wide in this world
Wondres to here.
Though we must rejoice that Chaucer prevailed with his French forms,
Langland reminds us that poetry—even English poetry—is older than rhyme,
older than the iambic measure, older than all the metrical patterns
which now seem so much a part of it. If our criticism is to have any
value, it must insist upon the obvious truth that poetry existed before
the English language began to form itself out of the débris of other
tongues, and that it now exists in forms of great beauty among many
far-away peoples who never heard of our special rules.
Perhaps the first of these disturbing influences from afar to be felt in
modern English poetry was the Celtic renascence, the wonderful revival
of interest in old Irish song, which became manifest in translations and
adaptations of the ancient Gaelic lyrics and epics, made by W. B. Yeats,
Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde and others.
This influence was most powerful because it came to us directly, not at
second-hand, through the English work of two poets of genius, Synge and
Yeats. These great men, fortified and inspired by the simplicity and
clarity of primitive Celtic song, had little patience with the
“over-appareled” art of Tennyson and his imitators. They found it
stiffened by rhetoric, by a too conscious morality leading to pulpit
eloquence, and by second-hand bookish inspirations; and its movement
they found hampered, thwarted of freedom, by a too slavish acceptance of
ready-made schemes of metre and rhyme. The surprises and irregularities,
found in all great art because they are inherent in human feeling, were
being ruled out of English poetry, which consequently was stiffening
into forms too fixed and becoming more and more remote from life. As Mr.
Yeats said in Chicago:
“We were weary of all this. We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric
but of poetic diction. We tried to strip away everything that was
artificial, to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose,
like a cry of the heart.”
It is scarcely too much to say that “the new poetry”—if we may be
allowed the phrase—began with these two great Irish masters. Think what
a contrast to even the simplest lyrics of Tennyson the pattern of their
songs presents, and what a contrast their direct outright human feeling
presents to the somewhat culture-developed optimism of Browning, and the
science-inspired pessimism of Arnold. Compared with these Irishmen the
best of their predecessors seem literary. This statement does not imply
any measure of ultimate values, for it is still too early to estimate
them. One may, for example, believe Synge to be the greatest
poet-playwright in English since Shakespeare, and one of the great poets
of the world; but a few more decades must pass before such ranking can
have authority.
At the same time other currents were influencing progressive minds
toward even greater freedom of form. Strangely enough, Whitman’s
influence was felt first in France. It reached England, and finally
America, indirectly from Paris, where the poets, stimulated by
translations of the great American, especially Bajazette’s, and by the
ever-adventurous quality of French scholarship, have been experimenting
with free verse ever since Mallarmé. The great Irish poets felt the
French influence—it was part of the education which made them realize
that English poetry had become narrow, rigid, and insular. Yeats has
held usually, though never slavishly, to rhyme and a certain regularity
of metrical form—in which, however, he makes his own tunes; but Synge
wrote his plays in that wide borderland between prose and verse, in a
form which, whatever one calls it, is essentially poetry, for it has
passion, glamour, magic, rhythm, and glorious imaginative life.
This borderland between prose and verse is being explored now as never
before in English; except, perhaps in the King James translation of the
Bible. The modern “vers-libertines,” as they have been wittily called,
are doing pioneer work in an heroic effort to get rid of obstacles that
have hampered the poet and separated him from his audience. They are
trying to make the modern manifestations of poetry less a matter of
rules and formulæ, and more a thing of the spirit, and of organic as
against imposed, rhythm. In this enthusiastic labor they are following
not only a strong inward impulse, not only the love of freedom which
Chaucer followed—and Spenser and Shakespeare, Shelley and Coleridge and
all the masters—but they are moved also by influences from afar. They
have studied the French _symbolistes_ of the ’nineties, and the more
recent Parisian _vers-libristes_. Moreover, some of them have listened
to the pure lyricism of the Provençal troubadours, have studied the more
elaborate mechanism of early Italian sonneteers and canzonists, have
read Greek poetry from a new angle of vision; and last, but perhaps most
important of all, have bowed to winds from the East.
In the nineteenth century the western world—the western æsthetic
world—discovered the orient. Someone has said that when Perry knocked at
the gates of Japan, these opened, not to let us in, but to let the
Japanese out. Japanese graphic art, especially, began almost at once to
kindle progressive minds. Whistler, of course, was the first great
creative artist to feel the influence of their instinct for balance and
proportion, for subtle harmonies of color and line, for the integrity of
beauty in art as opposed to the moralizing and sentimental tendencies
which had been intruding more and more.
Poetry was slower than the graphic arts to feel the oriental influence,
because of the barrier of language. But European scholarship had long
dabbled with Indian, Persian and Sanskrit literatures, and Fitzgerald
even won over the crowd to some remote suspicion of their beauty by
meeting Omar half-way, and making a great poem out of the marriage, not
only of two minds, but of two literary traditions. Then a few airs from
Japan blew in—a few translations of _hokku_ and other forms—which showed
the stark simplicity and crystal clarity of the art among Japanese
poets. And of late the search has gone further: we begin to discover a
whole royal line of Chinese poets of a thousand or more years ago; and
we are trying to search out the secrets of their delicate and beautiful
art. The task is difficult, because our poets, ignorant of Chinese, have
to get at these masters through the literal translations of scholars.
