The Riverside by John Crowe Ransom
A GREAT green spread of meadow land,
(Must rest his weight on an ample base),
A secret water moving on,
A clean blue air for his breathing-space,
A pair of willows bending down
In double witness to his grace,
And on the rock his sinner sprawls
And looks the Strong One face to face.
The sinner's mocking tongue is dry,
Wonder is on that mighty jeerer,
He loves, and he never loved before,
He wants the glowing sky no nearer,
He likes the willows to be two,
He would not have the water clearer,
He thinks that God is perfect once:
Heaven, rejoice! a new God-fearer.
And now each quiet thing awakes
And dances madly, wavers, dips;
These are God's motions on the air,
His Pulse for the sinner's finger-tips,
His arrows shot across the blue,
His love-words dropping from his lips,
And who ever heard such whisperings,
Who ever saw such fellowships?
(Submitted by Athena Tsunis) April
SAVOR of love is thick on the April air,
The blunted boughs dispose their lacy bloom,
And many sorry steeds dismissed to pasture
Toss their old forelocks, flourish heavy heels.
Where is there any unpersuaded poet
So angry still against the wrongs of winter
Which caused the dainty earth to droop and die,
So vengeant for his vine and summer song,
As to decline the good releasing thaw?
Poets have temperature and follow seasons,
And covenants go out at equinox.
The champions! For Heaven, riding high
Above the icy death, considered truly;
'My agate icy work, I thought it fair;
Yet I have lacked that pretty lift of praise
That mounted once from these emaciate minstrels.
They will not sing, and duty drops away
And I must turn and make a soft amend!'
At once he showered April down, until
The bleak twigs bloom again; and soon, I swear,
He shall receive his praise.
John Crowe Ransom -Jake Brown-Garcia
Dead Boy
The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,
A green bough from Virginia's aged tree,
And none of the county kin like the transaction,
Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.
A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,
A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,
A sword beneath his mother's heart—yet never
Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.
A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,
Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense
With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,
I see the forbears' antique lineaments.
The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.
He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree's late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the short and shaken.
John Crowe Ransom(Keaton Cooper)
Darkness
WHEN hurrying home on a rainy night
And hearing tree-tops rubbed and tossed,
And seeing never a friendly star
And feeling your way when paths are crossed:
Stop fast and turn three times around
And try the logic of the lost.
Where is the heavenly light you dreamed?
Where is your hearth and glowing ash?
Where is your love by the mellow moon?
Here is not even a lightning-flash,
And in a place no worse than this
Lost men shall wail and teeth shall gnash.
Lightning is quick and perilous,
The dawn comes on too slow and pale,
Your love brings only a yellow lamp,
Yet of these lights one shall avail:
The dark shall break for one of these,
I've never known this thing to fail. John Crowe Ransom
by jeffrey littman
Ada Ruel The Queens of Hell had lissome necks to crane
At the tall girl approaching with long tread
And, when she had caught up even with them, nodded:
"If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
We would esteem her company over the plain,
To profit us all where the dogs will be out barking;
And we'll walk by the windows where the young men are working
And tomorrow we will all come home again." But the Queen of Heaven who had advanced and stood
In the likeness, I hear, of a fine motherly woman
Made a wry face, despite it was so common
To be worsted by the shrewd ladies of hell,
And crisped her sweet tongue: "This never will come to good:--
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you well." from The Fugitive. Volume III. Number 2. April 1924. (Christina Rafael)
Poem by Laura Riding - Yes and No
Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet—
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas—
Ran an animal unzoological,
Without a fate, without a fact,
Its private history intact
Against the travesty
Of an anatomy.
Not visible not invisible,
Removed by dayless night,
Did it ever fly its ground
Out of fancy into light,
Into space to replace
Its unwritable decease?
Ah, the minutes twinkle in and out
And in and out come and go
One by one, none by none,
What we know, what we don't know.
Laura Riding (Kendall Schene)
Edges: BY ALLEN TATE
I’ve often wondered why she laughed
On thinking why I wondered so;
It seemed such waste that long white hands
Should touch my hands and let them go.
And once when we were parting there,
Unseen of anything but trees,
I touched her fingers, thoughtfully,
For more than simple niceties.
But for some futile things unsaid
I should say all is done for us;
Yet I have wondered how she smiled
Beholding what was cavernous.
(Kalan Hilua)
Next Day
By Randall Jarrell 1914–1965 Randall Jarrell
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I’ve become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.
When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I’d wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind
Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water—
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work—I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.
And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.
Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds, Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather; He would lump the saint and the courtesan together, Most miserably jangling all the creeds.
The prurient multitude heard he was mad, Yet nosed his books for some pornography. The censors doubted his virginity, And secretly conned the works that they forbade.
Reporters found this dangerous oddity In rusty pantaloons, mowing the green, And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen A naked Venus disturbing an alien sea.
He watched their backs receding down the street, Raked up the grass, and suddenly had a vision Of how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derision Behind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.
-Shane Reider
_
By: Allen Tate
Death Of Little Boys
When little boys grown patient at last, weary,
Surrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,
The event will rage terrific as the sea;
Their bodies fill a crumbling room with light.
Then you will touch at the bedside, torn in two,
Gold curls now deftly intricate with gray
As the windowpane extends a fear to you
From one peeled aster drenched with the wind all day.
And over his chest the covers in the ultimate dream
Will mount to the teeth, ascend the eyes, press back
The locks while round his sturdy belly gleam
Suspended breaths, white spars above the wreck:
Till all the guests, come in to look, turn down
Their palms, and delirium assails the cliff
Of Norway where you ponder, and your little town
Reels like a sailor drunk in a rotten skiff.
The bleak sunshine shrieks its chipped music then
Out to the milkweed amid the fields of wheat.
There is a calm for you where men and women
Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
During the 1920's there was a group of poets that formed together in Tennessee, and published literary works, as a way showcasing their talent. This group was known as Fugitives and once they formed their group they then created a magazine called "The Fugitives", this is the Magazine in which they showcased and published all of their literary works. The Fugitive is known to be one of the most influential collections of American Letters and was a host to many notable poets. This collection of poets was very large and many of these people were even influential teachers at Universities. The reason that the Fugitives were so important is because they would shed light on the current situations that were occurring and would bring attention to some of the segregation issues as Robert Penn Waren does in his poem titled "The Briar Patch", which talks about being separate, but equal.
