Yale Review John Erskine
THE LAGGARD SONG
I had no heart to write to thee in prose,
The sadness in me sore demanded song;
But the song came not,—laggard as the birds,
That will not sing us back the little leaves.
O winter of my heart—when comes the spring?
I am sore weary of these deathlike days,
This shroud unheaving of eternal snow,—
O winter of my heart—when comes the spring?
’Tis time to answer, O nightingale,—
’Tis thine to sing the winter all away,
Release the world from bondage, and bring back
The sound of many waters and of trees,
And little sleeping lives anumb with cold,—
Yea! all the resurrection of the world.
O winter of my heart! O nightingale!
Harper’s Richard Le Gallienne
GROTESQUE
With the first light on the skyline came the rapping of the sickles
And the brown arms of the reapers bent to toil another morn;
Close beside me in the glimmer, in the golden sweep and shimmer,
Knelt a reaper strange among us, crooning thro’ the ragged corn:
“Born of sorrow,
Gone to-morrow—
Gone to lie in yonder valley where their fathers long have lain;
Men who know not ship nor sabre,
Each but drudges by his neighbor,
And the fields wherein they labor are a heritage of pain!”
Sleep was heavy on our eyelids when a lone star followed sunset,
But we missed the pale young stranger, none knew whither he had gone—
Then, from where the dead are lying, with the nightwind’s tender sighing
Rose and fell a last low cadence of the voice we heard at dawn:
“Weary reapers,
Early sleepers—
Brief the glow that drifts across them from the waning August moon:
These that rest beyond its gleaming
Lie unvexed of drift or dreaming,
And the fields with harvest teeming have forgot them all too soon!”
Boston Transcript Ruth Guthrie Harding