NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY

TRENT UNIVERSITY
 THE WORKS OF

WITTER BYNNER

GENERAL EDITOR, JAMES KRAFT

SELECTED POEMS

Edited, and with a critical introduction, by Richard Wilbur;

biographical introduction by James Kraft

LIGHT VERSE AND SATIRES

Edited, and with an introduction, by William Jay Smith

THE CHINESE TRANSLATIONS

THE JADE MOUNTAIN

Introduction by Burton Watson

THE WAY OF LIFE ACCORDING TO LAOTZU

Introduction by David Lattimore

PROSE PIECES

Edited, and with an introduction, by James Kraft

LETTERS

Edited, and with an introduction, by James Kraft

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/selectedpoemsOOOObynn
SELECTED POEMS
 WITTER BYNNER

DRAWN BY KAHLIL GIBRAN IN 1919

 THE WORKS OF

WITTER BYNNER
GENERAL EDITOR, JAMES KRAFT

SELECTED
POEMS
• 5sS;5€3sCS!£ •

EDITED, AND WITH A CRITICAL

INTRODUCTION, BY

Richard Wilbur
BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION BY

James Kraft

FARRAR'STRAUS’GIROUX / NEW YORK

35S3 Yhs Pi ij

Copyright © 2977, 1978 by The Witter Bynner Foundation

Copyright © 1915, 1916, 1919, 1920, 1925, 1926,
1927, 1928, 1929, 1930, 1931, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937,
1940, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1950, 1954,
1955, 1957, 1960 by Witter Bynner
Copyright renewed 1947, 1948, 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958,
1959, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1967, 1968
by Witter Bynner
Copyright renewed 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1974
by The Executors of the Estate of Witter Bynner
All rights reserved
First printing, 1978
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada by
McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto
Designed by Cynthia Krupat

The quotation from Letters of Wallace Stevens,

edited by Holly Stevens, is reprinted by permission
of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1966 by
Holly Stevens

Bynner, Witter, 1881-1968. / Selected poems.

(The Works of Witter Bynner)
1. Wilbur, Richard. / II. Series.
PS3503.Y45A17 1977 / 811'.5'2 / 77-21365

This book is published with the aid of a grant from

The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry
 Contents

Biographical Introduction by James Kraft / xvii

Critical Introduction by Richard Wilbur / lxxxi

from An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems (1907)

The New Life / 3
Mount Auburn Cemetery / 4

from The New World (1915)

Night / 9
There Was a Poet Celia Loved / 1 0
Grieve Not for Beauty 111

from Spectra (1916)

Opus 62 / 1 5
Opus 14 / 1 6
Opus 101 I 17
Opus 78/18
Opus 79 / 1 9

from Grenstone Poems (1917)

This Wave / 2 3
The Patient to the Doctors I 24
The Fields I 25

3:19558'
 v i i i • Contents

Poplars I 2 6
A Thrush in the Moonlight I 27

Grasses I 28
An Old Elegy for a Child / 2 9
Rhythm / 3 0
Treasure / 31
Driftwood / 32
The Dead Loon / 3 3
She Has a Thousand Presences / 3 4
Encounter / 3 5
Rose-Time / 3 6

Shasta / 3 7

A Spring Song in a Cafe / 3 8

The Highest Bidder / 3 9

Passing Near / 4 0

Breath / 4 2
At the Last / 4 3

Epitaph / 4 4

During a Chorale by Cesar Franck / 45

A Prayer / 4 6

from The Beloved Stranger {1919)

The Wave I 49

Dream / 5 0

The Wall / 52
Lightning / 52
Cherry-Blossoms / 5 3

Horses / 5 4

The Wind / 5 5

Fear / 5 6
 Contents • ix

A Sigh / 5 7

T/ze Boatmen / 5 8
The Cataract / 5 9

Weariness / 6 0

Lament / 6 1

The Moon / 6 2

I Gamble / 6 3
I Leer / 6 4

from A Canticle of Pan (1920)

From Sea / 6 7

In Havana / 6 8

Haskell / 6 9

A Fortune-Teller / 70

Meadow-Shoes / 7 2

The Enchanted Toad / 7 3

The Enchanted Swans / 7 4
The Swimmer / 7 5

Through a Gateway in Japan / 7 6

In Kamakura / 7 7

Chinese Notes / 7 8

Chinese Drawings / 8 0

The Chinese Horseman / 8 3

Tiles / 8 5

Saint-Gaudens / 8 6
Foam / 8 7

Sands / 8 8

from Pins for Wings (1920)

Conrad Aiken / 9 1

Richard Aldington / 9 1
 x * Contents

John Jay Chapman I 9 1

T. S. Eliot I 91
Thomas Hardy / 9 1
John Masefield I 9 1

Harriet Monroe I 9 1

Alfred Noyes I 9 1
Ezra Pound I 9 1
Lizette Woodworth Reese I 9 1

James Stephens I 9 1

from Caravan (1925)

O Hunted Huntress / 9 5
Broken Circle I 9 6

Wistaria I 9 7
The City / 9 8
Donald Evans I 9 9
A Winter Cat-Tail / 10 0

D. H. Lawrence / 10 1

To a Young Inquirer / 10 5

A Country Cottage / 10 6

A Dance for Rain / 10 7

Theology /111

Loosen Your Marrow / 112

Epithalamium and Elegy / 1 1 3

from Indian Earth (1929)

Harmonica / 117

The Bats / 119

Moonlight Rain / 1 2 0

Folk-Song / 12 1
 Contents • x i

Market-Day / 12 2

A Countryman / 12 3
A Boatman / 12 4
In Mescala / 1 2 5
Lovers / 1 2 6

A Beautiful Mexican / 127

Crow's Beet / 12 8

A Foreigner / 12 9
The Web / 1 3 0

Tule / 13 1

Water-Hyacinths / 1 3 2

Moving Leaves / 1 3 3

Calendar / 13 4

Idols / 1 3 5

Snake Dance / 1 3 7

Shalako / 14 0

from Eden Tree (1931)

Chinese Procession / 1 4 5

From Part XVIII / 147

Alone I 1 49

No Anodyne / 15 0

from Guest Book (1935)

Benedick / 15 3

Dust / 1 5 4

Greenwich Villager / 15 5

Hostess / 15 6

Oats ! 157
 x ii • Contents

Pettifogger / 15 8

Sentimentalist / 15 9

from Against the Cold (1940)

The Sowers / 16 3
I Need No Sky / 16 4
Moon Fragrance / 16 5

Echo / 16 6
Summer-Leaves / 167

The Wind at the Candle / 16 8

The Wintry Mind / 16 9

The Edge / 17 0

Midnight / 1 7 1

At His Funeral / 17 2

Spring and a Mother Dead / 17 3

One's Oivn Requiem / 17 4

Episode of Decay / 17 5

Moles / 17 7

Bell-wethers / 17 8

After a Rain at Mokanshan / 17 9

Sonnets from "Against the Cold" / 1 8 0

II / 18 0
XVI / 180

XX / 181

from Take Away the Darkness (1947)

Defeat / 18 5

Dead in the Philippines / 1 8 6

Prayer / 18 7
To a Light-Hearted Friend / 1 8 8

Masthead / 18 9

Chart / 19 0

Snow / 19 1

Young Men Should Know I 19 2

Friendship / 1 9 3

Else Were No Ease / 19 4

Answer / 1 9 5

To Li Po / 19 6

The Two Windows / 197

Testament / 1 9 8

Archer / 19 9

Rose / 20 0

A Letter / 20 1

More Lovely than Antiquity / 20 2

Duet / 20 3

Burros / 2 0 4

Solitude / 2 0 5

Snake / 2 0 6

Impartial Be / 2 0 7

Circe / 2 0 8

Clouds / 2 0 9

A. E. Housman / 2 10

The Mantle / 2 1 1

Autumn Tree / 2 12

from Book of Lyrics (1955)

A Stream / 2 15
Prodigal Son / 2 16
 x i v ' Contents

Squanderings / 2 17

Out of the Sea / 2 1 8

Descending Landscape / 2 19

The Vessel / 2 2 0

Island / 2 2 1
Gothic /222
Winter Morning / 2 23

Grasses / 2 2 4

from New Poems (1960)

All tempest / 22 7
Any other time would have done / 22 8

Barnacles on underposts of the piers / 2 2 9

Coming down the stairs / 2 3 0

Even my friend / 2 3 1

He never knew what was the matter with him / 2 3 2

He noticed from the dark shore / 2 3 3

Kindness can go too high / 2 3 4

What is this death / 2 3 5

You fish for people / 23 6

Uncollected Poems

Santa Eel 2 3 9

El Musico / 2 4 0

A Mexican Vase / 2 4 1

These Hours / 2 4 2

Poplar at Dawn / 2 4 3

Lakes / 2 4 4

The Titanic / 2 4 5
 Contents • xv

Bartender at Banff / 24 6
The Stone / 2 5 2

Sculpture on a Beach I 2 5 2
The Web / 25 3

Robert Frost (1874-1963) / 25 4

 Biographical Introduction

JAMES KRAFT

Who is Witter Bynner? The question seems amusing, as if no

one could invent such a name, and if by some quirk it were in¬

vented, no one would really be given it. In fact the legal name

was Harold Witter Bynner, but he was usually called "Hal" by

his friends and signed his work Witter Bynner. At one point

early in this century, it was a name as well-known in poetry

circles as the names of Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Carl Sand¬

burg, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He wrote for the major
periodicals, as well as for the little magazines, and compiled

eighteen volumes of verse, mostly published by Alfred A.

Knopf. He traveled twice to China, in 1917 and 1920, and trans¬

lated into English two of the Chinese classics, a selection of the

T'ang poets which he entitled The Jade Mountain, and the Tao

Teh Ching, which Bynner called The Way of Life According to

Laotzu. He knew D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, traveled with

them on their first Mexican trip, was the source for a minor

character in The Plumed Serpent, and in 1951 wrote a con¬

troversial account of his trip and of the Lawrences, Journey

with Genius. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1881,

raised in Norwich, Connecticut, and Brookline, Massachusetts,

and went to Harvard with Wallace Stevens and Franklin Delano

Roosevelt. Upon his graduation, he worked with Lincoln Steffens,

Ida Tarbell, and Willa Cather at McClure's magazine, where he

arranged for the first publication in this country of A. E. Hous-

 xviii ‘ Biographical Introduction

man and was one of the early champions of O. Henry. Pound's

father asked Bynner if the young Ezra should be sent to Europe

for the experience, and Bynner readily agreed. Bynner was a

very close friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay and she accepted his

proposal of marriage, a proposal they later agreed was not a

good idea. In 1915 he translated Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris

at the request of Isadora Duncan in order for her to have a

version of a Greek play that was not stilted; in 1956 the trans¬
lation was included in the University of Chicago's collected

Greek plays as one of the first modern stage versions of a Greek

drama.
For forty-six years he lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, thirty-

four of these with one man, Robert Hunt, in a large, rambling,

and eccentric adobe house filled with Chinese scrolls and jade;

Indian jewelry, rugs, and baskets; and Mexican pottery and san-

tos. He was an early supporter of equal suffrage and an admirer

and advocate of the blacks—especially their writers—and of the

American Indians, about whom he wrote some very good poetry.

He also owned a house in Chapala, Mexico, and wrote well of the

people of that country. An intensely devoted American, little

interested in Europe and greatly interested in Walt Whitman's
sense of our democracy as a brotherhood, he avidly supported

FDR and believed in the need for America to tolerate Com¬

munism if it was to consider itself a democracy. A Rabelaisian

storyteller, a social man whose friends said he alone could make

a party a success, a wit and punster with a laugh broad and

high, he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke created one of

the greatest hoaxes in American letters. For two years, in all

the best magazines, under the names of Emanuel Morgan and

Anne Knish, they published the Spectra poems, a "school"

started to mock the seriousness of Imagism and the pretensions

 Biographical Introduction • xix

of the new intellectual poetry—the poetry that later pre¬

dominated in this country and that was in part responsible for

leaving Bynner an increasingly forgotten writer for the last
thirty of his eighty-seven years.

Most of his life a man of means, he became in the late

1950's a millionaire who always spent money like a frugal New

Englander. His friend Robert Hunt, although twenty-five years
younger, died in 1964. One year later, Bynner suffered a severe
stroke that necessitated his complete dependency on nurses for

his last three and a half years. During this time he existed in a

silence and isolation he had intensely fought to avoid all his life.
Who, indeed, is Witter Bynner?

By nature he was an open, generous man, and by belief he

was one who saw no value in consistency—in this he went back

to Emerson's remark that a foolish consistency showed a little

mind. Also he was unable to be intimate with anyone, for he was

too large a spirit with too quick a talent that he could too easily

disperse. Maybe his life was more open and less well struc¬

tured than other lives, more episodic and not as comprehensible

in the whole. Perhaps more lives would be seen to be like his if

we knew as much of what Bynner in his life made no effort to

hide. For although Bynner clearly did not understand many

aspects of himself, he showed, especially for his time, an un¬

usually high degree of frankness about his life.

On a muggy day—the tenth of August 1881—Mrs. Annie

Louise Bynner, nee Brewer of Plainfield, Connecticut, not yet

twenty-three and eight months pregnant, accidentally dropped

 x x • Biographical Introduction

a bird in its cage from the second floor of a four-story brown-

stone in then-very-fashionable Brooklyn; in her frantic attempt

to reach the ground before the family cat got there, she pre¬
cipitated young Harold prematurely into the world. Freudians

may delight in this. A caged bird falls to the earth and out

comes a poet. Questions do remain, however, and we are not

given further details. Did the bird survive, fly away, and sing,

or was it crushed in the fall? Did the cat get it? Did the poet
escape from his demanding and high-spirited mother, or was

he always held back by her controlling propriety?

This muggy August day was almost exactly eight months

after the wedding of Annie Louise and Thomas Edgarton

Bynner. About the wedding, we know that Annie wanted the

word "obey" omitted from the service and that Thomas forgot
the wedding license. Born in 1853 in Clinton, Massachusetts,

the father was a civil engineer of many jobs and a peculiar

character who allowed all to call him "Dive." He described
himself to his future wife's brother as "the habitue of the

dramshop and the turf—the gambling hall and the brothel."

Some kind of forced bravado and a need for truth made this

often melancholy man state to Annie's father, in an earnest

appeal for her hand, that he had been heavily into drink—and

worse—but would reform. Dive did not, of course, reform, and

Annie Louise, Harold, and a second son, Edwin Tyler (called

Tim), moved to her relatives' in Norwich, Connecticut, in De¬

cember 1888. Dive died in 1891, from depression, drink, tu¬

berculosis—or something else so unacceptable that it was never

mentioned. His sister Jeanie wrote to young Harold: "How

near your young father came to being a poet and how hand¬

some and agreeable when sober! What a vehicle rum is for

misery and shame." The same sister spoke of the marriage of

 Biographical Introduction • xx i

Annie and Thomas as a frustrated, brilliant match: "Your

mother and he were just the wrong too high-spirited rather
beautiful-to-see pair to come together."
The father's family was English, originally Welsh, and
came to this country from London in 1832. Bynner's great¬
grandfather arrived with his seven children—one being Bynner's
grandfather Edwin, then sixteen. Also a man of some drink
and many jobs—newspaper editor, painter, auctioneer, freight
agent, and dealer in brick and lime—Edwin was in 1896 de¬
scribed in the History of the Origin of the Town of Clinton,
Massachusetts, 1653-1865, as an important editor of the Clinton
Courant:

Mr. Bynner was a man of literary ability, although he was

at times more fluent than a severe taste might demand. Efe
was a man of vivid imagination, keen wit, sound judgment,
honest fearlessness and a high ideal of his editorial posi¬
tion. In local affairs, his influence was always used to re¬
strain lawlessness and to promote enterprise. His frequent
editorials on such public needs as fire engines, railroads
and gas works, on beautifying the Common and planting
trees along the streets, and especially on liberality in mat¬
ters of education by means of schools, books and the lec¬
ture system, must have had an important influence in the
development of the community.

To these engaging qualities should be added the facts that

he married into an old (1645) and well-to-do family—the Edgar-
tons of Massachusetts—that he had seven children, and that he
was known for his intense feelings against monarchy and
slavery and for his superb qualities as a storyteller—an attribute
 x x i i • Biographical Introduction

that put him much in demand as a newspaper writer and at

public social functions, which frequently included people like

Emerson and Louis Agassiz. In Boston in 1870 he had a fatal

fall from an omnibus on a winter's night—perhaps he was

drunk or drinking—and was spoken of in obituaries in the

Boston and New York papers as a man of incomparable quali¬

ties of wit, repartee, and mimicry. "Among the rarest and

choicest spirits ... To secure Bynner for any convivial under¬
taking was considered almost indispensable—for his presence

was an augury of success, as his absence was a precursor of dis¬

appointment, if not of failure." It was also noted that he "lacked

aim, and persistence, and while conscious of his own powers he

yet distrusted their promises." Clearly a man of talent, energy,

nervousness, and mixed directions.

One of his sons was Edwin Lassetter Bynner, a man who

remained a bachelor and lived most of his quiet life in Boston,
hie was the writer of several popular historical novels on Ameri¬

can themes—Agnes Surriage (1886) is his best-known work—

a fine historian, a poor playwright, and an indifferent lawyer

who had received an LL.D. from Elarvard Law School. His

obituaries by Everett Edward Hale and Barrett Wendell praised

his talent as modest and his character as serious and admirable,

if singularly lacking in any particularly demonstrative quality

that they could portray. He was a quiet, well-bred New England

gentleman of the nineteenth-century kind, a rare spirit whose

quiet eccentricity was carefully channeled into historical fiction.

Bynner's mother's side was also unusual. The Brewers were

old, Protestant, highly respectable Connecticut clergymen,

schoolteachers, and, more recently, thriving bankers and

businessmen. They appeared to be like the straight, tall elm

trees of New England—native and solid—and counted in their

 Biographical Introduction ’ x x i i i

past a Chauncy who was the second president of Harvard

College, a Bishop John Tyler of Norwich, and even the august

Bushnells of Hartford, one of the most prominent Connecticut

families. They were proud of their independence of spirit and

showed a stern frankness in analyzing their own faults and

those of others. These people were—and remained, in the poet's

mother—headstrong, proper, and demanding; people who, in

their public roles, seemed to have a drive toward respectability,

power, and independence, but these qualities never quite came

together in their private, intimate selves. One relative is re¬

ferred to as having misbehaved, appropriately out West, and

Annie's father is supposed to have made home life quite miser¬

able with his private drinking. There is also a family tradition

of debilitating stomach illnesses and neuralgic headaches—

both of which were inherited by Harold and his mother. If the

Bynners went in for excessive self-expression, the Brewers

sought to hold it back. Annie Louise named her first son

Harold Witter after members of her mother's family, but not

until after a four months' debate with Dive, who wanted to

name him after his own family. During the interval this much-

named infant existed only as “Baby Bynner."

There is an old Bynner family photograph of a class, grade

7 or 8, posed in front of a school, probably in Brookline. In the

last of four rows, on the right, is young Harold, taller than the

others, stepping slightly forward with one shoulder tipped to

the camera, the head high, the hair dark and curly, the gaze

clear, and the mouth slightly open, the entire face showing an

adult assurance that one guesses is created consciously through

the deliberate pose of a clever child. It is a handsome face, a bit

 x x i v • Biographical Introduction

too firm in its gaze to be convincing; one senses that he is try¬

ing very hard to appear mature.

