I heartily envy him these experiences; to me every river is an adventure, even the quiet, serious old Connecticut.
Yet the poem that resulted from these visions is not remarkable. Nothing, I suppose, is more difficult than to write a good long poem. Poe disapproved of the undertaking in itself; and only men of undoubted genius have succeeded, whereas writers of hardly more than ordinary talent have occasionally turned off something combining brevity and excellence. I feel sure that Mr. Neihardt talks about this journey more impressively than he writes about it. His love lyrics, in A Bundle of Myrrh, are much better. The tendency to eroticism is redeemed by sincerity of feeling.
Charles Wharton Stork was born at Philadelphia, on the twelfth of February, 1881, and studied at Haverford, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is a scholar, a member of the English Faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, and has made many translations of Scandinavian poems. Always interested in modern developments of poetry, both in America and Europe, he is at present the editor of Contemporary Verse, a monthly magazine exclusively made up of original poems. This periodical has been of considerable assistance to students of contemporary poetry, for it has given an opportunity to hitherto unknown writers, and often it contains some notable contribution from men of established reputation. Thus the number for April, 1918, may some day have bibliographical value, since it leads off with a remarkable poem by Vachel Lindsay, The Eyes of Queen Esther. I advise collectors to secure this, and to subscribe to the magazine. Mr. Stork has written much verse himself, of which Flying Fish: an Ode, may be taken as illustrative of his originality and imagination.
Another excellent magazine of contemporary poetry is The Sonnet, edited and published by Mahlon Leonard Fisher, at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, of which the first number bears the date February, 1917. This appears bimonthly; and while the attempt to publish any magazine whatever displays courage, Mr. Fisher is apparently on the side of the conservatives in art. "We have attempted no propagandism, and acknowledged no revolution," is the sentence that forms the signature to his periodical. Furthermore, we are informed that "the sole aim of The Sonnet is to publish poetry so well thought of by its makers that they were willing to place it within strict confines. The magazine will have nothing to say in defence of its name. It will neither attack nor respond to attacks." It has certainly printed some good sonnets, among which are many by the editor. In 1917 appeared a beautiful little volume, limited to two hundred copies, and published by the author—Sonnets: a First Series. Fifty specimens are included, all written by Mr. Fisher. More than a few have grace and truth.
A new aspirant appeared in 1917 with his first volume, Streets and Faces. This is Scudder Middleton, brother of George Middleton, the dramatist. He was born at New York, on the ninth of September, 1888, and studied at Columbia. His little book of poetry contains nothing profound, yet there is evidence of undoubted talent which gives me hope. The best poem of his that I have seen was published in Contemporary Verse in 1917, and makes a fine recessional to Mr. Braithwaite's Anthology.
THE POETS
We need you now, strong guardians of our hearts,
Now, when a darkness lies on sea and land,
When we of weakening faith forget our parts
And bow before the falling of the sand.
Be with us now or we betray our trust
And say, "There is no wisdom but in death"—
Remembering lovely eyes now closed with dust—
"There is no beauty that outlasts the breath."
For we are growing blind and cannot see,
Beyond the clouds that stand like prison bars,
The changeless regions of our empery,
Where once we moved in friendship with the stars.
O children of the light, now in our grief
Give us again the solace of belief.
A young Princeton student, John Peale Bishop, First Lieutenant of Infantry in the Officers Reserve Corps, who studied the art of verse under the instruction of Alfred Noyes, published in 1917 a little book of original poems, with the modest title, Green Fruit. These were mostly written during his last undergraduate year at college, and would not perhaps have been printed now had he not entered the service. The subjects range from the Princeton Inn to Italy. Mr. Bishop is a clear-voiced singer, and there are original songs here, which owe nothing to other poets. Such a poem as Mushrooms is convincing proof of ability; and there is an excellent spirit in him.
William Aspenwall Bradley was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on the eighth of February, 1878. He was a special student at Harvard, and took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Columbia. He is now in the Government War Service. He wrote an admirable Life of Bryant in the English Men of Letters series, and has made many scholarly contributions to the literature of criticism. He has issued two volumes of original verse, of which perhaps the better known is Old Christmas, 1917. This is composed of tales of the Cumberland region in Kentucky. These poem-stories are not only full of dramatic power, comic and tragic, but they contain striking portraits. I think, however, that I like best Mr. Bradley's nature-pictures. The pleasure of recognition will be felt by everyone who reads the first few lines of
AUTUMN
Now shorter grow November days,
And leaden ponds begin to glaze
With their first ice, while every night
The hoarfrost leaves the meadows white
Like wimples spread upon the lawn
By maidens who are up at dawn,
And sparkling diamonds may be seen
Strewing the close-clipped golfing green.
But the slow sun dispels at noon
The season's work begun too soon,
Bidding faint filmy mists arise
And fold in softest draperies
The distant woodlands bleak and bare,
Until they seem to melt in air.
William Griffiths was born at Memphis, Missouri, on the fifteenth of February 1876, and received his education at the public schools. He has been a "newspaper man" and magazine editor, and has produced a number of books in verse and prose, of which the best example is City Pastorals, originally published in 1915, revised and reissued in 1918. The title of this book appears to be a paradox; but its significance is clear enough after one has read a few pages. It is an original and interesting way of bringing the breath of the country into the town. The scene is a New York Club on a side street; the year is 1914; the three speakers are Brown, Gray, Green; the four divisions are Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. The style is for the most part rimed stanzas in short metre, which go trippingly on the tongue. Grace and delicacy characterize the pictures of the country that the men bring back to the smoky city from their travels.
Occultly through a riven cloud
The ancient river shines again,
Still wandering like a silver road
Among the cities in the plain.
On far horizons softly lean
The hills against the coming night;
And mantled with a russet green,
The orchards gather into sight.
Through apples hanging high and low,
In ruddy colours, deeply spread
From core to rind, the sun melts slow,
With gold upcaught against the red.
And here and there, with sighs and calls,
Among the hills an echo rings
Remotely as the water falls
And down the meadow softly sings.
