DESERTED

The old house leans upon a tree
Like some old man upon a staff:
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:
The starlight flitting in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now

A fox-hound howls: and through the night,
Like some old ghost from out its grave,
The moon comes misty white.

Bert Leston Taylor

Bert Leston Taylor was born in Goshen, Massachusetts, November 13, 1866, and educated at the College of the City of New York. He was engaged in journalism since 1895, conducting his column "A Line o' Type or Two" in the Chicago Daily Tribune. He was the author of two novels as well as A Line-o'Verse or Two (1911) and Motley Measures (1913), a pair of delightful light verse collections. Posthumous volumes have spread his lightly ironic verse beyond the mid-Western circle that read him daily.

Taylor died of pneumonia March 19, 1921.

CANOPUS

When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,

I like to think about that star Canopus,

So far, so far away.

Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list 'em;
To weigh it, science almost must despair.

Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system,
Nor even know 'twas there.

When temporary chairmen utter speeches,

And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns,
My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches
To where Canopus swims.

When men are calling names and making faces,
And all the world's ajangle and ajar,

I meditate on interstellar spaces

And smoke a mild seegar.

For after one has had about a week of
The argument of friends as well as foes,
A star that has no parallax to speak of
Conduces to repose.

William Vaughn Moody

William Vaughn Moody was born in Spencer, Indiana, July 8, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study-he taught, for eight years, at the University of Chicago-his death coming at the very height of his creative power.

The Masque of Judgment, his first and strikingly original work, was published in 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, and particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" and the majestic uncompleted "The Death of Eve," Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. "Gloucester Moors" is an outcry against the few exploiting the many; "The Quarry"

and "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" are passionate with prophecy. His last extended works have an epic quality which, with their too crowded details and difficult diction, will effectually prevent them from ever becoming popular. But their importance will grow even as Moody's place in our literature will most likely be a higher one than that which has yet been accorded him.

Of the lyrics woven in "The Fire-Bringer" most anthologists have preferred the song beginning:

Of wounds and sore defeat

I made my battle stay.

The one reprinted here has not only the virtue of being little known but seems to the present editor even more searching, more typical of its author's spirit.

Moody's prose play The Great Divide (1907) was extremely successful when produced by Henry Miller. The Faith Healer (1909), another play in prose, because of its more exalted tone, did not win the favor of the theatre-going public. A complete edition of The Poems and Poetic Dramas of William Vaughn Moody was published in 1912 in two volumes.

In the summer of 1909 Moody was stricken with the illness from which he never recovered. Had he lived he would probably have become one of the major poets of his country.

He died

in October, 1910.

FROM "JETSAM"

Once at a simple turning of the way

I met God walking; and although the dawn
Was large behind Him, and the morning stars
Circled and sang about his face as birds
About the fieldward morning cottager,
My coward heart said faintly, "Let us haste!
Day grows and it is far to market-town."
Once where I lay in darkness after fight,
Sore smitten, thrilled a little thread of song
Searching and searching all my muffled sense
Until it shook sweet pangs through all my blood,

And I beheld one globed in ghostly fire

Singing, star-strong, her golden canticle;

And her mouth sang, "The hosts of Hate roll past,
A dance of dust-motes in the sliding sun;

Love's battle comes on the wide wings of storm,
From east to west one legion! Wilt thou strive?"
Then, since the splendor of her sword-bright gaze
Was heavy on me with yearning and with scorn,
My sick heart muttered, "Yea, the little strife,
Yet see, the grievous wounds! I fain would sleep."

O heart, shalt thou not once be strong to go
Where all sweet throats are calling, once be brave
To slake with deed thy dumbness?
Let us go

The path her singing face looms low to point,

Pendulous, blanched with longing, shedding flames
Of silver on the brown grope of the flood;
For all my spirit's soilure is put by

And all my body's soilure, lacking now
But the last lustral sacrament of death

To make me clean for those near-searching eyes
That question yonder whether all be well,
And pause a little ere they dare rejoice.

Question and be thou answered, passionate face!
For I am worthy, worthy now at last
After so long unworth; strong now at last
To give myself to beauty and be saved.

PANDORA'S SONG

(From "The Fire-Bringer")

I stood within the heart of God;
It seemed a place that I had known:
(I was blood-sister to the clod,
Blood-brother to the stone.)

I found my love and labor there,
My house, my raiment, meat and wine,
My ancient rage, my old despair,-
Yea, all things that were mine.

I saw the spring and summer pass,
The trees grow bare, and winter come;
All was the same as once it was
Upon my hills at home.

Then suddenly in my own heart
I felt God walk and gaze about;
He spoke; his words seemed held apart
With gladness and with doubt.

"Here is my meat and wine," He said,
"My love, my toil, my ancient care;
Here is my cloak, my book, my bed,
And here my old despair.

"Here are my seasons: winter, spring,
Summer the same, and autumn spills
The fruits I look for; everything
As on my heavenly hills."

1

ON A SOLDIER FALLEN IN THE PHILIPPINES 1

Streets of the roaring town,
Hush for him; hush, be still!

He comes, who was stricken down

Doing the word of our will.
Hush! Let him have his state.
Give him his soldier's crown,

The grists of trade can wait
Their grinding at the mill.

1 Compare the point of view expressed in Hovey's "Unmanifest Destiny" on page 126. This poem was also written at the time of the Spanish-American War.