By the window resting above the city's floors. Her crystal necklaces and possessions will be strewn; And dividends will re-assume with wings And in the city there are numberless women, Is part Or unprevisioned life! They have no spoil, PETIT, THE POET Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick, But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof. Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus. Ballades by the score with the same old thought: The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished; Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus, Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics, While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines! LUCINDA MATLOCK I went to the dances at Chandlerville, Driving home in the moonlight of middle June, We were married and lived together for seventy years, Ere I had reached the age of sixty. I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick, Rambled over the fields where sang the larks, Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys. And passed to a sweet repose. What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness, Life is too strong for you— It takes life to love Life. ANNE RUTLEDGE Out of me unworthy and unknown "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions, Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom! SILENCE I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea, And the silence of the city when it pauses, And the silence of a man and a maid, And the silence for which music alone finds the word, And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin, A curious boy asks an old soldier Sitting in front of the grocery store, "How did you lose your leg?" And the old soldier is struck with silence, Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg. And he says, "A bear bit it off." And the boy wonders, while the old soldier The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon, The shrieks of the slain, And himself lying on the ground, And the hospital surgeons, the knives, And the long days in bed. But if he could describe it all He would be an artist. But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds There is the silence of a great hatred, And the silence of a great love, And the silence of a deep peace of mind, And the silence of an embittered friendship, There is the silence of a spiritual crisis, Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured, Comes with visions not to be uttered Into a realm of higher life. And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech, There is the silence of defeat. There is the silence of those unjustly punished; And the silence of the dying whose hand Suddenly grips yours. There is the silence between father and son, When the father cannot explain his life, Even though he be misunderstood for it. There is the silence that comes between husband and wife. There is the silence of those who have failed; And the vast silence that covers Broken nations and vanquished leaders. There is the silence of Lincoln, Thinking of the poverty of his youth. And the silence of Napoleon After Waterloo. And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc Saying amid the flames, "Blessèd Jesus"— Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope. And there is the silence of age, Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it And there is the silence of the dead. Stephen Crane TEPHEN CRANE, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born in Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died prematurely, at the age of thirty, he had ten printed volumes to his credit, two more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing serially. Crane's most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was a tour de force, written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of conflict. The Atlantic Monthly pronounced it "great enough to set a new fashion in literature"; H. G. Wells, speaking of its influence in England, said Crane was "the first expression of the opening mind of a new period . . . a record of intensity beyond all precedent.” Crane's other books, although less powerful than The Red Badge of Courage, are scarcely less vivid. The Open Boat (1898) and The Monster (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a passionate sensitivity that caused Wells to exclaim, "The man who can call these 'brilliant fragments' would reproach Rodin for not 'completing' his fragments." At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new acuteness of symbol and vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry-The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the elliptical free verse that followed fifteen years later. Acidulous and biting, these concisions were unappreciated in his day; Crane's suggestive verse has not yet received its due in an age which employs its very technique. But it was forty years before Emily Dickinson won her rightful audience, and a quarter of a century passed before a publisher risked a Complete Works of Stephen Crane. It was not until 1930 that a Collected Poems appeared. Besides novels, short stories and poems, Crane was writing, at the time of his death, descriptions of the world's great battles for Lippincott's Magazine; his droll Whilomville Stories for boys were appearing in Harper's Monthly, and he was beginning a series of similar stories for girls. It is more than probable that this feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey's end, June 5, 1900. |