I. MEDITATION AND THE SEARCHING SPIRIT
Strange Splendor-Ernest Hartsock
Second Coming-Ernest Hartsock
Stirrup Cup-Ernest Hartsock
Final Lightning-James E. Warren, Junior
Only the Dream Is Real-Anderson M. Scruggs
Lines to a Practical Man-Anderson M. Scruggs
Elegy on the Wind-Lola Pergament
Words Are No Net for Beauty-Minnie Hite Moody
Incident in the Green Pastures-Marguerite Steedman
There Is a Little Wisdom-Janef Newman Preston
Choice-Mavis Garey
Paradox-Mavis Garey
First Symphony of Brahms-Gilbert Maxwell
On Hearing a Bach Fugue-Merle G. Walker
Prayer for a Righteous Man-Marguerite Steedman
Logic-Merle G. Walker
Lullabye for a Dead Child-Randolph Shaffer,
Junior
Barriers-Glenn W. Rainey
Plus Ultra-Ernest Hartsock
Mystery-David Edward Ungar
Relegation-Robert Leseur Jones
Consolation-Frank L. Stanton
This World-Frank L. Stanton
Let Us Believe-Frank L. Stanton
Keep- A-Goin'-Frank L. Stanton
My Library-Charles W. Hubner
Some Brooklet Be-Robert Norris
Horizon-Marshall Walker, Junior
Preparedness-Catherine Walker
Reform-Martha Hodgson Ellis
Pain at Loveliness-Robert Leseur Jones
Unicorn-Gilbert Maxwell
Friend and Enemy-Constance Gay Morenus
II. LOCAL COLOR
III. PORTRAITS AND PERSONALITIES
IV. CITIES
VI. NATURE
Ages of earth are in me. I am made
Of time's immortal matter, which is dust.
I am old atoms in a new parade;
I am new iron miracled from rust.
This that is I has not been I forever;
Once it was pearl or spider, flame or fly.
Nature's destination is endeavor;
There is no dust that beauty will let die.
This that is flesh of me may once have ridden
The saddle of the stallions of the sun
Which leap from hidden glory unto hidden,
Knowing their goal and origin are one.
Lost among sulphurous meteors I come;
Vanished in smoky mystery I go,
Where cooling comets crackle like a drum
To ether's weird electric tremolo.
From space to space the flaming planets scatter,
Crashing and splitting in the black abyss.
Still onward hurls the starry march of matter:
Each Armageddon is a Genesis.
There is no height nor depth beyond our border
Of isolated vision in the earth;
And all there is is cataclysmic order
Moving in rhythms of ironic mirth.
There is no East nor West. Only an aching
Cyclone of chaos hurtling forever on.
There is no day nor night. Only the breaking
Of eerie shadows in eternal dawn.
Where shall we go who came from conflagrations
Unkindled and unquenched within the vast?
Oblivion is the home of destinations,
And darkness is our domicile at last.
Sick lust leans fevered on the arm of death.
The vitals quiver and the heart goes hot.
Fear at the throat bites out the guttering breath:
Havoc is conqueror where hope is not.
Now as I pause on midnight's promontory
By the grim currents of infinity,
Sudden the revelation breaks in glory-
The desperate strange splendor of To Be.
Out of the chaos and the dark and thunder,
Flung to new glamor in earth's diagram,
I stand upon the citadel of wonder
And shout the terrible miracle-I am!
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
He found us like the deathly thief
In all our night of unbelief.
A new star, like the Magi's gem,
Above a blind new Bethlehem
He lighted up the little way
Of men lost fearfully in clay.
Firefly or foxfire he was not,
But some eternal burning spot,
Some faggot that the gods forgot.
Some flowering torch that dropped in place
From bonfires on the fields of space;
'With beauty almost blasphemous
He aureoled and haloed us.
And we who had not known before
The white of daisies by a door,
The white of cloud and sycamore,
Knew suddenly the feathered frond
Of angels' wings-and worlds beyond!
Though some men craven in their fear
Shaded their eyes when he grew near,
Some men who did not fear the glow
Went close and were translucent so,
With souls like hexagons of snow,
And we who once were darkened glass
Through which men's gazes could not pass,
Each opened and a rainbow was.
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
Horizons widen and the skies expand,
Cosmologies and creeds wax dim and hoary,
No longer is the earth time's only glory.
And Galilee no longer is God's land.
