Third Movement
An organ growls in the heavy roof-groins of a church,
It wheezes and coughs.
The nave is blue with incense,
Writhing, twisting,
Snaking over the heads of the chanting priests.
Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine;
The priests whine their bastard Latin
And the censers swing and click.
The priests walk endlessly
Round and round,
Droning their Latin
Off the key.
The organ crashes out in a flaring chord,
And the priests hitch their chant up half a tone.
Dies illa, dies irae,
Calamitatis et miseriae,
Dies magna et amara valde.
A wind rattles the leaded windows.
The little pear-shaped candle-flames leap and flutter,
Dies illa, dies irae,
The swaying smoke drifts over the altar,
Calamitatis et miseriae,
The shuffling priests sprinkle holy water,
Dies magna et amara valde.
And there is a stark stillness in the midst of them
Stretched upon a bier.
His ears are stone to the organ,
His eyes are flint to the candles,
His body is ice to the water.
Chant, priests,
Whine, shuffle, genuflect,
He will always be as rigid as he is now
Until he crumbles away in a dust heap.
Lacrymosa dies illa,
Qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus.
Above the grey pillars, the roof is in darkness.
[1] This Quartet was played from the manuscript by the Flonzaley Quartet during their season of 1915 and 1916. The poem is based upon the programme which M. Stravinsky appended to his piece, and is an attempt to reproduce the sound and movement of the music as far as is possible in another medium.
Vibrant Life
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
He was a man of forty-five, vigorous and straight of body. About his jaws was a slight heaviness, but his eyes were quiet. In his young manhood he had been involved in a scandal that had made him a marked man in the community. He had deserted his wife and children and had run away with a serious, dark-skinned young girl, the daughter of a Methodist minister.
After a few years he had come back into the community and had opened a law office. The social ostracism set up against him and his wife had in reality turned out to their advantage. He had worked fiercely and the dark-skinned girl had worked fiercely. At forty-five he had risen to wealth and to a commanding position before the bar of his state, and his wife, now a surgeon, had a fast-growing reputation for ability.
It was night and he sat in a room with the dead body of his younger brother, who had gone the road he had traveled in his twenties. The brother, a huge good-natured fellow, had been caught and shot in the home of a married woman.
In the room with the lawyer sat a woman. She was a nurse, in charge of the children of his second wife, a magnificent blonde creature with white teeth. They sat beside a table, spread with books and magazines.
The woman who sat with the lawyer in the room with the dead man, was, like himself, flush with life. He remembered, with a start, that she had been introduced into the house by the boy who was dead. He began to couple them in his mind and talked about it.
“You were in love with him, eh?” he asked presently.
The woman said nothing. She sat under a lamp with her legs crossed. The lamplight fell upon her shapely shoulders.
The lawyer, getting out of his chair, walked up and down the room. He thought of his wife, the woman he loved, asleep upstairs, and of the price they had paid for their devotion to each other.
“It is barbarous, this old custom of sitting up with the dead,” he said, and, going to another part of the house, returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses.
With the wine before them the lawyer and the woman sat looking at each other. They stared boldly into each other’s eyes, each concerned with his own thoughts. A clock ticked loudly and the woman moved uneasily. By an open window the wind stirred a white curtain and tossed it back and forth above the coffin, black and ominous. He began thinking of the years of hard, unremittent labor and of the pleasures he had missed. Before his eyes danced visions of white-clad dinner tables, with men and bare-shouldered women sitting about. Again he walked up and down the room.
Upon the table lay a magazine, devoted to farm life, and upon the cover was a scene in a barn yard. A groom was leading a magnificent stallion out at the door of a red barn.
Pointing his finger at the picture, the lawyer began to talk. A new quality came into his voice. His hand played nervously up and down the table. There was a gentle swishing sound of the blown curtain across the top of the coffin.
“I saw one once when I was a boy,” he said, pointing with his finger at the stallion.
He approached and stood over her.
“It was a wonderful sight,” he said, looking down at her. “I have never forgotten it. The great animal was all life, vibrant, magnificent life. Its feet scarcely touched the ground.”
“We are like that,” he added, leaning over her. “The men of our family have that vibrant, conquering life in us.”
The woman arose from the chair and moved toward the darkened corner where the coffin stood. He followed slowly. When they had gone thus across the room she put up her hand and plead with him.
“No, no!—Think! Remember!” she whispered.
With a low laugh he sprang at her. She dodged quickly. Both of them had become silent. Among the chairs and tables they went, swiftly, silently, the pursuer and the pursued.
Into a corner of the room she got, where she could no longer elude him. Near her sat the long coffin, its ends resting on black stands made for the purpose. They struggled, and then as they stood breathless with hot startled faces, there was a crash, the sound of broken glass and the dead body of his brother with its staring eyes rolled, from the fallen coffin, out upon the floor.
Don’ts for Critics[2]
(Apropos of recent criticisms of Imagism, vers libre, and modern poetry generally.)
ALICE CORBIN HENDERSON
Don’t confuse vers libre and Imagism. The two are not identical. One pertains to verse, the other to vision.
Don’t attempt to “place” Imagism until you know what it is.
Don’t substitute irritability for judgement.