~Tierra Roetto __
Brad Diehl
The fugitives were a group of poets during the 1920’s who were located in Nashville, Tennessee. These poets published their work in a small magazine called The Fugitive. The fugitives were some of the most influential people in American literature history and members included, John Crowe Ranson, Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Donald Davidson, William Ridley Willis, and Robert Warren. These individuals’ poems focused on various social issues such as black exploitation. The fugitives later merged with a group also based in Vanderbilt, called the Agrarians.
BY JOHN CROWE RANSOM
It had better been hidden But the Poets inform: We are chattel and liege Of an undying Worm.
Were you, Will, disheartened, When all Stratford’s gentry Left their Queen and took service In his low-lying country?
How many white cities And grey fleets on the storm Have proud-builded, hard-battled, For this undying Worm?
Was a sweet chaste lady Would none of her lover. Nay, here comes the Lewd One, Creeps under her cover!
Have ye said there’s no deathless Of face, fashion, form, Forgetting to honor The extent of the Worm?
O ye laughers and light-lipped, Ye faithless, infirm, I can tell you who’s constant, ’Tis the Eminent Worm.
Ye shall trip on no limits, Neither time ye your term, In the realms of His Absloute Highness the Worm.
April Treason by John Crowe Ransom
So he took her as anointed
In the part he had appointed,
She was lips for smiling faintly,
Eyes to look and level quaintly,
Length of limb and splendors of the bust
Which he honored as he must.
Queen of women playing model,
Pure of brow but brain not idle,
Sitting in her silence meetly,
Let her adjective be stately;
So he thought his art would manage right
In the honest Northern light.
But he fashioned it too coldly,
April broke-and-entered boldly,
Thinking how to suit the season’s
Odor, savor, heats and treasons:
Painter! do not stoop and play the host
Lest the man come uppermost.
Yet he knew that he was altered
When the perfect woman faltered,
Languish in her softly speaking,
Anguish, even, in her looking:
All the art had fled his fingertips
So he bent and kissed her lips.
He and Venus took their pleasure,
Then he turned upon his treasure,
Took and trampled it with loathing,
Flung it over cliffs to nothing;
Glittering in the sunlight while it fell
Like a lovely shattered shell.
Strict the silence that came onward
As they trod the foothill downward,
One more mocking noon of April,
Mischief always is in April;
Still she touched his fingers cold as ice
And recited, “It was nice.”
----- Jamie DeLozier
San Francisco Night Windows
by Robert Penn Warren
So hangs the hour like fruit fullblown and sweet,
Our strict and desperate avatar,
Despite that antique westward gulls lament
Over enormous waters which retreat
Weary unto the white and sensual star.
Accept these images for what they are--
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.
Think you, hungry is the city in the fog
Where now the darkened piles resume
Their framed and frozen prayer
Articulate and shafted in the stone
Against the void and absolute air.
If so the frantic breath could be forgiven,
And the deep blood subdued before it is gone
In a savage paternoster to the stone,
Then might we all be shriven.
The Fugitives were poets who published a literary magazine aptly titled The Fugitive which was published at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. The magazine is no longer published but is still deemed incredibly important as a great deal of the work that graced its pages are still widely read today. Some of the more famous members of the group are: Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and William Ridley Wills. (Added by Peter Tunnell)
Poets Have Chanted Mortality (from The Fugitive, 1922)
BY JOHN CROWE RANSOM
It had better been hidden But the Poets inform: We are chattel and liege Of an undying Worm.
Were you, Will, disheartened, When all Stratford’s gentry Left their Queen and took service In his low-lying country?
How many white cities And grey fleets on the storm Have proud-builded, hard-battled, For this undying Worm?
Was a sweet chaste lady Would none of her lover. Nay, here comes the Lewd One, Creeps under her cover!
Have ye said there’s no deathless Of face, fashion, form, Forgetting to honor The extent of the Worm?
O ye laughers and light-lipped, Ye faithless, infirm, I can tell you who’s constant, ’Tis the Eminent Worm.
Ye shall trip on no limits, Neither time ye your term, In the realms of His Absloute Highness the Worm.
"The Mediterranean" by Allen Tate
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone——
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide——
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
What country shall we conquer, what fair land
Unman our conquest and locate our blood?
We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!
Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood
Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.
-Jake Coleman
"Lee in the Mountains"
by Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
(Edwin Santana)
"Bells For John Whiteside's Daughter" by Jown Crowe Ransom
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all
Her wars were bruited in our high window. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow, Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud Dripping their snow on the green grass, Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little Lady with rod that made them rise From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.
-Kaitlyn Charley
"Fable" Merril Moore Does everyone have to die? Yes, everyone. Isn’t there some way I can arrange Not to die—cannot I take some strange Prescription that my physician might know of?
No. I think not, not for money or love; Everyone has to die, yes, everyone.
Cannot my banker and his bank provide, Like a trust fund, for me to live on inside My warm bright house and not be put into A casket in the clay, can they not do That for me and charge a fixed per cent Like interest or taxes or the rent?
No, Madame, I fear not, and if they could There might be more harm in it than good.
-James Hancock
The Simple Line- John Jackson (Meagan Poage)
The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known
When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.
But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality--
The total silence to say:
I am dead.
For death is all ugly, all lovely
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.
Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone--
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide--
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
What country shall we conquer, what fair land
Unman our conquest and locate our blood?
We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!
Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood
Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.
- Allen Tate
Raymond Resseguie</span>
Please post a poem by a poet associated with The Fugitive magazine or the Nashville Fugitives followed by your name.
Thanks
The Book of How
Poet: Merrill Moore
After the stars were all hung separately out For mortal eyes to see that care to look, The one who did it sat down and wrote a book On how he did it. It took him about As long to write the book as to do the deed, But he said, "It's things like this we mostly need." And the angels approved but the devils screamed with laughter, For they knew exactly what would follow after.
For somehow he managed entirely to omit The most important facts in accomplishing it: Where he got the ladder to reach the stars; And how he lighted them, especially Mars; And what he hung them on when he got them there, Eternally distant and luminous in the air.
-Rosali Delgado
False Nightmare-Allen Tate
'I give the yawp barbaric
Of piety and pelf
(Who now reads Herrick?)
'And contradict myself
No matter, the verse is large.
My five-and-ten cent shelf
'The continent is: my targe
Bigger than Greece. The shock
Of Me exceeds its marge
'Myself the old cock
With wind and water wild
(Hell with the privy lock):
'I have no woman child;
Onan-Amurikee
My son, alone, beguiled
'By my complacency
In priggery to slay
My blind posterity . . .'
