Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914

by Unknown

III

October earth, with scarlet maple-leaf,
With oak-leaves brown, with flaming leaves and pale;
Mysterious autumn, symbol of all grief,
Symbol of lives that die and hopes that fail:
Now on the threshing-floor has fallen the flail,
The hands are elsewhere that have stored the grain;
Now comes the season of snows and bitter rain.

Weeks passed.... And then one day there came a note
To New York for this youth ... he tore and read.
It was that girl he played with on the boat....
Scarcely three shaky lines ... in which she said,
That she was sick with typhoid, nearly dead,—
Wanted to say she loved him; then she cried,
O God, if he would come before she died!—

Loved him!... a blackness fell; and in his eyes,
So long unused, and even now ashamed,
He felt the warm tears quickening to rise....
Loved him!—he had not known.... Could he be blamed?—
Then a great light of sorrow in him flamed,—
And bitterness, his sight swam quickly dim,—
Thinking how little it had meant to him!

Scarce knowing why, he packed his things and went....
He was surprised, on seeing her, to find how lovely
she had been, though pale and spent....
He sat beside her, striving to be kind,
Stroking her forehead.... Yet, she had divined,
And known too bitterly, before she died,
This man had never loved her, but had lied....

And he knew this: he knew that she had known;
In her dark eyes he saw the mastered yearning,
All the unspoken love that died in moan,
Shrunk on itself, through all her body burning....
And many days the memory came returning
Of her last kiss,—quivering, wet with tears,—
Her clinging hands, her brimmed eyes dark with fears....

Until at times a sudden terror came
Lest, through great pity, he should love one dead,—
So burning sweet recurred in him this shame,
So haunted him those eyes, that fallen head;
The lips that pleaded so, the words she said,—
Pathetic words!—these haunted him a space;
Then, in the dark of time he lost her face....

O Autumn! bringing to old adventures death,
Sadness at all things past, things passing still,—
You touched this love with strange and dreadful breath;
Easy as leaf is human love to chill,—
Easy as leaf is human to kill;
Yet beautiful is that death with sudden flame,
Ere it goes down to darkness, whence it came!...

The Poetry Journal Conrad Aiken

“IF YOU SHOULD CEASE TO LOVE ME”

If you should cease to love me, tell me so!
I could not bear to feel your ardent hand
That waked the chords of life to understand,
Hold mine less closely; no, belovèd, no;
If you should cease to love me, tell me so!

If you should cease to love me, do not dare
To meet me with a masque of tenderness;
I could not stoop to suffer one caress
That any other had the right to share,—
If you should cease to love me, do not dare!

If you should cease to love me, do not fear—
I would not have you think I made one claim.
If your great love should pass, there is no blame;
For love grown cold, I would not shed a tear;—
If you should cease to love me, do not fear!

If you should cease to love me, let us part,
As friends who part for all eternity;
Let us make grave the reverent obsequy
For what was once our very soul and heart—
If you should cease to love me, let us part!

But while you love me, keep our hearts’ deep faith
As some High Priest would guard the holy place;
Let me not see the shame upon your face
Of one unworthy of Love’s vital breath,
So while you love me, keep our hearts’ high faith!

Thus, if you cease to love me, save my soul
By having kept our love so pure and high
That if the time must come when it shall die,
I may retain my treasure fair and whole,—
If you should cease to love me,—save my soul!

Scribner’s Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

VAIN EXCUSE

Be patient, Life, when Love is at the gate,
And when he enters let him be at home.
Think of the roads that he has had to roam,
Think of the years that he has had to wait.

But if I let Love in I shall be late.
Another has come first, there is no room;
And I am busy at the thoughtful loom;
Let Love be patient, the importunate.

O Life, be idle, and let Love come in,
And give thy dreamy hair that Love may spin.

But Love himself is idle with his song.
Let Love come last, and then may Love last long.

Be patient, Life, for Love is not the last;
Be patient now with Death, for Love has passed.

The Trend Walter Conrad Arensberg

SONNET XXX

You mean, my friend, you do not greatly care
For these harsh portraits I have lately done?
You like my old style better,—like the rare
Enamelled softness of that princess-one?
True, this old woman, with the sunken throat
Painted like cordage, is not sweet to view.
Perhaps the blear whites of her eyes connote
No element of loveliness to you.
Ah yes, we all must love the sapphire lake,
The rainbow, and the rose,—but these alone?
Or is there some slight wonder where pines shake
On bare-ribbed mountain-peaks of shattered stone?
So these disturb? I fear this is the end
Of days when I shall please your taste, my friend.

