Part 21

Back on the curving beach I stood again, Facing the bath-house, when a group of men, Stumbling beneath some sort of weight, went by. I could not see the hidden thing they carried; I only heard: “He never gave a cry”— “Who’s going to tell her?”—“Yes, and they just married”— “Such a good swimmer, too.” ... And then they passed; Leaving the silence throbbing and aghast.

A moment there my buoyant heart hung slack, And then the glad, barbaric blood came back Singing a livelier tune; and in my pulse Beat the great wave that surges and exults.... Why I was there and whither I must go I did not care. Enough for me to know The same unresting struggle and the glowing Beauty of spendthrift hours, bravely showing Life, an adventure perilous and gay; And Death, a long and vivid holiday.

HANDS

Strange, how this smooth and supple joint can be Put to so many purposes. It checks And rears the monsters of machinery And shapes the idle gallantries of sex.

Those hands that light the fuse and dig the trap, Fingers that spin the earth or plunge through shame— And yours, that lie so lightly in your lap, Are only blood and dust—all are the same.

What mastery directs them through the world And gives these delicate bones so great a power? You drop your head. You sleep. Your hands are curled Loosely, like some half-opened, perfumed flower.

An hour ago they burned in mine and sent Armies with banners charging through my veins. Now they are cool and white; they rest content, Curved in a smile. The mystery remains.

A SIDE STREET

On the warm Sunday afternoons And every evening in the Spring and Summer When the night hurries the late home-comer And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes Float from the open windows and jar Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;

When the city noises commingle and melt With a restless something half-seen, half-felt— I see them always there, Upon the low, smooth wall before the church; That row of little girls who sit and stare Like sparrows on a granite perch. They come in twittering couples or walk alone To their gray bough of stone, Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five— But always they sit there on the narrow coping Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping To see more than what is merely moving and alive.... They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet....

Before the quiet church that smells of death They sit. And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath And reaches out and plucks them by the hand And calls them boldly, whispering to each In some strange speech They tremble to but cannot understand. It thrills and troubles them, as one by one, The days run off like water through a sieve; While, with a gaze as candid as the sun, Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive, They come and sit,— A part of life and yet apart from it.

_Jean Starr Untermeyer_

Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and educated at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At sixteen, she came to New York City, pursuing special studies at Columbia. In 1907 she married Louis Untermeyer and, although she had written some prose previous to the poetic renascence, her first volume was published more than ten years later.

_Growing Pains_ (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, the result of eight years slow and self-critical creation. This careful and highly selective process does much to bring the volume up to an unusually high level; a severity of taste and standards maintain the poet on the same austere plane. Perfection is almost a passion with her; the first poem in the book declares:

I would rather work in stubborn rock All the years of my life; And make one strong thing And set it in a high, clean place, To recall the granite strength of my desire.

Acutely self-analytical, there is a stern, uncompromising relentlessness toward her introspections that keeps them from being wistful or pathetic. These poems are, as she explains in her title-poem—

No songs for an idle lute, No pretty tunes of coddled ills, But the bare chart of my growing pains.

Intellect is always in the ascendency, even in the most ecstatic verses. In an almost religious poem, “A Man” (dedicated to her father), she pictures herself as a child, and expresses the whole psychology of our juvenile love of poor literature in lines like:

A book held gaping on my knees, Watering a sterile romance with my thoughts.

But it is not only her keen search for truth and an equally keen eye for the exact word that make these poems distinctive. A sharp color sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of the ordinary in terms of the beautiful, illumine such poems as “Sinfonia Domestica,” “Clothes,” “Autumn.” In the last named, with its brilliant combination of painting and housewifery, Mrs. Untermeyer has reproduced her early environment with a bright pungency; “Verhaeren’s Flemish _genre_ pictures are no better,” writes Amy Lowell. Several of her purely pictorial poems establish a swift kinship between the most romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny “Moonrise” is an example; so is “High Tide,” that, in one extended metaphor, turns the mere fact of a physical law into a most arresting and noble fancy.

_Dreams Out of Darkness_ (1921) is a ripening of this author’s powers with a richer musical undercurrent. This increase of melody is manifest on every page, possibly most striking in “Lake Song,” which, beneath its symbolism, is one of the most liquid unrhymed lyrics of the period.

