Part 13
As a result of being taken by a bar-tender to an Italian vaudeville show on the Bowery, the boy began to write—a farce, jokes, anecdotes “of the type for my class of people.” Then he bought a small Webster’s dictionary for a quarter and set out to master it. His companions laughed at him, but he persisted tirelessly. “I made them understand by spelling each word or writing it on a railroad tie or a piece of wood anywhere, just to express myself.” As his ardour and his reputation grew some young brakemen undertook to discipline him. “What they did was to bring new words every morning. They used to come half an hour before working time and ask me the meaning of the new words. If I could answer the first word all was well and good; then they were quiet all day. If not, when noon came all the office people, both men and women, crowded the place where everybody was present and tried to show me up. But their trials and efforts were all useless, as useless as I could make them. But one day they brought me before all the crowd, just to have me ridiculed perhaps, because they all were high-school lads. So they brought five words of which I knew only three. Then they began to proclaim themselves victorious. But I gave them two words they did not understand. Then I bet them I could give them ten words, and two more for good measure, that they could not understand. And I began: ‘troglodyte, sebaceous, wen, passerine, indeciduity, murine, bantling, ubiquity, clithrophobia, nadir’; and instead of two I added seven more to make their debacle more horrible. So I again wrote seven more words with the chalk which they provided me, writing them against the office façade where every one could see their eternal defeat: ‘anorexia, caballine, phlebotomy, coeval, arable, octoroon, risible.’ Then to complete I added ‘asininity’ and explained its meaning to them immediately.... After that triumph they named me ‘Solution’ and all became friends.”
Later he went to Sheepshead Bay to hear “Aïda” in the open air. “Suddenly when I heard the music I began to feel myself driven toward a goal—a goal that became more and more distinct each day. There were parts of such eloquent beauty in that opera that they tore my soul. At times, afterwards, even on the job amid the confusion of running engines, cars, screams, thuds, I felt the supreme charms of the melodies around me.” But he could not compose music, for he did not know one note from another—“as I still don’t know.... Music is not like the English language, that I began to write without a teacher.... In poetry I fared better. In the library I wandered upon Shelley and was again thrilled to the heart. Shelley I could proceed to emulate almost immediately.... It was a hard job to put my words in order. The stuff I used to write at first was unthinkable trash. But I was always bothering people to point out my mistakes. Grammar gave me plenty of trouble and still does. Rhyme stumped me. Then I began to read all kinds of poetry and saw that rhyme was not absolutely necessary. I also discovered that a good deal of what is called poetry is junk. So from the first I have tried to avoid echoing the things I have read, and to bring an originality both of expression and thought.”
Pascal D’Angelo has taught himself French and Spanish and has read most of the best poets of those tongues as well as of English and Italian. At present he is living under the most difficult conditions, asking no favours, and writing poetry which, though much of it is naturally full of imperfections, occasionally strikes such notes as these in _The City_:
We who were born through the love of God must die through the hatred of Man. We who grapple with the destruction of ignorance and the creation of unwitting love— We struggle, blinded by dismal night in a weird shadowy city. Yet the city itself is lifting street-lamps, like a million cups filled with light, To quench from the upraised eyes their thirst of gloom; And from the hecatombs of aching souls The factory smoke is unfolding in protesting curves Like phantoms of black unappeased desires, yearning and struggling and pointing upward; While through its dark streets pass people, tired, useless, Trampling the vague black illusions That pave their paths like broad leaves of water-lilies On twilight streams; And there are smiles at times on their lips. Only the great soul, denuded to the blasts of reality, Shivers and groans. And like two wild ideas lost in a forest of thoughts, Blind hatred and blinder love run amuck through the city.
TAP-ROOT OR MELTING-POT?
Recent American poetry is to recent British poetry somewhat as New York is to London. Its colours are higher and gayer and more diverse; its outlines are more jagged and more surprising; its surfaces glitter and flash as British poetical surfaces do not always do, though its substances are often not so solid or so downright as the British. Nowhere in America have we a poet of the deep integrity of Thomas Hardy, a poet so rooted in ancient soil, ancient manners, ancient dialect. Nor has England a poet shining from so many facets as Amy Lowell, or a poet resounding with such a clang of cymbals—now gold, now iron—as Vachel Lindsay. Experiment thrives better here than there; at least, our adventurers in verse, when they go out on novel quests for novel beauties, are less likely than the British to be held in by steadying tradition, and they bring back all sorts of gorgeous plunder considerably nearer in hue and texture to the flaming shop windows of Fifth Avenue than to those soberer ones of Bond and Regent streets. Even John Masefield, most brilliant living poet of his nation, runs true to British form, grounded in Chaucer and Crabbe, fragrant with England’s meadows, salt with England’s sea. Edgar Lee Masters, as accurately read in Illinois as Masefield in Gloucester, writes of Spoon River not in any manner or measure inherited with his speech, but more nearly in that of the Greek Anthology, by Masters sharpened with a bitter irony.