-These words, at dawn of day
In the sleep-awakened mind,
I made Walt Whitman say:
Wherefore I and my kind
Wear meekly in the face
A pale honeydew rind
Of rotten-sweet grace;
Ungracefully doating
Great-aunts hanged in lace
We are: mildly gloating
Dog bones in a trunk
Saved in the attic. . . .
Floating
Hating king and monk,
The classes and the mass,
We chartered an old junk
(Like Jesus on his ass)
Unto the smutty corn
And smirking sassafras.
In bulled Europa's morn
We love our land because
All night we raped her-torn,
Blue grass and glade. Jackdaws,
Buzzards and crows the land
Love with prurient claws;
So may I cunning my hand
To clip the increment
From the land or quicksand;
For unto us God sent
To gloze with iron bonds
The dozing continent-
The fallow graves, ponds
Full of limp fish, tall
Terrains, fields and fronds
Through which we crawl, and call. -Sharon Martin
Pursuit Robert Penn Warren The hunchback on the corner, with gum and shoelaces, Has his own wisdom and pleasures, and may not be lured To divulge them to you, for he has merely endured Your appeal for his sympathy and your kind purchases; And wears infirmity but as the general who turns Apart, in his famous old greatcoat there on the hill At dusk when the rapture and cannonade are still, To muse withdrawn from the dead, from his gorgeous subalterns; Or stares from the thicket of his familiar pain, like a fawn That meets you a moment, wheels, in imperious innocence is gone.
Go to the clinic. Wait in the outer room Where like an old possum the snag-nailed hand will hump On its knee in murderous patience, and the pomp Of pain swells like the Indies, or a plum. And there you will stand, as on the Roman hill, Stunned by each withdrawn gaze and severe shape, The first barbarian victor stood to gape At the sacrificial fathers, white-robed, still; And even the feverish old Jew stares stern with authority Till you feel like one who has come too late, or improperly clothed, to a party.
The doctor will take you now. He is burly and clean; Listening, like lover or worshiper, bends at your heart; But cannot make out just what it tries to impart; So smiles; says you simply need a change of scene. Of scene, of solace: therefore Florida, Where Ponce de Leon clanked among the lilies, Where white sails skit on blue and cavort like fillies, And the shoulder gleams in the moonlit corridor. A change of love: if love is groping Godward, through blind, No matter what crevice, cranny, chink, bright in dark, the pale tentacle find.
In Florida consider the flamingo Its color passion but its neck a question; Consider even that girl the other guests shun On beach, at bar, in bed, for she may know The secret you are seeking, after all; Or the child you humbly sit by, excited and curly, That screams on the shore at the sea’s sunlit hurly-burly, Till the mother calls its name, toward nightfall. Till you sit alone: in the dire meridians, off Ireland, in fury Of spume-tooth and dawnless sea-heave, salt rimes the lookout’s devout eye.
Till you sit alone—which is the beginning of error— Behind you the music and lights of the great hotel: Solution, perhaps, is public, despair personal, But history held to your breath clouds like a mirror. There are many states, and towns in them, and faces, But meanwhile, the little old lady in black, by the wall, Who admires all the dances, and tells you how just last fall Her husband died in Ohio, and damp mists her glasses; She blinks and croaks, like a toad or a Norn, in the horrible light, And rattles her crutch, which may put forth a small bloom, perhaps white.
(-Nicole Angeles)
Lee in the Mountains
Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
-Jasmine Penniman
Lee in the Mountains
By Donald Davidson Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies. My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be. Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked. If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States—— If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray? If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence. Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom. The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains. It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
(Sorry for this horrible greenish-gray colored highlight background.)
- Ryan Sweeney
Edges
BY ALLEN TATE
I’ve often wondered why she laughed
On thinking why I wondered so;
It seemed such waste that long white hands
Should touch my hands and let them go.
And once when we were parting there,
Unseen of anything but trees,
I touched her fingers, thoughtfully,
For more than simple niceties.
But for some futile things unsaid
I should say all is done for us;
Yet I have wondered how she smiled
Beholding what was cavernous.
(Janette Allen)
POEM:
Pursuit
By:Robert Penn Warren
The hunchback on the corner, with gum and shoelaces,
Has his own wisdom and pleasures, and may not be lured
To divulge them to you, for he has merely endured
Your appeal for his sympathy and your kind purchases;
And wears infirmity but as the general who turns
Apart, in his famous old greatcoat there on the hill
At dusk when the rapture and cannonade are still,
To muse withdrawn from the dead, from his gorgeous subalterns;
Or stares from the thicket of his familiar pain, like a fawn
That meets you a moment, wheels, in imperious innocence is
gone.
Go to the clinic. Wait in the outer room
Where like an old possum the snag-nailed hand will hump
On its knee in murderous patience, and the pomp
Of pain swells like the Indies, or a plum.
And there you will stand, as on the Roman hill,
Stunned by each withdrawn gaze and severe shape,
The first barbarian victor stood to gape
At the sacrificial fathers, white-robed, still;
And even the feverish old Jew stares stern with authority
Till you feel like one who has come too late, or improperly
clothed, to a party.
The doctor will take you now. He is burly and clean;
Listening, like lover or worshiper, bends at your heart;
But cannot make out just what it tries to impart;
So smiles; says you simply need a change of scene.
Of scene, of solace: therefore Florida,
Where Ponce de Leon clanked among the lilies,
Where white sails skit on blue and cavort like fillies,
And the shoulder gleams in the moonlit corridor.
A change of love: if love is groping Godward, through blind,
No matter what crevice, cranny, chink, bright in dark, the pale
tentacle find.
In Florida consider the flamingo
Its color passion but its neck a question;
Consider even that girl the other guests shun
On beach, at bar, in bed, for she may know
The secret you are seeking, after all;
Or the child you humbly sit by, excited and curly,
That screams on the shore at the sea’s sunlit hurly-burly,
Till the mother calls its name, toward nightfall.
Till you sit alone: in the dire meridians, off Ireland, in fury
Of spume-tooth and dawnless sea-heave, salt rimes the lookout’s
devout eye.
Till you sit alone—which is the beginning of error—
Behind you the music and lights of the great hotel:
Solution, perhaps, is public, despair personal,
But history held to your breath clouds like a mirror.
