—Assembled from stray

  thoughts picked up

  on the byways of life.

Spring, lovely spring! Thou art

In Nature’s files

The cheery counterpart

Of human smiles.

Summer, so gaily guised!

Life’s chronograph

In thee has symbolized

The merry laugh.

Autumn, so bleak and brown!

On Nature’s chart—

As on a face—the frown

Of Time thou art.

Winter! Time’s icy shell!

On Life’s quick page

Thou art the parallel

Of human rage.

The seasons, one by one,

The moods we feel,

Are but the skeins upon

Life’s spinning wheel.

1934

“God is in His Heaven”

And things are far from right.

We slave from seven to seven

For shelter through the night.

Our plans to pots are driven

By press and racketeer,

For God is in His Heaven

And doesn’t seem to hear.

The shelves with goods are swaying;

The shops are full of meat.

Yet many a man is praying

For more to wear and eat.

Our wheat is sent to Sweden,

While bread is very dear;

For God is up in Eden

And doesn’t interfere.

The birds are blithely singing

And bravely flying north.

A vernal breeze is bringing

The buds and crocus forth.

Just man, the wise, must wonder

And worry what to do;

For God is still up Yonder.

—I think He’s puzzled too.

No beast will stalk another

Within the selfsame clan,

Nor prey upon a brother,

As man does unto man.

If Nature is to leaven

Our daily bread of fear,

God’s place is not in Heaven.

I think He should be here.

1935.

I know a lovely maiden—

A minx I wished to say—

Who charms and tantalizes

With her sweet, confounded way.

Her neck is like the opal.

Her hair is soft as silk.

Her cheeks resemble roses

Upon a sea of milk.

Her eyes are either cruel

Or else with pathos melt.

Behind her hot caresses

A hardness may be felt.

A cupid’s bow her mouth is,

But sometimes upside down.

Her pouting ends with laughter.

Her smiles begin a frown.

At times she is so lovely

And looks so pleased and good.

—And then she turns sarcastic

And seems so cold and rude.

I like her and I loathe her;

My love blows cold and hot.

And sometimes I am happy;

And sometimes I am not.

And though I cannot leave her,

I often wish I had.

I know I shall be sorry.

I know I shall be glad.

1899.

Our cells have not forgotten

The time we lived in caves,

When tribal feuds were rampant

And all the gods were knaves;

When warriors were the masters

And all the rest were slaves.

Our ruins grim and hoary

Depict the castle age,

When every mother’s hopeful

Became a serf or page,

And every knight, hysteric,

Was on a pilgrimage.

It is a long, long story

Of fears and hates and pain,

Where every saint was tortured

And all the “reds” were slain.

—And yet in every protest

There was a little gain.

For in this age of science

And wealth and ether waves,

When Art obeys her master

And Nature, led, behaves,

The burden shall be lifted,

At last, from all the slaves.

And Earth shall be an Eden

Where mankind, happy, dwells;

Where no one bows to Worry

And none his honor sells;

Where every serf is willing

And love, not fear, compels.

I know they stone the dreamers

Whose dreams are young and bold.

But this one is a day-dream

That daring men behold,

Of better things than poet

Or prophet ever told.

In truth it is a vision

Of wiser things to do;

A kindly invitation

Of Fate to me and you,

—And what remains is only

To make the dream come true.

1931.

In spite of Moses, Abraham,

The Ark and Genesis,

God’s one advice—instead of ten—

To man, was simply this:

“I’ve made a world for thy delight.

Its goodness I bespeak.

The treasures may be hard to find,

But thine, if thou wilt seek.

“Go help thyself. Dispel the doubts

That so confuse thee now.

Should’st thou forget, the master key

Is limned upon thy brow.”

1934.

A hundred years of chronic peace

Beneath the Bridge of Time has flowed

Since Hate, enslaved to Fear’s decrees,

Beside our frontiers grimly strode.

No Christian aims inspired the “plutes”

To send the strutting robots home:

Brave Greed, their master, saw the fruits

That might be gathered from the loam.

Their minds, diverted, quite forgot

The menace just beyond the line;

And so each busy patriot

Beheld no more the foe’s design.

And now the Brain Trust of the state,

With experts from the titled class,

Is laboring to investigate

How such a thing could come to pass.

That worthy group has sweated blood

For two long years without surcease;

And still it is as clear as mud

What may account for such a peace.

For though they’re wise and from the East,

The problem baffles all their lore.

They ask a few more years at least

This knotty question to explore.

And when their findings are proclaimed

At last, and stated to be sound,

Another bureau must be named

To try to ravel what they found.

But meanwhile doubts must give us pause

And leave us trembling at the knees;

For should they fail to find the cause,

This land must suffer on in peace.

1934.

Thou wert to me the land of liberty,

Where lust for conquest would be deemed a sin.

I knew the weak would kneel in trust to thee,

And nursed the hope that justice would begin.

It was a dream. My lips no longer shape

A lover’s tribute to thy stainless fame.

Adaze, with trembling hands I hang the crepe

That hides my country’s dread, beloved name.

The strong and wise may argue as they will

That other races need the white man’s rod;

But though they rule the dupes that dread their skill,

They dare not whisper such a lie to God.

Our hypocrites with shrewdness say, “We keep

The simple, for their own good, thus at bay.”

Ah fools! Should men be kept in dungeons deep

And dark, to fit them for the light of day?

1899.

I rose and found the dawn unchanged,

The sunrise as of old.

The morning had its maiden blush,

The midday still its gold.

I knew the evening’s quiet touch,

The sunset’s crimson hue.

The stars at twilight winked at me

Just as they used to do.

I walked afield and found the lea

Still fragrant, thick and green.

The trees still waved their leafy arms,

In manner quite serene.

The robin sang, the brook still played,

The breeze felt just the same.

The cows at eve with udders taut

Looked innocent and tame.

I wondered. It was all so strange.

I knew the people’s needs.

I thought the food plants and the grass

Had turned to useless weeds.

I thought that nature and the earth

Had suffered grievous change;

That rains had ceased, the soil had struck

And cows died on the range.

I looked about and saw what seemed

A mummy in the rain,

Who with a span of mangy mules

Was plowing down the grain.

I asked him why, in face of want,

He wouldn’t save the wheat.

He smiled with sympathy and said:

“With lots there’s less to eat.”

Again I looked. A squad of men

Was stationed all around,

Intent, I thought, on dumping grain

In tons upon the ground.

I asked my friend why this might be.

He spread his bony chest

And said: “These worthy men are here

To fight the ’hopper pest.”

Once more I looked. I saw afar

Where ships at anchor lay,

Whose crews were busy pitching out

Their cargoes in the bay.

Again I quizzed. My friend replied:

“It’s plain as plain can be,

If apples grow too well they must

Be dumped into the sea.”

It was not plain to me; but then

I thought it must be so.

I felt appeased; yet one thing more

I wanted still to know.

I asked my friend to tell me straight

If we were in B.C.

He froze me with a sneer and said:

“Wake up! This is A.D.”

I said no more and turned to go,

When on my startled ear

A soul-requiting anthem broke

In accents sweet and clear.

Methought I saw a great white dome,

And on its portico

An angel sang: “The Lord be praised

From Whom all blessings flow!”

1934.

When time was young men learned to know

That cows give milk where grasses grow;

That fruits and nuts and goodly grains

Will grow abundant if it rains.

They thought it well for all to eat.

They even stored the surplus wheat.

For Nature, rich and often kind,

Was now and then a little blind.

They had no labor-saving tools.

They hadn’t thought of using mules.

But through the spirit of the hive

The rugged managed to survive.

In time they learned to fashion rafts.

They came to know the simple crafts.

The schemers hoarded on the sly,

And some grew wealthy by and by.

So when the first depression came

They started up the profit game.

They made the hungry sweat, to wit,

For just enough to keep them fit.

And thus the age of slaves began.

Thus came “The Master and the Man.”—

A system fraught with sin and grief,

Where centuries brought no relief.

At last through dreams and discontent

The toilers grew belligerent.

’Twas then the wily master clan

Devised a new and better plan.

They said, “We’ll lend you chips for use

To buy from us what you produce.”

And lo! The witless, weary slaves

Took up the yoke—and praised the Knaves!

But all the chips could not re-buy

The rank and meagre food supply,

For mothers and the new-born slaves

Were not considered by the knaves.

Yet that indeed was not the worst:

The chips were borrowed from the first;

So all the toilers ever use

Is owed to those who don’t produce.

No matter how the fathers bled,

We slaves are always in the red.

The chattel serf who died was through;

Our debts must follow me and you.

So when it comes to judgment day,

Should we be called and asked to pay,

With costs and interest all applied,

Then I, for one, will suicide.

For though my bleeding back is strong,

Eternity is far too long

To labor on account—and yet

Not long enough to square the debt.

1934.

There are wars in the oldest story.

There are wars in the Land of Nod.

There are wars for the sake of glory

And wars for the grace of God.

There are wars on the upland ranges.

There are wars on the deep blue seas.

There’s a war that the souls estranges

—But only a prayer for peace.

There’s an arch to the oldest bully.

There’s an arch to the newest cad.

There’s an arch to the most unruly

Who struck when the world was mad.

There’s an arch to the boldest raider,

Who forced the weak to their knees.

There’s an arch to the keenest trader

—And now there’s an Arch of Peace.

They plant by the gates a garden

To greet when the brave returns,

To comfort the hearts that harden

Where hell on the earth still burns.

With busts of the new-time Neros

They tip its chevaux-de-frise,

—Not one for the patient heroes

Who worked in the cause of peace.

Since Eve in the Garden of Eden

Her ears to the Tempter lent,

Some turks of the times or a Hedin

Our temples of peace have rent.

And so for a sinner’s pardon

We sue on our bended knees

And offer a Goodwill Garden

To grow in the cause of peace.

—We fenced in the land with frigates

And forts in the long ago,

And stationed a band of brigades

To battle the so-called foe.

But strangely we found that the faster

We fired the whole police,

Instead of a grave disaster

It gave us continued peace.

The forts with the mold have mingled.

We’ve melted the guns into plows.

The swords that the sentries jingled

Will serve us to prune the boughs.

The “foe” that we harmed and hated

Are helping to plant the trees;

For blindly we both awaited

This bond of eternal peace.

1932.

As long as the sun has brilliance,

As long as the years endure,

As long as a saint has virtue,

As long as the truth is pure,

As long as the heart has feeling

And the mind has a thought to spare,

A friend will have friends aplenty,

And friends for each other care.

1930.

You’ve read about the Roosevelt deal,

The Douglas plan, inflation

And other nostrums said to heal

And help a floundering nation.

You’ve heard our doughty captain speak

—His hands and face uplifting,—

“No statesman would estop a leak

While still at sea and drifting.

“You know I’ve had to watch and wait

Until the storms abated.

By sitting tight I’ve saved the State,

Through seas most agitated.

“For nothing, save the grace of God,

Can guide the fearless skipper.

But once our frozen funds are thawed

I’ll fix the blasted clipper.

“I’ll stamp my trusty iron heel

On all the Reds about me,

Who state there is a steering wheel

And stir the mob to flout me.

“O where are now the pioneers

Who plowed the land unaided?

They never preyed upon their peers.

They simply hewed and spaded.

“They never asked the State, when licked,

To be a sort of mother

To wet-nurse every derelict

As if he were a brother.

“Alas! I fear the day is dead

That bred the old go-getters.

Today the ‘beggars’ ask for bread,

And even doubt their betters.

“I know the system seems to be

In some ways rather flooey.

But if you plug and pray for me

I’ll patch it up; no hooey!”

1935.

The sun was gliding earth’s far rim below.

The glint that erstwhile played upon the deep

Was stilled, as if the waves had gone to sleep.

Meanwhile the sky took on a crimson glow

That softly spread and faded as I gazed,

From gold to rose, from rose to pearly gray,

As if some unseen master hand at play

A color-dream upon the sky had traced.

Soon Night approached with soft and stealthy tread

And gently drew the drapes of twilight to.

She tucked the earth, as if her child, to bed

And slaked its fever with her cooling dew;

Then wiped the frescoes from the vaulted wall

And spread her shadow blanket over all.

1937.

We praise the flock that freely went to battle

And fast in death beneath the poppies lies.

We glorify the dolts that, dumb as cattle,

We drove unwilling to the sacrifice.

We build a lofty marble cairn or column

And carve it deep with “slush” to those who fell;

And once a year with faces sad and solemn

We show regret for making Earth a hell.

We sent them forth to fight their distant brothers

In foreign lands, where things were new and strange,

And when they fell we mollified the mothers

With make-believe and promises of change.

But some returned and sought the recognition

We seemed at first so anxious to give.

And that brought on a nasty new condition

—We never really thought they’d need to live.

The banks provided dearly for their dying,

—Our dumb-bells had already signed the note.

But when they ask for something satisfying,

Our saviors with the funds are all remote.

To kill a single soldier in the trenches

Was said to cost some five and twenty grand.

The derelicts returned, like toiling wenches,

Get twenty cents a day I understand.

Of course we know the overhead is heavy.

We hear it costs the realm a dollar ten

—Beside the graft that goes with such a levy—

To get each twenty pennies to the men.

1936.

His father was born on the banks of the Clyde.

His Bengalese mother was darker of hide.

    For neither was he the causation.

A comfortless hut was the home that he knew

And hunger and cold were his lot as he grew

    Like a weed in the wilds of creation.

With urchins and paupers he played in the street;

He played in the storm and the rain and the heat,

    A target for taunts and abuses.

A stranger to kindness, a cuff on the ear,

And curses, inured him to hatred and fear.

    Let him give account that accuses.

At school he was ordered to push and compete,

To prey on the weaker and strive for a seat

    Where honor and ease were the prizes.

In church he was told that the Christian goal

Was to capture a berth for his own little soul,

    And pray as the preacher advises.

He learned from his cronies to lie and deceive,

To lurk in the darkness and by-ways to thieve,

    A course that his conduct was shaping.

No father commanded, no mother implored;

By most of the “great” he was shunned and ignored.

    What chance had his class of escaping?

His parents were wealthy and born to the blood.

No beggar was he in the slums and the mud.

Not much was denied him that money could buy.

His mates in the play were the rich and the high.

So when he in turn threw his hat in life’s ring,

Of hardship and troubles he knew not a thing.

He graded all men as the good and the bad.

The good were the smug and the idle who had.

The poor were to him as the ass or the ox,

Just an ancient need, like the goose to the fox.

So when he developed a craving to kill,

His conscience felt but an innocent thrill.

He had, like the other, been often misled.

He honestly thought he had paid for his bread.

He thought that the buying of bonds on the mart,

And bleeding the toilers, was doing his part.

So when you are tempted to censure his sin,

Be sure that you probe where the errors begin.

The game as designed has a system of rules,

Where some may disport at the cost of the fools.

The masses, we know, are but pawns in the play;

Yet prelates and kings are as helpless as they.

It is wrong and unwise for a brother to blame.

’Tis better to alter the rules of the game.

1936.

———————

Bard Bracy to Roland’s castle sped

And bravely his liege’s message read,

Though ringed about by a hostile band,

To die perchance at the first command.

The haughty baron turned ghastly pale

As Bracy unfolded the gruesome tale.

