NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
In order that the experiment of a magazine of verse may have a fair trial, over one hundred subscriptions of fifty dollars annually for five years have been promised by the ladies and gentlemen listed below. In addition, nearly twenty direct contributions of smaller sums have been sent or promised. To all these lovers of the art the editors would express their grateful appreciation.
| Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor | Mr. Thomas D. Jones |
| Mr. Howard Shaw | Mr. H. H. Kohlsaat |
| Mr. Arthur T. Aldis | Mr. Andrew M. Lawrence |
| Mr. Edwin S. Fechheimer | Miss Juliet Goodrich |
| Mr. D. H. Burnham [B] | Mr. Henry H. Walker |
| Mrs. Emmons Blaine (2) | Mr. Charles Deering |
| Mr. Wm. S. Monroe | Mr. Jas. Harvey Peirce |
| Mr. E. A. Bancroft | Mr. Charles L. Freer |
| Mrs. Burton Hanson | Mrs. W. F. Dummer |
| Mr. John M. Ewen | Mr. Jas. P. Whedon |
| Mr. C. L. Hutchinson | Mr. Arthur Heun |
| Mrs. Wm. Vaughan Moody | Mr. Edward F. Carry |
| Hon. Wm. J. Calhoun | Mrs. George M. Pullman |
| ⌈ Miss Anna Morgan | Mr. Cyrus H. McCormick (2) |
| ⌊ Mrs. Edward A. Leicht | Mr. F. Stuyvesant Peabody |
| Mrs. Louis Betts | Mrs. F. S. Winston |
| Mr. Ralph Cudney | Mr. J. J. Glessner |
| Mrs. George Bullen | ⌈ Mr. C. C. Curtiss |
| Mrs. P. A. Valentine | ⌊ Mrs. Hermon B. Butler |
| Mr. P. A. Valentine | Mr. Will H. Lyford |
| Mr. Charles R. Crane | Mr. Horace S. Oakley |
| Mr. Frederick Sargent | Mr. Eames Mac Veagh |
| Mrs. Frank G. Logan | Mrs. K. M. H. Besly |
| Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus | Mr. Charles G. Dawes |
| Mrs. Emma B. Hodge | Mr. Clarence Buckingham |
| Mr. Wallace Heckman | Mrs. Potter Palmer |
| Mr. Edward B. Butler (2) | Mr. Owen F. Aldis |
| Miss Elizabeth Ross | Mr. Albert B. Dick |
| Mrs. Bryan Lathrop | Mr. Albert H. Loeb |
| Mr. Martin A. Ryerson | The Misses Skinner |
| Mrs. La Verne Noyes | Mr. Potter Palmer |
| Mrs. E. Norman Scott (2) | Miss Mary Rozet Smith |
| Mr. Wm. O. Goodman | Misses Alice E. and Margaret D. Moran |
| Mrs. Charles Hitchcock | ⌈ Mrs. James B. Waller |
| Hon. John Barton Payne | ⌊ Mr. John Borden |
Mr. Victor F. Lawson | Mr. Alfred L. Baker |
| ⌈ Mrs. H. M. Wilmarth | Mr. George A. McKinlock |
| ⌊ Mrs. Norman F. Thompson | Mr. John S. Field |
| ⌈ Mrs. William Blair | Mrs. Samuel Insull |
| ⌊ Mrs. Clarence I. Peck | Mr. William T. Fenton |
| Mr. Clarence M. Woolley | Mr. A. G. Becker |
| Mr. Edward P. Russell | Mr. Honoré Palmer |
| Mrs. Frank O. Lowden | Mr. John J. Mitchell |
| Mr. John S. Miller | Mrs. F. A. Hardy |
| Miss Helen Louise Birch | Mr. Morton D. Hull |
| Nine members of the Fortnightly | Mr. E. F. Ripley |
| Six members of the Friday Club | Mr. Ernest MacDonald Bowman |
| Seven members of the Chicago Woman's Club | Mr. John A. Kruse |
| Mr. William L. Brown | Mr. Frederic C. Bartlett |
| Mr. Rufus G. Dawes | Mr. Franklin H. Head |
| Mr. Gilbert E. Porter | Mrs. Wm. R. Linn |
Through the generosity of five gentlemen, Poetry will give two hundred and fifty dollars in one or two prizes for the best poem or poems printed in its pages the first year. In addition a subscriber to the fund offers twenty-five dollars for the best epigram.
