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Edward Bellamy - "Looking Backward From 2000 to 1887"

William Makepeace Thackeray - "The Bedford Row Conspiracy"

F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau - "The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther"

Henry Altemus - "The History of Tom Thumb, et. al."

The Second Book of Modern Verse

J >> Jessie B. Rittenhouse >> The Second Book of Modern Verse







Tampico. [Grace Hazard Conkling]



Oh, cut me reeds to blow upon,
Or gather me a star,
But leave the sultry passion-flowers
Growing where they are.

I fear their sombre yellow deeps,
Their whirling fringe of black,
And he who gives a passion-flower
Always asks it back.




Which. [Corinne Roosevelt Robinson]



We ask that Love shall rise to the divine,
And yet we crave him very human, too;
Our hearts would drain the crimson of his wine,
Our souls despise him if he prove untrue!
Poor Love! I hardly see what you can do!
We know all human things are weak and frail,
And yet we claim that very part of you,
Then, inconsistent, blame you if you fail.
When you would soar, 't is we who clip your wings,
Although we weep because you faint and fall.
Alas! it seems we want so many things,
That no dear love could ever grant them all!
Which shall we choose, the human or divine,
The crystal stream, or yet the crimson wine?




Apology. [Amy Lowell]



Be not angry with me that I bear
Your colours everywhere,
All through each crowded street,
And meet
The wonder-light in every eye,
As I go by.

Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,
Blinded by rainbow haze,
The stuff of happiness,
No less,
Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds
Of peacock golds.

Before my feet the dusty, rough-paved way
Flushes beneath its gray.
My steps fall ringed with light,
So bright,
It seems a myriad suns are strown
About the town.

Around me is the sound of steepled bells,
And rich perfumed smells
Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,
And shroud
Me from close contact with the world.
I dwell impearled.

You blazon me with jewelled insignia.
A flaming nebula
Rims in my life. And yet
You set
The word upon me, unconfessed
To go unguessed.




The Great Hunt. [Carl Sandburg]



I cannot tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last --
Maybe I'll tell you then --
some other time.

When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the wrack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long" --
Maybe I'll tell you then --
some other time.

I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you.
I shall never find any
greater than you.




Dialogue. [Walter Conrad Arensberg]



Be patient, Life, when Love is at the gate,
And when he enters let him be at home.
Think of the roads that he has had to roam.
Think of the years that he has had to wait.

~But if I let Love in I shall be late.
Another has come first -- there is no room.
And I am thoughtful of the endless loom --
Let Love be patient, the importunate.~

O Life, be idle and let Love come in,
And give thy dreamy hair that Love may spin.

~But Love himself is idle with his song.
Let Love come last, and then may Love last long.~

Be patient, Life, for Love is not the last.
Be patient now with Death, for Love has passed.




Song. [Margaret Widdemer]



The Spring will come when the year turns,
As if no Winter had been,
But what shall I do with a locked heart
That lets no new year in?

The birds will go when the Fall goes,
The leaves will fade in the field,
But what shall I do with an old love
Will neither die nor yield?

Oh! youth will turn as the world turns,
And dim grow laughter and pain,
But how shall I hide from an old dream
I never may dream again?




The Bitter Herb. [Jeanne Robert Foster]



O bitter herb, Forgetfulness,
I search for you in vain;
You are the only growing thing
Can take away my pain.

When I was young, this bitter herb
Grew wild on every hill;
I should have plucked a store of it,
And kept it by me still.

I hunt through all the meadows
Where once I wandered free,
But the rare herb, Forgetfulness,
It hides away from me.

O bitter herb, Forgetfulness,
Where is your drowsy breath?
Oh, can it be your seed has blown
Far as the Vales of Death?




Behind the House is the Millet Plot. [Muna Lee]



Behind the house is the millet plot,
And past the millet, the stile;
And then a hill where melilot
Grows with wild camomile.

There was a youth who bade me goodby
Where the hill rises to meet the sky.
I think my heart broke; but I have forgot
All but the smell of the white melilot.




Men of Harlan. [William Aspinwall Bradley]



Here in the level country, where the creeks run straight and wide,
Six men upon their pacing nags may travel side by side.
But the mountain men of Harlan, you may tell them all the while,
When they pass through our village, for they ride in single file.
And the children, when they see them, stop their play and stand and cry,
"Here come the men of Harlan, men of Harlan, riding by!"

