For we know the world is glorious, And that God is not censorious When his children have their fling; And life slips its tether When the boys get together, With a stein on the table in the fellowship of spring. WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study - he taught, for eight years, at the University of Chicago — his death coming at the very height of his creative power. The Masque of Judgment, his first work, was published in 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines," Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. A complete edition of The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn Moody was published in 1912 in two volumes. In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness from which he never recovered. He died in October, 1910. ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES Streets of the roaring town, But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown. Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone. Toll! Let the great bells toll He did what we bade him do. Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good; Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's-blood. A flag for a soldier's bier Who dies that his land may live; O banners, banners here, Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark, Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark. GEORGE STERLING George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, December 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and lived in California until he met death by his own hand in 1926. Of Sterling's ten volumes of poetry, A Wine of Wizardry (1908) and The House of Orchids and Other Poems (1911) are the most characteristic. An excellent and carefully chosen Selected Poems was published in 1923. Sterling was happiest in the romantic manner, fondest of the sonnets, in which he let his rhetoric have full sway. THE BLACK VULTURE Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome, His hazards on the sea of morning lie; To make their dream and its fulfillment one, THE NIGHT OF GODS Their mouths have drunken the eternal wine Lo! when I hear from voiceless court and fane The cry of kingdoms past and gods undone, - Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in Robinson's poetry as "Tilbury Town." In 1891 he entered Harvard College, leaving that institution in 1893. A little collection of verse (The Torrent and the Night Before) was privately printed in 1896 and the following year marked the appearance of his first representative work, The Children of the Night (1897). Somewhat later, Robinson was struggling in various capacities to make a living in New York, five years passing before the publication of Captain Craig (1902). This richly detailed narrative, recalling Browning's method, increased Robinson's audience. His work was brought to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United States), who became interested in the poet and, a few years later, offered him a place in the New York Customs House. In 1910, he published a series of short poems, The Town Down the River. The Man Against the Sky, Robinson's fullest and most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.) In all of these books there is manifest that searching for truth, that constant questioning, which takes the place of mere acceptance. As the work of a native portrait painter, nothing, with the exception of some of Frost's pictures, has been produced that is at once so keen and so kindly; in the half-cynical, half-mystical etchings like “Miniver Cheevy," and "Richard Cory' lines where Robinson's irony is inextricably mixed with tenderness - his art is at its height. His splendid "The Master," one of the finest evocations of Lincoln, is, at the same time, a bitter commentary on the commercialism of the times and the "shopman's test of age and worth." In his two reanimations of the Arthurian legends, Merlin (1917) and Launcelot (1920), Robinson, differing radically from the idyls of Tennyson, has colored the tale with somber reflections of the collapse of old orders, the darkness of an age in ashes. Avon's Harvest, which the author has called "a dime novel in verse,' a study of a fear-haunted, hate-driven man, appeared in 1921. In the same year The Macmillan Company issued his Collected Poems, which received the Pulitzer Prize for 1921. Roman Bartholow (1923) is a single poem of almost two hundred pages; a dramatic and introspective narrative in blank verse. The Man Who Died Twice (1924), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that year, is likewise one long poem: a tale which is a cross between a grotesque recital and inspired metaphysics. Curiously enough, the mixture is one of Robinson's greatest triumphs; none of his portraits, either miniatures or full-length canvases, has given us a profounder insight of a tortured soul than this of Fernando Nash, "the king who lost his crown before he had it." Dionysus in Doubt (1925) contains, besides several characteristic extended poems, a dozen of Robinson's finest dramatic sonnets. Tristram (1927) vividly modernizes the immortal love-story and moves with an emotional warmth that is unusual in Robinson. Although he is often accused of holding a negative attitude toward life, Robinson's philosophy is essentially positive; a dogged desire for a deeper faith, a greater light, is his. It is a philosophy expressed in Captain Craig: Take on yourself But your sincerity, and you take on Good promise for all climbing; fly for truth And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, MINIVER CHEEVY 1 Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons. Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing. Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam's neighbors. Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant. 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, Charles Scribner's Sons, from The Town down the River by E. A. Robinson. |