But even by this round-about way, poets like Allen Upward, Ezra Pound,
Helen Waddell and a few others, give us something of the rare flavor,
the special exquisite perfume, of the original. And of late the Indian
influence has been emphasized by the great Bengali poet and sage,
Rabindranath Tagore, whose mastery of English makes him a poet in two
languages.
This oriental influence is to be welcomed because it flows from deep
original streams of poetic art. We should not be afraid to learn from
it; and in much of the work of the imagists, and other radical groups,
we find a more or less conscious, and more or less effective, yielding
to that influence. We find something of the oriental directness of
vision and simplicity of diction, also now and then a hint of the
unobtrusive oriental perfection of form and delicacy of feeling.
All these influences, which tend to make the art of poetry, especially
poetry in English, less provincial, more cosmopolitan, are by no means a
defiance of the classic tradition. On the contrary, they are an endeavor
to return to it at its great original sources, and to sweep away
artificial laws—the _obiter dicta_ of secondary minds—which have
encumbered it. There is more of the great authentic classic tradition,
for example, in the _Spoon River Anthology_ than in the _Idylls of the
King_, _Balaustian’s Adventure_, and _Sohrab and Rustum_ combined. And
the free rhythms of Whitman, Mallarmé, Pound, Sandburg and others, in
their inspired passages, are more truly in line with the biblical, the
Greek, the Anglo-Saxon, and even the Shakespearean tradition, than all
the exact iambics of Dryden and Pope, the patterned alexandrines of
Racine, or the closely woven metrics of Tennyson and Swinburne.
Whither the new movement is leading no one can tell with exactness, nor
which of its present manifestations in England and America will prove
permanently valuable. But we may be sure that the movement is toward
greater freedom of spirit and form, and a more enlightened recognition
of the international scope, the cosmopolitanism, of the great art of
poetry, of which the English language, proud as its record is, offers
but a single phase. As part of such a movement, even the most
extravagant experiments, the most radical innovations, are valuable, for
the moment at least, as an assault against prejudice. And some of the
radicals of to-day will be, no doubt, the masters of to-morrow—a
phenomenon common in the history of the arts.
* * * * *
It remains only to explain the plan of this anthology, its inclusions
and omissions.
It has seemed best to include no poems published before 1900, even
though, as in a few cases, the poets were moved by the new impulses. For
example, those two intensely modern, nobly impassioned, lyric poets,
Emily Dickinson and the Shropshire Lad (Alfred Edward Housman)—the one
dead, the other fortunately still living—both belong, by date of
publication, to the ’nineties. The work of poets already, as it were,
enshrined—whether by fame, or death, or both—has also not been quoted:
poets whose works are already, in a certain sense, classics, and whose
books are treasured by all lovers of the art—like Synge and Moody and
Riley, too early gone from us, and William Butler Yeats, whose later
verse is governed, even more than his earlier, by the new austerities.
Certain other omissions are more difficult to explain, because they may
be thought to imply a lack of consideration which we do not feel. The
present Laureate, Robert Bridges, even in the late ’eighties and early
’nineties, was led by his own personal taste, especially in his _Shorter
Poems_, toward austere simplicity of subject, diction and style. But his
most representative poems were written before 1900. Rudyard Kipling has
been inspired at times by the modern muse, but his best poems also
antedate 1900. This is true also of Louise Imogen Guiney and Bliss
Carman, though most of their work, like that of Arthur Symons and the
late Stephen Phillips and Anna Hempstead Branch, belongs, by its
affinities, to the earlier period. And Alfred Noyes, whatever the date
of his poems, bears no immediate relation to the more progressive modern
movement in the art.
On the other hand, we have tried to be hospitable to the adventurous,
the experimental, because these are the qualities of pioneers, who look
forward, not backward, and who may lead on, further than we can see as
yet, to new domains of the ever-conquering spirit of beauty.
_H. M._
_NOTE. A word about the typography of this volume. No rigid system of
lineation, indention, etc., has been imposed upon the poets who very
kindly lend us their work. For example, sonnets are printed with or
without indention according to the individual preference of the poet;
also other rhymed forms, such as quatrains rhyming alternately; as
well as various forms of free verse. Punctuation and spelling are more
uniform, although a certain liberty has been conceded in words like_
gray _or_ grey, _the color of which seems to vary with the spelling,
and in the use of dots, dashes, commas, colons, etc._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CONRAD AIKEN: PAGE
Music I Heard 1
Dead Cleopatra 1
Dancing Adairs 2
ZOË AKINS:
The Tragedienne 3
I Am the Wind 3
Conquered 4
The Wanderer 4
RICHARD ALDINGTON:
The Poplar 5
Lesbia 6
Images, I-VI 6
Choricos 7
MARY ALDIS:
Barberries 10
When You Come 11
Flash-lights, I-III 12
WALTER CONRAD ARENSBERG:
Voyage à l’Infini 13
At Daybreak 14
To Hasekawa 14
Dialogue 14
Song of the Souls Set Free 15
WILTON AGNEW BARRETT:
A New England Church 15
JOSEPH WARREN BEACH:
Rue Bonaparte 16
The View at Gunderson’s 17
WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT:
The Falconer of God 18
The Horse Thief 20
MAXWELL BODENHEIM:
The Rear Porches of an Apartment-Building 24
The Interne 24
The Old Jew 25
The Miner 25
To an Enemy 25
To a Discarded Steel Rail 26
GORDON BOTTOMLEY:
Night and Morning Songs:
My Moon 26
Elegiac Mood 27
Dawn 27
ROLLO BRITTEN:
Bird of Passion 28
RUPERT BROOKE:
Retrospect 28
Nineteen-Fourteen:
I. Peace 29
II. Safety 30
III. The Dead 30
IV. The Dead 31
V. The Soldier 31
WITTER BYNNER:
To Celia:
I. Consummation 32
II. During a Chorale by Cesar Franck 33
III. Songs Ascending 34
Grieve not for Beauty 34
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
At Harvest 35
On Waking 36
The Old Woman 38
NANCY CAMPBELL:
The Apple-Tree 38
The Monkey 39
SKIPWITH CANNÉLL:
The Red Bridge 40
The King 41
WILLA SIBERT CATHER:
The Palatine (In the “Dark Ages.”) 43
Spanish Johnny 44
PADRAIC COLUM:
Polonius and the Ballad Singers 45
The Sea Bird to the Wave 49
Old Men Complaining 49
GRACE HAZARD CONKLING:
Refugees (Belgium—1914) 52
“The Little Rose is Dust, My Dear” 53
ALICE CORBIN:
O World 53
Two Voices 54
Love Me at Last 55
Humoresque 55
One City Only 55
Apparitions, I-II 57
The Pool 57
Music 58
What Dim Arcadian Pastures 59
Nodes 59
ADELAIDE CRAPSEY:
Cinquains:
November Night 60
Triad 60
Susanna and the Elders 61
The Guarded Wound 61
The Warning 61
Fate Defied 61
The Pledge 61
Expenses 62
Adventure 62
Dirge 62
Song 62
The Lonely Death 63
H. D.:
Hermes of the Ways, I-II 63
Priapus (Keeper of Orchards) 65
The Pool 66
Oread 66
The Garden, I-II 66
Moonrise 67
The Shrine, I-IV 68
MARY CAROLYN DAVIES:
Cloistered 71
Songs of a Girl, I-V 72
FANNIE STEARNS DAVIS:
Profits 73
Souls 74
WALTER DE LA MARE:
The Listeners 74
An Epitaph 75
LEE WILSON DODD:
The Temple 76
The Comrade 77
JOHN DRINKWATER:
Sunrise on Rydal Water 78
LOUISE DRISCOLL:
The Metal Checks 80
DOROTHY DUDLEY:
La Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Gèneviève 84
HELEN DUDLEY:
To One Unknown 86
Song 86
MAX EASTMAN:
Diogenes 87
In March 87
At the Aquarium 87
T. S. ELIOT:
Portrait of a Lady, I-III 88
ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE:
Meeting 92
Among Shadows 93
The Three Sisters 93
Portrait of an Old Woman 93
I am Weary of Being Bitter 94
From “Sonnets of a Portrait Painter” 95
Like Him Whose Spirit 95
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER:
Irradiations, I-IV 96
Arizona Poems:
Mexican Quarter 98
Rain in the Desert 99
The Blue Symphony, I-V 100
F. S. FLINT:
Poems in Unrhymed Cadence, I-III 104
MOIREEN FOX:
Liadain to Curithir, I-V 106
FLORENCE KIPER FRANK:
The Jewish Conscript 108
The Movies 109
You 109
ROBERT FROST:
Mending Wall 110
After Apple-Picking 111
My November Guest 112
Mowing 113
Storm Fear 113
Going for Water 114
The Code—Heroics 115
HAMLIN GARLAND:
To a Captive Crane 119
The Mountains are a Lonely Folk 119
Magic 119
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON:
Color 120
Oblivion 121
Tenants 121
Gold 122
On Hampstead Heath 122
Battle:
The Going 123
The Joke 123
In the Ambulance 123
Hit 124
The Housewife 124
Hill-born 125
The Fear 125
Back 125
RICHARD BUTLER GLAENZER:
Star-Magic 126
DOUGLAS GOLDRING:
Voyages, I-IV 127
HERMANN HAGEDORN:
Early Morning at Bargis 128