Mr. Maurice Browne, director of the Chicago Little Theatre, offers to produce, during the season of 1913-14, the best play in verse published in, or submitted to, Poetry during its first year; provided that it may be adequately presented under the requirements and limitations of his stage.
We are fortunate in being able, through the courtesy of the Houghton-Mifflin Co., to offer our readers a poem, hitherto unprinted, from advance sheets of the complete works of the late William Vaughan Moody, which will be published in November. The lamentable death of this poet two years ago in the early prime of his great powers was a calamity to literature. It is fitting that the first number of a magazine published in the city where for years he wrote and taught, should contain an important poem from his hand.
Mr. Ezra Pound, the young Philadelphia poet whose recent distinguished success in London led to wide recognition in his own country, authorizes the statement that at present such of his poetic work as receives magazine publication in America will appear exclusively in Poetry. That discriminating London publisher, Mr. Elkin Mathews, "discovered" this young poet from over seas, and published "Personae," "Exultations" and "Canzoniere," three small volumes of verse from which a selection has been reprinted by the Houghton-Mifflin Co. under the title "Provença." Mr. Pound's latest work is a translation from the Italian of "Sonnets and Ballate," by Guido Cavalcanti.
Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke, another contributor, is a graduate of Harvard, who studied law and entered his father's office in Davenport, Iowa. He is the author of "The Happy Princess" and "The Breaking of Bonds," and a contributor to leading magazines. An early number of Poetry will be devoted exclusively to Mr. Ficke's work.
Mrs. Roscoe P. Conkling is a resident of the state of New York; a young poet who has contributed to various magazines.
Miss Lorimer is a young English poet resident in Oxford, who will publish her first volume this autumn. The London Poetry Review, in its August number, introduced her with a group of lyrics which were criticized with some asperity in the New Age and praised with equal warmth in other periodicals.
Miss Dudley, who is a Chicagoan born and bred, is still younger in the art, "To One Unknown" being the first of her poems to be printed.
Poetry will acknowledge the receipt of books of verse and works relating to the subject, and will print brief reviews of those which seem for any reason significant. It will endeavor also to keep its readers informed of the progress of the art throughout the English-speaking world and continental Europe. The American metropolitan newspaper prints cable dispatches about post-impressionists, futurists, secessionists and other radicals in painting, sculpture and music, but so far as its editors and readers are concerned, French poetry might have died with Victor Hugo, and English with Tennyson, or at most Swinburne.
Note.—Eight months after the first general newspaper announcement of our efforts to secure a fund for a magazine of verse, and three or four months after our first use of the title Poetry, a Boston firm of publishers announced a forthcoming periodical of the same kind, to be issued under the same name. The two are not to be confused.
THE RALPH FLETCHER SEYMOUR COMPANY
PRINTERS CHICAGO
| Vol. I No. 2 | |
| NOVEMBER, 1912 | |
| ———— |
THE PIPER
I see him now, a little man In proper black, whey-bearded, wan, With eyes that scan the eastern hills Thro' thick, gold-rimmèd spectacles. His hand is on the chanter. Lo, The hidden spring begins to flow In waves of magic. (He is dead These seven years, but bend your head And listen.) Rising from the clay The Master plays The Ring of Day. It mounts and falls and floats away Over the sky-line ... then is gone Into the silence of the dawn!
