Yet more they see through the furnace door!
They see the bursting hot shells pour
On the battle-fields as in days of yore
The Deluge waters fell.
They see the bloody bayonet blade,
The unsheathed sword and the hand grenade,
The havoc, the wreck and the ruin made
By the steel they roll and sell.
All this through the furnace door they see
As they work and laugh—they are full and free;
Their steel has purchased their liberty
From want and the tyrant’s sway.
And just as long as their gas shall burn,
In times of need will the people turn
To them for their product and they shall learn
Its value endures for aye.
For of what they make we are servants all,
They have bound our lives in an iron thrall,
We do their bidding, we heed their call,
As they work with willing zeal.
So tap your heats with a courage bold,
You’re worth to your world a thousand fold
More than the men who mine her gold,
You men who make her steel!
Intrinsic merit is in that poem, apart from the circumstance of its being written by a workman himself. As an interpretation of the life of his fellow-workmen—their imaginative, inner life—it is a human document to be reflected upon. As for the artistic quality of the verses they place you in imagination amid the sights and sounds described and they have something in them suggestive of the steel bars the men are making.
VI. Irvin W. Underhill
In what strange disguises comes ofttimes the call to nobler things! Our happiness not seldom springs out of seeming misfortune. An illustration is afforded by Mr. Irvin W. Underhill, of Philadelphia, to whom blindness brought a more glorious seeing—the seeing of truth, of greater meaning in life, of greater beauty in the world. Out of this new vision springs a corresponding message in verse, a message not of bitterness for
Irvin W. Underhill
what might to another man, in the middle years of his life, have seemed a bitter loss, but of love, and exhortation, and encouragement. Blind, he lives in the Light. In his little book, entitled Daddy’s Love and Other Poems, are poems witnessing to a beautiful spirit, poems of beauty. Because of its sage counsel, however, I pass over some of these lovelier expressions of sentiment and choose a didactic piece: