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Blow slug-horns, chink a latch, or clank a bell.
I've watched a many a one this weary while.

You can hear the nightingales, I won't deny.
They always sing for eager souls like you,
Perched on their boughs of possibility,
Most vaguely heard and still more vaguely true.

And they are more, perhaps, than mere tradition.
They must exist, though none come back to say
How they are feathered, or what rare nutrition
Keeps them piping their sad peculiar lay.

Gardens there are, and Queens, no doubt, a-walking,
White blooms adrift on gold and marvelous hair.

Young men in murmurous dreams have heard them talking,
Leaped up, like you, and entered . . . vanished . . . where?

For all I know, the castle's just a dream,
A shadow piled to mask a dangerous ledge,
A fantasy blown from devils' lungs in steam,
Made permanent here, just on a chasm's edge,
Where you will plunge, forever, ever falling,
For infinite days and nights, a dark lump whirled
That hears or thinks it hears an old voice calling
Beyond the stars that cluster near this world;

A voice that follows you past endless night,
Familiar, yet not quite half-known or named,
The last and sorry remnant of delight

That you lived for, pursued, and touched, and claimed,

Even as you touch the bolt that locks this gate,
Smiling, with patience such as fits old men.
Who prophesy. Ah, yes, what you create
Perhaps you'll find, but never come back again.

FIRE ON BELMONT STREET

(Epilogue to "The Tall Men")

He was a worthy citizen of the town.
"Where is the fire?" he babbled as he ran.
"The fire! The fire!" spat between pursy breaths.
He dropped his question, stuck his gross right hand
Against his watch-chain, ran, and stared, and sobbed,
Out Belmont Street? My God, that's where I live!
Stumbling with slow fat feet and tragic breath
While roaring sirens passed upon the wind.
And then I heard (what laughter!) blobs of heels
Pecking the night with hurry. Poor staccato,
Dragging a million feeble stumps across
The easy pavements while the flames went up,
Gobbling the roofs and sky. Beneath was earth.

Steady against all shouting, ground was waiting
Forever subtle, old. But walls dissolved
And houses quaked with Fire until I could
Endure no more, but ran, as clamorous

As all the plump mad mob, shouting like them:
"The fire," I cried. What fire? No gables burn,
Nor is that redness some unusual dawn
Sprawled against moonrise, nor a dragon's breath
Spurted from some old sewer you forgot,

Nor ghosts of the Red Men that your fathers knew,
Come back with devil-medicine to bombard
Your bungalows. Choctaw and Cherokee
Lie where the spitting Decherd rifles planted
Under the Tennessee grass, their tired bones.
The fire! What fire? Why, God has come alive
To damn you all, or else the smoke and soot
Have turned back to live coals again for shame
On this gray city, blinded, soiled, and kicked
By fat blind fools. The city's burning up?
Why, good! Then let her burn!

But I'll say more,
Remembering other odds, a narrow place,
A shock of arms, a cry of gables burning,
And there were gathered in that long grim room
Of warriors sixty who called Hnaef their lord,
Who saw the gray wolf creeping in the wood
And heard the grind of linden shields afar;
Surrounded were, yet held the door and died
While the strange light of swords and helmets made
The place like day.

But who will stand tonight,
Holding this other door against the press
Of brazen muscles? Who can conquer wheels
Gigantically rolled with mass of iron

Against frail human fingers? Who can quench
The white-hot fury of the tameless atoms
Bursting the secret jungle of their cells?
Oh, who can stay or ever chain the dull
Gnaw of the fiery smoke, eternally settling
Into the beating heart? There is no fire?
Only, perhaps, the breath of a Southern wind
That I have known too well in many a summer,
Drying the pulse, stopping the weary pulse,
Blowing the faint blood back in the curdled veins
Till there is no way to think of what might be
Better or worse. Yet maybe it were better
Climbing the tallest hill to cry at night:
"Citizens, awake! Fire is upon you, fire

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,
Only your naked selves, your naked hearts.
Fly from the wrath of fire to the hills
Where water is and the slow peace of time."

There is a place where beech-trees droop their boughs
Down-slanting, and where the dark cedars grow
With stubborn roots threading the lichened rocks.
There the smooth limestone benches, rubbed
By warm primeval streams, yet hold the crystal
Forms of dead life. There on a summer's evening
The screech-owl quavers and unseen July-flies
Trill their thin songs. And there my father said,
Pointing a low mound out to me, "My son,
Stand on this Indian's grave and plainly ask,
Indian, what did you die for? And he'll say,
Nothing!"

So was it! So it is!

What did you die for? Nothing, indeed nothing!
The seed of the white man grows on Indian graves,
Waxing in steel and stone, nursing the fire

That eats and blackens till he has no life

But in the fire that eats him. White man, remember,
Brother, remember Hnaef and his sixty warriors
Greedy for battle-joy. Remember the rifles.
Talking men's talk into Tennessee darkness

And the long-haired hunters watching the Tennessee hills
In the land of big rivers for something.

APPLE AND MOLE

For a heavy long time on the long green bough
Hangs the apple of a summer that is shaken
From its flat hot road to its apple-topped hill
With the scraping of a mole that would awaken.

He is under the turf of the long green meadow,
Snuffling under grass and lusty clover

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,
Till the tree will be a-quiver, feeling mole at the root,

It is tall, it is green, but he will burrow,

Till the root will be sapless and the twig will be dry,
And the long green bough will be shaken.
The apple is too old, it has worms at the core,
And the long green summer will be green no more.
The apple will fall and not awaken.

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

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