HIGH TIDE

I edged back against the night. The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore. And the breakers, Like young and impatient hounds, Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand. Sprang—but were drawn back slowly With a long, relentless pull, Whimpering, into the dark.

Then I saw who held them captive; And I saw how they were bound With a broad and quivering leash of light, Held by the moon, As, calm and unsmiling, She walked the deep fields of the sky.

AUTUMN

(_To My Mother_)

How memory cuts away the years, And how clean the picture comes Of autumn days, brisk and busy; Charged with keen sunshine. And you, stirred with activity, The spirit of those energetic days.

There was our back-yard, So plain and stripped of green, With even the weeds carefully pulled away From the crooked red bricks that made the walk, And the earth on either side so black.

Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air. And winter comforts coming in like a pageant. I shall not forget them:— Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles, Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, Exhaling the pungent dill; And in the very centre of the yard, You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down Like jolly monks in a drunken dance. And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by the wagon-load, Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers. Such feathery whiteness—to come to kraut! And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness under a grey dust, Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire; And enamelled crab-apples that tricked with their fragrance But were bitter to taste. And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces, And long string beans floating in pans of clear water Like slim, green fishes. And there was fish itself, Salted, silver herring from the city....

And you moved among these mysteries, Absorbed and smiling and sure; Stirring, tasting, measuring, With the precision of a ritual. I like to think of you in your years of power— You, now so shaken and so powerless— High priestess of your home.

SINFONIA DOMESTICA

When the white wave of a glory that is hardly I Breaks through my mind and washes it clean, I know at last the meaning of my ecstasy, And know at last my wish and what it can mean.

To have sped out of life that night—to have vanished Not as a vision, but as something touched, yet grown Radiant as the moonlight, circling my naked shoulder; Wrapped in a dream of beauty, longed for, but never known.

For how with our daily converse, even the sweet sharing Of thoughts, of food, of home, of common life, How shall I be that glory, that last desire For which men struggle? Is Romance in a wife?

Must I bend a heart that is bowed to breaking With a frustration, inevitable and slow, And bank my flame to a low hearth fire, believing You’ll come for warmth and life to its tempered glow?

Shall I mould my hope anew, to one of service, And tell my uneasy soul “Behold, this is good.” And meet you (if we do meet), even at Heaven’s threshold, With ewer and basin, with clothing and with food?

LAKE SONG

The lapping of lake water Is like the weeping of women, The weeping of ancient women Who grieved without rebellion.

The lake falls over the shore Like tears on their curven bosoms. Here is languid, luxurious wailing; The wailing of kings’ daughters.

So do we ever cry, A soft, unmutinous crying, When we know ourselves each a princess Locked fast within her tower.

The lapping of lake water Is like the weeping of women, The fertile tears of women That water the dreams of men.

_John Gould Fletcher_

John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, January 3, 1886. He was educated at Phillips Academy (Andover, Massachusetts) and Harvard (1903-7) and, after spending several years in Massachusetts, moved to England, where, except for brief visits to the United States, he has lived ever since.

In 1913, Fletcher published five tiny books of poems which he has referred to as “his literary wild oats,” five small collections of experimental and faintly interesting verse. Two years later, Fletcher appeared as a decidedly less conservative and far more arresting poet with _Irradiations—Sand and Spray_ (1915). This volume is full of an extraordinary fancy; imagination riots through it, even though it is often a bloodless and bodiless imagination. It is crowded—even overcrowded—with æsthetic subtleties, a sort of brilliant and haphazard series of improvisations.

In the following book, _Goblins and Pagodas_ (1916), Fletcher carries his unrelated harmonies much further. Color dominates him; the ambitious set of eleven “color symphonies” is an elaborate design in which the tone as well as the thought is summoned by color-associations, sometimes closely related, sometimes far-fetched, “It contains,” says Conrad Aiken in his appreciative chapter on Fletcher in _Scepticisms_, “little of the emotion which relates to the daily life of men and women.... It is a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry of detached waver and brilliance, a beautiful flowering of language alone—a parthenogenesis, as if language were fertilized by itself rather than by thought or feeling. Remove the magic of phrase and sound and there is nothing left: no thread of continuity, no thought, no story, no emotion. But the magic of phrase and sound is powerful, and it takes one into a fantastic world.”

