For now I see that when of old I thought of justice and believed I was dreaming that only then was I awake, For now I see that the wrongdoer is the first to withdraw wrong and is the only one who can with draw it, For now I see that all the effort I spent trying to discover why lives were beautiful or ugly has shown me that all ugliness and all beauty finally must lapse in one transfiguration, For now in the confidences of this morning, in the rapture of this awakening, I find my illimitable roots trailed backward and forward and round into all time and all men, Pledging my love to countless surrenders and repeals. O MY DEAD COMRADE (for W. W.) O my dead comrade-my great dead! I sat by your bedside-it was the close of day- You also departing, departing You and the light, companions in life, now, too, companions in death, Retiring to the shadow, carrying elsewhere the benediction of your sunbeams. I sat by your bedside. I held your hand: Once you opened your eyes: O look of recognition! O look of bestowal! From you to me then passed the commission of the future, From you to me that minute, from your veins to mine, Out of the flood of passage, as you slipped away with the tide, From your hand that touched mine, from your soul that touched mine, near, O so near— Filling the heavens with stars Entered, shone upon me and out of me, the power of the spring, the seed of the rose and the wheat, As of father to son, as of brother to brother, as of god to god! O my great dead! You had not gone, you had stayed-in my heart, in my veins, Reaching through me, through others through me, through all at last, our brothers, A hand to the future. Frank Dempster Sherman Frank Dempster Sherman was born at Peekskill, New York, May 6, 1860. He entered Columbia University in 1879, where, after graduation and a subsequent instructorship, he was made adjunct professor in 1891 and Professor of Graphics in 1904. He held the latter position until his death, which occurred September 19, 1916. Besides being a writer of airy lyrics and epigrammatic quatrains, Sherman was an enthusiastic genealogist and a designer (especially of book-plates of no little skill. As a poet, his gift was essentially that of a writer of light verse-fragrant, fragile, yet seldom too sentimental or brittle. Pleasant is the name for it, a pleasantness perfumed with a pungent wit. Sherman never wearied of the little lyric; even the titles of his volumes are instances of his penchant for the brief melody, for the sudden snatch of song: Madrigals and Catches (1887), Lyrics for a Lute (1890), Little-Folk Lyrics (1892), Lyrics of Jog (1904). A sumptuous collected edition of his poems was published, with an Introduction by Clinton Scollard, in 1917 AT MIDNIGHT See, yonder, the belfry tower That gleams in the moon's pale light- That dreams in the silent night? I listen and hear the chime Go quavering over the town, BACCHUS Listen to the tawny thief, Fill his cup with wine distilled Who,-who makes this mimic din Bacchus 'tis, come back again TWO QUATRAINS IVY Upon the walls the graceful Ivy climbs. And wraps with green the ancient ruin gray: Romance it is, and these her leafy rhymes DAWN Out of the scabbard of the night Flashes his shining sword of light, Charlotte P. S. Gilman Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman was born at Hartford, Connecticut, July 3, 1860. She began public work in 1890, lecturing on ethics, economics and sociology; identifying herself with the labor question and the advance of women. She has written about a dozen books, her best works being Woman and Economics (1898) and Human Work (1904). Her volume of verse, In This Our World (1898), hurls many a shaft of ironic wit. Beneath the whimsical humor of "A Conservative" and the better known 'Similar Cases " (unfortunately too long to quote) there is a sub-acid satire not easily forgotten. A CONSERVATIVE The garden beds I wandered by A black and crimson butterfly All doleful and forlorn. |