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A Foreword Milkweed Home Thoughts Life Some Day, Oh Seeker of Dreams Black Hours Before Renewal Hill-Top Hours Letters from Home Chains The Drums Anaesthesia A Summer Night Sappho's Tomb The Wild Swans Pass At Notre Dame The Pilot Doors Spring Floods The Turn of the Year If I Love You What Shall I Care? Hunter and Hunted Apple Blossoms The House of Life Ultimata The Life on the Table You Bid Me to Sleep The Last of Summer At Charing Cross Prescience The Steel Workers The Children The Nocturne The Wild Geese The Day The Revolt Atavism March Twilight The Echo Autumn Faces There Is Strength in the Soil Life-Drunk My Heart Stood Empty One Night in the Northwest Dreamers The Question The Gift of Hate The Dream One Room in My Heart The Meaning The Veil The Man of Dreams April on the Rialto The Surrender The Passing Protestations I Sat in the Sunlight

A FOREWORD

To even the casual reader of poetry who may chance to turn to the following pages it will be evident that the lyrics contained therein have been written without what is commonly known as end-rhyme. It may also be claimed by this reader that the lyrics before him are without rhythm. As such, it may at first seem that they mark an effort in revolt against two of the primary assets of modern versification.

All art, of course, has its ancestry. While it is the duty of poetry both to remember and to honour its inherited grandeurs, the paradoxical fact remains that even this most convention-ridden medium of emotional expression is a sort of warfare between the embattled soul of the artist, seeking articulation, and the immuring traditions with which time and the prosodian have surrounded him.

In painting and in music, as in sculpture and the drama, there has been a movement of late to achieve what may be called formal emancipation, a struggle to break away from the restraints and the technical obligations imposed upon the worker by his artistic predecessors. In one case this movement may be called Futurism, and in another it may be termed Romanticism, but the tendency is the same. The spirit of man is seen in rebellion against a form that has become too intricate or too fixed to allow him freedom of utterance.

Poetry alone, during the last century, seems to have remained stable, in the matter of structure. Few new forms have been invented, and with one or two rare exceptions success has been achieved through ingeniously elaborating on an already established formula and through meticulously re-echoing what has already been said. This has resulted, on the one hand, in a technical dexterity which often enough resembles the strained postures of acrobatism, and, on the other, in that constantly reiterated complaint as to the hollowness and aloofness of modern poetry. Yet this poetry is remote and insincere, not because the modern spirit is incapable of feeling, but because what the singer of to-day has felt has not been directly and openly expressed. His apparel has remained mediaeval. He must still don mail to face Mausers, and wear chain-armour against machine-guns. He must scout through the shadowy hinterlands of consciousness in attire that may be historic, yet at the same time is distressingly conspicuous. And when he begins his assault on those favouring moments or inspirational moods which lurk in the deeper valleys and by-ways of sensibility, he must begin it as a marked man, pathetically resplendent in that rigid steel which is an anachronism and no longer an armour.

Rhyme, from the first, has been imposed upon him. His only escape from rhyme has been the larger utterance of blank verse. Yet the iambic pentameter of his native tongue, perfected in the sweeping sonority of the later Shakespearean tragedies and left even more intimidatingly austere in the organ-like roll of Milton, has been found by the later singer to be ill-fitted for the utterance of those more intimate moods and those subjective experiences which may be described as characteristically modern. Verse, in the nature of things, has become less epic and racial, and more and more lyric and personal. The poet, consequently, has been forced back into the narrower domain so formally and so rigidly fenced in by rhyme. And before touching on the limitations resulting from this incarceration, it may be worth while to venture a brief glance back over the history of what Milton himself denominated as "the jingling sounds of like endings" and Goldsmith characterized as "a vile monotony" and even Howells has spoken of as "the artificial trammels of verse."

It has been claimed that those early poets of Palestine who affected the custom of beginning a number of lines or stanzas with the same letter of the alphabet unconsciously prepared the way for that latter-day ornamental fringe known as end-rhyme. Others have claimed that this insistence of a consonance of terminals is a relique of the communal force of the chant, where the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet, or the twanging of bow-strings marked the period-ends of prehistoric recitative. The bow-string of course, later evolved into the musical instrument, and when poetry became a written as well as a spoken language the consonantal drone of rhyming end-words took the place of the discarded instrument which had served to mark a secondary and wider rhythm in the progress of impassioned recitative.

