Soon in the wide wilderness,

On a branch blown over a creek,

Up a trail of the wild coon,

In a lair of the wild bee,

The rugged boy, by danger's stress,

Learnt the speech the wild things speak,
Learnt the Earth's eternal tune

Of strife-engendered harmony

Went to school where Life itself was master,
Went to church where Earth was minister-
And in Danger and Disaster

Felt his future manhood stir!

And lo, as he grew ugly, gaunt,
And gnarled his way into a man,
What wisdom came to feed his want,
What worlds came near to let him scan!
And as he fathomed through and through
Our dark and sorry human scheme,

He knew what Shakespeare never knew,
What Dante never dared to dream-

That round him such a glory rolls.

For not alone he knew it as a truth,

He made it of his blood, and of his brain-
He crowned it on the day when piteous Booth
Sent a whole land to weeping with world pain-

When a black cloud blotted out the sun
And men stopped in the streets to sob,
To think Old Abe was dead.

Dead, and the day's work still undone,

Dead, and war's ruining heart athrob,

And earth with fields of carnage freshly spread.
Millions died fighting;

But in this man we mourned

Those millions, and one other—

And the States today uniting,

North and South,

East and West,

Speak with a people's mouth

A rhapsody of rest

To him our beloved best,

Our big, gaunt, homely brother—

Our huge Atlantic coast-storm in a shawl,

Our cyclone in a smile-our President,

Who knew and loved us all

With love more eloquent

Than his own words-with Love that in real deeds was

spent.

Oh, to pour love through deeds

To be as Lincoln was!

That all the land might fill its daily needs

Glorified by a human Cause!

Then were America a vast World-Torch

Flaming a faith across the dying Earth,
Proclaiming from the Atlantic's rocky porch,
That a New World was struggling at the birth!
O living God. O Thou who living art

And real, and near, draw, as at that babe's birth,
Into our souls and sanctify our Earth-

Let down thy strength that we endure.

Mighty and pure

As mothers and fathers of our own Lincoln-child.
O Child, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone,

Soul torn from out our Soul!

May you be great, and pure, and beautiful—

A Soul to search this world

To be a father, brother, comrade, son,

A toiler powerful;

A man whose toil is done

One with God's Law above:

Work wrought through Love!

Lola Ridge

Lola Ridge was born in Dublin, Ireland, leaving there in infancy and spending her childhood in Sydney, Australia. After living some years in New Zealand, she returned to Australia to study art. In 1907, she came to the United States, earning her living as organizer, as advertisement writer, as illustrator, artist's model, factory-worker, etc. In 1918, The New Republic published her long poem The Ghetto and Miss Ridge, until then totally unknown, became the "discovery" of the year.

Her volume The Ghetto and Other Poems (1918) contains one poem that is brilliant, several that are powerful and none that is mediocre. The title-poem is its pinnacle; in it Miss Ridge touches strange heights. It is essentially a poem of the city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden beauties.

Sun-Up (1920) is less integrated, more frankly experimental. But the same vibrancy and restrained power that distinguished her preceding book are manifest here.

PASSAGES FROM "THE GHETTO"

Old Sodos no longer makes saddles.

He has forgotten how

Time spins like a crazy dial in his brain,

And night by night

I see the love-gesture of his arm

In its green-greasy coat-sleeve
Circling the Book,

And the candles gleaming starkly

On the blotched-paper whiteness of his face,

Like a miswritten psalm . . .

Night by night

I hear his lifted praise,

Like a broken whinnying

Before the Lord's shut gate.

Lights go out

And the stark trunks of the factories

Melt into the drawn darkness,
Sheathing like a seamless garment.
And mothers take home their babies,

Waxen and delicately curled,

Like little potted flowers closed under the stars.

Lights go out

And colors rush together,

Fusing and floating away.

Pale worn gold like the settings of old jewels . . Mauve, exquisite, tremulous, and luminous purples, And burning spires in aureoles of light

Like shimmering auras.

They are covering up the pushcarts . .

Now all have gone save an old man with mirrors-
Little oval mirrors like tiny pools.

He shuffles up a darkened street

And the moon burnishes his mirrors till they shine like phosphorus.

...

The moon like a skull,

Staring out of eyeless sockets at the old men trundling home the pushcarts.

Alfred Kreymborg

Alfred Kreymborg, one of the most daring of the younger insurgents, was born in New York City, December 10, 1883. His education was spasmodic, his childhood being spent beneath the roar of the elevated trains. At ten he was an expert chess player, supporting himself, from the ages of seventeen to twenty-five, by teaching and playing exhibition games. His passion, however, was not mathematics but music. At thirty, he began to turn to the theater as a medium.

In 1914, he organized that group of radical poets which, half-deprecatingly, half-defiantly, called itself "Others." (He edited the three anthologies of their work published in 1916, 1917 and 1919.)

Meanwhile, he had been working on a technique that was an attempt to strip poetry of its frequent wordiness and rhetorical non-essentials. Mushrooms (1916) was the first collection in this vein. Here Kreymborg continually sought for simplification, cutting away at his lines until they assumed an almost naked expression. Often he overdid his effects, attaining nothing more than a false ingenuousness, a sophisticated simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish.

Kreymborg's most ambitious volume of poetry, Blood of Things (1920), is, for all the surface oddities, the work not only of an ardent experimenter but a serious thinker. Here, in spite of what seems a persistence of occasional charlatanry, is a rich and sensitive imagination; a fancy that is as wild as it is quick-witted.