VOICES
O there were lights and laughter
And the motions to and fro
Of people as they enter
And people as they go ...
And there were many voices
Vying at the feast,
But mostly I remember
Yours—who spoke the least.
A FARMER REMEMBERS LINCOLN[[40]][[41]]
“Lincoln?—
Well, I was in the old Second Maine,
The first regiment in Washington from the Pine Tree State.
Of course I didn’t get the butt of the clip;
We was there for guardin’ Washington—
We was all green.
“I ain’t never ben to the theayter in my life—
I didn’t know how to behave.
I ain’t never ben since.
I can see as plain as my hat the box where he sat in
When he was shot.
I can tell you, sir, there was a panic
When we found our President was in the shape he was in!
Never saw a soldier in the world but what liked him.
“Yes, sir. His looks was kind o’ hard to forget.
He was a spare man,
An old farmer.
Everything was all right, you know,
But he wasn’t a smooth-appearin’ man at all—
Not in no ways;
Thin-faced, long-necked,
And a swellin’ kind of a thick lip like.
“And he was a jolly old fellow—always cheerful;
He wasn’t so high but the boys could talk to him their own ways.
While I was servin’ at the Hospital
He’d come in and say, ‘You look nice in here,’
Praise us up, you know.
And he’d bend over and talk to the boys—
And he’d talk so good to ’em—so close—
That’s why I call him a farmer.
I don’t mean that everything about him wasn’t all right, you understand,
It’s just—well, I was a farmer—
And he was my neighbor, anybody’s neighbor.
I guess even you young folks would ’a’ liked him.”
TRAIN-MATES[[42]]
Outside hove Shasta, snowy height on height,
A glory; but a negligible sight,
For you had often seen a mountain-peak
But not my paper. So we came to speak ...
A smoke, a smile,—a good way to commence
The comfortable exchange of difference!
You a young engineer, five feet eleven,
Forty-five chest, with football in your heaven,
Liking a road-bed newly built and clean,
Your fingers hot to cut away the green
Of brush and flowers that bring beside a track
The kind of beauty steel lines ought to lack,—
And I a poet, wistful of my betters,
Reading George Meredith’s high-hearted letters,
Joining betweenwhile in the mingled speech
Of a drummer, circus-man, and parson, each
Absorbing to himself—as I to me
And you to you—a glad identity!
After a time, when others went away,
A curious kinship made us choose to stay,
Which I could tell you now; but at the time
You thought of baseball teams and I of rhyme,
Until we found that we were college men
And smoked more easily and smiled again;
And I from Cambridge cried, the poet still:
“I know your fine Greek theatre on the hill
At Berkeley!” With your happy Grecian head
Upraised, “I never saw the place,” you said—
“Once I was free of class, I always went
Out to the field.”
Young engineer, you meant
As fair a tribute to the better part
As ever I did. Beauty of the heart
Is evident in temples. But it breathes
Alive where athletes quicken curly wreaths,
Which are the lovelier because they die.
You are a poet quite as much as I,
Though differences appear in what we do,
And I an athlete quite as much as you.
Because you half-surmise my quarter-mile
And I your quatrain, we could greet and smile.
Who knows but we shall look again and find
The circus-man and drummer, not behind
But leading in our visible estate—
As discus-thrower and as laureate?
James Oppenheim
James Oppenheim was born at St. Paul, Minnesota, May 24, 1882. Two years later his family moved to New York City, where he has lived ever since. After a public school education, he took special courses at Columbia University (1901-3) and engaged in settlement work, acting in the capacity of assistant head worker of the Hudson Guild Settlement, and superintendent of the Hebrew Technical School for Girls (1904-7). His studies and experiences on the lower East Side of New York furnished the material for his first, and most popular, book of short stories, Doctor Rast (1909).
Oppenheim’s initial venture as a poet, Monday Morning and Other Poems (1909), was a tentative collection; half imitative, half experimental. In spite of its obvious indebtedness to Whitman, most of the verses are in formal meters and regular (though ragged) rhyme. Beauty is sought but seldom captured here; the message is coughed out between bursts of eloquence and fits of stammering.
With Songs for the New Age (1914) Oppenheim became his own liberator. The stammering has gone, the uncouth dissonances have resolved. One listens to a speech that, echoing the Whitmanic sonority, develops a music that is strangely Biblical and yet local. It is the expression of an ancient people reacting to modernity, of a race in solution. (See Preface.) This volume, like all of Oppenheim’s subsequent work, is analysis in terms of poetry; a slow searching beneath the musical surface that attempts to diagnose the twisted soul of man and the twisted times he lives in. The old Isaiah note, with a new introspection, rises out of such poems as “The Slave,” “We Dead,” “Tasting the Earth”; the music and imagery of the Psalms are heard in “The Flocks,” “The Tree” and “The Runner in the Skies.”
War and Laughter (1916) holds much of its predecessor’s exaltation and an almost ecstatic discontent. The Semitic blend of delight and disillusion—that quality which hates the world for its shams and hypocrisies and loves it in spite of them—is revealed in “Greed,” in the ironic “Report on the Planet Earth” and the brightly affirmative “Laughter.”
The Book of Self (1917) is less notable, an imperfect fusion. Oppenheim’s preoccupation with analytical psychology mars the effect of the long passages which, in themselves, contain flashes of clairvoyance. The Solitary (1919) is a great stride forward; its major section, a long symbolic poem called “The Sea,” breathes the same note that was the burden of the earlier books—“We are flesh on the way to godhood”—with greater strength and still greater control.
Besides his poetry, Oppenheim has published several volumes of short stories, four novels, and two poetic plays. During 1916-17 he was editor of that promising but short-lived magazine, The Seven Arts.