O the mountain men of Harlan, when they come down to the plain,
With dangling stirrup, jangling spur, and loosely hanging rein,
They do not ride, like our folks here, in twos and threes abreast,
With merry laughter, talk and song, and lightly spoken jest;
But silently and solemnly, in long and straggling line,
As you may see them in the hills, beyond Big Black and Pine.

For, in that far strange country, where the men of Harlan dwell,
There are no roads at all, like ours, as we've heard travelers tell.
But only narrow trails that wind along each shallow creek,
Where the silence hangs so heavy, you can hear the leathers squeak.
And there no two can ride abreast, but each alone must go,
Picking his way as best he may, with careful steps and slow,

Down many a shelving ledge of shale, skirting the trembling sands,
Through many a pool and many a pass, where the mountain laurel stands
So thick and close to left and right, with holly bushes, too,
The clinging branches meet midway to bar the passage through, --
O'er many a steep and stony ridge, o'er many a high divide,
And so it is the Harlan men thus one by one do ride.

Yet it is strange to see them pass in line through our wide street,
When they come down to sell their sang, and buy their stores of meat,
These silent men, in sombre black, all clad from foot to head,
Though they have left their lonely hills and the narrow creek's rough bed.
And 't is no wonder children stop their play and stand and cry:
"Here come the men of Harlan, men of Harlan, riding by."




Have you an Eye. [Edwin Ford Piper]



Have you an eye for the trails, the trails,
The old mark and the new?
What scurried here, what loitered there,
In the dust and in the dew?

Have you an eye for the beaten track,
The old hoof and the young?
Come name me the drivers of yesterday,
Sing me the songs they sung.

O, was it a schooner last went by,
And where will it ford the stream?
Where will it halt in the early dusk,
And where will the camp-fire gleam?

They used to take the shortest cut
The cattle trails had made;
Get down the hill by the easy slope
To the water and the shade.

But it's barbed wire fence, and section line,
And kill-horse travel now;
Scoot you down the canyon bank, --
The old road's under plough.

Have you an eye for the laden wheel,
The worn tire or the new?
Or the sign of the prairie pony's hoof
Was never trimmed for shoe?




After Apple-Picking. [Robert Frost]



My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.




Autumn. [Jean Starr Untermeyer]

(For my Mother)



How memory cuts away the years,
And how clean the picture comes
Of autumn days, brisk and busy;
Charged with keen sunshine.
And you, stirred with activity;
The spirit of these energetic days.

There was our back-yard,
So plain and stripped of green,
With even the weeds carefully pulled away
From the crooked, red bricks that made the walk,
And the earth on either side so black.

Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air;
And winter comforts coming in like a pageant.
I shall not forget them:
Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles,
Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch,
Exhaling the pungent dill;
And in the very center of the yard,
You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper
Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down
Like jolly monks in a drunken dance.
And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by the wagon-load,
Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons
Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers.
Such feathery whiteness -- to come to kraut!
And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness under a grey dust,
Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire;
And enamelled crab-apples that tricked with their fragrance
But were bitter to taste.
And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces,
And long string beans floating in pans of clear water
Like slim, green fishes.
And there was fish itself,
Salted, silver herring from the city . . .

And you moved among these mysteries,
Absorbed and smiling and sure;
Stirring, tasting, measuring,
With the precision of a ritual.
I like to think of you in your years of power --
You, now so shaken and so powerless --
High priestess of your home.




Autumn Movement. [Carl Sandburg]



I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.




God's World. [Edna St. Vincent Millay]



O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, -- Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, -- let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.




Overtones. [William Alexander Percy]



I heard a bird at break of day
Sing from the autumn trees
A song so mystical and calm,
So full of certainties,
No man, I think, could listen long
Except upon his knees.
Yet this was but a simple bird,
Alone, among dead trees.




When the Year grows Old. [Edna St. Vincent Millay]



I cannot but remember
When the year grows old --
October -- November --
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget --
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old --
October -- November --
How she disliked the cold!




In the Monastery. [Norreys Jephson O'Conor]



Cold is the wind to-night, and rough the sea,
Too rough for even the daring Dane to find
A landing-place upon the frozen lea.
Cold is the wind.

The blast sweeps round the chapel from behind,
Making the altar-light flare fitfully,
While I must kneel and pray with troubled mind.

Patrick and Brigid, I have prayed to ye!
The night is over, and my task resigned
To Colum. Though God's own dwelling shelter me,
Cold is the wind.




