IV
Macdonough lies with Downie in one land.
Victor and vanquished long ago were peers.
Held in the grip of peace an hundred years,
England has laid her hand
In ours, and we have held—and still shall hold—the band
That makes us brothers of the hemispheres;
Yea, still shall keep the lasting brotherhood
Of law and blood.
Yet one whose terror racked us long of yore
Still wreaks upon the world her lawless might:
Out of the deeps again the phantom Fight
Looms on her wings of war,
Sowing in armèd camps and fields her venomed spore,
Embattling monarch’s whim against man’s right,
Trampling with iron hoofs the blooms of time
Back in the slime.
We, who from dreams of justice, dearly wrought,
First rose in the eyes of patient Washington,
And through the molten heart of Lincoln won
To liberty forgot,
Now, standing lone in peace, ’mid titans strange distraught,
Pray much for patience, more—God’s will be done!—
For vision and for power nobly to see
The world made free.
The Outlook Percy MacKaye
THE PROPHET
Jeremiah, will you come?
Will you gather up the multitudes, and wake them with a drum?
Will you dare anoint the chosen ones from all the cattle kind,
And threaten with the fire of God the foolish and the blind?
Jeremiah, Jeremiah, we have waited for you long,
To see the flaming fury of your hate against the wrong,
For we dally in the Temple, and we flee the eye of Truth,
And we waste along the wilderness the glory of our youth.
Jeremiah, Jeremiah, here the lying prophets speak,
Here they flatter in their feebleness the gilded and the sleek;
But their languid pipings die in shame when trumpet cries are heard.
Are you coming? Are you coming? O Prophet of the Word!
The Forum Lyman Bryson
NEWPORT
On these brown rocks the waves dissolve in spray
As when our fathers saw them first alee.
If such a one could come again and see
This ancient haven in its latter day,
These haughty palaces and gardens gay,
These dense, soft lawns, bedecked by many a tree
Borne like a gem from Ind or Araby;
If he could see the race he bred, at play—
Bright like a flock of tropic birds allured
To pause a moment on the southward wing
By these warm sands and by these summer seas—
Would he not cry, “Alas, have I endured
Exile and famine, hate and suffering,
To win religious liberty for these?”
Smart Set Alice Duer Miller
TO A PHOTOGRAPHER
I have known joy and woe and toil and fight
I have lived largely, I have dreamed and planned,
And Time, the sculptor, with a master hand,
Upon my face has wrought for all men’s sight
The lines and seams of Life, of growth and blight,
Of struggle and of service and command;
And now you show me This—this waxen, bland
And placid face—unlined, untroubled, white!
This is not I—this fatuous face you show
Retouched and prettified and smoothed to please,
Put back the wrinkles and the lines I know;
I have spent blood and brain achieving these,
Out of the pain, the sorrow and the wrack,
They are my scars of battle—PUT THEM BACK!
Harper’s Weekly Berton Braley
SONG
Flesh unto flowers,
And flame unto wind,
The cleansing of showers
Shall come to thee blind.
In the night of thy sleeping
The sound of the tide
Shall waken thee weeping
To turn to my side.
Boston Transcript Edward J. O’Brien
SONNET XXXVII
Through vales of Thrace, Peneus’ stream is flowing
Past legend-peopled hillsides to the deep;
From Paestum’s rose-hung plains soft winds are blowing;
The halls of Amber lie in haunted sleep;
The Cornish sea is silent with the Summer
That once bore Iseult from the Irish shore;
And lovely lone Fiesole is dumber
Than when Lorenzo’s garland-guests it wore.
This eve for us the emerald clearness glowing
Over the stream, where late was ruddy might,
Whispers a wonder, dumb to other knowing,—
Known but to you, the silence, and the night.
Our boat drifts breathless; the last light is dying;
Stars, dawn, shall find us here together lying.
The Forum Arthur Davison Ficke
THE HUNTING OF DIAN
In the silence of a midnight lost, lost forevermore,
I stood upon a nameless beach where none had been before,
And red gold and yellow gold were the shells upon that shore.
Lone, lone it was as a mist-enfolded strand
Set round a lake where marble demons stand—
Held like a sapphire-stone in Thibet’s monstrous hand.
And there I beheld how One stood in her grace
To hold to the stars her wet and faery face,
And on the smooth and haunted sands her footfall had no trace.
White, white was she as the youngest seraph’s word,
Or milk of Eden’s kine or Eden’s fragrant curd,
Cast in love by Eve’s wan hand to her most snowy bird.
Fair, fair was she as Venus of the sky,
And the jasmine of her breast and starlight of her eye
Made the heart a pain and the soul a hopeless sigh.
Weak with the sight I leaned upon my sword,
Till my soul that had sighed was become an unseen chord
For stress of music rendered to unknown things adored.
Surely she heard, but her beauty gave no sign
To me for whom the hushed sea was odorous as wine,—
To me for whom the voiceless world was made her silent shrine.
And she sent forth her gaze to the waters of the West,
And she sent forth her soul to the Islands of the Blest,
Below a star whose silver throes set pearls upon her breast.
But chill in the East brake a glory on the lands,
And she moaned like some low wave that dies on frozen sands,
And held to her sea-lover sweet and cruel hands.
Then rose the moon, and its lance was in her side,
And there was bitter music because in woe she cried,
Ere on the hard and gleaming beach she laid her down and died.
I leapt to her succor, my sword I left behind;
But one low mound of opal foam was all that I could find—
A moon-washed length of airy gems that trembled in the wind.
I knelt below the stars; the sea put forth a wave;
The moon drew up the captive tides upon her shining grave,
As far away I heard the cry her dim sea-lover gave.
Smart Set George Sterling