Doors 129
Departure 129
Broadway 130
THOMAS HARDY:
She Hears the Storm 130
The Voice 131
In the Moonlight 132
The Man He Killed 132
RALPH HODGSON:
The Mystery 133
Three Poems, I-III 133
Stupidity Street 134
HORACE HOLLEY:
Three Poems:
Creative 134
Twilight at Versailles 135
Lovers 135
HELEN HOYT:
Ellis Park 135
The New-Born 136
Rain at Night 137
The Lover Sings of a Garden 137
Since I Have Felt the Sense of Death 138
FORD MADOX HUEFFER:
Antwerp, I-VI 138
SCHARMEL IRIS:
After the Martyrdom 143
Lament 143
Iteration 144
Early Nightfall 144
ORRICK JOHNS:
Songs of Deliverance:
I. The Song of Youth 144
II. Virgins 146
III. No Prey Am I 146
JOYCE KILMER:
Trees 150
Easter 150
ALFRED KREYMBORG:
America 151
Old Manuscript 151
Cézanne 152
Parasite 152
WILLIAM LAIRD:
Traümerei at Ostendorff’s 153
A Very Old Song 154
D. H. LAWRENCE:
A Woman and Her Dead Husband 155
Fireflies in the Corn 157
Green 158
Grief 158
Service of All the Dead 159
AGNES LEE:
Motherhood 159
A Statue in a Garden 161
On the Jail Steps 161
Her Going 162
WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD:
Indian Summer 165
VACHEL LINDSAY:
General William Booth Enters into Heaven 166
The Eagle that is Forgotten 168
The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race):
I. Their Basic Savagery 169
II. Their Irrepressible High Spirits 171
III. The Hope of Their Religion 172
Aladdin and the Jinn 174
The Chinese Nightingale 175
AMY LOWELL:
Patterns 182
1777:
I. The Trumpet-Vine Arbor 186
II. The City of Falling Leaves 187
Venus Transiens 191
A Lady 192
Chinoiseries:
Reflections 192
Falling Snow 193
Hoar-frost 193
Solitaire 193
A Gift 194
Red Slippers 194
Apology 195
PERCY MACKAYE:
Old Age 196
Song from “Mater” 197
FREDERIC MANNING:
Sacrifice 198
At Even 199
JOHN MASEFIELD:
Ships 200
Cargoes 203
Watching by a Sick-Bed 203
What am I, Life? 204
EDGAR LEE MASTERS:
Spoon River Anthology:
The Hill 205
Ollie M^cGee 206
Daisy Fraser 207
Hare Drummer 207
Doc Hill 208
Fiddler Jones 208
Thomas Rhodes 209
Editor Whedon 210
Seth Compton 210
Henry C. Calhoun 211
Perry Zoll 212
Archibald Higbie 212
Father Malloy 213
Lucinda Matlock 213
Anne Rutledge 214
William H. Herndon 215
Rutherford M^cDowell 215
Arlo Will 216
Aaron Hatfield 217
Webster Ford 218
Silence 219
ALICE MEYNELL:
Maternity 221
Chimes 221
MAX MICHELSON:
O Brother Tree 222
The Bird 223
Storm 223
A Hymn to Night 224
Love Lyric 224
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY:
God’s World 225
Ashes of Life 226
The Shroud 226
HAROLD MONRO:
Great City 227
Youth in Arms 228
The Strange Companion 229
HARRIET MONROE:
The Hotel 231
The Turbine 233
On the Porch 236
The Wonder of It 237
The Inner Silence 238
Love Song 238
A Farewell 239
Lullaby 239
Pain 240
The Water Ouzel 241
The Pine at Timber-Line 242
Mountain Song 242
JOHN G. NEIHARDT:
Prayer for Pain 243
Envoi 244
YONE NOGUCHI:
The Poet 245
I Have Cast the World 246
GRACE FALLOW NORTON:
Allegra Agonistes 246
Make No Vows 247
I Give Thanks 247
JAMES OPPENHEIM:
The Slave 248
The Lonely Child 249
Not Overlooked 249
The Runner in the Skies 250
PATRICK ORR:
Annie Shore and Johnnie Doon 250
In the Mohave 251
SEUMAS O’SULLIVAN:
My Sorrow 252
Splendid and Terrible 252
The Others 253
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY:
Cradle Song, I-III 254
The Cedars 256
A Song of Solomon 257
EZRA POUND:
Δώρια 257
The Return 258
Piccadilly 259
N. Y. 259
The Coming of War: Actaeon 260
The Garden 260
Ortus 261
The Choice 261
The Garret 262
Dance Figure 262
From “Near Périgord” 263
An Immorality 264
The Study in Aesthetics 265
Further Instructions 265
Villanelle: The Psychological Hour, I-III 266
Ballad of the Goodly Fere 268
Ballad for Gloom 270
La Fraisne 271
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter (from the Chinese of Li Po.) 273
Exile’s Letter (From the Chinese of Li Po.) 274
JOHN REED:
Sangar 277
ERNEST RHYS:
Dagonet’s Canzonet 280
A Song of Happiness 281
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON:
The Master 283
John Gorham 285
Richard Cory 287
The Growth of Lorraine, I-II 287
Cassandra 288
CARL SANDBURG:
Chicago 290
The Harbor 291
Sketch 292
Lost 292
Jan Kubelik 293
At a Window 293
The Poor 294
The Road and the End 294
Killers 295
Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard 296
Handfuls 296
Under the Harvest Moon 297
Choose 297
Kin 298
Places 298
Joy 299
The Great Hunt 299
Our Prayer of Thanks 300
CLARA SHANAFELT:
