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Move among stems like towers

Of the old redwoods to the stream,

No twig crackling; dip shy

Wild muzzles into the mountain water
Among the dark ferns.

O passionately at peace you being secure will pardon

The blasphemies of glowworms, the lamp in my tower, the fretfulness
Of cities, the crescents of the planets, the pride of the stars.

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
Globed, out of grasp of the mind enormous; but to you

O Night

What? Not a spark? What flicker of a spark in the faint far glimmer
Of a lost fire dying in the desert, dim coals of a sand-pit the Bedouins
Wandered from at dawn. . . . Ah singing prayer to what gulfs tempted
Suddenly are you more lost? To us the near-hand mountain

Be a measure of height, the tide-worn cliff at the sea-gate a measure of continuance,

The tide, moving the night's
Vastness with lonely voices,
Turns, the deep dark-shining
Pacific leans on the land,
Feeling his cold strength

To the outmost margins: you Night will resume
The stars in your time.

O passionately at peace when will that tide draw shoreward,
Truly the spouting fountains of light, Antares, Arcturus,
Tire of their flow, they sing one song but they think silence.
The striding winter-giant Orion shines, and dreams darkness.
And life, the flicker of men and moths and the wolf on the hill,
Though furious for continuance, passionately feeding, passionately
Remaking itself upon its mates, remembers deep inward
The calm mother, the quietness of the womb and the egg,
The primal and the latter silences: dear Night it is memory
Prophesies, prophecy that remembers, the charm of the dark.
And I and my people, we are willing to love the four-score years
Heartily; but as a sailor loves the sea, when the helm is for harbor.

Have men's minds changed,

Or the rock hidden in the deep of the waters of the soul
Broken the surface? A few centuries

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,
And death is no evil.

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,
Over and under the ocean

Divinely superfluous beauty

Rules the games, presides over destinies, makes trees grow
And hills tower, waves fall.

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;
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers 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
The stronger dog will still be on top,
All in the turning of time.

If civilization goes down, that
Would be an event to contemplate.

It will not be in our time, alas, my dear,
It will not be in our time.

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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,
The grass that seeds, the sheep that fatten for men,
Shapes that are beaten in fire or built in wall,
The plow preparing the soil to be born again;
The crystal well, the gold of the honeycomb,
The hands that pattern with wool or hide or clay;
Earth is the wain, the sickle, the sledge, the stall—
Earth is our yesterday.

II

Air is the thrust of steam and burning gas,

The spark men take from the foam of a falling stream,
The word of the first sea caught on the last of the seven,
Ships with the speed of a dream made more than dream;
The throb of steel in a cage of steel and glass,

Iron fingers at smooth and gleaming play,
Air is the wings of men on the sea of heaven-

Air is today.

III

Earth is the suck of men, their loaf and their healing;
With earth they are poor but sapful, driven but strong;
Air is a high, thin world where their eyes grow weaker,
Their round breasts flatten, their cheeks fall white and long.
Air is a shifting floor and a viewless ceiling,

Genii building and wrecking and building again,

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