The Forum Arthur Davison Ficke

LOST TREASURE

You know deep in your heart, it could not last—
And, when a wind, newborn on some hillside—
(Some fair tall hill the other side of Crete)
Came laden with the dear and odorous past—
(Laden with scents of gardens that have died,
Buried in dust, not any longer sweet.)

Then, realized, all the unlovely years
Lay on your heart, like those old gardens’ dust;
You had forgotten how your life was fair,
For all the memories were dulled with tears
Since shed, and unsuspected moth and rust
Ate deep, and naught remembered was but care.

So is your treasure lost, vanished away—
Nothing but wind and half-shut eyes and grass—
Nothing of now but strivings after then.
And naught heard in the clear air of to-day
But dusty wings that crumble as they pass—
You have not strength to make them live again.

The Masses Lydia Gibson

OLD FAIRINGDOWN

Soft as a treader on mosses
I go through the village that sleeps;
The village too early abed,
For the night still shuffles, a gypsy,
In the woods of the east,
And the west remembers the sun.

Not all are asleep; there are faces
That lean from the walls of the gardens.
Look sharply, or you will not see them,
Or think them another stone in the wall.
I spoke to a stone, and it answered
Like an agèd rock that crumbles;
Each falling piece was a word.
“Five have I buried,” it said,
“And seven are over the sea.”

Here is a hut that I pass,
So lowly it has no brow,
And dwarfs sit within at a table.
A boy waits apart by the hearth;
On his face is the patience of firelight,
But his eyes seek the door and a far-world
It is not the call to the table he waits,
But the call of the sea-rimmed forests,
And cities that stir in a dream.
I haste by the low-browed door,
Lest my arms go in and betray me,
A mother jealously passing.
He will go, the pale dwarf, and walk tall among giants;
The child with his eyes on the far land,
And fame like a young curled leaf in his heart.

The stream that darts from the hanging hill
Like a silver wing that must sing as it flies,
Is folded and still on the breast
Of the village that sleeps.
Each mute old house is more old than the other,
And each wears its vines like ragged hair
Round the half-blind windows.
If a child should laugh, if a girl should sing,
Would the houses rub the vines from their eyes,
And listen and live?
A voice comes now from a cottage,
A voice that is young and must sing,
A honeyed stab on the air,
And the houses do not wake.

I look through the leaf-blowsed window,
And start as a gazer who, passing a death-vault,
Sees Life sitting hopeful within.
She is young, but a woman, round-breasted,
Waiting the peril of Eve;
And she makes the shadows about her sweet
As the glooms that play in a pine-wood.
She sits at a harpsichord (old as the walls are),
And longing flows in the trickling, fairy notes
Like a hidden brook in a forest
Seeking and seeking the sun.

I have watched a young tree on the edge of a wood
When the mist is weaving and drifting;
Slowly the boughs disappear, and the leaves reach out
Like the drowning hands of children,
Till a grey blur quivers cold
Where the green grace drank of the sun.
So now, as I gaze, the morrows
Creep weaving and winding their mist
Round the beauty of her who sings.
They hide the soft rings of her hair,
Dear as a child’s curling fingers;
They shut out the trembling sun of eyes
That are deep as a bending mother’s;
And her bridal body is scarfed with their chill.

For old, and old, is the story;
Over and over I hear it,
Over and over I listen to murmurs
That are always the same in these towns that sleep;
Where, grey and unwed, a woman passes,
Her cramped, drab gown the bounds of a world
She holds with grief and silence;
And a gossip whose tongue alone is unwithered
Mumbles the tale by her affable gate;
How the lad must go, and the girl must stay,
Singing alone to the years and a dream;
Then a letter, a rumor, a word,
From the land that reaches for lovers
And gives them not back;
And the maiden looks up with a face that is old;
Her smile, as her body, is evermore barren;
Her cheek like the bark of the beech-tree
Where climbs the grey winter.

Now have I seen her young,
The lone girl singing,
With the full, round breast and the berry lip,
And heart that runs to a dawn-rise
On new-world mountains.
The weeping ash in the dooryard
Gathers the song in its boughs,
And the gown of dawn she will never wear.

