THE LINCOLN CHILD

Clearing in the forest,

In the wild Kentucky forest,

And the stars, wintry stars strewn above!

O Night that is the starriest

Since Earth began to roll

For a Soul

Is born out of Love!

Mother love, father love, love of Eternal God

Stars have pushed aside to let him through

Through heaven's sun-sown deeps

One sparkling ray of God

Strikes the clod

(And while an angel-host through wood and clearing sweeps!) Born in the wild

The Child

Naked, ruddy, new,

Wakes with the piteous human cry and at the mother-heart sleeps.

To the mother wild berries and honey,

To the father awe without end,

To the child a swaddling of flannel—
And a dawn rolls sharp and sunny
And the skies of winter bend
To see the first sweet word penned
In the godliest human annal.

Frail Mother of the Wilderness,
How strange the world shines in
And the cabin becomes chapel
And the baby lies secure-
Sweet Mother of the Wilderness,
New worlds for you begin,
You have tasted of the apple
That giveth wisdom sure.

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!

All about him the land,
Eastern cities, Western prairie,
Wild, immeasurable, grand;

But he was lost where blossomy boughs make airy
Bowers in the forest, and the sand

Makes brook-water a clear mirror that gives back
Green branches and trunks black

And clouds across the heavens lightly fanned.
Yet all the Future dreams, eager to waken,
Within that woodland soul—

And the bough of boy has only to be shaken
That the fruit drop whereby this Earth shall roll
A little nearer God than ever before.

Little recks he of war,

Of national millions waiting on his word-
Dreams still the Event unstirred

In the heart of the boy, the little babe of the wild-
But the years hurry and the tide of the sea
Of Time flows fast and ebbs, and he, even he,
Must leave the wilderness, the wood-haunts wild.
Soon shall the cyclone of Humanity

Tearing through Earth suck up this little child
And whirl him to the top, where he shall be
Riding the storm-column in the lightning-stroke,
Calm at the peak, while down below worlds rage,
And Earth goes out in blood and battle-smoke,
And leaves him with the Sun-an epoch and an age!

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.

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

Make us more wise, more true, more strong, more mild,

That we may day by day

Rear this wild blossom through its soft petals of clay;

That hour by hour

We may endow it with more human power

Than is our own

That it may reach the goal

Our Lincoln long has shown!

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!

NIGHT NOTE

A little moon was restless in Eternity

And, shivering beneath the stars,

Dropped in the hiding arms of the western hill.
Night's discord ceased:

The visible universe moved in an endless rhythm:

The wheel of the heavens turned to the pulse of a cricket in the grass.

TASTING THE EARTH

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

As I lay on my couch in the muffled night, and the rain lashed my window,
And my forsaken heart would give me no rest, no pause and no peace,
Though I turned my face far from the wailing of my bereavement.

Then I said: I will eat of this sorrow to its last shred,

I will take it unto me utterly,

I will see if I be not strong enough to contain it.

What do I fear? Discomfort?

How can it hurt me, this bitterness?

The miracle, then!

Turning toward it, and giving up to it,

I found it deeper than my own self.

O dark great mother-globe so close beneath me . . .

It was she with her inexhaustible grief,

Ages of blood-drenched jungles, and the smoking of craters, and the roar of tempests,

And moan of the forsaken seas,

It was she with the hills beginning to walk in the shapes of the dark-hearted animals,

It was she risen, dashing away tears and praying to 'dumb skies, in the pompcrumbling tragedy of man

...

It was she, container of all griefs, and the buried dust of broken hearts,

Cry of the christs and the lovers and the child-stripped mothers,

And ambition gone down to defeat, and the battle overborne,

And the dreams that have no waking. . . .

My heart became her ancient heart:

...

On the food of the strong I fed, on dark strange life itself:
Wisdom-giving and somber with the unremitting love of ages.
There was dank soil in my mouth,

And bitter sea on my lips,

In a dark hour, tasting the Earth.

HEBREWS

I come of a mighty race I come of a very mighty race

...

Adam was a mighty man, and Noah a captain of the moving waters,
Moses was a stern and splendid king, yea, so was Moses . . .

Give me more songs like David's to shake my throat to the pit of the belly,
And let me roll in the Isaiah thunder . . .

Ho! the mightiest of our young men was born under a star in midwinter
His name is written on the sun and it is frosted on the moon . . .

...

Earth breathes him like an eternal spring; he is a second sky over the Earth.

...

I go about with a dark heart where the Ages sit in a divine thunder . .
My blood is cymbal-clashed and the anklets of the dancers tinkle there.
Harp and psaltery, harp and psaltery make drunk my spirit . . .
I am of the terrible people, I am of the strange Hebrews . .
Amongst the swarms fixed like the rooted stars, my folk is a streaming Comet,
The Wanderer of Eternity, the eternal Wandering Jew . . .

...

Ho! we have turned against the mightiest of our young men
And in that denial we have taken on the Christ,

And the two thieves beside the Christ,

And the Magdalen at the feet of the Christ,

And the Judas with thirty silver pieces selling the Christ,
And our twenty centuries in Europe have the shape of a Cross
On which we have hung in disaster and glory . . .

OLA 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, and supported herself for three years by writing fiction for popular magazines. She stopped this work only, as she says, "because I found I would have to do so if I wished to survive as an artist." For several years she earned her living in a variety of waysas organizer for an educational movement, as advertisement writer, as illustrator, artist's model, factory-worker. In 1918, The New Republic published her long poem, "The Ghetto," and Miss Ridge, until then totally unknown, became the “discovery” of the year. She died in Brooklyn on May 19, 1941.

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; it is a poem of the city, of its sodden brutalities, its sudden beauties. Swift figures shine from these lines, like barbaric colors leaping out of darkness; images are surprising but never strained; confusion is given clarity. In the other poemsespecially in "The Song of Iron," "Faces" and the poignant portrait "Marie"-the same dignity is maintained, though with somewhat less magic.

Sun-Up (1920) and Red Flag (1924) are less integrated, more frankly experimental. But the same vibrancy and restrained power that distinguished her first book are manifest here. Her delineations are sensitive, her phrases vivid yet natural. In spite of an overuse of similes, she accomplishes the maximum in effect with a minimum of effort.

Firehead (1929) is a narrative poem, the time and scene of which are the day of the Crucifixion. Making John, Peter and the two Marys interpret the significance of the event, Miss Ridge constructed a poem of depth and urgent penetration. If