Meanwhile, Fletcher has been developing. After having appeared in the three Imagist anthologies, he sought for depths rather than surfaces. Beginning with his majestic “Lincoln,” his work has had a closer relation to humanity; a moving mysticism speaks from _The Tree of Life_ (1918), the more obviously native _Granite and Breakers_ (1921) and the later uncollected poems. Although the unconscious too often dictates Fletcher’s fantasies, a calm music dominates his shorter poems, a grave and subdued lyricism moves and enriches them.

THE SWAN

Under a wall of bronze, Where beeches dip and trail Their branches in the water; With red-tipped head and wings— A beaked ship under sail— There glides a single swan.

Under the autumn trees He goes. The branches quiver, Dance in the wraith-like water, Which ripples beneath the sedge With the slackening furrow that glides In his wake when he is gone: The beeches bow dark heads.

Into the windless dusk, Where in mist great towers stand Guarding a lonely strand, That is bodiless and dim, He speeds with easy stride; And I would go beside, Till the low brown hills divide At last, for me and him.

LONDON NIGHTFALL

I saw the shapes that stood upon the clouds: And they were tiger-breasted, shot with light, And all of them, lifting long trumpets together, Blew over the city, for the night to come. Down in the street, we floundered in the mud; Above, in endless files, gold angels came And stood upon the clouds, and blew their horns For night.

Like a wet petal crumpled, Twilight fell soddenly on the weary city; The ’buses lurched and groaned, The shops put up their doors. But skywards, far aloft, The angels, vanishing, waved broad plumes of gold, Summoning spirits from a thousand hills To pour the thick night out upon the earth.

DAWN

Above the east horizon, The great red flower of the dawn Opens slowly, petal by petal; The trees emerge from darkness With ghostly silver leaves, Dew powdered. Now consciousness emerges Reluctantly out of tides of sleep; Finding with cold surprise No strange new thing to match its dreams, But merely the familiar shapes Of bedpost, window-pane, and wall.

Within the city, The streets which were the last to fall to sleep, Hold yet stale fragments of the night. Sleep oozes out of stagnant ash-barrels, Sleep drowses over litter in the streets. Sleep nods upon the milkcans by back doors. And, in shut rooms, Behind the lowered window-blinds, Drawn white faces unwittingly flout the day.

But, at the edges of the city, Sleep is already washed away; Light filters through the moist green leaves, It runs into the cups of flowers, It leaps in sparks through drops of dew, It whirls against the window-panes With waking birds; Blinds are rolled up and chimneys smoke, Feet clatter past in silent paths, And down white vanishing ways of steel, A dozen railway trains converge Upon night’s stronghold.

LINCOLN[53]

I

Like a gaunt, scraggly pine Which lifts its head above the mournful sandhills; And patiently, through dull years of bitter silence, Untended and uncared for, begins to grow.

Ungainly, labouring, huge, The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches; Yet in the heat of midsummer days, when thunder-clouds ring the horizon, A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade.

And it shall protect them all, Hold everyone safe there, watching aloof in silence; Until at last one mad stray bolt from the zenith Shall strike it in an instant down to earth.

II

There was a darkness in this man; an immense and hollow darkness, Of which we may not speak, nor share with him, nor enter; A darkness through which strong roots stretched downwards into the earth Towards old things; Towards the herdman-kings who walked the earth and spoke with God, Towards the wanderers who sought for they knew not what, and found their goal at last; Towards the men who waited, only waited patiently when all seemed lost, Many bitter winters of defeat; Down to the granite of patience These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seeking, And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.

Not proud, but humble, Only to serve and pass on, to endure to the end through service; For the ax is laid at the root of the trees, and all that bring not forth good fruit Shall be cut down on the day to come and cast into the fire.

III

There is silence abroad in the land to-day, And in the hearts of men, a deep and anxious silence; And, because we are still at last, those bronze lips slowly open, Those hollow and weary eyes take on a gleam of light.

