The Project Gutenberg eBook of The flying parliament, and other poems
Title: The flying parliament, and other poems
Author: Edwina Stanton Babcock
Release date: August 16, 2024 [eBook #74264]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: James T. White & Co, 1918
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
THE FLYING PARLIAMENT
AND OTHER POEMS
The
Flying Parliament
and
Other Poems
By
EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK
NEW YORK
JAMES T. WHITE & CO.
1918
COPYRIGHTED 1918 BY
JAMES T. WHITE & CO
DEDICATED TO
CAROLINE LEXOW BABCOCK
1914-1918
CONTENTS
THE FLYING PARLIAMENT
THE SACRED SHIPS
The great gray ships on secret orders steam;
Battalioned boys their dawn-lit land behold
Drifting astern, like towers in a dream;
They watch the havened harbor lights that gleam
Speechless farewell, too tender to be told—
Until within their breasts austere and bold,
The former days remote and alien seem,
And they, the fathers of a Day supreme.
Thus, visioning their service—to a man—
They grim in their stern blitheness, sail to War.
Yea, while we sleep, in one night’s star-lit span—
Youth leaves our shores—to face the Minotaur.
THE FLYING PARLIAMENT
Scene. Venice, November, 1917. The piazza of San Marco.
A chill air emphasizes the weather stains on arcade and collonade. Now and then the pale sunlight glitters faintly on a bit of mosaic, but the lacy fretwork of St. Marks and the Palazzo Giustizia are nearly covered by sandbags and scaffoldings. The statues are all removed from their pedestals. The four famous bronze horses are once more removed; also the giants on the famous clock tower. The winged lion of St. Mark and the little St. Theodore and his crocodile have been carried to places of safety. From the bronze flagstaffs in the Piazza of St. Marks the Italian flags are flying. From afar off there comes the slow booming of guns. Suddenly the piazza is a whirl with pigeons. The guns sound like huge bass chords; the pigeon wings beat a curious suggestion of delicate pastoral themes. The canals are deserted except for one gondola slowly approaching a bridge. An American war correspondent wields the great oar unaccustomedly. The American steps out at a bridge; he makes fast the gondola; he walks slowly into the deserted piazza. Near the bronze base of the flagstaffs is a single child standing among the whirling pigeons. The child has a small bit of black bread in his hand; now and then he breaks off a tiny bit of the bread and throws it to the birds who come eagerly to him.
Child looking at pigeons circling in the sky speaks as though to them:
In the unlibertied air!
Wings of gray instinct,
All opal tinct,
Pulses of pleasure,
Feathery measure—
Wings of delicate vibrant life,
Cutting blue air with halcyon knife;
Sky-strewn garlands of pleasant days,
No more your turret and tower ways!
Nowhere—nowhere
Do hearers your sweet counsels share!
Nowhere—nowhere
Is your place in the militant air!
The American advances slowly; he is clad in khaki, and carries field glasses; his broad brimmed hat is worn down low over his eyes which, burned out and weary, are fixed on the Duomo of St. Marks.
As he notices the Italian flags, his lips close firmly together, and he looks down at the little American flag set in his button-hole. He stares around the deserted piazza and shivers. Taking out his notebook he sits down on the steps of the Duomo and commences writing:
Here in the Piazza
Where the colonnades
Dripped with globules
Of colored beads,
Where delicate shapes
Of Venetian glass
Expanded like flowers
In cavelike booths;
Here where the band played strains,
Wild and rich and forlorn,
Till the very stars dropped down,
Like gold tears on the night;
And the moon, like an orbèd lyre,
Tried to echo the strain
Through strings of fine-drawn cloud....
Here where the musing crowds
Sat in the coffee stalls
Of Florian’s and drank
Tiny glasses of green
Or golden yellow Chartreuse;
In a sweet dazed waking dream—
Here is emptiness now,
Emptiness like a curse,
Emptiness like a house
With the light and life all gone;
All the loving turned to dread,
The children statues of Fear,
The windows closed and stark,
And the pictures turned to the wall,
The people are fled away
To Padua and the plains,
Because the Prussian comes.
