That he encountered and saw through;
But little of us did he ask,
And little did we ever do.
And what appears if we review
The season when we railed and chaffed?—
It is the face of one who knew
That we were learning while we laughed.
The face that in our vision feels
Again the venom that we flung,
Transfigured, to the world reveals
The vigilance to which we clung.
Shrewd, hallowed, harassed, and among
The mysteries that are untold—
The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.
For he, to whom we had applied
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,
As he was ancient at his birth:
The saddest among kings of earth,
Bowed with a galling crown, this man
Met rancor with a cryptic mirth,
Laconic—and Olympian.
The love, the grandeur, and the fame
Are bounded by the world alone;
The calm, the smouldering, and the flame
Of awful patience were his own:
With him they are forever flown
Past all our fond self-shadowings,
Wherewith we cumber the Unknown
As with inept, Icarian wings.
For we were not as other men:
’Twas ours to soar and his to see.
But we are coming down again,
And we shall come down pleasantly;
Nor shall we longer disagree
On what it is to be sublime,
But flourish in our perigee
And have one Titan at a time.
JOHN GORHAM
“Tell me what you’re doing over here, John Gorham—
Sighing hard and seeming to be sorry when you’re not.
Make me laugh or let me go now, for long faces in the moonlight
Are a sign for me to say again a word that you forgot.”
“I’m over here to tell you what the moon already
May have said or maybe shouted ever since a year ago;
I’m over here to tell you what you are, Jane Wayland,
And to make you rather sorry, I should say, for being so.”
“Tell me what you’re saying to me now, John Gorham,
Or you’ll never see as much of me as ribbons any more;
I’ll vanish in as many ways as I have toes and fingers,
And you’ll not follow far for one where flocks have been before.”
“I’m sorry now you never saw the flocks, Jane Wayland;
But you’re the one to make of them as many as you need.
And then about the vanishing: it’s I who mean to vanish;
And when I’m here no longer you’ll be done with me indeed.”
“That’s a way to tell me what I am, John Gorham!
How am I to know myself until I make you smile?
Try to look as if the moon were making faces at you,
And a little more as if you meant to stay a little while.”
“You are what it is that over rose-blown gardens
Makes a pretty flutter for a season in the sun.
You are what it is that with a mouse, Jane Wayland,
Catches him and let’s him go and eats him up for fun.”
“Sure I never took you for a mouse, John Gorham.
All you say is easy, but so far from being true
That I wish you wouldn’t ever be again the one to think so;
For it isn’t cats and butterflies that I would be to you.”
“All your little animals are in one picture—
One I’ve had before me since a year ago to-night;
And the picture where they live will be of you, Jane Wayland,
Till you find a way to kill them or to keep them out of sight.”
“Won’t you ever see me as I am, John Gorham,
Leaving out the foolishness and all I never meant?
Somewhere in me there’s a woman, if you know the way to find her—
Will you like me any better if I prove it and repent?”
“I doubt if I shall ever have the time, Jane Wayland;
And I dare say all this moonlight lying round us might as well
Fall for nothing on the shards of broken urns that are forgotten,
As on two that have no longer much of anything to tell.”
RICHARD CORY
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
THE GROWTH OF LORRAINE
I
While I stood listening, discreetly dumb,
Lorraine was having the last word with me:
“I know,” she said, “I know it, but you see
Some creatures are born fortunate, and some
Are born to be found out and overcome—
Born to be slaves, to let the rest go free;
And if I’m one of them (and I must be)
You may as well forget me and go home.
“You tell me not to say these things, I know,
But I should never try to be content:
I’ve gone too far; the life would be too slow.
Some could have done it—some girls have the stuff;
But I can’t do it—I don’t know enough.
I’m going to the devil.” And she went.
II
I did not half believe her when she said
That I should never hear from her again;
Nor when I found a letter from Lorraine,
Was I surprised or grieved at what I read:
“Dear friend, when you find this, I shall be dead.
You are too far away to make me stop.
They say that one drop—think of it, one drop!—
Will be enough; but I’ll take five instead.
“You do not frown because I call you friend;
For I would have you glad that I still keep
Your memory, and even at the end—
Impenitent, sick, shattered—cannot curse
The love that flings, for better or for worse,
This worn-out, cast-out flesh of mine to sleep.”
CASSANDRA
I heard one who said: “Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.
“You build it altars tall enough
To make you see, but you are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.
“When Reason beckons you to pause,
You laugh and say that you know best;
But what it is you know, you keep
As dark as ingots in a chest.