In the second row on the left side stands the only black
child in the white group, carefully dressed in dark clothes and

hat, the face and body heavy, the eyes frightened wide. She
seems out of place here, too carefully dressed, ill at ease—or is

that how one looks back at her? Perhaps she is only looking
into the strange camera, perhaps she is the most natural of all

in expressing a fear of what this machine is recording. The

photograph is otherwise unidentified.

In New York City in 1902, when Bynner began to see the

world on his own, he also began to meet blacks, especially

through his friend Carl Van Vechten. Bynner was interested

in their artists and writers, liked their music, sang their

spirituals well, and later gave Countee Cullen in 1925 and

Langston Hughes in 1926 the Witter Bynner Undergraduate
Award for the best poetry. At a time when few were comfortable

in mixed society, Bynner appeared easy in it. He was also an

early and ardent supporter of equality for women and for

blacks, and later for Indians and Spanish-speaking Americans.

He really believed in Walt Whitman's democratic America as
"the new world," the title of his second volume of poems, pub¬
lished in 1915. In 1944 The New Republic printed "Defeat,"

his poem on the blacks (see page 185). It was considered an

important statement and circulated among blacks in manuscript,

and then, unknown to Bynner, was reprinted in The New
Masses.

These frank affiliations created the myths that Bynner was

Whitman's illegitimate son—born, it would have to have been,

when Whitman was sixty-two—and that he had black ancestors.

Both stories can be understood as explanations for the human

 Biographical Introduction ‘ xxv

need to understand what seemed abnormal at the time. Yet we

need not go that far afield. Belief in full equality now is more

acceptable; perhaps more people held it then, and with some

hope, than we may now want to realize. It is also true that

Bynner's past was not so conventional as to exclude this belief;
nor is the past so uniform in belief or idea as we make it. The

past, when seen in all its elements, is as much a study of the

present possibilities and confusions as it is of lost ideals and

simplicities.

In October 1892, Annie Louise, Harold, and his brother

moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, to live with Dive's married
sister, Jeanie Ernst, a witty, opinionated woman whom Bynner

always liked. This period was one of financial difficulties for

Mrs. Bynner, who played the piano for a private dancing class
and taught at a school in Boston run by Dive,s other sister,

Caroline Naomi Bynner, a woman who had remained a spinster

and had formidable will and intellect. She was a great reader
of English and French literature and a strict moralist. The two
sisters felt a strong responsibility to help the busy mother

direct Harold through his early years. The terms they set for

him must have affected him powerfully. Here is Aunt Jeanie

writing to the young man:

... I look to you to redeem the forfeit of your race. You

inherit much good blood—and even better brains from

your paternal side—but some deep life errors from both

sides of ancestors—weaknesses which you must efface—just

be clean and true—and all the rest will come—polish your

honor every day.
 x xv i • Biographical Introduction

Aunt Naomi wrote this to Bynner:

You have a highly nervous organization, inherited

from both sides I regret to say—the Bynners were and are
all of the fussy petty apprehensive kind. It does no good.
Try to down it all . . . Take better care of your health.
Try to live more regularly. You were never vicious, but
lawless. All the old Bynners sat up nights and indulged
themselves to their hearts' content—and they all had neu¬

ralgia.

Bynner's reaction to such pressure was what one might

expect. After a dinner one evening with Aunt Naomi, he re¬
turned to his room and wrote in his diary: ". . . was forced for
a while to take life as a thing of honor, purpose and character.
Much as I love her, I fear there was born in me the lines of a
life dishonorable, purposeless and of doubtful character."

After four years at Brookline High School, where he was

editor of The Sagamore, the school literary magazine, Bynner
was admitted to Harvard, with aid from the Price Greenleaf
Fund. It was 1898, and this heavily pressured young man was
in his seventeenth year.
Harvard became an ideal. Like Housman's Shropshire, it
remained for Bynner a place of the great potential found in
youth. His first book contained a long poem, also used as the
book's title. An Ode to Harvard (he later changed the title to
Young Harvard), about a graduate who, returning after four

years, remembers what had been so beautiful. He attempts to

capture the image of the past in verse, as if this act of writing
 Biographical Introduction ’ xxvii

could hold the past. Bynner says no castle in Spain can mean

more than to see the turns and turrets of the buildings in the

Yard. The poem touches collegiate emotions we no longer seem

to experience, but that does not contradict the fact that this is
a work of deeply felt idealism. Its spectrum—from college classes

and talks with teachers and students to great football games

and evenings—ends with these lines about Harvard that repre¬
sent what Bynner wished to hold forever:

O mean to all those others whom you'll see

The thousand things in one you mean to me!

O lift forever on the shield of truth.

Before the armies of mortality.

The sounding challenge of the spear of youth!

He says in the "Ode" what is true, that he was not really

interested in his courses, except for some of those in English.
His study of languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German—

was often deficient. Even at this point in his life, he did little

that did not interest him directly. He took a course in the

history of philosophy with Professors George Herbert Palmer

and Josiah Royce (grade B —); one in Shakespeare with George

Lyman Kittredge (whom he found a frightful dullard and who

in return gave him his only C in an English course); one in the

drama from 1642 to 1900 with George Pierce Baker (only a

B); and one in the philosophy of aesthetics with George San¬

tayana (who awarded Bynner an A — ). He graduated with

honors, but only in English. The record is not as brilliant as the

talent would suggest. He did what he could do well, with an

amazing talent and uncritical ease. His Harvard professor Barrett

 x x v i i i ’ Biographical Introduction

Wendell, who had been a friend of his uncle, the novelist Edwin

Lassetter Bynner, wrote on an assignment:

With more than usual sensitiveness to detail, which

makes your writing individual and interesting, you are apt

to be infirm of literary purpose. That you hand in three

sonnets instead of one is typical, I think, of your con¬
stitutional disinclination to decision. In consequence, your

work is sometimes fastidiously eccentric. Your aim should

be assertive strength. Your grade is B. By stronger concen¬

tration you may raise it.

The character begins to appear—the open, excessive, all-

encompassing lack of discrimination that made him act but fre¬

quently led to failure; none of these traits ever seemed to bother

him. He was not free of the past, of its inheritance and its
burdens, but he seemed to be striking out against its confining

and debilitating concerns, without really knowing how or why.

His closest friend at college was the poet Arthur Davison Ficke,
who referred to Bynner as often found in a state of exhilaration,

running "through the yard shrieking, with streaming hair."

Bynner accepted that comment as adequately descriptive. An

acquaintance took him to task for what was weak in his char¬

acter and Bynner recorded in his diary: "God help me to eat

and walk and sleep regularly, to be silly as little as possible,

to like people, to appreciate time and opportunity, to cultivate

a sense of duty and not to bury my silver." Bynner was con¬

cerned with his friend's lecture to him because he believed it

was true, but could see nothing to do about it beyond saying,

"Of course I made resolutions during the lecture."

In one of his earliest poems for The Advocate—which he
 Biographical Introduction ‘ x x i x

was the first member of his class to be asked to join, by its

editor, Wallace Stevens—he showed his colors completely, per¬

haps more so than he intended. Bynner gave this light piece the
heavy title "Revolution":

Away with that frown from your forehead!

Away with that storm out there!

And away with the sign that you've done with your wine!
Away with you. Emperor Care!

Here's
Down with Emperor Care!

Scorn his command!

Scoff at his hand!
Death to Emperor Care!

Drink deep, and make love, and be merry!

Of morrows you've wealth to spare.

Oh drink deep; for to-day is fast racing away—

Drink death to you, Emperor Care!

Here's

Death to Emperor Care!

Pluck off his crown!

Drag the fool down!

Death to the Emperor Care!

This solemn pledge to frivolity goes on for three more stanzas

and suggests that hidden inside Bynner, perhaps not even be¬

yond his self-perception, may have been a still point related far

too closely to the despair and sickness of his father and grand-
 XXX • Biographical Introduction

father. His clown was a deliberate fool who made fun in order

to please the company, who in turn were there to keep the

loneliness away. In his folly there was an element of despera¬

tion. Bynner began a “revolution," at least for the males in his

family, and in the best way he could conceive. He did not let
a progression of circumstances bring him to drink, sickness,

and despair, but resolutely heeding his aunts' call to redeem

his race, he turned the family pattern away from self-reflection

and analysis toward high-spirited independence and determined

fun. The price one pays for such acts of will is a certain loss
of the self, a shutting away of the pain and with it some kind
of deep self-reflection. I don't suppose that at this point Bynner

even knew what he was doing. He simply chose what seemed

the best possible course. He had then and throughout his life
virtually no interest in or capacity for self-analysis or sustained

philosophical inquiry, and he had a blatant hostility to psycho¬

logical analysis. He seemed to accept what is, or had the re¬

markable ability totally to reconstruct events in memory to suit

his sense of what should be. It is as if the analytical process

were quite alien to his brilliant, sharp, emotive, and playful

being. To tie down his spirit in analysis was to destroy its cre¬

ative self.
For Bynner, the life of the college was in the fun he had

and the romance he saw everywhere around him. Stoughton 3

was his room for four years, and was "hung solid with framed
photographs of paintings, sculpture, architecture, or classic ruins,

and on the mantel family photographs." There was a grate for

a coal fire, and no running water, except from a pump in the

Yard. Just above him was Professor Charles Townsend Cope¬

land, and Bynner's habitually late hours, booming voice, and

high shrieking laughter necessitated endless scenes with "Copey"

 Biographical Introduction • xxxi

and in the Dean s office. The famous Mr. Copeland was patient

and good-natured, but Bynner was insatiable. He liked to get

up at 2:15, assemble friends for buckwheat cakes and ginger ale

at Rammy's, a local eatery on Harvard Square, and return for

more talk and laughter. He formed a club of about ten friends

to read Meredith's novels. The group included Arthur Ficke;

Lyman Beecher Stowe; George Claire St. John, the future head¬
master of the Choate School; and Karl Young, later to be a pro¬

fessor of English at Wisconsin and Yale. These readings also

resulted in noise—at one, Bynner, after drinking a tankard of

beer, could not stop talking—but out of this love of Meredith

came an essay, George Meredith's Style," that won Bynner

second prize in the 1902 Bowdoin contest for the best literary

essay. The Boylston Prize for Elocution (second place) also went
to him that year.

He went repeatedly into Boston to the theater, especially to

see Minnie Maddern Fiske, and to the opera, where he was a

"super," and to the symphony. He would frequently end such

evenings at Marliave's, a restaurant with a bohemian character

he enjoyed. He taught French to a class of one—"a man 45

with a mustache"—at the Prospect Union, an early Harvard

version of extension education. He became involved with the

suffrage movement. After a speech in 1901 in Brookline, a

woman said to Bynner's mother, "You must be very proud of

your son," to which she replied with pleasure, "You don't know

him." He wrote in his diary that Wallace Stevens's high spirits

one evening at Rammy's prompted him to leap the counter in

mock rape of the waitress, landing both of them in a heap on

the floor. Unfortunately, a professor was present who reported

him, and this event is supposed to have led to Stevens's early

departure from Harvard. Bynner became "Hal" during these

 x x x i i • Biographical Introduction

college years, lost the election for college poet to Bobbie Green,
296 to 76, and on November 24, 1901, reported in his journal:

"Last night I made new friends in strange rooms. After walking

alone from Marliave's to City Hall, I boarded what I knew as

a car because it had a yellow curl on its forehead and pink silk
underdrawers." At dinner one evening with George Santayana,

Bynner, with the audacity that he enjoyed showing, asked the

cautious, aesthetic Spaniard if he was in love with anyone. The

philosopher stared at him coldly and solemnly answered, "One

moon has set, and another not yet risen." When writing
the "Ode to Harvard" a few years later, Bynner described

Santayana as

The Spanish poet-philosopher whose eye would so beguile

That you'd see no more his meaning, but the flaring altar-

oil
That was burning as for worshippers inside.

Bynner's mother had remarried in 1901. Her new husband,

Walter Liveridge Wellington, was a successful businessman,

rather simple in manner, and very generous, a man who had

been like a relative: his first wife, Sarah, had been engaged to
the brother of Bynner's father; this brother died of smallpox

with Sarah tending him; she then married Wellington and died
young. Wellington, who was supposed to have been with

Bynner's father when he died, married Annie Louise Bynner in

December 1901 and moved with her to a splendid house on St.

Mark's Avenue in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, he, like Bynner's

own father, also suffered from extreme depression. He was in¬

stitutionalized and died in 1914, quite mad and pathetic in his

 Biographical Introduction • x x x i i i

simplicity. His daughter, Ruth, whom Annie Louise raised, had

multiple sclerosis, became addicted to drugs and to alcohol, and

died in 1919, having caused many painful problems for Bynner's

mother over the years. In spite of all her difficulties, Ruth Well¬
ington was able to elicit great love from her family. When she

died, she left a substantial legacy to her stepmother and a small

inheritance to Bynner and his brother, Tim.

For a man of his age—twenty-one in 1902—and his time,

Bynner had traveled extensively: from Brooklyn through all of

New England and some of New York State, into Canada as far
north as Quebec City, to Buffalo, to Chicago to visit college

friends and his Palmer relatives, and to Davenport, Iowa, to see

Arthur Ficke and his family. Upon graduation, he expected to

stay on at Harvard to teach English, but Mr. Wellington, with

Annie Louise's encouragement, proposed a tour of Europe and

then a return to New York for a year's try at business. The

proposal suited everyone, especially Bynner, who had not been

certain about his choice of teaching. An interview was arranged

at McClure's in July; a position was promised him to start in

October upon his return; and he then sailed to Europe on the

S.S. Philadelphia.

His grand tour started in London. He then crossed the

Channel to Mont-Saint-Michel, Amiens, Beauvois, Paris, Ver¬

sailles, Chartres; Switzerland—especially to Geneva and to climb

various mountains; Heidelberg, the Rhine, Hamburg; Holland;

and back to London and Cambridge, Lincoln, Melrose Abbey,

Edinburgh, Stratford, Oxford, and Southampton, from where he

sailed September 13.
 x x xiv • Biographical Introduction

Bynner called London "a larger and older Boston where

nobody spits." He made notes about his travels that are more

crisply descriptive than they are reflective.

London:
Women and children at bars late at night.
Gamins in twos and threes, arms locked, singing popular

songs.
Women of high color and reddish or muddy yellow hair

accost you shrilly on street in grotesque costume in¬

viting in all but appearance.

"Don't notice their English—it's American."

France:
The people stare, then melt indoors.

Real Madonnas with living babies.

Amiens Cathedral with spires would be the Venus of Milo

with arms.
The urinals at Caen are the most exposed yet.
Two peasants (Beauvois to Compiegne) lean out windows

six trains apart and conduct genial and easy conversation

all the way.

Spoken French is one grand nasal elision.

Germany:
Germans and Dutch must be scrupulous door-shutters; the

sign is ubiquitous, "The door closes itself."

Conscious ruins on the Rhine.

Germans speak better English than French.

A German on the Rigi train—from Hamburg by his coat—

bought four bunches of black cherries and gave me one

 Biographical Introduction ■ x x x v

of the bunches. Our only way of friendly communication

when we saw each other on the boat was to show our

black tongues.

The supreme moment of all was on September 3, when

Bynner traveled to Box Hill, Surrey, to meet George Meredith,

the elderly novelist and poet, a man now quite deaf and im¬

mobile—Bynner says he no longer had the use of his legs.

Bynner's three literary gods were Meredith, Whitman, and

A. E. Housman— an odd but complementary trio: the patrician

self, the democratic self, the ascetic self." Of these he was to

meet only Meredith. Years later, in 1956, Bynner took his notes

of this meeting and wrote "A Young Visit with George

Meredith."

On leaving the train at Box Hill, I felt my heart fiddling

and thumping. Could a man just of age experience in the

1950's any such tremors, on any such pilgrimage, as those

that stirred me on mine at the turn of the century? Are

young men of today, about to meet Picasso, Malraux, or

Stravinsky, as shaken by such excitement? The younger

generation seems cool today. Perhaps younger generations

always seem cool. Several times along the walk from the sta¬

tion I stopped to make sure that the person moving was I.

My heart was not only in my throat but in my ears, half¬

deafening me as I approached the presence of one who, to

his disciple, was a supreme being in the heaven of letters.

The sensation returned and then slowly subsided on my train

trip back to London, during which a still hypnotized hand

managed to draw from my brief case a black-and-white

checkered notebook with a Spencerian label. Compositions,

 xxxvi • Biographical Introduction

and joggle into it paragraphs remembered from the after¬

noon. Echoes of Meredith's voice made for me a recording

in that book, as actual voices were later to do on discs.

Europe impressed Bynner and interested him, but never for

a moment convinced him that its ancient civilization was su¬

perior to his own. If Elenry James, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and

the group of Americans in Paris in the twenties felt a need for

European manners and culture in order to find their self-
expression, Bynner simply did not. Europe's superiority never

occurred to him, and as he grew older, its commonplace failure

to understand Whitman's new world left Bynner indifferent

and, at times, impatient. He did not return to Europe for almost

fifty years. He went west, all the way to the California coast

and then on to the Orient. This direction drew him and became
his sphere; it was this love of the Orient that educated him and

seriously affected his poetry, and it was this inclination that in¬
creasingly left him outside the mainstream of modern verse and

its criticism.

In 1902 he began his New York and McClure's journal

this way:

October 6: My first day in business—and I refrained

from writing a letter on McClure paper: I'm growing older.

My tastes don't frighten me so much as they make me

realize how little method and dispatch in clerical matters

Harvard training has given me.

October 8: Met William Aspenwall Bradley [later the

well-known literary agent in Paris], who compiles circulars.

 Biographical Introduction ‘ x x x v i i

and S. S. McClure. New duties confusing and difficult.

(Uncle Edward Hutchinson advertises over his own name
for lost false tooth. Alden isn’t the only looney connection!)
October 14: At the office my dazed activity is losing
the adjective. The mists are rising.
October 20: Saturday the cashier handed me as I went
out, two little envelopes. Castles began to show fantastic
turrets in the air.
October 23: I have been given the combination that
opens the safe!
November 7: Remembered after dining with W. Mor¬
row that the safe was open, went back at 10:15 in dark
elevator to shut it. (Later convinced Sister Ruth that I am
insane. Am I?)
November 17: A very good day at the office. All of a
sudden I seem to know the ropes better than I did last
week or yesterday.
November 18: A quatrain which I wrote yesterday to
show Molly Best that I can do a "McClurish po'm" is ac¬
cepted for the January number. It was written as a parody.

He became the poetry editor and an accomplished editor of

fiction. Once, at McClure's instructions, Bynner cut a Willa
Cather story to everyone's satisfaction but Miss Cather's; her
wrath was so great that McClure refused to accept the responsi¬
bility and said it was done on Bynner's own initiative. Bynner
saved an O. Henry story from rejection and got him as a regular
writer for McClure's. The two became close friends, dining
around town, taking walks, talking literature. O. Henry's letters
to Bynner are full of light, warm fun and constant requests for
a loan. Once he repaid a loan with the manuscripts of three
 xxxv Hi ■ Biographical Introduction

short stories. Bynner sold them in the twenties for cash to build

a second floor onto his house in Santa Fe; for many years he

called it “the O. Henry Story."