All the men are on the lagoons,
With Latin passion and pride
Fighting the Prussians back;
But here in this empty place,
Thronged once by a brilliant world,
Stands a little Venetian child
Feeding the hungry doves.
Child, moving over near the American, curiously watches him at his writing. At last the little one sits soberly down beside the war correspondent, who smiles at him but goes on rapidly scribbling his notes:
Where the yellow sails once sank
Into gold dusted sky;
Where the great green waves crashed on
The lilac shadowed sands,
Grey tides move like a dirge.
Young waters that once lapped
The dream-lanes of canals,
Where marble faces smiled
In shadows green as moss,
Now are wrinkled and old;
The morning-tinted shores
Are now brittle and old;
And here, where on festa days
The banners clasped the breeze,
And the tapestries rolled down
Over the galleries,
And the air-ships, like great beads,
Buoyed them on the sun
Floating over the roofs,
Those days, fanning with sails
And fairy trails of boats,
And somnolent dip of oars—
Those nights, fruited with lights
Spattered with gleam and gold—
All are ended and gone,
Blasted before the guns.
Venetian people are gone,
Fled to Bologna’s plains,
Away from Piave’s floods
To Padua’s pallid walls.
The decadent boom of guns—
Sullen, brutish guns—
Tired, moody guns—
Sick, disillusioned guns—
Is all that comes to the ear.
The child, sitting placidly near the war correspondent, keeps on throwing the tiny crumbs of bread to the pigeons; the American looks at him absently, and then bends again to his writing:
Glutted with fiendish drink
Of hot young human blood;
Brutal ennuyeux! Fat
With soft delicious food
Brought them from every land.
Now the very guns are shamed;
The hideous tanks are shamed;
The fields and mountains are shamed;
The Zeppelins are shamed;
The submarines are shamed;
Men’s faces are set and stern
With an solemn awful shame.
The world turns from its trough,
And knows its swinishness;
The guns are glutted now,
Yet, if the flood be passed
On Piave’s fertile plains,
Venice shall come to their maw;
All the delicate high-bred bones
Of the Bride of the Seas will come
To be crunched by the wild-boar guns
Venice the fragile, grey
Queen of the lamped lagoons—
Of slender lily tower—
Of rich dustcovered bronze—
Of history-crusted stone—
Of luminous Christs and saints
And Gods of golden lands—
Of dreaming palace and port—
Of wingèd winy glass
And vine-hung water-gate—
Venice must go to the guns.
The war correspondent closes his book; getting wearily to his feet he walks around the corner of the Palazzo Giustizia and gazes out on the Grand Canal toward the lagoons. He turns and looks sorrowfully toward the Bridge of Sighs, to the restored Campanile and the Procurate Nuova. The grey pigeons whirl around him; the child follows him.
Child looking earnestly at the American, points to the doves:
(Child, singing:)
Leaves of the steeples and seed of the sea;
They know never our commerce nor barter,
Yet the doves are no longer free.
All of their flight among starry steeples
Fanning of wings over militant peoples,
Brings us no harmony.
Yet the work of the pigeons is not done,
For the work of wings is never done.
American looking down at the child wonderingly:
The child stands gazing up at the American; he keeps mysterious dark eyes fixed upon him answering solemnly:
A song of many lines
And all about the doves.
“Pigeons,” he sings, “are wise
They know their way so well,
For they mark it out by stars
And spiral paths of air;
They know their way so well,
And their way is always home
To quietness and peace—”
The child, keeping his eyes gravely fastened on the war correspondent, chants with a weird insistence:
The meaning of everything;
What makes the flowers grow,
What makes the bright stars fall,
What makes the echoes stay
After the priests’ intoning,
And boom around the walls
Of our cathedral there.
