Move among stems like towers Of the old redwoods to the stream, No twig crackling; dip shy Wild muzzles into the mountain water O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon The blasphemies of glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the fretfulness This August night in a rift of cloud Antares reddens, The great one, the ancient torch, a lord among lost children, The earth's orbit doubled would not girdle his greatness, one fire O Night What? Not a spark? What flicker of a spark in the faint far glimmer Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance, The tide, moving the night's To the outmost margins: you Night will resume O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward, Have men's minds changed, Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul Gone by, was none dared not to people The darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations. But now, dear is the truth. Life is grown' sweeter and lonelier, SHINE, PERISHING REPUBLIC While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You make haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught-they say-God, when he walked on earth. DIVINELY SUPERFLUOUS BEAUTY The storm-dances of gulls, the barking game of seals, Divinely superfluous beauty Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow The incredible beauty of joy Stars with fire the joining of lips, O let our loves too Be joined, there is not a maiden Burns and thirsts for love More than my blood for you, by the shore of seals while the wings Weave like a web in the air Divinely superfluous beauty. HURT HAWKS The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder, The wing trails like a banner in defeat, No more to use the sky forever but live with famine And pain a few days: cat nor coyote Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons. He stands under the oak-bush and waits The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it. He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse. The curs of the day come and torment him At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head, The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes. The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant. You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying remember him. I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail Had nothing left but unable misery From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved. We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom, He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death, Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what What fell was relaxed, Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising Before it was quite unsheathed from reality. PRESCRIPTION OF PAINFUL ENDS Lucretius felt the change of the world in his time, the great republic coming to the height Whence no way leads but downward, Plato in his time watched Athens Dance the down path. The future is ever a misted landscape, no man foreknows it, but at cyclical turns There is a change felt in the rhythm of events: as when an exhausted horse Falters and recovers, then the rhythm of the running hoofbeats is altered, he will run miles yet, But he must fall: we have felt it again in our own lifetime, slip, shift and speed-up In the gallop of the world, and now suspect that, come peace or war, the progress of America and Europe Becomes a long process of deterioration-starred with famous Byzantiums and Alexandrias, Surely, but downward. One desires at such times To gather the insights of the age summit against future loss, against the narrowing mind and the tyrants, The pedants, the mystagogues, the swarms of barbarians: time-conscious poems, poems for treasuries: Lucretius Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato smiling carves dreams, bright cells Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey. and far less fortunate Our own time, much greater Has acids for honey and for fine dreams The immense vulgarities of misapplied science and decaying Christianity: therefore one christens each poem, in dutiful Hope of burning off at least the top crust of the time's uncleanness, from the acid bottles. MAY-JUNE, 1940 Foreseen for so many years: these evils, this monstrous violence, these massive agonies: no easier to bear. We saw them with slow stone strides approach, everyone saw them; we closed our eyes against them, we looked And they had come nearer. We ate and drank and slept, they came nearer. Sometimes we laughed, they were nearer. Now They are here. And now a blind man foresees what follows them: degradation, famine, recovery and so forth, and the Epidemic manias: but not enough death to serve us, not enough death. It would be better for men To be few and live far apart, where none could infect another; then slowly the sanity of field and mountain And the cold ocean and glittering stars might enter their minds. dream, another dream. Another We shall have to accept certain limitations In future, and abandon some humane dreams; only hard-minded, sleepless and realist, can ride this rock-slide To new fields down the dark mountain; and we shall have to perceive that these insanities are normal; We shall have to perceive that battle is a burning flower or like a huge music, and the dive-bomber's screaming orgasm As beautiful as other passions; and that death and life are not serious alternatives. One has known all these things For many years: there is greater and darker to know In the next hundred. And why do you cry, my dear, why do you cry? It is all in the whirling circles of time. If millions are born millions must die, If England goes down and Germany up If civilization goes down, that It will not be in our time, alas, my dear, Frank Ernest Hill RANK ERNEST HILL was born in San Jose, California, October 29, 1888. He graduated from Stanford University, taught at the University of Illinois, Stanford University and Columbia Extension. During the War, he went into the Air Service, and after a brief experience with the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation, engaged in journalism, publishing, and teaching. In collaboration with Joseph Auslander, he wrote The Wingèd Horse (1927), which is a story rather than a criticism of poetry, and edited The Wingèd Horse Anthology (1929). His translation of The Canterbury Tales (1935), containing all the metrical tales unexpurgated, is the best modern rendering, being highly readable and authoritative. Stone Dust (1928) is a volume which presents the clash between the mechanical and creative forces in modern civilization. Neither scorning nor sentimentalizing the machine, Hill appraises it in terms of inner as well as outer experience. "Upper Air," "Wing Harbor," and the three other aeroplane poems are verses-possibly the first-by one who has known flying intimately; they transcend physical sensation, registering effects on spirit. The two longer poems, of which "Earth and Air" is the better, pierce through the material with clear vision. It is interesting to compare "Earth and Air"-particularly its point of view-with Elinor Wylie's "Hymn to Earth." EARTH AND AIR I Earth is the tower of granite, the floor of loam, II Air is the thrust of steam and burning gas, The spark men take from the foam of a falling stream, Iron fingers at smooth and gleaming play, Air is today. III Earth is the suck of men, their loaf and their healing; Genii building and wrecking and building again, |