Burning within was the grim old feud,

A rancour that both had nursed and rued.

At first deep hatred with pride combined

To harden his eye and betray his mind;

But slowly in turn, as the tale unwound,

Sir Roland bowed in thought profound.

It warmed his heart to feel a hand

Extended by an old-time friend.

“To horse!” he cried, “ye gallants mine;

We ride to greet Sir Leoline.”

Sir Leoline was at the gate

As Roland crossed the bridge in state.

The two embraced with sighs and tears

For friendship lost those many years.

The castle doors stood warm and wide

To welcome all the guests inside.

The tables groaned with meats and wine

And Christabel and Geraldine

Expectant stood with arms apart,

More radiant now and light of heart.

The instant that the foes embraced,

And friendship all their bonds unlaced,

The spell that held fair Geraldine

Had broken like a strand of twine;

And Christabel again was free

To seek her own fair destiny.

The hate the former friends had nursed

Had made their souls in part accursed;

And so the taint—as next in line—

Descended on fair Geraldine.

Her doom was to impersonate,

Without intent, that spell of hate.

—But in the words of Christabel:

“It broke, and all will yet be well.”

1943.

Where lazy mornings greet the gladsome hills

And grey-blue valleys tremble in the haze;

Where glaciers, weeping, start the rippling rills

That riven lowlands in the distance glaze;

Where grassy slopes amid defiant snags

Rise slowly, meekly to their destined height,

Contrasting, as it were, the jaunty crags

With the omnipotence of gentle might;

Where heaven’s fireworks send a silver stream

To swathe the landscape in its pallid light,

And summits in their pearly parkas gleam,

To people every by-room of the night;

Where every whisper that thy lips may leave

In loud, deep echoes fills thy startled ear,

And cascades from the waves of ether weave

A wonder legend that the poets hear;

Thou knowest well it is our Thulean isle

—An Eden that all praises but defile.

1900.

—From the Icelandic

of various authors,

both in America and

the homeland.

God of our land! Our land’s great God!

With lauds we emblazon Thy all-holy name.

Time’s legions, the centuries, shaped Thee a crown

From the suns in the heavens aflame.

One day at Thy throne is a thousand years,

A thousands years only a day:

A meek little flower of time with its tears

That trembles and passes away.

    Iceland’s thousand years:

A meek little flower of time with its tears

That trembles and passes away.

O God above! On bended knees

We bare Thee, as children, our deep-burning soul.

We tender Thee, Father from age unto age,

As earnest, our holiest toll.

We stammer and thank Thee a thousand years,

And throng to Thy refuge as one.

We stammer and thank Thee with tremulous tears

The trials our destiny spun.

    Iceland’s thousand years

Were the morning’s deep-icicled measure of tears

That melt in the rays of the sun.

God of our land! Our land’s great God!

Our life is a quivering, quivering reed.

Forsaken we perish. For prowess and faith

We pray unto Thee in our need.

O, be Thou each morning the life-giving light

To last through the day of our strife;

Our comfort and guard in the gloom of the night;

Our guide on the highway of life.

    Iceland’s thousand years

Shall prosper the nation, repay all our tears

And purchase the kingdom of life.

1936

Strung beneath the ocean’s anger

Are the ties that man devised:

That in lands so long estrangèd

Link the minds of humankind.

Yet a mightier tie and token,

Tended by the gods, may send

Through our souls a deeper solace,

Sung in our own mother tongue;

A tongue that stood the strain of ages,

Steeled to all that man can feel:

Ice and hunger, fire and fury,

Fear and breathless siege of death—

Wondrous tongue of song and saga,

Surely modelled by the gods,

Laughing in the odes of gladness,

Or it sobs with hearts athrob.

Through the wear of weary ages

It was a mentor Heaven-sent,

Nectar for the nights of hunger,

Nursed us when we lay athirst;

Light within the lowly cottage,

Long our winters’ evensong;

Mouthpiece for the news of nations,

Nestor of the dizzy past.

Firm it stood through storm and earthquake,

Stood the iron test of fire;

On the bitter field of battle

Bought the freedom that we sought.

Cultured land of light, thou wilt be

Long remembered in our songs,

With thy viking-soul unshaken,

Self-commanded hero-land.

“Tell me, do our women wonder

We are thin and yellow-skinned?”

Asked a bard, and made immortal

Master-dirges to the past.

Bleeding through the bold and giddy

Battle clangor, Hedin sang.

Thorir and the mighty muttered

Maxims while they swung the axe.

Sturla mused in bitter battles.

Bleak was time when Snorri rhymed.

Inspiration lifted Loftur.

Lilja grew among the ruins.

Arason with soul undaunted

Shook the headsman with a look.

Hallgrim with his holy passion

Helped to brace a dying race.

What’s the tongue? An aimless, empty,

Odd absurdity of words?

No, ’tis art, alert with living

Light and soul of wondrous might;

Mind’s incarnate mantle, shining;

Memory’s bastions of the past;

Life astream in rippling runnels;

Rhyming symphonies of time.

Long preserved in stirring story

Stand the annals of the land:

Frantic pain and searing sorrow;

Songs of glorious days of yore;

Budding love and fearless fury;

Fate’s relentless punishments;

Peaceful homes in happy image;

Hallowed times that live in rhyme.

Vision, traits and language linger

Longest in the common song.

Those who themed our thousand ditties

Through the years have been the peers.

Hear ye, bards that fable fondly:

Freedom ceases, left in peace.

If ye find the tales they tell us

Truthful praise—beware, O youth!

Meet unbowed, with might and vigor,

Mammon’s long and cruel wrongs,

With thy hapless lot delighted.

Luck impersons every curse.

What is freedom? Froth and twaddle;

False unless it spells success.

Earth becomes a sorry shambles

Should we moulder where we stood.

Lend thy peaks, O land of Thule!

Loan me once thy godly throne!

Other vistas every-whither

Offer grandeur, wonder-land!

Guilty age with golden altars,

God commends thee to the sod.

Fear success, but force the issue.

—Friendless are the wealthy lands.

Hear ye, bards of bleakest Thule,

Bare your standard to the air!

To your care—so hear me Heaven!—

Handed is the motherland.

And the Harp, though bent and broken,

Blanched in storm and avalanche,

Singed in fire through songless ages,

Shall arise from lullabies.

By the sun that shines in heaven,

Sacred honor and the dawn,

Let the young in living chorus

Long preserve their mother tongue!

Write amain, with runes of fire,

Reason—that it may increase.

Man, aspiring through the spirit,

Spells eternal life. Farewell!

1930

Supposing with firmness we force right ahead,

    Though faced with the steeps of Resistance?

For though we have plodded and patiently bled,

No path that we found in the open has led

    To the land of our dreams in the distance.

It’s setting our pulse and our patience aboil

    How pithless and few is our number.

But it would embitter each son of the soil

To seek for the fruits of our clamor and toil,

    And find but the crypts we encumber.

Beyond the long road to that ravishing land

    The riches we seek are abiding.

That freehold awaits the unfaltering band,

With flashing rewards in each liberal hand,

    Yet over the hills ever hiding.

How well you remember the tear-laden tale

    They tell of humanity’s stages!

You’ve seen the enthusiast falter and fail,

While forth the bold pioneer blazed the new trail

    In the jungles of earth, through the ages.

How many a bowlder was bathed in the gore

    Of the brave whom the multitude followed!

But every new martyr enabled a score

To enter the breach where he struggled before,

    For the rocks by his hot blood were hollowed.

While the darkness of old, in the depth of its night,

    Like death o’er the fastnesses lowered,

The only relief in that faith-killing fight

Was fixing the gaze on that region of light

    Where the sun-mantled tops gaily towered.

’Twas ever the hope of that heavenly goal

    That heartened the chief to the dashes,

While heads of the church threatened Hell for his soul

And hirelings of despotism sought the last toll

    As they burned his live body to ashes.

Thou charmed the first heroes, O On-coming Age,

    With the arch of thy brow still aglitter!

And one day the lowly who live by a wage

At last will emerge from the slavery stage.

    What a day that will be for the bitter!

Then all the blue sky will be cloudless and clear,

    For our cause will be heard by a master

Whom mankind can love without mixture of fear,

Who misses no heartbeat, a sigh or a tear,

    Nor hounds us with Hell and disaster.

And then the poor weaklings can weather the blast

    On the wind-beaten ridge where they cower;

For after the trials and toil of the past

The tempting new vistas imbue them at last

    With visions of pleasure and power.

What a bliss for the weary to wake up anew

    In that wonderful age, when the masses

Can safely embrace and retell what is true,

Without taking a chance on the rack or the screw

    And the verdict that Piety passes!

I vision the time when the victor shall stand

    And view the rich sweep of The Valley,

And greet the long-coveted goshen of land,

While gambolling hordes from the battle-scarred band

    With shouts to its rendezvous rally.

They’d fought through the desert with faith-given poise;

    For freedom indeed is the leaven.

And master and peon shall mingle their voice,

Demanding the deed to the land of their choice

    From the despots, both here and in Heaven.

However acute be the cost and the pain,

    That cross will be light as a feather,

When the settlers file into their sunny domain,

Where servants of Truth and Equality reign,

    And sing their hosannas together.

I know that we comrades may fall in the fight

    Before the last pathway is beaten.

But hail to the first one who forces the height

And feasts on the prospect revealed to the sight,

    Though his last day that scene is to sweeten.

We’ve only a handful of hearts in the game,

    But the whole of our strength we are giving.

We know what a tribute the trail is to claim,

But trust that the Future will nail up each name,

    Though our graves may be lost to the living.

Though many a cliff on the course may debar

    Or crush me betimes in the races,

Undaunted I head for the highlands afar,

And hail with delight every toiler and car

    That the way to the wilderness faces.

And though you’ll make fun of the fool on the hill

    Who falls by the wayside defeated,

Don’t doubt for an instant that others, athrill,

Will enter the ranks and continue until

    The last rift in the road is completed.

I believe that thy triumph, O Truth, in the end

    Will attend to the final equation.

That’s why, O King, to thy bidding I bend,

And bravely await what the future may send,

    In the fullness of Freedom’s invasion.

Then rise all ye quitters and come to the fight!

    Our cause will be lost if we dally.

For Pluck is the beacon, the beckoning light,

That brought us through Tyranny’s negative night

    —And the god who will give us The Valley.

1923

If you can watch the hordes of Hell upheave and rebel,

With Dignity atremble in the toils of its spell,

And every prop that holds the heavens whittled in two—

Then I will calmly sing my song and share it with you.

If you will hate the haughty knave who hog-ties your soul

And forces you to act as if you honored his role,

And buys applause from peons that his powers subdue—

Then I will lend my heart to wholesome hatred with you.

If you can love the lonely slave who leans on his chains

And will not kiss the hand that holds the whip, as he strains,

And to the bitter end unbowing battles it through—

Then I will to my dying day adore him with you.

And should you wish to solve the wondrous secrets of life,

Beginning on the alphabet as aid in the strife,

And scorn to look through others’ eyes—so often askew—

Then I would also like to learn my lessons with you.

If you embark and breast the foam when breakers run high,

Without a private passage to the Port in the sky,

And keep your pace and purpose with your peril in view—

Then over all the seven seas I’ll sail it with you.

And when you face the night of nights with no land in sight,

And murky billows beat upon the boat in its flight,

If you can hold the helm, no matter what may ensue—

Then out upon that dismal deep I’ll dare it with you.

1925

There’s a dismal knell on the ambient air.

The echoing forest in bleak despair

Resounds to the surf’s intoning.

A cloudful of misery hangs on high,

There’s a hint of fear in the morning sky,

And the city itself is groaning.

The beacons of summer are burning low.

Abend you see in the afterglow

The tops of the trees aquiver.

I feel in the moan of the sounding surge

The solemn tones of the funeral dirge

For the last of the leaves ashiver.

The people that hunger for love and light

Have lost their way in the chilly night,

And hurry, they know not whither.

Their hearts are filled with the fear-blent doubt

That Fate compels, as they look about

On the wind-swept leaves that wither.

Everything seems to be doomed today.

There’s a doleful sound to the poet’s lay,

That erst was so free and airy,

Each sylvan bower is sere and bare.

It seems like a funeral everywhere,

For the earth her own must bury.

The landscape fades as the fury grows;

Yet the faith that the summer of life bestows

Lives on through the tireless ages.

The autumn winds off the Arctic zone

From out of the prairies force a groan,

And the blizzard about us rages.

The sickles are piling row on row.

For rule in heaven and earth, we know,

Two forces are fast contending:

The falling leaves and the fear of death,

And faith in the summer’s eternal breath,

Its hand to our hopes extending.

1930

Thou comest afar from the frigid spaces

To fill up the land with snow.

The surge of thy lusty song embraces

Assault on our peace, I know;

But also in human hearts it places

A hint of the summer-glow.

Thy mantle enshrouds the bays and beaches

And buries the flowers deep.

The sound of thy healthy harp-string reaches

Each harbor that lies asleep.

The glow that enhaloes thy heart impeaches

The howl of thy chilly sweep.

Many a prank we have played together

As pals in my native land.

I heard in the call of thy coldest weather

A kindly but stern command,

And saw thee abroad, with thy broken tether

—A broadsword in either hand.

Many have wished for thy death, O Winter,

From weakness and lack of heart.

No runes like thine could the proudest printer

Impress on his eager chart;

Nor would the hand of a Titian tinter

Attempt such a work of art.

Thy voice, at times with its tone of ire,

Is tender beneath and sweet.

Thy fury is dulled by the dream-desire

To dwell on thy ’prisoned heat.

I hear in thy breast, as I hear in fire,

The heart of Eternity beat.

1930

The seas on the bars are beating.

About, on the sand dunes, lie

The flanks of the fated vessels

That foundered in years gone by.

Though most of the rafts are riven

And the writing is worn and old,

Man’s tortuous road to reason

The wrecks on the beach unfold.

The surf by the capes is crowding.

It creeps on the rising lith

And hugs to its breast each billow

That broke on the scarry frith.

The breakers resemble Saga.

They sweep to the fore again

A coastful of ancient cargoes

And corpses of long-dead men.

Yet out to the tameless ocean

The eyes of the fearless turn,

To vision afar, in fancy,

The fringe of a new day burn.

—A soul from the source eternal

Must seek where the storms are rife.

We rot in the dreamy doldrums;

To dare is the food of life.

1932

How still the eve! Yet o’er thy grave’s quiescence,

From out the deeps of thought a voice is calling.

Meseems a holy dew in drops is falling

Adown the visage of the bower’s Presence.

Here both the living and the dead are dreaming.

A dying glow the templed silence kisses.

How oft a soul with learning’s largess misses

The living truths that on this bourne are teeming!

Slabs with Nordic runes—in rows—engraven,

Arise above the meadow’s far expanses;

Preserving ever true, though time advances,

Returning gleams of light from Story’s haven.

Our joys and tears, like rains, when all is over,

Must end their journeys in the self-same ocean.

Thy mound, a legacy to love’s devotion,

Is laden with the rose and four-leaf clover.

That morns and noons must wane away is certain.

A westering shaft the gathered haze is cleaving.

I feel a mystic hand my web unweaving.

Thy weary son eftsoons will draw the curtain.

Voiceless night. The moody murk is weeping.

My muse’s theme reposes in the dingle.

