With a bright-bronze breast and a bronze-brown wing,

Captured the world with his caroling.

Late at night his tune was spent.

Peasants,

Sages,

Children,

Homeward went,

And then the bronze bird sang for you and me.

The great gray joss on the rustic shelf,
Rakish and shrewd, with his collar awry,
Sang impolitely, as though by himself,

darling..."

Drowning with his bellowing the nightingale's cry:
"Back through a hundred, hundred years
Hear the waves as they climb the piers,
Hear the howl of the silver seas,
Hear the thunder.

Hear the gongs of holy China
How the waves and tunes combine
In a rhythmic clashing wonder,
Incantation old and fine:

'Dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons,
Red firecrackers, and green firecrackers
And dragons, dragons, Chinese dragons."

Then the lady, rosy-red,

Turned to her lover Chang and said:

"Dare you forget that turquoise dawn

When we stood in our mist-hung velvet lawn,

And worked a spell this great joss taught

Till a God of the Dragons was charmed and caught?
From the flag high over our palace home
He flew to our feet in rainbow-foam-
A king of beauty and tempest and thunder
Panting to tear our sorrows asunder.
A dragon of fair adventure and wonder.
We mounted the back of that royal slave

With thoughts of desire that were noble and grave.
We swam down the shore to the dragon-mountains,
We whirled to the peaks and the fiery fountains.
To our secret ivory house we were borne.
We looked down the wonderful wind-filled regions
Where the dragons darted in glimmering legions.
Right by my breast the nightingale sang;

The old rhymes rang in the sunlit mist
That we this hour regain-

Song-fire for the brain.

When my hands and my hair and my feet you kissed, When you cried for your heart's new pain,

What was my name in the dragon-mist,

In the rings of the rainbowed rain?”

"Sorrow and love, glory and love,"
Sang the Chinese nightingale,
"Sorrow and love, glory and love,"
Said the Chinese nightingale.

And now the joss broke in with his song:
"Dying ember, bird of Chang,

Soul of Chang, do you remember?—
Ere you returned to the shining harbor
There were pirates by ten thousand
Descended on the town

In vessels mountain-high and red and brown,
Moon-ships that climbed the storms and cut the skies.
On their prows were painted terrible bright eyes.

But I was then a wizard and a scholar and a priest;
I stood upon the sand;

With lifted hand I looked upon them

And sunk their vessels with my wizard eyes,

And the stately lacquer-gate made safe again.

Deep, deep below the bay, the seaweed and the spray, Embalmed in amber every pirate lies,

Embalmed in amber every pirate lies."

Then this did the noble lady say:

"Bird, do you dream of our home-coming day When you flew like a courier on before

From the dragon-peak to our palace-door,

And we drove the steed in your singing path—

The ramping dragon of laughter and wrath:
And found our city all aglow,

And knighted this joss that decked it so?

There were golden fishes in the purple river

And silver fishes and rainbow fishes.

There were golden junks in the laughing river,

And silver junks and rainbow junks:

There were golden lilies by the bay and river,

And silver lilies and tiger-lilies,

And tinkling wind-bells in the gardens of the town By the black-lacquer gate

Where walked in state

The kind king Chang
And his sweetheart mate.

With his flag-born dragon

And his crown of pearl . . . and . . . jade,
And his nightingale reigning in the mulberry shade,
And sailors and soldiers on the sea-sands brown,
And priests who bowed them down to your song-

By the city called Han, the peacock town,

By the city called Han, the nightingale town,
The nightingale town."

Then sang the bird, so strangely gay,
Fluttering, fluttering, ghostly and gray,
A vague, unraveling, final tune,
Like a long unwinding silk cocoon;
Sang as though for the soul of him
Who ironed away in that bower dim:-
"I have forgotten

Your dragons great,

Merry and mad and friendly and bold. Dim is your proud lost palace-gate.

I vaguely know

There were heroes of old,

Troubles more than the heart could hold,

There were wolves in the woods

Yet lambs in the fold,

Nests in the top of the almond tree.

The evergreen tree . . . and the mulberry tree....

Life and hurry and joy forgotten,

Years and years I but half-remember . . .

Man is a torch, then ashes soon,

May and June, then dead December,
Dead December, then again June.
Who shall end my dream's confusion?
Life is a loom, weaving illusion. . .
I remember, I remember

M

Melville Cane

elville cane was born April 15, 1879, at Plattsburg, New York. He was educated at Columbia Grammar School, received his A.B. at Columbia in 1900, LL.B. in 1903. At Columbia he was editor-in-chief of the Literary Monthly; he wrote the lyrics of the Varsity operetta, the music of which was supplied by John Erskine. While still in college he contributed light verse to Puck, Judge, and the more sedate Century and was a reporter on the New York Evening Post. Upon graduation he engaged in the practice of law, specializing in the law of copyright and the theater. After an interval of twenty years, he resumed writing and turned to a wholly unforeseen expression. January Garden (1926) is the antithesis of the light verse of Cane's youth; it is sensitive and unequivocally serious. Most of the volume is in a free verse whose contours are shaped by introspection. A somber cast may have accounted for the sparse enthusiasm with which it was received, but it is more difficult to account for failure to recognize the delicacy of the pictorial effects.

Cane's Behind Dark Spaces (1930) is less impressionistic, but what it loses in suggestion it gains in sharpness. Mixing "pure" and "suspended" rhyme, his tonecolor has grown richer; concentrating on instead of writing around the object, he has developed power without resorting to force. Since 1934 Cane has written in a new genre, a type of poetry which blends seriousness and vers de société with a nice balance.