The Narrow Doors. [Fannie Stearns Davis]



The Wide Door into Sorrow
Stands open night and day.
With head held high and dancing feet
I pass it on my way.

I never tread within it,
I never turn to see
The Wide Door into Sorrow.
It cannot frighten me.

The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
Are secret, still, and low:
Swift tongues of dusk that spoil the sun
Before I even know.

My dancing feet are frozen.
I stare. I can but see.
The Narrow Doors to Sorrow
They stop the heart in me.

-- Oh, stranger than my midnights
Of loneliness and strife
The Doors that let the dark leap in
Across my sunny life!




"I Pass a Lighted Window". [Clement Wood]



I pass a lighted window
And a closed door --
And I am not troubled
Any more.

Though the road is murky,
I am not afraid,
For a shadow passes
On the lighted shade.

Once I knew the sesame
To the closed door;
Now I shall not enter
Any more;

Nor will people passing
By the lit place,
See our shadows marry
In a gray embrace.

Strange a passing shadow
Has a long spell!
What can matter, knowing
She does well?

How can life annoy me
Any more?
Life: a lighted window
And a closed door.




Doors. [Hermann Hagedorn]



Like a young child who to his mother's door
Runs eager for the welcoming embrace,
And finds the door shut, and with troubled face
Calls and through sobbing calls, and o'er and o'er
Calling, storms at the panel -- so before
A door that will not open, sick and numb,
I listen for a word that will not come,
And know, at last, I may not enter more.

Silence! And through the silence and the dark
By that closed door, the distant sob of tears
Beats on my spirit, as on fairy shores
The spectral sea; and through the sobbing -- hark!
Down the fair-chambered corridor of years,
The quiet shutting, one by one, of doors.




Where Love once was. [James Oppenheim]



Where love once was, let there be no hate:
Though they that went as one by night and day
Go now alone,
Where love once was, let there be no hate.

The seeds we planted together
Came to rich harvest,
And our hearts are as bins brimming with the golden plenty:
Into our loneliness we carry granaries of old love . . .

And though the time has come when we cannot sow our acres together,
And our souls need diverse fields,
And a tilling apart,
Let us go separate ways with a blessing each for each,
And gentle parting,
And let there be no hate,
Where love once was.




Irish Love Song. [Margaret Widdemer]



Well, if the thing is over, better it is for me,
The lad was ever a rover, loving and laughing free,
Far too clever a lover not to be having still
A lass in the town and a lass by the road and a lass by the farther hill --
Love on the field and love on the path and love in the woody glen --
(Lad, will I never see you, never your face again?)

Ay, if the thing is ending, now I'll be getting rest,
Saying my prayers and bending down to be stilled and blest,
Never the days are sending hope till my heart is sore
For a laugh on the path and a voice by the gate and a step
on the shieling floor --
Grief on my ways and grief on my work and grief till the evening's dim --
(Lord, will I never hear it, never a sound of him?)

Sure if it's done forever, better for me that's wise,
Never the hurt, and never tears in my aching eyes,
No more the trouble ever to hide from my asking folk
Beat of my heart at click o' the latch, and throb if his name is spoke;
Never the need to hide the sighs and the flushing thoughts and the fret,
And after awhile my heart will hush and my hungering hands forget . . .
Peace on my ways, and peace in my step, and maybe my heart grown light --
(~Mary, helper of heartbreak, send him to me to-night!~)




Nirvana. [John Hall Wheelock]



Sleep on -- I lie at heaven's high oriels,
Over the stars that murmur as they go
Lighting your lattice-window far below;
And every star some of the glory spells
Whereof I know.
I have forgotten you, long long ago;
Like the sweet, silver singing of thin bells
Vanished, or music fading faint and low.
Sleep on -- I lie at heaven's high oriels,
Who loved you so.




A Nun. [Odell Shepard]



One glance and I had lost her in the riot
Of tangled cries.
She trod the clamor with a cloistral quiet
Deep in her eyes
As though she heard the muted music only
That silence makes
Among dim mountain summits and on lonely
Deserted lakes.

There is some broken song her heart remembers
From long ago,
Some love lies buried deep, some passion's embers
Smothered in snow,
Far voices of a joy that sought and missed her
Fail now, and cease . . .
And this has given the deep eyes of God's sister
Their dreadful peace.




Silence. [Edgar Lee Masters]



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 of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths,
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities --
We cannot speak.

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,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
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
Which he could not describe.

There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
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.
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, "Blessed Jesus" --
Revealing in two words all sorrows, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.

