Part 17

When he who flouted the Church, or doubted, would find his neck fast in hempen ruff, And saint and sinner thought eggs for dinner and beer for breakfast the proper stuff; When men were scary of witch and fairy, of haunted castle, of spook and elf, When every mixer of cough-elixir was thought a vassal of Nick himself; When income taxes and prophylaxis and Comic Sections were yet unborn, When Leagues of Nations and Spring Vacations and Fall Elections were held in scorn—

When all brave fellows would fight duellos with sword and dagger, with lance and mace, When good men guzzled until, clean fuzzled, they’d reel and stagger about the place; When pious journeys and jousts and tourneys brought high adventure and secret tryst, When knives were many, but forks not any—’twas fist to trencher, and mouth to fist!— Oh, men had chances for true romances, for fame and glory, and knightly acts ... (And childish quarrels and beastly morals, if song and story would stick to facts!)

_Franklin P. Adams_

Franklin P. Adams, better known to the readers of his column as F. P. A., was born at Chicago, Illinois, November 15, 1881. He attended the University of Michigan (1899-1900) and, after a brief career as an insurance agent, plunged into journalism. Adams had already been an ardent contributor to B. L. T.’s “A Line o’ Type or Two” and, in 1903, he began conducting a column of his own on the Chicago _Journal_. Late in 1904, he came to New York, running his “Always in Good Humor” section on _The Evening Mail_ until 1914, when he started “The Conning Tower” for the New York _Tribune_.

Adams is the author of five volumes of a light verse that is not only skilful but energetic as well as facile. _Tobogganing on Parnassus_ (1909), _In Other Words_ (1912), _By and Large_ (1914), _Weights and Measures_ (1917) and _Something Else Again_ (1920) reveal a spirit which is essentially one of mockery. One admires these books for their impudent—and faithful—paraphrases of Horace and Propertius, for their last line twists _à la_ O. Henry, (with whom Adams wrote a comic opera that never reached New York), for the ease with which their author springs his surprises and, perhaps most of all, for the healthy satire that runs sharply through all of his colloquial and dexterous lines.

WAR AND PEACE

“This war is a terrible thing,” he said, “With its countless numbers of needless dead; A futile warfare it seems to me, Fought for no principle I can see. Alas, that thousands of hearts should bleed For naught but a tyrant’s boundless greed!”

· · · · · ·

Said the wholesale grocer, in righteous mood, As he went to adulterate salable food.

Spake as follows the merchant king: “Isn’t this war a disgraceful thing? Heartless, cruel, and useless, too; It doesn’t seem that it _can_ be true. Think of the misery, want and fear! We ought to be grateful we’ve no war here.”

· · · · · ·

“Six a week”—to a girl—“That’s flat! I can get a thousand to work for that.”

THE RICH MAN

The rich man has his motor-car, His country and his town estate. He smokes a fifty-cent cigar And jeers at Fate.

He frivols through the livelong day, He knows not Poverty, her pinch. His lot seems light, his heart seems gay; He has a cinch.

Yet though my lamp burns low and dim, Though I must slave for livelihood— Think you that I would change with him? You bet I would!

THOSE TWO BOYS

When Bill was a lad he was terribly bad. He worried his parents a lot; He’d lie and he’d swear and pull little girls’ hair; His boyhood was naught but a blot.

At play and in school he would fracture each rule— In mischief from autumn to spring; And the villagers knew when to manhood he grew He would never amount to a thing.

When Jim was a child he was not very wild; He was known as a good little boy; He was honest and bright and the teacher’s delight— To his mother and father a joy.

All the neighbors were sure that his virtue’d endure, That his life would be free of a spot; They were certain that Jim had a great head on him And that Jim would amount to a lot.

And Jim grew to manhood and honor and fame And bears a good name; While Bill is shut up in a dark prison cell— You never can tell.

_John G. Neihardt_

John Gneisenau Neihardt was born at Sharpsburg, Illinois, January 8, 1881. He completed a scientific course at Nebraska Normal College in 1897 and lived among the Omaha Indians for six years (1901-7), studying their customs, characteristics and legends.

Although he had already published two books, _A Bundle of Myrrh_ (1908) was his first volume to attract notice. It was full of spirit, enthusiasm and an insistent virility—qualities which were extended (and overemphasized) in _Man-Song_ (1909). Neihardt found a richer note and a new restraint in _The Stranger at the Gate_ (1911); the best of the lyrics from these three volumes appearing in _The Quest_ (1916).