Here, where the nations’ dust-remains commingle,

The Memories come to bivouac with the sleeping.

1932

I’ve rambled o’er the road of life

    Unreconciled,

And to the last I’ve laughed and whimpered

    Like a child.

Yet I have sought for life and light

    And looked about,

A child of faith that fought the bane

    Of fear and doubt.

Throughout the pleasing park of life

    I’ve played my fill,

And broken all my bonny toys,

    As babies will.

I’ve weeded every hill of hope

    On hands and knees,

And sung my little poem-prayers

    To plants and trees.

But trees have lost their charming coats

    And colors gay;

And seared is every shoot of hope

    Beside the way.

And so I leave my land of dreams

    With lyric sighs,

Just like a boy that loves to croon

    His lullabies.

May Heaven’s light so lead me on,

    Though lure-beguiled,

That I may end my life just like

    A little child.

1941

Come sit on the bar of my sawbuck a while;

    It is safe as a rock, I trow.

Although it is worn and withered and old

    It will not complain, I know.

No, I am the one that is weary and spent

    In the work that I have to do.

The strength of my arms is ebbing away,

    As even my soul is, too.

I’ve toiled it for seventy summers on end

    —For seventy and five, my lad.

While some of them may have been mild and bright,

    Yet most of the lot were bad.

Each year in its turn, since I wandered west,

    Was the worst of the endless string;

For what have I earned in this land of light

    But labor and want—not a thing.

In silence I’ve trudged with my saw and the buck,

    Like a sheep on a barren plain.

I’ve snooped, like a thief, in the loathsome lanes

    And looked as a rule in vain,

To see if there wasn’t a pile on the place

    Or a pole I could sever in two,

That people might know I was willing to work

    —For wages or food, ’tis true.

In the burning rays of the summer sun

    I’ve sweated and toiled amain.

In winter my ill-clad feet would freeze,

    Though flushed with the grinding strain.

Where I happen in time, with a trembling hand

    I tap on the master’s door;

But the hardest task and the trial is

    To tell what I want, once more.

All I can say is “Kind sir, cut wood?”

    And it sounds, I’m afraid, like a prayer—

And then I explain by shaking the saw

    As swiftly as ever I dare.

At last when he sees what my errand is

    And offers to make a deal,

If I mention “A dollar to cut one cord”

    He cringes and squirms like an eel.

He puffs and he blusters and pushes me off,

    Till the price is the one he’d choose;

For “profit” was made for the men of ease,

    And mine is to slave and lose.

To make it still harder I’ve had to compete

    With the headstrong impractical fools,

Who offer their service so shamefully cheap

    That I saunter away with my tools.

And no one has felt like a friend in need,

    Or furthered my case if he did.

My silvery locks were a sign to most

    To serve me the lowest bid.

—And yet I have met with some friendly folk

    (A few) where I made a call,

Who gave me a handout of butter and bread

    —To beg is the worst of all.

This cloak that I wear is a wonderful gift

    From a woman across the street.

I know that her husband wore it once;

    It’s warm and so strong and neat.

These boots—like a prince’s!—the tapster took

    And tossed in my path one night.

He looks like a rake of the careless kind,

    But the core of his heart is right.

In every place there are some good souls

    Who seek to improve your lot.

But who wants to beg like a brazen cur,

    Or bend to a pauper’s cot?

For him who was once quite well-to-do

    And willing to spend his cheque,

It is hard to accept a daily dole

    And drift like a human wreck.

You ask if I have not a sister or son,

    To see that I’m housed and clad.

No. All my relations and fellows and friends

    Are faded and gone, my lad.

One day with my Bertha and Katie I came;

    But Katie took sick and died.

The climate out here is so cold and dry,

    And comforts were not supplied.

The work in the laundry was lengthy and hard,

    And a little, frail girl was she.

For reading and leisure her life was meant—

    To learn was an ecstacy.

So gentle and loyal, I loved her the best—

    The last of my children five.

My sad, old days would be sunny again

    And sweet, were she still alive.

My Bertha was always so bold and so free,

    But beautiful as a queen.

The life in the taverns enticed her fast

    And tainted her mind, I ween.

She lost her heart to a handsome crook

    And hastily ran away.

He stole her, in fact, with his stylish ways.

    She is starving, I fear, today.

You ask if there wasn’t a son. Yes, sir.

    Their souls are a gospel to me.

There never were better or manlier men,

    So manly they were—all three.

They say that young Benny was stronger than Steve,

    Whose strength was enough for three;

But Raven, if taunted, the twain could hold,

    So terribly strong was he.

All of them longed for a life on the sea

    —The land was so dull and tame—

To match their strength with the stormy deep

    And strive for the boldest fame.

But many a cruise on the main was rough

    —Too much in the end for me!

They perished at last, my poor little boys

    —My poor little boys—all three.

I’ve often been happy and overly rich,

    But all that I had is gone.

I sway in the blast like an aged oak,

    With even its sap withdrawn.

1931

Long I strolled, though late the hour.

Lightnings set the skies aglower,

While a drenching summer shower

Swiftly filled each step ajar.

Through the aspen arbors gleaming

On I sauntered, vaguely dreaming,

’Till I came upon a quiet

Camping ground at Sandy Bar;

Where the pioneers, in passing,

Pitched their tents at Sandy Bar.

Silence reigned. All signs have faded

Since the early fathers waded

Through the leagues of lakes that made it

Like an ocean near and far.

Death, that in their dreams abided,

Darkly o’er the floods presided,

Casting ’neath his falcon feathers

Fateful gloom on Sandy Bar,—

From his wings, so broad, a baleful

Black-out over Sandy Bar.

Sturdy fathers, fey and ailing,

Feared the Summoning Angel’s hailing

Ere they could be set for sailing

Safely to life’s Port afar.

Sick for weeks on ships a-tossing

Souls were not prepared for crossing.

Standing face to face with terror

Few could rest at Sandy Bar.

Pressed for time, on pins and needles

People walked at Sandy Bar.

All their tragic toil and scourging

To my heart like pain came surging;

For the old remains emerging

Marred the foreground like a scar.

As I looked the lightning flashes

Lit the scattered heaps and ashes,

Where exhausted men and mothers

Mutely rest at Sandy Bar;

Where the immigrants so gamely

Gave their all at Sandy Bar.

Those who came to seek and settle

Showed their earnest will and mettle,

Well content to wage a battle

With conditions under par.

Since the hour of immigration

All their mass-determination

Was to make their way to freedom,

Westward bound from Sandy Bar;

Blaze a trail through bog and jungle

Branching out from Sandy Bar.

Thoughts of old within me straining

On my heart their darts were training,

As if cosmic eyes were raining

All the tears of pain there are.

Shafts of lightning, like a token,

Left the highest trees all broken,

As if spirit hopes were hewing

Highways out of Sandy Bar,

Hewing lanes to life and glory

Leading out from Sandy Bar.

Thus the braves who fell a-fighting

From their graves the path are lighting,

All the willing ones uniting

With their long-abandoned car.

Every hope shall earn fruition

In each mind that has ambition

To take up the uncompleted

Exodus from Sandy Bar,

To pursue the ever-onward

Aims that grew at Sandy Bar.

He who makes new paths, and passes,

Plants ambition with the masses,

Bringing forth, like frosted grasses,

From the soil an avatar.

Though some active urge decreases

In each living thing that freezes,

In my fancy ice encrusted

All the grass at Sandy Bar.

Plants still green with frozen fragrance

Filled the air at Sandy Bar.

Shining spectral shades, I doubt me,

Sent a stream of warmth throughout me.

Phantom gleams on graves about me

Glittered faintly like a star.

All the brawn that blessed the sleeping

Buried now the earth is keeping,

Where it lies forever idle

In the ground at Sandy Bar.

All that death could overpower

Is interred at Sandy Bar.

As the beating rain abated,

Breezes kind, so long awaited,

Crowding on the clouds so freighted

Cleared the sky for every star.

Routed packs with fury flashing

Farther to the north were dashing,

Till a riftless reach of heaven

Rested over Sandy Bar.

Heaven, where the leaders landed,

Looked with peace on Sandy Bar.

1943

“Thy long-sought land of Promise

I lay before thy gaze,

The land wherein thy people

Shall dwell in coming days.

But o’er its sacred border

Thy foot shall never tread.

Anear the goal thy spirit

Shall gather with the dead.”

Thus long ago to Moses,

The man, Jehovah spake

—A doom that mixed forebodings

Of life and death awake.

Moses led his people

A long and toilsome way,

Till gleaming in the offing

The fields of Goshen lay.

Jehovah spared his servant

For one enraptured look;

Then signed his earthly chapter

And closed his mortal book.

Roosevelt led his people

A long and toilsome way,

Until his land of promise

In brilliant prospect lay.

God blessed him with an image

Of all its features grand;

A land of peace and plenty,

The peoples’ freedom-land.

Oft with his trusty Fala

Beside the hearth he sat,

While with the earth’s far peoples

He shared his weekly chat.

And all the troubled millions

That listened, far and near,

Could feel his vibrant power

Dispel their chronic fear.

Some men of strength and valor

Among the dross are born.

An innate trend to goodness

Some others may adorn.

But few among the masters

—As human records state—

Are gifted with the nature

That makes them good and great.

Roosevelt’s hope and vision

For home and world embrace

The faith that peace eternal

May bless the human race.

An eager world had listened

Through many an hour of fear,

While o’er the void he sent them

His messages of cheer.

Now this our mighty Moses,

So noble, wise and true,

Has scaled life’s highest summit

And waved his last “adieu.”

His feet the Lord has guided

Across the desert wild,

As any loving mother

Will guide her stumbling child.

And all the mighty nations

Stand awed and thunderstruck,

As if the hopes of mankind

Were trampled in the muck.

Across the foaming ocean

Love’s tribute to his worth

Is wafted from the heart of

The smallest state on earth.

One hope, nay, one conviction,

From out the chaos stands:

That pilgrims, fired with purpose,

From all betroubled lands

Will seek for truth and courage

And visions new and brave,

And find that inspiration

Beside his hallowed grave.

“Ægir’s daughters” softly

Sing their lullabies.

Beneath a rain of roses

A child in slumber lies.

1945

Amuse, in His glory, when God surveyed

Our great but unfinished sphere,

Of matter He found He had made enough,

But most of it out of gear.

As over the lands from place to place

His piercing gaze He ran,

To find in the world a worthy home

To welcome His chosen man

—’Twas here that He paused to plan.

Though Nature in silence must play her part

In patience, at God’s command,

Each atom astir from year to year

Must yield to His mighty hand.

His vision is still the same, it seems—

The same as it first began,—

So when He fashions a finer soul

To finish His super-man

—’Tis here that He has to plan.

No graver duty was given to man

By God, than His sweet command:

That every Thulean battle his best

To better his fatherland.

Each son abroad, while he dwells adrift,

Must dream, like the exile can,

Of the joy of lending a hand at home

And helping the Artisan

To perfect His wondrous plan.

1929

A fire of hate throughout the earth is burning,

As if King Death dictated all our learning

—As if life’s sunny day to dusk were turning.

The lords of war write every act that passes,

Each edict that would starve the poorer classes.

Like witless sheep, they fool and fleece the masses.

The deadly strife is high and low alarming.

Each land prepared the cause of man is harming;

For, strange to say, our hope lies in disarming.

Our motherland that lesson now is teaching,

While long-embattled states continue preaching

Of wars, and strive each other overreaching.

Dear isle, thou art a haven consecrated,

A country by the god of peace located,

Where human rights, not raids, are emulated.

I know thy sons their swords at one time rattled.

The sagas much about their valor prattled.

But now they stand for better things embattled.

The age-old ways of other lands thou breakest;

From errors seen a lesson new thou takest;

From broken rafts a bridge to Heaven makest.

No race nor clan on earth our own transcended.

Some innate law our sturdy growth attended.

From kings and slaves our blood was truly blended.

Remember, then, thy destiny and dower,

Thy duty to the world each pregnant hour:

To be a guiding light to peace and power.

God bless thee, mother by the outer ocean,

And all thy hundred thousand souls’ devotion

To peace and art and every true emotion.

May countless “Jons” be born to be thy genii,

To bless thee with a halo deep and sheeny

—But never a “Hitler,” never a “Mussolini.”

1940

In pensive mood beside the road

I flung an empty flask,

But fancied that my thirst was undiminished.

I fumbled for another one.

You needn’t stop to ask—

I never leave a thing like that unfinished.

My head grew weak and dizzy;

The day resembled night,

And duly everything began to flutter.

I tumbled over headlong;

I tumbled up aright

—And tumbled off again into the gutter.

I lay there in a swoon,

Just a limp and sleepy soak;

And loafers hurried by me as if glad to.

I thought I must have died

In the dark, and had a stroke

—Or drunk a little more than I had had to.

But I managed to recover,

As you certainly can see,

And Satan lost a prize he might have landed.

So at last the fact is proven,

Through Lazarus and me,

That Life can beat the Devil single-handed.

1923

Too much the muse exacted

From me so ill-content.

No inspiration acted

On only “two per cent.”

1934

In dreamy contentment the day was enjoyed

And drew to a close like the rest.

Her soul was alight with a love that is pure

And license had never oppressed.

Her mind, like a babe at the bosom of dreams,

Went back to her earliest days;

And memory’s ties with her kindred and kith

Were kind as the morning’s first rays.

She sensed in the starlight the sorrows of life,

Assessed on the ages gone by.

But none of the evils that come with the clouds

Of crime ever darkened her sky.

For sun-gilded lands with their summers of faith

Her soul with bright memories filled.

Her morning of life with its mystical wand

Its magic of hope had distilled.

She felt no alarm as she passed through the park,

At peace with all humans at large.

Through years of devotion she’d yearned to anneal

The young that were placed in her charge.

She loved, always loved, every creature and child

That conquered the threshold of life.

Her mind was a stranger to darkness and doubt

And dread of the murderer’s knife.

Alas, all in vain proved her visions and faith:

A villain her byway patrolled,

A serpent in ambush to sully her life.

The sequel may never be told,

How dauntless in spirit she duelled the foe

Till death was her only release.

Her heart valued honor much higher than life.

Sweet heroine, rest thou in peace!

1946

I thank my God that he gave me you,

A goddess of beauty rare.

No other could help me to hold in view

The heavens, so calm and fair.

No other could show me the simple way

The seeker for truth must go;

And only to you do I owe today

For all that I feel and know.

No other could tune up my tiny harp

That timid and idle lay,

Nor whisper with tact if my tones were sharp,

And tell me the theme to play.

No other could free me from fear and doubt,

In face of the cosmic strife,

Nor help me to feel in a faith devout

The facts of eternal life.

I thank my God for His gift to me:

A goddess to love and prize,

Who raised me to heights from which to see

Our Heavenly Paradise.

1950

A friendly smile awakens love and light

And laughter in a heart devoid of ease;

It makes the glow on furrowed faces bright

And fills the soul with happiness and peace.

A smile of scorn can build within the best

A blaze of hate no will can long conceal;

It tears the finest tendons in the breast

That time can never quite amend or heal.

A kindly smile may quicken strength anew

And kindle faith that erst was still and dead;

It makes the hapless hunger to pursue

The hidden wonder-realms that lie ahead.