Don’t attempt to establish absolutes—positive or negative—by precedents of a half or a quarter of a century, or a mere decade ago.
Don’t be a demagogue.
Don’t try to speak the last word—you can’t.
Don’t be dishonest with yourself. Analyze your own inhibitions.
Don’t believe that beauty is conventionality, or that the classic poets chose only “nice” subjects.
Don’t forget that the age that produced the cathedrals produced also the grotesques.
Don’t be afraid to expand.
Don’t deny the poet his folly, or expect him to appear always pompously on stilts. Think of the poets who have fun in their make-up, and you think of some of the greatest—Shakespeare, Chaucer, Villon,—(by no means excepting Lewis Carroll, whose Jabberwock is almost “pure” poetry and the poetic prototype of much excellent modern painting.) Don’t relax your own appreciation of humor to the soft, easy level of the newspapers.
Don’t squirm when a poet is a satirist. We need the keen vision. Not all pessimism is unhealthy, and not all optimism healthy.
Don’t think that Spoon River is more sordid than Athens, Greece, or Athens, Georgia, than Sparta or Troy, or—the Lake Shore Drive.
Don’t think that the poet must always copy something or somebody, and that something usually of a recent date. Correspondences, to be valuable, must be genuine and of the spirit, rather than of the letter.—When Mr. Powys brackets the names of Chaucer and Edgar Lee Masters, he is illuminating. When Mr. Hervey or Mr. Willard-Huntington-Wright discover each a different one of Mr. Masters’ copybooks, and publish their discoveries, the absurdity is manifest. Picture Mr. Masters sitting with Robinson’s book in one hand, and somebody’s Small Town in the other, inditing Spoon River with his teeth!
Don’t expect a poet to repeat himself indefinitely, however much you may admire his earlier work. You may appreciate his later work in time.
Don’t condemn the work of a man whose books you have not read. Unfortunately there are no civil service examinations for critics.
Don’t think that competition is unhealthy for the poet, or that his poetry suffers thereby.
Don’t be confident, as Mr. Arthur J. Eddy said at the “Poetry” dinner, that no good thing is ever lost. Ask Mr. Eddy, who is a lawyer, to prove that no good thing is ever lost.
Don’t expect poets to refrain from writing about one another—even in praise. If you don’t enjoy the feast, don’t eat it. When the poets tear one another to pieces, don’t you enjoy it? But if, like most critics of poetry, you are a poet also, take warning. Be prepared!
Don’t wait until a poet is dead before you discover him.
Don’t gnash your teeth and expect the public to take it as a sign of force and insight.
Don’t forget that prosody is derived from poetry, not poetry from prosody.
Don’t waste your time trying to squeeze exceptions into the rule. Remember that exceptions in poetry, as in music, are the variations that give life.
Don’t measure English poetry by English poetic standards alone. Consider the sources of English poetry, and don’t begin with Chaucer, or stop with Tennyson.
Don’t think that English or American poetry may not assimilate as much new beauty and richness from foreign sources in the future as it has in the past.
Don’t consider rhyme as the be-all and end-all of poetry. Rhyme is sometimes as beautiful as the reflection of trees in water; it is sometimes as monotonous as a stitch in time.
Don’t substitute vituperation for the “critique raisonné”—almost an unknown quantity in this country.
Don’t look first at the publisher’s imprint.
Don’t cling to convictions that you fear to have upset.
Don’t, because you fail to share the convictions of a fellow critic, think that he is a bigger fool than you are—unless you can prove it.
Don’t imagine that printing a poem as prose makes it prose. A musical masterpiece may be distorted by unrhythmic playing, yet the composer’s rhythm remains intact in the score.
Don’t object to conceptions in poetry that you might find striking and powerful in bronze or plaster. “The Hog Butcher of the World” is one picturesque attitude of Chicago.... Is the truth unbearable? One may still love Chicago in spite of its dirty face.
Don’t try to establish even a distant kinship between poetry and ethics. The relation is illicit.
Don’t tell the poet what he must, or must not, write about—he doesn’t hear you.
Don’t be tedious.
Don’t take ten times as much space as the poet to prove that he is a bad poet. Your sin against the public is more grievous, and your art less, than his.
Don’t make up your review from the publisher’s advance notice. The poet might like to know what you think about his work—not what he told the publisher to tell you.
Don’t expect a poet to punch a time-clock, or record only the emotions of his fellow townspeople.
Don’t limit a poet to primary emotions, or find decadence in a refinement that may exceed your own.
Don’t fancy that brutality is strength, or delicacy weakness.
Don’t fancy that the poem that gives up its meaning quickest gives most, or lives longest.
Don’t make the mistake of believing that vers libre is easier to write than rhymed metrical verse—or the reverse.
Don’t think because you say a thing, it is so. Your venture is as uncertain as the poet’s. Authority, unless bestowed by the Mayor, is the gift of time; and then not unassailable.
Don’t reverence only dead poets or be certain that the dead poets would think just as you do about contemporary poets.
Don’t discard the past for the future, or the future for the past. We learn about the earth from the telescope, and about the stars from the microscope.
DON’T be as negative as this list, or sit on the fence. It is better to be on the wrong side than to straddle.
Poems[3]
JEANNE D’ORGE