Neihardt meanwhile had been going deeper into folk-lore, the results of which appeared in _The Song of Hugh Glass_ (1915) and _The Song of Three Friends_ (1919). The latter, in 1920, divided the annual prize offered by the Poetry Society, halving the honors with Gladys Cromwell’s _Poems_. These two of Neihardt’s are detailed long poems, part of a projected epic series celebrating the winning of the West by the pioneers. What prevents both volumes from fulfilling the breadth at which they aim is the disparity between the author’s story and his style; essentially racy narratives are recited in an archaic and incongruous speech. Yet, in spite of a false rhetoric and a locution that considers prairies and trappers in terms of “Ilion,” “Iseult,” “Clotho,” the “dim far shore of Styx,” Neihardt has achieved his effects with no little skill. Dramatic, stern, and conceived with a powerful dignity, his major works are American in feeling if not in execution.

WHEN I AM DEAD

When I am dead and nervous hands have thrust My body downward into careless dust; I think the grave cannot suffice to hold My spirit ’prisoned in the sunless mould! Some subtle memory of you shall be A resurrection of the life of me. Yea, I shall be, because I love you so, The speechless spirit of all things that grow. You shall not touch a flower but it shall be Like a caress upon the cheek of me. I shall be patient in the common grass That I may feel your footfall when you pass. I shall be kind as rain and pure as dew, A loving spirit ’round the life of you. When your soft cheeks by perfumed winds are fanned, ’Twill be my kiss—and you will understand. But when some sultry, storm-bleared sun has set, _I will be lightning if you dare forget_!

CRY OF THE PEOPLE[38]

Tremble before thy chattels, Lords of the scheme of things! Fighters of all earth’s battles, Ours is the might of kings! Guided by seers and sages, The world’s heart-beat for a drum, Snapping the chains of ages, Out of the night we come!

Lend us no ear that pities! Offer no almoner’s hand! Alms for the builders of cities! When will you understand? Down with your pride of birth And your golden gods of trade! A man is worth to his mother, Earth, All that a man has made!

We are the workers and makers. We are no longer dumb! Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! Sweeping the earth—we come! Ranked in the world-wide dawn, Marching into the day! _The night is gone and the sword is drawn And the scabbard is thrown away!_

LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS[39]

Let me live out my years in heat of blood! Let me die drunken with the dreamer’s wine! Let me not see this soul-house built of mud Go toppling to the dust—a vacant shrine.

Let me go quickly, like a candle light Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow. Give me high noon—and let it then be night! Thus would I go.

And grant that when I face the grisly Thing, My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps. Let me be as a tune-swept fiddlestring That feels the Master Melody—and snaps!

_Witter Bynner_

Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been assistant editor of various periodicals as well as adviser to publishers. Recently, he has spent much of his time lecturing on poetry and travelling in the Orient.

_Young Harvard_ (1907), the first of Bynner’s volumes, was, as the name implies, a celebration of his _alma mater. The New World_ (1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. In this extended poem, Bynner sought—almost too determinedly—to translate the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of these volumes displays its author’s gifts at their best, for Bynner is, first of all, a lyric poet. _Grenstone Poems_ (1917) and _A Canticle of Pan_ (1920) reveal a more natural singing voice. Bynner harmonizes in many keys; transposing, modulating and shifting from one tonality to another. This very ease is his chief defect, for Bynner’s facility leads him not only to write too much but in too many different styles. Many of his poems seem like sounding-boards that echo the tones of every poet except the composer of them. Instead of a fusion of gifts we have, too often, a disintegration.

When Bynner is least dexterous he is most ingratiating. When he does not try to sound the whole gamut of modern poetry from the lyrics of A. E. Housman to the attenuated epigrams of Ezra Pound, he can strike his own note with clarity and precision. Even in _The Beloved Stranger_ (1919), where the borrowed accents of his _alter ego_ are only too apparent, one is arrested by lines of musical charm and fluency.

Under the pseudonym “Emanuel Morgan,” Bynner was coauthor with Arthur Davison Ficke (writing under the name of “Anne Knish”) of _Spectra_ (1916). _Spectra_ was a serious burlesque of some of the extreme manifestations of modern poetic tendencies—a remarkable hoax that deceived many of the radical propagandists as well as most of the conservative critics.

GRASS-TOPS

What bird are you in the grass-tops? Your poise is enough of an answer, With your wing-tips like up-curving fingers Of the slow-moving hands of a dancer ...

And what is so nameless as beauty, Which poets, who give it a name, Are only unnaming forever?— Content, though it go, that it came.

VOICES

O there were lights and laughter And the motions to and fro Of people as they enter And people as they go ...

And there were many voices Vying at the feast, But mostly I remember Yours—who spoke the least.

A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN[40][41]

“Lincoln?— Well, I was in the old Second Maine, The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree State. Of course I didn’t get the butt of the clip; We was there for guardin’ Washington— We was all green.

“I ain’t never ben to the theayter in my life— I didn’t know how to behave. I ain’t never ben since. I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in When he was shot. I can tell you, sir, there was a panic When we found our President was in the shape he was in! Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him.

“Yes, sir. His looks was kind o’ hard to forget. He was a spare man, An old farmer. Everything was all right, you know, But he wasn’t a smooth-appearin’ man at all— Not in no ways; Thin-faced, long-necked, And a swellin’ kind of a thick lip like.

“And he was a jolly old fellow—always cheerful; He wasn’t so high but the boys could talk to him their own ways. While I was servin’ at the Hospital He’d come in and say, ‘You look nice in here,’ Praise us up, you know. And he’d bend over and talk to the boys— And he’d talk so good to ’em—so close— That’s why I call him a farmer. I don’t mean that everything about him wasn’t all right, you understand, It’s just—well, I was a farmer— And he was my neighbor, anybody’s neighbor. I guess even you young folks would ’a’ liked him.”

TRAIN-MATES[42]

Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height, A glory; but a negligible sight, For you had often seen a mountain-peak But not my paper. So we came to speak ... A smoke, a smile,—a good way to commence The comfortable exchange of difference! You a young engineer, five feet eleven, Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven, Liking a road-bed newly built and clean, Your fingers hot to cut away the green Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,— And I a poet, wistful of my betters, Reading George Meredith’s high-hearted letters, Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each Absorbing to himself—as I to me And you to you—a glad identity!

After a time, when others went away, A curious kinship made us choose to stay, Which I could tell you now; but at the time You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme, Until we found that we were college men And smoked more easily and smiled again; And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still: “I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill At Berkeley!” With your happy Grecian head Upraised, “I never saw the place,” you said— “Once I was free of class, I always went Out to the field.”

Young engineer, you meant As fair a tribute to the better part As ever I did. Beauty of the heart Is evident in temples. But it breathes Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths, Which are the lovelier because they die. You are a poet quite as much as I, Though differences appear in what we do, And I an athlete quite as much as you. Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile. Who knows but we shall look again and find The circus-man and drummer, not behind But leading in our visible estate— As discus-thrower and as laureate?

_James Oppenheim_

James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, where he has lived ever since. After a public school education, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls (1904-7). His studies and experiences on the lower East Side of New York furnished the material for his first, and most popular, book of short stories, _Doctor Rast_ (1909).

Oppenheim’s initial venture as a poet, _Monday Morning and Other Poems_ (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, half experimental. In spite of its obvious indebtedness to Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular (though ragged) rhyme. Beauty is sought but seldom captured here; the message is coughed out between bursts of eloquence and fits of stammering.

With _Songs for the New Age_ (1914) Oppenheim became his own liberator. The stammering has gone, the uncouth dissonances have resolved. One listens to a speech that, echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is strangely Biblical and yet local. It is the expression of an ancient people reacting to modernity, of a race in solution. (See Preface.) This volume, like all of Oppenheim’s subsequent work, is analysis in terms of poetry; a slow searching beneath the musical surface that attempts to diagnose the twisted soul of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as “The Slave,” “We Dead,” “Tasting the Earth”; the music and imagery of the Psalms are heard in “The Flocks,” “The Tree” and “The Runner in the Skies.”

_War and Laughter_ (1916) holds much of its predecessor’s exaltation and an almost ecstatic discontent. The Semitic blend of delight and disillusion—that quality which hates the world for its shams and hypocrisies and loves it in spite of them—is revealed in “Greed,” in the ironic “Report on the Planet Earth” and the brightly affirmative “Laughter.”