From jumbled globes of Ptolemaic glass
The world was freed when down the firmament
Copernicus and Galileo went
Bringing a vaster universe to pass.
New martyrs blazing with immortal zeal
Have flung the heavens farther, until man
No longer monarch of a mystic plan
Becomes a mute Ixion on earth's wheel.
What of his pomp and pride, whose dream is broken,
Who drifts, a derelict on cosmic seas?
O let him face the clean eternities
Holding the past before him as a token:
We know in part and prophesy in part;
Through faith in unknown knowledges we came
Borne upward out of darkness into flame,
Triumphant through the courage of the heart!
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
Soon will the lovely cornice suddenly crumble
Like scattered sand into the quaking street,
And jagged glass across the bloody pavement
Gleam with the fiery sleet.
Soon will the bronze-limbed boys in white forsake
The quiet courts and sun and speeding ball,
To run through muddy fields, to throw hands skyward,
To clutch-no thing at all.
Soon will the willows, mirrored in park waters,
Stifle in ebon smoke and saffron gas,
No more to taste the drowsiness of August,
Or hear the Aprils pass.
Soon, we who dream must terribly awaken
In gentle places, where the thunder conies,
Our laughing eyes be torches of cold anger,
Our hearts be foolish drums.
And soon shall we, who feared no final lightning,
Lie with our battle flags of folly furled,
And, with our fingers touching, sleep forever,
Unworthy of the world.
-JAMES E. WARREN, JUNIOR.
Only the dream is real. There is no plan
Transcending even a rose's timid glory,
A cricket's summer song. The ways of man
Are stupors of the flesh and transitory.
There is no truth but dreams, yet man must spend
His gift of quiet days in storm and stress,
Unheeding that a single breath will end
With one swift stroke the hoax of worldliness.
Only the dream will last. Some distant day
The wheels will falter, and the silent sun
Will see the last beam leveled to decay
And all man's futile clangor spent and done.
Yet, after brick and steel and stone are gone
And flesh and blood are dust, the dream lives on.
-ANDERSON M. SCRUGGS.
You who have tossed the sun aside and quenched
The rainbow in the darkness of your mind,
Whose ears are deaf to winds, whose thoughts are clenched
Like rivets to the turmoil and the grind,-
You cannot shut your heart forevermore
Against the siege of laurel from a hill;
A sparrow's note will batter down your door
In that last hour when all but thought grows still.
Then shall the lilac's breath come back to hover
Over the deepening twilight in your brain,
The moon return like a rejected lover;
The creatures of the heart your hands have slain
Shall find a tongue, and from the darkening sky
Forgotten stars will stab you like a cry.
-ANDERSON M. SCRUGGS.
The music of your voice comes sadly on the wind tonight,
it is like an old April singing a farewell to spring;
so beautiful it is, I shall live for listening.
I shall hear other music given to the wind and possessed
like a leaf loved by the wind, like a bird blown to flight
upward and alone, driven beyond the moon to rest.
Say it is all I shall live for, music that flees
the indelicate mind, the heart undisturbed by its going;
say it is all I have known or shall ever be knowing,
that I have forsaken the soullessness of these,
Coming out of time, out of wandering, out of die night
to hear the music of your voice blowing, blowing.
-LOLA PERGAMENT.
Words are no net for beauty: while I strive
With loveliness an aching weight in me,
Somewhere young lambs are joyously alive
Beneath the branches of a blossoming tree;
And stars are cleaving winter midnights spun
With crackling frost, and somewhere blue wildflowers
Sway in the mountain's high oblivion
Content to dream through brief, anonymous hours.
Lo, all the earth flings beauty on the wind,
And even the wind is beauty, faintly stirred
By evening bells upon the distance thinned,
And the sure rhythms of a spiraling bird...
While I seek beauty with a desperate pen
And futile words, and fail-and fail again.
-MINNIE HITE MOODY.
INCIDENT IN THE GREEN PASTURES
I lined the benefits of God
All in a thankful row
That I might number them like sheep
The scriptural shepherds know.
I counted them that rest might come
As sleep came, long ago.
There was the ram of bed and board,
There was the spacious ewe
That counted for the casual roof
All generations knew.
And there the little lambs of hope
Came skipping, two by two.
They leaped the wall that lies between
The pasture and the fold.
I wondered as the high, thin moon
Tangled their fleece with gold,
And multiplied their argent hoofs
Till all the flocks were told.
The lambs of vision cantered by.
