Part 14

And then he flew as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name, Finding them butterfly-weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus, By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him, But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon, Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own; So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid, And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart, “Whether they work together or apart.”

THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step, She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage To meet him in the doorway with the news And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.” She pushed him outward with her through the door And shut it after her. “Be kind,” she said. She took the market things from Warren’s arms And set them on the porch, then drew him down To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him? But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said. “I told him so last haying, didn’t I? ‘If he left then,’ I said, ‘that ended it.’ What good is he? Who else will harbour him At his age for the little he can do? What help he is there’s no depending on. Off he goes always when I need him most. ‘He thinks he ought to earn a little pay, Enough at least to buy tobacco with, So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.’ ‘All right,’ I say, ‘I can’t afford to pay Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.’ ‘Someone else can.’ ‘Then someone else will have to.’ I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself If that was what it was. You can be certain, When he begins like that, there’s someone at him Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,— In haying time, when any help is scarce. In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.”

“Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,” Mary said.

“I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.”

“He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove. When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here, Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep, A miserable sight, and frightening, too— You needn’t smile—I didn’t recognize him— I wasn’t looking for him—and he’s changed. Wait till you see.”

“Where did you say he’d been?”

“He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house, And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke. I tried to make him talk about his travels. Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.”

“What did he say? Did he say anything?”

“But little.”

“Anything? Mary, confess He said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.”

“Warren!”

“But did he? I just want to know.”

“Of course he did. What would you have him say? Surely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man Some humble way to save his self-respect. He added, if you really care to know, He meant to clear the upper pasture, too. That sounds like something you have heard before? Warren, I wish you could have heard the way He jumbled everything. I stopped to look Two or three times—he made me feel so queer— To see if he was talking in his sleep. He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember— The boy you had in haying four years since. He’s finished school, and teaching in his college. Silas declares you’ll have to get him back. He says they two will make a team for work: Between them they will lay this farm as smooth! The way he mixed that in with other things. He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft On education—you know how they fought All through July under the blazing sun, Silas up on the cart to build the load, Harold along beside to pitch it on.”

“Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.”

“Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream. You wouldn’t think they would. How some things linger! Harold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him. After so many years he still keeps finding Good arguments he sees he might have used. I sympathise. I know just how it feels To think of the right thing to say too late. Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin. He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying He studied Latin like the violin Because he liked it—that an argument! He said he couldn’t make the boy believe He could find water with a hazel prong— Which showed how much good school had ever done him. He wanted to go over that. But most of all He thinks if he could have another chance To teach him how to build a load of hay—”

“I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment. He bundles every forkful in its place, And tags and numbers it for future reference, So he can find and easily dislodge it In the unloading. Silas does that well. He takes it out in bunches like birds’ nests. You never see him standing on the hay He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.”

“He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be Some good perhaps to someone in the world. He hates to see a boy the fool of books. Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk, And nothing to look backward to with pride, And nothing to look forward to with hope, So now and never any different.”

Part of a moon was falling down the west, Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills. Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand Among the harp-like morning-glory strings, Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves, As if she played unheard the tenderness That wrought on him beside her in the night. “Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die: You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home? It all depends on what you mean by home. Of course he’s nothing to us, any more Than was the hound that came a stranger to us Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Warren leaned out and took a step or two, Picked up a little stick, and brought it back And broke it in his hand and tossed it by. “Silas has better claim on us you think Than on his brother? Thirteen little miles As the road winds would bring him to his door. Silas has walked that far no doubt to-day. Why didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich, A somebody—director in the bank.”

“He never told us that.”

“We know it though.”

“I think his brother ought to help, of course. I’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right To take him in, and might be willing to— He may be better than appearances. But have some pity on Silas. Do you think If he’d had any pride in claiming kin Or anything he looked for from his brother, He’d keep so still about him all this time?”

“I wonder what’s between them.”

“I can tell you. Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him— But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide. He never did a thing so very bad. He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good As anyone. He won’t be made ashamed To please his brother, worthless though he is.”

“I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.”