And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.




The Dark Cavalier. [Margaret Widdemer]



I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover:
My arms shall welcome you when other arms are tired;
I stand to wait for you, patient in the darkness,
Offering forgetfulness of all that you desired.

I ask no merriment, no pretense of gladness,
I can love heavy lids and lips without their rose;
Though you are sorrowful you will not weary me;
I will not go from you when all the tired world goes.

I am the Dark Cavalier; I am the Last Lover;
I promise faithfulness no other lips may keep;
Safe in my bridal place, comforted by darkness,
You shall lie happily, smiling in your sleep.




Indian Summer. [William Ellery Leonard]

(After completing a book for one now dead)



(~O Earth-and-Autumn of the Setting Sun,
She is not by, to know my task is done.~)
In the brown grasses slanting with the wind,
Lone as a lad whose dog's no longer near,
Lone as a mother whose only child has sinned,
Lone on the loved hill . . . and below me here
The thistle-down in tremulous atmosphere
Along red clusters of the sumach streams;
The shrivelled stalks of golden-rod are sere,
And crisp and white their flashing old racemes.
(. . . forever . . . forever . . . . forever . . .)
This is the lonely season of the year,
This is the season of our lonely dreams.

(~O Earth-and-Autumn of the Setting Sun,
She is not by, to know my task is done!~)
The corn-shocks westward on the stubble plain
Show like an Indian village of dead days;
The long smoke trails behind the crawling train,
And floats atop the distant woods ablaze
With orange, crimson, purple. The low haze
Dims the scarped bluffs above the inland sea,
Whose wide and slaty waters in cold glaze
Await yon full-moon of the night-to-be,
(. . . far . . . and far . . . and far . . .)
These are the solemn horizons of man's ways,
These are the horizons of solemn thought to me.

(~O Earth-and-Autumn of the Setting Sun,
She is not by, to know my task is done!~)
And this the hill she visited, as friend;
And this the hill she lingered on, as bride --
Down in the yellow valley is the end:
They laid her . . . in no evening autumn tide . . .
Under fresh flowers of that May morn, beside
The queens and cave-women of ancient earth . . .

This is the hill . . . and over my city's towers,
Across the world from sunset, yonder in air,
Shines, through its scaffoldings, a civic dome
Of piled masonry, which shall be ours
To give, completed, to our children there . . .
And yonder far roof of my abandoned home
Shall house new laughter . . . Yet I tried . . . I tried
And, ever wistful of the doom to come,
I built her many a fire for love . . . for mirth . . .
(When snows were falling on our oaks outside,
Dear, many a winter fire upon the hearth) . . .
(. . . farewell . . . farewell . . . farewell . . .)
We dare not think too long on those who died,
While still so many yet must come to birth.




Death -- Divination. [Charles Wharton Stork]



Death is like moonlight in a lofty wood,
That pours pale magic through the shadowy leaves;
'T is like the web that some old perfume weaves
In a dim, lonely room where memories brood;
Like snow-chilled wine it steals into the blood,
Spurring the pulse its coolness half reprieves;
Tenderly quickening impulses it gives,
As April winds unsheathe an opening bud.

Death is like all sweet, sense-enfolding things,
That lift us in a dream-delicious trance
Beyond the flickering good and ill of chance;
But most is Death like Music's buoyant wings,
That bear the soul, a willing Ganymede,
Where joys on joys forevermore succeed.




The Mould. [Gladys Cromwell]



No doubt this active will,
So bravely steeped in sun,
This will has vanquished Death
And foiled oblivion.

But this indifferent clay,
This fine experienced hand,
So quiet, and these thoughts
That all unfinished stand,

Feel death as though it were
A shadowy caress;
And win and wear a frail
Archaic wistfulness.




In Patris Mei Memoriam. [John Myers O'Hara]



By the fond name that was his own and mine,
The last upon his lips that strove with doom,
He called me and I saw the light assume
A sudden glory and around him shine;
And nearer now I saw the laureled line
Of the august of Song before me loom,
And knew the voices, erstwhile through the gloom,
That whispered and forbade me to repine.
And with farewell, a shaft of splendor sank
Out of the stars and faded as a flame,
And down the night, on clouds of glory, came
The battle seraphs halting rank on rank;
And lifted heavenward to heroic peace,
He passed and left me hope beyond surcease.




Ad Matrem Amantissimam et Carissimam Filii in Aeternum Fidelitas.
[John Myers O'Hara]

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