A wind goes by; the air is stirred
With secret whispers far and near;
Another token—just a word
Had made the rose's meaning clear.
I see the fields; I catch the scent
Of pine cones and the fresh split wood,
Where bearded moss and stains are blent
With autumn rains—and all is good.
An air, arising, turns and lifts
The fallen leaves where they had lain
Beneath the trees, then weakly shifts
And slowly settles back again.
While with far shouts, now homeward bound,
Across the fields the reapers go;
And, with the darkness closing round,
The lilies of the twilight blow.
Many of the other poems in this volume, that follow the City Pastorals, are interpretations of various individuals and of various nationalities. Mr. Griffith has a gift for the making of epigrams; and indeed he has studied concision in all his work. It may be that this is a result of his long years of training in journalism; he must have silently implored the writers of manuscripts he was forced to read to leave their damnable faces and begin. Certain it is, that although he can write smoothly flowing music, there is hardly a page in his whole book that does not contain some idea worth thinking about. His wine of Cyprus has both body and bouquet.
Three professional teachers of youth who write poetry as an avocation are John Erskine, professor at Columbia, whose poems bear the impress of an original and powerful personality, William Ellery Leonard, professor in the University of Wisconsin, the author of a number of volumes of poems, some of which show originality in conception and style, and William Thornton Whitsett, of Whitsett Institute, Whitsett, North Carolina, whose book Saber and Song (1917), exhibits such variations in merit that if one read only a few pages one might be completely deceived as to the author's actual ability. His besetting sin as an artist is moralizing. Fully half the contents of the volume are uninspired, commonplace, flat. But when he forgets to preach, he can write true poetry. He has the lyrical gift to a high degree, and has a rather remarkable command of the technique of the art. An Ode to Expression, The Soul of the Sea, and some of the Sonnets, fully justify their publication. The author is rather too fond of the old "poetic diction"; he might do well to study simplicity.
A poet who differs from the two last mentioned in her ability to maintain a certain level of excellence is Helen Hay Whitney. She perhaps inherited her almost infallible good taste and literary tact from her distinguished father, that wholly admirable person, John Hay. His greatness as an international statesman was matched by the extraordinary charm of his character, which expressed itself in everything he wrote, and in numberless acts of kindness. He was the ideal American gentleman. One feels in reading the poems of Mrs. Whitney that each one is written both creatively and critically. I mean that she has the primal impulse to write, but that in writing, and more especially in revising, every line is submitted to her own severe scrutiny. I am not sure that she has not destroyed some of her best work, though this is of course only conjecture. At all events, while she makes no mistakes, I sometimes feel that there is too much repression. She is one of our best American sonnet-writers. Such a poem as After Rain is a work of art.
Corinne Roosevelt Robinson (Mrs. Douglas Robinson, sister of Theodore Roosevelt) has published two volumes of poems, The Call of Brotherhood, 1912, and One Woman to Another, 1914. I hope that she will speedily collect in a third book the fugitive pieces printed in various magazines since 1914. Mrs. Robinson's poetry comes from a full mind and a full heart. There is the knowledge born of experience combined with spiritual revelation. She is an excellent illustration of the possibility of living to the uttermost in the crowded avenues of the world without any loss of religious or moral values. It must take a strong nature to absorb so much of the strenuous activities of metropolitan society while keeping the heart's sources as clear as a mountain spring. It is the exact opposite of asceticism, yet seems not to lose anything important gained by the ascetic vocation. She does not serve God and Mammon: she serves God, and makes Mammon serve her. This complete roundness and richness of development could not have been accomplished except through pain. She expresses grief's contribution in the following sonnet:
Beloved, from the hour that you were born
I loved you with the love whose birth is pain;
And now, that I have lost you, I must mourn
With mortal anguish, born of love again;
And so I know that Love and Pain are one,
Yet not one single joy would I forego.—
The very radiance of the tropic sun
Makes the dark night but darker here below.
Mine is no coward soul to count the cost;
The coin of love with lavish hand I spend,
And though the sunlight of my life is lost
And I must walk in shadow to the end,—
I gladly press the cross against my heart—
And welcome Pain, that is Love's counterpart!
Meredith Nicholson, the American novelist, like Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Phillpotts and many other novelists in England, has published a volume of original verse, Poems, 1906. It is possibly a sign of the growing interest in poetry that so many who have won distinction in prose should in these latter days strive for the laurel crown. Mr. Nicholson's poems are a kind of riming journal of his heart. It is clear that he is not a born poet, for the flame of inspiration is not in these pages, nor do we find the perfect phrase or ravishing music; what we do have is well worth preservation in print—the manly, dignified, imaginative speculations of a clear and honest mind. Furthermore, although he writes verse with his left hand, there is displayed in many of these pieces a mastery of the exact meaning of words, attained possibly by his long years of training in the other harmony of prose.
Witter Bynner—the spelling of whose name I defy any one to remember, and envelopes addressed to him must be a collection of curiosities—was born at Brooklyn on the tenth of August, 1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902, and addressed his Alma Mater in an Ode To Harvard, published in book form in 1907. In 1917 he collected in one attractive volume, Grenstone Poems, the best of his production—exclusive of his plays and prose—up to that date. One who knew Mr. Bynner only by the terrific white slave drama Tiger, would be quite unprepared for the sylvan sweetness of the Grenstone poems. Their environment, mainly rural, does not localize the sentiment overmuch; for the poet's mind is a kingdom, even though he is bounded in a nutshell. The environment, however, may be partly responsible for the spirit of healthy cheerfulness that animates these verses; whatever they lack, they certainly do not lack purity and charm. Far from the madding crowd the singer finds contentment, which is the keynote of these songs; happiness built on firm indestructible foundations. Some of the divisional titles indicate the range of subjects: Neighbors and the Countryside, Children and Death, Wisdom and Unwisdom, Celia, Away from Grenstone, where homesickness is expressed while travelling in the Far East. And the tone is clearly sounded in
A GRACE BEFORE THE POEMS
"Is there such a place as Grenstone?"
