Part 15

Meanwhile the newspaperman was having a hard struggle to keep the poet alive. Until he was thirty-six years old, Sandburg was totally unknown to the literary world. In 1914 a group of his poems appeared in _Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_; later the same year one of the group (the now famous “Chicago”) was awarded the Levinson prize of two hundred dollars. A little more than a year later his first, full-fledged book was published, and Sandburg—tardily but triumphantly—had arrived.

_Chicago Poems_ (1916) is full of ferment; it seethes with a direct poetry surcharged with tremendous energy. Here is an almost animal exultation that is also an exaltation. Sandburg’s speech is simple and powerful; he uses slang as freely (and beautifully) as his predecessors used the now archaic tongue of their times. (See Preface.) Immediately the cries of protest were heard: Sandburg was coarse and brutal; his work ugly and distorted; his language, unrefined, unfit for poetry. His detractors forgot that Sandburg was only brutal when dealing with brutality; that beneath his toughness, he was one of the tenderest of living poets; that, when he used colloquialisms and a richly metaphorical slang, he was searching for new poetic values in “limber, lasting, fierce words”—unconsciously answering Whitman who asked, “Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These States have to do only with delicate lady-words? With gloved gentleman-words?”

_Cornhuskers_ (1918) is another step forward; it is fully as sweeping as its forerunner and far more sensitive. The gain in power and restraint is evident in the very first poem, a magnificent panoramic vision of the prairie. Here is something of the surge of a Norse saga; _Cornhuskers_ is keen with a salty vigor, a vast sympathy for all that is splendid and terrible in Nature. But the raw violence is restrained to the point of mysticism. There are, in this volume, dozens of those delicate perceptions of beauty that must astonish those who think that Sandburg can write only a big-fisted, rough-neck sort of poetry. “Cool Tombs,” one of the most poignant lyrics of our time, moves with a new music; “Grass” whispers as quietly as the earlier “Fog” stole in on stealthy, cat feet.

_Smoke and Steel_ (1920) is the synthesis and sublimation of its predecessors. In this ripest of his collections, Sandburg has fused mood, accent and image in a new intensity. It is a fit setting for the title-poem; it is, in spite of certain over-mystical accents, an epic of industrialism. Smoke-belching chimneys are here, quarries and great boulders of iron-ribbed rock; here are titanic visions: the dreams of men and machinery. And silence is here—the silence of sleeping tenements and sun-soaked cornfields. _Smoke and Steel_ is a rich amalgam; indigenous to the core. And what makes it so vital is Sandburg’s own spirit: a never-sated joy in existence, a continually fresh delight in the variety and wonder of life.

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

FOG

The fog comes on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

FROM “SMOKE AND STEEL”

Smoke of the fields in spring is one, Smoke of the leaves in autumn another. Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel, They all go up in a line with a smokestack, Or they twist ... in the slow twist ... of the wind. If the north wind comes they run to the south. If the west wind comes they run to the east. By this sign all smokes know each other. Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn, Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue, By the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”

Hunted and hissed from the center Deep down long ago when God made us over, Deep down are the cinders we came from— You and I and our heads of smoke.

· · · · · ·

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job Cross on the sky and count our years And sing in the secrets of our numbers; Sing their dawns and sing their evenings, Sing an old log-fire song: You may put the damper up, You may put the damper down, The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Smoke of a city sunset skyline, Smoke of a country dusk horizon— They cross on the sky and count our years.

· · · · · ·

Smoke of a brick-red dust Winds on a spiral Out of the stacks For a hidden and glimpsing moon. This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill, This is the slang of coal and steel. The day-gang hands it to the night-gang, The night-gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this— Let us understand half of it. In the rolling mills and sheet mills, In the harr and boom of the blast fires, The smoke changes its shadow And men change their shadow; A nigger, a wop, a bohunk changes.

A bar of steel—it is only Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, And left smoke and the blood of a man And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again, And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel, A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky; And always dark in the heart and through it, Smoke and the blood of a man. Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys The smoke nights write their oaths: Smoke into steel and blood into steel; Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men. Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

The birdmen drone In the blue; it is steel a motor sings and zooms.

· · · · · ·

Steel barb-wire around The Works. Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works. Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells. The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel. Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped: Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.

BLUE ISLAND INTERSECTION

Six street ends come together here. They feed people and wagons into the center. In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags, Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies. Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day. The people and wagons come and go, out and in. Triangles of banks and drug stores watch. The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump: Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

In the false dawn when the chickens blink And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at to-morrow, And the east fixes a pink half-eye this way, In the time when only one milk wagon crosses These three streets, these six street ends, It is the sleep time and they rest. The triangle banks and drug stores rest. The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep. The owl car blutters along in a sleep-walk.