“No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back. He wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge. You must go in and see what you can do. I made the bed up for him there to-night. You’ll be surprised at him—how much he’s broken. His working days are done; I’m sure of it.”

“I’d not be in a hurry to say that.”

“I haven’t been. Go, look, see for yourself. But, Warren, please remember how it is: He’s come to help you ditch the meadow. He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him. He may not speak of it, and then he may. I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud Will hit or miss the moon.”

It hit the moon. Then there were three there, making a dim row, The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.

Warren returned—too soon, it seemed to her, Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.

“Warren,” she questioned.

“Dead,” was all he answered.

GOOD-BYE AND KEEP COLD

This saying good-bye on the verge of the dark And cold to an orchard so young in the bark, Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter cut off by a hill from the house. I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse, (If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call, I’d summon grouse, rabbit and deer to the wall And warn them away with a stick for a gun.) I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm, But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm. “How often already you’ve had to be told Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below.” I have to be gone for a season or so; My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nurtured, less fruitful than these And such as is done to their wood with an ax— Maples and birches and tamaracks. I wish I could promise to lie in the night And share in an orchard’s arboreal plight, When slowly (and nobody comes with a light!) Its heart sinks lower under the sod; But something has to be left to God.

THE RUNAWAY

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall, We stopped by a mountain pasture to say “Whose colt?” A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall, The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head And snorted to us. And then he had to bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled And we saw him or thought we saw him dim and grey, Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes. “I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow. He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play With the little fellow at all. He’s running away. I doubt if even his mother could tell him, ‘Sakes, It’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know! Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.” And now he comes again with a clatter of stone And mounts the wall again with whited eyes And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight. He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies. “Whoever it is that leaves him out so late, When other creatures have gone to stall and bin, Ought to be told to come and take him in.”

BIRCHES

When I see birches bend to left and right Across the line of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay. Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load, And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed So low for long, they never right themselves: You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. But I was going to say when Truth broke in With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm I should prefer to have some boy bend them As he went out and in to fetch the cows— Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father’s trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise To the top branches, climbing carefully With the same pains you use to fill a cup Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches; And so I dream of going back to be. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping From a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate wilfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree, And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk _Toward_ heaven, till the tree could bear no more, But dipped its top and set me down again. That would be good both going and coming back. One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

FRAGMENTARY BLUE

Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird or butterfly Or flower or wearing-stone or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)— Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

THE ONSET

Always the same when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods and with a song It shall not make again all winter long— Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,— I almost stumble looking up and round, As one who, overtaken by the end, Gives up his errand and lets death descend Upon him where he is, with nothing done To evil, no important triumph won More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side: I know that winter death has never tried The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap In long storms an undrifted four feet deep As measured against maple, birch and oak; It cannot check the Peeper’s silver croak; And I shall see the snow all go down hill In water of a slender April rill That flashes tail through last year’s withered brake And dead weeds like a disappearing snake. Nothing will be left white but here a birch And there a clump of houses with a church.

_William Ellery Leonard_

William Ellery Leonard was born at Plainfield, New Jersey, January 25, 1876. He received his A.M. at Harvard in 1899 and completed his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn. After traveling for several years throughout Europe, he became a teacher and has been professor of English in the University of Wisconsin since 1906.

_The Vaunt of Man_ (1912) is Leonard’s most representative volume. Traditional in form and material, it is anything but conservative in spirit. Leonard’s insurrectionary fervor speaks sonorously in the simplest of his quatrains and the strictest of his sonnets. This protesting passion is given an even wider sweep in _The Lynching Bee_ (1920), the title-poem being a terrific indictment in which the poet’s outrage speaks with a new ironism.

Besides his original poetry, Leonard has published several volumes of translations from the Greek and Latin as well as a series of paraphrases of the fables of Æsop.

THE IMAGE OF DELIGHT

O how came I that loved stars, moon, and flame, And unimaginable wind and sea, All inner shrines and temples of the free, Legends and hopes and golden books of fame; I that upon the mountain carved my name With cliffs and clouds and eagles over me, O how came I to stoop to loving thee— I that had never stooped before to shame?

