BEFORE DAWN IN THE WOODS
Upon our eyelids, dear, the dew will lie,
And on the roughened meshes of our hair,
While little feet make bold to scurry by
And half-notes shrilly cut the quickened air.
Our clean, hard bodies, on the clean, hard ground
Will vaguely feel that they are full of power,
And they will stir, and stretch, and look around,
Loving the early, chill, half-lighted hour.
Loving the voices in the shadowed trees,
Loving the feet that stir the blossoming grass—
Oh, always we have known such things as these,
And knowing, can we love and let them pass?
Harry Kemp
Harry (Hibbard) Kemp, known as “the tramp-poet,” was born at Youngstown, Ohio, December 15, 1883. He came East at the age of twelve, left school to enter a factory, but returned to high school to study English.
A globe-trotter by nature, he went to sea before finishing his high school course. He shipped first to Australia, then to China, from China to California, from California to the University of Kansas. After a few months in London in 1909 (he crossed the Atlantic as a stowaway) he returned to New York City, where he has lived ever since, founding his own theater in which he is actor, stage-manager, playwright and chorus.
Kemp’s first book was a play, Judas (1910), a reversion of the biblical figure along the lines of Paul Heyse’s Mary of Magdala. His first collection of poems, The Cry of Youth (1914), like the subsequent volume, The Passing God (1919), is full of every kind of poetry except the kind one might imagine Kemp would write. Instead of crude and boisterous verse, here is a precise and almost over-polished poetry. Kemp has, strangely enough, taken the classic formalists for his models—one can even detect the whispers of Pope and Dryden in his lines.
Chanteys and Ballads (1920) is riper and more representative. The notes are more varied, the sense of personality is more pronounced.