Bynner lunched, dined, and went to the theater and opera

both constant amusements—with many of the writers and artists

who came to McClure's, to the publishing firm of McClure,

Phillips, or to The Players, the theatrical and literary club in

Gramercy Park that Bynner joined in 1903 and generally used

as his New York focus and address. The list of his companions
is large and catholic: Henry Harland, the fastidious expatriate
American who wrote romances of European royalty and edited

in London the notorious publication The Yellow Book; Barry

Faulkner, the muralist and a Harvard classmate; Augustus
Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer, also a classmate; Richard
Watson Gilder, the genteel editor of The Century; the poet

Richard Le Gallienne, who introduced Bynner to Housman's

work and praised Bynner's poetry; Rex Beach, the writer of Alas¬

kan adventure stories who spat regularly behind the couch in

The Players during a lunch Bynner arranged; the artist Rock¬

well Kent; the playwright Percy MacKaye; the novelist Booth

Tarkington; John Quinn and the Yeatses—Bynner greatly ad¬
mired the father and painter, John Butler Yeats; John Sloan and

Robert Henri and the other members of the Ashcan School who
came to New York over the next few years; Ezra Pound, for

whom he arranged, in 1910, his first American book publica¬

tion; Mark Twain, whom Bynner often visited late at night at

21 Fifth Avenue, enjoying his writing and delighting in his

Rabelaisian humor; John Dewey, with whom he marched up

Fifth Avenue for women's rights; and Bynner's antithesis—

Henry James.

The two were an odd couple. The refinements of Henry

 Biographical Introduction ' x x x i x

James were respected by Bynner, but he also found them

amusing; the Bynner youth and charm were delightful to James,

but Bynner s writing was never presented as a critical issue for

the Jamesian mind. They saw a good deal of one another in
1905 in New h ork, especially at The Players, where they would
lunch, and then go for walks.

In 1905 Bynner was allowed by the Master to publish a

memoir of their conversations, in interview form—a great con¬
cession on James's part—and Bynner returned once again to their

relationship in an article he wrote in 1943. Bynner, showing re¬

spectful amusement, called the first article "A Word or Two

with Henry James," and went on to print a several-column

superb recollection of James's non-stop sentences and para¬

graphs. These paragraphs are like an early draft of James's
chapter on New York that appeared in 1907 in The American

Scene, his book about his visit here in 1904-1905. James talks
about the loss of the past, the recollection of it in the old build¬
ings in Gramercy Park, and his excited remembrance of the
theater as a child: "I was seated in the theater with my eyes on
the old green curtain, feeling quite convinced that in a few

minutes before that curtain should rise, I was doomed to be re¬

moved by accident or death or some unforeseen punishment."

The accuracy of Bynner's reporting of the Jamesian dialogue is

revealed in this one paragraph on Boston:

After the shock of New York in those one or two hot

days, I was glad to be back again in Boston, the city with

the charm exclusively its own. Its distinction is, of course,

its oneness, its completeness, its homogeneity, qualities it

has retained almost precisely as it had them when I was a

boy, and it was a rural, or rather a rustic city, the conserva-

 x l • Biographical Introduction

tive, collective and representative capital of New England.

One feels, to be sure, the disadvantages of such advantage.

Boston's standard of comparison is bounded entirely by its

own precincts. It is given to bidding you to swan and

setting you goose. But this very stiffness, stuffiness, this
very inaccessibility to a breath of outer air, produces, in

however close an atmosphere, a demeanor of self-respect

and of patrician dignity.

Bynner and James never saw one another again, although

they often wrote, but Bynner's portraits of James in these two

published sketches remain amusing and accurate records of the

manner of the Master in his late, ripe, brilliant style.

Bynner's remarkable memory is shown in another brief

literary encounter that took place in April 1904. This time it

was with the young Wallace Stevens. These two Harvard

friends and poets, rivals who went separate ways in literature,

recorded the following sequence of events in the journal each

kept of his early years in New York.

Bynner:

April 8: In evening at the Francis drank with Wallace

Stevens till we were drunk. We slept hard in his room.

April 9: Stevens is not only likable but a wholesome

friend—particularly as antidote to chatter-brains with ten¬

derer manners. Through being much alone, he has gone

daffy a little. His egotism is monumental. My intrusion with

an egotism of my own confused him by not wholly dis¬

pleasing him. It was the same in Cambridge.
 Biographical Introduction • xli

Stevens:

April 9: Strange phantasmagoria! Bynner, the old

Advocate poet, dropped in on me last night & I went with
him to the Cafe Francis in West 35th Street where we sat &

smoked & talked & drank St. Estephe until after midnight.

An inexplicable fellow—the manner of a girl, the divina¬

tion, flattery & sympathy of a woman, the morbidness &

reverie of a poet, the fire and enthusiasm & ingenuousness

of a young man. He has gathered his own impressions &

odd ones they are. Has he passed safely through the senti¬
mental, sketchy stage?

Bynner:

April 14: Wallace Stevens shows me, in his irregular

running comment of a journal, what he has written about

our reacquaintance. Liking and admiring him, I pretty well

memorized what he wrote of me. “Strange phantasmagoria!

I met Bynner, the poet of Advocate days. He is an in¬

explicable fellow, has the manners of a girl; the divination,

sympathy and flattery of a woman; the morbidness and

reverie of a poet; the enthusiasm, fire and ingenuousness of

a young man. He has derived his own impressions and they

are original ones. Is he, perhaps, only coming through the

sketchy stage?"

April 15: He has so much more to say about me than I

about him that I was more pleased with the fact than vexed
with details.

April 16: Last night ... I walked home in a chatter-

 xlii • Biographical Introduction

ing chill, to arrive at our door . . . with no government of

my legs and a general dimness as to the world. 'I m not

drunk/' I said . . . "I'm sick." [I went] to bed, where I

writhed in pain all night.

Stevens:
(May?) 1904

Dear Hal: Last week my insides were in great disorder

I was, indeed, sick with a sickness. But by dint of going to

bed at eight, & of much Sitzbathing, & dieting & lithia-ing &

porous plastering, I am knocking about again. My bar

exams are on June 7 & until then I intend to apply myself

most conscientiously to grinding. Therefore our congeni¬

ality must ex necessitate be a thing apart from "drink (as

you call it—hideously). In fact, I detest rum, & never in¬

tended that, if we were to see much of one another, there

should be much liquor spilled. It is a tiresome thing. My

idea of life is a fine evening, an orchestra & a crowd at a

distance, a medium dinner, a glass of something cool & at

the same time wholesome, & a soft, full Panatela. If that

is congenial to you, we can surely arrange it after June 7—

unless I flunk. In the meantime we must be without much

ceremony, although eager enough.

This sequence is a rare revelation of two personalities more

through what it implies and leaves unsaid than through what it

overtly expresses. Stevens continued to look with skepticism on

Bynner. Bynner spoke with guarded admiration of Stevens and

advised Alfred Knopf not to bother to publish his poems. The

two poets could never be close, but they wrote each other over

the years and near the end of their lives became less reserved
 Biographical Introduction • xliii

with one another. It is as if, in spite of their differences, their

memory of the past gave them something important to share

in their old age. Yet Stevens could never see why Bynner went

to Santa Fe and Bynner could never understand how one could

choose Hartford, Connecticut!

Once at McClure's, it never occurred to Bynner to leave

there and return to Harvard to teach, although he had to strug¬
gle to make himself fit in. Clearly Mr. McClure liked him and

respected his work; the uncertainty was in Bynner. Early in

1903 he began to suffer from extreme neuralgic headaches that

lasted for days and continued to occur intermittently through¬
out the year. "Daily the wild pain circling like an acid round

my eye unhinges my hope and care of the world." When he

returned to his office after several days at home, his first remark
in his journal was this: "Wheels at the office are smoother and

smoother in their round. The rub now is to establish a convic¬

tion that I'm solid and to make myself popular. I can do the
first if Til say little and look a lot—but the latter, how?" His

constant associations with all kinds of people in endless en¬

tertainments, his "breezy and jaunty" nature, his many ex¬

cursions to dinner, the theater, and the opera, his frantic pace in

everything, and his attempts at the same time to write—all

these revealed a deep uncertainty about his direction and an

inability to give of himself fully to anyone or anything. He lived

at home, with a more and more dominating mother, another

weak and decaying father, a younger brother who was trying to

settle himself in the cotton business, and a brilliant and pa¬

thetically mad stepsister. The answer was to know where he

was, to decide how he should move, and also to reach into his
 xliv ' Biographical Introduction

nature to find his own voice. To know that he was a poet of

lyric grace and simplicity, a lonely extrovert and clown hiding

his love for men in a garrulous affection for mankind this per¬
ception was as yet far beyond him. Now he could go only as far

as this remark on May 19, 1903: "Will Bradley is off on his

honeymoon. He ll not be separate any more not happily and

boyishly so. I'm afraid girls strike me as an exotic diversion or
else an erotic intrusion." When he considered that in a year or

so Homer Saint-Gaudens and he might live together in New

York, which they briefly did, Bynner wrote in his journal, "God
grant that I may by that time be a wholesome chap whom he shall

continue to like." He says of another college friendship, "But

why should I expect anyone to value my friendship? In all

conscience I have little to give." His uncertainty about himself,

his need for affection and respect, his inability to commit him¬

self personally, were marking him.

In October 1906 he finally left McClure's to devote himself

to writing. He went to live in the house of Homer and Carlota

Saint-Gaudens, in Cornish, New Hampshire. Cornish was a com¬

munity of important and respectable artists—Augustus Saint-

Gaudens, Maxfield Parrish, Percy MacKaye. Bynner had ar¬

ranged to rent a study and bedroom from his college friend and

his wife, and to pay for board, thus freeing himself of New

York life and its pressures. It was his first step away from what

he saw as the chaos of New York. His life was now a pattern

of withdrawals, movements away from what he felt were dis¬

turbances; these retreats never completely worked, as he always

brought what was disturbing him with him, but, for the moment,

they gave him release and time to write.

He was not certain what kind of writer he wanted to be.

 Biographical Introduction • xlv

He published his first book in 1907, An Ode to Harvard and

Other Poems; he went to Maine to write a one-act play with

Cecil B. De Mille for Hilda Spong; he wrote several other one-

act plays, three in verse, which had a few productions—one of

these. Tiger, on the white-slave trade, received considerable

publicity; he tried dramatizing some novels and even trans¬

lated an Italian farce; he wrote songs and attempted a musical

version of Everyman, called Anygirl; he translated Iphigenia

in Tauris for Isadora Duncan, who performed parts of it before

her theater was closed down (because of complications, as so

often happened to Isadora); his next book. The New World

(1915), was a Whitmanesque song in praise of America.

During this time, in order to earn money, he began to lec¬

ture throughout the United States, sometimes on suffrage, some¬

times on poetry. His lectures, his plays, his criticism, and his

numerous poems in periodicals made him one of the bright

names in literature in America among those who supported the
new free verse, with its attention to everyday events in a lan-

guage that was clear and basic. He was in the group of new

poets, his direction seemed established, but his need to separate

himself out was made manifest in 1916 in the hoax that he and
Arthur Ficke created and called Spectra. Under the guise of

humor and playful deception, Bynner, who originated the idea,

set himself against the poets of his time and set himself apart;
in so doing, he began for the first time to find his own voice.

Bored with all the current "schools" of poetry, especially

the Imagism of Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, Bynner created

one called Spectrism, which tried to see the spectre in our life

and capture the varied light of the spectrum. The theory is

tenuous, at best, but was just convincing enough to be be-

 xlv i * Biographical Introduction

lievable in a day when everyone was trying the new and was
afraid of rejecting it. Bynner became Emanuel Morgan and
Ficke became Anne Knish, both from Pittsburgh, but with
European backgrounds. They wrote poetry like this:

Opus 118
by Anne Knish

If bathing were a virtue, not a lust,

I would be dirtiest.

To some, housecleaning is a holy rite.

For myself, houses would be empty
But for the golden motes dancing in sunbeams.

Tax-assessors frequently overlook valuables.

Today they noted my jade.
But my memory of you escaped them.

Opus 40
by Emanuel Morgan

Two cocktails round a smile,

A grapefruit after grace.
Flowers in an aisle
. . . Were your face.

A strap in a street-car,
A sea-fan on the sand,
A beer on a bar
. . . Were your hand.
 Biographical Introduction • xlvii

The pillar of a porch.

The tapering of an egg.

The pine of a torch

. . . Were your leg.—

Sun on the Hellespont,

White swimmers in the bowl

Of the baptismal font

Are your soul.

Writing the Spectra poems was important, because it gave

Bynner a way out of himself. The restraints he and others put
on him could be escaped. Writing from a place within himself

he did not clearly know, he allowed new qualities of person and

style to emerge: an abandonment to sex, liquor, decadence; a

commitment to direct statements; an absurd, almost surrealistic

juxtaposition of natural elements; the elliptical quality of haiku;
and a delight in wild humor.

Bynner and Ficke had found a way to express a series of

elements that were a part of them but that they felt they could
not fully reveal in their professional poetry. Whatever the nature

of the intense friendship between the two men, both were in love

with Edna St. Vincent Millay, and she with them. She would

have married either, and did accept Bynner's invitation to marry,

but Ficke correctly saw that if any two married, the three

could not remain as close as they could separately. The situation

reveals many qualities of all three, especially the need each

had for a vehicle to express his or her extremely complicated

nature. Millay fell deeply in love with Ficke, who was then

married. She went to Europe, while, in 1917, Ficke went to the

Orient with his wife and Bynner. Ficke was fascinated with Japa-
 xlv ii i • Biographical Introduction

nese prints and wrote a fine study of them. His sonnets then and

later were coolly intellectual but contained very strong passions,

like his own character. Ficke found in Japanese art a stylized

feeling that served him for his stylized verses, and through his

interest in the Orient, he gave Bynner the model for his best

poetry; Bynner found in China its concept of lyric poetry

brief, taut, and specific; Millay found her husband, a Dutchman,
Eugen Boissevain, whom Bynner and Ficke had first met on the

boat to China. Of the three, it was she who put the most of her¬

self into her brilliantly clear, white-hot poetry.

It was in March 1917 that Bynner went to Japan and

China for four months, and he was in China again from June

1920 until May 1921. Between these trips he spent a year or

more traveling in the United States; met in New York the man
who became a close friend and a lover, the Swiss painter Paul

Thevenaz. He taught a poetry class at Berkeley for a year; pub¬

lished Grenstone Poems (1917) and The Beloved Stranger

(1919); and met a Chinese scholar, Kiang Kang-hu, with whom

he began to translate an anthology of three hundred T'ang

poems, from the finest period of Chinese poetry. The series of

events is chaotic: Spectra, the Orient, travels in the United

States, teaching, translation, poetry, a return to China, a first

great and acknowledged love affair—all this took place during

his thirty-fifth to fortieth years, although it took him eight

more years to finish translating all the T'ang poems.

And of course there was the war. Bynner was deeply

against war and, because he refused to fight, lost many friends,

especially Homer Saint-Gaudens. Although never deeply drawn

to Europe, he now turned away from it to the Orient with some

 Biographical Introduction * xli x

special, harsh, external force. He was to say in later life that

during World War I he turned to China and began a translation,

and that he did the same in World War II. The Orient repre¬

sented for Bynner an escape into a style of life that was more
acceptable to him as a man and as a poet.

Something must be said about Paul Thevenaz and Berkeley,

for both were important experiences in Bynner's life. There is
no evidence that before meeting Thevenaz Bynner had accepted

himself as homosexual, but after this affair he would seldom

claim to be anything else. Bynner was away when Thevenaz

died on July 6, 1921, in Greenwich Hospital, but he wrote a

long article on him that appeared in the July 24 issue of The
I\ ew Yortc Tunes Book Review and Magazine. Thevenaz was

born in 1891 in Switzerland; Bynner says he worked on ballets

with Stravinsky and Cocteau in Paris while studying art and

painting portraits; he came to America in 1916 and decided to

make it his home. In America he did portraits and decorated

rooms in the houses of rich patrons such as Mrs. George Vander¬

bilt and Rodman Wanamaker. There is a Bynner poem in which

Thevenaz is said to move through life "lighter than any dancer."

Bynner said, "No scriptures we were ever taught / Accords with

his career." In his article he quotes a letter from Thevenaz: "It

[a Bynner poem] makes me think. And I do not like to think.

Laughing is better." There is little else known about him, except

that Bynner later in life frequently spoke of Thevenaz as some¬

one he had loved, an ideal lost, and when Bynner in 1931 wrote

Eden Tree, his long autobiographical poem acknowledging his

bisexuality, he called the male lover Paul and described him as

he had in the Times article. Probably it was Thevenaz's light¬

hearted, youthful directness, his open acceptance of himself,

that appealed to Bynner, providing him with a model of artistic

 I • Biographical Introduction

and personal expression as individual and strong as the New

England expression of his family.

When he went to California, Bynner fell in love with

Berkeley and the Bay area and decided early in his stay to make

it his permanent home. He was there to do "military service ;

he had been hired to teach public speaking to the Students
Auxiliary Training Corps at the university. When the war ended

a month after he arrived in 1918, he was asked to teach verse

writing the next term. About twenty students were officially in

the class, but many others came; there were no texts or tests;

poems were read and criticized; often there were guests—Ficke,

John Cowper Powys, Stella Benson; and often the class met
outdoors. It is vividly remembered by the students. Bynner

helped to develop several poets and literary figures: Genevieve

Taggard, Eda Lou Walton, Hildegarde Flanner, Idella Purnell

Stone, Ernest Walsh, David Greenhood, and Stanton A.

Coblentz. He participated energetically in the active social life

of the Bay area's literary figures: he knew Jack London, George

Sterling, and many other artists, writers, and patrons, such as

Bruce Porter, the painter and designer who married William

James's daughter; John Henry Nash and Porter Garnett, both

fine printers; Beniamino Bufano, the controversial sculptor, who

went to China with Bynner in 1920; and Albert M. Bender, an

extraordinary Irish Jew who supported the arts by means of his

successful insurance business. Bynner was in the Bohemian

Club and was about to write the 1920 Grove play for that men's

group when he was caught in a bitter controversy over his

support of the release of conscientious objectors from prison.

The issue became volatile and was in all the papers. Forced to

return East to see his stepsister just before her death, Bynner

abandoned the city that he had once seen as his new home.
 Biographical Introduction ' l i

It was with a great loss of spirit and energy that Bynner

began, in January 1922, another lecture tour; it was almost as
though these trips were a search for a place to remain. He had
some belongings in his mother's apartment in New York—she
now had a whole floor in the Hotel Seymour on West Forty-fifth
Street others in the Saint-Gaudens' house in Cornish; some of
his Chinese scrolls, jade, and wood carvings in a friend's house
in Berkeley; and all his other possessions in his permanent hotel
rooms at the Hotel Carlton, on the corner of Telegraph and
Durant in Berkeley. He and his possessions were literally dis¬
persed across the country, and he was, at forty-one, tired of
wandering. His lecture tour was through the Southwest, and
on his way there he went to the University of Oklahoma, where
he met and advised Lynn Riggs, a young student who was con¬
fused about what he should do. Riggs would later follow Bynner
and serve him briefly as his secretary. Bynner traveled on, ex¬
hausted from a heavy cold that would not leave him; in this
poor condition he arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on February
20, 1922. Except for brief vacations and trips to a second house
in Chapala, Mexico, this town and the first house he occupied
in it, at 342 Buena Vista Street, would remain his home until he
,
died on June 1 1968. He had begun to find where he was going.

