Part 10

I saw the spring and summer pass, The trees grow bare, and winter come; All was the same as once it was Upon my hills at home.

Then suddenly in my own heart I felt God walk and gaze about; He spoke; his words seemed held apart With gladness and with doubt.

“Here is my meat and wine,” He said, “My love, my toil, my ancient care; Here is my cloak, my book, my bed, And here my old despair.

“Here are my seasons: winter, spring, Summer the same, and autumn spills The fruits I look for; everything As on my heavenly hills.”

ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Streets of the roaring town, Hush for him; hush, be still! He comes, who was stricken down Doing the word of our will. Hush! Let him have his state. Give him his soldier’s crown, The grists of trade can wait Their grinding at the mill. But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown. Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone.

Toll! Let the great bells toll Till the clashing air is dim, Did we wrong this parted soul? We will make it up to him. Toll! Let him never guess What work we sent him to. Laurel, laurel, yes. He did what we bade him do. Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good; Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country’s own heart’s-blood.

A flag for a soldier’s bier Who dies that his land may live; O banners, banners here, That he doubt not nor misgive! That he heed not from the tomb The evil days draw near When the nation robed in gloom With its faithless past shall strive. Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark, Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.

_George Sterling_

George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, December 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and has lived in California ever since.

Of Sterling’s ten volumes of poetry, _The Testimony of the Suns_ (1903), _A Wine of Wizardry_ (1908) and _The House of Orchids and Other Poems_ (1911) are the most characteristic. As their titles indicate, this is poetry of a flamboyant and rhetorical type; of luxuriant sentences and emotions decorated in “the grand manner.” Yet Sterling has added a definite vigor to his ornate tropes and verbal prodigality. Nor is he always extravagant. His simpler verses, though not in his most familiar vein, are among his best.

THE BLACK VULTURE

Aloof upon the day’s immeasured dome, He holds unshared the silence of the sky. Far down his bleak, relentless eyes descry The eagle’s empire and the falcon’s home— Far down, the galleons of sunset roam; His hazards on the sea of morning lie; Serene, he hears the broken tempest sigh Where cold sierras gleam like scattered foam. And least of all he holds the human swarm— Unwitting now that envious men prepare To make their dream and its fulfillment one, When, poised above the caldrons of the storm, Their hearts, contemptuous of death, shall dare His roads between the thunder and the sun.

THE MASTER MARINER

My grandsire sailed three years from home, And slew unmoved the sounding whale: Here on a windless beach I roam And watch far out the hardy sail.

The lions of the surf that cry Upon this lion-colored shore On reefs of midnight met his eye: He knew their fangs as I their roar.

My grandsire sailed uncharted seas, And toll of all their leagues he took: I scan the shallow bays at ease, And tell their colors in a book.

The anchor-chains his music made And wind in shrouds and running-gear: The thrush at dawn beguiles my glade, And once, ’tis said, I woke to hear.

My grandsire in his ample fist The long harpoon upheld to men: Behold obedient to my wrist A grey gull’s-feather for my pen!

Upon my grandsire’s leathern cheek Five zones their bitter bronze had set: Some day their hazards I will seek, I promise me at times. Not yet.

I think my grandsire now would turn A mild but speculative eye On me, my pen and its concern, Then gaze again to sea—and sigh.

_Edwin Arlington Robinson_

Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in Robinson’s poetry as “Tilbury Town.” In 1891 he entered Harvard College. A little collection of verse was privately printed in 1896 and the following year marked the appearance of his first representative work, _The Children of the Night_ (1897).

Somewhat later, he was struggling in various capacities to make a living in New York, five years passing before the publication of _Captain Craig_ (1902). This fine piece of psychology, in the cryptic vein of Browning but in Robinson’s own idiom, was brought to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United States), who became interested in the work of the poet and, a few years later, offered him a place in the New York Custom House. Robinson held this position from 1905 to 1910, leaving it the same year which marked the appearance of his most characteristic volume, _The Town down the River_. Robinson’s three books, up to this time, showed his clean, firmly-drawn quality; but, in spite of their excellences, they seem little more than a succession of preludes for the dynamic volume that was to establish him in the first rank of American poets. _The Man Against the Sky_, Robinson’s fullest and most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.)

