Part 2

To a New York poetry society one night with a friend of a friend.... I had always wanted to see that society. Long have I listened in awe to the unutterable rhythms of the city itself: the daily ictus of the workward crowds in the morning, the beat again in the homeward evening, lyric activity of the weeks rising to a crest like an Elizabethan sonnet to end in a Saturday-Sunday couplet of application to the heart of man, involved quatrains of the seasons, free verse epochs and tensions, years and decades. As I listened to these bigger canticles of New York City I have wanted to see its poetry society, fancying it some homely cricket on its communal hearth—my pleasant heart-warming dream. You see, also, besides listening in on this great, loud city voice, I once wanted to write poetry myself—but that was long ago before, under penalty of death by starvation, they took me and put me to work and rediscovered vers libre.

As I sat beside the friend of a friend, gazing in glad surmise at an elegant assembly of ladies and gentlemen, the poetry society meeting came to order. Not since I was fourteen-fifteen, and went to prayer-meeting because the girl I adored would be there, have I experienced such emotions as I experienced then.

I don’t suppose you know my particular old white church prayer-meeting. I used to go, rain or shine, every Friday night, and sit where I could watch the door admit the pretty upward toss of curls of my affections’ desire. Sometimes she didn’t come and didn’t come. The opening hymn would be sung and I would hear it not, for my eyes were upon the door. Another hymn and the preacher would begin to speak with a gentle, gushing, splashing sound at the mouth, but the door would remain closed; and knotted, stifling disappointment be clutching at my throat. Another hymn, and the discussion would be thrown open to the congregation. Well, the door was stolid; I would slide back from the edge of my chair and breathe thickly of the resisting air. So late, she would not come now. To be sure, the congregation was some comfort: there were the frisky young lady and the frisky middle-aged lady who would pop to their feet with a squeal of enthusiasm, the deacons and the elders, the sincere girls, the succinct young men with a duty to perform, the conservatives and the infirm—all of them to speak. There came one night when there was rejoicing in heaven’s hour. Somebody had sent a check to pay for a new coat of white paint for the church. The treasurer arose from his chair and lifted up the check for all to see. Then were hymns and glad talks with God and with woman and man. The banks next day refused to honor the check.

In the New York poetry society meeting appeared no novelty for me. I had been there before, so it seemed. Then, as of old, the meeting-room was more charming, the congregation more elegant, but the same, even to the frisky ones, with an exception in the authors’ literary agent I saw just a few feet from me. Otherwise the same—a prayer-meeting, the great American habit, a community impulse boiled down to four-square-wallsful.

As the meeting progressed I knew I had been there before. Absently I looked toward the door for the pretty upward toss of curls again, but I caught myself in time. Notices were read—again I looked toward the door, and stopped. Jokes were made about vers libre; several very interesting recitations were given; restlessly my eyes wandered doorward again. One always forms such bad habits when he is young. Poems now were being read, and criticized. But I had given up: I was looking toward the door and willing to acknowledge it. But she for whom I looked, came not. Then the leader with pleasure read a list of several new members—one of them with the name of a certain rich person, a name I had often seen associated with the millions of commerce but never with the measures of verse. An uncrushed sigh of self-congratulation went up over the room. I took my last look at the stolid door, slid back from the edge of my chair; gave up. I knew She would not come. My heart beat as of old, whimsically and sadly. She would not come.

I took my friend of a friend by the hand and sidled out of the room into the night. A few corners away we came upon a news-stand, full of magazines, upon every magazine a cover, upon every cover a girl, one and the same forever and ever. “If She had come, would She have been so grown that She would have looked like them?” I asked.

“Who come?” asked my friend of a friend.

“The Spirit of Poetry,” says I. “She hadda right, you know.”

American modernity, I bless thee through closed teeth—get thee to thy prayer-meetings or some Billy Sunday will Carl Sanburg thee.

Silhouettes

HARRIET DEAN

Barn-Yarding

I cannot joyously write little things. Perhaps that is why I write none at all. The little people about me fill me with disgust. They are cocksure bantam hens, loose and fertile, laying egg-thoughts carelessly. The crack of shells is loud, but tiny wet chicks roll out, smaller than the rest. God forbid that I am of the same breed! If I must linger in the barn-yard for a few days, studying the swagger of these hens and silently measuring my own, may I in the end fly away to my mountain-top—alone in the night. Strut, if I must, but quite alone.

* * * * *

Their voices are splinters of sound which prick my desolation to shreds. My one great fear is that clumsily they may stumble against my loneliness. What matter if the tongue be unknown to me! These tone arrows beat at my door like undesired rain; they hurl themselves against my tissue walls until I shall go mad with their urgence.