Pasture and byre were still.
But lo, that shape that crouches on
The silence of the hill!
No beauty where his leanness stands,
Eyes burning red, to see
The one who had not counted him
Till he had counted me...
-MARGUERITE STEEDMAN.
There is a little wisdom to be won
From Time, the ruthless runner in the dark,
Who takes our treasured days beneath the sun
And leaves us nothing but a cryptic mark
To ponder on the ground. His giant word
The pigmy mind must battle to construe,
And though it never can be plainly said,
Its meaning splits the narrow heart in two:
Love, if it be love, will wake from sleep,
As winter trees, untroubled yet by spring,
Have for uncounted Aprils felt the deep
Compulsion of the earth's awakening.
Love, if it be love, is like the earth,
That comes unnumbered seasons to re.birth.
-JANEF NEWMAN PRESTON.
Give me the beauty of imperfect things!
To me a crooked tree that wildly flings
Its gnarled arms up to touch the crystal stars
Holds all the beauty that perfection mars.
-MAVIS GAREY.
Swans sing before they die;
Leaves turn to flame;
Men-fear.
-MAVIS CAREY.
Ocean of Sound, O gravely mounting tide
Roll over me, draw under
These five slow-merging senses, so divide
And cleave asunder
The crouching body and the weighted mind
That the worn spirit shall arise and pass
Lightly again, as through translucent glass
Into that kingdom man shall never find.
Only in thee, O bodiless sea of air
Unseen as blinding wind, more beautiful
Than a new sun made manifest, more fair
Than the brief dream inhabiting the skull:
Only in thee are all my sorrows blown
Into a fragile, round
Bright nothingness of breath; through thee alone
The sight released, the broken wing made whole,
My bonded spirit shall ascend unbound
Into the vast wide ether of the Soul.
-GILBERT MAXWELL.
Take hence the sound, but leave the counterpoint.
The anatomy of music is more strictly made,
More stern than tone. Here is a pattern laid
More intricate than the union of the joint
With sinew, and more accurate than bone
Set in its socket. The separate note
Alone is vague, and each a monotone
Hung in its vacuous nonentity,
Until the bond of law and symmetry
Welds it to music like a world of stars,
And the great sweep of sound
Is fettered and is bound.
Thus Chaos brooded on itself and slept
A timeless sleep within the arm of space,
Till slowly on immensity there crept
The Word, articulate, and there was grace,
And love, that goes precisely, seeking its own,
Seeking a region it may circumscribe,
And faith, that hears behind the monotone
The theme repeated, and the cadence known,
Hearing the word spoken
And the law, unbroken.
All things indefinite find necessity,
The earth, its sun,
Ulysses moves toward his Penelope,
And no day done
But some bright star beholds its satellite.
The note remembers its fugue, and sleep its night.
And the soul of man discovers a private place:
This is its planet, this its appointed space.
-MERLE G. WALKER.
..."So they stoned Stephen." And his gentle word
Remains to tear the heart:
"Lay not this sin unto their charge, O Lord!"
But one who stood apart
Guarded the clothes the slayers had cast by,
And watched, in righteous self-complacency.
Father, this prayer! You know, and you alone,
The grief and anger that sharp words provoke.
Grant, though my hands fling not a single stone,
I hold no stoner's cloak!
-MARGUERITE STEEDMAN.
Stone proves its logic in the slanting shaft,
The line unbent,
Precise conclusion to the argument
The marble held. Some question in the brass
Has final answer in this Cretan jar;
The shape of truth, complete and circular,
Lays quiet form upon this bowl of glass.
Yet man alone his syllogism keeps,
Its end unknown,
Seeking conclusion to the premises
Of flesh and bone.
-MERLE G. WALKER.
Sleep quietly, my child.
Do not awaken
until you have lost
all memory of me
for I could not endure
the thought
of your remembering...
Rest tranquil
in the night
until the scar
of my cherishing
has blanched
and you can laugh
without the recollection
of that which comes after laughter.
Do not awaken
until the pain has passed
and that strange wisdom
which pain taught
has been long
forgotten.
I know one there
who will sing to you
in the night
as I have done
so many times.
And her song
will commemorate
a solitude.
She is for ever
set apart
from the son
of her travail
for she was a woman
and that child
whom she bore
a god.
Sleep quietly, my son.
Mary will sing to you
out of her loneliness...
-RANDOLPH SHAFFER, JUNIOR
The heart has not enough of barriers
Against the blade compassion's naked thrust.