There are many states, and towns in them, and faces,
But meanwhile, the little old lady in black, by the wall,
Who admires all the dances, and tells you how just last fall
Her husband died in Ohio, and damp mists her glasses;
She blinks and croaks, like a toad or a Norn, in the horrible
light,
And rattles her crutch, which may put forth a small bloom,
perhaps white.
-Sariah Schurr-Quinonez
Teach Me- By Donald Davidson
Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change,
Your calm of stars, watching the turn of earth,
Patient of man, and never thinking strange
The mad red crash of each new system’s birth.
Teach me, for I would know your beauty’s way
That waits and changes with each changing sun,
No dawn so fair but promises a day
Of other perfectness than men have won.
Teach me, old World, not as vain men have taught,
—Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass,
Nor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought
Is woe that they and worlds alike must pass.
Nothing I learn by any mortal rule;
Teach me, old World, I would not be man’s fool.
--Cassie Bahne
Ada Ruel
The Queens of Hell had lissome necks to crane
At the tall girl approaching with long tread
And, when she had caught up even with them, nodded:
"If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
We would esteem her company over the plain,
To profit us all where the dogs will be out barking;
And we'll walk by the windows where the young men are working
And tomorrow we will all come home again." But the Queen of Heaven who had advanced and stood
In the likeness, I hear, of a fine motherly woman
Made a wry face, despite it was so common
To be worsted by the shrewd ladies of hell,
And crisped her sweet tongue: "This never will come to good:--
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you well."
from The Fugitive. Volume III. Number 2. April 1924.
(Submitted by David Flores)
Submitted by: Sandon Stine
POEM BY: Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The Riverside by John Crowe Ransom
A GREAT green spread of meadow land,
(Must rest his weight on an ample base),
A secret water moving on,
A clean blue air for his breathing-space,
A pair of willows bending down
In double witness to his grace,
And on the rock his sinner sprawls
And looks the Strong One face to face.
The sinner's mocking tongue is dry,
Wonder is on that mighty jeerer,
He loves, and he never loved before,
He wants the glowing sky no nearer,
He likes the willows to be two,
He would not have the water clearer,
He thinks that God is perfect once:
Heaven, rejoice! a new God-fearer.
And now each quiet thing awakes
And dances madly, wavers, dips;
These are God's motions on the air,
His Pulse for the sinner's finger-tips,
His arrows shot across the blue,
His love-words dropping from his lips,
And who ever heard such whisperings,
Who ever saw such fellowships?
(Submitted by Athena Tsunis)
April
SAVOR of love is thick on the April air,
The blunted boughs dispose their lacy bloom,
And many sorry steeds dismissed to pasture
Toss their old forelocks, flourish heavy heels.
Where is there any unpersuaded poet
So angry still against the wrongs of winter
Which caused the dainty earth to droop and die,
So vengeant for his vine and summer song,
As to decline the good releasing thaw?
Poets have temperature and follow seasons,
And covenants go out at equinox.
The champions! For Heaven, riding high
Above the icy death, considered truly;
'My agate icy work, I thought it fair;
Yet I have lacked that pretty lift of praise
That mounted once from these emaciate minstrels.
They will not sing, and duty drops away
And I must turn and make a soft amend!'
At once he showered April down, until
The bleak twigs bloom again; and soon, I swear,
He shall receive his praise.
John Crowe Ransom
-Jake Brown-Garcia
Dead Boy
The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,
A green bough from Virginia's aged tree,
And none of the county kin like the transaction,
Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.
A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,
A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,
A sword beneath his mother's heart—yet never
Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.
A pig with a pasty face, so I had said,
Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense
With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,
I see the forbears' antique lineaments.
The elder men have strode by the box of death
To the wide flag porch, and muttering low send round
The bruit of the day. O friendly waste of breath!
Their hearts are hurt with a deep dynastic wound.
He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;
The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;
But this was the old tree's late branch wrenched away,
Grieving the sapless limbs, the short and shaken.
John Crowe Ransom(Keaton Cooper)
Darkness
WHEN hurrying home on a rainy nightAnd hearing tree-tops rubbed and tossed,
And seeing never a friendly star
And feeling your way when paths are crossed:
Stop fast and turn three times around
And try the logic of the lost.
Where is the heavenly light you dreamed?
Where is your hearth and glowing ash?
Where is your love by the mellow moon?
Here is not even a lightning-flash,
And in a place no worse than this
Lost men shall wail and teeth shall gnash.
Lightning is quick and perilous,
The dawn comes on too slow and pale,
Your love brings only a yellow lamp,
Yet of these lights one shall avail:
The dark shall break for one of these,
I've never known this thing to fail.
John Crowe Ransom
by jeffrey littman
Ada Ruel
The Queens of Hell had lissome necks to crane
At the tall girl approaching with long tread
And, when she had caught up even with them, nodded:
"If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
We would esteem her company over the plain,
To profit us all where the dogs will be out barking;
And we'll walk by the windows where the young men are working
And tomorrow we will all come home again."
But the Queen of Heaven who had advanced and stood
In the likeness, I hear, of a fine motherly woman
Made a wry face, despite it was so common
To be worsted by the shrewd ladies of hell,
And crisped her sweet tongue: "This never will come to good:--
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you well."
from The Fugitive. Volume III. Number 2. April 1924.
(Christina Rafael)
Poem by Laura Riding - Yes and No
Across a continent imaginary
Because it cannot be discovered now
Upon this fully apprehended planet—
No more applicants considered,
Alas, alas—
Ran an animal unzoological,
Without a fate, without a fact,
Its private history intact
Against the travesty
Of an anatomy.
Not visible not invisible,
Removed by dayless night,
Did it ever fly its ground
Out of fancy into light,
Into space to replace
Its unwritable decease?
Ah, the minutes twinkle in and out
And in and out come and go
One by one, none by none,
What we know, what we don't know.
Laura Riding (Kendall Schene)
Edges: BY ALLEN TATE
I’ve often wondered why she laughed
On thinking why I wondered so;
It seemed such waste that long white hands
Should touch my hands and let them go.
And once when we were parting there,
Unseen of anything but trees,
I touched her fingers, thoughtfully,
For more than simple niceties.
But for some futile things unsaid
I should say all is done for us;
Yet I have wondered how she smiled
Beholding what was cavernous.
(Kalan Hilua)
Next Day
By Randall Jarrell 1914–1965 Randall Jarrell
Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,
Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I’ve become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.