CLEAN CURTAINS

New neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets.

The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun’s bonnet.

One way was an oyster pail factory, one way they made candy, one way paper boxes, strawboard cartons.

The warehouse trucks shook the dust of the ways loose and the wheels whirled dust—there was dust of hoof and wagon wheel and rubber tire—dust of police and fire wagons—dust of the winds that circled at midnights and noon listening to no prayers.

“O mother, I know the heart of you,” I sang passing the rim of a nun’s bonnet—O white curtains—and people clean as the prayers of Jesus here in the faded ramshackle at Congress and Green.

Dust and the thundering trucks won—the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way—was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?

A. E. F.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty. And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall. Forefingers and thumbs will point absently and casually toward it. It will be spoken among half-forgotten, wished-to-be-forgotten things. They will tell the spider: Go on, you’re doing good work.

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.

GRASS

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work— I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now?

I am the grass. Let me work.

_Adelaide Crapsey_

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years after graduation she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school. In 1905 she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson’s, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese _hokku_, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

“Her death,” writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, “was tragic. Full of the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all unfinished.” She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume _Verse_ appeared in 1915, and a part of the unfinished _Study in English Metrics_ was posthumously published in 1918.

THREE CINQUAINS

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen ... With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees And fall.

TRIAD

These be Three silent things: The falling snow ... the hour Before the dawn ... the mouth of one Just dead.

THE WARNING

Just now, Out of the strange Still dusk ... as strange, as still ... A white moth flew. Why am I grown So cold?

ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown, By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

_Grace Hazard Conkling_

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling’s _Afternoons of April_ (1915) and _Wilderness Songs_ (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A fragrant whimsicality, a childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).

THE WHOLE DUTY OF BERKSHIRE BROOKS

To build the trout a crystal stair; To comb the hillside’s thick green hair; To water jewel-weed and rushes; To teach first notes to baby thrushes; To flavor raspberry and apple And make a whirling pool to dapple With scattered gold of late October; To urge wise laughter on the sober And lend a dream to those who laugh; To chant the beetle’s epitaph; To mirror the blue dragonfly, Frail air-plane of a slender sky; Over the stones to lull and leap Herding the bubbles like white sheep; The claims of worry to deny, And whisper sorrow into sleep!

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way Nightingales sound. Tall larches lilt and sway Above the glittering ground: The wild white cherry spray Scatters radiance round. The chuckle of the nightingale Is like this elfin wood. Even as his gleaming trills assail The spirit’s solitude, These leaves of light, these branches frail Are music’s very mood.

The song of these fantastic trees, The plumes of frost they wear, Are for the poet’s whim who sees Through a deceptive air, And has an ear for melodies When never a sound is there.

_Amelia Josephine Burr_

Amelia Josephine Burr was born in New York City in 1878. She was educated at Hunter College and has made her home in Englewood, New Jersey.

A great range of interests has been the outstanding feature of her work. Too often she yields to her own facility, but there is decided vigor in many pages of _The Roadside Fire_ (1912), _In Deep Places_ (1914) and _Life and Living_ (1916).

BATTLE-SONG OF FAILURE

We strain toward Heaven and lay hold on Hell; With starward eyes we stumble in hard ways, And to the moments when we see life well Succeeds the blindness of bewildered days,— But what of that? Into the sullen flesh Our souls drive home the spur with splendid sting. Bleeding and soiled, we gird ourselves afresh. Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

The loveless greed the centuries have stored In marshy foulness traps our faltering feet. The sins of men whom punishment ignored Like fever in our weakened pulses beat; But what of that? The shame is not to fail Nor is the victor’s laurel everything. To fight until we fall is to prevail. Forth, and make firm a highway for the King.

Yea, cast our lives into the ancient slough, And fall we shouting, with uplifted face; Over the spot where mired we struggle now Shall march in triumph a transfigured race. They shall exult where weary we have wept— They shall achieve where we have striven in vain— Leaping in vigor where we faintly crept, Joyous along the road we paved with pain. What though we seem to sink in the morass? Under those unborn feet our dust shall sing, When o’er our failure perfect they shall pass. Forth, and make firm a highway for the King!

_Don Marquis_

Donald Robert Perry Marquis was born at Walnut, Bureau County, Illinois, July 29, 1878. Since his boyhood he has been actively connected with various newspapers, his chief metropolitan success being due to his pungent column, “The Sun Dial” in the New York _Evening Sun_.

Many of Marquis’s most penetrating and satiric skits have been collected in his prose volumes, _Hermione_ (1916) and _Prefaces_ (1919). Besides his burlesque verse, Marquis has written a quantity of serious poetry, the best of which he published in _Dreams and Dust_ (1915).