Caught unawares, failing sometimes she must
Grope for some very wall of being-hers
It is not even in the groves of spring
To hear the speaking of sweet winds alone,
But she must hear some breathing undertone
To rend her with a hard remembering.
-GLENN W. RAINEY.
He who has launched an airship on the sky,
Defending man's riparian rights to space,
Has for his port no brief, terrestrial place,
No harbor but a dream to occupy,
No beacon but a star to pilot by,
No friends to wait him but the populace
Of some far world to greet the finished race,
No compass but the fortitude to die.
There is no goal on earth for flying men,
Whose mission is to link earth with the stars;
There is no cargo worth the tragic quest
But visions sent to some strange denizen
Of Jupiter or some sage men of Mars;
This is a fitting goal for man's unrest.
And then, when Alexander's wish of old
For many worlds to conquer, is outrun
And all the satellites of our dim sun
Are joined, as ancient prophets have foretold;
When through the chasm of ethereal cold
The webs of commerce have been brightly spun
By supermen, and time is not yet done,
Today's brave heritage shall make men bold .
For in that distant time new gods shall be,
New universes past the eternal blue,
Undreamed of planets circling suns more vast
Than all our seers, though radiant-eyed, could see,
Sublimer spheres than all our dreaming knew-
And one fierce future, greater than the past!
-ERNEST HARTSOCK.
Across the path of every living man
There falls one shadow that is not his own.
Thenceforth another leads his caravan;
From that bright hour he walks no more alone.
He thinks no more, but that his thought is shared;
Nor speaks, but that his echoed word returns
Unto its source, and thereby is declared
A mystery: a fire that ever burns;
A tree that ever blooms; a winding road
That never ends; and these eternal twain
Forever linked beneath their starry load,
Meeting to part, still part to meet again.
Though old as time itself-forever new;
I am the ageless I-and who are you?
-DAVID EDWARD UNGAR.
What though we build machines that hiss and crawl
Like fierce chimaeras, spitting scarlet fire,
Great metal birds that whirl and whine above,
And bridges like suspended woofs of wire!
What though we tell of cells and protoplasms
Tales of organic immortality,
And fly into ecstatic, heinous spasms
Over atoms floating in infinity!
Proud of the marvels of our current age,
We roll and flounder in our fine conceit,
Mere human nebula in time and space
Drunk on a current wine too light and sweet.
We are short steps beyond Neanderthal,
Spinning in universal adolescence;
We are but babes upon a still young earth
Loud-crying for eternal aquiescence.
A million years from now we will not matter:
Some geologist will dig deep down and say,
Finding a bone in twentieth century strata,
"I found another monkey skull today."
-ROBERT LESEUR JONES.
CONSOLATION
Hoping for the best,
While in the dark we're groping,
And if it never comes at all-
Had a good time hoping.
-FRANK L. STANTON.
THIS WORLD
This world that we're a-livin' in
Is mighty hard to beat;
You get a thorn with every rose,
But [ain't] the [roses] sweet?
-FRANK L. STANTON.
Let us believe
That there is hope for all the hearts that grieve;
That somewhere night
Drifts to a morning beautiful with light.
And that the wrong-
Though now it triumph-wields no scepter long.
But Right will reign
Throned where the waves of Error beat in vain!
-FRANK L. STANTON.
Ef you strike a thorn or rose,
Keep a-goin'!
Ef it hails, or ef it snows,
Keep a-goin'!
'Tain't no use to sit an' whine,
When the fish ain't on yer line;
Bait yer hook an' keep a-tryin'-
Keep a-goin'!
When the weather kills yer crop,
Keep a-goin'!
When you tumble from the top,
Keep a-goin'!
S'pose you're out o' every dime,
Bein' so ain't any [crime];
Tell the world you're feelin' [prime]-
Keep a-goin'!
When it looks like all is up,
Keep a-goin'!
Drain the sweetness from the cup,
Keep a-goin'!
See the wild birds on the wing,
Hear the bells that sweetly ring,
When you feel like singin' [sing]-
Keep a-goin'!
-FRANK L. STANTON.
This is my kingdom! Here I sway,
Uncrowned, unsceptered, day by day,
A mightier realm, and fairer far,
Than any ruled by King or Czar.
Beside the little table, there,
Behold my throne-an old arm-chair.
My royal state it well befits-
No King on his as easy sits.