In all of these books there is manifest that searching for truth, the constant questioning, that takes the place of mere acceptance. As the work of a verbal portrait painter nothing, with the exception of some of Frost’s pictures, has been produced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, half-mystical etchings like “Cliff Klingenhagen,” “Miniver Cheevy,” “Richard Cory”—lines where Robinson’s irony is inextricably mixed with tenderness—his art is at its height.

Technically, Robinson is as precise as he is dexterous; there is never a false image or a blurred line in any of his verses which, while adhering to the strictest models and executed according to traditional forms, are made fresh and surprising. It is interesting to observe how the smoothness of his rhymes, playing against the hard outlines of his verse, emphasizes the terse, epigrammatic vigor of poems like “The Gift of God,” “The Field of Glory” and “The Master,” one of the finest evocations of Lincoln which is, at the same time, a bitter commentary on the commercialism of the times and the “shopman’s test of age and worth.”

Robinson’s blank verse is scarcely less individual. It is, in spite of a certain unblinking seriousness, always modern, always packed with the instant. In “Ben Johnson Entertains a Man from Stratford” we have the clearest and most human portrait of Shakespeare ever attempted; the lines run as fluently as good conversation, as inevitable as a perfect melody. In his two reanimations of the Arthurian legends, _Merlin_ (1917) and _Launcelot_ (1920), Robinson, shaming the tea-table idyls of Tennyson, has colored the tale with somber reflections of the collapse of old orders, the darkness of an age in ashes.

Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude toward life, Robinson’s philosophy is essentially positive; a dogged if never dogmatic desire for a deeper faith, a greater light. It is a philosophy expressed in _Captain Craig_:

... Take on yourself But your sincerity, and you take on Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, No laughter to vex down your loyalty.

A collection of the poet’s later verse, _The Three Taverns_ (1920), reflects the same high standards of conciseness and craftsmanship. Robinson lives in Peterboro, New Hampshire, during the summer; his home in the winter is in Brooklyn, New York.

MINIVER CHEEVY[17]

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici, Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the mediæval grace Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought, But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.

THE GIFT OF GOD[18]

Blessed with a joy that only she Of all alive shall ever know, She wears a proud humility For what it was that willed it so,—

That her degree should be so great Among the favored of the Lord That she may scarcely bear the weight Of her bewildering reward.

As one apart, immune, alone, Or featured for the shining ones, And like to none that she has known Of other women’s other sons,— The firm fruition of her need, He shines anointed; and he blurs Her vision, till it seems indeed A sacrilege to call him hers.

She fears a little for so much Of what is best, and hardly dares To think of him as one to touch With aches, indignities, and cares; She sees him rather at the goal, Still shining; and her dream foretells The proper shining of a soul Where nothing ordinary dwells.

Perchance a canvass of the town Would find him far from flags and shouts, And leave him only the renown Of many smiles and many doubts; Perchance the crude and common tongue Would havoc strangely with his worth; But she, with innocence unwrung, Would read his name around the earth.

And others, knowing how this youth Would shine, if love could make him great, When caught and tortured for the truth Would only writhe and hesitate; While she, arranging for his days What centuries could not fulfil, Transmutes him with her faith and praise, And has him shining where she will.

She crowns him with her gratefulness, And says again that life is good; And should the gift of God be less In him than in her motherhood, His fame, though vague, will not be small, As upward through her dream he fares, Half clouded with a crimson fall Of roses thrown on marble stairs.

THE MASTER[19][20]

(_Lincoln as seen, presumably, by one of his contemporaries shortly after the Civil War_)

A flying word from here and there Had sown the name at which we sneered, But soon the name was everywhere, To be reviled and then revered: A presence to be loved and feared, We cannot hide it, or deny That we, the gentlemen who jeered, May be forgotten by and by.

He came when days were perilous And hearts of men were sore beguiled; And having made his note of us, He pondered and was reconciled. Was ever master yet so mild As he, and so untamable? We doubted, even when he smiled, Not knowing what he knew so well.

He knew that undeceiving fate Would shame us whom he served unsought; He knew that he must wince and wait— The jest of those for whom he fought; He knew devoutly what he thought Of us and of our ridicule; He knew that we must all be taught Like little children in a school.

We gave a glamour to the task 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 have 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.

AN OLD STORY[21]

Strange that I did not know him then, That friend of mine! I did not even show him then One friendly sign;

But cursed him for the ways he had To make me see My envy of the praise he had For praising me.

I would have rid the earth of him Once, in my pride!... I never knew the worth of him Until he died.

RICHARD CORY[21]

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.