Celia, hear them ask!
Tell me, shall we share it with them?—
Shall we let them breathe and bask
On the windy, sunny pasture,
Where the hill-top turns its face
Toward the valley of the mountain,
Our beloved place?
Shall we show them through our churchyard,
With its crumbling wall
Set between the dead and living?
Shall our willowed waterfall,
Huckleberries, pines and bluebirds
Be a secret we shall share?—
If they make but little of it,
Celia, shall we care?
It will be seen that the independence of Mr. Bynner is quite different from the independence of Mr. Underwood; but they both have the secret of self-sufficiency.
Another loyal Harvard poet is Herman Hagedorn, who was born at New York in 1882, and took his degree at college in 1907. For some time he was on the English Faculty at Harvard, and has a scholar's knowledge of English literature. He has published plays and books of verse, of which the best known are A Troop of the Guard (1909) and Poems and Ballads, which appeared the same year. He has a good command of lyrical expression, which ought to enable him in the years to come to produce work of richer content than his verses have thus far shown.
The best known of the Harvard poets of the twentieth century is Percy Mackaye, who is still better known as a playwright and maker of pageants. He was born at New York, on the sixteenth of March, 1875, and was graduated from Harvard in 1897. He has travelled much in Europe, and has given many lectures on dramatic art in America. His poetry may be collectively studied in one volume of appalling avoirdupois, published in 1916. It takes a strong wrist to hold it, but it is worth the effort.
The chief difficulty with Mr. Mackaye is his inability to escape from his opinions. He is far too self-conscious, much too much preoccupied with theory, both in drama and in poetry. He can write nothing without explaining his motive, without trying to show himself and others the aim of poetry and drama. However morally noble all this may be—and it surely is that—it hampers the author. I wish he could for once completely forget all artistic propaganda, completely forget himself, and give his Muse a chance. "She needs no introduction to this audience."
There is no doubt that he has something of the divine gift. His Centenary Ode on Lincoln, published separately in 1909, was the best out of all the immense number of effusions I read that year. He rose to a great occasion.
One of his most original pieces is the dog-vivisection poem, called The Heart in the Jar. There is a tumultuous passion in it almost overpowering; and no one but a true poet could ever have thought of or have employed such symbolism. Mr. Mackaye's mind is so alert, so inquisitive, so volcanic, that he seems to me always just about to produce something that shall surpass his previous efforts. I have certainly not lost faith in his future.
John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886. He studied at Andover and at Harvard, and has lived much in London. He has become identified with the Imagists. Personally I wish that Mr. Fletcher would use his remarkable power to create gorgeous imagery in the production of orthodox forms of verse. Free verse ought to be less monotonous than constantly repeated sonnets, quatrains, and stanza-forms; but the fact is just the other way. A volume made up entirely of free verse, unless written by a man of genius, has a capacity to bore the reader that at times seems almost criminal.
Conrad Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, on the fifth of August, 1889, is a graduate of Harvard and lives in Boston. He has published several volumes of poems, among which Earth Triumphant (1914) is representative of his ability and philosophy. It certainly represents his ability more fairly than The Jig of Forslin (1916), which is both pretentious and dull. I suspect few persons have read every page of it. I have.
Not yet thirty, Mr. Aiken is widely known; but the duration of his fame will depend upon his future work. He has thus far shown the power to write melodious music, to paint nature pictures in warm colours; he is ever on the quest of Beauty. His sensible preface to Earth Triumphant calls attention to certain similarities between his style in verse-narrative and that of John Masefield. But he is not a copier, and his work is his own. Some poets are on the earth; some are in the air; some, like Shelley, are in the aether. Conrad Aiken is firmly, gladly on the earth. He believes that our only paradise is here and now.
He surely has the gift of singing speech, but his poetry lacks intellectual content. In the volume Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), there is a dreamy charm, like the hesitating notes of Chopin.
Although his contribution to the advance of poetry is not important, he has the equipment of a poet. When he has more to say, he will have no difficulty in making us listen; for he understands the magic of words. Thus far his poems are something like librettos; they don't mean much without the music. Let him remember the bitter cry of old Henry Vaughan: every artist, racked by labour-pains, will understand what Vaughan meant by calling this piece Anguish:
O! 'tis an easy thing
To write and sing;
But to write true, unfeigned verse
Is very hard! O God, disperse
These weights, and give my spirit leave
To act as well as to conceive
Among our young American poets there are few who have inherited in richer or purer measure than William Alexander Percy. He was born at Greenville, Mississippi, on the fourth of May, 1885, and studied at the University of the South and at the Harvard Law School. He is now in military service. In 1915, his volume of poems, Sappho in Leukas, attracted immediately the attention of discriminating critics. The prologue shows that noble devotion to art, that high faith in it, entirely beyond the understanding of the Philistine, but which awakens an instant and accurate vibration in the heart of every lover of poetry.
O singing heart, think not of aught save song;
Beauty can do no wrong.
Let but th' inviolable music shake
Golden on golden flake,
Down to the human throng,
And one, one surely, will look up, and hear and wake.
Weigh not the rapture; measure not nor sift
God's dark, delirious gift;
But deaf to immortality or gain,
Give as the shining rain,
Thy music pure and swift,
And here or there, sometime, somewhere, 'twill reach the grain.
There is a wide range of subjects in this volume, Greek, mediaeval, and modern—inspiration from, books and inspiration from outdoors. But there is not a single poem that could be called crude or flat. Mr. Percy is a poet and an artist; he can be ornate and he can be severe; but in both phases there is a dignity not always characteristic of contemporary verse. I do not prophesy—but I feel certain of this man.
One day in 1917, I clipped a nameless poem from a daily newspaper, and carried it in my pocketbook for months. Later I discovered that it was written by Mr. Percy, and had first appeared in The Bellman. I know of no poem by any American published in the year 1917 that for combined beauty of thought and beauty of expression is superior to this little masterpiece.
OVERTONES
I heard a bird at break of day
Sing from the autumn trees
A song so mystical and calm,
So full of certainties,
No man, I think, could listen long
Except upon his knees.