In rank and order due aligned,
There my liege Lords of Heart and Mind
Meet me, when I have crossed the sill,
Ready to do their sovereign's will.
No matter what I wish to know,
Of heaven above or earth below,
Some modern Sage or Saint of old
Will tell me all that can be told.
What King has nobler retinue,
Or counsellors more wise and true?
Has greater treasure, safe laid by
For use of heart and soul, than I?
Prose-writers, playwrights, poets, wits
Strive, in the way which best befits
The mood I happen to be in,
My praise, my tears, or smiles to win.
What care I what the world's about?
I close the door and shut it out;
What matter strife, or storm or gloom?
Sunshine and peace are in my room.
Good books to read, a mind at ease,
A place to dream in when I please,
Can I not claim, by right divine,
My crown and say, "The world is mine"?
-CHARLES W. HUBNER.
*This poem is included as an example of what might be called the
Georgia Victorian School of Poetry.
O be not mute, you sweetest Orator!
Nor leave the air to carry common sound,
When it can thus bestow your utterance
Upon this host of heart. I dare not wish
To be its source, but let me be some shallow
Guiding bed, to feel its liquid notes
Pass over me. An endless course allow
Me be-a bed where even sleep might keep
A wakefulness like Spring's articulation.
Your sweet unquiet I shall take where never
Sound strays: being the silence that bears sound-
Some brooklet be, and I shall be your course.
-ROBERT NORRIS.
To scan the whole, time-freed, shames mortal, dearth
Of patience. Midnight is but sleeping noon;
Rare fruits and flowers, unsurpassed on earth,
Are seeds in amber-trellised gardens of the moon.
To him whose thought has wings, time wears no veil
Of hours. He knows that from the longest wars
Comes strongest truce, and contemplates the pale,
Unhurried loveliness of slow-dissolving stars.
-MARSHALL WALKER, JUNIOR
If I could ride the hurricane
And learn
How the wild winds turn;
If I could find in stratosphere
What force
Keeps universes in their course;
If I could sit astride a star
And know
Why things are so;
I might also be wise. In fact
Would be
Well prepared to face eternity.
-CATHERINE WALKER.
Henceforth I will be virtuous
In a calm, meticulous way;
Methodical and punctual
The live-long day.
I will fold and press my scárves,
Sedately hang my clothes,
Lining out my many shoes
In neat proper rows.
My perfumes and my powders,
And my bottles and my jars,
I will pinion from disorder
With smooth glass bars.
I will always be at home,
Quite pleasantly at beck and call,
And nothing that I ever say
Will startle anyone at all.
-MARTHA HODGSON ELLIS.
I have felt unknown pain at loveliness-
The swirl of silver rain
Falling at dusk about a steeple's spire
Has stabbed with all 'the keenness of a blade.
A chain of geese hung in a smoky sky
And autumn trees
Wrapped in their flaming cerements,
Have made me feel something
Beyond the salutation of the winter elements.
So have I known the beauty of the snow
Dropping its myriad flake through twilight hours,
And then, at dawn,
The far, white stretch of quietude,
And low, flake-drowsy pines.
I shall have peace from this some day,
The calm that only old and waiting hearts may have,
But I shall know, that once,
With senses taut with pain,
I saw a white moth pass,
Flitting into the dusk.
-ROBERT LESEUR JONES.
This land is bright
With curious light-
A radiance born
Of the unicorn,
He of the single centered horn,
Elusive, light of hoof, forlorn.
See how he stands in the forest there,
White to his shortest glistening hair,
Grazing the slight
Grass, poised for flight:
See in his eyes that mythical stare?
Never be sure
There lives so pure
Select a creature.
Mark each feature,
But stay a tree or so behind...
Never draw nearer lest you find
The light a fable-cold, unkind,
And him a child's wish in your mind.
-GILBERT MAXWELL
Men call death coward that he strikes the young
And shows no pity for the withered old
Who ward him off with wrinkled hand. The cold
And sudden fear of him still dries the tongue
That shapes his name; even the hunted hare
Skimming a hill spends troubled breath in vain
To keep some saving space of kindly plain
Between him and his final dumb despair.
Yet death is strong,and he is beautiful,
Naked of false beguilement, swift to deal
His ancient blow. He lays no Judas kiss
Upon the cheek, no silver flat and dull
Will buy his pardon or delay the steel,-
His brother life might learn from him of this.
-CONSTANCE GAY MORENUS.