Each hour that gave us dreams and daily breath

Is dimmed and tainted by the cynic’s sneer.

It turns a song into a dirge of death

And drowns our longings in a sea of fear.

1950

Starting forth on Fate’s long journey

Fired with hope the eager lad.

Brand-new shoes and some provisions

Satisfied and made him glad.

But some wonder-wine of courage

Was the best thing that he had.

Having reached life’s hilly stages,

Hemmed about with sleet and snow,

On a drift the swain now seated

Says in accents weak and low:

“Lunch kit empty, outworn shoes,

And the road gets worse, I know.”

“Barefoot and without provisions

It is hard to trudge the snow.

Yet, were anything in the bottle

I’d bestir myself and go.

Heaven is now my hope and stay.

Hast Thou not, O Lord, I pray,

A drop to fill that flask of mine?

I feel I’m through without the wine.”

“Utter silence everywhere!

Is even prohibition There?”

1948

I studied the texts with a weak aversion;

There was no pressure from inner need.

I felt no desire to seek incursion.

My soul was untouched by a holy creed.

I drifted about like a beast unthinking

And blandly ignored the mind’s arrears,

—And yet stray hopes in my heart were linking

Some heavenly bliss with our earthly tears.

My messages all were an aimless chatter

And every service besmirched the cloth.

I was like the rhymesters who rave and clatter

And ream out cantos of tasteless froth;

A blind man to point out the path that matters;

A peon who thinks we are much too free;

A father who sends out a son in tatters

To seek live coals on a snowy lea.

—I buried and catechised, christened and married

And quietly did what the rules declare.

I gazed on the skies as I prayed and parried

And piously feigned that my heart was there.

I sensed what I was. I had wished for glory

And weakly forgave what I did amiss:

An erring shepherd—the same old story—

Who shirks and falls for a traitor’s kiss.

I lacked the manhood to make retraction.

I muddled along for thirty years,

And offered, in signal of satisfaction,

The silvery locks that the mob reveres.

Thirty years spent—and the spell is breaking.

My spirit, through grace, is unchained at last.

My soul is cloven, my conscience aching.

I’ve conquered the trammels that held me fast.

Laid open, my bosom its faults confesses.

I fear the impending bugle call.

I hear the wails of the misled masses,

The millions that kneel in the judgment hall.

1933

She huddled on the stoop on a cold and stormy day

And shrank into herself till a crumpled heap she lay.

A bony hand was groping and reaching all about

Her tatters, in the vain attempt to keep the weather out.

Her eyes were cold and dim, as if the light within had died

Out in the killing blasts that sweep Life’s unforgiving tide.

They shifted to and fro with a blank and aimless stare,

But saw and sought for nothing through the windows of despair.

Her sallow brow was wrinkled, where furrow furrow crossed;

The cruel memorandum of sorrow’s awful cost.

For who can tell the anguish, the pain and bitter tears,

The derelicts of mankind must suffer through the years.

She may have been a diamond, a bright and lovely thing,

That fell out of its setting in Luck’s bejewelled ring,

Or else a pearl that someone had tossed into the deep

—A dull and worthless fragment now on Life’s dank refuse heap.

1936

From mystic realms, by Heaven consecrated,

Now casts the sun to earth his parting gleams.

Bedewed, a fairer land has long awaited,

Where lilies fondly kiss the purling streams.

There dwells a maid ’mid din of fall and river

And dreams, aweave upon the purple haze.

The northern lights like silken curtains quiver.

Across the sky the moon forever plays.

Above, in airy halls that cannot crumble,

The colonnades resound with melody.

Below, the thunders of the earth, arumble,

In undertones support the rhapsody.

Œolian strings with amber hues aglitter,

Forever play the music of the spheres,

In lands of peace no bloody feuds embitter:

Abodes of light my fairy domineers.

1929

Through all the years that I remember

Stark Want has been my paramour.

From life’s young May to late December

That luckless bond has held secure.

How long we shall continue thus

He knows Who first united us.

1936

With silver steeples shining gleams

The city of my boyhood dreams,

Beyond the sand-plain, sere and bare.

The serried palms will guide me there.

There, glinting in the sun, I see

The symbol of my destiny.

Beyond this ruddy sea of sand

My soul beholds the promised land.

No threat or menace may avail

To march me off the beaten trail,

And no compulsion, path or sway

—The palms are there to show the way.

—The journey finished, far and drear

I find the selfsame desert here:

A parched and withered waste of land.

My weary eyes are filled with sand!

1930

Other lands may live on ancient glory

And lean their destinies on past renown;

May dig among the fossils, far and hoary,

To find the pearl of life and honor’s crown.

Not so with thee, whose sons are up and doing

And sing amain their happy roundelay,

Each manly task with noble zeal pursuing.

Thy sun was never brighter than—today.

Other lands to sham their souls are giving,

To seek the glamor in the halls of state.

Here thy sons must seek an honest living,

And service is the hall-mark of the great.

Upon thy shores the sun of freedom playing

Outshines the brilliant globoid in the sky;

And every thrall for independence praying

Upon thy smile of welcome must rely.

O land of faith and freedom’s holy dower,

That fate reserved for youth and purity,

Imbue us all with manhood’s mighty power

To meet unbowed each fell conspiracy!

Yea, give us strength to soar each sacred hour

To sunny peaks of love and charity,

O land of faith and freedom’s holy dower

That fate reserved for youth and purity!

1929

I stood aghast with awe indeed

As angry forth the river sprang.

It would devour my starving steed.

Astang the floes beneath me sang.

But vowing still to ford the flow,

I fought the pack the current brought,

Allowed my horse a “half a show.”

O what’s a task if that is not?

1928

Friends are passing fast away,

Fate’s insistent call obey.

Perhaps I, too, am due today,

With dented armor, shield aspley,

A broken helmet, shattered sword and sins to pay.

1932

Full well I know the bang and boom

Of bells that toll so near.

Fast approaching Death and Doom

Are dinning in my ear.

Visions float in front of me

For future contemplation.

With dying eyes I dimly see

The drama of creation.

1940

O how it pains me through and through

To think of the birds in cages,

Torn away from the boundless blue,

Its breath of life and the thrills they knew,

And the fears that are freedom’s wages!

Ye poor little playthings of Error!

How plaintive your cry and your terror!

Don’t flutter your wings, just sit and sigh.

Insult them not by trying.

The bars of the cage your claims defy;

And could ye escape, the walls deny

Any further attempt at flying.

To those that have wings and a vision

’Tis weary to live in a prison.

But minds that have always refused to fly,

Unfaltering look, without anguish,

On the free-born pent in a puny sty,

In the pitch of life, till they mope and die

—Condemned to their level to languish.

Ye poor little playthings of Error,

With your plaintive cry and your terror!

1929

Just like the tender flower

That grows beside the way

And greets the morning hour

In nature’s bright array

Before the reaper falleth

To earth and withered lies,

So, when the Angel calleth,

Man, young or aged, dies.

All men to higher forces

Must answer soon or late.

On life’s uncertain courses

They meet the selfsame fate.

And no one, poor or wealthy,

Can buy a day’s reprieve.

When summoned, weak or healthy

Without delay must leave.

To me, as to the sower,

King Death, it seemeth plain,

Is like the tireless mower

Who cuts the standing grain.

And roses, reeds and sedges

Fall victims with the grass

Before the sickle’s edges,

Wherever he may pass.

Mankind impatient races,

Nor ever hesitates,

Right into Death’s embraces.

Beyond the grave awaits.

The multitudes keep milling

To one predestined goal;

And all, both loath and willing,

Must go—there’s no parole.

For neither wealth nor station

Can turn grim Death aside.

No bribe nor supplication

Can buy a single stride.

All human power faileth

His lifted hand to still.

No prayer nor threat availeth

Against his iron will.

Men, ever dazed and fickle

With doubt, are unaware

How Death may swing his sickle,

On whom or when or where.

By one accustomed highway

Into this life we come,

But many a devious byway

Appears to lead therefrom.

Since Death all men arraigneth

And marketh for his own,

No sanguine hope remaineth

He’d spare but me alone.

And as we still inherit

Old Adam’s native lust,

I know I truly merit

To be returned to dust.

No right the mind espouseth

Can make this life my own.

The soul my body houseth

Abides there as a loan.

The Lord, whene’er He pleaseth,

May claim His goods in fee;

And Death, His servant, seizeth

What hath been lent to me.

Content in Jesus’ keeping

With meekness I obey,

Less worthy than the sleeping,

Whose last remains are clay.

Whene’er the call resoundeth,

No strength nor pleas avail;

But when the night surroundeth,

My courage shall not fail.

My Saviour now resideth

Amongst the pure Above

And in His wisdom guideth

All things with perfect love.

While ending death’s fell power

He on the crosstree died,

That I might from that hour

For aye with Him abide.

He conquered death by dying

And set the spirit free.

While on His strength relying

No harm can come to me.

Though deep in earth be hidden

My bones, for timeless rest,

My soul will bide unchidden

In Heaven among the blest.

Christ dwells with me each minute.

In Him my trust I keep,

Outside the house or in it,

Awake or when asleep.

Without Him hope were sterile

And hollow in the strife.

Through Him, in spite of peril,

We gain eternal life.

In Jesus’ name I’m biding;

In Jesus’ name I’ll die.

With Him my footsteps guiding

No fate can terrify.

So, Death, though I be near thee

And foul has been my guilt,

I say: “I do not fear thee.

Come hail whene’er thou wilt!”

1954

My tongue a plaint composes,

    My heart compels a tear,

On greeting you exhausted

    From the battle’s grim career,

With broken shields and sabres

    With kindred blood asmear.

A blessing high—without intent—

    Was rendered me by him,

Who first disarmed my eager sons,

    Unscathed of heart and limb.

Our friendly shores, at peace with all,

    No fears may since bedim.

But thrice accursèd be the knaves

    My errant sons beguile

To war, with blinded eyes, upon

    A neighbor’s domicile;

As Hoth, with tragic innocence,

    Obeyed a tempter’s wile.

About the graves of No-man’s-land

    May peace be with the slain;

And may the stains of clotted gore

    Conceal the marks of Cain.

But oh, to view the human wrecks

    That wander back again

    Repletes a mother’s pain!

1933

Lone Peak rears his bust to the beautiful sky,

And the bulrushes gaze on astounded.

The copsewood refuses to clamber so high

And the creepers lose footing around it.

And though the cold blasts ever beat without ruth

On his brow, in the strife he engages,

Unconquered he stands, as if courage and truth

Were carved from the rock of the ages.

1924

Gleaming through the gloaming,

Geysers, wild, arising,

Tip the rocks with tapers,

Twos and more afusing.

Lambent rays illumine

Living bows aquiver.

Rainbows, lined with lanterns,

Light the way so brightly,

’Round the summits running

Rills of golden spillings.

Winter’s hand, in hundreds,

Heaves the flares at even.

Icy cones, like candles,

Quicken till they flicker.

Spangles thrown asprinkle

Spray the night with daylight.

Glossy reaches glisten,

Glasslike, to the flashes

Of the fireworks’ fury

Far beyond the Arctic.

1930

No horns were blown nor havoc made

When He was in the Manger laid.

No diary the date has shown;

His day of birth is still unknown.

And even yet our age is blind

To excellence in humankind.

But somewhere Nature’s twirling Tide

Will tender payment, multiplied.

His Time, we know, would not agree

To name His anniversary,

And let each current Christmas lay

Acclaim, instead, the longer day.

His catechism was common toil,

His copy-book the living soil,

Where nature, old, yet all abloom,

In every knoll concealed a tomb

Of poet, whom the people spurned,

Or prophet, later stoned or burned;

Where fathers broke each others’ bones,

And builded sons memorial stones.

Amid those scenes there came the call

That comes to leaders, one and all:

To mend the ills that cause decay

And cure the blunders of the day.

In whispers low the human flood

Said “Here’s a prophet in the bud.”

The mother-heart, that hoped and yearned,

The hallmark on His brow discerned.

He saw what ailed society.

That sin was not impiety;

Not penury that pinched the folk

In part, nor yet the Roman yoke.

He saw that narrow selfishness

Was searing all our happiness;

That the burden of each citizen

Was saddled on by fellowmen—

Men of craft and cruelty,

Who clamored for servility;

Who took on faith the favored guess

That faking may beget success.

He preached that human love, alone,

Could lead the way to Heaven’s throne;

That all our deepest wisdom went

To waste, if lacking good intent.

His text upon the profiteer

And penny-slave had thin veneer;

But every sinner found defence

Whose fault was just incompetence.

He charged a cankered ministry,

With creed-enslaved mentality,

Who fear the light and sell their soul

For softer jobs and more control.

O’er the crowd He cast a spell

That charmed the groping infidel;

For something in a soul divine

Can serve a thought that words confine.

And every truth His soul was sent

He seemed to think self-evident;

Forgetting that the mind of man

Is multi-cosmopolitan.

But how remiss the multitude

His message found, He understood,

When, after all His soul had sown,

They sought for Him the local throne.

For men believed that vision was

The work of schools, alone, because

Some brands, at least, were brought or sent

In book-form to the ignorant.

To fail in building brotherhood

Embittered Him upon the rood.

It broke His heart of hearts to see

How hopeless such a task would be.

But evermore the gods beget,

And gospel themes are written yet;

And from the self-same source is hurled

Each servant that improves the world.

And there are always mighty men;

And mundane culture, now and then,

And Fancy’s bright, effulgent whole

Are focused in a godly soul.

But every martyr, man or saint,

Has made in turn the same complaint:

That when his heart and hope were spent

The harvest seemed a punishment.

That pain of mind the preacher draws

Who pleads for better faiths and laws,

And dies, with all his efforts banned,

An outcast in his fatherland.

And ’tis the leader’s lot to see

His labors’ sad futility,

When mankind, full of self-deceit,

Keep signing up their own defeat.

And the poet’s portion is

To perish in the chrysalis,

And carry to the bier, unborn,

The budding visions of the morn.

And even the peasant pioneer,

Who plows the glebe beside the mere,

Succumbs ere he, himself, can see

His service to humanity.

1924

So maudlin, with pity and pathos I stood

If someone who erred got the lashes;

If hanged, I’d weep over the ashes.

With vocal dispraise such injustice I viewed.

But somehow as soon as the war-craze ensued,

When slaughter en masse was the popular mood

And corpses all over the planet were strewed,

With dumb indecision I stood.

For there was the problem of friendships and food

—One’s sympathies nobody cashes.

To dampen my conscience-clashes

The cracks in my honor I artfully glued

With unctuous lies that I hastily brewed

—And cheered just as loud as I could.

1953

For ages the growth had been garnered.

The ground was still blowing away.

And closer and closer each farmer

Had cut down the trees and the hay.

Each tenant, in turn, that departed

Had taken his pound since he started

And timed the last take to the day.

Each son that succeeded his elders

Received a less fruitful estate.

The longer the line of the fathers

The less would the heritage rate.

The last of the lot were two brothers

To live on the desert the others

Had looted and left to its fate.

They blamed all their forebears and fathers

For faithless and shameful neglect.

On nostrums and needs they debated,

But never agreed in effect.

Yet faster than language could frame it,

They felt that they had to reclaim it,

Or flee from a region so wrecked.