Yet this was but a simple bird,
Alone, among dead trees.
Alan Seeger—whose heroic death glorified his youth—was born at New York on the twenty-second of June, 1888. He studied at Harvard; then lived in Paris, and no one has ever loved Paris more than he. He enlisted in the Foreign Legion of France at the outbreak of the war in 1914, and fell on the fourth of July, 1916. His letters show his mind and heart clearly.
He knew his poetry was good, and that it would not die with his body. In the last letter he wrote, we find these words: "I will write you soon if I get through all right. If not, my only earthly care is for my poems. Add the ode I sent you and the three sonnets to my last volume and you will have opera omnia quae existant."
He wrote his autobiography in one of his last sonnets, paying poetic tribute to Philip Sidney—lover of woman, lover of battle, lover of art.
Sidney, in whom the heydey of romance
Came to its precious and most perfect flower,
Whether you tourneyed with victorious lance
Or brought sweet roundelays to Stella's bower,
I give myself some credit for the way
I have kept clean of what enslaves and lowers,
Shunned the ideals of our present day
And studied those that were esteemed in yours;
For, turning from the mob that buys Success
By sacrificing all life's better part,
Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart,
And lived in strict devotion all along
To my three idols—Love and Arms and Song.
His most famous poem, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, is almost intolerably painful in its tragic beauty, in its contrast between the darkness of the unchanging shadow and the apple-blossoms of the sunny air—above all, because we read it after both Youth and Death have kept their word, and met at the place appointed.
He was an inspired poet. Poetry came from him as naturally as rain from clouds. His magnificent Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen in France has a nobility of phrase that matches the elevation of thought. Work like this cannot be forgotten.
Alan Seeger was an Elizabethan. He had a consuming passion for beauty—his only religion. He loved women and he loved war, like the gallant, picturesque old soldiers of fortune. There was no pose in all this; his was a brave, uncalculating, forthright nature, that gave everything he had and was, without a shade of fear or a shade of regret. He is one of the most fiery spirits of our time, and like Rupert Brooke, he will be thought of as immortally young.
CHAPTER XI
A GROUP OF YALE POETS
Henry A. Beers—the fine quality of his literary style in prose and verse—force and grace—finished art—his humour—C. M. Lewis—his war poem—E. B. Reed—Lyra Yalensis—F. E. Pierce—his farm lyrics—Brian Hooker—his strong sonnets—his Turns—R. C. Rogers—The Rosary—Rupert Hughes—novelist, playwright, musician, poet—Robert Hunger—his singing—R. B. Glaenzer—his fancies—Benjamin R. C. Low—his growth—William R. Benét—his vitality and optimism—Arthur Colton—his Chaucer poem—Allan Updegraff—The Time and the Place—Lee Wilson Dodd—his development—a list of other Yale Poets—Stephen V. Benét.
During the twentieth century there has been flowing a fountain of verse from the faculty, young alumni, and undergraduates of Yale University; and I reserve this space at the end of my hook for a consideration of the Yale group of poets, some of whom are already widely known and some of whom seem destined to be. I am not thinking of magazine verse or of fugitive pieces, but only of independent volumes of original poems. Yale has always been close to the national life of America; and the recent outburst of poetry from her sons is simply additional evidence of the renaissance all over the United States. Anyhow, the fact is worth recording.
Professor Henry A. Beers was born at Buffalo on the second of July, 1847. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1870, but in 1871 became an Instructor in English Literature at Yale, teaching continuously for forty-five years, when he retired. He has written—at too rare intervals—all his life. His book of short stories, containing A Suburban Pastoral and Split Zephyr, the last-named being, according to Meredith Nicholson, the best story of college life ever printed, would possibly have attracted more general attention were it not for its prevailing tone of quiet, unobtrusive pessimism, an unwelcome note in America. I am as sure of the high quality of A Suburban Pastoral as I am sure of anything; and have never found a critic who, after reading the tale, disagreed with me. In 1885 Professor Beers published a little volume of poems, The Thankless Muse; and in 1917 he collected in a thin book The Two Twilights, the best of his youthful and mature poetic production. The variety of expression is so great that no two poems are in the same mood. In Love, Death, and Life we have one of the most passionate love-poems in American literature; in The Pasture Bars the valediction has the soft, pure tone of a silver bell.
Professor Beers has both vigour and grace. His fastidious taste permits him to write little, and to print only a small part of what he writes. But the force of his poetic language is so extraordinary that it has sometimes led to a complete and unfortunate misinterpretation of his work. In The Dying Pantheist to the Priest, he wrote a poem as purely dramatic, as non-personal, as the monologues of Browning; he quite successfully represented the attitude of an (imaginary) defiant, unrepentant pagan to an (imaginary) priest who wished to save him in his last moments. The speeches put into the mouth of the pantheist no more represent Mr. Beers's own sentiments than Browning's poem Confessions represented Browning's attitude toward death and religion; yet it is perhaps a tribute to the fervour of the lyric that many readers have taken it as a violent attack on Christian theology.
Just as I am certain of the finished art of A Suburban Pastoral, I am equally certain of the beauty and nobility of the poetry in The Two Twilights. This volume gives its author an earned place in the front rank of living American poets.
To me one of the most original and charming of the songs is the valediction to New York—and the homage to New Haven.
NUNC DIMITTIS
Highlands of Navesink,
By the blue ocean's brink,
Let your grey bases drink
Deep of the sea.
Tide that comes flooding up,
Fill me a stirrup cup,
Pledge me a parting sup,
Now I go free.
Wall of the Palisades,
I know where greener glades,
Deeper glens, darker shades,
Hemlock and pine,
Far toward the morning lie
Under a bluer sky,
Lifted by cliffs as high,
Haunts that are mine.
Marshes of Hackensack,
See, I am going back
Where the Quinnipiac
Winds to the bay,
Down its long meadow track,
Piled in the myriad stack,
Where in wide bivouac
Camps the salt hay.