For the poet to turn his back on rhythm, as at times he has been able to do with rhyme, is an impossibility. For the rhythmising instinct is innate and persistent in man, standing for a law which permeates every manifestation of energy. The great heart of Nature itself beats with a regular systole and diastole. But, rhythmically, the modern versifier has been a Cubist without quite comprehending it. He has been viewing the world mathematically. He has been crowding his soul into a geometrically designed mould. He has bowed to a rule-of-thumb order of speech, arbitrarily imposed on him by an ancestry which wrung its ingenuous pleasure out of an ingenuous regularity of stress and accent. To succeed under that law he must practise an adroit form of self-deception, solemnly pretending to fit his lines to a mould which he actually over-runs and occasionally ignores. He has not been satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their manifold expressions are omnipresent but never confined to any single sustained pulse or any one limited movement. It is not argued that he should ignore rhythm altogether. To do so, as has already been said, would be impossible, since life itself is sustained by the rise and fall of mortal breasts and the beat and throb of mortal hearts. Rhythm is in man's blood. The ear of the world instinctively searches for cadences. The poet's efforts towards symphonic phrasing have long since become habitual and imperative. But that he should confine himself to certain man-made laws of meter, that he should be shackled by the prosodian of the past, is quite another matter. His predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed mortality seeking expression.

To abandon fixed rhythm, or meter, for the floating rhythm of the chant may not be an immediate solution of the problem. To follow the Psalms of David, for example, will not suddenly conjure a new school of verse into the world. But to return to the more open movement of the chant, which is man's natural and rudimentary form of song, may constitute a step towards freedom. The mere effort towards emancipation, in fact, is not without its value. It may serve to impress on certain minds the fact that poetry is capable of exhausting one particular form of expression, of incorporating and consuming one particular embodiment of perishable matter and passing on to its newer fields. Being a living organism, it uses up what lies before it, and to find new vigour must forever feed on new forms. Being the product of man's spirit, which is forever subject to change, verse must not be worshipped for what it has been, but for what it is capable of being. No necrophilic regard for its established conventions must blind the lover of beautiful verse to the fact that the primary function of poetry is both to intellectualize sensation and to elucidate emotional experience. If man must worship beauty only as he has known it in the past, man must be satisfied with worshipping that which has lived and now is dead.

A. S.

OPEN WATER

MILKWEED

The blue, blue sea, And the drone of waves, And the wheeling swallows, And the sun on the opal sails, And the misty and salt-bleached headlands, And the milkweed thick at my feet, And the milkweed held in the hand of a child Who dreams on the misty cliff-edge, Watching the fading sails And the noonday blue Of the lonely sea!

Was it all years ago, Or was it but yesterday? I only know that the scent Of the milkweed brings it back, Back with a strangle of tears: The child and the misty headlands, The drone of the dark blue sea, And the opal sails In the sun!

HOME THOUGHTS

LIFE

A rind of light hangs low On the rim of the world; A sound of feet disturbs The quiet of the cell Where a rope and a beam looms high At the end of the yard.

But in the dusk Of that walled yard waits a woman; And as the thing from its cell, Still guarded and chained and bound, Crosses that little space, Silent, for ten brief steps, A woman hangs on his neck.

SOME DAY, O SEEKER OF DREAMS

Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us! Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and want For the Ways to the Lonelier Height! So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart, For out of their dust they will call to us yet! Let us wait, and sing, and be wise, As the sea has waited and sung, As the hills through the night have been wise! For we are the Bringers of Light, and the Voices of Love, Aye, we are the Soothers of Pain, the Appeasers of Death, The Dusk and the Star and the Gleam and the Loneliest Peak! And when they have found and seen, and know not whither they trend, They will come to us, crying aloud like a child in the night; And when they have learned of our lips, Still back to our feet they will grope For that ultimate essence and core of all song, To usher them empty and naked, then, out to the unanswering stars, Where Silence and Dreaming and Music are one!

BLACK HOURS

I have drunk deep Of the well of bitterness. Black hours have harried me, Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head, And on my brow the iron crown Of sorrow has been crushed. And being mortal, I have cried aloud At anguish ineluctable. But over each black hour has hung Forlorn this star of knowledge: The path of pain too great to be endured Leads always unto peace; And when the granite road of anguish mounts Up and still up to its one ultimate And dizzy height of torture, Softly it dips and meets The valley of endless rest!