One brother, less sanguine, decided

To search at the borders for gold.

He deemed that there must be some metals

In mountains so rugged and old.

At night he had noted a glimmer,

A nebulous kind of a shimmer,

From underground treasures untold.

The other one went on the warpath

To wake up the glade and the field,

To coax the young birch from the border

And better the ground and the yield,

To lure the tough ling up the highlands,

To liven the pines on the dry-lands

And sew up the sward till it healed.

They parted; for pride and ambition

So pull at the ties of the clan.

No other enticements can answer

When Honor has called to the man

Who gears not his work to his wages,

But wills the result to the ages

And plans to improve what he can.

In centuries progress is patterned

And proved, not in days or in years;

And visions that time found the truest

Betoken which epoch endears.

But always the people are proudest

And play up their freedoms the loudest

Whenever no author appears.

In sooth there’s a fable or folklore

Some few are repeating today

That deep in the past when the people

Were poorer and full of dismay,

A skeleton bleaching and broken

Had been to the finder a token

That tempting rich treasures there lay.

Who froze there in raiments so ragged

The rock-slide alone could retell.

One forearm, though brittle, still beckoned

To breaks in the side of the fell.

In frost-cracks that long had been littered

The loadstones in particles glittered

Like ghost-eyes agleam in a cell.

And much of the precious metal

The mob that came after had found;

For Toil, ever tempted by profit,

Kept tearing the wealth from the ground.

The mountains, now mined to their bases,

Were moved through the gaps in their faces

And yielded up stores that astound.

For profit the brother had blasted

The boulders with weakening hands

And torn from the treasures behind them

Their time-honored rock-woven bands.

And man set the mountains ashiver,

To make them consent to deliver

And bow to their master’s commands.

In Sundale’s new farmsteads, so fertile,

By folks it’s remembered and told

How gardens had built out their borders

While birches grew stalwart and old.

The barrens got fewer and fewer,

The fatherland better and newer

—A sight for the sons to behold!

A tree in what once was the wasteland

Keeps watch o’er the dale and the steeps,

And under its shadow in silence

’Tis said that the brother now sleeps.

A hillock near-hidden with flowers

Is his, that envisioned these bowers

And sealed up the sandpits for keeps.

And people have faith in the forest

That fondly has sheltered the one

Who fostered the trees and the flowers

And first of the tribe had begun

To bid for more dews for the dry-lands,

To drive the brave furze up the highlands

And temper both shower and sun.

The vessels our seamen are sailing

Were sawn from the timbers at home,

And proud of their part, as a symbol,

They play it wherever they roam.

From ports with the products of labor

They ply to the marts of a neighbor

Or sally afar o’er the foam.

We see in each fact, not the fable,

As feebly we search and appraise,

That law, if illucid, is stable

And leaves but one prospect to face:

To think not in hours, but in ages,

At eve not to claim all our wages,

Will bring out the best in the race.

Through sins that may seem to enfetter

The sharp will instinctively learn

To change what is best to a better

In building the future we earn—.

It isn’t today, with its dancing

And dreams, but the art of advancing,

That buys what the seers can discern.

1953

The shooting for the moment had abated,

The sound of battle faded to a whisper.

The dead and dying o’er the field enscattered,

In no-man’s-land, prevented further action.

So like a breastwork ’twixt the poisèd armies,

The carrion wall restricted will and vision.

Repellent unto both the feet and senses

In random piles the human flesh was lying,

Inert and maggoty or feebly crawling.

A momentary truce had been agreed on

The while the sappers dug the putrid masses.

Beside a tattered tree-bole at the forefront

A tired youth arose upon his haunches.

All day through filth and blood he had been crawling

Beneath a rain of lead and shrapnel flying.

The long night through, uncovered in a shell-hole,

In icy slush he’d lain with fear and shivered.

Across the gap a seasoned, greying trooper

With cautious glances rose from out his crater.

His clothes and shoes were wet and blood-bespattered.

Though he himself was hale and still unwounded.

“Good day to you!” he said in accents kindly

And, strangely, spoke the language of the other.

“To both of us this lull is welcome, comrade.”

“My years do not deserve this adulation.

I never owned a foot of my fair country.

Another reason sent me forth to battle.

“A house and home? No, I live in a city

And am for sale from day to day to masters

Who set the rates of pay, decide the hours

And own the tools, the shops and vacant spaces.

“No, I’m not here because our propaganda

For peace was less than yours in pitch or phrasing.

We were the first of all, if you remember,

To get the Nobel Prize, so highly valued.

And yet we shot, as if he were a felon,

The one who tried to stop this Armageddon!

The rich, grown famous for their great possessions,

As death approached vied blindly with each other

To hang upon ‘The Tree of Peace,’ with unction,

Their hats, packed full of bonds against the public,

That one last decent gesture might engloss them

And save their hated names from due oblivion.

“Your spokesmen were, it seems then, like our poets

Who sang to us for half an age in concert

Of peace on earth, of charity and friendship,

Like Christian men: then gladly took to screaming

The martial anthems, each in his best measure,

As quickly as the first loud cannon sounded,

Until the farthest outposts of the nations

In answer rumbled forth. Old politicians

Who long had been advising strife and conquest,

In discord with the attitude prevailing,

Were scarcely heard above the spate that followed,

And stopped—perhaps to listen in, delighted.

An old and faithful comrade in our country

Through all his life had led the dumb providers,

Demanding for the dispossessed and homeless

A modicum of fare and peace and freedom.

The butt of hate and harm from all the mighty,

In weal or woe he bore the flaming banner

Of peace and justice for the ragged masses.

With tongue and pen and faith he fought this madness,

While we, his wards, opposed him in the struggle.

We shook our knotty toiler-hands in anger,

Commanding him, our leader, to be silent.

That vile betrayal broke his heart and courage;

And now a wreck, bereft of hope and reason,

He roams alone, awaiting his last summons.

We hear that all the ancient holy churches

That graced your spacious land in bygone ages

Have lost their hold upon the teeming masses:

That heathendom among you now is rampant.

“Not so! Our church in every phase and manner

Resembles yours, and many a leading shepherd

Who taught the members all the Christian virtues,

Himself has fallen on the field of battle.

We hear that even our new peerless leader,

The head of church and state in our great empire,

Has carried high before the gathered army

The sacred icon of our true religion,

Thus dedicating all the battle forces

To war, and to our new-found god—to Woden.

The very infidels of old, the godless,

Are flocking to the chapels and repenting.

As throngs refill our erstwhile empty churches,

Revival and reform are in the offing.

“The Church has called and duly consecrated

Our cause, like yours. To me it has no meaning.

A frenzied call to service and repentance

Has left me cold. What profit to abandon

The token peace and brotherhood prevailing,

And then revert to former faiths and customs,

That through the painful centuries have given

The civilizing methods and the culture

To which this grim and bloody field bears witness?

Results are facts. They never have been clearer.

I went to school, in line with laws and custom,

And learned the academic art of killing.

To me that training meant but little, comrade,

Since slaying was a branch of civic duty.

Soon war was kindled up and I conscripted.

Had I refused I would have been arrested,

Condemned to die as if I were a traitor

And shot at dawn—a lesson to the people.

There were some young to feed. I had to struggle

In their behalf. A war is fraught with dangers;

But there, with luck, a wound may not be fatal;

The gun squad’s is. The odds decided for me.

“My part as soldier in the forces, father,

Resembles yours. Before the war had started

A wave of deep unrest and strikes impended.

While men in droves were destitute and idle

And millions starved, the goods in stores were rotting.

Distress was said to stem from lack of money

And blamed, we heard, on overmuch production.

The rulers and their wealthy friends together

Had long ago devised a fit solution:

A larger mortgage load upon the people

In loans and bonds was called for, thus enslaving

The unborn too, through all the coming ages,

To pay the magic, self-renewing profit.

Dire poverty within a world of plenty

Has now become the major cause of warfare.

But few there were who foresaw all the horror!

When keyed to war and all it meant, the nation

Ignored the need for civic rights and welfare—

The work and wages that sustain the masses.

The owners stopped production for the people

And offered half a wage to all the healthy

And young who would enlist and join the army

To save the fatherland. The state would feed them.

For me it was the practical solution,

That I might eat and help to feed my mother,

Who is a widow from a former bloodbath.

My father, true, was only gravely wounded

And lingered for a time, in bed and helpless.

When I had grown to boyhood, fit to labor,

The pension he had drawn was discontinued.

The taxes were a cause of much complaining,

And here the masters spied a chance for saving.

They were convinced that I could earn the wherewith

For our support. The solemn promise given

To us, and many another, could be broken.

But now again while I’m alive and fighting

The state allots a stipend to my mother.

As long as there are many thousands wanted

Who seek this livelihood, through need and pressure,

’Tis well to pay at first with grace and honor.

By those, unfit, who stay behind unchallenged,

The youth who never volunteered for service

Is shunned and often openly insulted—

A slam that very few defy undaunted.

“Nor am I in this mess because last August

A countryman of mine was seized with panic

And shot a noted duke. The cause lies deeper.

A while ago you named a truer reason

For all this long and murderous disaster.

The people, after long and painful thinking

About their plight, in spite of toil and pinching,

Suspected there was something topsy-turvy.

The doubting spread and all the props of power

Began to tremble o’er the gloomy prospect.

And so they planned—the native and the foreign,

Who always stand together for survival—

A remedy to still the bitter grumbling.

A nation locked in struggle with another

Forgets in time her daily civic worries.

The tyrant changes, in her twisted thinking,

From foe to friend, her hero and defender.

The super-nation blather, as a fillip

To those who want to rule, is also useful.

The rivalry to shape the varied peoples

In thought and action to their own, regardless—

Albeit only for the passing moment—

Affords a breathing spell for further planning.

The culture in the world of man, emerging,

Can only stem from brave, unfettered thinking

In divers lands, that often clash and differ.

“Indeed I could. But in the press and pulpit

We call it something else: to guard our freedom!

I well remember when our stolid thousands

In uniform were mustered, due for action,

The mayor said: ‘ ’Tis well you have, my heroes,

Some more important aims and things to ponder

Than wages and the worries of the masses.

The war confers on us a signal blessing.’

And I recall that leaders from the city

Behind the lines took time and leave to travel,

For rest and pleasure, to the front in numbers

If, thanks to luck, the shelling had abated.

They praised us and inquired if we had wishes

That could be met. No boon would be too costly

For us, the brave. But we were all reluctant

To hurt the feelings of these kindly masters

By asking for the one thing they were neither

Empowered nor inclined so soon to grant us:

A world at peace; an end to all this killing.

And then one day, when we were busy clearing

The gory field, like now, the same old question

Was asked by groups that came again to visit.

Our doctor is a kind and clever surgeon

Who binds our wounds with patient care in silence.

But when he heard the oft-repeated question

He said with heat: ‘Since you are bent on helping,

Roll up your sleeves, pick up a spade or shovel

And go to work, to dig these rotting corpses.

We need the rest. The time allowed us presses.’

How fast it worked! The patriots in a twinkling

Were gone—and have not since returned to cheer us.

“I care not for the victory you speak of.

A state that wins is not for long the victor.

The vanquished, glum and restive, live for vengeance

And prosper on the sweet anticipation.

And soon or late the victor in his triumph

Will fall a victim to the snare it bought him.

When Rome had spent herself in winning battles

And lost, the while, the flower of her manhood,

The slaves and misfits left to reap the glory

Had neither wit nor will to save the pieces.

Just such a fate awaits our own successes.

My will in such a storm is but a plaything

That’s blown about without intent or meaning.

“Without much thought I, too, have wondered, father,

About the very things that you have mentioned.

It touched my feelings rather than my reason,

But I can now perceive what you complain of.

When we were promised, as is now the custom,

Security and peace for all this turmoil,

The pride of states, together with the boasting,

Outran the will and power of fulfilment.

And as I saw the afterbirth of action—

The thousands dead and maimed among the ruins—

It struck me that our masters, in their panic,

Had led us, with scant feeling, into error;

That they had, willing, when it came to choices,

Brought home to us the pattern of their Congos.

But as I knew such thoughts were labeled treason,

I ‘passed the buck’ and harbored them in silence.

Not long ago I, too, lay sorely wounded

And suffered much; but kindly care and science

Nursed back to life and strength my ailing body.

I hailed with joy my growing health and vigor,

Unmindful of the fate that might await me.

And yet it was a shock to me what happened

The very day they said I would recover

And sent me back to harden in the trenches.

Upon the bed I rose from, in my presence,

They placed another gravely wounded soldier

Who seemed near death, so wracked with pain and worry.

To cheer him up the doctor said with feeling:

‘A month or two and I will have you mended.

Just look! and—pointing at me—see your comrade!

A while ago he was as dead as you are,

And now you see him just as good as ever

And on his way again to join the fighting.’

With this he meant to brace the gloomy patient.

But, strange to say, the lad rose up in anger

And said; ‘No, never, knave! will I permit you

To cure me for the battlefield and trenches,

To suffer endless thirst and fear and torture.

Much rather will I die here at your pleasure,

Whatever method you may choose to end me,

With drug or knife. So do your worst, and welcome!’

With startled feelings at his words, I pondered

A fleeting spell, and fled with haste unseemly

To hear no more. Of course the man was raving

—And yet I shuddered at the sense he uttered!

“Do we, the dupes who have no votes nor voices

To shape our lives according to our wishes,

With tooth and claw contend with one another

About our right to live in peace and freedom?

Such dumb obedience to mobs and masters

Has made us into beasts and cannon-fodder.

The meek are often kicked from post to pillar.

Are we not both, without our own approval,

Sent hither by our self-appointed masters?

To both they give the very same assignment;

The difference only how the ranks are facing.

Within, I know, we had been contemplating

A life of peace. But tired now and older

We are too spent to think about it longer.

But what of youth, the brave and enterprising,

Who faced with hope a long and pleasant future?

Killed off! In heaps star-scattered ’round the trenches!

And so the coming epoch will be peopled

By aged duds and self-centred wretches.

The peace—if peace will come to those now living—

Will be the peace of impotence and error:

A truce that swims in failures and lost causes.

For such a life the payment is excessive!

In times gone by the diplomats of nations

Spoke each to each in soft and honeyed phrases.

They practised well the subtle art of talking

With tongue in cheek, and drafting fake agreements.

Today with every crime they charge each other,

The daily papers burn with accusations

And all the great and wise have joined the wrangling.

It could be lucky for the lesser nations

That stand apart from all the strife and fury,

If all the powers left them uninvaded—

To prove each other base and wilful liars,

When charging that they harbor such intentions.

Could you have, son, refrained, if you had chosen,

From fighting me, since you possessed the power

And also were convinced you had to conquer?

My actions were not voluntary either.

“Thus we have likewise often found it, father.

Our allies seem at times to be unwilling

To die like flies on foreign soil embattled.

In spite of claims, we know they lack the fire

That drives the man defending home and country.

We know they feel, down deep within their being,

That they were tricked into the sorry bargain.

Still we believe that all the world’s best culture,

As represented by the side we favor,

By crafty foes is threatened with extinction

And stands undaunted fighting for survival.

Your side has seldom been the first to forward

The aims of man, or do the pioneering

In this our age of science and invention.

A stagnant world of famine and depression

Would be our sorry lot if you should triumph,

And all the gains of ages would be cancelled.

