Chapter 10

Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote _Il Trovatore_ did you dream Of the City when the sun sinks low, Of the organ and the monkey and the many-coloured stream On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam As _A che la morte_ parodies the world's eternal theme And pulses with the sunset-glow?

There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone In the City as the sun sinks low; There's a portly man of business with a balance of his own, There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful tone, And they're all of them returning to the heavens they have known: They are crammed and jammed in busses and--they're each of them alone In the land where the dead dreams go.

There's a labourer that listens to the voices of the dead In the City as the sun sinks low; And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red As he sees a loafer watching him and--there he turns his head And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led Through the land where the dead dreams go ...

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street In the City as the sun sinks low; Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it sweet Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand feet Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat In the land where the dead dreams go.

So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah, What have you to say When you meet the garland girls Tripping on their way? All around my gala hat I wear a wreath of roses (A long and lonely year it is I've waited for the May!) If any one should ask you, The reason why I wear it is-- My own love, my true love is coming home to-day.

And it's buy a bunch of violets for the lady (_It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!_) Buy a bunch of violets for the lady; While the sky burns blue above:

On the other side the street you'll find it shady (_It's lilac-time in London; it's lilac-time in London!_) But buy a bunch of violets for the lady, And tell her she's your own true love.

There's a barrel-organ carolling across a golden street In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow; And the music's not immortal; but the world has made it sweet And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song complete In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet, As it dies into the sunset glow;

And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light, And they've given it a glory and a part to play again In the Symphony that rules the day and night.

And there, as the music changes, The song runs round again; Once more it turns and ranges Through all its joy and pain: Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets; And the wheeling world remembers all The wheeling song forgets.

Once more _La Traviata_ sighs Another sadder song: Once more _Il Trovatore_ cries A tale of deeper wrong; Once more the knights to battle go With sword and shield and lance Till once, once more, the shattered foe Has whirled into--a dance!

_Come down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time; Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in summer's wonderland, Come down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)_

EPILOGUE

(_From "The Flower of Old Japan"_)

Carol, every violet has Heaven for a looking-glass!

Every little valley lies Under many-clouded skies; Every little cottage stands Girt about with boundless lands. Every little glimmering pond Claims the mighty shores beyond-- Shores no seamen ever hailed, Seas no ship has ever sailed.

All the shores when day is done Fade into the setting sun, So the story tries to teach More than can be told in speech.

Beauty is a fading flower, Truth is but a wizard's tower, Where a solemn death-bell tolls, And a forest round it rolls.

We have come by curious ways To the light that holds the days; We have sought in haunts of fear For that all-enfolding sphere: And lo! it was not far, but near. We have found, O foolish-fond, The shore that has no shore beyond.

Deep in every heart it lies With its untranscended skies; For what heaven should bend above Hearts that own the heaven of love?

Carol, Carol, we have come Back to heaven, back to home.

_Padraic Colum_

Padraic Colum was born at Longford, Ireland (in the same county as Oliver Goldsmith), December 8, 1881, and was educated at the local schools. At 20 he was a member of a group that created the Irish National Theatre, afterwards called The Abbey Theatre.

Colum began as a dramatist with _Broken Soil_ (1904), _The Land_ (1905), _Thomas Muskerry_ (1910), and this early dramatic influence has colored much of his work, his best poetry being in the form of dramatic lyrics. _Wild Earth_, his most notable collection of verse, first appeared in 1909, and an amplified edition of it was published in America in 1916.

THE PLOUGHER

Sunset and silence! A man: around him earth savage, earth broken; Beside him two horses--a plough!

Earth savage, earth broken, the brutes, the dawn man there in the sunset, And the Plough that is twin to the Sword, that is founder of cities!

"Brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker! Can'st hear? There are ages between us. "Is it praying you are as you stand there alone in the sunset?

"Surely our sky-born gods can be naught to you, earth child and earth master? "Surely your thoughts are of Pan, or of Wotan, or Dana?

"Yet, why give thought to the gods? Has Pan led your brutes where they stumble? "Has Dana numbed pain of the child-bed, or Wotan put hands to your plough?

