Part 3

But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw the folds aside, (I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to set the casement wide.

Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his five sweet notes a bird, And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thought thou hadst surely heard.

But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand throats awake, Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon, for thy sake?

Nay--bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait no more Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at the open door!

II. NOCTURNE

My darling, come!--The wings of the dark have wafted the sunset away, And there's room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay.

A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering moon looks up From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in its cup.

The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom--elder, viburnum, rose; The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that sighs of love as it goes.

The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the greater ones abide, With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside.

The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower of the elder gleams, Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest dreams.

Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south, That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy sweeter mouth.

Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and have naught to see? Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say nothing of thee and me?

--My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are guiding her way; There is room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay!

_Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer_

THE SINGING PLACE

Cold may lie the day, And bare of grace; At night I slip away To the Singing Place.

A border of mist and doubt Before the gate, And the Dancing Stars grow still As hushed I wait. Then faint and far away I catch the beat In broken rhythm and rhyme Of joyous feet,-- Lifting waves of sound That will rise and swell (If the prying eyes of thought Break not the spell), Rise and swell and retreat And fall and flee, As over the edge of sleep They beckon me. And I wait as the seaweed waits For the lifting tide; To ask would be to awake,-- To be denied. I cloud my eyes in the mist That veils the hem,-- And then with a rush I am past,-- I am Theirs, and of Them! And the pulsing chant swells up To touch the sky, And the song is joy, is life, And the song am I! The thunderous music peals Around, o'erhead-- The dead would awake to hear If there were dead; But the life of the throbbing Sun Is in the song, And we weave the world anew, And the Singing Throng Fill every corner of space--

Over the edge of sleep I bring but a trace Of the chants that pulse and sweep In the Singing Place.

_Lily A. Long_

IMMURED

Within this narrow cell that I call "me", I was imprisoned ere the worlds began, And all the worlds must run, as first they ran, In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free. I beat my hands against the walls and find It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!

_Lily A. Long_

NOGI

Great soldier of the fighting clan, Across Port Arthur's frowning face of stone You drew the battle sword of old Japan, And struck the White Tsar from his Asian throne.

Once more the samurai sword Struck to the carved hilt in your loyal hand, That not alone your heaven-descended lord Should meanly wander in the spirit land.

Your own proud way, O eastern star, Grandly at last you followed. Out it leads To that high heaven where all the heroes are, Lovers of death for causes and for creeds.

_Harriet Monroe_

THE JESTER

I have known great gold Sorrows: Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully Through the slow-pacing morrows: I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing Dim endless voices cried of suffering Vibrant and far in broken litany: Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air-- All things most tragical, most fair, Have still encompassed me ...

I dance where in the screaming market-place The dusty world that watches buys and sells, With painted merriment upon my face, Whirling my bells, Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery.

I have known great gold Sorrows ... Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones, If it shall make them merry, and forget That grief shall rise and set With the unchanging, unforgetting suns Of their relentless morrows?

_Margaret Widdemer_

THE BEGGARS

The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces, Begging of Life for Joy!

I saw the little daughters of the poor, Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay, Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled A hideous flushed beggar at the door, Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed, Complacent in his profitable mask. They mocked his horror, but they gave to him From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand Covered by darkness, to the luring voice Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings, Of silks, of feathers, bought--so cheap!--with just Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life: (A frock of satin for an hour's shame, A coat of fur for two days' servitude; "And the clothes last," the thought runs on, within The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days; "Who cares or knows after the hour is done?") --Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy! The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible, Complacent in the marketable mask That earned his comforts--and they gave to him!

But ah, the little painted, wistful faces Questioning Life for Joy!

_Margaret Widdemer_

REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

MOODY'S POEMS

_The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody_ will soon be published in two volumes by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. Our present interest is in the volume of poems, which are themselves an absorbing drama. Moody had a slowly maturing mind; the vague vastness of his young dreams yielded slowly to a man's more definite vision of the spiritual magnificence of life. When he died at two-score years, he was just beginning to think his problem through, to reconcile, after the manner of the great poets of the earth, the world with God. Apparently the unwritten poems cancelled by death would have rounded out, in art of an austere perfection, the record of that reconciliation, for nowhere do we feel this passion of high serenity so strongly as in the first act of an uncompleted drama, _The Death of Eve_.