You have aspired to total domination,

And in your haste forgot to build your fences.

“Quite true. I lack the knack and native talent

To scan the value of each rumor-story.

My purview has indeed a small horizon.

I well remember, though, that in my homeland

The people bled for thirty years profusely.

The reason was perhaps of little moment;

The question only: whether it were proper

To seek for God with methods of the reason

Or let our preachers douse the public conscience

With dope and holy-water disinfectant.

And now there is another church accepted,

Much richer and if possible more vicious

In aim and content than the Roman species.

Between the two the policies are fashioned.

With reason misapplied, the toiling public

Is kept in want while merchant kings are fighting

Amongst themselves about the dwindling markets

In backward, needy, undeveloped regions,

To feed their parasites and spineless stooges.

The wars pertain to commerce, not to freedom.

Our culture and our much-admired inventions,

Applied by misfits in a planless era,

Instead of blessing us with peace and plenty,

Have brought the sorry mess we see about us.

And will perhaps the destiny of mankind,

With all its pride, at last be self-destruction?

Will men persist in planning and producing

Machines of death from which there’s no escaping,

By either side, with victory or honor?

Or will they be compelled to stop, exhausted,

Beneath the weight of their own machinations?

Has not your nation, proud and often envied,

Pursued this course and more than any other

Induced the rest, the more reserved and timid,

To emulate and follow her example?

“That thought reminds me of a thing that happened

The other day, when we were caught short-handed

Defending our prize military weapon

From capture by your overwhelming forces.

‘Big Bertha’ was our greatest, most effective

Machine of death constructed since creation.

Against the onslaught of your teeming numbers

Our choice was flight, or mass annihilation.

Our captain, raving mad, in desperation

Sent wave on wave in vain into the battle.

Though head to heel our fighters fell in layers

He grimly drove them on without compunction.

But when your bandits broke our last battalion

And blew the ‘wonder’ into bits and pieces

Our doughty captain wept just like a baby.

Though hard repressed like other sons of peasants

You, father, may have dreamt of fame and fortune

And felt that you were born to be a leader.

You may have thought the arts of war the answer.

“Win fame through war!—for us the pawns, so puny,

Whom hidden hands that play the game for profit

Can move and sacrifice in flocks at pleasure?

The masters even sell their valued key-men

Upon the board of play, if in the long run

The strategy will trap—in their opinion—

The other side, and mate it at the finish.

They send us forth to certain death as decoys.

A herd of sheep, in essence, we are gathered

And driven in a body to the barracks,

Not knowing which are to be shorn or slaughtered.

Nor do the owners care which strain or portion

Is left alive to forage through the winter.

The metal cross and other gaudy baubles

By accident may hit, just like the bullet.

“Undoubtedly the glittering adventures

Are gone from wars that men today are waging.

Yet I can tell a simple tale of valor

About a youth back home who had resisted

The call to arms and disobeyed the masters.

Cajoled and threatened, pleaded with and pestered,

Despised and shunned and said to stain and blacken

The honored name of brave and loyal fathers,

A craven renegade afraid of dying,

He steadfastly refused to join the army.

But then one day, as fateful luck would have it,

We learned that one of your advance divisions

Had pierced our lines without intent or orders

And would escape unless we could surround it.

The strange terrain was rugged and uncharted,

So we engaged this youth to lead our columns

The best and quickest way. He knew the lay-out.

But after hours of hard and weary going

Our captain, now suspicious, took his rifle

And, aiming at the youth who faced him, thundered:

‘Unless we reach our goal within the hour,

I’ll shoot you like a dog! Now, laggard, hurry!’

The boy looked at the gun and, smiling, answered:

‘Too late! I cannot now, sir, take your offer.

You never will hereafter find your quarry.

I’ve led you far astray with tact and purpose

To save some lives, if only for the moment,

For mine—and now you, sir, may shoot, and welcome!’

A score of rifles spoke and tore to tatters

The gallant youth. And there in peace they left him.

A short time later, when I told the story

To one who had been captured from your forces—

We both were in the mood for reminiscing

About the things that happen in the armies—

He thought a while and then burst out in laughter.

‘O now at last,’ he said, ‘I know the reason

Why Falkenheyn so quickly was promoted!

His title, that of general, was given

For skill and forethought in that great withdrawal—

He was the officer in that adventure—.

They soon bedecked his breast with stars and crosses,

Although he modestly objected, saying

That he was not entitled to the glory:

The march had been his normal speed of movement!

The modesty shown by the old commander

Was much acclaimed. His deep reserve and candor

Was known and counted on throughout the nation.

Appearances would indicate, I fancy,

That he would be the last of all our leaders

To want the doubtful symbol of distinction

Required to wear that lie as decoration

If he could know to whom the signal honor

Belonged—to wit: your boy, the brave dissenter.’

Do you believe, as I do also, father,

That when this senseless slaughter will be ended

The ghosts of many such, among the ruins,

Will stand revealed to many eyes now blinded—

That, rising from this rank abomination,

The wrongs unveiled will shame us into thinking?

“What state is neutral, son, when powers wrangle?

Have we not published to the whole of mankind—

To our own glory and the foe’s discomfort—

That we can keep the costly warfare going

From year to year on end, without impairing

Our goods and lands? The profit from investments

Abroad, so long pursued, will pay the piper.

What land is neutral, since the scattered peoples

Co-operate in paying for the business?

Of course you also tap the selfsame sources

To meet the bill. The world at large pays tribute

To both of us, as agents in the wrecking.

If any nation sitting on the sidelines

Could still so shape her course that all the flower

Of her young people would escape the slaughter,

Her culture might survive. She might adventure

To build anew—and maybe earn a future.

The only key to that desired condition

Is just the will to see the silver lining

In centuries to come—and fortify it

With faith and deeds, in spite of other outlook.

Events instil into the major powers

The craze for war. Its high proponents gaily

Direct the moves. They welcome every error

That leads to civic strife among the classes

And use the fears and turmoil as a pretext

To arm the state, in readiness for action.

The ones who set the world aflame so foully

Use every ruse to win and gain as allies

The states that are attempting to be neutral.

They promise, press, decry, appeal and threaten

—As they have need—assistance or destruction.

With more ill-will than quoted in the Scriptures

About the rich man, groaning in his torment,

Who wished to warn and save his friends and brothers

From such a cruel fate as he had suffered,

They want to plunge the world to death and ruin.

The story of the rich man may be garbled,

But never in the hell of human warfare

Has there been any sign of love or kindness.

And what has been the fate of faithful leaders,

The few who would not break their solemn pledges

For peace, and gamely stood by their convictions?

One simply falls a prey to the assassin.

Another is maligned among his fellows

And duly charged with treason and convicted.

A third, gone mad, avoided and abandoned,

With aimless tread is hobbling to oblivion.

The Roman prince himself who rules, on paper,

Complaining says: ‘Behold the man, ye judges!’

We weep and pray for those who die in battle,

The martyrs who are through with pain and worry.

But all the hate and misery remaining

Are more entitled to our aid and pity.

At times one hopeful thought has made me wonder;

If all this murder-lust among the nations

Would strike at every household under Heaven

And slay a husband, father, son or brother—

With Sorrow breaking in through every doorway

And sitting, most unwelcome, there forever—

The common loss might unify the victims

And make them feel anew their ties of kinship,

The sharpest tongue of truth is our experience.

“Our rest, in truth, is almost finished, father.

The dead no more obstruct the line of vision.

“Here, catch this morsel! You have long been starving.

I well can do without until the evening.

Look, father! I have thrown the parcel over.”

“Then welcome, son, into the grave here with me!”

1953

Has man ever gazed on a grander sight

Than the gods’ high realm in a blaze of glory,

Resplendent with torches in tier and storey?

—What toper could revel on such a night?

Like a maiden the earth is without a blight

In its alban kirtle of frosted roses.

Each granule of sand is a cinder, bright.

Ensilvered the winding brooklet dozes.

The Arctic at night is alustre with light

That the living aurora imposes.

From the highest plane to the sombre sea

The scene is enacted without a shutter.

Each sylph asplutter with flounce a-flutter

Is falling and rising in ecstasy.

Some hand with its fingers of filigree

The fiery ocean of ether splashes.

From here below to the life-to-be

We look amazed while the drama flashes.

And the glaciers on high are agaze with each eye

That gleams in their crystal sashes.

In the light of that wonder our problems appear

So petty and mean that they vanish unbidden.

Though roughly I’m chidden my rancor is hidden;

At rest with the masses, no slight can sear,

For the vaulting above is so bright and clear.

Each blazing star is a magic pinion.

It lifts our hopes to a higher sphere,

Where Heaven recharges each lowly minion.

We are sensing tonight and asserting our right

As servants in Light’s dominion.

How vast is the infinite ocean of space

And eerie the barks that its waters are plying!

Each skipper on high to a haven is flying,

Whether he veers or goes onward apace.

But blind is the urge that the eye obeys

And the author his light in the dark composes.

With bended knees and a burning face

We bide at the wall the temple encloses.

But into the garden the gateway is barred,

And God in His sanctum reposes.

1925

Above the ocean, formless, huge and hollow,

The heightless void my dusky barque surrounds.

No vista greets the eye; no song of swallow

The silence breaks, as night the day impounds.

The lazy air its bated breath is holding.

About me lies, without a sign of molding,

The nameless highway that the nations follow.

As if a shadow-hood on high were trailing

From heaven’s rim, the darkening west returns

The lowering cloud, that, calmly ’round me sailing.

In creeping, ghostly fog the sea interns;

While dark of mien, with dripping hair and bosom,

The “daughter of the atmosphere,” so gruesome,

With clammy fingers fondles deck and railing.

The halting boat its head is calmly rolling

And holds its dripping neck above the waves.

Alarum bells in warning tones are tolling.

A tireless eye of light the darkness braves.

The sail to yard, like cloak to arm, is clinging,

A cloudy breath the wheezy stack is flinging.

Abaft you feel the spurs the speed controlling.

The thick and woolly fog that fills the alleys

A fearful monster places everywhere.

The crew resembles giants from the galleys,

The genial swain a troll, the dog a bear.

And towering in the mist the mast is fading.

The mainsail, spar and boom in haze are wading,

While snowy crests divide the water-valleys.

Around the ship no fish nor fowl is wending.

No fitful sounds a living thing reveal.

The yeast beneath the prow no life is lending.

The lifeless words upon the tongue congeal.

But no restraint can tame the trackless ocean;

Between two worlds the billows are in motion.

And Hoth of Storms again his bow is bending.

Below the clouds a saving gleam presages

A sunny welcome, though the fog rebels.

The course a magic finger guides and gauges.

A giant arm of steel the boat propels.

Afar, we know, the land of Leif is biding,

Whose lovely maiden name the Fates are hiding

—A day-bright world of dead, forgotten ages.

1930

Mother, I’ve sailed o’er the seas afoam.

To southward the lands are fading.

A scarf for my isle with the icy dome

The afterglow is braiding.

At last my ship is heading for home.

My heart is the bill of lading.

From stolid crowds that the streets infest

I steer for thy spires so conely.

I find no men where the mobs congest,

Nor music in noises only;

But he is the welcome and willing guest

Who visits himself when lonely.

Abroad in the storm and the times that try

Thy truths with my heart were pleading.

I dreamt of the past, when I played thee nigh,

And peacefully thou wert reading.

If seas were calm or the surf ran high

My soul on the dream was feeding.

At every step along Bifrost burned

A beacon our minds erected.

From thee, with pleasure and love, I learned

The language our isle protected;

For that’s where the gods, in trust, interned

Each tone that a thought affected.

We heard in the lilt of her lullabies

The language our fancy teaches

And the ages honed from its hardy guise,

’Mid hills and on sandy reaches.

From nature’s morning to reason’s rise

It wrote on the manless beaches.

The rhymes I loved and the lullabies,

Though lost, with my dreams are blending.

A mountain swan, in my fancy, flies

Afar, with his song unending.

And a mother stands by the ocean-ice,

Her arms to her son extending.

Aloft the wings of thy faith have flown

Where the frosted rose was lying.

The swell of thy first young force was thrown

When Fate each heart was trying.

—No keener pain in my soul was sown

Than to see that thy hopes were dying.

Whenever I flee with a fallen crest

Thy faith new courage giveth.

The burdens lift at thy hope’s behest.

Thy hardy spirit liveth.

And thine, on the earth, is the only breast

That all my sins forgiveth.

Wherever my ship on the billows swung,

In search of a deeper learning,

Unmarred forever thy image clung

And into my soul was burning.

Thou placed my hand on thy harp, bestrung,

When my heart for the muse was yearning.

Thy life and the songs that my soul regaled

Are seas that the minds are laving.

Mother, my lines that so long had failed

At last on thy shield are graven—

The reason I boarded, the reason I sailed,

The reason I’m back to the haven.

1930

Bright the silvery sands are gleaming.

Souls renew their waning might.

Sleepy reefs and dunes are dreaming.

Dance the sylphs, with torches beaming.

Fast propelled, a ship in sight

Sweeps into the magic night.

Softly ’round its sides are leaping

Silver-crested billows, weeping.

Even the deep is dumb tonight;

Death his secret thoughts is keeping.

Glorious scene! A silver spire

Sits upon a granite bar.

Earth beneath a nameless fire

Kneels to wonders that inspire.

Greetings pass from star to star;

Steep in dreams the glinty spar.

Forth amain the mind is faring.

Many a soul above is staring.

Fateful, sizzling suns afar

Silent wonder-hosts are snaring.

Through my soul each suasive hour

Seas and light my being claim.

I can feel a phantom power—

Former ages’ sacred dower.

Mystic laws from lights aflame

Lead us on to joy or shame.

Magic strength from starry spaces,

Streaming through our hearts, amazes.

All our glowing future fame

From the skyey splendor blazes.

Show me life—and let me share it.

Lock each realm the stars forsake.

Give me strife, and strength to bear it,

Star of Hope, my queen of merit!

Grant my heart a higher stake,

High enough to make or break.

Soon athwart the sylph’s caprices

Surly Fate her skein releases.

Life’s a chess; you lose or take.

The lead is mine—arrange the pieces.

1930

At dusk the sun with its deepest blushes

Adorns the West.

Whenever love is aroused it rushes

And runs amuck to an unlike breast,

Like a storm afield, or a flood that gushes

From fell to the sea, and rest.

Thus even the magnet in order places

Each atom small,

That, drawn to a certain centre, races,

With swift delight in the ranks to fall—

Where pole, enravished, its pole embraces,

Impelled by its inmost call.

He was the shade at the sunset hour

And she the bright.

Like flavors that mingle the sweet and sour,

She took the darkness and he the light—

A picture of melody’s mighty power,

When meekness and strength unite.

About the shepherd with soft oppression

The sweet night played.

Dark as his eye with its deep confession

It draped in shadow the snowy maid.

Though young and tender his powerful passion

The pulse of his heart obeyed.

Each steely mite with a motive burning

The magnet sways,

Till every secret desire is turning

To serve the will of its focal blaze.

But after the magnet gives out the yearning

Is over—and Nature pays.

They met in the grip of the magnet’s power

A moment’s space,

As night may blend with a cinder shower

And sear the mind with a charm that stays

—With her like a wraith from its hidden bower;

With him like a starry blaze.