When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I’d wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car
See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile
Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind
Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water—
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,
My husband away at work—I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:
I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.
And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me
How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.Alaina Lascano
Censored
BY DONALD (GRADY) DAVIDSON
Into a crock of gold he’d set some weeds,
Behold swart devils in the sunniest weather;
He would lump the saint and the courtesan together,
Most miserably jangling all the creeds.
The prurient multitude heard he was mad,
Yet nosed his books for some pornography.
The censors doubted his virginity,
And secretly conned the works that they forbade.
Reporters found this dangerous oddity
In rusty pantaloons, mowing the green,
And wondered how so dull a wretch could have seen
A naked Venus disturbing an alien sea.
He watched their backs receding down the street,
Raked up the grass, and suddenly had a vision
Of how Venus, bathing, saw with amused derision
Behind the bushes peeping satyrs’ feet.
-Shane Reider
_
By: Allen Tate
Death Of Little Boys
When little boys grown patient at last, weary,
Surrender their eyes immeasurably to the night,
The event will rage terrific as the sea;
Their bodies fill a crumbling room with light.
Then you will touch at the bedside, torn in two,
Gold curls now deftly intricate with gray
As the windowpane extends a fear to you
From one peeled aster drenched with the wind all day.
And over his chest the covers in the ultimate dream
Will mount to the teeth, ascend the eyes, press back
The locks while round his sturdy belly gleam
Suspended breaths, white spars above the wreck:
Till all the guests, come in to look, turn down
Their palms, and delirium assails the cliff
Of Norway where you ponder, and your little town
Reels like a sailor drunk in a rotten skiff.
The bleak sunshine shrieks its chipped music then
Out to the milkweed amid the fields of wheat.
There is a calm for you where men and women
Unroll the chill precision of moving feet.
During the 1920's there was a group of poets that formed together in Tennessee, and published literary works, as a way showcasing their talent. This group was known as Fugitives and once they formed their group they then created a magazine called "The Fugitives", this is the Magazine in which they showcased and published all of their literary works. The Fugitive is known to be one of the most influential collections of American Letters and was a host to many notable poets. This collection of poets was very large and many of these people were even influential teachers at Universities. The reason that the Fugitives were so important is because they would shed light on the current situations that were occurring and would bring attention to some of the segregation issues as Robert Penn Waren does in his poem titled "The Briar Patch", which talks about being separate, but equal.
~Tierra Roetto
__
Brad Diehl
The fugitives were a group of poets during the 1920’s who were located in Nashville, Tennessee. These poets published their work in a small magazine called The Fugitive. The fugitives were some of the most influential people in American literature history and members included, John Crowe Ranson, Allen Tate, Merrill Moore, Donald Davidson, William Ridley Willis, and Robert Warren. These individuals’ poems focused on various social issues such as black exploitation. The fugitives later merged with a group also based in Vanderbilt, called the Agrarians.
BY JOHN CROWE RANSOM
It had better been hidden
But the Poets inform:
We are chattel and liege
Of an undying Worm.
Were you, Will, disheartened,
When all Stratford’s gentry
Left their Queen and took service
In his low-lying country?
How many white cities
And grey fleets on the storm
Have proud-builded, hard-battled,
For this undying Worm?
Was a sweet chaste lady
Would none of her lover.
Nay, here comes the Lewd One,
Creeps under her cover!
Have ye said there’s no deathless
Of face, fashion, form,
Forgetting to honor
The extent of the Worm?
O ye laughers and light-lipped,
Ye faithless, infirm,
I can tell you who’s constant,
’Tis the Eminent Worm.
Ye shall trip on no limits,
Neither time ye your term,
In the realms of His Absloute
Highness the Worm.
April Treason
by John Crowe Ransom
So he took her as anointed
In the part he had appointed,
She was lips for smiling faintly,
Eyes to look and level quaintly,
Length of limb and splendors of the bust
Which he honored as he must.
Queen of women playing model,
Pure of brow but brain not idle,
Sitting in her silence meetly,
Let her adjective be stately;
So he thought his art would manage right
In the honest Northern light.
But he fashioned it too coldly,
April broke-and-entered boldly,
Thinking how to suit the season’s
Odor, savor, heats and treasons:
Painter! do not stoop and play the host
Lest the man come uppermost.
Yet he knew that he was altered
When the perfect woman faltered,
Languish in her softly speaking,
Anguish, even, in her looking:
All the art had fled his fingertips
So he bent and kissed her lips.
He and Venus took their pleasure,
Then he turned upon his treasure,
Took and trampled it with loathing,
Flung it over cliffs to nothing;
Glittering in the sunlight while it fell
Like a lovely shattered shell.
Strict the silence that came onward
As they trod the foothill downward,
One more mocking noon of April,
Mischief always is in April;
Still she touched his fingers cold as ice
And recited, “It was nice.”
----- Jamie DeLozier
San Francisco Night Windows
by Robert Penn Warren
So hangs the hour like fruit fullblown and sweet,
Our strict and desperate avatar,
Despite that antique westward gulls lament
Over enormous waters which retreat
Weary unto the white and sensual star.
Accept these images for what they are--
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.
Think you, hungry is the city in the fog
Where now the darkened piles resume
Their framed and frozen prayer
Articulate and shafted in the stone
Against the void and absolute air.
If so the frantic breath could be forgiven,
And the deep blood subdued before it is gone
In a savage paternoster to the stone,
Then might we all be shriven.
The Fugitives were poets who published a literary magazine aptly titled The Fugitive which was published at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. The magazine is no longer published but is still deemed incredibly important as a great deal of the work that graced its pages are still widely read today. Some of the more famous members of the group are: Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom and William Ridley Wills. (Added by Peter Tunnell)
Poets Have Chanted Mortality (from The Fugitive, 1922)
BY JOHN CROWE RANSOM
It had better been hidden
But the Poets inform:
We are chattel and liege
Of an undying Worm.
Were you, Will, disheartened,
When all Stratford’s gentry
Left their Queen and took service
In his low-lying country?
How many white cities
And grey fleets on the storm
Have proud-builded, hard-battled,
For this undying Worm?
Was a sweet chaste lady
Would none of her lover.
Nay, here comes the Lewd One,
Creeps under her cover!
Have ye said there’s no deathless
Of face, fashion, form,
Forgetting to honor
The extent of the Worm?
O ye laughers and light-lipped,
Ye faithless, infirm,
I can tell you who’s constant,
’Tis the Eminent Worm.