Bynner went to Santa Fe to see a friend, the painter Willard

Nash, at the invitation of Alice Corbin Henderson. Mrs. Hen¬
derson had helped Harriet Monroe found Poetry magazine in
Chicago in 1912, and she had been continuing her editorial
work from Santa Fe, to which she had come in 1916 to be cured
of tuberculosis. She was the center of the writing community in
Santa Fe, and through her husband, William Penhallow Hen-
 Hi • Biographical Introduction

derson, the painter, architect, and furniture designer, she was

greatly involved in the very active painting scene. Santa Fe and

its neighboring town, Taos, seventy miles north, had attracted,

and went on attracting, American painters John Sloan, Robert

Henri, Edward Hopper, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, George

Bellows, Andrew Dasburg, and later, Georgia O'Keeffe. Santa

Fe was small, just over seven thousand people; those who spoke
only English were a minority in the Spanish-speaking com¬

munity. The light was brilliant, the air was clear, the long views
of the desert and mountains often suggested some land not

America. Bynner said (as others have) that the terrain is like
Peking's, as are the houses enclosed in courtyards of adobe

walls, and the Indians are like the Chinese in manner and
character. Both north and south of Santa Fe are the ancient

homes of the Pueblo Indians, the adobe pueblos mounting in

the air like the mountains behind them. The streets of Santa Fe

were unpaved. Automobiles were few and the donkeys loaded

with pinon wood a common sight. Remains of Indian, Spanish,

and early Anglo-Saxon cultures were in the architecture and

on the faces of the people in the streets. It was a place in the

landscape that seemed to many, as it seemed to Bynner, unique.

Some two years after his arrival he described it this way:

On Sunday evenings when the band played, youths would

stream in one direction round the Plaza and in the opposite

direction maidens, just as apart from one another and just

as aware of one another as I have seen them in Mexican

cities. Older women moved nunlike, on Sundays or week¬

days, with soft black shawls over their heads, the fringe
hanging down their dresses. Burros came daily in droves

with round burdens of firewood, or with riders from the

 Biographical Introduction ‘ l i i i

country whose heels bumped lazily from a jiggling trot.

Though there was no longer an open market in the Plaza,

there was one street left where wagons, from ranches or

from Indian villages, held corn, tomatoes, apples, melons

and other fresh produce to be bought directly from the

dark-eyed drivers. On the roads radiating from town

were many views and few signboards. In doorways, on

street-corners, were many groups speaking Spanish and

few speaking English. In the Legislature were interpreters

nimbly moving from one member to another and nimbly
re-phrasing remarks into English or Spanish. On the out-

lying hills were venturous artists in sombreros, corduroys

and bright neckerchiefs. When Holy Days came, there were

bonfires and the Virgin or St. Francis was carried through

the streets by walking worshippers. And round about the

landscape, in their snug, earthen "pueblos," were Indians,

guarding the dignity of their race and instinctively living

the beauty of their religion and their art, as they had been
doing for hundreds of years.

The main hotel had burned the month before he arrived, so

Bynner stayed at the tuberculosis sanatorium, Sunmount. The

guests were in all variations of health, but most of them seemed

invigorated by, and were responsive to, Bynner. He himself was

not well and after a few days canceled his speaking tour in
order to rest in a town that had greeted him and his lecture

"The Heart of China" with great enthusiasm. There were many

teas and parties lasting until late in the morning, and he would

walk home with a lantern along the Camino del Monte Sol just
as the sun came up across the vast, still, black desert.

After only a few weeks Bynner made the decision to stay

 liv • Biographical Introduction

in Santa Fe. He was able to rent a small adobe house from the
artist Paul Burlin. He then went to Berkeley briefly, via the
Grand Canyon, but returned in June to remain indefinitely, he

said. The town was a comfortable place for an artist like

him. Alice Corbin had brought other writers to Santa Fe to

speak: Vachel Lindsay and Carl Sandburg, both friends of

Bynner's, lectured there shortly before he did. Many others had

come to stay, like Glenway Wescott and Yvor Winters; and
many more would come to visit, like Robert Frost, Arthur

Ficke, Edna Millay, Thornton Wilder, W. H. Auden, Stephen

Spender, and Aldous Huxley. It seemed that, in time, everyone

passed through Santa Fe, en route to the Coast, or returning

East. Bynner saw that he was removed from the East and from

its pressures, but that he was in a community where the artist

and writer mattered, where there was a tradition of individual

action in varied cultural patterns. The city was talkative and

gossipy, but so was he, and it tolerated what it talked about in
the recognition that land lasts longer than its owner and that

history is greater than our single lives and covers most of us

in its folds.

In Taos, where he went for a long visit in July, lived Mabel

Dodge Sterne. Known as a great patron of the arts in Europe

and in New York, and as an "advanced" woman, an experi¬

menter with life, and a collector of people, she had come to

New Mexico a jaded Easterner and found in the sun and land,

and especially in the Indians, a source for renewal. She divorced

her painter husband, Maurice Sterne, began to build an elaborate

house, and in 1923 married an Indian, Tony Luhan. She brought

people to New Mexico and to Taos—famous people. She

wanted to become an institution all on her own, to inspire the

 Biographical Introduction • lv

great. Bynner, whom she had met in New York, was summoned

to Taos and came. At first the spectacle of the endless Taos

landscape, the pueblo, and Mabel's generosity pleased him, but

it soon became apparent that they were not easy companions;

they both wanted to dominate everything and everyone.

Their first ostensible problem had to do with Bynner's

secretary, Willard Johnson, called "Spud." A student at Berkeley,

founder there of The Laughing Horse, a clever satirical publi¬

cation that went with him when he came to live with Bynner,

Johnson was a quiet, subtle wit, slight and shy, and, finally,
rather lazy about his talent. As he grew older he looked like a

monk, and his single, quiet life became almost monastic. Bynner

and he were lovers, but Spud was too indecisive to satisfy

Bynner for long—he didn't respond to Bynner's teaching with

alacrity. Mabel gradually won him over and eventually took

him to Taos to become her own secretary. The current of this

conflict ran below the surface from the start.

But the real issue between them was over Bynner's relation¬
ship with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, which began in Septem¬

ber 1922, when Mabel arrived at Bynner's adobe house in Santa

Fe saying it was too late in the day to drive her guests to Taos.

She asked Bynner if he could house the Lawrences, who were

tired and uncertain about New Mexico and Mabel, and D.H.

was especially belligerent about a painting of a wooden Sicilian

cart that Tony had accidentally cracked. But the laughter of

Bynner, the quiet humor of Spud, the evident good will of

everyone relaxed the tensions that night and at breakfast the

next morning. William Penhallow Henderson and his daughter,

"Little Alice," who was to marry Mabel's only son, John

Evans, came over to make the breakfast. The car finally went

off. In it: Mabel in command; the silent Indian, Tony, driving;

 I v i • Biographical Introduction

and the Lawrences, one full of open response, the other so

aggressively and eagerly waiting to be convinced, beginning

another journey to find a place in which he could live.

Bynner and the Lawrences met again, and early in 1923 a

message came from Lawrence asking Bynner and Spud to go to

Mexico with them in March. The idea seemed a good one, and a

few days later they all met in Mexico City. From there they
traveled through the country. It was a strange journey, tense
with emotion that generated some of Lawrence's best essays

and his novel The Plumed Serpent, in which Bynner is a minor

character; it also resulted eventually in Bynner's best volume of

poems, Indian Earth (1929); three brilliant portraits of Lawrence

in verse, "D. H. Lawrence," "Lorenzo," and "A Foreigner"; and

the book on the trip that Bynner published in 1951, Journey

with Genius.

The relationships were unusual. Bynner and Spud were

lovers, friends, father and son, teacher and student. Perhaps

Lawrence wanted to be all of these to each, or at least some of

them. He was fascinated by the energetic assurance of Bynner,
which insisted on seeing the light and pleasant when Lawrence

saw the dark and ugly. He felt, correctly, that Bynner avoided

issues, but Lawrence could not openly admit—although he no

doubt knew—that he himself did not always face the truth. They

wrestled in their minds for a victory, but it did not come; in

such a contest there is no winner. Frieda loved her husband, but

she enjoyed Bynner; after Lawrence's death she returned to

Taos and remained close friends with him. Spud refused to

commit himself to anyone, which did not bother Frieda, but

slightly disturbed both his teachers—it was an affront to their

doctrines.

What went on was the unspoken contest of wills that often

 Biographical Introduction • Ivii

exists in life and that was so much a part of the fiction Lawrence

wrote. He and Bynner existed somewhere between Gerald and

Birkin in Women in Love, and the Captain and his peasant

orderly in Lawrence's story "The Prussian Officer." It was a

relationship that could not be resolved, and if Lawrence knew

and saw the character of Bynner isolated in his maleness with

his male partner, Bynner also knew that Lawrence could be
a child to a mother, as well as a tyrant and a lover. The in¬

tensity of what Lawrence and Bynner felt was very great, per¬
haps too great to allow them to relax together.

Journey with Genius tells about the relationship. It shows

each as he was, Bynner no better than Lawrence. To Lawrence
followers, Bynner is irreverent, but others can see that it is

Bynner's journey with a genius who was also a flawed man, as

was Bynner himself. Much about the relationship is left unsaid,

but two elements express its deep-felt emotions: Lawrence later

wrote Bynner fine letters, full of genuine affection and good

will, and praised Bynner's book of verse containing the long,
critical poem about Lawrence as "very sincere and really deep

in life. Even serving happiness is no joke"; and Bynner re¬

turned to the town that Lawrence had found in Mexico, Chapala.

He returned year after year and finally bought the house in

which he wrote his Lawrence memoir. He never lost Lawrence.

It seems that in each man there was a self that attracts and

repels, irrevocably and inexplicably. Bynner's poem "Lorenzo"

comes as close to this conflict as he was able to:

I had not known that there could be

Men like Lorenzo and like me.

Both in the world and both so right

That the world is dark and the world is light.

 Iviii • Biographical Introduction

I had not thought that anyone

Would choose the dark for dwelling on.
Would dig and delve for the bitterest roots

Of sweetest and suavest fruits.

I never had presumed to doubt
That now and then the light went out;
But I had not known that there could be

Men like Lorenzo and like me

Both in the world and both so right
That the world is dark and the world is light.

I had not guessed that joy could be

Selected for an enemy.

Mabel's possessive nature never forgave Bynner for going

with Lawrence and for the affection Frieda felt for him, and she
sought revenge by taking Spud and by accusing Bynner, later

in life, of having brought homosexuality to New Mexico—an

accusation so marvelous in its imaginative vindictiveness as to

be almost forgivable. Bynner had his own revenge—for it must

be said that neither was a creature without venom; in 1926

he wrote a play about Mabel, nee Ganson, then Evans, Dodge,

Sterne, and Luhan, and called it Cake. It is about a woman

jaded by life who seeks relief from her boredom in travel, in

drink, in sex, in religion, in death, and finally in cake. It is a

verse play, elaborately stylized, a spoof that has many brilliant

qualities; today we would call it camp. The play portrays modern

woman as emasculator, goddess of wealth, and deceiver of both

men and herself. It is very witty and nasty fun.

Most of the events in Bynner's early Santa Fe life were not

that dramatic. The years were divided into many months in

 Biographical Introduction ' lix

Santa Fe, a few in Chapala, and maybe two in New York visit¬

ing his mother and brother and friends. These visits upset him:

his mother was a demanding disturbance and so was New

York; he preferred to remain in the West. The adobe shack was

bought and added to, Chinese scrolls and gold-painted wood¬

work installed, Indian blankets used as thick curtains and on

chairs, and Mexican santos and pottery placed throughout the

house. Over the years it grew from a three-room shack, simple

and barren, to a large, complicated, eccentric house surrounded

by high trees and hedges. The house in details of architecture

was at once Chinese, Indian, and Mexican, and became an ex¬

pressive reflection of Bynner's character as it rambled, changed

shape and style, opened up and closed inward, reflected differ¬
ent textures and dark tones.

He entered into the community: into its politics, running

once for the state legislature—as a Democrat—and losing; into

the preservation of its old and varied past; into its great Sep¬

tember Fiesta, which he saw as an occasion for wild fun and

during which, for many years, he led the parade in some

costume, all six foot two of him, with Dolly Sloan—John Sloan's

wife—as his tiny, less-than-five-foot partner; into its poetry

readings and discussions, its community theater, its art exhibits;
and of course he entered into the social life of the community.

The last could occupy so much time in Santa Fe that Bynner

established the rule, written on a sign for him by John Sloan,

that no one should call at his house before five in the evening.

Then began drinks, dinner, and card games or talk until any

hour of the morning. After the guests left, he wrote, going to

bed at dawn. He would rise at one, have breakfast, answer

letters, which he did with great care, and write again, or

garden, until it was five. No one minded waiting for him until
 I x • Biographical Introduction

that hour, for when Witter Bynner came into a group, it was

brought alive in a way that to most people seemed delightful

and personal, as if it were a special occasion and meant only

for them. He told stories, made endless puns, drank and smoked
constantly, did monologues, played old tunes on the piano,

imitated his mother in her usual role of demanding more atten¬

tion, or a toothless old aunt in some endless family narrative,

recited limericks or poetry in a voice that even in old record¬

ings is strong, mellow, and cultivated. With his head, now quite

bald, and his large, strong body always browned by gardening

in the sun; his clothes often individual—a velvet Navajo blouse
in dark blue, a large turquoise-and-silver belt, and wide white

pants, or one of his beautifully embroidered Chinese robes with

great sleeves—his gestures and movements strong, quick,
affirmative, as was his walk; his laugh that would soar high

above the noise of a room like the whoop of a crane—he was a

vibrant figure in the landscape of Santa Fe.

When he first came to Santa Fe, he had several male secre¬

taries who ran the house for him, typed his letters and poems,

and carried out administrative details. He worked in the garden,

but never bothered with household matters. The cooking and

cleaning were left to Rita Padilla, a Bynner neighbor on College

Street (or the Old Santa Fe Trail, as it is now called) who came
to Bynner soon after he arrived in Santa Fe and stayed until her

death in 1963, some forty years later. She was the major-domo

and Bynner her "patron," whom she served devotedly and pro¬

tectively; in turn, he fed all her family from his kitchen, a family

that always seemed to be growing, and saw to it that she and

they were always provided for. She was a hard, wiry, dark-
 Biographical Introduction ' Ixi

skinned, dark-haired Spanish-Mexican woman, full of super¬

stitions, to whom some attributed special powers, but she was
mostly just a proud woman who served her master with a pas¬
sionate love that never changed and that seemed to others to be
so excessive that they explained it as diabolical. Rita remained in
the house, a single constant in Bynner's life, while the secretaries
came and went, typing letters and volumes of poetry.
Alfred A. Knopf had become Bynner's publisher with the
appearance of The Beloved Stranger in 1919. In 1920 there was
a volume of poems, A Canticle of Pan, and also Pins for Wings,
a brief book of short quips that describe other writers, a book
Bynner published under the name Emanuel Morgan with Sun¬
wise Turn Inc. (T. S. Eliot is described as "the wedding cake / of
two tired cultures'7); then A Book of Plays in 1922; a transla¬
tion from the French of Charles Vildrac, A Book of Love, in
1923; a volume of verse. Caravan, in 1925; then Cake in 1926;
and in 1929, Indian Earth, poems about Chapala with a section
on the New Mexican Indians; The Persistence of Poetry, an
essay on verse published in San Francisco as a special volume
for The Book Club of California and as his introduction to The
fade Mountain (1929), his translation from the Chinese that
after eleven years finally appeared.
It seemed as though he were reaching some height. Cer¬
tainly he was never better known, but the next year, 1930, he
described as one of long and deep depression. He was forty-
nine, no longer young, and very much alone. He must have seen
that a new poetry, that of his young friend Ezra Pound and
of T. S. Eliot, was taking over and that his lyric style was losing
ground. He had recognized this in his essay The Persistence of
Poetry. He began his autobiographical poem, Eden Tree, slowly
working out of the depression and trying to write his version
 lx i i ' Biographical Introduction

of the modern poem of anxiety, if that were possible for him.

In November 1930, Robert Nichols Hunt, whom Bynner had

met in 1926 through Paul Horgan and seen when in Los Angeles

for a production of Cake in 1928, came for a brief visit to recu¬

perate from an illness; he remained with Bynner until 1964, when

he died. Bynner was to turn fifty on August 10,1931.

Bob, Bobby, sometimes called Monte, was twenty-four when

he came to Bynner's house. Tall, lean, handsome in the way of

Robert Taylor or Robert Montgomery, with a brisk, debonair

walk and an easy way of dressing, wearing clothes so well that

they seemed insignificant, he had a fine, clear voice, excellent

manners, little formal education but a crackling sharp mind,

and was well read and intelligent about history, art, and litera¬

ture. He had tried all kinds of schools and jobs, but he could
“do" nothing, and his very patient father, the fine California

architect Myron Hunt, had attempted everything he could think

of to help him. He even brought him into his architecture firm,
since Bob had superb talents as an architect. But nothing ever

took hold. In his life he published a book of verse; designed a

wing and some rooms for Bynner's house, a mirador and several

other changes in the Chapala house, a living room on the Peter

Hurd ranch in San Patricio, New Mexico; and completely re¬
built a house on a hill in Santa Fe, turning it into an exquisite,

self-contained structure. He wrote good prose and letters of

such brilliant detail and outrageous fun as to be an art in them¬

selves. Yet he never really stayed with anything, or did any¬

thing—except take care of Hal. Over the years, as he became

more and more bitter, more cynical, and would not stop drinking,

smoking, or going out for endless nights on the town, he even

 Biographical Introduction ‘ lx Hi

failed at times in his care of Hal. And he lived so hard that a

second and fatal heart attack was almost expected. To say he did
nothing would be wrong, for he did as much as a good com¬

panion does for any writer: he read the poems, edited them,

compiled them into books, went over proofs—and he ran the

house and took care of the practicalities of their lives. No one

would think to fault a wife who did as well. He had to fail

because this was his expectation of himself. It was his bitter

disgust with himself and his harsh judgment of himself that

made what he did unsatisfying. He felt he was, and his best

friends knew he was, a talented man who had been lazy and

indolent, who near the end cared personally only for Hal, for

drink, and for some crude sexual experience too slight to matter

even to him. He hated himself, the world, and most of the people
in it. He could not tolerate his own hollow life—he knew himself

too well to believe in what he did, and he saw human shabbiness

in himself and in almost everyone else.

At the beginning this was not so. Bynner found Bob a fine,

handsome companion and a friend whose wit was as sharp and

whose mind was as quick as his own—someone with whom

he could easily share, someone who should have a bright future.

Bob had a deeply sympathetic and sensitive nature, a desire to

love and be loved that must have appealed to Bynner, as it did

to so many men and women. For Bob there was a need to look

up to someone, to be helped and dealt with in a paternal man¬

ner, to be directed in his wayward pattern, and Bynner could

gracefully do this.

The relationship was a marriage, in the sense that we mean

a sharing together in life. We do not always know what forces

bring people together, what collaboration is made to protect

weaknesses, what is given and taken. We know so very little of

 I x i v • Biographical Introduction

the private agreements by which we make our lives that the ex¬

ternal pattern of couples often seems inexplicable. Bynner pro¬

vided the young Hunt with a place to live well, perhaps a place

in which to hide; he also provided the kind of stability that

might allow Hunt to try for self-fulfillment. In turn. Hunt

brought the lively companionship and the flattery of youth that

Bynner needed. If in time Bynner grew old and blind and
depended on Hunt, Hunt had nothing else in his life but that
now-very-old man who needed him to make the journey up the
stairs. If their relationship was never without some need and

never remained the same, we are only saying of it what could

be said of any kind of human dependency.