Great-minded youth must dream, and modern dreams of the meaning of life lack the props and pillars of the old dogmatism. Vagueness, confusion and despair are a natural inference from the seeming chaos of evil and good, of pain and joy. Moody from the beginning took the whole scheme of things for his province, as a truly heroic poet should; there are always large spaces on his canvas. In his earlier poetry, both the symbolic _Masque of Judgment_ and the shorter poems derived from present-day subjects, we find him picturing the confusion, stating the case, so to speak, against God. Somewhat in the terms of modern science is his statement--the universe plunging on toward its doom of darkness and lifelessness, divine fervor of creation lapsing, divine fervor of love doubting, despairing of the life it made, sweeping all away with a vast inscrutable gesture.

This seems to be the mood of the _Masque of Judgment_, a mood against which that very human archangel, Raphael, protests in most appealing lines. The poet broods over the earth--

The earth, that has the blue and little flowers--

with all its passionate pageantry of life and love. Like his own angel he is

a truant still While battle rages round the heart of God.

The lamps are spent at the end of judgment day,

and naked from their seats The stars arise with lifted hands, and wait.

This conflict between love and doubt is the motive also of _Gloucester Moors_, _The Daguerreotype_, _Old Pourquoi_--those three noblest, perhaps, of the present-day poems--also of _The Brute_ and _The Menagerie_, and of that fine poem manqué, the _Ode in Time of Hesitation_. _The Fie-Bringer_ is an effort at another theme--redemption, light after darkness. But it is not so spontaneous as the _Masque_; though simpler, clearer, more dramatic in form, it is more deliberate and intellectual, and not so star-lit with memorable lines. _The Fire-Bringer_ is an expression of aspiration; the poet longs for light, demands it, will wrest it from God's right hand like Prometheus. But his triumph is still theory, not experience. The reader is hardly yet convinced.

If one feels a grander motive in such poems as the one-act _Death of Eve_ and _The Fountain_, or the less perfectly achieved _I Am the Woman_, it is not because of the tales they tell but because of the spirit of faith that is in them--a spirit intangible, indefinable, but indomitable and triumphant. At last, we feel, this poet, already under the shadow of death, sees a terrible splendid sunrise, and offers us the glory of it in his art.

_The Fountain_ is a truly magnificent expression of spiritual triumph in failure, and incidentally of the grandeur of Arizona, that tragic wonderland of ancient and future gods. Those Spanish wanderers, dying in the desert, in whose half-madness dreams and realities mingle, assume in those stark spaces the stature of universal humanity, contending to the last against relentless fate. In the two versions of _The Death of Eve_, both narrative and dramatic, one feels also this wild, fierce triumph, this faith in the glory of life. Especially in the dramatic fragment, by its sureness of touch and simple austerity of form, and by the majesty of its figure of the aged Eve, Moody's art reached its most heroic height. We have here the beginning of great things.

The spirit of this poet may be commended to those facile bards who lift up their voices between the feast and the cigars, whose muses dance to every vague emotion and strike their flimsy lutes for every light-o'-love. Here was one who went to his desk as to an altar, resolved that the fire he lit, the sacrifice he offered, should be perfect and complete. He would burn out his heart like a taper that the world might possess a living light. He would tell once more the grandeur of life; he would sing the immortal song.

That such devotion is easy of attainment in this clamorous age who can believe? Poetry like some of Moody's, poetry of a high structural simplicity, strict and bare in form, pure and austere in ornament, implies a grappling with giants and wrestling with angels; it is not to be achieved without deep living and high thinking, without intense persistent intellectual and spiritual struggle.

_H. M._

BOHEMIAN POETRY

_An Anthology of Modern Bohemian Poetry_, translated by P. Selver (Henry J. Drane, London).

This is a good anthology of modern Bohemian poetry, accurately translated into bad and sometimes even ridiculous English. Great credit is due the young translator for his care in research and selection. The faults of his style, though deplorable, are not such as to obscure the force and beauty of his originals.

One is glad to be thus thoroughly assured that contemporary Bohemia has a literature in verse, sensitive to the outer world and yet national. Mr. Selver's greatest revelation is Petr Bezruc, poet of the mines.

The poetry of Brezina, Sova and Vrchlicky is interesting, but Bezruc's _Songs of Silesia_ have the strength of a voice coming _de profundis_.

A hundred years in silence I dwelt in the pit,

* * * * *

The dust of the coal has settled upon my eyes--

* * * * *

Bread with coal is the fruit that my toiling bore;--

That is the temper of it. Palaces grow by the Danube nourished by his blood. He goes from labor to labor, he rebels, he hears a voice mocking:

I should find my senses and go to the mine once more--

And in another powerful invective:

I am the first who arose of the people of Teschen.