To Thee 301
Caprice 301
A Vivid Girl 301
Invocation 302
Pastel 302
A Gallant Woman 302
Scherzo 303
FRANCES SHAW:
Who Loves the Rain 304
The Harp of the Wind 304
The Ragpicker 305
Cologne Cathedral 305
Star Thought 305
The Child’s Quest 306
Little Pagan Rain Song 306
CONSTANCE LINDSAY SKINNER:
Songs of the Coast-Dwellers:
The Chief’s Prayer after the Salmon Catch 307
Song of Whip-Plaiting 308
No Answer is Given 309
JAMES STEPHENS:
What Tomas An Buile said in a Pub 312
Bessie Bobtail 313
Hate 313
The Waste Places, I-II 314
Hawks 316
Dark Wings 317
GEORGE STERLING:
A Legend of the Dove 317
Kindred 318
Omnia Exeunt in Mysterium 318
The Last Days 319
WALLACE STEVENS:
Peter Quince at the Clavier, I-IV 320
In Battle 322
Sunday Morning, I-V 323
AJAN SYRIAN:
The Syrian Lover in Exile Remembers Thee, Light of my Land 325
RABINDRANATH TAGORE:
From “Gitanjali,” I-VI 327
From “The Gardener,” I-IX 329
SARA TEASDALE:
Leaves 334
Morning 334
The Flight 335
Over the Roofs 335
Debt 336
Songs in a Hospital:
The Broken Field 336
Open Windows 336
After Death 337
In Memoriam F. O. S. 337
Swallow Flight 338
The Answer 338
EUNICE TIETJENS:
The Bacchante to Her Babe 339
The Steam Shovel 341
The Great Man 343
RIDGELY TORRENCE:
The Bird and the Tree 344
The Son 345
CHARLES HANSON TOWNE:
Beyond the Stars 346
LOUIS UNTERMEYER:
Landscapes 348
Feuerzauber 350
On the Birth of a Child 351
Irony 352
ALLEN UPWARD:
Scented Leaves from a Chinese Jar:
The Acacia Leaves 352
The Bitter Purple Willows 352
The Coral Fisher 353
The Diamond 353
The Estuary 353
The Intoxicated Poet 353
The Jonquils 353
The Marigold 353
The Mermaid 354
The Middle Kingdom 354
The Milky Way 354
The Onion 354
The Sea-Shell 354
The Stupid Kite 354
The Windmill 355
The Word 355
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK:
Sunday Evening in the Common 355
Spring 356
Like Music 356
The Thunder-Shower 357
Song 357
Alone 358
Nirvana 358
Triumph of the Singer 358
HERVEY WHITE:
Last Night 359
I Saw the Clouds 360
MARGARET WIDDEMER:
The Beggars 361
Teresina’s Face 362
Greek Folk Song 362
FLORENCE WILKINSON:
Our Lady of Idleness 363
Students 365
MARGUERITE WILKINSON:
A Woman’s Beloved—A Psalm 367
An Incantation 368
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:
Sicilian Emigrant’s Song 369
Peace on Earth 370
The Shadow 371
Metric Figure 371
Sub Terra 372
Slow Movement 373
Postlude 374
CHARLES ERSKINE SCOTT WOOD:
“The Poet in the Desert”—Extracts from the Prologue 375
EDITH WYATT:
On the Great Plateau 377
Summer Hail 379
To F. W. 380
A City Afternoon 382
THE NEW POETRY
Conrad Aiken
MUSIC I HEARD
Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is desolate,
All that was once so beautiful is dead.
Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved:
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.
For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes.
And in my heart they will remember always:
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise!
DEAD CLEOPATRA
Dead Cleopatra lies in a crystal casket,
Wrapped and spiced by the cunningest of hands.
Around her neck they have put a golden necklace
Her tatbebs, it is said, are worn with sands.
Dead Cleopatra was once revered in Egypt—
Warm-eyed she was, this princess of the south.
Now she is very old and dry and faded,
With black bitumen they have sealed up her mouth.
Grave-robbers pulled the gold rings from her fingers,
Despite the holy symbols across her breast;
They scared the bats that quietly whirled above her.
Poor lady! she would have been long since at rest
If she had not been wrapped and spiced so shrewdly,
Preserved, obscene, to mock black flights of years.
What would her lover have said, had he foreseen it?
Had he been moved to ecstasy, or tears?
O sweet clean earth from whom the green blade cometh!—
When we are dead, my best-beloved and I,
Close well above us that we may rest forever,
Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
DANCING ADAIRS
Behold me, in my chiffon, gauze and tinsel,
Flitting out of the shadow into the spotlight,
And into the shadow again, without a whisper!—
Firefly’s my name, I am evanescent.
Firefly’s your name. You are evanescent.
But I follow you as remorselessly as darkness,
And shut you in and enclose you, at last, and always,
Till you are lost, as a voice is lost in silence.
Till I am lost, as a voice is lost in silence....
Are you the one who would close so cool about me?