Throughout the thirties there was some shortage of money

in Bynner's life, but nothing serious. He and Hunt could gen¬
erally do what they wanted. They traveled to and from New

York, to the West Coast, to Mexico. It was a period of quiet

pleasures. Bynner discovered the unpublished poems of Fred¬

erick Goddard Tuckerman and edited them in 1931. His next

book was a tour de force: seventy sonnets, each on a friend or
acquaintance, focusing on what made him or her a type or a
class. These Guest Book poems have such titles as "Debutante/'

"Hostess," "Communist," "Bluestocking," "Widower," "Play¬

boy." Bynner included his famous friends and some not so

famous, although none are named; he wrote about himself, Paul

Thevenaz, Robert Hunt (as "Chantecleer," "Ganymede," and

"Lucifer"), Lady Duff-Twysden (the model for Brett Ashley)

and her husband, Clinton King (as "Expatriates"), Mabel Dodge

Luhan, Robinson Jeffers, Edna Millay, Amy Lowell, Carl Van

Vechten, Thornton Wilder, and Max Eastman. Guest Book

 Biographical Introduction ’ l x v

was meant to be read lightly, for fun, but unfortunately it pro¬

voked some bitter remarks from people who thought they recog¬
nized themselves.

Hunt chose a group of Bynner's poems, and these appeared

in 1936, with an introduction by Paul Horgan as Selected Poems.

They were not ignored, but they did not achieve what a man of
fifty-five had hoped a survey of his life's work would suggest—

important critical attention, perhaps even a prize. By this time

he could see that his pattern was set and so was that of the
world of poetry, and the patterns were not likely to match.

An incident with Robert Frost suggests how deeply this

realization was affecting Bynner. They had been friends from
the early twenties, and at one point Frost agreed to write the

introduction to a volume of Bynner's verse. But as Frost won ac¬

ceptance and became the beloved poet of the American people,

Bynner began to resent the fact that Frost had succeeded where

he had not. No role as poet would have pleased Bynner more

than the national one that Frost was now assuming. When in

1935 Frost came to Santa Fe to speak, Bynner was to introduce

him, but arrived late; Frost had already begun. The next day

Frost was taken to see one of the pueblos and arrived late at

Bynner s for lunch. They discussed a book of poems by Horatio

Colony that Bynner liked but Frost found "bestial." Without

any apparent provocation, Bynner poured his glass of beer on

Frost's head. After a stunned moment, the incident was passed

off at least Frost said nothing and Bynner did nothing more.

Later Bynner wrote an apology; in it he turned the incident into

a kind of joke, but one that he said had misfired. It was a lame

attempt to cover his anger and must have sounded wrong even
to Bynner, who said nothing more.

Many years later Bynner was at the Hanover Inn in New

 I xv i ’ Biographical Introduction

Hampshire and saw Frost in the dining room. He went over to

him and said, "Robert, do you remember me? I apologize for

pouring that beer on you." Frost looked at him in silence for

a brief moment, as if, Bynner felt, taking his measure, and then

recited two of Bynner's poems. A great compliment had been

paid.
In 1963 Bynner wrote a poem in honor of Frost. Although

it must have hurt him to know that he lacked the genius of

Frost, he had accepted his limitations, and within them he did

well. He had reached the point where he was willing to accept

private recognition of his own worth.

Robert Frost

(1874-1963)

They would have stayed there for farewell

Until the train pulled out

But he waved them away and they could tell

He knew what he was about.

The train held only strangers, yes.

But he was a stranger too—

When you say goodbye to friends who bless

They leave you only you.

On November 25, 1937, Bynner's mother died in her apart¬

ment in New York at the age of seventy-nine. She had given a

great deal to her son: she was responsible for his upbringing,

and she had supported him with advice—sometimes harsh, but

 Biographical Introduction • Ixv ii

always concerned. She had been headstrong and not always

wise in some actions in her own life, but she had been con¬

fronted with hard conditions that often made judgment difficult.

She was proud, and the loss of her husband, her movement

from family to family, her work as a teacher and piano player

for dancing classes were not easy for her. When she married

again, she achieved financial ease, but the responsibilities for

her new husband and physically and mentally ill stepdaughter

did not make life comfortable. It is true that she created many

of her own problems by demanding too much and by never

being satisfied with what she had; she cared too much for show

ever to be satisfied with the reality of anything. The great pas¬

sion of her life was her son Witter, and when he, against her
advice, moved away from her, she was too proud to accept his

suggestion that she come to live in Santa Fe. Yet she knew

that she was the woman he loved most. He could describe

her objectively, but never without great feeling. She was, she
knew, the single greatest element in his life.

She flew to Mexico City on December 11, 1936, and toured

so energetically that both Bynner and Hunt were exhausted.

They went to Chapala and stayed at the hotel on the water,

a grand wreck of a place owned by an ancient eccentric woman,

Doha Maria Pacheco Viuda de Arzapalo, who dressed in laven¬

der and white silk and dined once a week with Mrs. Wellington,

the two talking endlessly each in her own language, which the
other couldn't speak. Mrs. Wellington admired Doha Maria's

ability to talk without pausing, an accomplishment she was

known to possess herself, and she said of Doha Maria what she

wanted thought of herself: "She is wonderful and a constant

source of interest and astonishment to me."

She and Hunt did not get on. As Bynner said, there was no
 I xv i i i • Biographical Introduction

hope, for his mother was determined that they fight, and the

more polite Hunt was, the worse she acted. She objected to the

jerseys men wore in Mexico and called them undershirts: "Men

don't seem to realize that the less they show of themselves, the
less they look like baboons." She had a way of directing these

offhand remarks at Hunt. On their journey north to Santa Fe,

she accused him of deliberately jolting her by driving the car

roughly. Bynner recorded an incident on one day of that

journey: "During this final day in Mexico she took to pelting

Bob's head or mine or the car generally with tangerine peels

accompanied by peals of laughter—hours of this perverse pas¬

time, which I should like to see anyone play for a moment in

her own car." She saw herself being replaced and could not
tolerate it, but her need for attention forced her to remain in

Santa Fe. Finally she said she found it all "forlorn" and flew
back to New York on March 31. Bynner wrote of her visit:

"She had almost ground us into dead dust. She knew it and
was glad. But what a sad gladness she had always made for
herself out of life is told in her diary with its almost daily dark

entries." In October her depressions grew worse and were more

frequently noted in her journal. Her face began to pain her, a

symptom that she noted again and again. Bynner arrived in

New York just before she died. His secretary for many years,

Henriette Harris, recorded Mrs. Wellington's death in her jour¬

nal as Bynner later described it.

He told about the last hours around her, how active her

mind was to the very end. As Tim and he were sitting with

her, and she was suffering, Tim put his hand on hers and

said, to her, "Poor woman . . . take it easy . . ." She

turned on him with her old vehemence and said, "How

 Biographical Introduction • lx i x

dare you talk like that to me—how can I take it easy,

when I don t know what I m taking!!" Hal said those were

almost her last words. A little later, with the doctor there,
she suddenly sat up in bed and threw off the covers with

strength and said, "Let me up! I have an errand . . ." And

when they gently made her lie down again, she looked

around at them all, and said, almost to herself, and over and
over again, "Well, well, well . . . Well, well, well . .

Hal went on to say that she had made the request several
times that once she was in her coffin, to let no one see her,

to "just nail me in immediately," and so he was troubled

as to what to do at the funeral. When a cousin came in for

the funeral and told him of that same request made to her, he

appealed to the undertaker, who said, "Why don't you just

leave her in her bed for the two days?" Which was done.
"I was in that great apartment with her alone for two
nights, not the least bit disturbed. We had to pass back

and forth through her room, to the bathroom, and through

her room to another room, and there she was, just resting
—a person amongst us."

Mrs. Wellington and her older son were very much alike:

strong, single-minded, intelligent, humorous, outrageous at

times, possessive. They left their mark on one another. Bynner

asked Hunt to come to New York right after his mother's death
and they arranged to ship back much of her furniture and many

objects and paintings. Bynner also inherited a large sum of

money. They returned to Santa Fe and their life continued, in

appearance, much as it had before. It was a year later that Bob

Hunt pointed out to Bynner that he had not written any poetry
 I x x * Biographical Introduction

since his mother's death and said that it was now time to begin.

When Bynner let this pass, Hunt went out and brought him his
writing pad and pencil. Bynner simply began again, and in 1940
his next volume of poems. Against the Cold, appeared; many

were about death. One of these poems is a condensation of emo¬

tion in Bynner's most delicate lyric style, in which, as in Chinese

poetry, every word tells. It is called "Spring and a Mother Dead."

I who should write her epitaph

Would err:
What could I say to anyone
But her?

Apricot-blossoms open

Like a bell:
But this time there is nobody

To tell.

The relationship between the mother and son had been a

deeply creative yet destructive link that is hard to understand
and did not end with death. One poem illustrating this love was

published in 1929 in Indian Earth:

To My Mother Concerning a Chapala Sunset

To you, at evening, I exclaim aloud—

Because you never see the range of light

That lives along Chapala mountain-tops

With massive interchange of sun and moon.

And yet, before I was born, you had often watched.

On mountain-clouds as beautiful as these.

 Biographical Introduction • lx x i

Changes of light that I shall never see

In this confused and separating world.

When World War II came, the life of Bynner and Hunt

changed, as did everyone else's. Bob wanted to serve, but was
rejected by both the army and navy because of his health—his
lungs were not good and years of overindulgence had greatly
weakened his body. Instead, he served on the local draft board.
Bynner was state chairman for New Mexico of the United China
Relief Fund. On St. Patrick's Day, 1943, he and Hunt left for
Chapala. They had bought a house there in 1940 and were mak-
ing many renovations, especially the building of a high sun ter¬
race at the back of the second floor. Bob, after more than a year
with the draft board, wanted to take a vacation; Bynner had been
giving a lecture for the United China Relief on "Chinese Poetry
and People" and wanted to develop it into a book.
Bynner's brother, Tim, came to Chapala for a brief visit,
without his wife. By May, Bob Hunt had left, this time to go
to San Francisco to work as a checker on the loading docks
in the civilian force and later in the navy personnel bureau for
the docks. Time passed slowly for each. Hunt's work was ex¬
hausting, at least to him. He wrote Bynner on August 28 and
September 5, 1943:

I know it's Saturday night in the Big City and all that, but
I worked all day—and the other guys have gone out for a
spree—but I can no longer even see the keyboard, what
with sleepiness and fatigue. Maybe tomorrow I'll do better
by you: this certainly is no letter—and I have in no way
expressed to you my thoughts (about the both of us, as it
 I x x i i ’ Biographical Introduction

were, and the world in general) but I can no longer stay

awake ... I only hope that you are well and happy, and

working hard—and that you think of me as often as I do

of you—and that someday soon we can get together again

in more peaceful times . . . Yes; I'll write again tomorrow.

It will be much better . . . good-night, and bless you.

I've just come off a Liberty Ship—a new one, where I've

been "supervising" a loading lot. The ships are fun—and

it's interesting to watch all the loading machinery and the

great cranes, etc. The men will work all night—my time
comes next week, I think. . . .
Another interruption: Six freight cars of flour, beer and

cigarettes have just come in—so. I'm off. See you later! . . .

I wish you could hear some of the language around

here. The Navy was calm and tame. These guys are really
tough (on the outside)—but their off-work hobbies would

kill you: knitting, collecting butterflies—and one does minia¬

tures! Sheer Compensation. ... I, on the other hand,

make sleep my hobby. I've even had to give up what little

was left of my so-called Sex-life—if any. Just as well, per¬
haps—and why not?

Bynner was hard at work on the Chinese book, but also

active in the social life of Chapala and involved in repairs on

the house. A servant and his family were living in a house he

had built for them behind his own. As a boy, the man had

attached himself to Bynner when the writer first came to

Chapala in 1923. Bynner had never come to visit when Ysidoro

did not take charge of his life, and now he was officially in

charge, as he and his family would be for the rest of Bynner's

 Biographical Introduction ‘ Ixxiii

life. A young American painter, Charles Stigall, too ill at the

time to be drafted, came to Chapala to recuperate and lived in

the house with Bynner. Bynner wrote to Hunt about him:

A babyless bachelor won't disrupt the house, and I'll be

glad in a way to have a little break in my habit of solitude.
He's quiet and will, I think, let me work as much as is good

for me. Also it may perk up Ysidoro, who was going a bit
slack on the food because of my caring so little.

Hunt wrote Bynner's brother on December 7, 1943:

Lord how I miss him! And how wonderful it will be for us

all to be together again one of these fine days. But who

knows? I, for one, have given up guessing at anything, and

can only hope that we will all be in one piece by the time
we all meet again. It's a hell of a life—this being separated

and uncertain as to the plans of mice and men—but what

to do? And, as you know, I couldn't just vegetate any

longer; and this seemed to be the answer. It's certainly

better than fox-holes;—and Christ knows I'm not com¬
plaining.

Hunt remained in San Francisco until September 1944,

when he returned to Chapala, too ill to continue working.

Bynner and he did not return to Santa Fe until August 1945. It
was during this period, while working on the Chinese book—

which was never finished—that Bynner began to write a ver¬

sion of Laotzu based upon other English translations. The Way

of Life According to Laotzu was published in October 1944

and was to be his most popular work, selling over fifty thousand
 I x x i v • Biographical Introduction

copies. It is still in print. Mistakenly, the Knopfs refused it,

thinking it would not be popular, so Bynner sent it to a college

friend, Richard Walsh (the husband of Pearl Buck), who ran

The John Day Company.

Bynner was sixty-five years old in 1946, but he had sus¬

tained remarkable health and youth. Once he had gone bald,
which occurred gradually over the first decade of the century,

his appearance changed little, until now, when illness—low

blood pressure, a blood clot in his leg, colitis, arthritis—began

to disturb him. His friends had begun to die, and his letters

comment on the beginning of his isolation. Franklin Roosevelt's

death in 1945 was for him a summation of the life of his gen¬

eration. Arthur Ficke's death in November 1945 was the loss of

his oldest and closest friend, a relationship that went back to

1900 and touched all aspects of his life. It was acknowledged

that the work in Los Alamos, just up from Santa Fe, was with

the atom bomb. Bynner was fascinated with the scientists and

the bomb, but saw reflected in Los Alamos how little he or even

Santa Fe had escaped the present destructive world. His secre¬

tary Henriette Harris had to retire because of back trouble. She

was replaced by Dorothy Chauvenet, who would remain to the

end of his life. Frieda Lawrence and he celebrated their birth¬

days on August 10 and 11 together and saw how age had

affected each of them. Bynner began to have eye trouble, which

eventually led to an operation, blindness in one eye, continual

pain, and, finally, nearly total blindness.

He went to the West Coast in 1946, ostensibly to get away

from the high altitude in Santa Fe, which wasn't good for his

heart, but while in Hollywood and San Francisco he was end-

 Biographical Introduction • l xx v

lessly visiting and meeting people, seeing George Kennedy of

The Hollywood Reporter and Dr. Hans Fehling, both old friends.

At a party a friend admitted he himself had changed, but "Hal

is but slightly changed, if at all. He did a great deal of talking

and kept things quite lively." He left for Chapala just before

Christmas in 1946 with a severe case of eczema that bothered

him for several months, making writing difficult: "And I have

been slow these days with new writing. Rhythms don't float
through me as happily as they used to . . But by March 1947

another book of verse had appeared. Take Away the Dark¬

ness. It was soon after this that he turned to the thought of prose

memoirs, which led in 1951 to publication of his book on D. H.

Lawrence.

If there was a slowing down, a quieter pacing, and an ac¬

ceptance in Bynner, in Hunt there was the beginning of severe

bitterness. Even Bynner acknowledged it in writing a friend:

"I can't help feeling that he is developing a genius for un¬

necessary quarrels . . . His opinions should be his of course

but might be governed to make life easier all around." Hunt

seemed to have exhausted himself in the war and had little left
to give. He worked on the Santa Fe and Chapala houses, and soon

on the house he bought in Santa Fe, but most of his energy went

into drinking and sex. Everywhere he went, he carried his own

case of liquor, containing bourbon, gin, and rum; he was often

very drunk, and Bynner worried about his safety. If he agreed

to go to a dinner party, he often became so drunk and belligerent

that he provoked strong reactions. At one dinner in 1948, Hunt's

abusive language and Bynner's attempted defense of him lost

them the friendship of five people, one of them the poet Haniel
 I x x v i ’ Biographical Introduction

Long, a man Bynner had been close to since 1907. This incident

especially bothered Bynner: he was a man who had learned to

accept a great deal and who wanted to avoid conflict—in many

ways he had become Taoist in his reaction to life—but Hunt

had become a force working against acceptance, tolerance, and

resignation. He was a tender man who had grown bitter, but he
was not stupid or dishonest, and he was capable of strong feel¬

ings of love and anger—perhaps even more so than Bynner. But

Hunt was now a potential source of chaos, and the pressure on

Bynner grew and grew as Hunt became more difficult. Bynner
never spoke against him, never showed any anger or hostility

in public, but to his closest friends he expressed a frightened

concern that Bob would be lost.

Such a life is not lived without a price. Bynner's aging, with

its many losses and illnesses, the lack of recognition for his years
of writing, and his problems with Bob—all these had to affect

him. They eventually led to a serious case of shingles on his

shoulders, which lasted for many years. His friends began to

see a great isolating egotism, as if he were ignoring everything

but what he chose to see, yet perhaps it was that he had not the

stamina to focus on life. Henriette Harris wrote: "When we see

him as we did last night, I wonder. He didn't ask any of us

one thing about ourselves. But there is something about him we

love, I guess, and perhaps just take it and forget the rest. I hope

the evening fed him." There was now little time, little energy,

for anything but himself and the act of performing well for a
special few.

Bynner and Bob went to the East Coast in 1947, for the
first time in a decade, to see many friends—Edna Millay and
 Biographical Introduction ’ l x x v i i

her husband, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, William Rose Benet,

Robert Flaherty, Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Wash¬

ington—who greeted Bynner with a great bear hug—and other

friends on down the coast and across the Gulf. Bynner left at
once for Chapala, and Hunt visited his family in Los Angeles

before joining him. They returned to Santa Fe, where they saw

Stephen Spender, Jane Cowl, the Victor Babins, Peter and

Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Frieda Lawrence, Millicent Rogers. Then

they were off to New York again to hear Victor Babin's song
cycle, based upon Bynner poems, which was performed at Town

Hall; and then to Key West, where Bynner's old friend John

Dewey lent them a house. They returned to Chapala in 1949,

when Bynner's severe eye problems began. Yet even this did
not stop a six-month trip, starting in January 1950, to North

Africa and Europe with Hunt, Clinton King, and his wife,

Narcissa. On this trip they visited Jane Bowles, Alice B. Toklas,

Thornton Wilder, James Baldwin in Paris; Sybille Bedford and

George Santayana in Rome—the latter twice at the Convent of

the Blue Sisters; Norman Douglas in Capri; and Osbert Sitwell,

John Strachey, Arthur Waley, and Alfred Noyes in England. That

fall Bynner entertained the Igor Stravinskys, Aldous Huxley,

Robert Oppenheimer, Christopher Isherwood, Carl Van Vechten,

Martha Graham, Ina Claire, Richard Arlen, and Clara Bow—a

list he delighted in reciting to other visitors. His young friend

Miranda Masocco, who ran one of the best shops on the Plaza

in Santa Fe, brought many of these people to his house and kept

his life as active as was possible. That fall he had his first severe

heart attack, and in June 1951 he had an eye operation that un¬

fortunately failed to prevent the eventual loss of sight in one

eye. Yet there is no indication that Bynner then decided to stop;

he continued to go regularly to Chapala and the West Coast,

 I x x v i i i • Biographical Introduction

especially to see an eye doctor, and he returned to Europe in

1952 to visit Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy, and in 1957,

Greece.
Bynner brought out a collection of poems in 1955, Book of

Lyrics, and then another. New Poems I960, both of which show
his careful lyric quality, the second revealing a release of ele¬
ments similar to the early Spectra poems. New Poems is star¬

tlingly modern for a man of almost eighty: conceived in the mo¬

ment just before waking, jotted onto a large pad with a thick
pencil, in the dark, since he could no longer see, and never

rewritten, they read like inquiries into the amusing and serious
mysteries and absurdities of our long, strange lives. They give

no answers, but they open many vistas.