* * * * *

They follow the stranger's plough, the slaves fare downwards.

He thanks God he is not in the place of the oppressor, and ends:

Thus 'twas done. The Lord wills it. Night sank o'er my people. Our doom was sealed when the night had passed; In the night I prayed to the Demon of Vengeance. The first Beskydian bard and the last.

This poet is distinctly worth knowing. He is the truth where our "red-bloods" and magazine socialists are usually a rather boresome pose.

As Mr. Selver has tried to make his anthology representative of all the qualities and tendencies of contemporary Bohemian work it is not to be supposed that they are all of the mettle of Bezruc.

One hears with deep regret that Vrchlicky is just dead, after a life of unceasing activity. He has been a prime mover in the revival of the Czech nationality and literature. He has given them, besides his own work, an almost unbelievable number of translations from the foreign classics, Dante, Schiller, Leopardi. For the rest I must refer the reader to Mr. Selver's introduction.

_Ezra Pound_

"THE MUSIC OF THE HUMAN HEART"

This title-phrase has not been plucked from the spacious lawn of _Bartlett's Familiar Quotations_. It grew in the agreeable midland yard of Mr. Walt Mason's newspaper verse, and appeared in a tribute of his to Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, whose fifty-ninth birthday anniversary, falling on the seventh of October, has been widely celebrated in the American public libraries and daily press.

Mr. Riley's fine gift to his public, the special happiness his genius brings to his readers, cannot, for lack of space, be adequately described, or even indicated, here. Perhaps a true, if incomplete, impression of the beauty of his service may be conveyed by repeating a well-known passage of Mr. Lowes Dickinson's _Letters from John Chinaman_--a passage which I can never read without thinking very gratefully of James Whitcomb Riley, and of what his art has done for American poetry-readers.

Mr. Dickinson says:--

In China our poets and literary men have taught their successors for long generations, to look for good not in wealth, not in power, not in miscellaneous activity, but in a trained, a choice, an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life. To feel, and in order to feel, to express, or at least to understand the expression, of all that is lovely in nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man, is to us in itself a sufficient end.... The pathos of life and death, the long embrace, the hand stretched out in vain, the moment that glides forever away, with its freight of music and light, into the shadow and bush of the haunted past, all that we have, all that eludes us, a bird on the wing, a perfume escaped on the gale--to all these things we are trained to respond, and the response is what we call literature.

Among Mr. Riley's many distinguished faculties of execution in expressing, in stimulating, "an exquisite appreciation of the most simple and universal relations of life," one faculty has been, in so far as I know, very little mentioned--I mean his mastery in creating character. Mr. Riley has expressed, has incarnated in the melodies and harmonies of his poems, not merely several living, breathing human creatures as they are made by their destinies, but a whole world of his own, a vivid world of country-roads, and country-town streets, peopled with farmers and tramps and step-mothers and children, trailing clouds of glory even when they boast of the superiorities of "Renselaer," a world of hardworking women and hard-luck men, and poverty and prosperity, and drunkards and raccoons and dogs and grandmothers and lovers. To have presented through the medium of rhythmic chronicle, a world so sharply limned, so funny, so tragic, so mean, so noble, seems to us in itself a striking achievement in the craft of verse.

No mere word of criticism can of course evoke, at all as example can, Mr. Riley's genius of identification with varied human experiences, the remarkable concentration and lyric skill of his characterization. Here are two poems of his on the same general theme--grief in the presence of death. We may well speak our pride in the wonderful range of inspiration and the poetic endowment which can create on the same subject musical stories of the soul as diverse, as searching, as fresh and true, as the beloved poems of _Bereaved_ and _His Mother_.

BEREAVED

Let me come in where you sit weeping; aye, Let me, who have not any child to die, Weep with you for the little one whose love I have known nothing of.

The little arms that slowly, slowly loosed Their pressure round your neck; the hands you used To kiss. Such arms, such hands I never knew. May I not weep with you.

Fain would I be of service, say something Between the tears, that would be comforting; But ah! so sadder than yourselves am I, Who have no child to die.

HIS MOTHER

Dead! my wayward boy--my own-- Not _the Law's_, but mine; the good God's free gift to me alone, Sanctified by motherhood.

"Bad," you say: well, who is not? "Brutal"--"With a heart of stone"-- And "red-handed." Ah! the hot Blood upon your own!

I come not with downward eyes, To plead for him shamedly: God did not apologize When He gave the boy to me.