The only true friendliness near me is the blank brick wall of the house next door. I wrap myself in its unresponsiveness and stop up my ears with its cold silence that I may have courage to go on with my work.

* * * * *

Flame curtains flap in my grate and send grey indistinctness shivering and stumbling over my walls.

A dusty mirror in a lonely house waits....

Departure

“And now you, too, must go,” she said to me; I who had already gone, silently, tenderly lest my steps break the stairs of her heart.

Announcements

_The Migratory Magazine_

We have been invited to spend the summer in San Francisco, so we decided to carry THE LITTLE REVIEW along and publish it there until October or November. Then we shall go back to Chicago for a couple of months, and by the first of the year we plan to establish ourselves in New York, where all good things seem to turn at last. Our travels have been so exciting that it was impossible to get out a June issue on the way. (In all honesty I should add that the chronic low state of the treasury had even more to do with it.) So we have combined the June and July issues, as we did last year. Subscriptions will be extended accordingly.

_Charles Kinney’s Article_

Mr. Kinney’s exposure of conditions at the Chicago Art Institute, which was advertised in the last issue, has not come in time to go in. The court procedures have taken much of Mr. Kinney’s time. It will be published in the August issue.

Psycho-Analysis

Some Random Thoughts Thereon

FLORENCE KIPER FRANK

Why not history rewritten from the researches of the Freudians? We have our economic determinism; why not our psycho-sexual? The tendencies of the individual studied in their relations to world-breaking and world-making! Hannibal and his mother, Queen Elizabeth and her nurse, Frederick the Great and the Oedipus complex!

The priest of the future will be the Inspired Physician. All tendencies seem so to point. The Christian Scientist and New Thought healers are vague and emotional answers to this social demand, the psycho-analytic physician a more sophisticated and precise one. The functions of those who now minister separately to soul and to body will, as in primitive society, again be united. The modern medicine-man shall be the priest of the new order!

To the adolescent, the value of the Inspired Physician can scarcely be over-stated. Jeanne D’Orge has thus written of the sixteen-year-old period:

I wish there were Someone Who would hear confession: Not a priest—I do not want to be told of my sins; Not a mother—I do not want to give sorrow; Not a friend—she would not know enough; Not a lover—he would be too partial; Not God—he is far away; But Someone that should be friend, lover, mother, priest, God all in one, And a Stranger besides—who would not condemn nor interfere, Who when everything is said from beginning to end Would show the reason of it all And tell you to go ahead And work it out your own way.

What of the functions of the physician-priest in marriage! The possibilities are, to say the least, interesting. As substitute for the churchly bunk talked at the average churchly ceremony, an intimate tete-a-tete between, say, the Inspired Physician and the woman. It might do much to validate the “sacredness” of wedlock. And, incidentally, I wonder what data the Freudians are going to contribute during the next ten years to feminism. Ellis states that sexual normality isn’t possible to determine because there isn’t enough material by which to base a norm. Especially, says he, is this true of the sexual psychology of women. Valuable, then, will be the testimony of those who have been hearing confessions!

One of the most powerful functions of the Catholic Church united with modern scientific research! I wonder if the need for the confessional isn’t eternal.

Amazing, isn’t it, that the most remarkable contributions to the study of personality come out of the modern Prussianized Teutonic empires? On the one hand men mowed down by the socialized thousands; on the other this incredibly patient and exhaustive searching into the bewildering complexities of the individual soul.

Break through the crust of any man as he thinks he is, and you are plunged into currents undreamed of. And isn’t one amazed at how much alike we all of us are—and how different!

The Freudian searching into motives is the accredited material of the novelist; the use of dream symbols the very stuff of the poet. The successful psycho-analytic physician ought to combine the adroitness of the fictionist with the imagination of the versifier.

From the standpoint of medical technique Freud and Jung may have diverged importantly—philosophically the younger man builds on the Freudian researches and there is no break in the continuity. Freud is perhaps more valuable to the physician; to the layman Jung opens up a realm of speculation and discovery more fascinating than that of Darwinism.

The old sweet mythos, as friend Browning says, has been rediscovered. We are more wonderful than we thought. We are carrying about in our compassed personalities all dreams and imaginings. What avails the modernity of elevators and skyscrapers! You, betrousered one, walking Michigan Avenue—in your psyche are the ancient Hindus and the dancing sun-worshippers. You with the hand-bag and that 1916 model frock, do you truly think you are thinking in terms of American asphalted Chicago? Indeed! It was the symbolism of the Eleusinian mysteries that was used in the image which flashed into your mind just then. How was it recreated? Heaven knows—or Dr. Jung! And in your dreams, when the censor is quite off guard—how did you, prosaic being, become suddenly the wildest of poets?