"What matter your foolish reply! O, man, standing lone and bowed earthward, "Your task is a day near its close. Give thanks to the night-giving God."

* * * * *

Slowly the darkness falls, the broken lands blend with the savage; The brute-tamer stands by the brutes, a head's breadth only above them.

A head's breadth? Ay, but therein is hell's depth, and the height up to heaven, And the thrones of the gods and their halls, their chariots, purples, and splendors.

AN OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS

O, to have a little house! To own the hearth and stool and all! The heaped up sods upon the fire, The pile of turf against the wall!

To have a clock with weights and chains And pendulum swinging up and down! A dresser filled with shining delph, Speckled and white and blue and brown!

I could be busy all the day Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor, And fixing on their shelf again My white and blue and speckled store!

I could be quiet there at night Beside the fire and by myself, Sure of a bed and loth to leave The ticking clock and the shining delph!

Och! but I'm weary of mist and dark, And roads where there's never a house nor bush, And tired I am of bog and road, And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

And I am praying to God on high, And I am praying Him night and day, For a little house--a house of my own-- Out of the wind's and the rain's way.

_Joseph Campbell_

(_Seosamh MacCathmhaoil_)

Joseph Campbell was born in Belfast in 1881, and is not only a poet but an artist; he made all the illustrations for _The Rushlight_ (1906), a volume of his own poems. Writing under the Gaelic form of his name, he has published half a dozen books of verse, the most striking of which is _The Mountainy Singer_, first published in Dublin in 1909.

I AM THE MOUNTAINY SINGER

I am the mountainy singer-- The voice of the peasant's dream, The cry of the wind on the wooded hill, The leap of the fish in the stream.

Quiet and love I sing-- The carn on the mountain crest, The _cailin_ in her lover's arms, The child at its mother's breast.

Beauty and peace I sing-- The fire on the open hearth, The _cailleach_ spinning at her wheel, The plough in the broken earth.

Travail and pain I sing-- The bride on the childing bed, The dark man laboring at his rhymes, The eye in the lambing shed.

Sorrow and death I sing-- The canker come on the corn, The fisher lost in the mountain loch, The cry at the mouth of morn.

No other life I sing, For I am sprung of the stock That broke the hilly land for bread, And built the nest in the rock!

THE OLD WOMAN

As a white candle In a holy place, So is the beauty Of an aged face.

As the spent radiance Of the winter sun, So is a woman With her travail done,

Her brood gone from her, And her thoughts as still As the waters Under a ruined mill.

_James Stephens_

This unique personality was born in Dublin in February, 1882. Stephens was discovered in an office and saved from clerical slavery by George Russell ("A. E."). Always a poet, Stephens's most poetic moments are in his highly-colored prose. And yet, although the finest of his novels, _The Crock of Gold_ (1912), contains more wild phantasy and quaint imagery than all his volumes of verse, his _Insurrections_ (1909) and _The Hill of Vision_ (1912) reveal a rebellious spirit that is at once hotly ironic and coolly whimsical.

Stephens's outstanding characteristic is his delightful blend of incongruities--he combines in his verse the grotesque, the buoyant and the profound. No fresher or more brightly vigorous imagination has come out of Ireland since J. M. Synge.

THE SHELL

And then I pressed the shell Close to my ear And listened well, And straightway like a bell Came low and clear The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas, Whipped by an icy breeze Upon a shore Wind-swept and desolate. It was a sunless strand that never bore The footprint of a man, Nor felt the weight Since time began Of any human quality or stir Save what the dreary winds and waves incur. And in the hush of waters was the sound Of pebbles rolling round, For ever rolling with a hollow sound. And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go Swish to and fro Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey. There was no day, Nor ever came a night Setting the stars alight To wonder at the moon: Was twilight only and the frightened croon, Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind And waves that journeyed blind-- And then I loosed my ear ... O, it was sweet To hear a cart go jolting down the street.

WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID IN A PUB

I saw God. Do you doubt it? Do you dare to doubt it? I saw the Almighty Man. His hand Was resting on a mountain, and He looked upon the World and all about it: I saw him plainer than you see me now, You mustn't doubt it.

He was not satisfied; His look was all dissatisfied. His beard swung on a wind far out of sight Behind the world's curve, and there was light Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, "That star went always wrong, and from the start I was dissatisfied."

He lifted up His hand-- I say He heaved a dreadful hand Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, "Stay, You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way; And I will never move from where I stand." He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead," And stayed His hand.

TO THE FOUR COURTS, PLEASE

The driver rubbed at his nettly chin With a huge, loose forefinger, crooked and black, And his wobbly, violet lips sucked in, And puffed out again and hung down slack: One fang shone through his lop-sided smile, In his little pouched eye flickered years of guile.

And the horse, poor beast, it was ribbed and forked, And its ears hung down, and its eyes were old, And its knees were knuckly, and as we talked It swung the stiff neck that could scarcely hold Its big, skinny head up--then I stepped in, And the driver climbed to his seat with a grin.

God help the horse and the driver too, And the people and beasts who have never a friend, For the driver easily might have been you, And the horse be me by a different end. And nobody knows how their days will cease, And the poor, when they're old, have little of peace.

_John Drinkwater_

Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of _Abraham Lincoln--A Play_ (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative and elegiac in mood.

The best of his verses have been collected in _Poems, 1908-19_, and the two here reprinted are used by permission, and by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers.

RECIPROCITY

I do not think that skies and meadows are Moral, or that the fixture of a star Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees Have wisdom in their windless silences. Yet these are things invested in my mood With constancy, and peace, and fortitude; That in my troubled season I can cry Upon the wide composure of the sky, And envy fields, and wish that I might be As little daunted as a star or tree.

A TOWN WINDOW

Beyond my window in the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As over Warwick woods are sweet.

Under the grey drift of the town The crocus works among the mould As eagerly as those that crown The Warwick spring in flame and gold.

And when the tramway down the hill Across the cobbles moans and rings, There is about my window-sill The tumult of a thousand wings.

_James Joyce_

James Joyce was born at Dublin, February 2, 1882, and educated in Ireland. He is best known as a highly sensitive and strikingly original writer of prose, his most celebrated works being _Dubliners_ (1914) and the novel, _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ (1916). His one volume of verse, _Chamber Music_, was published in this country in 1918.

I HEAR AN ARMY

I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees: Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name: I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter. They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair: They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore. My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair? My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

_J. C. Squire_

Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1884, at Plymouth, of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and Cambridge University, and became known first as a remarkably adroit parodist. His _Imaginary Speeches_ (1912) and _Tricks of the Trade_ (1917) are amusing parodies and, what is more, excellent criticism. He edited _The New Statesman_ for a while and founded _The London Mercury_ (a monthly of which he is editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym "Solomon Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every week for six years, many of these papers being collected in his volume, _Books in General_ (1919).

His original poetry is intellectual but simple, sometimes metaphysical and always interesting technically in its fluent and variable rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was published under the title, _Poems: First Series_.

A HOUSE

Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, In clouds of hyacinth the sun retires, And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him Keep but in memory their borrowed fires.

And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, From that faint exquisite celestial strand, And turn and see again the only dwelling-place In this wide wilderness of darkening land.

The house, that house, O now what change has come to it. Its crude red-brick facade, its roof of slate; What imperceptible swift hand has given it A new, a wonderful, a queenly state?

No hand has altered it, that parallelogram, So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was; No, it is not that any line has changed.

Only that loneliness is now accentuate And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, And all man's energies seem very brave.

And this mean edifice, which some dull architect Built for an ignorant earth-turning hind, Takes on the quality of that magnificent Unshakable dauntlessness of human kind.

Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be, Yet imperturbable that house will rest, Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast.

Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac May howl their menaces, and hail descend: Yet it will bear with them, serenely, steadfastly, Not even scornfully, and wait the end.

And all a universe of nameless messengers From unknown distances may whisper fear, And it will imitate immortal permanence, And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear.

It stood there yesterday; it will to-morrow, too, When there is none to watch, no alien eyes To watch its ugliness assume a majesty From this great solitude of evening skies.

So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, While life remains to it prepared to outface Whatever awful unconjectured mysteries May hide and wait for it in time and space.

_Lascelles Abercrombie_

Lascelles Abercrombie was born in 1884. Like Masefield, he gained his reputation rapidly; totally unknown until 1909, upon the publication of _Interludes and Poems_, he was recognized as one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his period. _Emblems of Love_ (1912), the ripest collection of his blank verse dialogues, justified the enthusiasm of his admirers.

Many of Abercrombie's poems, the best of which are too long to quote, are founded on scriptural themes, but his blank verse is not biblical either in mood or manner. It is the undercurrent rather than the surface of his verse which moves with a strong religious conviction. Abercrombie's images are daring and brilliant; his lines, sometimes too closely packed, glow with a dazzling intensity that is warmly spiritual and fervently human.

FROM "VASHTI"

What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty? Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all The world, but an awning scaffolded amid The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty? The East and West kneel down to thee, the North And South; and all for thee their shoulders bear The load of fourfold space. As yellow morn Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea, Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, Whatever has been passionate in clay, Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body The yearnings of all men measured and told, Insatiate endless agonies of desire Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! What beauty is there, but thou makest it? How is earth good to look on, woods and fields, The season's garden, and the courageous hills, All this green raft of earth moored in the seas? The manner of the sun to ride the air, The stars God has imagined for the night? What's this behind them, that we cannot near, Secret still on the point of being blabbed, The ghost in the world that flies from being named? Where do they get their beauty from, all these? They do but glaze a lantern lit for man, And woman's beauty is the flame therein.

SONG

(_From "Judith"_)

Balkis was in her marble town, And shadow over the world came down. Whiteness of walls, towers and piers, That all day dazzled eyes to tears, Turned from being white-golden flame, And like the deep-sea blue became. Balkis into her garden went; Her spirit was in discontent Like a torch in restless air. Joylessly she wandered there, And saw her city's azure white Lying under the great night, Beautiful as the memory Of a worshipping world would be In the mind of a god, in the hour When he must kill his outward power; And, coming to a pool where trees Grew in double greeneries, Saw herself, as she went by The water, walking beautifully, And saw the stars shine in the glance Of her eyes, and her own fair countenance Passing, pale and wonderful, Across the night that filled the pool. And cruel was the grief that played With the queen's spirit; and she said: "What do I here, reigning alone? For to be unloved is to be alone. There is no man in all my land Dare my longing understand; The whole folk like a peasant bows Lest its look should meet my brows And be harmed by this beauty of mine. I burn their brains as I were sign Of God's beautiful anger sent To master them with punishment Of beauty that must pour distress On hearts grown dark with ugliness. But it is I am the punisht one. Is there no man, is there none, In whom my beauty will but move The lust of a delighted love; In whom some spirit of God so thrives That we may wed our lonely lives. Is there no man, is there none?"-- She said, "I will go to Solomon."

_James Elroy Flecker_

Another remarkable poet whose early death was a blow to English literature, James Elroy Flecker, was born in London, November 5, 1884. Possibly due to his low vitality, Flecker found little to interest him but a classical reaction against realism in verse, a delight in verbal craftsmanship, and a passion for technical perfection--especially the deliberate technique of the French Parnassians whom he worshipped. Flecker was opposed to any art that was emotional or that "taught" anything. "The poet's business," he declared, "is not to save the soul of man, but to make it worth saving."

The advent of the war began to make Flecker's verse more personal and romantic. The tuberculosis that finally killed him at Davos Platz, Switzerland, January 3, 1915, forced him from an Olympian disinterest to a deep concern with life and death. He passionately denied that he was weary of living "as the pallid poets are," and he was attempting higher flights of song when his singing ceased altogether.

His two colorful volumes are _The Golden Journey to Samarkand_ (1913) and _The Old Ships_ (1915).

THE OLD SHIPS