My fire sheds into and through you and beyond you:
How can your fingers hold me? I am elusive.
How can my fingers hold you? You are elusive?
Yes, you are flame; but I surround and love you,
Always extend beyond you, cool, eternal,
To take you into my heart’s great void of silence.
You shut me into your heart’s great void of silence....
O sweet and soothing end for a life of whirling!
Now I am still, whose life was mazed with motion.
Now I sink into you, for love of sleep.
Zoë Akins
THE TRAGEDIENNE
A storm is riding on the tide;
Grey is the day and grey the tide,
Far-off the sea-gulls wheel and cry—
A storm draws near upon the tide;
A city lifts its minarets
To winds that from the desert sweep,
And prisoned Arab women weep
Below the domes and minarets;
Upon a hill in Thessaly
Stand broken columns in a line
About a cold forgotten shrine,
Beneath a moon in Thessaly:
But in the world there is no place
So desolate as your tragic face.
I AM THE WIND
I am the wind that wavers,
You are the certain land;
I am the shadow that passes
Over the sand.
I am the leaf that quivers,
You the unshaken tree;
You are the stars that are steadfast,
I am the sea.
You are the light eternal—
Like a torch I shall die;
You are the surge of deep music,
I but a cry!
CONQUERED
O pale! O vivid! dear!
O disillusioned eyes
Forever near!
O Dream, arise!
I will not turn away
From the face I loved again;
Your beauty may sway
My life with pain.
I will drink the wine you pour,
I will seek to put asunder
Our ways no more—
O Love! O Wonder!
THE WANDERER
The ships are lying in the bay,
The gulls are swinging round their spars;
My soul as eagerly as they
Desires the margin of the stars.
So much do I love wandering,
So much I love the sea and sky,
That it will be a piteous thing
In one small grave to lie.
Richard Aldington
THE POPLAR
Why do you always stand there shivering
Between the white stream and the road?
The people pass through the dust
On bicycles, in carts, in motor-cars;
The wagoners go by at dawn;
The lovers walk on the grass path at night.
Stir from your roots, walk, poplar!
You are more beautiful than they are.
I know that the white wind loves you,
Is always kissing you and turning up
The white lining of your green petticoat.
The sky darts through you like blue rain,
And the grey rain drips on your flanks
And loves you.
And I have seen the moon
Slip his silver penny into your pocket
As you straightened your hair;
And the white mist curling and hesitating
Like a bashful lover about your knees.
I know you, poplar;
I have watched you since I was ten.
But if you had a little real love,
A little strength,
You would leave your nonchalant idle lovers
And go walking down the white road
Behind the wagoners.
There are beautiful beeches
Down beyond the hill.
Will you always stand there shivering?
LESBIA
Grow weary if you will, let me be sad.
Use no more speech now;
Let the silence spread gold hair above us,
Fold on delicate fold.
Use no more speech;
You had the ivory of my life to carve....
And Picus of Mirandola is dead;
And all the gods they dreamed and fabled of,
Hermes, and Thoth and Bêl are rotten now,
Rotten and dank.
And through it all I see your pale Greek face;
Tenderness
Makes me eager as a little child to love you,
You morsel left half-cold on Cæsar’s plate.
IMAGES
I
Like a gondola of green scented fruits
Drifting along the dank canals at Venice,
You, O exquisite one,
Have entered my desolate city.
II
The blue smoke leaps
Like swirling clouds of birds vanishing.
So my love leaps forth towards you,
Vanishes and is renewed.
III
A rose-yellow moon in a pale sky
When the sunset is faint vermilion
In the mist among the tree-boughs,
Art thou to me.
IV
As a young beech-tree on the edge of a forest
Stands still in the evening,
Yet shudders through all its leaves in the light air
And seems to fear the stars—
So are you still and so tremble.
V
The red deer are high on the mountain,
They are beyond the last pine trees.
And my desires have run with them.
VI
The flower which the wind has shaken
Is soon filled again with rain;
So does my mind fill slowly with misgiving
Until you return.
CHORICOS
The ancient songs
Pass deathward mournfully.
Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths,
Regretful eyes and drooping breasts and wings—
Symbols of ancient songs
Mournfully passing
Down to the great white surges,
Watched of none
Save the frail sea-birds
And the lithe pale girls,
Daughters of Okeanos.
And the songs pass
From the green land
Which lies upon the waves as a leaf
On the flowers of hyacinth;
And they pass from the waters,
The manifold winds and the dim moon,
And they come,
Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk,
To the quiet level lands
That she keeps for us all,
That she wrought for us all for sleep
In the silver days of the earth’s dawning—
Prosperine, daughter of Zeus.
And we turn from the Kuprian’s breasts,
And we turn from thee,
Phoibos Apollon,
And we turn from the music of old
And the hills that we loved and the meads,
And we turn from the fiery day,
And the lips that were over-sweet;
For silently
Brushing the fields with red-shod feet,
With purple robe
Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame,
Death,
Thou hast come upon us.
And of all the ancient songs
Passing to the swallow-blue halls
By the dark streams of Persephone,
This only remains:
That in the end we turn to thee,
Death,
That we turn to thee, singing
One last song.