BEYOND THE STARS
Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead, (It was so strange to me that they should weep!) Tall candles burned about me in the dark, And a great crucifix was on my breast, And a great silence filled the lonesome room.
I heard one whisper, "Lo! the dawn is breaking, And he has lost the wonder of the day." Another came whom I had loved on earth, And kissed my brow and brushed my dampened hair. Softly she spoke: "Oh that he should not see The April that his spirit bathed in! Birds Are singing in the orchard, and the grass That soon will cover him is growing green. The daisies whiten on the emerald hills, And the immortal magic that he loved Wakens again—and he has fallen asleep." Another said: "Last night I saw the moon Like a tremendous lantern shine in heaven, And I could only think of him—and sob. For I remembered evenings wonderful When he was faint with Life's sad loveliness, And watched the silver ribbons wandering far Along the shore, and out upon the sea. Oh, I remembered how he loved the world, The sighing ocean and the flaming stars, The everlasting glamour God has given— His tapestries that wrap the earth's wide room. I minded me of mornings filled with rain When he would sit and listen to the sound As if it were lost music from the spheres. He loved the crocus and the hawthorn-hedge, He loved the shining gold of buttercups, And the low droning of the drowsy bees That boomed across the meadows. He was glad At dawn or sundown; glad when Autumn came With her worn livery and scarlet crown, And glad when Winter rocked the earth to rest. Strange that he sleeps today when Life is young, And the wild banners of the Spring are blowing With green inscriptions of the old delight."
I heard them whisper in the quiet room. I longed to open then my sealèd eyes, And tell them of the glory that was mine. There was no darkness where my spirit flew, There was no night beyond the teeming world. Their April was like winter where I roamed; Their flowers were like stones where now I fared. Earth's day! it was as if I had not known What sunlight meant!... Yea, even as they grieved For all that I had lost in their pale place, I swung beyond the borders of the sky, And floated through the clouds, myself the air, Myself the ether, yet a matchless being Whom God had snatched from penury and pain To draw across the barricades of heaven. I clomb beyond the sun, beyond the moon; In flight on flight I touched the highest star; I plunged to regions where the Spring is born, Myself (I asked not how) the April wind, Myself the elements that are of God. Up flowery stairways of eternity I whirled in wonder and untrammeled joy, An atom, yet a portion of His dream— His dream that knows no end.... I was the rain, I was the dawn, I was the purple east, I was the moonlight on enchanted nights, (Yet time was lost to me); I was a flower For one to pluck who loved me; I was bliss, And rapture, splendid moments of delight; And I was prayer, and solitude, and hope; And always, always, always I was love. I tore asunder flimsy doors of time, And through the windows of my soul's new sight I saw beyond the ultimate bounds of space. I was all things that I had loved on earth— The very moonbeam in that quiet room, The very sunlight one had dreamed I lost, The soul of the returning April grass, The spirit of the evening and the dawn, The perfume in unnumbered hawthorn-blooms. There was no shadow on my perfect peace, No knowledge that was hidden from my heart. I learned what music meant; I read the years; I found where rainbows hide, where tears begin; I trod the precincts of things yet unborn.
Yea, while I found all wisdom (being dead), They grieved for me ... I should have grieved for them!
ΧΟΡΙΚΟΣ [CHORIKOS]
The ancient songs Pass deathward mournfully.
Cold lips that sing no more, and withered wreaths, Regretful eyes, and drooping breasts and wings— Symbols of ancient songs Mournfully passing Down to the great white surges, Watched of none Save the frail sea-birds And the lithe pale girls, Daughters of Okeanos.
And the songs pass From the green land Which lies upon the waves as a leaf On the flowers of hyacinth; And they pass from the waters, The manifold winds and the dim moon, And they come, Silently winging through soft Kimmerian dusk, To the quiet level lands That she keeps for us all, That she wrought for us all for sleep In the silver days of the earth's dawning— Proserpine, daughter of Zeus.
