But he cannot wait for his honor, now the trumpet has been blown. Wreathe pride now for his granite brow, lay love on his breast of stone. Toll! Let the great bells toll Laurel, laurel, yes. He did what we bade him do. Praise, and never a whispered hint but the fight he fought was good; Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's-blood. A flag for a soldier's bier Who dies that his land may live; O banners, banners here, That he doubt not nor misgive! When the nation robed in gloom With its faithless past shall strive. Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark, Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark. George Sterling George Sterling was born at Sag Harbor, New York, December 1, 1869, and educated at various private schools in the Eastern States. He moved to the far West about 1895 and has lived in California ever since. Of Sterling's ten volumes of poetry, The Testimony of the Suns (1903), A Wine of Wizardry (1908) and The House of Orchids and Other Poems (1911) are the most characteristic. Ambrose Bierce was the first to hail Sterling with what now seems extravagant praise; he declared that A Wine of Wizardry contained some of the greatest lines in English poetry. As the titles indicate, this is poetry of a flamboyant and rhetorical type; of luxuriant sentences and emotions decorated in "the grand manner." Yet Sterling has added a definite vigor to his ornate tropes and verbal prodigality. He is not always hurling suns about, sweeping the skies with orchids, strange gods and exotic His simpler verses, though not in his most familiar vein, are among his best. stars. A recent collection, Selected Poems, was published in 1923. THE BLACK VULTURE Aloof upon the day's immeasured dome, His hazards on the sea of morning lie; And least of all he holds the human swarm- To make their dream and its fulfillment one, His roads between the thunder and the sun. THE MASTER MARINER My grandsire sailed three years from home, And slew unmoved the sounding whale: Here on a windless beach I roam And watch far out the hardy sail. The lions of the surf that cry On reefs of midnight met his eye: My grandsire sailed uncharted seas, The anchor-chains his music made And wind in shrouds and running-gear: The thrush at dawn beguiles my glade, And once, 'tis said, I woke to hear. My grandsire in his ample fist A grey gull's-feather for my pen! Upon my grandsire's leathern cheek I think my grandsire now would turn On me, my pen and its concern, Then gaze again to sea-and sigh. THE NIGHT OF GODS Their mouths have drunken the eternal wine- Lo! when I hear from voiceless court and fane The cry of kingdoms past and gods undone,- Edwin Arlington Robinson Edwin Arlington Robinson was born December 22, 1869, in the village of Head Tide, Maine. When he was still a child, the Robinson family moved to the nearby town of Gardiner, which figures prominently in Robinson's poetry as "Tilbury Town." In 1891 he entered Harvard College, leaving that institution in 1893. A little collection of verse (The Torrent and the Night Before) was privately printed in 1896 and the following year marked the appearance of his first representative work, The Children of the Night (1897). Somewhat later, Robinson was struggling in various capacities to make a living in New York, five years passing before the publication of Captain Craig (1902). This richly detailed narrative, recalling Browning's method, increased Robinson's audience and his work was brought to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt (then President of the United States), who became interested in the poet and, a few years later, offered him a place in the New York Custom House. Robinson held this position from 1905 to 1910, leaving it the same year which marked the appearance of his clear-cut characteristic volume, The Town Down the River. Robinson's three books, up to this time, showed his clean, firmlydrawn quality; but, in spite of their excellences, they seem little more than a succession of preludes for the dynamic volume that was to establish him in the first rank of American poets. The Man Against the Sky, in many ways Robinson's fullest and most penetrating work, appeared in 1916. (See Preface.) This was followed by The Three Taverns (1920), a less arresting but equally concentrated, distinctively voiced collection of poems. In all these books there is manifest that searching for truth, the probing analysis, which takes the place of mere acceptance. Purely as a psychological portrait painter, Robinson has given American literature an entire gallery of memorable figures: Richard Cory, who "glittered when he walked," gnawing his dark heart even while he fluttered pulses with his apparent good fortune; Miniver Cheevy, sighing "for what was not," one of the most poignant pictures of the frustrated dreamer that has ever been drawn; the nameless mother in "The Gift of God," transmuting her mediocrity of a son into a shining demigod; poor Bewick Finzer, the wreck of wealth, coming for his pittance, "familiar as an old mistake, and futile as regret." Such sympathetic illuminations reveal Robinson's sensitive power, especially in his projection of the failures of life. Indeed, much of Robinson's work seems a protest, a criticism by implication, of that type of standardized success which so much of the world worships. Frustration and defeat are like an organ-point heard below the varying music of his verse; failure is almost glorified in his pages. Technically, Robinson is as precise as he is dexterous. He is, in company with Frost, a master of the slowly diminished ending. But he is capable of cadences as rich as that which ends "The Gift of God," as pungent as the climax of "Calvary," as brilliantly fanciful as the sestet of his recent sonnet, "The Sheaves," in which he pictures a landscape where A thousand golden sheaves were lying there, |