UNREST

A fierce unrest seethes at the core Of all existing things: It was the eager wish to soar That gave the gods their wings.

From what flat wastes of cosmic slime, And stung by what quick fire, Sunward the restless races climb!— Men risen out of mire!

There throbs through all the worlds that are This heart-beat hot and strong And shaken systems, star by star, Awake and glow in song.

But for the urge of this unrest These joyous spheres are mute; But for the rebel in his breast Had man remained a brute.

When baffled lips demanded speech, Speech trembled into birth— (One day the lyric word shall reach From earth to laughing earth.)—

When man’s dim eyes demanded light, The light he sought was born— His wish, a Titan, scaled the height And flung him back the morn!

From deed to dream, from dream to deed, From daring hope to hope, The restless wish, the instant need, Still lashed him up the slope!

· · · · · ·

I sing no governed firmament, Cold, ordered, regular— I sing the stinging discontent That leaps from star to star!

_John Erskine_

John Erskine was born in New York City, October 5, 1879. He graduated from Columbia University, receiving his A.M. in 1901 and Ph.D. in 1903. He has taught English since 1903, first at Amherst College, and (beginning in 1909) at Columbia.

Although most of Erskine’s works have been performed in the capacity of editor and essayist, he has written two volumes of excellent verse. _Actæon and Other Poems_ (1906) is little more than an introduction to _The Shadowed Hour_ (1917), which contains such keen verses as “Satan” and “Ash-Wednesday” in which philosophy and poetry are interknit.

DEDICATION

When imperturbable the gentle moon Glides above war and onslaught through the night, When the sun burns magnificent at noon On hate contriving horror by its light, When man, for whom the stars were and the skies, Turns beast to rend his fellow, fang and hoof Shall we not think, with what ironic eyes Nature must look on us and stand aloof? But not alone the sun, the moon, the stars, Shining unharmed above man’s folly move; For us three beacons kindle one another Which waver not with any wind of wars: We love our children still, still them we love Who gave us birth, and still we love each other.

_James Branch Cabell_

James Branch Cabell was born at Richmond, Virginia, April 14, 1879. He taught French and Greek for two years at William and Mary College (1896-7), worked in the pressroom of the Richmond _Times_ (1898), was on the staff of the New York _Herald_ (1899-1901) and began contributing to the magazines in 1902, writing over sixty short stories as well as scattered essays, translations and papers on historical and biographical subjects.

Although Cabell likes to describe himself as a genealogist, he is the author of some of the most exquisite prose in contemporary literature. But it is a prose that rises high above its own beauty of style. In books like _The Certain Hour_ (1916), _The Cream of the Jest_ (1917), _Jurgen_ (1919) and the poetry-crammed “comedy of appearances,” _Figures of Earth_ (1921), the composite Cabell hero emerges, triumphant in the midst of his defeats—the eternally disillusioned, eternally hopeful Jurgen-Charteris-Kennaston: a symbol of the human soul seeking some sort of finality, some assurance in a world of illimitable perplexities.

Though Cabell is best known as a novelist, his books are liberally dotted with original verses that do duty as chapter-headings, mottoes, tail-pieces, interpolated songs and epilogues. A complete volume of his verse, _From the Hidden Way_ (1916), bore the subtitle “Being Seventy-Five Adaptations.” It purported to be paraphrases from forgotten troubadours like Allesandro de Medici, Antoine Riczi, Charles Garnier and half a dozen other obscure Parnassians. Cabell even quoted the first lines of each of their poems in the original Latin, French or Provençal. Even after the hoax was exposed, it was difficult for most readers to believe that the entire collection—names, references, first lines in the “original” and all—were the creation of Cabell, the masquerader.

In _From the Hidden Way_, the romancer has added another story to that gem-studded ivory tower in which Cabell lives and escapes the modern world. Whether he echoes the mediæval ballata or the more modern rondeau, roundel and sonnet, his is an artifice solidly erected upon art.

SEA-SCAPES

I lie and dream in the soft warm sand; and the thunder and surge and the baffled roar Of the sea’s relentless and vain endeavors are a pleasant lullaby, here on shore.

Since a little hillock screens yonder ageless, tenacious battlings (which shatter, and pass In foam and spume), I appraise, half-nodding, much sand and sky and gaunt nodding grass.

And I am content to lie and dream; and I am too drowsy to rise, and see If it be worth breasting—that ocean yonder, which a little hillock hides from me.

ONE END OF LOVE

“It is long since we met,” she said. I answered, “Yes.”

She is not fair, But very old now, and no gold Gleams in that scant gray withered hair Where once much gold was: and, I think, Not easily might one bring tears Into her eyes, which have become Like dusty glass.