BEFORE RENEWAL

Summer is dead. And love is gone. And life is glad of this. For sad were both, with having given much; And bowed were both, with great desires fulfilled; And both were grown too sadly wise Ever to live again. Too aged with hours o'er-passionate, Too deeply sung by throats That took no thought of weariness, Moving too madly toward the crest of things, Giving too freely of the fountaining sap, Crowding too gladly into grass and leaves, Breathing too blindly into flower and song! Again the lyric hope may thrill the world, Again the sap may sweeten into leaves, Again will grey-eyed April come With all her choiring throats; But not to-day-- For the course is run. And the cruse is full, And the loin ungirt, And the hour ordained! And now there is need of rest; And need of renewal there is; And need of silence, And need of sleep. Too clear the light Now lies on hill and valley; And little is left to say, And nothing is left to give. Summer is dead; And love is gone!

HILL-TOP HOURS

I am through with regret. No more shall I kennel with pain. I have called to this whimpering soul, This soul that is sodden with tears And sour with the reek of the years! And now we shall glory in light! Like a tatter of sail in the wind, Like a tangle of net on the sand, Like a hound stretched out in the heat, My soul shall lie in the sun, And be drowsy with peace, And not think of the past!

LETTERS FROM HOME

Letters from Home, you said. Unopened they lay on the shack-sill As you stared with me at the prairie And the foothills bathed with light. Letters from Home, you whispered, And the homeland casements shone Through the homeland dusk again, And the sound of the birds came back, And the soft green sorrowing hills, And the sigh of remembered names, The wine of remembered youth,-- Oh, these came back, Back with those idle words Of "Letters from Home"!

Over such desolate leagues, Over such sundering seas, Out of the lost dead years, After the days of waiting, After the ache had died, After the brine of failure, After the outland peace Of the trail that never turns back, Now that the night-wind whispers How Home shall never again be home, And now that the arms of the Far-away Have drawn us close to its breast, Out of the dead that is proved not dead, To waken the sorrow that should have died, To tighten the throat that never shall sing, To sadden the trails that we still must ride, Too late they come to us here-- Our Letters from Home!

CHAINS

I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock, But mostly the one man poised on a drill Above the steam that hissed and billowed about him White in the frosty air, Where the lordly house would stand.

Majestic, muscular, high like a god, He stood, And controlled and stopped And started his thundering drill, Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor, Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat, Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.

Then out of a nearby house came a youth, All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content, Thin-shouldered and frail and finished, Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain. He peered at the figure that fought with the drill Above the billowing steam and tumult of sound, Peered up for a moment impassive, With almost pitying eyes, And then went pensively down the Avenue's calm, In the clear white light of the noonday sun, Not holding, but held by his silvery chain!

THE DRUMS

A village wrapped in slumber, Silent between the hills, Empty of moon-lit marketplace, Empty of moving life-- Such is my quiet heart. Shadowy-walled it rests, Sleeping its heavy sleep; But sudden across the dark Tingles a sound of drums! The drums, the drums, the distant drums, The throb of the drums strikes up, The beat of the drums awakes! Then loud through the little streets, And strange to the startled roofs, The drums, the drums approach and pound, And throb and clamour and thrill and pass, And between the echoing house-walls All swart and grim they go, The battalions of regret, After the drums, the valiant drums That die away in the night!

ANAESTHESIA

I caught the smell of ether From the glass-roofed room Where the hospital stood. Suddenly all about me I felt a mist of anguish And the old, old hour of dread When Death had shambled by.

Yellow with time it is, This letter on which I look; But up from it comes a perfume That stabs me still to the heart; And suddenly, at the odour, Through a ghost-like mist I know Rapture and love and wild regret When Life, and You, went by.

A SUMMER NIGHT

Mournful the summer moon Rose from the quiet sea. Golden and sad and full of regret As though it would ask of earth Where all her lovers had vanished And whither had gone the rose-red lips That had sighed to her light of old. Then I caught a pulse of music, Brokenly, out at the pier-end, And I heard the voices of girls Going home in the dark, Laughing along the sea-wall Over a lover's word!

SAPPHO'S TOMB

In an old and ashen island, Beside a city grey with death, They are seeking Sappho's tomb!

Beneath a vineyard ruinous And a broken-columned temple They are delving where she sleeps! There between a lonely valley Filled with noonday silences And the headlands of soft violet Where the sapphire seas still whisper, Whisper with her sigh; Through a country sad with wonder Men are seeking vanished Sappho, Men are searching for the tomb Of muted Song!

They will find a Something there, In a cavern where no sound is, In a room of milky marble Walled with black amphibolite Over-scored with faded words And stained with time!

Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber, With her phials of perfume round her, In a terra-cotta coffin With her image on the cover, Childish echo of her beauty Etched in black and gold barbaric-- Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers, Or your search will end in dust!

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