_The Book of Self_ (1917) is less notable, an imperfect fusion. Oppenheim’s preoccupation with analytical psychology mars the effect of the long passages which, in themselves, contain flashes of clairvoyance. _The Solitary_ (1919) is a great stride forward; its major section, a long symbolic poem called “The Sea,” breathes the same note that was the burden of the earlier books—“We are flesh on the way to godhood”—with greater strength and still greater control.

Besides his poetry, Oppenheim has published several volumes of short stories, four novels, and two poetic plays. During 1916-17 he was editor of that promising but short-lived magazine, _The Seven Arts_.

THE RUNNER IN THE SKIES

Who is the runner in the skies, With her blowing scarf of stars, And our Earth and sun hovering like bees about her blossoming heart? Her feet are on the winds, where space is deep, Her eyes are nebulous and veiled; She hurries through the night to a far lover ...

THE SLAVE

They set the slave free, striking off his chains ... Then he was as much of a slave as ever.

He was still chained to servility, He was still manacled to indolence and sloth, He was still bound by fear and superstition, By ignorance, suspicion, and savagery ... His slavery was not in the chains, But in himself....

They can only set free men free ... And there is no need of that: Free men set themselves free.

TASTING THE EARTH

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

As I lay on my couch in the muffled night, and the rain lashed my window, And my forsaken heart would give me no rest, no pause and no peace, Though I turned my face far from the wailing of my bereavement.... Then I said: I will eat of this sorrow to its last shred, I will take it unto me utterly, I will see if I be not strong enough to contain it.... What do I fear? Discomfort? How can it hurt me, this bitterness?

The miracle, then! Turning toward it, and giving up to it, I found it deeper than my own self.... O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me ... It was she with her inexhaustible grief, Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests, And moan of the forsaken seas, It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals, It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to dumb skies, in the pomp-crumbling tragedy of man ... It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts, Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers, And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne, And the dreams that have no waking....

My heart became her ancient heart: On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself: Wisdom-giving and sombre with the unremitting love of ages....

There was dank soil in my mouth, And bitter sea on my lips, In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

THE LINCOLN CHILD[43]

Clearing in the forest, In the wild Kentucky forest, And the stars, wintry stars strewn above! O Night that is the starriest Since Earth began to roll— For a Soul Is born out of Love! Mother love, father love, love of Eternal God— Stars have pushed aside to let him through— Through heaven’s sun-sown deeps One sparkling ray of God Strikes the clod— (And while an angel-host through wood and clearing sweeps!) Born in the wild The Child— Naked, ruddy, new, Wakes with the piteous human cry and at the mother-heart sleeps.

To the mother wild berries and honey, To the father awe without end, To the child a swaddling of flannel— And a dawn rolls sharp and sunny And the skies of winter bend To see the first sweet word penned In the godliest human annal.

Frail Mother of the Wilderness— How strange the world shines in And the cabin becomes chapel And the baby lies secure— Sweet Mother of the Wilderness, New worlds for you begin, You have tasted of the apple That giveth wisdom sure....

Soon in the wide wilderness, On a branch blown over a creek, Up a trail of the wild coon, In a lair of the wild bee, The rugged boy, by danger’s stress, Learnt the speech the wild things speak, Learnt the Earth’s eternal tune Of strife-engendered harmony— Went to school where Life itself was master, Went to church where Earth was minister— And in Danger and Disaster Felt his future manhood stir!

All about him the land, Eastern cities, Western prairie, Wild, immeasurable, grand; But he was lost where blossomy boughs make airy Bowers in the forest, and the sand Makes brook-water a clear mirror that gives back Green branches and trunks black And clouds across the heavens lightly fanned.

Yet all the Future dreams, eager to waken, Within that woodland soul— And the bough of boy has only to be shaken That the fruit drop whereby this Earth shall roll A little nearer God than ever before. Little recks he of war, Of national millions waiting on his word— Dreams still the Event unstirred In the heart of the boy, the little babe of the wild— But the years hurry and the tide of the sea Of Time flows fast and ebbs, and he, even he, Must leave the wilderness, the wood-haunts wild— Soon shall the cyclone of Humanity Tearing through Earth suck up this little child And whirl him to the top, where he shall be Riding the storm-column in the lightning-stroke, Calm at the peak, while down below worlds rage, And Earth goes out in blood and battle-smoke, And leaves him with the sun—an epoch and an age!