All tempest
Has

Like a navel
A hole in its middle

Through which a gull may fly

In silence

They are poems such as a Prospero might have written; they

are the wise, odd words of an amusing old man who is in touch

still with some aspect of that special excitement one can find in
life.

But the chronicle of the end now begins: first his major-
domo in Chapala, Ysidoro Pulido, dies in 1956; his brother, Tim,

dies after an operation in 1959; Rita Padilla dies in 1963, after

three weeks in a coma. Then the great shock: Bob Hunt dies on

January 18, 1964, of a heart attack as he is about to go to

Chapala alone to bring back some of their possessions. Hunt

 Biographical Introduction • l x x i x

says, I feel a vertigo/' and he is dead. There had been serious

warnings—at least two serious heart attacks—that he refused

to heed, but he and Bynner had hoped he would not be hit
again.

The confusion is endless. Bob had not put his legal affairs
in order. There is no one to stay in the house with Bynner, and

now he cannot be left alone: he cannot see or always keep his

balance, and he is prone to fall over the edge of a carpet or on
the stairs. Bynner is not able to cope with all there is to do, nor

is his secretary. Bob's own house, the one he had so carefully

worked on, is willed to Bynner, who gives it to St. John's

College, but what about Hunt's furniture and books? Bynner

answers letters but forgets a few weeks later whether he has

already written, nor can a carbon be found; yet the letter has

been answered. Much of the fine Indian silver has been given
to local museums, and the Chinese scrolls and jade to the

Roswell Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, but there is so much

more to decide on. What else should he do; what is right to do?

Then there is a heart attack in the fall of 1964—but an un¬

usually good recovery.

One year exactly from the date of Hunt's death, January

18, 1965, clearly conscious of that event, Bynner had a severe

stroke. He never recovered, never again gained control of his

mind. Nursed much as a child, dressed, fed, and bathed, often

silent or speaking nonsense, seldom able to recognize anyone

but expressing fears of being left alone, cared for by round-the-

clock nurses, he persisted in staying alive until June 1, 1968,

when he went quickly from sleep into death, without any move¬

ment at all.
 I x x x ’ Biographical Introduction

All his life he had fought his fear of being alone, of the

loss in silence, the stillness of the night. He had constructed his

life so that he would not succumb to this fear, as had his father

and grandfather, and so many others who had gone mad, or

who had tried to escape despair in drink or in illness. He had

tried to make life work, to mold a life that was amusing, bright,
clear and simple, without any disarming or troublesome personal

contacts, any intimacies that forced one to examine relations too

closely. The still point, the eye in the tempest, the very darkness
at the center: it existed no matter what was done. At the end
"his family," as he called the nurses, might leave him. He would

always ask if the family loved one another; he wanted to be

certain they did, for without love they would not stay. In
"Epithalamium and Elegy," a poem he wrote in 1925, he said:

"My single constancy is love of life," and in the poem it is life

he has married, in an open, non-conditional union. Alone, man

married life, but not another human being. A human union was
too dangerous to sanity yet, in marrying life, one embraced death.
There is, then, no other way, but one accepts this.

Can I be tragical, in having had

My love of life by life herself subdued?
Since I am satiate with joy, can I be sad
In leaving? All that there is of solitude
Shall be little enough, after this vast embrace.
Give her some younger lover in my place.
 Critical Introduction

RICHARD WILBUR

Yeats praised the "powerful, eloquent language" of Witter

Bynner s first volume. An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems;

E. A. Robinson said of The New World that he could not recall

any book more thoroughly alive"; D. H. Lawrence found the

poems of Caravan "very sincere and really deep in life"; Allen

Tate was not alone in judging Bynner, as once he did, to be

"deservedly ... a leading figure in American poetry." Never¬

theless the editor of Louise Bogan's letters, published in 1973,

found it necessary to identify Witter Bynner in a footnote, say-

ing of him and of Arthur Davison Ficke that they "were poets

who, today, are best remembered as the perpetrators ... of

the Spectra hoax. Best remembered, I fear, always means

mostly forgotten.

How to explain the forgottenness of a poet who was so

valued, in his day, by other poets whom we still read and

esteem? A simple answer might be that writers are often seen,

in retrospect, to have overvalued their contemporaries, out of

proximity and a natural gratitude to all who are helping their

moment to find its voice. I think it no injustice to say that

Bynner had not the final stature of some who praised him. Yet

he was and is a true and valuable poet, as this book will prove,

and it will not do to dismiss Yeats's words, or anyone else's, as

puffery.

Leafing through the magazines in which Bynner published

 I x x x i i • Critical Introduction

during the 1920's, one soon comes upon another answer to the

question I have posed. In issues of The New Republic, for ex¬

ample, one repeatedly finds a whole page devoted to sonnets by

several hands—by Elinor Wylie, Robert Hillyer, Sara Teasdale,

Witter Bynner, and others. As it entered its second decade, the

American poetic "renaissance/' developing in many modes, had
brought forward a corps of expert practitioners of the lyric, by

which I here mean a shortish poem of personal feeling or per¬

ception, characterized at its best by intensity and by felicity of
phrasing and form. Of all these admired and much-published

lyricists, who were, to be sure, diverse within their apparent

class, Edna Millay was the most Thespian and the most cele¬

brated, and Bynner confidently declared her, in answer to a

1927 inquiry from The Bookman, to be the greatest living Ameri¬

can poet. But a page in The Nation of June 9, 1926, indicates

how things were going to go. At the bottom of the left-hand

column is an agreeable and clever poem by Bynner in which,

likening the repose of a quiet cafe, with its tables and tobacco

smoke, to that of a desert tableland traversed by puffs of cloud,

he prefers the remembered natural scene. In the right-hand

column, however, is Mark Van Doren's review of Selected

Poems: 1909-1925, by T. S. Eliot. The review acknowledges

certain aspects of the expatriate Eliot which had caused early

readers to resist him: his "difficulty," his aridity, his pessimism,

his elegant weariness, "his indifference to most of the current

poetic themes." But Van Doren also firmly states that Eliot is

"one of the finest of twentieth century poets," that "literary

historians five centuries hence may be able to sum up our gen¬

eration" by quoting The Waste Land, and that many of his

poems have already the character of classics. I do not pretend

 Critical Introduction ' Ixxxiii

that there is anything crucial about this magazine page I have

happened on, but it does represent one moment in an inexorable

transition.

In his 1929 essay. The Persistence of Poetry, Bynner some¬

what crankily said, "There are countless artificers, over-cultured

and jaded, who with extensive knowledge of the world's poets

and with the most highly self-conscious uses of prosody, fabri¬

cate words into strained and intellectualized meanings which

pass for a season among the literary fashionables as poetry, but

which are about as important to the singing heart of man as the

latest sartorial trick from Paris." The only culprit specifically

mentioned was Amy Lowell, and Bynner regarded her poetic

and promotional career as faded; but he also warned against "a

whole tribe of her nature" whose chieftain, I venture to guess,

was that Eliot who would so largely dominate American poetry

during the second quarter of this century. Bynner was right to

fear what an Age of Eliot could and would do to that open sort

of "song" which he most prized and was best equipped to write.

If Dr. Williams felt that The Waste Land's publication had

blasted his enterprise—the articulation of America in its own

word and cadence—he nonetheless survived the blast and went

on to enjoy wide recognition and mentorship in the 1950's. And

Hart Crane's Bridge, conceived as a visionary answer to Eliot's

pessimism, went at once into the modern canon. As in any

literary period, great things were achieved in spite of, or with¬

out reference to, those thought to be in the ascendancy. But the

poetic practice of Eliot and others (the Fugitive group, for in¬

stance), and the related aesthetic of the New Criticism, fostered

new tastes and standards in the light of which the well-turned

passionate lyric of love, earth, death, and beauty seemed not to

 I x x x i v ' Critical Introduction

be doing the necessary job of art. Poetry must now, it was felt,

cope with a complex time through a hard, intricate honesty of

thought and emotion, a scope beyond the personal, a sophisti¬

cated cultural and historical awareness, a resolute inclusiveness

in diction and matter, and a technique employing wit and irony

in the service of precision. As that prescription more and more

prevailed, the reputation of Millay began to wither, and other

talents loosely comparable to hers—some of them finer than

hers—were not encouraged to be productive. By 1938, Benet

and Pearson could say in their Oxford Anthology of American

Literature, "Witter Bynner is one of the few men writing poetry

today in whose work may be found any considerable body of

the simple lyric."

Good art, of whatever magnitude, is never replaced, but it
may well be mislaid. It is writers, I think, who are most likely

to be recklessly attached, regardless of critical orthodoxy and of

their own practice, to poems not currently in vogue. I can think
of one thoroughly "experimental" poet on whom Elinor Wylie

has been a recent influence; of another given to reading aloud

from Charlotte Mew; of another who has kept me up half the

night with his total recall of Bynner's beloved Housman. And I

have heard a playwright of unimpeachable contemporaneity say

from memory an exquisite sonnet by Lizette Woodworth Reese.

With anthologists, professors, and critics it is generally other¬

wise. E. C. Stedman's American Anthology, published in 1900,

had room for everyone past or present, not excluding John

Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster. But later anthologies of

our national poetry have increasingly been intended not only

for the window seat and bedside table but for the classroom

desk. In response to the views and needs of professors, many

anthologists have boiled down American poetry to the work of

 Critical Introduction ' Ixxxv

some fifty or sixty writers, all certifiably major. This work has

in some cases been excellently done, and I make no objection to

a stress upon what is best; but one may regret the presentation

of poets in vacuo, the close decisions which have consigned fine

talents to oblivion, and the inevitable bias against poetry which,

in its forthrightness, would seem to leave a lecturer little to do.

Among critical surveys of American verse, few recent studies

approach the evocative fullness of David Perkins's History of

Modern Poetry, which repeatedly restores a sense of the variety

and pre-canonical incertitude of our literary past. It is far more

usual to see a series of assured reputations revisited in the light

of some notion of the “American experience" and of "main cur¬

rents." I should guess that the surest way to have existed, in the

eyes of most contemporary criticism, is to be discernible some¬

where upon a line drawn through Emerson and Whitman.

Witter Bynner has not yet profited by that sort of tic-tac-toe,

but in fact the strongest influence on his early thought, if not on

his technique, was his fellow Brooklynite Whitman. An Ode to

Harvard (1907) may seem to us, at least in its long title poem,

an odd first book for a young man to have written. It had been

one thing for Longfellow, in "Morituri Salutamus," to summon

up a vanished Bowdoin at the fiftieth reunion of his class; it

was another thing for Bynner, just five years out of college and

embarked on an editorial career at McClure's, to return in

homesick verse to Cambridge and the Yard, chasing memories

of "goodies" and proctors, lamenting the old pump, and re¬

gretting high old times. We are helped to understand such a

choice of subject if we recall Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey

(author of the Maine "Stein Song"), who in the nineties had

idealized athletic youth and comradeship, and if we remember

that such colleges as Harvard, in the early 1900's, were seen not
 I x x xv i • Critical Introduction

only as educators of the aristoi but as instillers of moral and

spiritual purpose. Bynner's poem is thus able to move from
nostalgia for his and Harvard's past to an affirmation of Har¬

vard's future and all mankind's, and to end by charging Har¬

vard, founded "for Christ and for His Church," to continue to

brandish "the spear of youth" in "the spirit's fight."

The best lines in the poem, those concerning Mount Auburn
Cemetery, were commended by A. E. Housman as "really beauti¬

ful poetry," and are in their substance far more Whitmanian

than Christian: the soul's destiny, they assert, is more and more
to incorporate all other souls, through universal love, until

... all shall be the mother and the son.

The daughter and the father and the one.

The poem is not everywhere so elevated in its language; there

is a fair amount of "sincere" and exclamatory gush which would

have made Stephen Crane, for one, grit his teeth; there are also

passages which are colloquial or slangy to good effect, as when

a Yale-Harvard game is described in a boisterous style and form

strikingly anticipatory of Lindsay's "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,

Bryan." Underlying both the bouncy and the vatic portions of

the poem, one senses a radical solitude akin to Whitman's, the

sort of solitude which might make one hanker for a fusion with

all humanity. The football game is seen as an event which "con¬

gregates / The many into one," and the memory of under¬

graduate friendships causes Bynner to exclaim,

O blessed are the early ways to share

The mystery of being not alone!

 Critical Introduction • l x x x v i i

It was not the gamey, exhibitionistic Whitman whom

Bynner followed, and continued to follow; nor was it the bold
confronter of pain, evil, and shame. The Whitman whom

Bynner's next work acknowledges by name is the finished

prophet of spiritual democracy, his visions calmed, codified,

and—as Paul Horgan has put it—ultimately translated "into

the terms of the Wilsonian Zeitgeist." In Bynner's Phi Beta

Kappa poem, "The Immigrant," given at Harvard in 1911 and

later enlarged into The New World (1915), the poet speaks
chiefly as a good student who is transmitting to us the wisdom

of others. This student has for his teacher and inspirer a woman

named Celia, and Bynner tells us in a note that Celia is a real

woman, now dead, whom her poet has idealized, gathering "into
her large spirit the beauties of many women, into her words

the wisdom of many men, as stars into the one heaven." This
haloed and educative spirit, this Egeria, has herself a beloved

instructor in Walt Whitman, and thus the thought of Bynner's

poem is doubly sanctioned, oracular in depth.

What does the poem reveal? Celia tells the poet that "the

love of two," such as they enjoy, "incurs the love of multi¬

tudes," because each of us is a part of everyone else, and the

flow of history is toward unselfish brotherhood and spiritual

unity. This process is irresistible: "something pure and ex¬

quisite, / Although inscrutably begun, / Surely exalts the many

into one." To "seek out the single spirit" by embracing all

others is to "join God's growing mind," a mind which grows

toward a final condition of divine wholeness, beauty, peace, and

love. America has a special role in that evolution because, where

democracy exists and social justice is an acknowledged goal, a

man can most readily "know all men to be himself." As im¬

migrant ships have sought America out of the dark past, and
 I x x x v i i i • Critical Introduction

from every corner of the world, America is itself a figurative

ship bound for an ideal “new world/7 Already, it and mankind

are under way: economic injustice is being overcome, the in¬

clination toward war is yielding to a ''fellowship of unshed

blood," and evil is ever more clearly seen to be the "temporary

pain" of giving birth to future good.

Where Whitman best persuades us, in his own work, is in
those poems which do not simply set forth a finished doctrine

but fight their way instead through sloughs and storms of the
mind toward a manic capacity to be "orotund, sweeping, and
final." In Song of Myself, Whitman's ideas are thus in a sense

validated—shown to be possible and achievable—by their visi¬

ble emergence from one man's psychic struggle. The thought of

The New World has no such dramatic persuasiveness, and must

convince by its adequacy to life, by its internal coherence, and
by the rhetoric in which it is couched. I do not find the poem al¬
together convincing, though there are fine rhetorical passages

like this, in which Celia is affirming the omega point:

It is my faith that God is our own dream

Of perfect understanding of the soul.

It is my passion that, alike through me

And every member of eternity.

The source of God is sending the same stream.

It is my peace that when my life is whole,

God's life shall be completed and supreme.

Considered as a religious utterance, whether Christian or tran¬

scendentalism the poem leaves the reader uneasy. God as creator

is minimized. It is not clear whether the God who impels history

is a mind or a mere force; if He is the latter, it is not explained

 Critical Introduction • lx x x i x

how a force could will itself to develop an encompassing mind.

Christ the Lord is demoted to be Christ the comrade, "a man

who proved man s unused worth— / And made himself the

God"; and though the poem speaks often of immortality or

resurrection, and proclaims that "Nothing is lost," it appears on

the whole that we shall survive death only as recycled matter
and in the memories of those we have edified. If Bynner were,

like Yeats, the poet of a "system," related works might iron out
all questions and tell us to what genre of poem The New

World truly belongs. Lacking such aids, I shall say that the poem
is a fervent and naive humanitarian exhortation, an appeal to
social conscience which exploits both Walt Whitman and the
author s felt but irregular Christian faith. It is a poem which

could, I think, be converted without much tinkering into a high-

minded sort of Marxist vision. It is also the poem of a lonely

young man who, somehow diffident about particular love,

wishes in this life to merge with everybody at once, and in

death to escape from the "incompleteness" of personal identity

into the whole.

The tone of The New World must be "mystical" and

"serene," those being among Celia's qualities, and so it has less
flexibility of voice than did An Ode to Harvard; but the two

poems use the same quite loose form, their lines varying freely
in length and rhyming according to no set scheme. The advan¬

tages of such a form might be a capacity for expressive dilation

or contraction, and an ease in the emphatic placement of im¬

portant words. The danger of such a form is that it invites lazi¬

ness, opportunistic rhyming, and the loss of rhythmic character

for want of a norm. Housman, writing to Bynner about the

poem in its first form, said, "The only criticism I have to make,

if it is a criticism, is that my personal ear is not pleased by verses

 x c * Critical Introduction

of more than 10 syllables in this mixed metre, though I know

that Patmore and others have used them." Anyone's ear, I

should think, would have trouble with lines like "As with

wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail," or "And then of a

sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place." The New
World is not a sustained performance, whether in technique or

in its rather static argument, but it may be mined for hand¬

somely turned passages such as the one here printed as "Grieve

Not for Beauty."

The mature Bynner, whom we begin to meet in Grenstone

Poems (1917), would probably not dissent from what I have

just said: the passage which I have mentioned was salvaged as

a self-sufficient poem in his Selected Poems (1936), and again

in the later Book of Lyrics (1955); and Bynner was to essay the
long poem opce more only, in Eden Tree. I have dwelt at some

length on his first extended efforts because, for all its shifts and
phases, Bynner's later poetry was remarkably continuous with

his first preoccupations; but from now on he was to be, in

theory and in practice, a lyric poet. Only such a poet would

describe a master as one "who can so use language that a whole

vast sky of words seems as simple as a petal." Only such a poet

would find in Housman's verse "all the great machinery of

Greek purgation gathered into a dewdrop." In casual answer to

a letter asking him why he wrote poetry, Bynner once replied,

"The best I can say is that I still feel as I felt from boyhood,
that there is importance in trying to condense a whole novel,

say, or a whole symphony into a few pages or even eight

lines ... I know that epics hold an important place in literary

history, but I venture to point out the fact that they are in

the long run mainly memorable because of imbedded lyrics."

 Critical Introduction • x c i

Whether advanced by Bynner or by the Poe whom he early

cherished, such claims for the lyric, though they indicate a

truth, are obviously disputable. Any art form which works has

need of all its means. The wrath of Achilles really does take

twenty-odd books to tell, and the machinery of purgation, in

Oedipus Rex, will not turn without all the parts discerned by
Aristotle. An eight-line lyric might "say the same thing," but
not to the same effect. A stanza or two might argue, as Bynner

so often did, the responsibility of each for all, but when that

idea transpires from the many concretely interwoven lives of

The Brothers Karamazov, the mode of proof and the nature of

the impact are different. Let it be enough to say of the lyric that

it can be language at its most compressed, that it can give the

suddenest of immortal wounds, and that it is rightly likened, at

times, to the dropped pebble which causes widening circles in

water.