Ye shall trip on no limits,
Neither time ye your term,
In the realms of His Absloute
Highness the Worm.
"The Mediterranean" by Allen Tate
Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone——
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the black hull no light moved
But a gull white-winged along the feckless wave,
The breeze, unseen but fierce as a body loved,
That boat drove onward like a willing slave:
Where we went in the small ship the seaweed
Parted and gave to us the murmuring shore
And we made feast and in our secret need
Devoured the very plates Aeneas bore:
Where derelict you see through the low twilight
The green coast that you, thunder-tossed, would win,
Drop sail, and hastening to drink all night
Eat dish and bowl--to take that sweet land in!
Where we feasted and caroused on the sandless
Pebbles, affecting our day of piracy,
What prophecy of eaten plates could landless
Wanderers fulfil by the ancient sea?
We for that time might taste the famous age
Eternal here yet hidden from our eyes
When lust of power undid its stuffless rage;
They, in a wineskin, bore earth's paradise.
Let us lie down once more by the breathing side
Of Ocean, where our live forefathers sleep
As if the Known Sea still were a month wide——
Atlantis howls but is no longer steep!
What country shall we conquer, what fair land
Unman our conquest and locate our blood?
We've cracked the hemispheres with careless hand!
Now, from the Gates of Hercules we flood
Westward, westward till the barbarous brine
Whelms us to the tired land where tasseling corn,
Fat beans, grapes sweeter than muscadine
Rot on the vine: in that land were we born.
-Jake Coleman
"Lee in the Mountains"
by Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
(Edwin Santana)
"Bells For John Whiteside's Daughter" by Jown Crowe Ransom
There was such speed in her little body,
And such lightness in her footfall,
It is no wonder her brown study Astonishes us all
Her wars were bruited in our high window. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow, Or harried unto the pond
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud Dripping their snow on the green grass, Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little Lady with rod that made them rise From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle Goose-fashion under the skies!
But now go the bells, and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.
-Kaitlyn Charley
"Fable" Merril Moore
Does everyone have to die? Yes, everyone.
Isn’t there some way I can arrange
Not to die—cannot I take some strange
Prescription that my physician might know of?
No. I think not, not for money or love;
Everyone has to die, yes, everyone.
Cannot my banker and his bank provide,
Like a trust fund, for me to live on inside
My warm bright house and not be put into
A casket in the clay, can they not do
That for me and charge a fixed per cent
Like interest or taxes or the rent?
No, Madame, I fear not, and if they could
There might be more harm in it than good.
-James Hancock
The Simple Line- John Jackson (Meagan Poage)
The secrets of the mind convene splendidly,
Though the mind is meek.
To be aware inwardly
of brain and beauty
Is dark too recognizable.
Thought looking out on thought
Makes one an eye:
Which it shall be, both decide.
One is with the mind alone,
The other is with other thoughts gone
To be seen from afar and not known
When openly these inmost sights
Flash and speak fully,
Each head at home shakes hopelessly
Of being never ready to see self
And sees a universe too soon
The immense surmise swims round and round
And heads grow wise
With their own bigness beatified
In cosmos, and the idiot size
Of skulls spells Nature on the ground,
While ears listening the wrong way report
Echoes first and hear words before sounds
Because the mind, being quiet, seems late.
By ears words are copied into books,
By letters minds are taught self-ignorance.
From mouths spring forth vocabularies
To the assemblage of strange objects
Grown foreign to the faithful countryside
Of one king, poverty,
Of one line, humbleness.
Unavowed and false horizons claim pride
For spaces in the head
The native head sees outside.
The flood of wonder rushing from the eyes
Returns lesson by lesson.
The mind, shrunken of time,
Overflows too soon.
The complete vision is the same
As when the world-wideness began
Worlds to describe
The excessiveness of man.
But man's right portion rejects
The surplus in the whole.
This much, made secret first,
Now makes
The knowable, which was
Thought's previous flesh,
And gives instruction of substance to its intelligence
As far as flesh itself,
As bodies upon themselves to where
Understanding is the head
And the identity of breath and breathing are established
And the voice opening to cry: I know,
Closes around the entire declaration
With this evidence of immortality--
The total silence to say:
I am dead.
For death is all ugly, all lovely
Forbids mysteries to make
Science of splendor, or any separate disclosing
Of beauty to the mind out of body's book
That page by page flutters a world in fragments,
Permits no scribbling in of more
Where spaces are,
Only to look.
Body as Body lies more than still.
The rest seems nothing and nothing is
If nothing need be.
But if need be,
Thought not divided anyway
Answers itself, thinking
All open and everything.
Dead is the mind that parted each head.
But now the secrets of the mind convene
Without pride, without pain
To any onlookers.
What they ordain alone
Cannot be known
The ordinary way of eyes and ears
But only prophesied
If an unnatural mind, refusing to divide,
Dies immediately
Of too plain beauty
Foreseen within too suddenly,
And lips break open of astonishment
Upon the living mouth and rehearse
Death, that seems a simple verse
And, of all ways to know,
Dead or alive, easiest.
Please post a poem by a poet associated with The Fugitive magazine or the Nashville Fugitives followed by your name.
Thanks
The Book of How
Poet: Merrill MooreAfter the stars were all hung separately out
For mortal eyes to see that care to look,
The one who did it sat down and wrote a book
On how he did it. It took him about
As long to write the book as to do the deed,
But he said, "It's things like this we mostly need."
And the angels approved but the devils screamed with laughter,
For they knew exactly what would follow after.
For somehow he managed entirely to omit
The most important facts in accomplishing it:
Where he got the ladder to reach the stars;
And how he lighted them, especially Mars;
And what he hung them on when he got them there,
Eternally distant and luminous in the air.
-Rosali Delgado
False Nightmare-Allen Tate
'I give the yawp barbaric
Of piety and pelf
(Who now reads Herrick?)
'And contradict myself
No matter, the verse is large.
My five-and-ten cent shelf
'The continent is: my targe
Bigger than Greece. The shock
Of Me exceeds its marge
'Myself the old cock
With wind and water wild
(Hell with the privy lock):
'I have no woman child;
Onan-Amurikee
My son, alone, beguiled
'By my complacency
In priggery to slay
My blind posterity . . .'
-These words, at dawn of day
In the sleep-awakened mind,
I made Walt Whitman say:
Wherefore I and my kind
Wear meekly in the face
A pale honeydew rind
Of rotten-sweet grace;
Ungracefully doating
Great-aunts hanged in lace
We are: mildly gloating
Dog bones in a trunk
Saved in the attic. . . .
