Blow slug-horns, chink a latch, or clank a bell. You can hear the nightingales, I won't deny. And they are more, perhaps, than mere tradition. Gardens there are, and Queens, no doubt, a-walking, Young men in murmurous dreams have heard them talking, For all I know, the castle's just a dream, A voice that follows you past endless night, That you lived for, pursued, and touched, and claimed, Even as you touch the bolt that locks this gate, FIRE ON BELMONT STREET (Epilogue to "The Tall Men") He was a worthy citizen of the town. Steady against all shouting, ground was waiting As all the plump mad mob, shouting like them: Nor ghosts of the Red Men that your fathers knew, But I'll say more, But who will stand tonight, Against frail human fingers? Who can quench That will not rest, invisible fire that feeds On your quick brains, your beds, your homes, your steeples, Fire in your sons' veins and in your daughters', Fire like a dream of Hell in all your world. Rush out into the night, take nothing with you, There is a place where beech-trees droop their boughs So was it! So it is! What did you die for? Nothing, indeed nothing! That eats and blackens till he has no life But in the fire that eats him. White man, remember, And the long-haired hunters watching the Tennessee hills APPLE AND MOLE For a heavy long time on the long green bough He is under the turf of the long green meadow, With a sure blunt snout and capable paws Up the long green slope past the beeches and the haws, For the summer must be shaken and over. It's a heavy long time that an apple must hang. He is butting out a path; he is shoveling a furrow, It is tall, it is green, but he will burrow, Till the root will be sapless and the twig will be dry, M Mark Van Doren ARK VAN DOREN was born at Hope, Illinois, June 13, 1894, and was educated at the University of Illinois and at Columbia. He taught English at Columbia, and became literary editor of The Nation. Since 1920 he has lived in New York except for the part of the year that he spends on his farm in Cornwall, Connecticut. Besides his verses, he has published four volumes of criticism. Henry David Thoreau, A Critical Study (1916) and The Poetry of John Dryden (1920) are the best of his analytical appraisals. He took upon himself the huge labor of editing An Anthology of World Poetry (1928), which assembles the world's best poetry in the best English versions, and compiled American Poets 1630-1930 (1932) and The Oxford Book of American Prose (1932). A novel called The Transients (1935) succeeded only in puzzling most of its readers. Spring Thunder and Other Poems appeared in 1924. A glance through its pages reveals that Van Doren has been influenced by Robert Frost. He, too, writes of homely bucolic things: of water wheels which need mending, a mountain house in December, the coming of alfalfa, river snow, and dry meadows. His emotion, like Frost's, is restrained. But if neither his subjects nor his point of view is particularly individualized, his mellowness is his own, and the spirit which moves beneath the contours of his verse personifies even the simplest of his quatrains. Now the Sky (1928) reveals Van Doren as a more metaphysical poet. He is still concerned with ferns, dark barns, deserted hollows, but he grows more and more preoccupied with "the crumbling away of former bright edges of courage and causeless decay." Jonathan Gentry (1933) is an impressive chronicle of five generations, interspersed with lyrics. It is a narrative poem which just misses being a great work, chiefly because of its author's unrestrained facility. A Winter Diary (1935) is Van Doren's richest volume, even though the book represents an alternation of tradition and technical experiment. The title poem is a genre picture in precise heroic couplets; the following group is a sequence of Shakespearean sonnets, complete to the slightest Elizabethan conceit; the lyrics range from the most formal designs to unexpected arrangements, from the inevitable pairings of vowels to consonance, even to lyrics with no rhyme at all. Apart from their novelty, the lyrics represent Van Doren at his best. The title-poem is the finest sustained piece of writing Van Doren has accomplished. It is nearly twelve hundred lines long, yet there is not a forced or flat couplet. It is rich in accurate observation, spiced with wit, and sensitive to the details of daily life on a northern winter farm; for sympathetic landscape and portrait painting there has been nothing like it in American poetry since Whittier's "Snow Bound." In 1939 Van Doren published Shakespeare, a persuasive study which cut through the heavy accumulation of research and penetrated to the power of the writing itself, and Collected Poems: 1922-1938. The latter volume received the Pulitzer poetry prize, and the award was applauded. Critics who had neglected Van Doren's verse acknowledged its lean-whittled power and its unornamented firmness. Spare though this verse is, it suggests large horizons; an American mythology is adumbrated in such lines as |