He knew what Shakespeare never knew, And before God are equal souls This truth was his, And this it is 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 Dead, and the day's work still undone, And earth with fields of carnage freshly spread. But in this man we mourned Those millions, and one other 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, With love more eloquent Than his own words with Love that in real deeds was Oh, to pour love through deeds To be as Lincoln was! That all the land might fill its daily needs Then were America a vast World-Torch And real, and near, draw, as at that babe's birth, 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 — To be a father, brother, comrade, son, A man whose toil is done One with God's Law above: Work wrought through Love! 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 age 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, halfdeprecatingly, 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 nonessentials. 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 ingenuous ness, a sophisticated simplicity. Often, too, he failed to draw the line between what is innocently childlike and what is merely childish. Kreymborg's volumes, Blood of Things (1920) and Scarlet and Mellow (1927), are, 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. Puppet Plays, with a preface by Gordon Craig, appeared in 1923. Although in its predetermination to preserve an open-eyed wonder, Kreymborg's marionette-like emotions are often too doll-charming or too doll-tragic, these miniature dramas are appealing. However, nothing which Kreymborg had written up to this time had prepared his readers for the volume which appeared a few months later. Less Lonely (1923) is not merely Kreymborg's most diverse volume, it is a new Kreymborg. A portion of it is in the idiom which the poet has made his own, but the greater part of the volume is in the shape of conventional verse the actual form, that is, is conventional although Kreymborg's turn of thought is always individual. Since the publication of this volume Kreymborg has been working almost entirely in rhyme, achieving fresh effects in essentially simple patterns. Funnybone Alley (1927) discloses the poet in a new role: a writer of quaint prose and city jingles for children. Besides his poetry, Kreymborg is guilty of several premature novels and, during the intervals between the founding of various experimental magazines, prose sketches. Troubadour (1925) is his altogether winning autobiography. OLD MANUSCRIPT The sky is that beautiful old parchment in which the sun and the moon keep their diary. To read it all, one must be a linguist more learned than Father Wisdom and a visionary more clairvoyant than Mother Dream. one must be an apostle: one who is more than intimate or the sea. THE DITTY THE CITY SANG If a lad's but a lad in the heart of a town, Is it mad he has grown, or a dunce or a clown, When he crowns common sights with delights of his own? He thought he saw ships at the end of the street He thought he saw figures and faces you miss He thought he heard bells where the clouds break in two, With a tone quite as low and clear as it's blue. But what he heard there not a cloud ever knew. He thought he touched fingers belonging to kings, And the crowns and the sceptres came tumbling in rings. But all he felt there is how poverty sings. CITY SPARROW Who's that dusty stranger? What's he doing here? Perching on branches like telegraph wires? Poking his head about, twitching his tail, Never accepting, but stealing our rations? Who asked him hither, what led him this way? And worse than all these, he's a jerky reminder BADGER CLARK Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved to Dakota Territory at the age of three months and now lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their work become part of folk-lore, many of his songs having been adapted and paraphrased by the cowboys who have made them their own. Sun and Saddle Leather (1915) and Grass-Grown Trails (1917) are the expression of a native singer; happy, spontaneous and seldom "literary." There is wind in these songs; the smell of camp-smoke and the colors of prairie sunsets rise from them. Free, for the most part, from affectations, Clark achieves an unusual ease in his use of the local vernacular. THE GLORY TRAIL1 But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride And mav'rick-hungry rope. 1 From Sun and Saddle Leather by Badger Clark. Copyright, 1915. Richard G. Badger, Publisher. 2 Pronounced Mokiónes. |