I can listen no more; good-by, little town, old Fairingdown.
I climb the long, dark hillside,
But the ache I have found here I cannot outclimb.
O Heart, if we had not heard, if we did not know
There is that in the village that never will sleep!

Hampshire, England.

Scribner’s Olive Tilford Dargan

IN THE ROMAN FORUM

Nothing but beauty, now.
No longer at the point of goading fear
The sullen, tributary world comes near
Before all-subjugating Rome to bow.
No more the pavement of the Forum rings
To breathless Victory’s exultant tread
Before the heavy march of captive kings.
Here stood the royal dead
In sculptured immortality; their gaze
Remote above the turmoil of the street
Hoarse with its living struggle at their feet.
Here spoke the law—that voice of bronze was heard
By all the world, and stirred
The latent mind of nations in the bud.
Bright with the laurels, bitter with the blood
Of heroes upon heroes was this place
Where the strong heart of an imperial race
Beat with the essence of a man’s life.
Princes and people evermore at strife—
Incense and worship—clash of armored rage—
Ambition soaring up the sky like flame—
Interminable war that mortals wage
From century to century the same.
Still Fortune holds the crown for those who dare;
Mankind in many a distant otherwhere
Leaps panting toward the promise of her face—
But here, no more of coveting nor care.
No longer here the weltering human tide
Sluices the market-place and scatters wide
The weak as foam, to perish where they list.
Now by the Sovereign Silence purified,
Spring showers all with fragrant amethyst.
Were once these pulses violent and swift
As those that shake the cities of to-day?
How indolently sweet the petals drift
From yonder nodding spray!
Warming their broidered raiment in the sun,
The little-bright-eyed lizards bask and run
O’er fallen temples gracious in decay.
Man’s arrogance with calculated art
Boasted in marble—now the quiet heart
Of the Great Mother dreams eternal things
In brief, bright roses and ethereal green,
Or more exuberant, sings
In poppies poured profusely to the air
From secret hoards of scarlet. Nothing seen
But swoons with beauty—beauty everywhere—
Nothing but beauty ... now.
Here is the immortality of Rome.
Not where the city rises, dome on dome,
Seek we the living soul of ancient might,
But in this temple of green silence—here
Flame purer than the vestal is alight.
The world again draws near
In reverence, but now it comes to pay
The tribute of a nobler coin than fear.
In wondering worship, not in fierce dismay,
Men bow the knee to what of Rome remains.
Time’s long lustration has effaced her stains,
All that is perishable now is past
And earth her portion tenderly transmutes
To evanescent beauty of her own—
Jubilant flowers and nectar-breathing fruits—
Living in deathless glory at the last
Divinity alone.

The Bellman Amelia Josephine Burr

ASH WEDNESDAY
(After hearing a lecture on the origins of religion)

Here in the lonely chapel I will wait,
Here will I rest, if any rest may be;
So fair the day is, and the hour so late,
I shall have few to share the blessed calm with me.
Calm and soft light, sweet inarticulate calls!
One shallow dish of eerie golden fire
By molten chains above the altar swinging,
Draws my eyes up from the shadowed stalls
To the warm chancel-dome;
Crag-like the clustered organs loom,
Yet from their thunder-threatening choir
Flows but a ghostly singing—
Half-human voices reaching home
In infinite, tremulous surge and falls.
Light on his stops and keys,
And pallor on the player’s face,
Who, listening rapt, with finger-skill to seize
The pattern of a mood’s elusive grace,
Captures his spirit in an airy lace
Of fading, fading harmonies.
Oh, let your coolness soothe
My weariness, frail music, where you keep
Tryst with the even-fall;
Where tone by tone you find a pathway smooth
To yonder gleaming cross, or nearer creep
Along the bronzèd wall,
Where shade by shade thro’ deeps of brown
Comes the still twilight down.

Wilt thou not rest, my thought?
Wouldst thou go back to that pain-breeding room
Whence only by strong wrenchings thou wert brought?
O weary, weary questionings,
Will ye pursue me to the altar rail
Where my old faith for sanctuary clings,
And back again my heart reluctant hale
Yonder, where crushed against the cheerless wall
Tiptoe I glimpsed the tier on tier
Of faces unserene and startled eyes—
Such eyes as on grim surgeon-work are set,
On desperate outmaneuverings of doom?
Still must I hear
The boding voice with cautious rise and fall
Tracking relentless to its lair
Each fever-bred progenitor of faith,
Each fugitive ancestral fear?
Still must I follow, as the wraith
Of antique awe toward a wreck-making beach
Drives derelict?
Nay, rest, rest, my thought,
Where long-loved sound and shadow teach
Quietness to conscience overwrought.