In all directions such borrowings extend. Even the popular verse men of the newspapers play daily pranks with Horace, fetching him from the cool shades of wit to the riotous companionship of Franklin P. Adams and George M. Cohan. China and Japan have been discovered again by Miss Lowell and Mr. Lindsay and Witter Bynner and Eunice Tietjens and a dozen others; have been discovered to be rich treasuries of exquisite images, costumes, gestures, moods, emotions. The corners of Europe have been ransacked by American poets as by American collectors, and translators at last are finding South America. Imagism has been imported and has taken kindly to our climates: H. D. is its finest spirit, Miss Lowell its firmest spokesman. Ezra Pound is a translator-general of poetic bibelots, who seems to know all tongues and who ransacks them without stint or limit. With exploration goes excavation. Poets are cross-examining the immigrants, as T. A. Daly the Italian-Americans. The myths and passions of Africa, hidden on this continent under three centuries of neglect and oppression, have emerged with a new accent in Mr. Lindsay, who does indeed see his Negroes too close to their original jungles but who finds in them poetry where earlier writers found only farce or sentiment. Still more remarkably, the Indian, his voice long drowned by the march of civilization, is heard again in tender and significant notes. Speaking so solely to his own tribe, and taking for granted that each hearer knows the lore of the tribe, the Indian must now be expanded, interpreted; and already Mary Austin and Alice Corbin and Constance Lindsay Skinner have worked charming patterns on an Indian ground. At the moment, so far as American poetry is concerned, Arizona and New Mexico are an authentic wonderland of the nation. Now poets and lovers of poetry and romance, as well as ethnologists, follow the news of the actual excavations in that quarter.
Indian and Negro materials, however, are in our poetry still hardly better than aspects of the exotic. No one who matters actually thinks that a national literature can be founded on such alien bases. Where, then, are our poets to find some such stout tap-root of memory and knowledge as Thomas Hardy follows deep down to the primal rock of England? The answer is that for the present we are not to find it. We possess no such commodity. Our literature for generations, perhaps centuries, will have to be symbolized by the melting-pot, not by the tap-root. Our geographical is also our spiritual destiny. The old idea of America-making in its absurd ignorance demanded that each wave of newcomers be straightway melted down into the national pot and that the resultant mass be as simply Anglo-Saxon as ever. This was bad chemistry. What has happened, and what is now happening more than ever, is that of a dozen—a hundred—nationalities thrown in, each lends a peculiar colour and quality. Arturo Giovannitti gives something that Robert Frost could not give; Carl Sandburg something not to be looked for from Edwin Arlington Robinson; James Oppenheim and Alter Brody what would not have come from Indiana or Kansas. Such a fusion of course takes a long time. The great myths and legends and histories of the Britons lay unworked for centuries in Anglo-Saxon England before the Normans saw them and built them into beauty. Eventually, unless the world changes in some way quite new to history, the fusion will be accomplished. But in the meantime experimentation and exploration and excavation must be kept up. We must convert our necessities into virtues; must, lacking the deep soil of memory, which is also prejudice and tradition, cultivate the thinner soil which may also be reason and cheerfulness. Our hope lies in diversity, in variety, in colours yet untried, in forms yet unsuspected. And back of all this search lie the many cultures, converging like immigrant ships toward the Narrows, with aspirations all to become American and yet with those things in their different constitutions which will enrich the ultimate substance.
X. IN THE OPEN
AUGUST NIGHTS AND AUGUST DAYS
At each new turning season I ask myself what annual phrase in the great epic of the year most pricks the senses: the stir of sap in the maples, the earliest robin coldly foraging across a bare lawn, crocuses or cowslips or trailing arbutus in the muddy wood-lot, grass appearing along a hundred borders, willow bark suddenly ripe for whistles, garden soil warm and dry enough to risk seed in it, apple blossoms and lilacs lifting the soul like music with their fragrance—the bright, young, green procession from March’s equinox to June’s accomplished solstice; or the higher pomps of summer, red and yellow—berries luxuriant on the hills, wheat in the head, corn haughty with the pride of its stature, meadow-larks that cry continually as cherubim, evenings spangled with fireflies and alive with shrill bats and angry night-hawks and repining frogs, the spare smell of mown hay, keen acrid dust flung through light air by the lean hands of drouth; or golden, purple, imperial autumn—the incredible blue of fringed gentians, apples compliant to hungry hands, grapes dewy and fresh on tingling mornings, gardens bequeathing their wealth to ready cellars, birch fires crackling on a hearth which had nearly forgotten them, leaves so scattered underfoot that every pedestrian sounds like a marching army, wild geese off for the south with eager bugles, a frost transmogrifying the world in a night; or white and black and dusky winter—sounds heard muffled over deadening snow, the gorgeous privacy of long nights, the sweet, bitter coldness of cheeks when the blast strikes them, blood triumphantly warmed by exercise even in zero weather, the crisp flesh of fruit dug from pits hid deep underground, the ringing blades of skates, the malicious whine of sleigh runners, fat companionable snow-birds with an eye on the pantry window, barns warm with the breath of ever-ruminant cows: which is best? Is there any choosing? Should we all vote for the nearest? Perhaps that is what I do when in this season I make my choice for the sundowns of August, which, by some keenness in the winds that then waken, clearly though not too brusquely prophesy, in the midst of a consoling splendour, that the epic has an end: August of the blazing noons, August of the cool nights.