He says to keep on watching
The doves with soaring wings,
The peaceful, happy doves,
For they have a message for men—
Feverish, stupid men
Who are caught in a tangling net
Of their own imaginings.
The American looks puzzled, he puts his hand on the child’s head and searches the large mournful eyes; he mutters something under his breath, and shakes his head sadly.
American caressing the child’s hair:
Are you the only thing
That lives—comes out to the sun?
Do the Venetians hide
In cellars and in tombs—
They who were made of sun?
The palaces are closed,
The gondolas are gone,
But your people—all the play
Of their merry liquid eyes,
The white of their perfect teeth,
The olive glow of their skins,
And their saucy ragged ways;
The dark faced coral women,
The laughing lacemakers,
The choruses clamoring
Under the bobbing lanterns
At night on the canals—
Are they sleeping a happy sleep?
A long siesta-hour?
(Ah! that siesta-hour,
It has grown very long
For many Italian youths.)
Where have the people gone?
The child, slipping from under the war correspondent’s hand, looks away from him up to the pigeons that stream in circles around them, saying simply:
But the Woodcarver and me.
The Woodcarver makes saints
And angels young and sweet;
They poise all over his shop,
They smile at us from the walls,
We sit with the angels there
And eat the bitter bread
The Woodcarver has saved;
Though the guns go snarling on,
We are not much afraid;
We stay to guard the doves.
The Woodcarver has said
They watch over Venice,
So we watch over them.
American to himself:
The child regarding the war correspondent curiously:
Venice is ugly now;
The strangers come no more—
Only the officers come
With charts and clanging boots;
Their talk is swift and stern,
Their eyes are burned like yours,
And no-one ever smiles.
Signori used to come;
My father rowed them around;
They laughed and sang and threw
Money in the canal,
As the Doges once threw rings.
The kind merry strangers!
They loved the bobbing lanterns,
The songs on the water-ways,
And the black gondolas swaying....
They were Americans
And English; yes, and French—
But always Americans,
Always feeding the doves,
Always caressing the doves,
Always protecting the doves!
War correspondent sombrely:
Now we are feeding guns.
The child, his eyes fixed upon the birds, breaks again into song:
In the cortile’s peace,
The soft grey doves came streaming
In ecstasied release;
Doves on my mother’s head
As she walked abroad with her laces,
Doves near the baby’s bed,
Doves in the window places,
Doves fanning the cornices there,
Doves flooding, rippling the square,
Cooing and preening and circling where
The fountain sprayed on its Graces—
Purple breasted graylings that fly
Into the blue tranquillity.
Now it seems they have no sky.
Bombs and smoke and horrors hover....
The day of wings and soaring is over.
The American, half smiling at the child’s fantastic quality—half angry at his pathos:
The war correspondent laughs at his own impatience, then takes the child’s hand, stroking it tenderly and saying:
Is sent into the world
On stronger enduring wings—
The peace of a mighty world,
Rises on sturdier wings.
The doves must rest awhile;
The sky is filling now
With wings of a mightier make.
What of the flying planes,
The noble charging planes,
The squadrons of flying planes,
Sweeping the fields of sky,
Hovering over the earth?
That is the new Parliament.
The wingèd Parliament,
The true Parliament,
Which comes to bring us peace.
Watch in the vault of heaven
Where soaring birdmen fly—
On a splendid errantry,
The Parliament of Peace!
The child smiles doubtfully; but the tenderness in the war correspondent’s voice gains his confidence; he slips his hand into the stranger’s, saying almost gayly:
A wonderful talk of wings.
Oh! come and see the Woodcarver,
And hear his wonderful things,
The way he reads the message
This dreadful war-time brings.
The two cross the deserted piazza toward the cálles where there are many little shops and booths now all boarded up; one, however, remains open. It is a small, dark, dingy cave, with small wooden angels, beautifully carved, festooned over the doorway. As one peers into the dimness of the interior, one has the sense of the fluttering of delicate carved wings. The Woodcarver comes to the door; he has in one hand his chisel, in the other a shapeless block of olive wood. The Woodcarver is old and bowed, but as he lifts his cavernous, dark eyes he smiles, and his whole face is irradiated with a look of the genius of simplicity.