Spire of old Trinity,
Never again to be
Seamark and goal to me
As I walk down;
Chimes on the upper air,
Calling in vain to prayer,
Squandering your music where
Roars the black town:
Bless me once ere I ride
Off to God's countryside,
Where in the treetops hide
Belfry and bell;
Tongues of the steeple towers,
Telling the slow-paced hours—
Hail, thou still town of ours—
Bedlam, farewell!
Those who are familiar with Professor Beers's humour, as expressed in The Ways of Yale, will wish that he had preserved also in this later book some of his whimsicalities, as in the poem A Fish Story, which begins:
A whale of great porosity,
And small specific gravity,
Dived down with much velocity
Beneath the sea's concavity.
But soon the weight of water
Squeezed in his fat immensity,
Which varied—as it ought to—
Inversely as his density.
Professor Charlton M. Lewis was born at Brooklyn on the fourth of March, 1866. He took his B.A. at Yale in 1886, and an LL.B at Columbia in 1889. For some years he was a practising lawyer in New York; in 1895 he became a member of the Yale Faculty. In 1903 he published Gawayne and the Green Knight, a long poem, in which humour and imagination are delightfully mingled. His lyric Pro Patria (1937) is a good illustration of his poetic powers; it is indeed one of America's finest literary contributions to the war.
PRO PATRIA
Remember, as the flaming car
Of ruin nearer rolls,
That of our country's substance are
Our bodies and our souls.
Her dust we are, and to her dust
Our ashes shall descend:
Who craves a lineage more august
Or a diviner end?
By blessing of her fruitful dews,
Her suns and winds and rains,
We have her granite in our thews,
Her iron in our veins.
And, sleeping in her sacred earth,
The ever-living dead
On the dark miracle of birth
Their holy influence shed….
So, in the faith our fathers kept,
We live, and long to die;
To sleep forever, as they have slept,
Under a sunlit sky;
Close-folded to our mother's heart
To find our souls' release—
A secret coeternal part
Of her eternal peace;—
Where Hood, Saint Helen's and Rainier,
In vestal raiment, keep
Inviolate through the varying year
Their immemorial sleep;
Or where the meadow-lark, in coy
But calm profusion, pours
The liquid fragments of his joy
On old colonial shores.
Professor Edward B. Reed, B.A. 1894, published in 1913 a tiny volume of academic verse, called Lyra Yalensis. This contains happily humorous comment on college life and college customs, and as the entire edition was almost immediately sold, the book has already become something of a rarity. In 1917, he collected the best of his more ambitious work in Sea Moods, of which one of the most impressive is
THE DAWN
He shook his head as he turned away—
"Is it life or death?" "We shall know by day."
Out from the wards where the sick folk lie,
Out neath the black and bitter sky.
Past one o'clock and the wind is chill,
The snow-clad streets are ghostly still;
No friendly noise, no cheering light,
So calm the city sleeps to-night,
I think its soul has taken flight.
Back to the empty home—a thrill,
A shudder at its darkened sill,
For the clock chimes as on that morn,
That happy day when she was born.
And now, inexorably slow,
To life or death the hours go.
Time's wings are clipped; he scarce doth creep.
Tonight no drug could bring you sleep;
Watch at the window for the day;
'Tis all that's left—to watch and pray.
But I think the prayer of an anguished heart
Must pierce that bleak sky like a dart,
And tear that pall of clouds apart.
The poplars, edging the frozen lawn,
Shudder and whisper: "Wait till dawn."
Two spirits stand beside her bed
Softly stroking her curly head.
Death whispers, "Come"—Life whispers, "Stay."
Child, little child, go not away.
Life pleads, "Remember"—and Death, "Forget."
Little child, little child, go not yet.
By all your mother's love and pain,
Child of our heart, child of our brain,
Stay with us; go not till you see
The Fairyland that life can be.
. . . . . . . .
The poplars, edging the frozen lawn,
Are dancing and singing. "Thank God—the Dawn!"
Professor Frederick E. Pierce, B.A. 1904, has produced three volumes of poems, of which The World that God Destroyed exhibits an epic sweep of the imagination. He imagines a world far off in space, where every form of life has perished save rank vegetation. One day in their wanderings over the universe, Lucifer and Michael meet on this dead ball. A truce is declared and each expresses some of the wisdom bought by experience.
The upas dripped its poison on the ground
Harmless; the silvery veil of fog went up
From mouldering fen and cold, malarial pool,
But brought no taint and threatened ill to none.
Far off adown the mountain's craggy side
From time to time the avalanche thundered, sounding
Like sport of giant children, and the rocks
Whereon it smote re-echoed innocently.
Then in a pause of silence Lucifer
Struck music from the harp again and sang.
"I am the shadow that the sunbeams bring,
I am the thorn from which the roses spring;
Without the thorn would be no blossoming,
Nor were there shadow if there were no gleam.
I am a leaf before a wind that blows,
I am the foam that down the current goes;
I work a work on earth that no man knows,
And God Works too,—I am not what I seem.
"There comes a purer morn whose stainless glow
Shall cast no shadow on the ground below,
And fairer flowers without the thorn shall blow,
And earth at last fulfil her parent's dream.
Oh race of men who sin and know not why,
I am as you and you are even as I;
We all shall die at length and gladly die;
Yet even our deaths shall be not what they seem."
Then Michael raised the golden lyre, and struck A note more solemn soft, and made reply.
"There dwelt a doubt within my mind of yore;
I sought to end that doubt and laboured sore;
But now I search its mystery no more,
But leave it safe within the Eternal's hand.
The tiger hunts the lamb and yearns to kill,
Himself by famine hunted, fiercer still;
And much there is that seems unmingled ill;
But God is wise, and God can understand.
"All things on earth in endless balance sway;
Day follows night and night succeeds the day;
And so the powers of good and evil may
Work out the purpose that his wisdom planned.
Eternal day would parch the dewy mould,
Eternal night would freeze the lands with cold;
But wise was God who planned the world of old;
I rest in Him for He can understand.