Floating
Hating king and monk,
The classes and the mass,
We chartered an old junk
(Like Jesus on his ass)
Unto the smutty corn
And smirking sassafras.
In bulled Europa's morn
We love our land because
All night we raped her-torn,
Blue grass and glade. Jackdaws,
Buzzards and crows the land
Love with prurient claws;
So may I cunning my hand
To clip the increment
From the land or quicksand;
For unto us God sent
To gloze with iron bonds
The dozing continent-
The fallow graves, ponds
Full of limp fish, tall
Terrains, fields and fronds
Through which we crawl, and call.
-Sharon Martin
Pursuit
Robert Penn Warren
The hunchback on the corner, with gum and shoelaces,
Has his own wisdom and pleasures, and may not be lured
To divulge them to you, for he has merely endured
Your appeal for his sympathy and your kind purchases;
And wears infirmity but as the general who turns
Apart, in his famous old greatcoat there on the hill
At dusk when the rapture and cannonade are still,
To muse withdrawn from the dead, from his gorgeous subalterns;
Or stares from the thicket of his familiar pain, like a fawn
That meets you a moment, wheels, in imperious innocence is
gone.
Go to the clinic. Wait in the outer room
Where like an old possum the snag-nailed hand will hump
On its knee in murderous patience, and the pomp
Of pain swells like the Indies, or a plum.
And there you will stand, as on the Roman hill,
Stunned by each withdrawn gaze and severe shape,
The first barbarian victor stood to gape
At the sacrificial fathers, white-robed, still;
And even the feverish old Jew stares stern with authority
Till you feel like one who has come too late, or improperly
clothed, to a party.
The doctor will take you now. He is burly and clean;
Listening, like lover or worshiper, bends at your heart;
But cannot make out just what it tries to impart;
So smiles; says you simply need a change of scene.
Of scene, of solace: therefore Florida,
Where Ponce de Leon clanked among the lilies,
Where white sails skit on blue and cavort like fillies,
And the shoulder gleams in the moonlit corridor.
A change of love: if love is groping Godward, through blind,
No matter what crevice, cranny, chink, bright in dark, the pale
tentacle find.
In Florida consider the flamingo
Its color passion but its neck a question;
Consider even that girl the other guests shun
On beach, at bar, in bed, for she may know
The secret you are seeking, after all;
Or the child you humbly sit by, excited and curly,
That screams on the shore at the sea’s sunlit hurly-burly,
Till the mother calls its name, toward nightfall.
Till you sit alone: in the dire meridians, off Ireland, in fury
Of spume-tooth and dawnless sea-heave, salt rimes the lookout’s
devout eye.
Till you sit alone—which is the beginning of error—
Behind you the music and lights of the great hotel:
Solution, perhaps, is public, despair personal,
But history held to your breath clouds like a mirror.
There are many states, and towns in them, and faces,
But meanwhile, the little old lady in black, by the wall,
Who admires all the dances, and tells you how just last fall
Her husband died in Ohio, and damp mists her glasses;
She blinks and croaks, like a toad or a Norn, in the horrible
light,
And rattles her crutch, which may put forth a small bloom,
perhaps white.
(-Nicole Angeles)
Lee in the Mountains
Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
-Jasmine Penniman
Lee in the Mountains
By Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
(Sorry for this horrible greenish-gray colored highlight background.)
- Ryan Sweeney
Edges
BY ALLEN TATE
I’ve often wondered why she laughed
On thinking why I wondered so;
It seemed such waste that long white hands
Should touch my hands and let them go.
And once when we were parting there,
Unseen of anything but trees,
I touched her fingers, thoughtfully,
For more than simple niceties.
But for some futile things unsaid
I should say all is done for us;
Yet I have wondered how she smiled
Beholding what was cavernous.
(Janette Allen)
POEM:
Pursuit
By:Robert Penn Warren
The hunchback on the corner, with gum and shoelaces,
Has his own wisdom and pleasures, and may not be lured
To divulge them to you, for he has merely endured
Your appeal for his sympathy and your kind purchases;
And wears infirmity but as the general who turns
Apart, in his famous old greatcoat there on the hill
At dusk when the rapture and cannonade are still,
To muse withdrawn from the dead, from his gorgeous subalterns;
Or stares from the thicket of his familiar pain, like a fawn
That meets you a moment, wheels, in imperious innocence is
gone.
Go to the clinic. Wait in the outer room
Where like an old possum the snag-nailed hand will hump
On its knee in murderous patience, and the pomp
Of pain swells like the Indies, or a plum.
And there you will stand, as on the Roman hill,
Stunned by each withdrawn gaze and severe shape,
The first barbarian victor stood to gape
At the sacrificial fathers, white-robed, still;
And even the feverish old Jew stares stern with authority
Till you feel like one who has come too late, or improperly
clothed, to a party.
The doctor will take you now. He is burly and clean;
Listening, like lover or worshiper, bends at your heart;
But cannot make out just what it tries to impart;
So smiles; says you simply need a change of scene.
Of scene, of solace: therefore Florida,
Where Ponce de Leon clanked among the lilies,
Where white sails skit on blue and cavort like fillies,
And the shoulder gleams in the moonlit corridor.
A change of love: if love is groping Godward, through blind,
No matter what crevice, cranny, chink, bright in dark, the pale
tentacle find.
In Florida consider the flamingo
Its color passion but its neck a question;
Consider even that girl the other guests shun
On beach, at bar, in bed, for she may know
The secret you are seeking, after all;
Or the child you humbly sit by, excited and curly,
That screams on the shore at the sea’s sunlit hurly-burly,
Till the mother calls its name, toward nightfall.
Till you sit alone: in the dire meridians, off Ireland, in fury
Of spume-tooth and dawnless sea-heave, salt rimes the lookout’s
devout eye.
Till you sit alone—which is the beginning of error—
Behind you the music and lights of the great hotel:
Solution, perhaps, is public, despair personal,
But history held to your breath clouds like a mirror.
There are many states, and towns in them, and faces,
But meanwhile, the little old lady in black, by the wall,
Who admires all the dances, and tells you how just last fall
Her husband died in Ohio, and damp mists her glasses;
She blinks and croaks, like a toad or a Norn, in the horrible
light,
And rattles her crutch, which may put forth a small bloom,
perhaps white.