* * * * *
The most blazing August on the heels of the most pitiless July has no terrors for the man or woman who knows Herrick and can turn from torrid cities to the meadows and brooks and hawthorn-guarded cottages of Herrick’s dainty Devon. He rises for ever with the dawn and summons his perennial Corinna, “sweet Slug-a-bed,”
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene; And sweet as Flora.
Love itself cannot inflame his morning worshippers: they walk through the early streets to the woods of May, courting one another exquisitely with all the forms of a ceremonial which Horace might have sung or Watteau painted. Here, in one bright season, are daffodils and violets, primroses and gilliflowers,
Millions of Lillies mixt with Roses,
tulips, pansies, marigolds, daisies, the cherry and the oak, laurels and cypresses, grapes and strawberries, spring standing side by side with purple harvest and cozy winter. Here are all exquisite scents, new rain on turf and tree, the smoke of quaint poetical sacrifices;
The smell of mornings milk, and cream; Butter of Cowslips mixt with them; Of rosted warden, or bak’d peare;
“the flowre of blooming Clove,” “Essences of Jessimine,” honey just brought in by bees, spiced wines, incomparable possets; the perfumes of youth and love and joy. Here, too, are delicate forms and precious colours, smooth narratives of a hundred rural customs chosen because they fit fine verses, and whimsical pious little odes and graces before meat and thanksgivings and creeds and prayers such as no other poet ever uttered. Nowhere else has adoration better lent itself to union with politeness than in this counsel to children:
Honour thy Parents; but good manners call Thee to adore thy God, the first of all.
Surely something ran in Herrick’s veins which was calmer than the hot blood of his kind in general. He laughs at Julia, Sapho, Anthea, Electra, Myrha, Corinna, Perilla, and at himself for having had and lost them; he tricks out his raptures of devotion with the blithest figures of speech:
Lord, I am like to Misletoe, Which has no root, and cannot grow, Or prosper, but by that same tree It clings about; so I by Thee;
he takes his ease in his country Zion as if it would last eternally and yet amuses himself with cheerful epitaphs for himself and with advice to his pretty mourners. He could be passionate enough about his calling; but he saw his world as images of marble, as pictures of gold set in silver, as charming ancient stories come to life again yet still with the dignity of remembered perfectness about them. It is a defence against August to remember the happy commentary upon Herrick which Dryden wrote when he imitated the lines to Perilla—
Then shall my Ghost not walk about, but keep Still in the coole, and silent shades of sleep—
in that admirable invitation to another cool world:
When, tired with following nature, you think fit To seek repose in the cool shades of wit.
LAKE AND BIRD
I had one perfect day during one imperfect weekend. I woke immensely early to a morning full of birds on a rough hill sloping down from an old Berkshire parsonage by many ways and windings to the devious Housatonic. I went dabbling on my knees among innumerable daisies and buttercups and black-eyed Susans to find enough wild strawberries for my breakfast, and ate them with reckless oceans of cream kept the night in a spring so cold that on the most tropic days vessels come up from it clouded and beaded. I neglected the newspapers all day, hoeing and joyfully baking in my garden in the confident expectation of a blessed reward. And then at six precisely, by the sun, not the clock, I slipped, with some splashing, be it admitted, for my dive was eager, into the cool, sweet, quiet, well-sunned, but still tonic waters of an unforgettable lake. Repaid by the first keen shock for the whole day’s scorching, I shouted and ploughed to a deeper pool I know, where the water is never troubled and where now its crystal loneliness was broken by nothing but a few pink laurel-blossoms wind-shaken down upon it. Here I drifted, halcyon for that day, and waited. Not too late it came, the timid challenge, the flaunting confession, the liquid lament, the whistled prayer of the hermit thrush, pulsing through the replying air. I let the spell take me, and lay for a long while at the summit of rapture, not quite sure which was I, which was calm lake, and which was radiant bird.