Woodcarver to the war correspondent:
Welcome forestiere!
Strangers are good to see.
It is like those other days,
When they drifted over the square
Like scattered, unstrung beads,
Or corn flung to the doves—
Or stood in the twilight churches,
Staring through the incense,
Hearing the organ roll,
And priests voice imploring
The Virgin’s intercession.
American, placing his hand on the old man’s arm;
Only officials greet me
Along the shivering streets.
Where are the people of Venice?
The lazy and happy and motley?
The vendors and hawkers and idlers?
The shop keepers and glass blowers?
The courtly bankers and merchants?
Ah! it is lonely in Venice.
Woodcarver, his cracked voice faltering:
To the Good St. Anthony.
And we—we only stay
To watch the doves—and pray.
American, looking wistfully about him:
Rather than meet Teutons,
In their compelling drive?
Woodcarver fiercely:
St. Mark has willed it so.
’Tis they who must not leave;
If they leave Venice will fall.
’Tis for that I stay behind,
I and the little child,
To feed and sooth the doves.
And you—how come you here?
You must have been in the field—
Glancing up eagerly at the war correspondent:
American solemnly and reluctantly:
The Woodcarver stand there, looks at the war correspondent for a dazed moment, then jumps suddenly at him snarling into his very face:
The old man looks wildly about him, grasping at the American’s shoulder, and slightly shaking him, sobbing querelously:
To tell a Venetian ear!
The Colleoni armed,
Astride his savage horse
In the Campello there—
A Mercenary, yet,
Filled with Italian pride,
Would fling you back on your words—
Your coward, lying words.
For Italy, retreat?
For Latin blood—retreat?
Was any retreat for France?
For Belgium any retreat?
Another stand perhaps,
Another flash of the eyes,
Another gritting of teeth,
Another steeling of heart,
Another bracing of flesh,
Another surge of the blood,
Another smell of the fray,
Then hell to the weltering hog
That plunges forth on our land,
Gnashing his filthy tusks!
Gas and fire and cold,
Water and steel and smoke,
Roaring fires of hell,
Vermin, disease and wounds
Against them—Latin blood!
Oh! that I had wells of it,
I, a bloodless man,
Faltering—old, and weak,
But I mind me how once it burned—
Fire, blazing and quick—
Floods, scarlet and hot—
Flowers, passionate sweet—
Spirit, dauntless and bold—
Instinct, sure and keen—
Supremest Latin blood!
The old man paused, breathless and trembling; his hand drops weakly from the war correspondent’s shoulder; he draws himself up, saying with gentle dignity:
The American, silent and touched, looks quietly at him; there is sympathy and understanding in his face, yet he remains coolly reflective. The old Woodcarver staggers to his stool, and begins fiercely cutting at the shapeless block of wood. All about the small cavelike shop the sun strikes the smooth glistening bodies of wooden angels, the golden brown nakedness of little cherubs.
The American also sitting down rolls and lights a cigarette, the child collecting shavings and bits of wood from the floor, sits in the doorway sorting them and arranging them in patterns.
The American quietly inhaling his cigarette:
The houses closed and blind;
The opal waters grown dun
With the muddied silt that comes
From the Piave’s plains.
You carve while the cannon booms;
Under your knife there grows
A figure, supple-soft,
Springing from uncouth wood,
And you give it branching wings,
And fashion its gentle face
As though there were angels still....
You go on making angels.
Do the angels know, think you,
Of all the passion and hate,
And waste and cursing and lies,
And pride and fierce world-strife,
Back of the making of wars?
These angels, do they preen
Their wings over it all,
And smile upon us men?
The old Woodcarver for a moment drops his head; he passes his hand across anguished eyes; then he points to the child sitting in the doorstep, and puts his finger on his lip.
Woodcarver, fiercely: