Tasting the Earth

Copyright (C) 1943 by The Estate of Mona Gould.
On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself, Wisdom-giving and sombre with the unremitting love of ages. There was dank soil in my mouth, And bitter sea on my lips In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.
James Oppenheim
Copyright, Canada, 1943 By Mona Gould All rights reserved - no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper. Printed in Canada T.H. Best Printing Co., Limited Toronto. Ont.
To Graham and John
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf Inc., publisher, New York, for permission to use the lines from Tasting the Earth by James Oppenheim, from his Songs For the New Age (1914), and for permission to reprint to: Saturday Night, Chatelaine, Montreal C.A.A. Year Books, Canadian Forum., Gossip, Montrealer, Canadian Magazine, Woman's Illustrated (London, Eng. ), Woman's Journal (London, Eng.).
Foreword
We all of us know that the ordinary every-day man and woman, the people we brush against in street cars, the people who read the funnies - the people who are like us - are capable of the profoundest depths of feeling and the noblest aspirations. But it is only on the rarest occasions that we happen to see one of them at it, so to speak, and when we do we have a certain sense of shame at intruding on something that really should be private between him and his God.
The artist enables us to see this ordinary man and woman in the moments when they are not ordinary, without any of this sense of intrusion. I think Mona Gould, in most of the verses in this volume, has been exceptionally successful in this kind of revelation, and I think Canada needs it. A number of these verses have been published in Saturday Night during the term of my editorship, and I am very glad that they are now to have a more permanent resting place.