FIREFLIES IN CORNWALL
As I hurried down the muddy road I saw fireflies ahead of me splashing the new darkness. And then suddenly the scene widened. On my left a broad meadow rolled away up the mountain; on my right lay a broader region of marshy ground sacred to flags and frogs. I knew that over all that green meadow buttercups were contending with daisies which should make it white or yellow, but now it was black with the night though somehow brightened by the gleaming mist. In the swamp, too, I knew there would soon be irises blooming, though now it had nothing but the paler iridescence of the quiet drizzle. And yet the night was alive with an uncanny and unaccustomed splendour. The fireflies were holding some sort of carnival, it seemed, moving up and down the meadow slope in glimmering processions and swarming thickly over the marsh which they almost illuminated with their fitful and inclusive flashes. There must have been thousands of them, for the usual intervals of darkness never came, and every instant was spangled. But the marvel of the occasion was not the number of lights but the magnitude of them. By some trick of the mist, some reflection from the particles of water suspended in the air, every firefly shone not as a vivid speck but as a slow, large, bland splotch of mellow light. Over the swamp they were so crowded and cast so many reflections upon the water and wet earth and dripping flags that they had created the perfect semblance of a lake on which numberless canoes rode softly with dancing lanterns. Up the mountain meadow they seemed, and doubtless were, less numerous, but the wonder continued, for they glowed here and there on the rising hillside like searchers beating through the grass for something lost. And, most exquisite of all, now and then on the high ridge of the hill behind the meadow a lantern would flash and move down into the carnival or up out of it. This hollow of the hills was a cup of light, filled to the brim, which continually spilled over only to be replenished by these bright creatures of the dark.
GARDENS
In any winter of our discontent let us think of gardens. The sun looks north again, March is stirring somewhere, and in a few stubborn weeks there will be another green spring with loud, cheerful robins, insistent grass, and buds ready to turn pink or white at the warm touch of the advancing season. We have lived long enough on the stores we laid up from the harvest of last year. Like bears, we have grown thin in our hollow trees and must resume our occupations. Too much winter can destroy the genial sap that spring annually renews in the veins of men as surely as in trees. Cities, which have built strong barriers against the seasons, forget them, but they bring morals no less than weather. The seasons are teachers that never cease teaching, and examples that never fail to move us. Our tempers follow the sun.
Though it is true that the senses relax and ripen in a garden, a garden is more than a sensual delight. Roses grow there, and radishes; so does patience. That man who puts seed into a furrow at the same moment tucks his hand through the crooked elbow of Time and falls into step. He knows he must abide the days, must endure hot and cold, wet and dry, the ups and downs of immeasurable nature. Infected almost at once with peace, he feels his will surrendering its fretful individuality to the ampler cause with which he has involved his fortunes. He sees that he cannot profitably scold the rain; he cannot wear a chip on his shoulder and dare the wind to knock it off. The stature of his will shrinks when he learns how little he means to the rain or the wind, and the stature of his wisdom increases. Vigilant of course he must remain. He must take quick advantage of sunshine, as sailors do of the tides. He must foreknow the storm by its signs. In the long run, his prosperity will depend upon his eyes and hands, but he will be aware that he thrives by virtue of the patience with which he tends a process which is ageless and immortal.
Nor will he be patient merely for hours or months. As the seasons depart and recur year after year, he will begin to realize what centuries mean, epochs, and aeons. It is the weather which varies, not the seasons. The gardener in his little plot looks out less feverishly at elections and revolutions than other men. He has seen clouds before and has lived through them confident of the sun. From an experience stronger than dogma he knows that just after night there is dawn, and that every winter is succeeded by a spring. What in another might be a shallow optimism is in him a faith rooted in subsoil and bedrock, bred and nourished in the vast, slow, undeviating habits of soil and sky. He is conservative because he has seen the seasons perennially pass one into the other without convulsions. He is radical because each spring he has had to set the spade into his sleepy ground, has had to tear it open and establish the new harvest on fresh seed. Others may stutter about the strife of old and new, but the gardener sees old and new eternally linked together with human toil. He perceives that history continues, for he has observed the grass. He understands, not dimly but certainly, that the tread of armies or the din of melting dynasties and shattered governments may indeed touch him in his garden, may even drive him forth into desolation, but that the work of the garden and the duty of the gardener will go on. To the end of the world there must be seed and toil and harvests.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 21 Changed: the successful chief becames a king to: the successful chief becomes a king
pg 88 Changed: possessed the Vision of Pierc Plowman to: possessed the Vision of Piers Plowman
pg 131 Changed: the narrow house cannnot endure unlikeness to: the narrow house cannot endure unlikeness
pg 146 Changed: studies has been due less to the deficiences to: studies has been due less to the deficiencies
pg 193 Changed: fire which uses the air merely as it medium to: fire which uses the air merely as its medium