1931

At Mossfell parish, the people say,

The pastor was known to have gone astray,

A prey to his pound of weakness.

He drank, but he sidled through Satan’s traps.

His soul was clean, not his vesture wraps.

He served his God—though he sinned perhaps—

Sincere, with a heart of meekness.

It came on a sunny Sabbath day,

When some of the flock had come to pray

And he on his bed lay bibbing.

He was the leader, and lay unfit!

He looked through the window and smiled a bit—

His flagon of wine at his face, to-wit;

His feet on the surplice-ribbing.

“Sunshine! The call of the church is high.

The cocks in the hayfield are turning dry,”

He said, with a shammed elation.

He spoke to the flask with its flashing wine,

“O fountain of pleasure and curse divine!”

Then turned on his pillow and took a stein

—His tempter and consolation.

He heard a rumble that rent the air,

Of running horses that, pair on pair,

Were coming, and coming faster.

His helpmate stood with a whit’ning cheek.

“The high and mighty from Reykjavik”

She whispered, and ran like at hide and seek

With the homespun togs of the pastor.

“Brush up the cassock and bid them in.”

He bit his lip, and he placed his chin

In the cup of his hand, so hollowed.

He sighed in his anguish, but said no word.

A simple prayer in his bosom stirred.

“High-noon” rose from the restless herd.

A ring from the steeple followed.

He grasped the hand of his worthy wife—

The witness and proof of their bygone life—

As she brought him his frock, so faded.

They stood for a moment eye to eye.

“My innate powers are just as high,”

He said, “I will stand though the storm is nigh.

The struggle is mine, unaided.”

They came in their triumph, ten abreast,

His temporal peers and the church’s best,

The country’s pride and power.

Sternly and brusquely the bishop spoke:

“I’ll break this fraud with a single stroke;

The name of the Crown and the Church invoke.

Thy cloak shall be off in an hour.”

Said the pastor: “Be welcome, ye mighty men.”

His manner was proud as he faced the ten

Firmly, yet free from rancor.

And then to each separate soul said he:

“I see no power to fear in thee;

Nor shalt thou, bishop, embarrass me—

Above is my fear, and anchor.”

The bishop raged as he rose to his feet:

“The rector is drunk and is full of conceit,

A sinful and grave transgression.

The service is faulty, the Synod defied,

The sexton is waiting, a case to be tried.”

“Stand back,” said the pastor and brushed them aside.

“Here, bishop, I lead the procession.”

With mangled faith, yet hope in her heart,

The housewife looked for a seat apart,

The end of it all surmising.

His name was soiled with their kin and kith.

Their costly gains were a trampled myth.

—But his voice rang out with power and pith,

And proudly her head was rising.

“Ye would drive and harry the weak to the wall,

The worn and tottering ones till they fall,

And break the reed that is bending.

Ye, men of honor and craft, accuse.

Ye come to judge what the base traduce.

But One is kind. He has called a truce.

We come with an equal standing.

“My church is a lowly and simple shrine;

But souls that come in their pride to shine

Still live in a pauper-prison.

And worldly peers in their wild conceit,

Who worship two, serve their own defeat.

To God there is nothing in man so meet

As meekness and deep contrition.

“Who answers the prayers of the poor with scorn?

Who places the blame on the weak and torn?

Who stones, if the steadfast waver?

And whose is the poisoned hand, so strong?

Whose hopes are based on the deepest wrong?

Yea, where is our court? On the hypocrite’s tongue,

—The hound’s that the rabble favor.

“I sip, it is true, and I break the ban.

I beg for no mercy. Ye look at a man

Who drank, to his shame and sorrow.

But under its magic I often stole

An echo that chimed with the people’s soul.

They come in peace with their punch and bowl

—And I pay to God what I borrow.

“For then I know they are frank and free.

They feel my weakness and bear with me.

I find they are friends, if earthy.

But thou hast the parvenu’s plain conceit;

A painless rock where a heart should beat.

Thy office is known to the oaf in the street

—But art thou, that holds it, worthy?

“The pathway of Error is often hard

And each retreat of our duty barred

On sin’s unholy highways.

But surely the meek for their sins atone.

For something was grief in pleasure sown.

And so in the end will be overthrown

The evils that lurk in the by-ways.

“When summoned to pay for each pound I spent

And I peacefully fold up my spirit’s tent,

The lowest of all the lowly,

I feel that whatever defence is read

By friends, in pleading, it will be said

For words and thoughts that were dumb and dead

In the dens of the rich and holy.”

They winced; for they knew that he told the truth.

He talked his mind without stint or ruth.

He faced them with force and candor.

He spoke to all, but each numskull knew

What knaves he meant, and imposters too,

Who sully the courts and the church undo

With cunning, to which they pander.

He struck at vice in its stealthy nook.

He stood, himself, like an open book.

His sins in the sunlight glistened.

Then he bowed his soul in a sinner’s prayer.

They say that a tear glowed here and there.

His sermon was not a formal affair,

But it found each heart that listened.

Here was a man in a beggarly byre,

Who burned within with a godly fire,

So far from a pawn to pity.

His wondrous power had tamed the ten,

Who turned their steeds to the road again

—And it was a party of modest men

That mosied back to the city.

1930

Among the pearls of maidenhood

Quite many to my heart appealed.

But Fate to me but once revealed

A Venus made of flesh and blood.

To praise her build, her beauty laud,

Would be the height of arrogance.

But I can view in one swift glance

The wondrous miracle of God.

Her voice is like a lullaby

Of love that hugs the trembling strings.

Her merry laugh with music rings.

With metric art her feet go by.

Beaming stars of frost and fire

Flame beneath a brow serene.

This girl of Nordic mind and mien

Is modelled to your heart’s desire.

Upon her lord she’d like to wait,

And love to be his slave—and queen.

But, reverent, in her eyes I’ve seen

She also could have learned to hate.

Many a secret flame I fed,

That fanned my young credulity;

But ever since, with ease, I see

The errors that my youth mis-read.

The gilded dross is gone, for me.

To greater heights the aim I raise.

And now, with poise, I can appraise

A perfect diamond that I see.

—And in thy hardy little hand

My hopes and fortunes I would lay,

And willing face the future way,

A fond and happy contraband.

1930

But time goes on with its tireless flow

And turns the minds in a new direction.

The earth is discovered, section by section,

And shoved in the forum for man to know.

Each tittle of fact that the sagas show

Will shine undimmed at the resurrection.

Through empire travel and outlawed races

The eye will learn, as the mind retraces,

The tale of the land with the live-long glow.

A quick-star on high in the heavenly blue,

With hope in her eye sees the Nordics in motion;

Commands them to sail to the edge of the ocean

And open the way to a realm anew.

That guiding eye to the uttermost clue

The Irishmen followed, in search of goshen.

Afar on the deep-sea’s foaming acres

They fought their way through the deadly breakers,

Depending on faith—and they found it true.

There sits on the deep, with her diadem bright,

Our dazzling queen, in her robes of glory.

She holds in her arms the unborn story

Her own true sons alone can write.

Her breath with a fragrance fills the night.

There’s a fountain of love in her bosom hoary.

Though hardness of mien her hood may lend her,

Her heaving breast is soft and tender.

Her eyes are the glassy lakes, alight.

The deep blue seas encircle her throne.

The shimmering lights of the north are behind her.

Fortune a place in the sun assigned her,

Where the surf is roaring and billows moan.

Currents of warmth from the west atone

If withering floes to the north are unkinder.

With a world in the offing either-whither,

Her own is the choice, be it hither or thither.

She sits at the crux of the seas alone.

Our Boreal goddess belongs where she lies

And listens in peace to Nature’s singing.

For eons of time in her ears were ringing

The odes of the billows that fall and rise.

And ever the southerly sea-breeze tries

To soften the blast that her cheek is stinging.

—Thule, the bride of the sea, surrenders,

With sorrow and fear in her heart, and tenders

Her hand to the world as a worthy prize.

The landscape clears as the breezes blow

And belly the sails till the fleet is grounded.

The brave adventurers stand astounded

And stare at the virgin land aglow.

Each sheltered cove in the southern bow

In silence mirrors the land around it.

No vandal hand had torn and tattered

The trees and the grassy quilt, and shattered

A stainless freehold and laid it low.

With features bold, as the billows rise

And break in foam on the crags of raven,

She lives in each heart to the furthest haven

Where human course of adventure lies.

In Memory’s hall, as the heroes’ prize,

Her hallowed image is deeply graven.

And the Mountain-Isle in her maiden beauty,

With meek devotion accepts her duty,

And offers herself as a sacrifice.

Still the twilight of the ages

Anchors to the haunted cave.

Still the creepy sea of silence

Swells about the architrave.

Still within the heart are hidden

Hoary fears of shades unbidden—

Shades that here had sought a grave.

Reason’s lightning rends the mountain.

Reason makes the vaulting bright.

As if distant swans were singing,

Something echoes through the night.

Dreams that seize my soul with wonder

Seem to tear the dusk asunder.

—To the past I turn a light.

Peaceful still in stormy waters,

Strife’s impassive battlefield;

Ice-encrusted fount of fire,

Fairest land the earth revealed;

Land of sorrow, swathed in glory,

Saga-land, thy wondrous story

Early to my pride appealed.

Hither nature’s magic many

Monks inveigled to the fold;

Magic that a little later

Lured the warrior strong and bold.

One subdued the will and feeling;

One the heart itself was steeling.

Both were honest “guinea-gold.”

One in bold and living letters

Left the imprint of his will,

While the spirit of the other

In the people caused a thrill.

Heralds, both, of blood and fire,

Both had deep and strong desire.

Buried lies the story still.

Spirit-shapes, meseems, are moving

Somewhere in the stony crust.

There a tearful shade in tatters

To the fore, I see, is thrust.

While its palsied hands it raises

High in prayer, its noble face is

Bowing deeply to the dust.

Granite vaulting cold thou keepest

Cryptic ruins of the past.

Army of the soul, I see thee

Sore and tattered in the blast;

Ancient, hallowed hero-sages,

Hidden in the dust of ages,

Fearless leaders to the last.

’Twixt the walls so wide and clammy

Vikings of the cross I see

From the cup of duty drinking

Death distilled them, on the knee—

See them face a far more cruel

Fate than any bloody duel,

Questing for Eternity.

Still thy souls in sunny regions

Serve the Master in the fight.

All thy hidden worth and wisdom

Will be ravelled from the night.

From thy graves infuse the nation;

Fill us with determination,

Squatters in the land of light!

1930

No grace transcends the image of a swan.

His alban coat becharms, his singing thrills.

His dirge each human heart with sorrow fills,

And Heaven itself is then not far withdrawn.

And though his notes a dream of death may bring,

A deeper aim in life their tone imparts.

If voices brave, yet blent with sadness, sing,

The simple dust of listening Nature starts;

And motionless the ambient air awaits

The eager wing that naught intimidates.

Then heaves the breast as white as driven snow,

With haughty neck in many a living wave

And sinuous curve, as silent as the grave,

To soar above the valley-towns below.

In tranquil, sleepy waves he wings alone

The wide conservatory of the sky—

The picture of a song whose silent tone

Assuages like a gentle lullaby;

As if from heaven’s open book would fall

An ode whose cadence would thy soul enthral.

The living soul is like an undertone

That lends a string to chime, if Fate consents.

A heart in tune can sing its sentiments

In silent strains that far transcend the known.

There are so many muted things that live

While mobs their hollow noise with noise disarm.

One little tone, both sweet and sensitive,

Vouchsafes to earthly souls a lasting charm.

A higher force than human thought exprest,

It heals the many ills that life infest.

Life’s utter maze the swan himself may dream;

In songs his prowess and his hopes intwine.

From Nature’s heart they ravel, line on line,

With lilt of brooks or gush of fall and stream.

He dresses up in daylight’s parting ray

And drinks the rosy morning’s early breath.

He nurses in his heart each happy day

A hymn of praise to God for life and death,

That echoes from the homes and hills prolong

Till hearts forget to prize a lovely song.

O music’s best, most blessed fount of life,

Thou bringest to the heart a treasure grand.

Thou fallest out of fabled Eden-land

To fill with joy the hour of mortal strife.

Through thee a lost and fallen soul may find

The front-door of his sanctum still ajar,

And see, when purged in heart, though halt and blind,

That Heaven’s minstrel is the guiding star.

As when a child with angel-glory gleams,

So godlike art awakens holy dreams.

How sweet to glide upon the skyey path

To perfect, clear and lusty strains, or none—

A minstrel poet, paling in the sun,

With proud abandon singing best in death;

To raise a voice that echoes loud and long,

Though life, exhausted on the note, resigns.

Is any aim in life’s allure so strong

As looking past the circle that confines,

Or leading, forcing human hearts along

To higher vision with undying song?

1930

He lives who created a lay that survives.

He’s lost who rose dumb from the Muse’s table;

Who knelt at its head with his heart in gyves,

With a hapless mind and a tongue unable.

The soul is akin to the seas we ply.

Each swell resembles a midget ocean:

Dead if it’s still; in the storm ’tis high,

And streams along with a sounding motion.

Billowing surge! Thou hast life; and thy lay,

Though lost, from the core of thy heart was streaming.

Thy force on the sands of the silent bay

Subsided, but firstly thy crest was gleaming.

Ocean’s songstress, thou drankest deep

The drafts that rose from thy welling fountain.

The land re-echoed thy sounding sweep,

That sank apace, but aimed at the mountain.

The Morning opens her golden gate.

Her gleaming face at the sash is peering.

The grassy liths for her gaze await.

The gloomy brow of the peak is clearing.

In the ocean’s shimmering surface-tide

The Sun-steed with gory curb-rein glasses.

The haunts, where of yore I yearned, abide.

Beyond, in a vision, my dreamland passes.

My heart is an ocean of deep desire

For the day of light that has no ending;

That gathered my song—as my soul afire

Absorbs the force that the strand is bending.

My shackled mind is impatient, pent,

Impounded fast by the sea’s dominion.

And what is the eagle’s high ascent

To a human soul equipped with a pinion?

I feel in the depths of my soul a surge

That seeks away from this life, so hollow.

The soundless tide of my inmost urge

Is an ardent prayer that I long to follow.

To send a strain through the starry zone,

A stilly wave or a mute oration—

To rise at the foot of the Father’s throne

And face the hosts, is my aspiration.

1930

A peaceful glow is glebe and croft caressing.

Against the mountain’s breast the land is pressing,

With herd and shepherd sunning near the byre,

In sight of glaciers with their snowy tressing.

It is in type a truly Nordic shire,

With tundra fields about, imposing, dire.

But thither every boor and burgher races,

To buy retreat from stagnant seaside places.

From desk and den the failing spirit flees,

To find delight in nature’s open spaces.

In contrast with a healthy highland breeze

The hamlet’s breath resembles vapid lees.

The landscape rises high above the heather.

A hundred stairs with rugs of green lie nether,

And rifts have cut a railing from the slate,

Where rills, that falling by the score together,

With din and clatter dance in wild estate

Adown the rungs, to seek an open gate.

There is a flood that comes from farther sources,

And from the upland wastes in torrents courses.

It quenches thirst and brushes leaf and limb,

Whose lungs a-pant renew their waning forces.