"Yet good and evil still their wills oppose;
And serving both, we still must serve as foes
On yon far globe that teems with human woes;
And sin thou art, though God work through thy hand.
But here the race of man is now no more;
The task is done, the long day's work is o'er;
One hour I'll dream thee what thou wert of yore,
Though changed thou art, too changed to understand."
All day sat Michael there with Lucifer
Talking of things unknown to men, old tales
And memories dating back beyond all time.
And all night long beneath the lonely stars,
That watched no more the sins of man, they lay,
The angel's lofty face at rest against
The dark cheek scarred with thunder.
Morning came,
And each departed on his separate way;
But each looked back and lingered as he passed.
Some of his best work, however, appears in short pieces that might best be described as lyrics of the farm, or, to use a title discarded by Tennyson, Idylls of the Hearth. Mr. Pierce knows the lonely farm-houses of New England, both by inheritance and habitation, and is a true interpreter of the spirit of rural life.
One of the best-known of the group of Yale poets is Brian Hooker, who was graduated from Yale in 1902, and for some years was a member of the Faculty. His Poems (1915) are an important addition to contemporary literature. He is a master of the sonnet-form, as any one may see for himself in reading
GHOSTS
The dead return to us continually;
Not at the void of night, as fables feign,
In some lone spot where murdered bones have lain
Wailing for vengeance to the passer-by;
But in the merry clamour and full cry
Of the brave noon, our dead whom we have slain
And in forgotten graves hidden in vain,
Rise up and stand beside us terribly.
Sick with the beauty of their dear decay
We conjure them with laughters onerous
And drunkenness of labour; yet not thus
May we absolve ourselves of yesterday—
We cannot put those clinging arms away,
Nor those glad faces yearning over us.
Mr. Hooker also includes in this volume a number of Turns, which he describes as "a new fixed form: Seven lines, in any rhythm, isometric and of not more than four feet; Rhyming AbacbcA, the first line and the last a Refrain; the Idea (as the name suggests) to Turn upon the recurrence of the Refrain at the end with a different sense from that which it bears at the beginning." For example:
MISERERE
Ah, God, my strength again!—
Not power, nor joy, but these:
The waking without pain,
The ardour for the task,
And in the evening, peace.
Is it so much to ask?
Ah, God, my strength again!
American literature suffered a loss in the death of Robert Cameron Rogers, of the class of 1883. His book of poems, called The Rosary, appeared in 1906, containing the song by which naturally he is best known. Set to music by the late Ethelbert Nevin, it had a prodigious vogue, and inspired a sentimental British novel, whose sales ran over a million copies. The success of this ditty ought not to prejudice readers against the author of it; for he was more than a sentimentalist, as his other pieces prove.
Rupert Hughes is an all around literary athlete. He was born in Missouri, on the thirty-first of January, 1872, studied at Western Reserve and later at Yale, where he took the degree of M.A. in 1899. He is of course best known as a novelist and playwright; his novel The Thirteenth Commandment (1916) and his play Excuse Me (1911) are among his most successful productions. His works in prose fiction are conscientiously realistic and the finest of them are accurate chronicles of metropolitan life; while his short stories, In a Little Town (1917) are, like those of William Allen White, truthful both in their representation of village manners in the West, and in their recognition of spiritual values. In view of the "up-to-dateness" of Mr. Hughes's novels, it is rather curious that his one long poem Gyges' Ring (1901), which was written during his student days at Yale, should be founded on Greek legend. Yet Mr. Hughes has been a student of Greek all his life, and has made many translations from the original. I do not care much for Gyges' Ring; it is hammered out rather than created. But some of the author's short poems, to which he has often composed his own musical accompaniment, I find full of charm. Best of all, I think, is the imaginative and delightful.
WITH A FIRST READER
Dear little child, this little book
Is less a primer than a key
To sunder gates where wonder waits
Your "Open Sesame!"
These tiny syllables look large;
They'll fret your wide, bewildered eyes;
But "Is the cat upon the mat?"
Is passport to the skies.
For, yet awhile, and you shall turn
From Mother Goose to Avon's swan;
From Mary's lamb to grim Khayyam,
And Mancha's mad-wise Don.
You'll writhe at Jean Valjean's disgrace;
And D'Artagnan and Ivanhoe
Shall steal your sleep; and you shall weep
At Sidney Carton's woe.
You'll find old Chaucer young once more,
Beaumont and Fletcher fierce with fire;
At your demand, John Milton's hand
Shall wake his ivory lyre.
And learning other tongues, you'll learn
All times are one; all men, one race;
Hear Homer speak, as Greek to Greek;
See Dante, face to face.
Arma virumque shall resound;
And Horace wreathe his rhymes afresh;
You'll rediscover Laura's lover;
Meet Gretchen in the flesh.
Oh, could I find for the first time
The Churchyard Elegy again!
Retaste the sweets of new-found Keats;
Read Byron now as then!
Make haste to wander these old roads,
O envied little parvenue;
For all things trite shall leap alight
And bloom again for you!
Robert Munger, B.A., 1897, published in 1912 a volume called The Land of Lost Music. He is a lyric poet. Melody seems as natural to him as speech.
There is a land uncharted of meadows and shimmering mountains,
Stiller than moonlight silence brooding and wan,
The land of long-wandering music and dead unmelodious fountains
Of singing that rose in the dreams of them that are gone.
That rose in the dreams of the dead and that rise in the
dreams of the living,
Fleeting, bodiless songs that passed in the night,
Winging away on the moment of wonder their cadence was giving
Into the deeps of the valleys of stifled delight.
Richard Butler Glaenzer, B.A. 1898, whose verses have frequently been seen in various periodicals, collected them in Beggar and King, 1917. His poems cover a wide range of thought and feeling, but I like him best when he is most whimsical, as in
COMPARISONS
Jupiter, lost to Vega's realm,
Lights his lamp from the sun-ship's helm:
Big as a thousand earths, and yet
Dimmed by the glow of a cigarette!
Mr. Glaenzer has published a number of verse criticisms of contemporary writers, which he calls Snapshots. These display considerable penetration; perhaps the following is fairly illustrative.
CABLE
To read your tales
Is like opening a cedar-box
Of ante-bellum days,
A box holding the crinoline and fan
And the tortoise-shell diary
With flowers pressed between the leaves
Belonging to some languid grande dame
Of Creole New Orleans.
Benjamin R. C. Low, B.A. 1902, a practising lawyer, has published four or five volumes of poems, including The Sailor who has Sailed (1911), A Wand and Strings (1913) and The House that Was (1915). He is seen at his best in These United States, dedicated to Alan Seeger, which appeared in the Boston Transcript, 7 February, 1917. This is an original, vigorous work, full of the unexpected, and yet seen to be true as soon as expressed. His verses show a constantly increasing grasp of material, and I look for finer things from his pen.
Although Mr. Low seems to be instinctively a romantic poet, he is fond of letting his imaginative sympathy play on common scenes in city streets; as in The Sandwich Man.
The lights of town are pallid yet
With winter afternoon;
The sullied streets are dank and wet,
The halted motors fume and fret,
The world turns homeward soon.
There is no kindle in the sky,
No cheering sunset flame;
I have no help from passers-by,—
They part, and give good-night; but I….
Walk with another's name.
I have no kith, nor kin, nor home
Wherein to turn to sleep;
No star-lamp sifts me through the gloam,
I am the driven, wastrel foam
On a subsiding deep.
I do not toil for love, or fame,
Or hope of high reward;
My path too low for praise or blame,
I struggle on, each day the same,
My panoply—a board.
Who gave me life I do not know,
Nor what that life should be,
Or why I live at all; I go,
A dead leaf shivering with snow,
Under a worn-out tree.
The lights of town are blurred with mist,
And pale with afternoon,—
Of gold they are, and amethyst:
Dull pain is creeping at my wrist….
The world turns homeward soon.
A poet of national reputation is William Rose Benét, who was graduated in 1907. Mr. Benét came to Yale from Augusta, Georgia, and since his graduation has been connected with the editorial staff of the Century Magazine. At present he is away in service in France, where his adventurous spirit is at home. He may have taken some of his reputation with him, for he is sure to be a favourite over there; but the fame he left behind him is steadily growing. The very splendour of romance glows in his spacious poetry; he loves to let his imagination run riot, as might be guessed merely by reading the names on his books. To every one who has ever been touched by the love of a quest, his title-pages will appeal: The Great White Wall, a tale of "magic adventure, of war and death"; Merchants from Cathay (1913), The Falconer of God (1914), The Burglar of the Zodiac (1917). His verses surge with vitality, as in The Boast of the Tides. He is at his best in long, swinging, passionate rhythms. Unfortunately in the same measures he is also at his worst. His most potent temptation is the love of noise, which makes some of his less artistic verse sound like organized cheering.
But when he gets the right tune for the right words, he is irresistible. There is no space here to quote such a rattling ballad—like a frenzy of snare-drums—as Merchants from Cathay, but it is not mere sound and fury, it is not swollen rhetoric, it is an inspired poem. No one can read or hear it without being violently aroused. Mr. Benét is a happy-hearted poet, singing with gusto of the joy of life.
ON EDWARD WEBBE, ENGLISH GUNNER
He met the Danske pirates off Tuttee;
Saw the Chrim burn "Musko"; speaks with bated breath
Of his sale to the great Turk, when peril of death
Chained him to oar their galleys on the sea
Until, as gunner, in Persia they set him free
To fight their foes. Of Prester John he saith
Astounding things. But Queen Elizabeth
He worships, and his dear Lord on Calvary.
Quaint is the phrase, ingenuous the wit
Of this great childish seaman in Palestine,
Mocked home through Italy after his release
With threats of the Armada; and all of it
Warms me like firelight jewelling old wine
In some ghost inn hung with the golden fleece!
Arthur Colton, B.A. 1890, is as quiet and reflective as Mr. Benét is strenuous. Has any one ever better expressed the heart of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde than in these few words?
A smile, of flowers, and fresh May, across
The dreamy, drifting face of old Romance;
The same reiterate tale of love and loss
And joy that trembles in the hands of chance;
And midst his rippling lines old Geoffrey stands,
Saying, "Pray for me when the tale is done,
Who see no more the flowers, nor the sun."
Mr. Colton collected many of his poems in 1907, under the title Harps Hung Up in Babylon. He had moved from New Haven to New York.
Allan Updegraff, who left college before taking his degree, a member of the class of 1907, recently turned from verse to prose, and wrote an admirable novel, Second Youth. He is, however, a true poet, and any one might be proud to be the author of
THE TIME AND THE PLACE
Will you not come? The pines are gold with evening
And breathe their old-time fragrance by the sea;
You loved so well their spicy exhalation,—
So smiled to smell it and old ocean's piquancy;
And those weird tales of winds and waves' relation—
Could you forget? Will you not come to me?
See, 'tis the time: the last long gleams are going,
The pine-spires darken, mists rise waveringly;
The gloaming brings the old familiar longing
To be re-crooned by twilight voices of the sea.
And just such tinted wavelets shoreward thronging—
Could you forget things once so dear—and me?
Whatever of the waves is ceaseless longing,
And of the twilight immortality:
The urge of some wild, inchoate aspiration
Akin to afterglow and stars and winds and sea:
This hour makes full and pours out in libation,—
Could you forget? Will you not come to me?
What golden galleons sailed into the sunset
Not to come home unto eternity:
What souls went outward hopeful of returning,
This time and tide might well call back across the sea.
Did we not dream so while old Wests were burning?
Could you forget such once-dear things—and me?
From the dimmed sky and long grey waste of waters,
Lo, one lone sail on all the lonely sea
A moment blooms to whiteness like a lily,
As sudden fades, is gone, yet half-seems still to be;
And you,—though that last time so strange and stilly,—
Though you are dead, will you not come to me?