“You laugh and answer, ‘We are young;
Oh, leave us now, and let us grow:’
Not asking how much more of this
Will Time endure or Fate bestow.
“Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,
Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untried?
“What lost eclipse of history,
What bivouac of the marching stars,
Has given the sign for you to see
Millenniums and last great wars?
“What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?
“Your Dollar, Dove and Eagle make
A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
It pays, it flatters, and it’s new.
“And though your very flesh and blood
Be what your Eagle eats and drinks,
You’ll praise him for the best of birds,
Not knowing what the Eagle thinks.
“The power is yours, but not the sight;
You see not upon what you tread;
You have the ages for your guide,
But not the wisdom to be led.
“Think you to tread forever down
The merciless old verities?
And are you never to have eyes
To see the world for what it is?
“Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are?”—No other word
We caught, but with a laughing crowd
Moved on. None heeded, and few heard.
Carl Sandburg
CHICAGO
Hog-Butcher for the World,
Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight-handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your
painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked, and I answer, Yes, it is true I have
seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is, On the faces of women
and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my
city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be
alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a
tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his
ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of youth; half-naked,
sweating, proud to be Hog-butcher, Tool-maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads, and Freight-handler to the Nation.
THE HARBOR
Passing through huddled and ugly walls,
By doorways where women haggard
Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,
Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,
Out from the huddled and ugly walls,
I came sudden, at the city’s edge,
On a blue burst of lake,
Long lake waves breaking under the sun
On a spray-flung curve of shore;
And a fluttering storm of gulls,
Masses of great gray wings
And flying white bellies
Veering and wheeling free in the open.
SKETCH
The shadows of the ships
Rock on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.
A long brown bar at the dip of the sky
Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.
The lucid and endless wrinkles
Draw in, lapse and withdraw.
Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles
Wash on the floor of the beach.
Rocking on the crest
In the low blue lustre
Are the shadows of the ships.
LOST
Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.
JAN KUBELIK
Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air.
(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child, perfect, learning to suck
milk.)
Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild.
(All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the
hills with their lovers.)
AT A WINDOW
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk,
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
THE POOR
Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was
amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I
stood silent;
Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the
horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.
Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,
mothers lifting their children—these all I touched, and felt the solemn
thrill of them.
And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor,
patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars;
innumerable, patient as the darkness of night—and all broken, humble
ruins of nations.
THE ROAD AND THE END
I shall foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
I shall foot it
In the silence of the morning,
See the night slur into dawn,
Hear the slow great winds arise
Where tall trees flank the way
And shoulder toward the sky.
The broken boulders by the road
Shall not commemorate my ruin.
Regret shall be the gravel under foot.
I shall watch for
Slim birds swift of wing
That go where wind and ranks of thunder
Dive the wild processionals of rain.
The dust of the travelled road
Shall touch my hands and face.
KILLERS
I am singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he can not move:
Under the sun
Are sixteen million men,
Chosen for shining teeth,
Sharp eyes, hard legs,
And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.
And a red juice runs on the green grass;
And a red juice soaks the dark soil.
And the sixteen million are killing ... and killing and killing.
I never forget them day or night:
They beat on my head for memory of them;
They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,
To their homes and women, dreams and games.
I wake in the night and smell the trenches,
And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines—
Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:
Some of them long sleepers for always,
Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,
Fixed in the drag of the world’s heartbreak,
Eating and drinking, toiling ... on a long job of killing.
Sixteen million men.
NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD
Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,
And round the creep of the wave line,
Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters
Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.
HANDFULS
Blossoms of babies
Blinking their stories
Come soft
On the dusk and the babble;
Little red gamblers,
Handfuls that slept in the dust.
Summers of rain,
Winters of drift,
Tell off the years;
And they go back
Who came soft—
Back to the sod,
To silence and dust;
Gray gamblers,
Handfuls again.
UNDER THE HARVEST MOON
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
CHOOSE
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.
KIN
Brother, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother—
Not for years, anyhow;
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
Then I will warm you,
Hold you close, wrap you in circles,
Use you and change you—
Maybe thousands of years, brother.
PLACES
Roses and gold
For you today,
And the flash of flying flags.
I will have
Ashes,
Dust in my hair,
Crushes of hoofs.
Your name
Fills the mouth
Of rich man and poor.
Women bring
Armfuls of flowers
And throw on you.
I go hungry
Down in dreams
And loneliness,
Across the rain
To slashed hills
Where men wait and hope for me.