The eagles on its upper surface swim,

And swallows frolic in its nether rim.

To live apart, alone, yet never lonely,

Delights the will eternal, pure and only.

I know a comfort in the cleft’s abyss

And court the friendly rocks so mute and thronely.

In solitude one finds the fullest bliss.

I feel there’s nothing in the world I miss.

It looks as if the shade, itself, is gleaming.

The silex in the vibrant air is beaming.

Here speckled trout and drake, bedizened, spring

And drink the wine of air and water streaming.

The mountain’s knitted brows the nest enring

That nurses well the land’s most airy wing.

The hurtling current holds reverse mirages

Where heaven’s blue in water-colors flashes.

The lofty sweetness that my soul respires

Beside me in the canyon river glasses.

In every part I feel the godly fires

That fill me with the peace my heart requires.

O mountain shire, thy memory lives undying,

Though many a flower beneath thy snows is lying.

Thy spirit has refreshed my sodden soul.

Thy subtle charm my muse is still supplying.

O dumb retreat, the dreamer’s happy goal!

O draft divine from life’s celestial bowl!

1930

With slackened ropes and rolling lightly

The river boats are cradled in.

There a wheeler, slipping slightly,

Sleeps upon its lazy fin.

One whose stack is hoarse and wheezy,

Hurling cinders on the night,

Down the river, dark and greasy,

Dips and wriggles out of sight.

Half the western wing of twilight

Winds about the parting day,

That behind the highest skylight

Hesitates and moves away.

Hidden deeply under ashes

Embers turn a paler hue.

O’er the threshold Evening passes

Into night and bids adieu.

On the murky, misty cover

Move the spirits of the night.

Baleful ’round the brink they hover,

Blushing in the strands of light,

That, like an angel-army gleaming,

At the darkness slashing burst,

While Stygian ogres stark and teeming

Stand on guard with lights reversed.

With its crowding knaves and noises

Night demands her heritage,

While the misfits’ mingled voices

Mark the culture of the age.

The air is thick and dark and dreary.

Day-slaves, crowding, hurry by,

Noisy, grimy, gaunt and weary.

Ghostly breezes ’round them sigh.

All nature seems a chained and churly

Chattel slave to haughty peers,

Like men who labor late and early,

Listless-eyed throughout the years.

Machines endowed with souls of fire

Seem to think and work and breathe.

Iron-throated spouts suspire,

Like spirit monsters, underneath.

As if steely tongues were telling

Truths about the faith in might,

Of war’s forgotten graves, and swelling

Glories purchased in the fight;

While Labor, stripped of freedom’s faking,

On fame’s gigantic tower stare

And bow before the column quaking,

Conscious of its stony glare.

A wreath this land of wealth is wearing,

Woven by some conquered isle.

Down the lighted streets are staring

Stony sphinxes from the Nile.

A prescient phase of faded glory,

Fell of eye and mute they stand

And tell the world a wonder story

Visioned in a slaver’s land.

Beside a statue, sunk in dreaming,

Sits a cast-off, homeless, banned.

Our shadowlands with such are teeming,

Of such are fleet and army manned.

Among the foundlings’ ragged regions—

Ridings that the great abhor—

They comb the grime and grope for legions,

Guards for them in peace or war.

Here the mundane heart is beating,

The heart that pumps our blood and gold.

Its core a worm is always eating,

And the stream though black and cold,

Yet ebbs and flows with fuller measure

As Pharaoh’s shadow-finger picks

The sinner who has seized our treasure:

Shylock—with the crucifix.

For deep sank Goshen’s early glory.

Its god became a willing slave;

Its holy rage a still-born story.

Here stands the tablet from the grave.

Our magic fairy—maid and lion—

Mild of brow with clenched hands,

Obedient keeps her blinded eye on

Both the stone and its commands.

—The river-murmurs sound like sorrow,

Each silvery drop a burning tear.

A bitter sigh precedes the morrow.

Souls are torn with pain and fear.

The friendly breeze afar, unheeding,

Folds its wings behind the light,

And Day, with face and body bleeding,

Bids a restless world “goodnight.”

1930

I’m dreaming about an all-immanent soul

That even the stones into bread is turning.

My laughter is grief. On talk and the bowl

I squander the wealth that my heart is earning.

The mead itself has a mouldy taste.

O what have I said that the world enriches?

My days in the land of the living I waste

In search of the light that my heart bewitches.

Thy peaceful heart was a holy shrine.

My reverent soul at thy feet was lying.

Footsore on Destiny’s sands that shine,

I found an oasis of rest—while dying.

O tender-eyed, wonderful light of my life,

How sweet to rest at thy bosom, pleading!

My soul is dumb—can thy lips contrive

The word of cheer that my heart is needing?

I wove thee a wreath from the songs of my soul;

But my deepest rapture in bonds awaited.

Together we drank life’s celestial bowl;

Yet the thirst of my mind was still unsated.

Like a child in its need at thy bosom I lay

And dreamt in comfort of love and treasures.

The unborn hope in my heart was fey.

O where is the fruit of our short-lived pleasures?

Is the heart empowered to sentence itself,

Or the soul to belittle its own conviction?

No. Life holds the key. One must look and delve,

And light needs the shadow to make depiction.

With doubts and suspicion our strife begins;

And a passing faith is the victor’s haven.

No life nor epoch can see its sins.

On Eternity’s scroll the facts are graven.

The cup is an oracle. Wine is the key

That opens a world behind the curtains.

The soul burns low or it flashes free,

In due respect to the table’s burdens.

The rich on a par with the poor must stay,

For want at the heavenly source is groundless.

—How mean is our life and how little our day;

How tiny the earth—and the Heavens boundless!

The prodigal loses the love he extends.

With fear and reserve speak a guest or a brother.

So shifty of mind are your fellows and friends,

While finding one you have lost another.

If your thoughts were high and your hand was kind

And your tongue excelled, you offended Beauty.

Envy and love fill the selfsame mind;

And Fear is the father and mother of Duty.

I courted but few and admired the men

Who loathed the scene where the mobs attended.

Bored with the laity’s long “amen,”

I lauded the one who was least befriended.

I scorned the parodist’s poor refrain,

That picked and aped what his betters stated.

—The grovelling spirit that follows fain

The footprints the masses pursued—and hated.

’Twas dawn and the birds in the branches sang.

From the bitter night to the street I wandered.

A tattered swain from the sewer sprang.

I saw he had slept on a stone, and pondered.

I threw him a coin where he crept in the sand.

He cringed; then smiled through his furtive lashes.

As a gleam illumined the gold in his hand—

Abundance in his; in mine but ashes.

The bit looms large in the realm of grief,

Where Mishap and Luck with the Fates are trading.

For seldom may two hold the same belief,

Though the selfsame mask they are both parading.

And yet, though the world may be hard of heart,

Though the haughty win and the Right must cower,

Misfortune that here played a hapless part

In Heaven amasses a princely dower.

A smile may transmute the dusk into day,

As a drop may change the wine in a beaker.

A cross remark drives kindness away;

So care should govern the tongue of the speaker.

A hidden cord in the breast may break

If bitter words, without cause, are spoken.

You cannot erase the wrongs you make.

No ruing can mend a heart that is broken.

Chaos is only an empty void

And every stream to its gulf is tending.

The quick are adown to its deeps decoyed,

And Death in his nullity sits unbending.

Each epoch and story go side by side

The selfsame way, like a falling river.

Eternity’s laws may alone abide.

Our lapsing time is a mental quiver.

In the halls of pleasure my heart was glum.

The hovel, so lowly, was more inviting.

For dangers lurk in a house a-hum.

The homely virtues are more requiting.

With mortal energy’s lees a-lip

I lift the cup, though my hand is failing.

I hear a lay—feel the life-line slip.—

The lights grow brilliant beyond the paling!

I waved the cup with its surface sheen,

While Magic and Fate o’er my life contended.

The first was weaving a garland green;

The other a coal-black shroud extended.

The beaker my decades in drafts will tell.

When drained to the lees ’tis a life-time covered.

A day passed out with each drop that fell.

Death, with the sickle, around me hovered.

In a vision I saw what the worldlings do:

The will that halts if its star is shining;

The joy that dies if its dreams come true;

The deepest gaze to the husk inclining.

O isn’t our story a tragic tale,

Where time is speeding from morrow to morrow?

And can there be hope in that heaven for sale

Where hearts are torn between fear and sorrow?

—The night stole in from the Styx afar,

Like a star whose light with the morning blended.

The doors of Heaven were held ajar

And hosts of pages their arms extended.

The nectar of life I gulped with greed.

My guise fell off like a shell of plaster.

My soul from its pagan sark was freed.

In silent wonder I faced the Master.

1930

Softly moving billow-breast,

Bury all thy joy and sadness.

Rest thyself so bright and blest;

Breezes o’er thee play with gladness.

’Round thy cot they come and go,

Quietly rock thee to and fro.

To wake thee from thy willing sleep were madness.

On thy placid ocean-brow

I can see a hint of billows.

’Neath thy cheeks that glint and glow,

Disguised, a restive monster pillows.

O breast a-swell, thy breathing deep

Is bated like a storm asleep!

Thy playful nymphs are light and lithe as willows.

Chilly, mighty, mystic sea,

Many a dream thy charm presages.

Forces ’neath thy limpid lea

Lift the mind to higher stages.

I can see thy surface spread

Softly like a feather bed,

While the tameless surf in shackles rages.

Lend, O sea, thy soft embrace!

Soothe my heart and ’round me crumble;

Torn with grief, with tear-wet face,

Take my hand with spirit humble.

I can feel the fire beneath

The flouncing of thy chilly sheath—

A power that scorns to rant with rage or grumble.

1930

The usurer’s eyes from place to place

Kept peering ’neath brow-thatch hoary.

The runes cut deep in his fox-like face,

Defying the mask of his sly grimace,

Had written a rascal’s story.

All through the line of his lengthy years

He’d lived on the fruits of want and tears

And carried the sum of his sins and fears

To settle in purgatory.

A coy young maiden with doubt and dread

Through the door of the shop advances.

At a harp whose strings are dumb and dead,

In a dusty niche by the wall ahead,

She looks with lingering glances.

The shelves are trammeled with tinsel and gold

To tempt the derelicts, young and old,

That mill in streets, where souls are sold,

And Sin with the tyro dances.

The lights of the city, one by one,

Awake when the daylight ceases.

The glitter and shine of the show goes on

And shadows flee to the slums anon,

Where Sorrow her soul appeases.

—Again in the steel-eyes, stern and keen,

She stares, with a coin in her palm so lean.

The harp was pawned that the heart be clean

When hunger its pangs increases.

1942

Recklessly a rider

Races o’er the ice.

Under shoes resounding

Sag the floes and rise.

The charger sniffs, and snorting

Snuggles to the rein.

Briskly mountain breezes

Brush the flowing mane.

Hoofs are hard and steely.

Hoarfrost rimes the lip.

Like a glass-eye gleaming,

To guide the midnight trip,

Through the growing gristle

Gloats a lonely star.

Abed though boors are sleeping,

A bog remains ajar!

When the twilight fades it is dull and dark.

Till daylight alarms will thicken.

Shades from the bourne of the night embark

And buried memories quicken.

Though, stricken with panic, the rector rides

To run from the noise that follows,

He cannot escape the crowd that hides

In clefts and the ghostly hollows.

Each sleepless night with its spooky spell

That spectral forms endower,

A guilty mind itself will sell

To sin’s avenging power.

It follows thee so fell of eye

And fiercely on thee glowers,

A phantom picture painted by

The pain of lonely hours.

But this is no time for dreams, indeed.

A demon faces the running steed,

That falls, as if held by the halter;

But jumps to its feet with a jerky bound,

Then jams its toes in the frozen ground

And stands like the stone of Gibraltar.

None can escape till the day he dies

The dying look in his victim’s eyes,

That hardened with hatred glower.

Torn with remorse that man is doomed

To meet his sin in the road, exhumed,

Who bowed to its baleful power.

The moon throws a pall with its pearly glare

On pallid brow, on the tousled hair

And a face most fear-impelling.

—Her eyes in the night have a nameless leer;

The neck is slitted from ear to ear,

And blood from the wound is welling.

Clenched in hatred a hand is raised

On high, to strike; the other is placed

On a shining knife beside her.

Abused by him, and a suicide,

She shrieked—and the echoing night replied—

This taunt to the trembling rider:

“Thy vile deceit has ruined my rest.

My role is that of an unclean guest,

And thou art crime-encumbered.

The threat that I swore is soon fulfilled.

My sweet revenge is about distilled,

For now thy days are numbered.”

—But hope revives, for his home is near.

The house stands out in its bright veneer,

And thither his thoughts are fleeing.

With horror he thinks of the bolts that bar—

A baleful wraith in the night can mar

The mind of a mortal being.

Fateful of mien and bleak of brow,

About the thatch is creeping

A shadowy form that holds, somehow,

The house in its ghostly keeping.

Under the sway of that shadow-wight

The servants sleep unchidden.

Their soughing blends with the sighs of night.

All signs of life are hidden.

But it was a haunted house that night.

They heard the rafters creaking;

And Solveig’s ghost beside each light

With severed neck was sneaking.

“Sleep until morning, ye men, content.

Tomorrow I have my inning,”

She said, and in through the open vent

From ear to ear was grinning.

“At Magnacroft so much occurs

That men would hardly credit.”

With manners bad and manners worse

They meet the thing they dreaded.

—For suddenly on the shutter pane

It seems a weight is falling;

While at the door with might and main

A man in need is calling.

Aroused, in a panic they peer in the dark.

A prayer through the silence quivers.

Each native figure, a statue stark,

And stricken with terror, shivers.

But out in the night to him they hear

No hero forth is racing.

The one outdoors, adaze with fear,

His doom alone is facing.

And when they open the door next day,

At dawn, and look for a token,

Their master’s gear and gauntlets lay

In the grass, by the whip-stock broken.

Nor horse nor parson has since been seen.

They say, while the folks were sleeping

An ogress down to her dark demesne

Had dragged them—and both is keeping.

1930

The night has the earth in her grip again;

Her groans in the treetops quiver.

It is silent now where we sang amain.

I sit alone till the candles wane,

Abend o’er the bowl and shiver.

I fondle and stare at a stone so bright,

With its stealthy gleams through the clouds of white:

A curious blending of color and light

Recast by the dark’s light-giver.

On the back of my finger it beams tonight,

In bonds, like a doubtful token.

They say that it augurs evil and plight;

But I would call it a harp of light,

With strings that are bruised and broken:

A glimmer of hopes that have gone astray;

Have gone to seed in a better day—

A vision of things that I should not say,

Or something I left unspoken.

The jewel forth like a flambeau shines

From fiery depths, beclouded.

A fountain of ease, like the oldest wines,

Its opal-charm—how it flares and declines,

Transparent, yet so enshrouded!

Its wiles enchant like a stolen kiss—

A cross-tree of faith with its arms amiss!—

And spectres wade in its weird abyss,

Like virtue with secrets crowded.

1930

—And so, my land, my life shall be

A leaf that in thy garden yearns.

Each little ode I offered thee

An earnest in thy garland burns.

And every surge within my soul

Shall seek amain, and find the goal

—A swell that to its source returns.

1930