O Death,
Thou art an healing wind
That blowest over white flowers
A-tremble with dew;
Thou art a wind flowing
Over long leagues of lonely sea;
Thou art the dusk and the fragrance;
Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling;
Thou art the pale peace of one
Satiate with old desires;
Thou art the silence of beauty,
And we look no more for the morning;
We yearn no more for the sun,
Since with thy white hands,
Death,
Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets,
The slim colorless poppies
Which in thy garden alone
Softly thou gatherest.
And silently;
And with slow feet approaching;
And with bowed head and unlit eyes,
We kneel before thee.
And thou, leaning towards us,
Caressingly layest upon us
Flowers from thy thin cold hands,
And, smiling as a chaste woman
Knowing love in her heart,
Thou sealest our eyes
And the illimitable quietude
Comes gently upon us.
Mary Aldis
BARBERRIES
You say I touch the barberries
As a lover his mistress?
What a curious fancy!
One must be delicate, you know—
They have bitter thorns.
You say my hand is hurt?
Oh no, it was my breast,
It was crushed and pressed.
I mean—why yes, of course, of course—
There is a bright drop—isn’t there?—
Right on my finger;
Just the color of a barberry,
But it comes from my heart.
Do you love barberries?
In the autumn
When the sun’s desire
Touches them to a glory of crimson and gold?
I love them best then.
There is something splendid about them:
They are not afraid
Of being warm and glad and bold;
They flush joyously,
Like a cheek under a lover’s kiss;
They bleed cruelly
Like a dagger wound in the breast;
They flame up madly for their little hour,
Knowing they must die.
Do you love barberries?
WHEN YOU COME
“_There was a girl with him for a time. She took him to her room when
he was desolate and warmed him and took care of him. One day he could
not find her. For many weeks he walked constantly in that locality in
search of her._”—From _Life of Francis Thompson_.
When you come tonight
To our small room
You will look and listen—
I shall not be there.
You will cry out your dismay
To the unheeding gods;
You will wait and look and listen—
I shall not be there.
There is a part of you I love
More than your hands in mine at rest;
There is a part of you I love
More than your lips upon my breast.
There is a part of you I wound
Even in my caress;
There is a part of you withheld
I may not possess.
There is a part of you I hate—
Your need of me
When you would be alone,
Alone and free.
When you come tonight
To our small room
You will look and listen—
I shall not be there.
FLASH-LIGHTS
I
Candles toppling sideways in tomato cans
Sputter and sizzle at head and foot.
The gaudy patterns of a patch-work quilt
Lie smooth and straight
Save where upswelling over a silent shape.
A man in high boots stirs something on a rusty stove
Round and round and round,
As a new cry like a bleating lamb’s
Pierces his brain.
After a time the man busies himself
With hammer and nails and rough-hewn lumber,
But fears to strike a blow.
Outside the moonlight sleeps white upon the plain
And the bark of a coyote shrills across the night.
II
A smell of musk
Comes to him pungently through the darkness.
On the screen
Scenes from foreign lands,
Released by the censor,
Shimmer in cool black and white
Historic information.
He shifts his seat sideways, sideways—
A seeking hand creeps to another hand,
And a leaping flame
Illuminates the historic information.
III
Within the room, sounds of weeping
Low and hushed:
Without, a man, beautiful with the beauty
Of young strength,
Holds pitifully to the handle of the door.
He hiccoughs and turns away,
While a hand-organ plays,
“The hours I spend with thee, dear heart.”
Walter Conrad Arensberg
VOYAGE À L’INFINI
The swan existing
Is like a song with an accompaniment
Imaginary.
Across the grassy lake,
Across the lake to the shadow of the willows,
It is accompanied by an image—
As by Debussy’s
“_Reflets dans l’eau_.”
The swan that is
Reflects
Upon the solitary water—breast to breast
With the duplicity:
“_The other one!_”
And breast to breast it is confused.
O visionary wedding! O stateliness of the procession!
It is accompanied by the image of itself
Alone.
At night
The lake is a wide silence,
Without imagination.
AT DAYBREAK
I had a dream and I awoke with it—
Poor little thing that I had not unclasped
After the kiss good-by.
And at the surface how it gasped—
This thing that I had loved in the unlit
Depth of the drowsy sea....
Ah me!
This thing with which I drifted toward the sky.
Driftwood upon a wave—
Senseless the motion that it gave.
TO HASEKAWA
Perhaps it is no matter that you died.
Life’s an _incognito_ which you saw through:
You never told on life—you had your pride;
But life has told on you.
DIALOGUE
Be patient, Life, when Love is at the gate,
And when he enters let him be at home.
Think of the roads that he has had to roam.
Think of the years that he has had to wait.
_But if I let Love in I shall be late.
Another has come first—there is no room.
And I am thoughtful of the endless loom—
Let Love be patient, the importunate._
O Life, be idle and let Love come in,
And give thy dreamy hair that Love may spin.
_But Love himself is idle with his song.