-Sariah Schurr-Quinonez
Teach Me- By Donald Davidson
Teach me, old World, your passion of slow change,Your calm of stars, watching the turn of earth,
Patient of man, and never thinking strange
The mad red crash of each new system’s birth.
Teach me, for I would know your beauty’s way
That waits and changes with each changing sun,
No dawn so fair but promises a day
Of other perfectness than men have won.
Teach me, old World, not as vain men have taught,
—Unpatient song, nor words of hollow brass,
Nor men’s dismay whose powerfullest thought
Is woe that they and worlds alike must pass.
Nothing I learn by any mortal rule;
Teach me, old World, I would not be man’s fool.
--Cassie Bahne
Ada Ruel
The Queens of Hell had lissome necks to crane
At the tall girl approaching with long tread
And, when she had caught up even with them, nodded:
"If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
We would esteem her company over the plain,
To profit us all where the dogs will be out barking;
And we'll walk by the windows where the young men are working
And tomorrow we will all come home again."
But the Queen of Heaven who had advanced and stood
In the likeness, I hear, of a fine motherly woman
Made a wry face, despite it was so common
To be worsted by the shrewd ladies of hell,
And crisped her sweet tongue: "This never will come to good:--
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you well."
Submitted by: Sandon Stine
POEM BY: Donald Davidson
Walking into the shadows, walking alone
Where the sun falls through the ruined boughs of locust
Up to the president's office. . . .
Hearing the voices
Whisper, Hush, it is General Lee! And strangely
Hearing my own voice say, Good morning, boys.
(Don't get up. You are early. It is long
Before the bell. You will have long to wait
On these cold steps. . . .)
The young have time to wait
But soldiers' faces under their tossing flags
Lift no more by any road or field,
And I am spent with old wars and new sorrow.
Walking the rocky path, where steps decay
And the paint cracks and grass eats on the stone.
It is not General Lee, young men. . . .
It is Robert Lee in a dark civilian suit who walks,
An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice
Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.
My father's house is taken and his hearth
Left to the candle-drippings where the ashes
Whirl at a chimney-breath on the cold stone.
I can hardly remember my father's look, I cannot
Answer his voice as he calls farewell in the misty
Mounting where riders gather at gates.
He was old then——I was a child——his hand
Held out for mine, some daybreak snatched away,
And he rode out, a broken man. Now let
His lone grave keep, surer than cypress roots,
The vow I made beside him. God too late
Unseals to certain eyes the drift
Of time and the hopes of men and a sacred cause.
The fortune of the Lees goes with the land
Whose sons will keep it still. My mother
Told me much. She sat among the candles,
Fingering the Memoirs, now so long unread.
And as my pen moves on across the page
Her voice comes back, a murmuring distillation
Of old Virginia times now faint and gone,
The hurt of all that was and cannot be.
Why did my father write? I know he saw
History clutched as a wraith out of blowing mist
Where tongues are loud, and a glut of little souls
Laps at the too much blood and the burning house.
He would have his say, but I shall not have mine.
What I do is only a son's devoir
To a lost father. Let him only speak.
The rest must pass to men who never knew
(But on a written page) the strike of armies,
And never heard the long Confederate cry
Charge through the muzzling smoke or saw the bright
Eyes of the beardless boys go up to death.
It is Robert Lee who writes with his father's hand——
The rest must go unsaid and the lips be locked.
If all were told, as it cannot be told——
If all the dread opinion of the heart
Now could speak, now in the shame and torment
Lashing the bound and trampled States——
If a word were said, as it cannot be said——
I see clear waters run in Virginia's Valley
And in the house the weeping of young women
Rises no more. The waves of grain begin.
The Shenandoah is golden with a new grain.
The Blue Ridge, crowned with a haze of light,
Thunders no more. The horse is at plough. The rifle
Returns to the chimney crotch and the hunter's hand.
And nothing else than this? Was it for this
That on an April day we stacked our arms
Obedient to a soldier's trust? To lie
Ground by heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, lost, impugned?
And was I then betrayed? Did I betray?
If it were said, as it still might be said——
If it were said, and a word should run like fire,
Like living fire into the roots of grass,
The sunken flag would kindle on wild hills,
The brooding hearts would waken, and the dream
Stir like a crippled phantom under the pines,
And this torn earth would quicken into shouting
Beneath the feet of the ragged bands——
The pen
Turns to the waiting page, the sword
Bows to the rust that cankers and the silence.
Among these boys whose eyes lift up to mine
Within gray walls where droning wasps repeat
A hollow reveille, I still must face,
Day after day, the courier with his summons
Once more to surrender, now to surrender all.
Without arms or men I stand, but with knowledge only
I face what long I saw, before others knew,
When Pickett's men streamed back, and I heard the tangled
Cry of the Wilderness wounded, bloody with doom.
The mountains, once I said, in the little room
At Richmond, by the huddled fire, but still
The President shook his head. The mountains wait,
I said, in the long beat and rattle of siege
At cratered Petersbyrg. Too late
We sought the mountains and those people came.
And Lee is in the mountains now, beyond Appomatox,
Listening long for voices that will never speak
Again; hearing the hoofbeats that come and go and fade
Without a stop, without a brown hand lifting
The tent-flap, or a bugle call at dawn,
Or ever on the long white road the flag
Of Jackson's quick brigades. I am alone,
Trapped, consenting, taken at last in mountains.
It is not the bugle now, or the long roll beating.
The simple stroke of a chapel bell forbids
The hurtling dream, recalls the lonely mind.
Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children's children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart.
SAVOR of love is thick on the April air,April
- The blunted boughs dispose their lacy bloom,
- And many sorry steeds dismissed to pasture
- Toss their old forelocks, flourish heavy heels.
- Where is there any unpersuaded poet
- So angry still against the wrongs of winter
- Which caused the dainty earth to droop and die,
- So vengeant for his vine and summer song,
- As to decline the good releasing thaw?
- Poets have temperature and follow seasons,
- And covenants go out at equinox.
- The champions! For Heaven, riding high
- Above the icy death, considered truly;
- 'My agate icy work, I thought it fair;
- Yet I have lacked that pretty lift of praise
- That mounted once from these emaciate minstrels.
- They will not sing, and duty drops away
- And I must turn and make a soft amend!'
- At once he showered April down, until
- The bleak twigs bloom again; and soon, I swear,
- He shall receive his praise.
John Crowe RansomJp Smith