The average man—by that I mean the average man of cultivation—is not at all cognizant yet of the large significance of the psycho-analytic studies. He thinks them some libidinous sex-stuff come out of Germany, or perhaps one of the many new methods to be tried on the insane and the neurotic. Their immense import for the normal (whatever _he_ is!) he has not yet understood. It will take perhaps another five years, for the discoveries of psycho-analysis to penetrate the popular consciousness. Perhaps less—for some Augustus Thomas (God save us from such!) may before then write a play about it.

A Dyptich

SKIPWITH CANNELL

Wonder Song

No man who borrows Should return the exact debt; Let him return more, Or let him return less.

I borrowed twelve dollars From a rich uncle of mine: I paid him back a hundred’s worth of poetry.

He is not satisfied. I am not forgotten.

I borrowed from a stranger An old coat full of lice; The cloth became strong serge, The lice became buttons.

The stranger Wanted his old coat back again, He got an old joke instead And went away laughing.

I gave my God some second-hand prayers, Prayers that were used and fingered and worn; In return He gave me My heart’s desire.

I gave my God all the love that’s in me.... He put it in His pocket, Absently, With talk of the weather: He’s a wise God, knowing His own worth.

No one who borrows Should make exact payment; If he does as I say He’ll be remembered forever.

Scorn

I will not lay bricks for the homes of other men; I prefer to fell trees in the forest, To fell them and let them lie. If I go to the forests, I will starve; If I lay bricks for those others, They will feed me soup and black bread and onions.

I will fell trees Angrily, And I will let them lie.

The Deeper Scorn

I will lay many bricks: And that I may lay them better, I will take their bread and their soup ... Courteously returning thanks For the wages they offer....

I will lay many bricks, And in a straight row, As befits one who has knowledge of his freedom.

Hokku

EDGAR LEE MASTERS

I lift my eyes from the humus Up the sea-green stalk to the flower. The base of the petals is red as blood; But I cannot see the line that divides The rim of the petals from the sun light.

Poems

MARK TURBYFILL

Thin Day

Bright, alert, Arise these wild blue buds Above this crystal jar.

But they have no soul, And bear no sweetness On their lips.

Oh pity of azure days Like these blue flowers! We cannot endure in their thinness: Our hearts sink Through their petal-gauze.

The Rose Jar

O Earth, You have brought me out too soon!

He whom I love Still clings upon the branch, Firm, a slender bud. But you have spread me wide.

Take these broken leaves, Now fallen from the core. (O Earth, You have brought me out too soon!) Drop them into your Jar For him who shall surely pass this way, At last!

The Irish Revolutionists

PADRAIC COLUM

The British Government, which was quite willing to exploit the sympathy felt here on the premature death of the young English poet, Rupert Brooke, shot to death three Irish poets, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett.

Not only in Ireland, but the whole world is at a loss by the extinction of these three brave, honorable, and distinguished lives.

The English illustrated journals that have just come to New York enable us to estimate by a contrast the world’s loss. They have published the photographs of the Irish revolutionary leaders; and with them they have published the photograph of the man who ordered their execution, General Maxwell. On one side they give you intellectual and spiritual faces—the faces of men who liberate the world. On the other side they give you a heavy, non-intellectual, non-spiritual face—the face of a man who could never liberate himself.

The vision and the aspiration of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett is on record for the world to know. A man cannot lie when he speaks of his vision or his aspiration in poetry. We know what Padraic Pearse thought of personal life. He has recorded it in his poem _To Death_, which has been translated from the Irish:

I have not gathered gold; The fame that I won perished; In love I found but sorrow That withered my life.

Of wealth or of glory I shall leave nothing behind me (I think it, O God, enough!) But my name in the heart of a child.

And what vision of life had Thomas MacDonagh? We know, for it is in his poem _Wishes For My Son_:

But I found no enemy, No man in a world of wrong, That Christ’s word of Charity Did not render clean and strong— Who was I to judge my kind, Blindest groper of the blind?

God to you may give the sight And the clear undoubting strength Wars to knit for single right, Freedom’s war to knit at length; And to win, through wrath and strife, To the sequel of my life.

But for you, so small and young, Born of Saint Cecilia’s Day, I in more harmonious song Now for nearer joys should pray— Simple joys: the natural growth Of your childhood and your youth, Courage, innocence, and truth:

These for you, so small and young, In your hand and heart and tongue.

And we know the vision of life that Joseph Plunkett had—it was the same vision that the great mystics and the great religious had. It is in his poem _I See His Blood Upon the Roses_:

I see his blood upon the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes, His body gleams amid eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower; The thunder and the singing of the birds Are but his voice—and carven by his power Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn, His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree.

These three men had a vision for their country that could not be expressed in a proclamation, no matter how nobly worded that proclamation might be.

Padraic Pearse gave all his thought and all his effort to bring back a chivalry to Ireland—the Heroic Age of Celtic History, when, as he said, “the greatest honor was for the hero with the most childlike heart, for the King who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the truest image of beauty.” The first thing you saw when you entered his school in Cullenswood House was a fresco representing the boy Cuchullain taking arms. The Druid has warned him that the youth who takes arms that day will make his name famous, but will have a short life. And written round the fresco, in the old Irish words, was Cuchullain’s answer, “I care not if my life have only the span of a day and a night if my deeds be spoken of by the men of Ireland.” This was the spirit that Padraic Pearse sought to kindle in his boys—this was the spirit that he tried to bring back again into Ireland.

Thomas MacDonagh strove to create an Ireland that would be free as his intelligence was free, as eager for deeds as he himself was eager. Those who knew MacDonagh in his literary expression thought of him as a poet with a tendency towards abstractions, as a scholar with a bent towards philology. Those who knew him intimately knew him as a man who was the best of comrades. And they knew that there was something in MacDonagh that he never expressed. What was fundamental in him was an eager search for the thing to which he could give the whole devotion of his life. He found it in his vision of the Irish Republic.

Joseph Mary Plunkett strove to bring back the spirit and the defiance of the martyrs. He came of a family whose name has been in Irish history for six hundred years. The proudest memory of his people was the memory of martyrdom. The last priest martyred in England—the Venerable Oliver Plunkett—was of his blood.

These men, with their comrades—the good and brave Connolly, who gave all of his will and all of his ability to the workers of Ireland, the upright Eamonn Ceant, the soldierly O’Rahilly, the adventurous MacBride, Shaun MacDermott, “kindly Irish of the Irish,” and the others—have done a great thing for our country at this great moment of history.

They have made Ireland not a British question but a European question.

They have shown us that the country should be redeemed by the heroic spirit as well as by the political intelligence.

They have belittled danger and death for generations of Irish nationalists.

Bring Out Your Dead

Braithwaite’s Death-Cart

_The Poetry Review of America, edited by William Stanley Braithwaite, Cambridge, Massachusetts._

The plague being upon us—God knows whence it came—the plague being upon us, poisoning men and women, and turning them into minor and sub-minor poets, and catching some in their youth so that they can never become men and women—the plague being upon us, I suppose there must be men brave enough to fashion death-carts for the corpses. It is a sanitary precaution. The more carts the better. The builders should be commended; the drivers medalled and ultimately pensioned. We should not bother much about the wheels—how they bang and rattle. Let the corpses leer and quarrel. But keep the carts well burdened and speed them to the pyres of oblivion.

This is not criticism, but the exaggeration of bitterness; and you, Mr. Braithwaite, should not complain if our lips writhe back at the cup which you have held out to us and if our tongues are twisted to a sincerity that sounds like malice. When _Contemporary Verse_ issued from Philadelphia like an ancient tumbril reconstructed by children we laughed and said, “God speed you while you last.” But when rumors came of a new poetry magazine in Boston we waited with the wonderful hope of eager youth. Ah, the new Poetry Review! The new Poetry Review! And what have you done? You have given us the old doll without even new tinsel. Do you wonder that I would smash your doll and tear its frayed and tawdry clothing?

“To serve the art we all love,” you say. Does Benjamin R. C. Low serve it with sentimental buncombe like _Jack O’Dreams_? Does Amelia Josephine Burr serve it with a library tragedy like _Vengeance_? And you, Mr. Braithwaite, do you serve it by writing a muddled article on _The Substance of Poetry_? The bad grammar and proofreading can be forgiven, but who can cleave his way through the jungle of incoherent thought? And I may add seriously that Mr. Edwin F. Edgett, with his puerile remarks about Shakespeare, sounds very much like your younger brother.

There is the beginning of service in the competently written criticisms by Messrs. Untermeyer, O’Brien and Colum, and especially in the tantalizing quotations in fine print from Donald Evan’s new book _Two_ _Deaths in the Bronx_. Amy Lowell contributes a short story in her recent colloquial vein and Sara Teasdale a sincere lyric.

If live men and women have been sand-bagged and put in the death-cart, let them awake and revive the corpses of their companions. Let them turn the cart into a tally-ho and gallop on with daring and exuberance, cracking a whip at critics.

I do not know your age, Mr. Braithwaite, but I feel that I have the wisdom of greater youth. You have not quite killed hope in me, for I know your true devotion to your work. What will you give us in the forthcoming numbers of your magazine?

MITCHELL DAWSON.