Lee Wilson Dodd, at present in service in France, was graduated in 1899, and for some years was engaged in the practice of the law. This occupation he abandoned for literature in 1907. He is the author of several successful plays, and has published two volumes of verse, The Modern Alchemist (1906) and The Middle Miles (1915). His growth in the intervening years will be apparent to any one who compares the two books; there is in his best work a combination of fancy and humour. He loves to write about New England gardens and discovers beauty by the very simple process of opening his eyes at home. The following poem is characteristically sincere:
TO A NEO-PAGAN
Your praise of Nero leaves me cold:
Poems of porphyry and of gold,
Palatial poems, chill my heart.
I gaze—I wonder—I depart.
Not to Byzantium would I roam
In quest of beauty, nor Babylon;
Nor do I seek Sahara's sun
To blind me to the hills of home.
Here am I native; here the skies
Burn not, the sea I know is grey;
Wanly the winter sunset dies.
Wanly comes day.
Yet on these hills and near this sea
Beauty has lifted eyes to me,
Unlustful eyes, clear eyes and kind;
While a clear voice chanted—
_"They who find
"Me not beside their doorsteps, know
"Me never, know me never, though
"Seeking, seeking me, high and low,
"Forth on the far four winds they go!"
Therefore your basalt, jade, and gems,
Your Saracenic silver, your
Nilotic gods, your diadems
To bind the brows of Queens, impure,
Perfidious, passionate, perfumed—these
Your petted, pagan stage-properties,
Seem but as toys of trifling worth.
For I have marked the naked earth
Beside my doorstep yield to the print
Of a long light foot, and flash with the glint
Of crocus-gold—
Crocus-gold!
Crocus-gold no mill may mint
Save the Mill of God—
The Mill of God!
The Mill of God with His angels in't!
Other Yale poets are W. B. Arvine, 1903, whose book Hang Up Philosophy (1911), particularly excels in the interpretation of natural scenery; Frederick M. Clapp, 1901, whose volume On the Overland (since republished in America) was in process of printing in Bruges in 1914, when the Germans entered the old town, and smashed among other things, the St. Catherine Press. Just fifteen copies of Mr. Clapp's book had been struck off, of which I own one; Donald Jacobus, 1908, whose Poems (1914) are richly meditative; James H. Wallis, 1906, who has joined the ranks of poets with The Testament of William Windune and Other Poems (1917); Leonard Bacon, 1909, who modestly called his book, published in the year of his graduation, The Scrannel Pipe; Kenneth Band, 1914, who produced two volumes of original verse while an undergraduate; Archibald Mac Leish, 1915, whose Tower of Ivory, a collection of lyrics, appeared in 1917; Elliot Griffis, a student in the School of Music, who published in 1918 under an assumed name a volume called Rain in May; and I may close this roll-call by remarking that those who have seen his work have a staunch faith in the future of Stephen Vincent Benét. He is a younger brother of William, and is at present a Yale undergraduate. Mr. Benét was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-second of July, 1898. His home is at Augusta, Georgia. Before entering college, and when he was seventeen, he published his first volume of poems, Five Men and Pompey (1915). This was followed in 1917 by another book, The Drug Shop. His best single production is the Cook prize poem, The Hemp.
APPENDIX
I Have a Rendezvous with Death
The remarkably impressive and beautiful poem by Alan Seeger which bears the above title naturally attracted universal attention. I had supposed the idea originated with Stephen Crane, who, in his novel The Red Badge of Courage, Chapter IX, has the following paragraph:
At last they saw him stop and stand motionless. Hastening up, they perceived that his face wore an expression telling that he had at last found the place for which he had struggled. His spare figure was erect; his bloody hands were quietly at his side. He was waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet. He was at the rendezvous. They paused and stood, expectant.
But I am informed both by Professor F. N. Robinson of Harvard and by Mr. Norreys Jephson O'Conor that the probable source of the title of the poem is Irish. Professor Robinson writes me, "The Irish poem that probably suggested to Seeger the title of his Rendezvous is the Reicne Fothaid Canainne (Song of Fothad Canainne), published by Kuno Meyer in his Fianaigecht (Dublin, 1910), pp. 1-21. Seeger read the piece at one of my Celtic Conferences, and was much impressed by it. He got from it only his title and the fundamental figure of a rendezvous with Death, the Irish poem being wholly different from his in general purport. Fothad Canainne makes a tryst with the wife of Ailill Flann, but is slain in battle by Ailill on the day before the night set for the meeting. Then the spirit of Fothad (or, according to one version, his severed head) sings the reicne to the woman and declares (st. 3): 'It is blindness for one who makes a tryst to set aside the tryst with death.'"
Miss Amy Lowell, however, believes that Seeger got the idea from a French poet. Wherever he got it, I believe that he made it his own, for he used it supremely well, and it will always be associated with him.
At Harvard, Alan Seeger took the small and special course in Irish, and showed enthusiasm for this branch of study. Wishing to find out something about his undergraduate career, I wrote to a member of the Faculty, and received the following reply: "Many persons found him almost morbidly indifferent and unresponsive, and he seldom showed the full measure of his powers…. I grew to have a strong liking for him personally as well as a respect for his intellectual power. But I should never have expected him to show the robustness of either mind or body which we now know him to have possessed. He was frail and sickly in appearance, and seemed to have a temperament in keeping with his physique. It took a strong impulse to bring him out and disclose his real capacity."
There is no doubt that the war gave him this impulse, and that the poem I Have a Rendezvous with Death must be classed among the literature directly produced by the great struggle. After four years, I should put at the head of all the immense number of verses inspired by the war John Masefield's August 1914, Alan Seeger's I Have a Rendezvous with Death, and Rupert Brooke's The Soldier; and of all the poems written by men actually fighting, I should put Alan Seeger's first.
While reading these proofs, the news comes of the death of a promising young American poet, Joyce Kilmer, a sergeant in our army, who fell in France, August, 1918. He was born 6 December, 1866, was a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia, and had published a number of poems. His supreme sacrifice nobly closed a life filled with beauty in word and deed.