Let Love come last, and then may Love last long._
Be patient, Life, for Love is not the last.
Be patient now with Death, for Love has passed.
SONG OF THE SOULS SET FREE
Wrap the earth in cloudy weather
For a shroud.
We have slipped the earthly tether,
We’re above the cloud.
Peep and draw the cloud together,
Peep upon the bowed.
What can they be bowing under,
Wild and wan?
Peep, and draw the cloud asunder,
Peep, and wave a dawn.
It will make them rise and wonder
Whether we are gone.
Wilton Agnew Barrett
A NEW ENGLAND CHURCH
The white church on the hill
Looks over the little bay—
A beautiful thing on the hill
When the mist is gray;
When the hill looks old, and the air turns cold
With the dying day!
The white church on the hill—
A Greek in a Puritan town—
Was built on the brow of the hill
For John Wesley’s God’s renown,
And a conscience old set a steeple cold
On its Grecian crown.
In a storm of faith on the hill
Hands raised it over the bay.
When the night is clear on the hill,
It stands up strong and gray;
But its door is old, and the tower points cold
To the Milky Way.
The white church on the hill
Looks lonely over the town.
Dim to them under the hill
Is its God’s renown,
And its Bible old, and its creed grown cold,
And the letters brown.
Joseph Warren Beach
RUE BONAPARTE
You that but seek your modest rolls and coffee,
When you have passed the bar, and have saluted
Its watchful madam, then pray enter softly
The inner chamber, even as one who treads
The haunts of mating birds, and watch discreetly
Over your paper’s edge. There in the corner,
Obscure, ensconced behind the uncovered table,
A man and woman keep their silent tryst.
Outside the morning floods the pavement sweetly;
Yonder aloft a maid throws back the shutters;
The hucksters utter modulated cries
As wistful as some old pathetic ballad.
Within the brooding lovers, unaware,
Sit quiet hand in hand, or in low whispers
Communicate a more articulate love.
Sometimes she plays with strings and, gently leaning
Against his shoulder, shows him childish tricks.
She has not touched the glass of milk before her,
Her breakfast and the price of their admittance.
She has a look devoted and confiding
And might be pretty were not life so hard.
But he, gaunt as his rusty bicycle
That stands against the table, and with features
So drawn and stark, has only futile strength.
The love they cherish in this stolen meeting
Through all the day that follows makes her sweeter,
And him perhaps it only leaves more bitter.
But you that have not love at all, old men
That warm your fingers by this fire, discreetly
Play out your morning game of dominoes.
THE VIEW AT GUNDERSON’S
Sitting in his rocker waiting for your tea,
Gazing from his window, this is what you see:
A cat that snaps at flies; a track leading down
By log-built shanties gray and brown;
The corner of a barn, and tangled lines of fence
Of rough-hewn pickets standing dense;
The ghost of a tree on a dull, wet day;
And the blanket fog where lies the bay.
But when he’s seen the last of you,
Sitting in his rocker, what’s _his_ view?
(For there he sits, day in, day out,
Nursing his leg—and his dreams, no doubt.)
The snow-slide up behind the _gaard_;
The farm beside old Trondjem _fjord_;
Daughters seven with their cold blue eyes,
And the great pine where his father lies;
The boat that brought him over the sea;
And the toothless woman who makes his tea.
(Their picture, framed on the rough log wall,
Proves she had teeth when he was tall.)
He sees the balsam thick on the hill,
And all he’s cleared with a stubborn will.
And last he sees the full-grown son
For whom he hoards what he has won.
You saw little worth the strife:
What he sees is one man’s life.
William Rose Benét
THE FALCONER OF GOD
I flung my soul to the air like a falcon flying.
I said, “Wait on, wait on, while I ride below!
I shall start a heron soon
In the marsh beneath the moon—
A strange white heron rising with silver on its wings,
Rising and crying
Wordless, wondrous things;
The secret of the stars, of the world’s heart-strings
The answer to their woe.
Then stoop thou upon him, and grip and hold him so!”
My wild soul waited on as falcons hover.
I beat the reedy fens as I trampled past.
I heard the mournful loon
In the marsh beneath the moon.
And then, with feathery thunder, the bird of my desire
Broke from the cover
Flashing silver fire.
High up among the stars I saw his pinions spire.
The pale clouds gazed aghast
As my falcon stooped upon him, and gript and held him fast.
My soul dropped through the air—with heavenly plunder?—
Gripping the dazzling bird my dreaming knew?
Nay! but a piteous freight,
A dark and heavy weight
Despoiled of silver plumage, its voice forever stilled—
All of the wonder
Gone that ever filled
Its guise with glory. O bird that I have killed,
How brilliantly you flew
Across my rapturous vision when first I dreamed of you!
Yet I fling my soul on high with new endeavor,
And I ride the world below with a joyful mind.
_I shall start a heron soon
In the marsh beneath the moon—
A wondrous silver heron its inner darkness fledges!_
I beat forever
The fens and the sedges.
The pledge is still the same—for all disastrous pledges,
All hopes resigned!
My soul still flies above me for the quarry it shall find!
THE HORSE THIEF