Harken! The choristers, the white-robed priest
Move thro’ the chapel dim
Sounding of warfare and the victor’s palm,
Of valiant marchings, of the feast
Spread for the pilgrim in a haven’d calm.
How on the first lips of my steadfast race
Sounded that battle hymn,
Quaint heaven-vauntings, with God’s gauntlet flung,
To me bequeathed, from age to age,
My challenge and my heritage!
“The Lord is in His holy place”—
How in their ears the herald voice has rung!
Now will I make bright their sword,
Will pilgrim in their ancient path,
Will haunt the temple of their Lord;
Truth that is neither variable nor hath
Shadow of turning, I will find
In the wise ploddings of their faithful mind;
Of finding not, as in this frustrate hour
By question hounded, waylaid by despair,
Yet in these uses shall I know His power
As the warm flesh by breathing knows the air.

O futile comfort! My faith-hungry heart
Still in your sweetness tastes a poisonous sour;
Far off, far off I quiver ’neath the smart
Of old indignities and obscure scorn
Indelibly on man’s proud spirit laid,
That now in time’s ironic masquerade
Minister healing to the hurt and worn!
What are those streams that from the altar pour
Where goat and ox and human captive bled
To feed the blood-lust of the murderous priest?
I cannot see where Christ’s dear love is shed,
So deep the insatiate horror washes red
Flesh-stains and frenzy-sears and gore.
Beneath that Cross, whereon His hands outspread,
What forest shades behold what shameful rites
Of maidenhood surrendered to the beast
In obscene worship on midsummer nights!
What imperturbable disguise
Enwraps these organs with a chaste restraint
To chant innocuous hymns and litanies
For sinner and adoring saint,
Which yet inherit like an old blood-taint
Some naked caperings in the godliest tune,—
Goat-songs and jests strong with the breath of Pan,
That charmed the easy cow-girl and her man
In uncouth tryst beneath a scandalous moon!
Ah, could I hearken with their trust,
Or see with their pure-seeing eyes
Who of the frame of these dear mysteries
Were not too wise!
Why cannot I, as in a stronger hour,
Outface the horror that defeats me now?
Hare I not reaped complacent the rich power
That harvest from this praise and bowing low?
On this strong music have I mounted up,
At yonder rail broke bread, and shared the holy cup,
And on that cross have hung, and felt God’s pain
Sorrowing, sorrowing, till the world shall end.

Not from these forms my questionings come
That serving truth are purified,
But from the truth itself, the way, the goal,
One challenge vast that strikes faith dumb—
If truth be fickle, who shall be our guide?
“Truth that is neither variable, nor hath
Shadow of turning?” Ah, where turns she not!
Where yesterday she stood,
Now the horizon empties—lo, her steps
Where yonder scholar woos, are hardly cold,
Yet shall he find her never, but the thought
Mantling within him like her blood
Shall from his eloquence fade, and leave his words
Flavor’d with vacant quaintness for his son.
What crafty patience, scholar, hast thou used,
Useless ere it was begun—
What headless waste of wing,
Beating vainly round and round!
In no one Babel were the tongues confused,
But they who handle truth, from sound to sound
Master another speech continuously.
Deaf to familiar words, our callous ear
Will quiver to the edge of utterance strange;
When truth to God’s truth-weary sight draws near,
Cannot God see her till she suffer change?
Must ye then change, my vanished youth,
Home customs of my dreams?
Change and farewell!
Farewell, your lost phantasmic truth
That will not constant dwell,
But flees the passion of our eyes
And leaves no hint behind her
Whence she dawns or whither dies,
Or if she live at all, or only for a moment seems.

Here tho’ I only dream I find her,
Here will I watch the twilight darken.
Yonder the scholar’s voice spins on
Mesh upon mesh of loveless fate;
Here will I rest while truth deserts him still.
What hath she left thee, Brother, but thy voice?
After her, have thy will,
And happy be thy choice!
Here rather will I rest, and harken
Voices longer dead but longer loved than thine.