Grenstone Poems was on the whole a gathering of short

poems from the decade following 1907, the year in which

Bynner decided against an editorial career and retired to write

in Cornish, New Hampshire. Cornish is "Grenstone," and Gren¬

stone is Bynner's Shropshire: there are, as might be expected,

a few poems reminiscent of Housman—verses written in home¬

sick absence from the countryside, stanzas which speak of

"lads," runners, and so on. But actually the volume is extremely

diverse in tenor and mode: there are experiments in strict or

relaxed vers libre, incantatory poems of the sort that Lindsay

was doing, a long Sandburgian paragraph-poem, songs, ballads,

epigrams, and even a doggerel piece in Negro dialect. Themati¬

cally, Grenstone Poems has a certain amount of cohesion through

its many poems of Celia—of the poet's love for her, of her
 x c i i • Critical Introduction

death and ideal continuance, of the spirit of all-embracing love

which she inculcates and symbolizes. In this book of consis¬

tently wide sympathies, whose poet declares, / For I am nothing

if I am not all," the mockingbird is characteristically praised

because in him "all birds" are joined in the one medley, and
there must even be a poem for Kansas, in which the poet, though
a devotee of New Hampshire hills, reassures the prairie of his

affection for its "easy ample flow."

Bynner always wished his books to be unities, rather than

mere accumulations. He best realized this wish in such a book

as Indian Earth, where a new subject matter and a fresh aesthetic

discover their appropriate and sustainable form. We have the

impulse at its most trivial in Book of Lyrics, where poems se¬

lected from many earlier books are sorted according to the four
seasons. A poet of Bynner's lyric temper is always in danger of

tidiness, a tidiness which will smother the incipient poem in a

neat stanza pattern full of graceful phrases and hill-rill rhymes.
I think that I discover such a tidying urge in the too-elaborate
organization of Grenstone Poems, which is divided into three

titled sections, each divided in turn into many subsections hav¬

ing titles and two-line mottoes. It is hard for me to see why this
interesting poem, called "Driftwood," should have been assigned
to subsection IV ("Dalliance") of Section I ("Grenstone"):

Come, warm your hands

From the cold wind of time.

I have built here, under the moon,

A many-colored fire

With fragments of wood

That have been part of a tree

And part of a ship.

 Critical Introduction ’ x c i i i

Were leaves more real.

Or driven nails.

Or fingers of builders.

Than these burning violets?

Come, warm your hands

From the cold wind of time.

There's a fire under the moon.

That is a disciplined free-verse poem, varying narrowly between

lines of two or three stresses, and disposed in two paragraphs

of seven lines each. It is about a fire made of driftwood on a
chill, gusty, and moonlit beach, and the poet invites us to share

it. The words never forsake their literal subject, and continually

render the scene more vivid to the eye: driftwood does in fact
burn with many colors, and through the mention of leaves,

nails, shipbuilders' fingers, and violets we imagine the several

shapes and behaviors of the flames. But of course the cold wind
of the second line is not merely a wind: it is also "time." The

poet invites us to meditate, in the presence of a driftwood fire,

on that time which coldly destroys all things, bringing down the

tallest tree and wrecking the best-made vessel. We are asked

whether the tree and the ship were "more real" than their now

burning fragments, and it is assumed that we know the answer.

I should say that Bynner is here doing a dangerous and delicate

thing, since it would be so possible to construe the whole poem

as an invitation to take refuge from a sense of temporal loss

in Buddha's teaching that all things are illusory and "on fire."
But even if Grenstone Poems did not begin with a poem ("This

Wave") which says "What was ended / Has begun," and end

with the poet moving forward and upward on a Whitmanian

spiritual journey, I think that "Driftwood" would be sufficiently

 x c iv • Critical Introduction

weighted toward another interpretation. The fire, as Bynner de¬

scribes it, is not simply the annihilation of wood fragments;

even as the wrecked ship of the poem was built of felled trees,

the fire is something "built" of ship's driftwood by the poet s

hands and offered us as a warming symbolic proof that time is
not a destroyer but a perpetual renewer. Out of all change

comes new life, as in the variously colored violets of spring; we

are to warm our hands at flames in which we see the fingers of

dead builders, and then turn to fresh work; and the moon,

above such a fire, is a light which forever rises and waxes again.

This brief, plain-seeming, subtle poem, in which all the

words prove to be working hard, and in which the meaning

seems to emerge uncoerced from the data, is for my taste more

compelling than The New World's grandiloquent assertions that

"Nothing is lost," and points toward the best qualities of

Bynner's later achievements.

Robert Hunt, who edited the Selected Poems of 1936, was

quite right to place Spectra (1916) after Grenstone Poems

(1917); the Spectra poems came after most of Grenstone in

date of composition, and represent an inadvertent modulation

toward Bynner's next serious work. The Beloved Stranger. As

everyone more or less knows. Spectra was a hoax cooked up

by Bynner (under the name of Emanuel Morgan) and Arthur

Davison Ficke (as Anne Knish). Its intention was to make fun,

by seemingly serious precept and example, of schools of poetry

and their apologists, and in particular of Imagism, Vorticism,

and Futurism. Anne Knish's preface (which was, of necessity,

collaborative) is a highly plausible bit of pomposity, no sillier

on the face of it than most other manifestoes. It defines "Spec-

tric" composition as the poet's breaking up of "the white light

of infinite existence" into delectable colors, as the imitation of

 Critical Introduction • x c v

the eye's and the spirit's after-images, and as the presentation

not only of the object but of its "spectres"—the shadowy and

sometimes grotesque ideas which, in the poet's imagination, sur¬

round the object and are its true essence. It will be seen that the

Spectric program recommends a wild subjectivity in the col¬

location of images, intended perhaps to burlesque the theory
behind such brusque juxtapositions as we find in Pound's fa¬

mous In a Station of the Metro"; it also proposes to outdo, in

lavish color imagery, the more visual of the Imagists, against

whose precious jasmines and alizarins Williams had protested

in "To a Solitary Disciple."

The preface further prescribes "a tinge of humor," albeit

with a mock-serious purpose—to support the poet's "intuition

of the Absolute" by a stress on the vanity of lowly man. The

fact that humor was an acknowledged seasoning in the Spectric

recipe may to a slight extent excuse the gullibility with which

Spectra was received by distinguished critics, distinguished

poets, and the public. Still, it is hard for us to conceive of any¬

one's perusing with any sobriety Emanuel Morgan's "Opus

104," which begins

How terrible to entertain a lunatic!

To keep his earnestness from coming close!

—let alone "Opus 14," which closes with the outrageous lines

Then you came—like a scream

Of beeves.

In any case, as William Jay Smith has told in The Spectra Hoax,

all manner of people were taken in, and the spoof was long un¬

detected. It went to show what has often been evidenced in later

 x c v i • Critical Introduction

decades, that when people are a-flutter about schools and ide¬
ologies of art, their perceptions of particular art works are likely
to be unwary and obtuse.
Bynner s own later comment, it is reported, was that
Emanuel Morgan had been less of a joke on the critics who took
him seriously than on Bynner himself, who took him for a joke.
When a poet turns to nonsense or travesty or satire, his poems,
in addition to accomplishing their primary aim, will often em¬
body or liberate some aspect of himself. "Opus 79," for all its
foolishness, seems to conclude on a familiar note of Whit-
manian ubiquity, and "Opus 78" ("I am beset by liking so many
people ) is Bynner's old theme of universal love restated with a
Spectric extravagance and a certain exasperation. As for libera¬
tions, one reason why Ficke and Bynner could hide for so long
behind their pseudonyms was that nothing like Spectra was
expected of them. Ficke had worked in sonnet sequences and
formal lyrics; Bynner had, to be sure, written all sorts of poems,
including little free-verse amusements like this, which appeared
in a 1915 issue of The Smart Set:

Passion transforms me from my puny build

Your bosom listens to me like a crowded balcony
To a great man speaking.

But prior to Spectra he was to the public, and to himself, the

high-minded author of The New World and of the forthcoming
Grenstone Poems. The experience of collaborating on a parodic
hoax seems to have loosened his bondage to an effusive idealism
and an endearing persona; he might now, when the subject
matter warranted, feel freer to be sharp, witty, intuitive, or
outlandish.
 Critical Introduction • x c v i i

The Beloved Stranger (1919) was serially published in

Reedy's Mirror as "Songs of the Unknown Lover," the first in¬

stallments appearing anonymously and the latter ones being

credited to Bynner. The poems were, however, the work of

Bynner's Doppelganger Emanuel Morgan, as Bynner had quite

seriously confessed in a letter to Thomas Raymond. Several of

The Beloved Stranger's less elevated poems were revisions of

earlier Spectric pieces; nevertheless, the book is a unified and

serious work, having no element of hoax in it, and my guess is

that Bynner wrote it "as by Emanuel Morgan" because the

temporary disguise emboldened him to depart from his previous

norms of thought, expression, and technique. Also, perhaps—

though I cannot give hard proof of this—because the book arose
from a critical emotional experience calling for some measure of

camouflage.
In Bynner's earlier poems, God is less a transcendent being

than a fullness which the poet, and mankind, are in process of

achieving through human brotherhood. Thus the last lines of

Grenstone read:

I have been waiting long enough . . .

Impossible gods, good-by!

I wait no more . . . The way is rough—

But the god who climbs is I.

The poems of The Beloved Stranger are not in that key at all.

They are mysterious, ambiguous, and cannot be neatly ex¬

pounded, but the divinity to whom they are addressed—though

once described by the poet as "a part of my soul passing and I

not finding it"—is high, secret, timeless, and absolute. Utterly

un-Whitmanian, and superior to "common things," he is sha-

 x c v i i i • Critical Introduction

dowed forth in sun, sky, lightning, and sea, and may sometimes

be approached in dream. Himself not transitory, he is periodi¬

cally embodied in the poet's transitory lovers. Of these we

glimpse but little—a hand here, a shoulder there—and they are

chiefly felt as occasions of rapturous communion with the god.

When we hear of a cascade of hair, or the snow valley of a

breast, we envision less the human lover than the natural beauty
which is the god's symbolic vestment. Despite its moments of

rapture. The Beloved Stranger is a painful book concerned with

the emotional predicaments of ideal love: human attachment
does not always conduce to vision and joy; it can be degrading,

and it passes; the unknown divinity, who is inaccessible to

language or reason, cruelly absents himself, and yet the thought

of him devalues the actual.

How is it.
That you, whom I can never know.

My beloved.
Are a wall between me and those I have known well—
So that my familiars vanish

Farther than the blue roofs of Nankow

And are lost among the desert hills?

In general, the movement of the book is from happiness to

spiritual and erotic loss, thence to a sardonic repudiation of

human love—

The look in your eyes

Was as soft as the underside of soap in a soap-dish . . .

And I left before you could love me.

 Critical Introduction ’ x c i x

—and finally to a renewed acceptance both of the poet's lovers

and of his ideal Beloved, together with all of the bitter con¬
tradictions involved.

Whitman's ebullient and godlike incorporation of all life,

in Song of Myself, yielded to a darker mood in "Out of the

Cradle Endlessly Rocking," where he became the poet of lost

love and of death. Scholars have attributed the shattering of

Whitman's narcissism, which was the emotional basis of the
first poem, to a belated and unhappy love affair with a particular

person; I dare assume—to return to my earlier conjecture—that

The Beloved Stranger testifies to a like development in Bynner's

emotional life, which was, as I have noted, centrally solitary,

and was further complicated by bisexuality. Babette Deutsch,

reviewing the book in The Dial, discerningly described its songs

as "the outcry of that profound solitude which the plummet of

love itself begins to sound," and added that the Stranger,

whether lost lover or unknown god, "is one who gives . . .

the perfection of withheld things." The new perspectives of

The Beloved Stranger are almost certainly to be accounted for

in personal terms, and not merely, though some have thought

so, as the result of Bynner's first visit to the Orient in 1916. The

Orient is, to be sure, conspicuously present in the properties of

the poems: in the roofs of Nankow, in temples, in cherry

blossoms, in jade. And if the poems' free forms and surprising

images are a strange legacy from Spectra, one must agree with

W. M. Reedy that they have also a spare suggestiveness arguing

a familiarity with haiku and tanka. However prompted and

however influenced, the best poems of The Beloved Stranger

are among the best poems of Witter Bynner, having, for all

their mystery and indirection, a clean accuracy of feeling.

China was to have a great effect on the remainder of

 c • Critical Introduction

Bynner's career. In 1918, while engaged in a year's teaching of

public speaking and verse writing at Berkeley, he met the

scholar Kiang Kang-hu, with whose aid he undertook the trans¬

lation of a T'ang anthology. After a decade's devoted labor, this

came out in 1929 as The Jade Mountain. Meanwhile, there were

Pins for Wings (1921), a little book of free-verse impressions of

fellow writers, and two collections of lyrics, A Canticle of Pan

(1920) and Caravan (1925). The latter two abandon the vein of

The Beloved Stranger, revert in good part to the forms of

Grenstone, and are, for all their thematic groupings, quite mis¬

cellaneous. Still, there are constants to be noted. If the poet of

A Canticle of Pan no longer lays down the Whitmanian gospel,

and makes no claims to godhead, the collection is nonetheless

permeated, through good poems and bad, by that outreaching

spirit which Bynner always had: Pan and Christ and Buddha are

all to be embraced and reconciled; the lives of Chinese and of

Russians are to be entered and warmly understood; there is

compassion for every victim, reproof for all that is cold and ex¬

clusive, and abhorrence of the wars which embitter and divide

mankind. When any of this is stridently noble, or simplistically

fervent, it fails; Bynner would never cease to write poems of

protest, exhortation, and argument, but where he is most suc¬

cessful is in lines which seem to come not from a speaker who is

marshaling his thoughts and images but from a man who

notices, responds, and records. Here, in the poem "Meadow-
Shoes," is a curious and minor instance of noticing:

My shoe-soles, wet in the meadow,

Sang like the chirrup of birds—

But like birds of only a note or two.

Like persons of few words.

 Critical Introduction • c i

And, O my shoes, how hard it is

To tell the joy you touch!

I know, for I have tried to sing

The things I love too much.

A speaker-poet would never in ten thousand lines say anything

about the musical limitations of wet shoe soles; but the recorder-

poet, the poet to whom things occur, is responsive to reality's

neglected trifles. The movement of thought here, from shoe
squeak to bird song to poetry, is odd but plausible enough; it

is not like Bryant's wrenching of a moral from the yellow violet;

but Bynner is aware of passing from a small, little-mentioned

thing to a larger notion, and so disarms us with the comic in¬

flation of "O my shoes."

A weightier piece of recording, and one which gains force

with each rereading, is "In Kamakura."

In Kamakura, near the great Diabutsu,

When I had sat a long time on the ground

And been gathered up, forgetful of my face and form.

Into the face and form of endless dream,

I found among the booths a little pendant Buddha

With the steel of a round mirror for His halo . . .

So that a brooding head still intervenes in bronze

Between my face and the image of my face.

And I cannot see myself and not see Him.

This is a poem both narrative and descriptive, which imparts an

extraordinary amount in nine effortless and transparent lines.

The scene is simply set; we are given the poet's meditative state
 c i i ’ Critical Introduction

to prepare us for the impact of the little Buddha which he

purchases; and then the Buddha, and the act of looking at him,

are so presented as to objectify a profoundly inward experience

—a Westerner's encounter with the Buddhist release from self.

A further virtue of the poem lies in its rhythm; Bynner has, by

mid-line pauses, rhythmic variations, and hypermetrical lines,

prevented his single sentence from marching through the pen¬

tameter in a manner inappropriate to the subject. If the words

of the poem deftly externalize a spiritual event, its movement
has the hovering progress of memory and thought.

Some of the brief characterizations of Pins for Wings (as

when George Santayana is defined as "a withered / rose-

window," or W. C. Williams as "carbolic acid / in love") fore¬

shadow what is most notable in Caravan. Bynner's poetic voice,

when first heard, had been a warm and generous one—and one

gathers that warmth and generosity were at all times real quali¬
ties of the man. (He was, for one thing, a lifelong encourager of

younger artists; my own sole communication with him, if I

may offer a bit of parenthetical witness, came when one of my
first publications, in The Harvard Advocate, brought a kind note

of approval from his desk in Santa Fe.) But poetry is most credi¬

ble when it seems to bear the impress of a whole personality,

warts and all; and so it is good to be fully assured, in Caravan,
that Bynner's voice can have an edge to it. The gift for acerbity

which had briefly surfaced in Spectra and The Beloved Stranger

is now displayed at leisure in an attack on his friend D. H.

Lawrence, who had visited Mexico with Bynner and was soon

to portray him unflatteringly in The Plumed Serpent. "D. H.

Lawrence" is a derisive portrait of a cat-man or man-cat who

hates civilized humanity and fancies himself as a savage spirit

attuned to the "life-urge" of the cosmos.

 Critical Introduction * cii i

Do you see that the moon is on its back for you?

And has turned up the white fur of its belly

And put out a silver-haired paw?

Bynner himself had once felt identified with cosmic processes,

but of a more upward-tending and cheerful kind; Lawrence's

dark primitivism, and its consequences for human relations, he

could not stomach. There are three reasons, I should suppose,

why Lawrence could forgive the poem and praise the volume in

which it appeared. In the first place, it is a strong, resourceful,

witty invective, worthy of its subject. In the second place, it is

unanswerably accurate as to Lawrence's weaknesses and inner
divisions. In the third place, it does Lawrence the honor of

denouncing the cat-man in just such urgently iterative vers libre

paragraphs as Lawrence had devoted to bats and snakes in

Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

There are other pieces in Caravan which represent new de¬

velopments of tone, new unfoldings of personality. There is the

muted astringency of "A Country Cottage," and in "Donald

Evans," with its splendid use of the word "decorate," Bynner

employs a dry and Latin-rooted pathos suggestive of Robinson.

Here and there in Caravan are references to mesas, to San

Felipe, to Chapala, reminding us that Bynner had now settled

for good in Santa Fe—traveling often into old Mexico—and that

his new territory and his continuing study of Chinese poetry

would soon converge in his mind to produce what may be his

most satisfying book of verse.

In The Persistence of Poetry (1929), which incorporated his

introduction to The Jade Mountain, Bynner makes plain the

conceptions of poetry, and of Chinese poetry in particular, which

resulted in the Chapala section of Indian Earth. Poetry every-

 civ' Critical Introduction

where began, he tells us, by issuing, together with music, from

"the heart and lips of simple mankind." Satiated and fatigued

by culture, we Westerners have come to be "intellectually

estranged from the simple sources of poetry." Why, then, has

poetry so vitally persisted in China, where "centuries ago, cul¬

tured Chinese had reached the point of intellectual saturation
which has tired the mind of the modern European"? Why do

the street cries and rock inscriptions of China attest to the fact
that poetry has never ceased, for the Chinese, to be "a natural

and solacing part of life"? Bynner takes his answer from the

scholar Ku Hung-ming, who in his pamphlet The Spirit of the

Chinese People attributes China's eternal youth to "the fact that

the average Chinese has managed to maintain within himself

the head of a man and the heart of a child."

The exceedingly difficult technical rules of T'ang verse,

which govern the number of characters, the number of lines,

the pattern of tones, the required grammatical parallelism, the

placement and nature of rhymes, and the avoidance of repeated

characters, had no interest for Bynner as translator or poet.
"The discovery," he said,

which has largely undone my early convictions as to the

way of writing poetry has really to do with use of sub¬

stance . . . Mencius said long ago, in reference to the

Odes collected by Confucius: "Those who explain the Odes

must not insist on one term so as to do violence to a sen¬

tence, nor on a sentence so as to do violence to the general

scope. They must try with their thoughts to meet that

scope, and then they will apprehend it." In the poetry of

the west we are accustomed to let our appreciative minds

accept with joy this or that passage in a poem,—to prefer
 Critical Introduction * cv

the occasional glitter of a jewel to the straight light of the

sun. The Chinese poet seldom lets any portion of what he

is saying unbalance the entirety. Moreover . . . Chinese

poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality.