And we turn from the Kuprian's breasts, And we turn from thee, Phoibos Apollon, And we turn from the music of old And the hills that we loved and the meads, And we turn from the fiery day, And the lips that were over-sweet; For silently Brushing the fields with red-shod feet, With purple robe Searing the flowers as with a sudden flame, Death, Thou hast come upon us.
And of all the ancient songs Passing to the swallow-blue halls By the dark streams of Persephone, This only remains: That in the end we turn to thee, Death, That we turn to thee, singing One last song.
O Death, Thou art an healing wind That blowest over white flowers A-tremble with dew; Thou art a wind flowing Over long leagues of lonely sea; Thou art the dusk and the fragrance; Thou art the lips of love mournfully smiling; Thou art the pale peace of one Satiate with old desires; Thou art the silence of beauty, And we look no more for the morning; We yearn no more for the sun, Since with thy white hands, Death, Thou crownest us with the pallid chaplets, The slim colorless poppies Which in thy garden alone Softly thou gatherest.
And silently; And with slow feet approaching; And with bowed head and unlit eyes, We kneel before thee: And thou, leaning towards us, Caressingly layest upon us Flowers from thy thin cold hands, And, smiling as a chaste woman Knowing love in her heart, Thou sealest our eyes And the illimitable quietude Comes gently upon us.
Richard Aldington
TO A GREEK MARBLE
Πὁτνια, πὁτνια [Photnia, photnia], White grave goddess, Pity my sadness, O silence of Paros.
I am not of these about thy feet, These garments and decorum; I am thy brother, Thy lover of aforetime crying to thee, And thou hearest me not.
I have whispered thee in thy solitudes Of our loves in Phrygia, The far ecstasy of burning noons When the fragile pipes Ceased in the cypress shade, And the brown fingers of the shepherd Moved over slim shoulders; And only the cicada sang.
I have told thee of the hills And the lisp of reeds And the sun upon thy breasts,
And thou hearest me not, Πὁτνια, πὁτνια [Photnia, photnia], Thou hearest me not.
Richard Aldington
AU VIEUX JARDIN.
I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds Which the wind of the upper air Tore like the green leafy boughs Of the divers-hued trees of late summer; But though I greatly delight In these and the water-lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white color of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.
Richard Aldington
UNDER TWO WINDOWS
I. AUBADE
The dawn is here—and the long night through I have never seen thy face, Though my feet have worn the patient grass at the gate of thy dwelling-place.
While the white moon sailed till, red in the west, it found the far world-edge, No leaflet stirred of the leaves that climb to garland thy window ledge.
Yet the vine had quivered from root to tip, and opened its flowers again, If only the low moon's light had glanced on a moving casement pane.
Warm was the wind that entered in where the barrier stood ajar, And the curtain shook with its gentle breath, white as young lilies are;
But there came no hand all the slow night through to draw the folds aside, (I longed as the moon and the vine-leaves longed!) or to set the casement wide.
Three times in a low-hung nest there dreamed his fivesweet notes a bird, And thrice my heart leaped up at the sound I thoughtthou hadst surely heard.
But now that thy praise is caroled aloud by a thousand throats awake, Shall I watch from afar and silently, as under the moon, for thy sake?
Nay—bold in the sun I speak thy name, I too, and I wait no more Thy hand, thy face, in the window niche, but thy kiss at the open door!
II. NOCTURNE
My darling, come!—The wings of the dark have wafted the sunset away, And there's room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay.
A still moon looketh down from the sky, and a wavering moon looks up From every hollow in the green hills that holds a pool in its cup.
The woodland borders are wreathed with bloom—elder, viburnum, rose; The young trees yearn on the breast of the wind that sighs of love as it goes.
The small stars drown in the moon-washed blue but the greater ones abide, With Vega high in the midmost place, Altair not far aside.
The glades are dusk, and soft the grass, where the flower of the elder gleams, Mist-white, moth-like, a spirit awake in the dark of forest dreams.