O ’twas not thee! Too eager of a white Far beauty and a voice to answer mine, Myself I built an image of delight, Which all one purple day I deemed divine— And when it vanished in the fiery night, I lost not thee, nor any shape of thine.

TO THE VICTOR

Man’s mind is larger than his brow of tears; This hour is not my all of time; this place My all of earth; nor this obscene disgrace My all of life; and thy complacent sneers Shall not pronounce my doom to my compeers While the Hereafter lights me in the face, And from the Past, as from the mountain’s base, Rise, as I rise, the long tumultuous cheers.

And who slays me must overcome a world: Heroes at arms, and virgins who became Mothers of children, prophecy and song; Walls of old cities with their flags unfurled; Peaks, headlands, ocean and its isles of fame— And sun and moon and all that made me strong!

_Sarah N. Cleghorn_

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was born at Norfolk, Virginia, February 4, 1876. She came North early in her youth and was graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont (in 1895), in which town, after a year at Radcliffe, she has lived ever since.

An ardent worker for lost causes, Miss Cleghorn’s fiery spirit shines through _Portraits and Protests_ (1917), the first half of which is coolly descriptive and the second half, hotly insurrectionary verse.

THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

“The unfit die: the fit both live and thrive.” Alas, who say so?—They who do survive.

So when her bonfires lighted hill and plain, Did Bloody Mary think on Lady Jane.

So Russia thought of Finland, while her heel Fell heavier on the prostrate commonweal.

So Booth of Lincoln thought: and so the High Priests let Barabbas live, and Jesus die.

THE INCENTIVE

I saw a sickly cellar plant Droop on its feeble stem, for want Of sun and wind and rain and dew— Of freedom!—Then a man came through The cellar, and I heard him say, “Poor, foolish plant, by all means stay Contented here: for—know you not?— This stagnant dampness, mould and rot Are your incentive to grow tall And reach that sunbeam on the wall.” —Even as he spoke, the sun’s one spark Withdrew, and left the dusk more dark.

_Carl Sandburg_

Carl (August) Sandburg was born of Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. His schooling was haphazard; at thirteen he went to work on a milk wagon. During the next six years he was, in rapid succession, porter in a barber-shop, scene-shifter in a cheap theatre, truck-handler in a brickyard, turner apprentice in a pottery, dish-washer in Denver and Omaha hotels, harvest hand in Kansas wheat fields. These tasks equipped him, as no amount of learning could have done, to be the laureate of industrial America. When war with Spain was declared in 1898, Sandburg, avid for fresh adventure, enlisted in Company C., Sixth Illinois Volunteers.

On his return from the campaign in Porto Rico, Sandburg entered Lombard College in Galesburg and, for the first time, began to think in terms of literature. He had already seen a great deal of the world from the roaring alleys of great cities as well as from the underside of box-cars; he had loafed, fought and expressed himself richly. So, what with the fact that the “terrible Swede,” as captain of the basket-ball team, won a series of new victories, it is little wonder that he was idolized by his class-mates and elected editor-in-chief of the college paper.

After leaving college he did all manner of things to earn a living. He was advertising manager for a department store and worked as district organizer for the Social-Democratic party of Wisconsin. He became a salesman, a pamphleteer, a newspaperman. On the staff of a business magazine, he became a “safety first” expert; his articles on accident prevention bringing him before manufacturers’ conventions where he talked about machinery safeguards and methods found successful in reducing injuries in factory organizations.

In 1904, Sandburg published the proverbial “slender sheaf”; a tiny pamphlet of twenty-two poems, uneven in quality but strangely like the work of the mature Sandburg in feeling. What is more, these experiments anticipated the very inflection of the later poems, with their spiritual kinship to Henley, Lincoln and Whitman; several of these early experiments (with the exception of the rhymed verses) might be placed, without seeming incongruous, in the most recent collection of Sandburg’s pieces. The idiom of _Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is more intensified, but it is the same idiom as that of “Milville” (1903), which begins:

Down in southern New Jersey they make glass. By day and by night, the fires burn on in Milville and bid the sand let in the light.