Slowly a patient, firm-syllabled voice cuts through the endless silence Like labouring oxen that drag a plow through the chaos of rude clay-fields: “I went forward as the light goes forward in early spring, But there were also many things which I left behind.

“Tombs that were quiet; One, of a mother, whose brief light went out in the darkness, One, of a loved one, the snow on whose grave is long falling, One, only of a child, but it was mine.

“Have you forgot your graves? Go, question them in anguish, Listen long to their unstirred lips. From your hostages to silence, Learn there is no life without death, no dawn without sun-setting, No victory but to Him who has given all.”

IV

The clamour of cannon dies down, the furnace-mouth of the battle is silent. The midwinter sun dips and descends, the earth takes on afresh its bright colours. But he whom we mocked and obeyed not, he whom we scorned and mistrusted, He has descended, like a god, to his rest.

Over the uproar of cities, Over the million intricate threads of life wavering and crossing, In the midst of problems we know not, tangling, perplexing, ensnaring, Rises one white tomb alone.

Beam over it, stars. Wrap it round, stripes—stripes red for the pain that he bore for you— Enfold it forever, O flag, rent, soiled, but repaired through your anguish; Long as you keep him there safe, the nations shall bow to your law.

Strew over him flowers; Blue forget-me-nots from the north, and the bright pink arbutus From the east, and from the west rich orange blossoms, But from the heart of the land take the passion-flower. Rayed, violet, dim, With the nails that pierced, the cross that he bore and the circlet, And beside it there, lay also one lonely snow-white magnolia, Bitter for remembrance of the healing which has passed.

THE SKATERS

Black swallows swooping or gliding In a flurry of entangled loops and curves; The skaters skim over the frozen river. And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface, Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

“_H. D._”

Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. When she was still a child, her father became Director of the Flower Observatory and the family moved to a suburb in the outskirts of Philadelphia. Hilda Doolittle attended a private school in West Philadelphia; entered Bryn Mawr College in 1904; and went abroad, for what was intended to be a short sojourn, in 1911. After a visit to Italy and France, she came to London, joining Ezra Pound and helping to organize the Imagists. Her work (signed “H. D.”) began to appear in a few magazines and its unusual quality was recognized at once. She married one of the most talented of the English members of this group (Richard Aldington) in 1913 and remained in London, creating, through a chiseled verse, her pure and flawless reproductions of Greek poetry and sculpture. In 1920, she made her long-deferred visit to America, settling on the Californian coast, returning, the following year, to England.

“H. D.” is, by all odds, the most important of her group. She is the only one who has steadfastly held to the letter as well as the spirit of its _credo_. She is, in fact, the only true Imagist. Her poems, capturing the firm delicacy of the Greek models, are like a set of Tanagra figurines. Here, at first glance, the effect is chilling—beauty seems held in a frozen gesture. But it is in this very fixation of light, color and emotion that she achieves intensity. What, at first, seemed static becomes fluent; the arrested moment glows with brimming energy.

Observe the poem entitled “Heat.” Here, in the fewest possible words, is something beyond the description of heat—here is the effect of it. In these lines one feels the very weight and solidity of a midsummer afternoon.

Her efforts to draw the contemporary world are less happy. She is best in her reflections of clear-cut loveliness in a quietly pagan world. Her art, in its precision and polish, is curiously Hellenic; “H. D.,” in most of her moods, seems less of a contemporary than an inspired anachronism.

OREAD

Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines. Splash your great pines On our rocks. Hurl your green over us— Cover us with your pools of fir.

PEAR TREE

Silver dust lifted from the earth, higher than my arms reach, you have mounted. O silver, higher than my arms reach you front us with great mass;

no flower ever opened so staunch a white leaf, no flower ever parted silver from such rare silver;

O white pear, your flower-tufts, thick on the branch, bring summer and ripe fruits in their purple hearts.

HEAT

O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop through this thick air— fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes.

Cut through the heat— plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.

LETHE

Nor skin nor hide nor fleece Shall cover you, Nor curtain of crimson nor fine Shelter of cedar-wood be over you, Nor the fir-tree Nor the pine.

Nor sight of whin nor gorse Nor river-yew, Nor fragrance of flowering bush, Nor wailing of reed-bird to waken you. Nor of linnet Nor of thrush.