VAIN GRATUITIES

Never was there a man much uglier In the eyes of other women, or more grim: “The Lord has filled her chalice to the brim, So let us pray she’s a philosopher,” They said; and there was more they said of her— Deeming it, after twenty years with him, No wonder that she kept her figure slim And always made you think of lavender.

But she, demure as ever, and as fair, Almost, as they remembered her before She found him, would have laughed had she been there; And all they said would have been heard no more Than foam that washes on an island shore Where there are none to listen or to care.

THE DARK HILLS

Dark hills at evening in the west, Where sunset hovers like a sound Of golden horns that sang to rest Old bones of warriors under ground, Far now from all the bannered ways Where flash the legions of the sun, You fade—as if the last of days Were fading, and all wars were done.

_Edgar Lee Masters_

Edgar Lee Masters was born at Garnett, Kansas, August 23, 1869, of old Puritan and pioneering stock. When he was still a boy, the family moved to Illinois, where, after desultory schooling, he studied law in his father’s office at Lewiston. For a year he practised with his father and then went to Chicago, where he became a successful and prominent attorney.

Before going to Chicago, Masters had composed a great quantity of verse in traditional forms on still more traditional themes; by the time he was twenty-four he had written about four hundred poems, revealing the result of wide reading and betraying the influence of Poe, Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. His work, previous to the publication of _Spoon River Anthology_, was derivative and undistinguished. In 1895 he wrote a blank verse play on Benedict Arnold. In 1898 he published _A Book of Verses_, a selection of some sixty of the early four hundred. In 1902 _Maximilian_, another blank verse play, appeared, causing no more comment than the others. Nothing daunted, Masters published several volumes in rapid succession (three books of poetry appearing, under various pseudonyms, between 1905 and 1912), _The New Star Chamber and Other Essays_ (1904), _Blood of the Prophets_ (1905), _Althea_, a play (1907), _The Trifler_, another play (1908).

In 1914, Masters, at the suggestion of his friend William Marion Reedy, turned from his preoccupation with classic subjects and began to draw upon the life he knew for those concise records which have made him famous. Taking as his model _The Greek Anthology_, which Reedy had pressed upon him, Masters evolved _Spoon River Anthology_, that astonishing assemblage of over two hundred self-inscribed epitaphs, in which the dead of a middle Western town are supposed to have written the truth about themselves. Through these frank revelations, many of them interrelated, the village is recreated for us; it lives again, unvarnished and typical, with all its intrigues, hypocrisies, feuds, martyrdoms and occasional exaltations. The crippling monotony of existence in a drab township, the defeat of ideals, the struggle toward higher goals—all is synthesized in these crowded pages. All moods and all manner of voices are heard here—even Masters’s, who explains the reason for his medium and the selection of his form through “Petit, the Poet.”

The success of the volume was stupendous. (See Preface.) With every new attack (and its frankness continued to make fresh enemies) its readers increased; it was imitated, parodied, reviled as “a piece of yellow journalism;” hailed as “an American Comédie Humaine.” Finally, after the storm of controversy, it has taken its place as a landmark in American literature.

With _Spoon River Anthology_ Masters arrived—and left. He went back to his first rhetorical style, resurrecting many of his earlier trifles, reprinting dull echoes of Tennyson, imitations of Shelley, archaic paraphrases in the manner of Swinburne. Yet, though none of Masters’s subsequent volumes can be compared to his masterpiece, all of them contain examples of the same straightforwardness, the stubborn searching for truth that intensified his best known characterizations.

_Songs and Satires_ (1916) contains the startling “All Life in a Life” and the gravely moving “Silence.” _The Great Valley_ (1916) is packed with echoes and a growing dependence on Browning. In _Toward the Gulf_ (1918), the Browning influence predominates, although there are such splendid individual monologues as “The World Saver,” “St. Deseret” and “Front the Ages with a Smile.” _Starved Rock_ (1919) and _Domesday Book_ (1920) are, like all Masters’s later books, queerly assembled mixtures of good, bad and derivative verse. And yet, for all of this poet’s borrowings, in spite of his cynicism and disillusion, Masters’s work is a continual searching for some key to the mystery of truth, the mastery of life.

PETIT, THE POET[22]

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel— Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens— But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; And what is love but a rose that fades? Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure— All in the loom, and oh what patterns! Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers— Blind to all of it all my life long. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines!

LUCINDA MATLOCK[23]