Arcturus beckons into the east, Antares toward the south, That sendeth a zephyr sweet with thyme to seek for thy sweeter mouth.
Shall the blossom wake, the star look down, all night and have naught to see? Shall the reeds that sing by the wind-brushed pool say nothing of thee and me?
—My darling comes! My arms are content, my feet are guiding her way; There is room for much in a summer night, but no room for delay!
Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer
THE SINGING PLACE
Cold may lie the day, And bare of grace; At night I slip away To the Singing Place.
A border of mist and doubt Before the gate, And the Dancing Stars grow still As hushed I wait. Then faint and far away I catch the beat In broken rhythm and rhyme Of joyous feet,— Lifting waves of sound That will rise and swell (If the prying eyes of thought Break not the spell), Rise and swell and retreat And fall and flee, As over the edge of sleep They beckon me. And I wait as the seaweed waits For the lifting tide; To ask would be to awake,— To be denied. I cloud my eyes in the mist That veils the hem,— And then with a rush I am past,— I am Theirs, and of Them! And the pulsing chant swells up To touch the sky, And the song is joy, is life, And the song am I! The thunderous music peals Around, o'erhead— The dead would awake to hear If there were dead; But the life of the throbbing Sun Is in the song, And we weave the world anew, And the Singing Throng Fill every corner of space—
Over the edge of sleep I bring but a trace Of the chants that pulse and sweep In the Singing Place.
Lily A. Long
IMMURED
Within this narrow cell that I call "me", I was imprisoned ere the worlds began, And all the worlds must run, as first they ran, In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free. I beat my hands against the walls and find It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!
Lily A. Long
NOGI
Great soldier of the fighting clan, Across Port Arthur's frowning face of stone You drew the battle sword of old Japan, And struck the White Tsar from his Asian throne.
Once more the samurai sword Struck to the carved hilt in your loyal hand, That not alone your heaven-descended lord Should meanly wander in the spirit land.
Your own proud way, O eastern star, Grandly at last you followed. Out it leads To that high heaven where all the heroes are, Lovers of death for causes and for creeds.
Harriet Monroe
THE JESTER
I have known great gold Sorrows: Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully Through the slow-pacing morrows: I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing Dim endless voices cried of suffering Vibrant and far in broken litany: Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air— All things most tragical, most fair, Have still encompassed me ...
I dance where in the screaming market-place The dusty world that watches buys and sells, With painted merriment upon my face, Whirling my bells, Thrusting my sad soul to its mockery.
I have known great gold Sorrows ... Shall they not mock me, these pain-haunted ones, If it shall make them merry, and forget That grief shall rise and set With the unchanging, unforgetting suns Of their relentless morrows?
Margaret Widdemer
THE BEGGARS
The little pitiful, worn, laughing faces, Begging of Life for Joy!
I saw the little daughters of the poor, Tense from the long day's working, strident, gay, Hurrying to the picture-place. There curled A hideous flushed beggar at the door, Trading upon his horror, eyeless, maimed, Complacent in his profitable mask. They mocked his horror, but they gave to him From the brief wealth of pay-night, and went in To the cheap laughter and the tawdry thoughts Thrown on the screen; in to the seeking hand Covered by darkness, to the luring voice Of Horror, boy-masked, whispering of rings, Of silks, of feathers, bought—so cheap!—with just Their slender starved child-bodies, palpitant For Beauty, Laughter, Passion, that is Life: (A frock of satin for an hour's shame, A coat of fur for two days' servitude; "And the clothes last," the thought runs on, within The poor warped girl-minds drugged with changeless days; "Who cares or knows after the hour is done?") —Poor little beggars at Life's door for Joy! The old man crouched there, eyeless, horrible, Complacent in the marketable mask That earned his comforts—and they gave to him!
But ah, the little painted, wistful faces Questioning Life for Joy!
Margaret Widdemer