JOY
Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere—
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.
THE GREAT HUNT
I can not tell you now;
When the wind’s drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind’s a whisper at last—
Maybe I’ll tell you then—
some other time.
When the rose’s flash to the sunset
Reels to the wrack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it’s no use to beckon or say, “So long”—
Maybe I’ll tell you then—
some other time.
I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you.
I shall never find any
greater than you.
OUR PRAYER OF THANKS
God,
For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds
at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the
summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
For the sunset and the stars, the women and their white arms that hold
us,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of
town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if
these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,
Our prayer of thanks.
God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system;
and so, for the break of the game and the first play and the last,
Our prayer of thanks.
Clara Shanafelt
TO THEE
White foam flower, red flame flower
On my tree of delight.
Lean from the shadow
Like singing in sorrow—
Pale flower of thy smile, flame flower of thy touch,
In my night.
CAPRICE
Who will be naming the wind
That lifts me and leaves me;
Swelleth my budding flame,
Foully bereaves me?
From the land whose forgotten name
Man shall not find,
Blowest thou, wind?
A VIVID GIRL
Her face is fair and smooth and fine,
Childlike, with secret laughter lit,
Drooping in pity, bright with wit,
A flower, a flame—God fashioned it.
Who sees her tastes the sacred wine.
INVOCATION
O glass-blower of time,
Hast blown all shapes at thy fire?
Canst thou no lovelier bell,
No clearer bubble, clear as delight, inflate me—
Worthy to hold such wine
As was never yet trod from the grape,
Since the stars shed their light, since the moon
Troubled the night with her beauty?
PASTEL
She has a clear, wind-sheltered loveliness,
Like pale streams winding far and hills withdrawn
From the bright reaches of the noon. Dawn
Is her lifting fancy, but her heart
Is orchard boughs and dusk and quietness.
A GALLANT WOMAN
She burst fierce wine
From the tough skin of pain,
Like wind that wrings from rigid skies
A scant and bitter gleam,
Long after the autumnal dusk
Has folded all the valleys in.
SCHERZO
The elder’s bridal in July,
Bright as a cloud!
A ripe blonde girl,
Billowing to the ground in foamy petticoats,
With breasts full-blown
Swelling her bodice.
But later
When the small black-ruddy berries
Tempt the birds to strip the stems,
And the leaves begin to yellow and fall off
While late summer’s still in its green,
Then you look lank and used up,
Elder;
Your big bones stick out,
You’re the kind of woman
Wears bleak at forty.
I’ll take my constant pleasure
In a willow-tree that ripples silver
All the summer.
And when the winter comes in greasy rags
Like a half-naked beggar,
Lets out the plaited splendor
Of her bright and glancing hair.
Frances Shaw
WHO LOVES THE RAIN
Who loves the rain
And loves his home,
And looks on life with quiet eyes,
Him will I follow through the storm;
And at his hearth-fire keep me warm;
Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise,
Who loves the rain,
And loves his home,
And looks on life with quiet eyes.
THE HARP OF THE WIND
My house stands high—
Where the harp of the wind
Plays all day,
Plays all night;
And the city light
Is far away.
Where hangs the harp that the winds play?—
High in the air—
Over the sea?
The long straight streets of the far-away town,
Where the lines of light go sweeping down,
Are the strings of its minstrelsy.
And the harp of the wind
Gives to the wind
A song of the city’s tears;
Thin and faint, the cry of a child,
Plaint of the soul unreconciled,
A song of the passing years.
THE RAGPICKER
The Ragpicker sits and sorts her rags:
Silk and homespun and threads of gold
She plucks to pieces and marks with tags;
And her eyes are ice and her fingers cold.
The Ragpicker sits in the back of my brain;
Keenly she looks me through and through.
One flaming shred I have hidden away—
She shall not have my love for you.
COLOGNE CATHEDRAL
The little white prayers
Of Elspeth Fry
Float up the arches
Into the sky.
A little black bird
On the belfry high
Pecks at them
As they go by.
STAR THOUGHT
I shall see a star tonight
From a distant mountain height;
From a city you will see
The same star that shines on me.
’Tis not of the firmament
On a solar journey bent;
Fixed it is through time and weather;—
’Tis a thought we hold together.
THE CHILD’S QUEST
My mother twines me roses wet with dew;
Oft have I sought the garden through and through;
I cannot find the tree whereon
My mother’s roses grew.
Seek not, O child, the tree whereon
Thy mother’s roses grew.
My mother tells me tales of noble deeds;
Oft have I sought her book when no one heeds;
I cannot find the page, alas,
From which my mother reads.
Seek not, O child, to find the page
From which thy mother reads.
My mother croons me songs all soft and low,
Through the white night where little breezes blow;
Yet never when the morning dawns,
My mother’s songs I know.
Seek not, O child, at dawn of day
Thy mother’s songs to know.
LITTLE PAGAN RAIN SONG
In the dark and peace of my final bed,
The wet grass waving above my head,
At rest from love, at rest from pain,
I lie and listen to the rain.
Falling, softly falling,
Song of my soul that is free;
Song of my soul that has not forgot
The sleeping body of me.
When quiet and calm and straight I lie,
High in the air my soul rides by:
Shall I await thee, soul, in vain?
Hark to the answer in the rain.
Falling, softly falling,
Song of my soul that is free;
Song of my soul that will not forget
The sleeping body of me.
Constance Lindsay Skinner
SONGS OF THE COAST-DWELLERS
THE CHIEF’S PRAYER AFTER THE SALMON CATCH
O Kia-Kunæ, praise!
Thou hast opened thy hand among the stars,
And sprinkled the sea with food;
The catch is great; thy children will live.
See, on the roofs of the villages, the red meat drying;
Another year thou hast encompassed us with life.
Praise! Praise! Kunæ!
O Father, we have waited with shut mouths,
With hearts silent, and hands quiet,
Waited the time of prayer;
Lest with fears we should beset thee,
And pray the unholy prayer of asking.
We waited silently; and thou gavest life.
Oh, praise! Praise! Praise!
Open the silent mouths, the shut hearts, my tribe:
Sing high the prayer of Thanksgiving,
The prayer He taught in the beginning to the Kwakiutl—
The good rejoicing prayer of thanks.
As the sea sings on the wet shore, when the ice thunders back,
And the blue water floats again, warm, shining, living,
So break thy ice-bound heart, and the cold lip’s silence—
Praise Kunæ for life, as wings up-flying, as eagles to the sun.
Praise! Praise! Praise!
SONG OF WHIP-PLAITING
In the dawn I gathered cedar-boughs
For the plaiting of thy whip.
They were wet with sweet drops;
They still thought of the night.
All alone I shredded cedar-boughs,
Green boughs in the pale light,
Where the morning meets the sea,
And the great mountain stops.
Earth was very still.
I heard no sound but the whisper of my knife,
My black flint knife.
It whispered among the white strands of the cedar,
Whispered in parting the sweet cords for thy whip.
O sweet-smelling juice of cedar—
Life-ooze of love!
My knife drips:
Its whisper is the only sound in all the world!
Finer than young sea-lions’ hairs
Are my cedar-strands:
They are fine as little roots deep down.
(O little roots of cedar
Far, far under the bosom of Tsa-Kumts!—
They have plaited her through with love.)
Now, into my love-gift
Closely, strongly, I will weave them—
Little strands of pain!
Since I saw thee
Standing with thy torch in my doorway,
Their little roots are deep in me.
In the dawn I gathered cedar-boughs:
Sweet, sweet was their odor,
They were wet with tears—
The sweetness will not leave my hands,
No, not in salt sea-washings:
Tears will not wash away sweetness,
I shall have sweet hands for thy service.
(Ah—sometimes—thou wilt be gentle?
Little roots of pain are deep, deep in me
Since I saw thee standing in my doorway.)
I have quenched thy torch—
I have plaited thy whip.
I am thy Woman!
NO ANSWER IS GIVEN
I am Ah-woa-te, the Hunter.
I met a maiden in the shadow of the rocks;
Her eyes were strange and clear,
Her fair lips were shaped like the bow of dawning.
I asked her name,
Striking my spear in the deep earth for resting.
“I am Kantlak, a maiden, named for the Morning.
On the mountain-top I heard two eagles talking—
The word was Love.
They cried it, beating their wings on each other
Until they bled; and she fell,
Yet, falling, still weakly cried it
To him soaring: and died.
I came to a mossy low valley of flowers.
There I saw Men-iak, the white grouse,
(White with chaste dreams, like the Spring Moon, fairer than flowers).
Through the forest a dark bird swooped, with fierce eyes,
And Men-iak flew down to it.
Her white breast is red-dyed, she lies on the moss;
Yet faintly cries the same strange word,
Hunter, will you come to my little fire and tell me
What Love is?”