Yet still my most of peace is more unrest,
As one who plods a summer road
Feels the coolness his own motion stirs,
But when he stops the dead heat smothers him.
Here in this calm my soul is weariest,
Each question with malicious goad
Pressing the choice that still my soul defers
To visioned hours not thus eclipsed and dim,
Lest in my haste I deem
That truth’s invariable part
Is her eluding of man’s heart.
Farewell, calm priest who pacest slow
After the stalwart-marching choir!
Have men thro’ thee taught God their dear desire?
Hath God thro’ thee absolvèd sin?
What is thy benediction, if I go
Sore perplexed and wrought within?
Open the chapel doors, and let
Boisterous music play us out
Toward the flaring molten west
Whither the nerve-racked day is set;
Let the loud world, flooding back,
Gulf us in its hungry rout;
Rest? What part have we in rest?

Boy with the happy face and hurrying feet,
Who with thy friendly cap’s salute
Sendest bright hail across the college street,
If thou couldst see my answering lips, how mute,
How loth to take thy student courtesy!
What truth have I for thee?
Rather thy wisdom, lad, impart,
Share thy gift of strength with me.
Still with the past I wrestle, but the future girds thy heart.
Clutter of shriveled yesterdays that clothe us like a shell,
Thy spirit sloughs their bondage off, to walk newborn and free.
All things the human heart hath learned—God, heaven, earth, and hell—
Thou weighest not for what they were, but what they still may be.
Whether the scholar delve and mine for faith-wreck buried deep,
Or the priest his rules and holy rites, letter and spirit, keep,
Toil or trust in breathless dust, they shall starve at last for truth;
Scholar and priest shall live from thee, who art eternal youth.
Holier if thou dost tread it, every path the prophets trod;
Clearer where thou dost worship, rise the ancient hymns to God;
Not by the priest but by thy prayers are altars sanctified;
Strong with new love where thou dost kneel, the cross whereon Christ died.

Yale Review John Erskine

THE LAGGARD SONG

I had no heart to write to thee in prose,
The sadness in me sore demanded song;
But the song came not,—laggard as the birds,
That will not sing us back the little leaves.
O winter of my heart—when comes the spring?
I am sore weary of these deathlike days,
This shroud unheaving of eternal snow,—
O winter of my heart—when comes the spring?

’Tis time to answer, O nightingale,—
’Tis thine to sing the winter all away,
Release the world from bondage, and bring back
The sound of many waters and of trees,
And little sleeping lives anumb with cold,—
Yea! all the resurrection of the world.
O winter of my heart! O nightingale!

Harper’s Richard Le Gallienne

GROTESQUE

With the first light on the skyline came the rapping of the sickles
And the brown arms of the reapers bent to toil another morn;
Close beside me in the glimmer, in the golden sweep and shimmer,
Knelt a reaper strange among us, crooning thro’ the ragged corn:
“Born of sorrow,
Gone to-morrow—
Gone to lie in yonder valley where their fathers long have lain;
Men who know not ship nor sabre,
Each but drudges by his neighbor,
And the fields wherein they labor are a heritage of pain!”

Sleep was heavy on our eyelids when a lone star followed sunset,
But we missed the pale young stranger, none knew whither he had gone—
Then, from where the dead are lying, with the nightwind’s tender sighing
Rose and fell a last low cadence of the voice we heard at dawn:
“Weary reapers,
Early sleepers—
Brief the glow that drifts across them from the waning August moon:
These that rest beyond its gleaming
Lie unvexed of drift or dreaming,
And the fields with harvest teeming have forgot them all too soon!”

Boston Transcript Ruth Guthrie Harding

BALLADE OF A DEAD LADY

All old fair things are in their places,
I count them over, and miss but one;
The April flowers are running races,
The green world stretches its arms to the sun;
The nuptial dance of the days is begun—
The same young stars in the same old skies;
And all that was lost again is won—
But where have they hidden those great eyes?

All have come back—dogwood and daisies—
All things ripple and riot and run;
Swallow and swallow in aery mazes,
A fairy frolic of fire and fun;
The same old enchanted web is spun,
With diamond dews for the same old flies;
Yet all is new, spite of Solomon—
But where have they hidden those great eyes?

Lovely as love are the new-born faces—
God knows they are fair to look upon;
And my heart goes out to the young embraces,
To the flight of the young to the young;
But, Time, what is it that thou hast done?
For my heart ’mid all the blossom cries:
“Roses are many, the Rose is gone—
Ah! where have they hidden those great eyes?”