Simply, I make ready now For His verdict. You prepare-- You have killed us both--and how Will you face us There!

_E. W._

THE OPEN DOOR

Fears have been expressed by a number of friendly critics that POETRY may become a house of refuge for minor poets.

The phrase is somewhat worn. Paragraphers have done their worst for the minor poet, while they have allowed the minor painter, sculptor, actor--worst of all, architect--to go scot-free. The world which laughs at the experimenter in verse, walks negligently through our streets, and goes seriously, even reverently, to the annual exhibitions in our cities, examining hundreds of pictures and statues without expecting even the prize-winners to be masterpieces.

During the past year a score or more of cash prizes, ranging from one hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, were awarded in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Washington, New York and Boston for minor works of modern art. No word of superlative praise has been uttered for one of them: the first prize-winner in Pittsburgh was a delicately pretty picture by a second-rate Englishman; in Chicago it was a clever landscape by a promising young American. If a single prize-winner in the entire list, many of which were bought at high prices by public museums, was a masterpiece, no critic has yet dared to say so.

In fact, such a word would be presumptuous, since no contemporary can utter the final verdict. Our solicitous critics should remember that Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Burns, were minor poets to the subjects of King George the Fourth, Poe and Whitman to the subjects of King Longfellow. Moreover, we might remind them that Drayton, Lovelace, Herrick, and many another delicate lyrist of the anthologies, whose perfect songs show singular tenacity of life, remain minor poets through the slightness of their motive; they created little masterpieces, not great ones.

The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine--may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions. Without muzzles and braces this is manifestly impossible unless all the critical articles are written by one person.

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Mr. Ezra Pound has consented to act as foreign correspondent of POETRY, keeping its readers informed of the present interests of the art in England, France and elsewhere.

The response of poets on both sides of the Atlantic has been most encouraging, so that the quality of the next few numbers is assured. One of our most important contributions is Mr. John G. Neihardt's brief recently finished tragedy, _The Death of Agrippina_, to which an entire number will be devoted within a few months.

Mr. Joseph Campbell is one of the younger poets closely associated with the renaissance of art and letters in Ireland. His first book of poems was _The Gilly of Christ_; a later volume including these is _The Mountainy Singer_ (Maunsel & Co.).

Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, the New York poet and magazine editor, has published three volumes of verse, _The Quiet Singer_ (Rickey), _Manhattan_, and _Youth and Other Poems_; also five song-cycles in collaboration with two composers.

Mr. Richard Aldington is a young English poet, one of the "Imagistes," a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in _vers libre_; trying to attain in English certain subtleties of cadence of the kind which Mallarmé and his followers have studied in French. Mr. Aldington has published little as yet, and nothing in America.

Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the well-known writer on art, began comparatively late to publish verse in the magazines. Her volume, _Poems_ (Macmillan), was issued in 1910.

Miss Long and Miss Widdemer are young Americans, some of whose poems have appeared in various magazines.

The last issue of POETRY accredited Mr. Ezra Pound's _Provenca_ to the Houghton-Mifflin Co. This was an error; Small, Maynard & Co. are Mr. Pound's American publishers.

BOOKS RECEIVED

_The Iscariot_, by Eden Phillpotts. John Lane. _The Poems of Rosamund Marriott Watson._ John Lane. _Lyrical Poems_, by Lucy Lyttelton. Thomas B. Mosher. _The Silence of Amor_, by Fiona Macleod, Thomas B. Mosher. _Spring in Tuscany and Other Lyrics._ Thomas B. Mosher. _Interpretations: A Book of First Poems_, by Zoë Akins. Mitchell Kennerley. _A Round of Rimes_, by Denis A. MacCarthy. Little, Brown & Co. _Voices from Erin and Other Poems_, by Denis A. MacCarthy. Little, Brown & Co. _Love and The Year and Other Poems_, by Grace Griswold. Duffield & Co. _Songs and Sonnets_, by Webster Ford. The Rooks Press, Chicago. _The Quiet Courage and Other Songs of the Unafraid_, by Everard Jack Appleton. Stewart and Kidd Co. _In Cupid's Chains and Other Poems_, by Benjamin F. Woodcox. Woodcox & Fanner. _Maverick_, by Hervey White. Maverick Press.

Poetry VOL. I A Magazine of Verse NO. 3

DECEMBER, 1912

THE MOUNTAIN TOMB

Pour wine and dance, if manhood still have pride, Bring roses, if the rose be yet in bloom; The cataract smokes on the mountain side. Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.