Whereas western poets will take actualities as points of

departure for exaggeration or fantasy or else as shadows
of contrast against dreams of unreality, the great Chinese
poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its

terms, and with profound simplicity find therein sufficient

solace. Even in phraseology they seldom talk about one

thing in terms of another, but are able enough and sure

enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms be¬

come the beautiful terms. If a metaphor is used, it is a

metaphor directly relating to the theme, not something

borrowed from the ends of the earth. The metaphor must
be concurrent with the action or flow of the poem; not

merely superinduced, but an integral part of both the scene

and the emotion.

Here, from The Jade Mountain, is Bynner's Englishing of

Po's eight-line shih poem, "A Farewell to a Friend."

With a blue line of mountains north of the wall.

And east of the city a white curve of water.

Here you must leave me and drift away

Like a loosened water-plant hundreds of miles . . .

I shall think of you in a floating cloud;

So in the sunset think of me.

. . . We wave our hands to say good-bye,

And my horse is neighing again and again.

 c v i • Critical Introduction

This exemplary translation illustrates everything which Bynner

found attractive and corrective in Chinese poetry. Everything is

distributed, in these quiet lines, with an evenness of attention;

there is nothing of what Yeats called "insubordination of de¬

tail," and there are no ostentatious felicities of language. Every¬

thing in the scene and situation is actual, and presented in a

natural sequence. The figures of speech involve no violent

amalgamations: that is, if one's friend is going on a river

journey, it is reasonable to think of a loosened water plant; that

done, since the poem occurs under the open sky, it is not hard
to associate the traveler with a floating cloud as well, and the

poet's sinking heart with the sunset. The horse in the last line
is neighing for equine reasons, but I suspect that we are to be

reminded of the sounds of human grief. What no single good

translation can convey to us is the cumulative force, in such

poetry as Li Po's, of great images of the natural world. I do not

know whether, in the above farewell poem, the mountain and

river of the first two lines are to be felt as juxtaposed symbols

of staying and going; but it is certain that all such imagery, in
its beauty and permanence, is a consoling background to that

melancholy, loneliness, or trouble usually present in the human

dimension of T'ang poetry.

Bynner found, in Santa Fe and Chapala, physical resem¬
blances to Peking, and in the Indians of New and old Mexico he

saw the heirs of a majestic and ultimately Asiatic culture, still

gifted with song and at one with the earth. In the Chapala sec¬

tion of Indian Earth he therefore presented, through eight-line

shih poems, the Mexican Indian in a Chinese key. All of this,

though nowhere insistently argued, is quite explicit. The musi¬

cians of Chapala are attuned to the mountains and the lake

waves; the sensibility of a blind guitarist belongs "centuries

 Critical Introduction ' c v i i

back in Asia"; Bynner wishes to concenter the world on ob¬

served detail as with "the point of a brush in ancient Chinese

fingers ; one of his lines in "Crow's Feet" is an echo of Li Po,

and there is a whole poem ("Tule") about loosened water plants.

Buying in the market a brightly painted dish or other "toy," he

observes that "Unless we remain children, we grow too old"—

a sentiment which recalls Ku Hung-ming's words on the per¬
petual youthfulness of China. Finally, sun, moon, lake, and

mountain afford, in Chapala as in China, a constant resource for

the heart troubled by ephemeral human things:

. . . even the look of a well-beloved child

Is lesser solace than a mountain-rim.

The Chapala poems are, as the reader will see, a remarkably

successful experiment. I need not recite their virtues, because

they are precisely those which Bynner had found important in

the poetry of China and had specified in The Persistence of

Poetry. Fortunately, he proved able to embody them not only in

translations but in original English verse. On the whole, his

Mexican octaves are blither in mood than the T'ang poems on

which they are modeled, and the reason for that is not far to

seek. Indian Earth is a volume in which the lyric ego and its

moods or troubles are not central: the poet's attention is turned

outward, in an effort to evoke a culture which delights and

moves him, and he does so in a modest and objective style,

losing himself, as never before, in the lives of an ancient people.

There may be moments of travel writing in the book, or

touches of anthropology, but above all it is an act of happy

communion. Hildegarde Flanner, discussing the Mexican poems,

rightly connects them with Bynner's "early desire for fellow-

 cviii • Critical Introduction

ship/' and observes that Indian Earth "comes close to the reality

of union and compassionate brotherhood" in a way that The

New World, with its abstract and theoretical benevolence, could

not.
And yet, of course, Bynner was as much a "foreigner" in

Chapala as he declared Lawrence to be in the poem so titled; he

was not a Mexican Indian but a rich, serape-buying, party-giving

visitor from "that northern country overrun with gringos." If

Indian Earth is a sensitive and loving expression of a place and

its people, if Bynner could lose himself for a while in writing of

Chapala, that self was still, at fifty, somewhat troubled and un¬

found. And so it is not wholly strange to see him abruptly turn¬

ing from the outwardness and relative self-effacement of Indian

Earth to Eden Tree (1931), a book-length inquiry into his own

history and nature.

Bynner thought of Eden Tree as a sequel to The New

World. There are various ways of understanding that. For one

thing, we have once again a long poem done in mixed meters

and irregular rhyme—a form now handled more adroitly, and

with an occasional brilliance. More significantly, we have an¬

other poem rooted in Whitman, and Douglas Day is right to

characterize it as "a sort of Song of Myself in modern dress." It

is also a sequel in a special palinodial sense, because the hope of

escaping isolation through universal love is now set aside, and

what the poem amounts to is a solitary soul's rehearsal of its

wavering progress toward an acceptance of aloneness and self¬

dependency. In part, the poet sees himself as Everyman, and

accordingly we have a mythic cast of characters in which the

main figures are Adam (the poet). Eve (the poet's attraction to

the wifely, the generative, the good), and Lilith (his attraction
 Critical Introduction ’ c i x

to lust, to freedom, to intoxications of body and spirit). There

are also Confucius, Buddha, and Jesus, appearing in one aspect

as philosophic or religious alternatives through which Everyman

might find himself. But the poem is also the confession of a par¬

ticular man, with his own peculiar history and emotional consti¬
tution, and therefore there is another set of characters, drawn

from Bynner's life, who interlace with the mythic figures and
overlap them, and are encountered on the plane of remembered

personal experience. It is on this plane that the poem truly pro¬

ceeds, in a narrative-dramatic form—not as a philosophical pil¬

grimage, but as a series of emotional reactions to persons, places,

and vicissitudes. It begins with the poet taking leave of the dead

Celia, who is the Eve-principle at its most positive, and of the

fictive Celia, whose ventriloquial gospel can no longer suffice

him. Setting forth unsponsored in quest of himself, he en¬

counters Paul, "a flower / Of isolate boyhood/7 a restless and

handsome young man who becomes his "god" (and the god or

lover of The Beloved Stranger poems, I should think). With

Paul's early death, Bynner-Adam seeks ease in travel, imbibing

something of Buddhism from an old Chinese priest, and com¬

muning on T'ai-shan with the spirit of Confucius, who recom¬

mends the life of reason and mocks the hope of "paradise apart
from earth." These experiences proving "not enough," Adam

succumbs in Shanghai, Peking, and later in New York to Lilith—

that is, to debauchery with women, meanwhile suffering flashes

of grief for Celia or Paul, and at one juncture feeling drawn into

St. Patrick's, only to conclude that

not by this gallows-tree

Is there respite for me.

 c x * Critical Introduction

The action or drift continues, with Adam visiting the dinner

tables of well-bred people and recoiling from their stuffiness
toward Lilith again; recoiling then from Lilith and "Babylon
and seeking the mountains, where he feels for a time at one
with the elements, "safe from men," and at peace with the
ghosts of Paul and Celia; eschewing a return to Eve under the
form of a tame and passionless marriage; reverting to "wild¬
fire" and "the crackle of lust" in the shape of another Lilith;
proceeding by way of disgust to solitary drinking and homo¬
sexuality; and hoping, as a last resort, for the revival of certain
old friendships, only to find that his friends have been so de¬
formed by marriage and money-getting that they can no longer
meet him freely "mind to mind."
This brings the poem to its crisis, and the resolution which

follows is strongly reminiscent in pattern of the final movement

of Song of Myself—especially of its sections 38, 41, and 52.

Friendless and despairing, the poet remembers his old faith in

the crucified and resurrected Christ, and takes heart; what re¬
vives him, however, is not Christ's doctrine or "dream" but His

courage in living out His dream "alone." Thus fortified by ex¬

ample, Adam befriends his own suffering, exchanges loneliness

for a strong aloneness, and feels expansive and free: he is no

longer a crucified man but "Jove, with the wind in his vast

beard / Making music," Apollo with his lyre, Orpheus, "Pro¬

metheus with his singing fire," and "even Buddha, set beyond

desire." Wishing "no mistress now, no Lord, no wife, / But

only himself and the wideness of the world," standing "apart

from thought, from years," he is bravely alone with the en¬

during universe. At the close of the poem he plunges into a

lake at dawn and merges. Whitman-fashion, with the elements

 Critical Introduction * c x i

of water and air. Losing his loneliness and his "own shape," he
becomes "a man made new" and will "never be dead."

Richard Blackmur, reviewing Eden Tree in Poetry for Janu¬

ary 1932, observed: "If there is a philosophic attitude governing

the poem, it is the double attitude of dramatic solipsism with

regard to the human world combined with a kind of instinctive

pantheism regarding the material world." That is wholly cor¬

rect, and excellently said. As for solipsism, Bynner's Adam puts

it plainly enough to himself:

It is Adam whom you condemn or praise

And not these other persons, in images of yourself . . .

What we examine in the poem is not other people, or the

thoughts and faiths of mankind, but the inability of any of

these to release the self-absorbed hero from his solitude and to

provide him with wholeness and social identity. There are many
ways, as we have glimpsed, in which Eden Tree resembles Song

of Myself, and one might add that the two poems are alike in

developing less by argument than by "mood swings" or oscilla¬

tions of feeling; but more than a difference in quality makes

them dissimilar. There is, no doubt, a level of analysis at which

Bynner's solipsism and Whitman's incorporation of all life

would seem paradoxically akin; but if we take seriously what

the two poets say they are saying, Bynner's Adam is a "single,

separate person" in a sense which Whitman would think im¬

poverished. It seems to me that the end of Eden Tree, for all its

suggestion of Whitman's translation into grass and air, is not

so much Whitmanian as it is an intensification of the conven¬

tional Chinese contrast between the often-rueful human realm

 c xii ’ Critical Introduction

and the serenity of nature. Turning wholly away from human

and doctrinal entanglements, and accompanied only by his poetic

gift, lone Adam entrusts himself to the mountains and the

waters.
The Selected Poems (1936) reprinted a slightly revised Eden

Tree in full; it is too long, in proportion to its merit, to be so

treated in this volume, and I have found it hard to do the poem
justice through excerpts. Unquestionably, I have done an in¬

justice by subjecting it to summary, which can make any work

whatever sound dismal or silly; but I saw no other way to trace

Bynner's altering sense of things or to convey the nature of so

curious a poem. There are a number of effective and coura¬
geously honest passages in Eden Tree, and its adaptability of

tone, as Adam fluctuates between the squalid and the exalted,

is often admirable. Of its weaknesses, let me mention two. As

Blackmur implicitly complains, a poem which presents its hero
with philosophical and religious challenges should not be writ¬

ten, as Eden Tree is, almost wholly on the level of emotional

logic and temperamental reaction. Secondly, Bynner's identifica¬

tion with Adam or Everyman is partially valid (we all know

Eve and Lilith and loneliness) and partially an imposture: for

example, the voice which scorns "wiving" and working and

rearing children as a craven surrender of one's mind and free¬

dom is not the voice of Everyman but of a moneyed Bohemian

who, though he once proposed marriage to Edna Millay, was

more strongly attracted to men than to women.

The anti-marriage theme is more amiably and acceptably

handled in several of the sonnets of Guest Book (1935), a series

of portraits—harsh, malicious, ironic, compassionate, or ad¬

miring—which, in view of the conclusion of Eden Tree, sound

downright gregarious. If any influence is felt in these poems

 Critical Introduction • c x i i i

it would be that of Robinson's sonnet portraits and sonnet

narratives, especially in lines like these—

And to relieve him largely of the stuff

That works in little cells behind the ear,

which have a Robinsonian circumlocution and convolution.

Such a poem as "Benedick" exhibits both a similarity to

Robinson and a lot of crucial differences.

His was a life of single blessedness.

Doubled upon occasion but not often,—

Because he still believed that toil can bless

While toils can only enervate and soften.

Therefore when twilight touched his studio

With loneliness, he would relieve his labour

By summoning his dog, and both would go

To while away a while upon a neighbour . . .

What happened to this bachelor of parts

Not one of all his neighbours can explain.

Had he a heart, then, like most other hearts?

Had he found solitude only a vain

Evasion, that his name is also hers

And the hangings in his house are diapers?

What mostly makes one think of Robinson, here, is the stated

uncertainty of the poet and his neighbors as to the bachelor

painter's motive for marrying. Robinson's Tilbury Town is full

of hearts which no one can quite fathom, and indeed the shal¬

lowness of human insight in a dissolving society is one of Robin¬

son's major motifs. But in "Benedick" there seems to be no real

 c x i v • Critical Introduction

mystery, and the poem's conjectures no doubt are true. Further¬

more, the poem is full of the frank dexterity and trickiness of

light verse—alliterations and reiterations, conspicuous rhymes,

the word-play of "toil" and "toils," the stylish phrasing of

"his name is also hers," and the joke about "hangings." With
few exceptions, the poems of Guest Book read like superior

products of a party game, and one gathers that each of them

is in fact about some specific friend or acquaintance of Bynner's;

since we cannot judge how well the subject has been hit off,

and are thus denied some of the party fun, it is surprising how

diverting some of the better poems are.

Bynner's two collections of the 1940's, Against the Cold
(1940) and Take Away the Darkness (1947), remind one by

their titles that the poet, who had symbolically died at the
end of Eden Tree, was now entering his sixties and must begin

to think about dying in earnest. Against the Cold is, in fact, a

book of seven sections organized (without any culpable "tidi¬

ness") around the idea of death. With one exception, the sec¬

tions consist of a number of self-sufficient pieces which are

nonetheless significantly linked. Section I, for example, begins

with rumors and stirrings of life in winter, follows that with

lyrics concerning spring flowers and spring plowing, and then

intensifies the season with the presence of a lover; yet in the

very white of cherry blossoms there comes a premonition of

winter's return, and the rest of the section sketches an estrange¬

ment which will leave the poet older, colder, and nearer to death.

All of this material is reworked toward a different outcome in

Section VII, the sonnet sequence which ends the book and gives

it its title; and between the first and last sections, in ways which

it would be laborious to tell, five classes of subject are viewed

by a mind alerted to mortality. One of Bynner's weapons

 Critical Introduction • cxv

against the cold is humor, and the mockery of whatever is

deadening; we have this at its most hilarious, here, in the poem

Episode of Decay,” and the reader who is interested in the art

of book arrangement may wish to note that, in the ordering of

Against the Cold, "Episode of Decay” is immediately followed
by the serious poem "Moles.” Both poems are about inferior

and vicious creatures who devour the lives of others, but one
might not readily connect them, so different are they in tone,
were they not printed side by side. So situated, they produce
together a rich and angry chord.

"The Wintry Mind” may serve as an example of how, in a

good little poem of his later period, Bynner could not only dis¬

tribute his subject matter subtly and evenly, avoiding local ob¬
trusions of word or figure, but could also make rhyme and
meter subserve "the entirety.”

Winter uncovers distances, I find;

And so the cold and so the wintry mind

Takes leaves away, till there is left behind

A wide cold world. And so the heart grows blind

To the earth's green motions lying warm below

Field upon field, field upon field, of snow.

The poem is based not on one scene or moment, but on the

gradual alteration of a landscape, and the poet's gradual re¬

sponse to it. This landscape is a very sketchy one, which over

a period of time loses its leaves, exposes its cold distances, and

then is covered with snow; yet it seems actual and particular,

because the poem speaks of the place and its weather from

beginning to end, and in the last line firmly roughs-in a deep

perspective of snowy fields. What we have, then, to start with.

 c x v i ’ Critical Introduction

is a poem about the numbing effect of winter on mind and

heart: the poet's mind partakes of the growing bleakness of the

winter world, and the unreminded heart forgets that green

motions" of new life underlie the snow. If Wallace Stevens s

famous poem "The Snow Man" tells how, by attunement to

cold and desolation, one may achieve "a mind of winter" and
thus enjoy a temporary aesthetic triumph, Bynner's "The Wintry
Mind" tells how too long an attunement to winter may prove

an emotional privation.

Is there more than that in this obviously simple poem?

The words "I find," in the first line, look pointless if one sees
no more in the poem than the poet's dealings with winter; a

man need not wait until his sixties to "find" that, as the leaves
fall, stark distances become visible. It helps, therefore, to re¬
member that "The Wintry Mind" belongs in a book called

Against the Cold, a book in which the seasons, while evoked in

convincing physical detail, have also their traditional symbolism.

In the light of that recollection, the first line may be seen as

announcing, in the appropriate setting of winter, a discovery

about approaching age. Age, the poet finds, is like winter in that

it is a time of losses and of increasing loneliness—of "distances"

in that sense. Furthermore, age may beget in us a "wintry mind"

which, in the poem's figure, somehow collaborates with the cold

in "taking leaves away." Brutally paraphrased, those words sig¬

nify that an aging man may distance the world by shrinking

into himself, retreating into his own thoughts, and rejecting the

world about him. Between his losses and his rejections, this
poem says, an old poet may live in an empty world, no longer

capable of taking heart from the continuity of life.

The rhyme scheme of this pentameter poem is ad hoc,

 Critical Introduction • c x v i i

organic, and unusual, and it could have been distractingly

clangorous had Bynner not muted lines 2—4 by mid-line pauses

and run-overs. As it is, the rhyming of find, mind, behind, and

blind supports much else expressive of the poet's resignation or

melancholy and the inexorability of winter and age: the repeti¬
tion, for example, of "And so . . . and so . . . And so . . ."

or the last line's "Field upon field, field upon field." An¬
other and obvious effect of the rhyme pattern is that the first

four lines, by their monotony of rhyme, strengthen the brief

outburst of the earth's counter-music in line 5. A final effect

of the poem's form is visual, or, as we would put it now, "con¬

crete." In a poem which sees so broadly and so deeply, and

which looks across "field upon field," there is a repeated im¬

pression of horizontality—an impression strong enough to re¬
mind this reader, at least, that "verse" derives from the Latin

word for "furrow," and to make the first four lines, with their

terminal sameness, suggest a level succession of barren fields.

What disrupts this pattern, and in a manner supportive of

Bynner's meaning, is the explosive verticality implicit in "earth's

green motions."

Jake Away the Darkness is a large collection which treats

all of Bynner's established themes, and which he perhaps ex¬

pected would be his last: it is uncommon, after all, for anyone

to persist in the lyric mode for more than half a century. One

sign that this book may have been imagined as a final bow is

the presence in it of that cafe-table poem which The Nation

had published twenty-one years before, and of a striking poem

called "Circe," which, under the title "To a Dead Beauty," had
appeared in The International for March 1914. Still, if Bynner

included in the volume a few long-uncollected items. Take

 cxviii • Critical Introduction

Away the Darkness is far from being a jumble of styles. Though

mostly metrical and rhymed, its poems tend to have a quick

naturalness of manner consonant with a readiness to be blunt

and brief. The earlier Bynner may have overused words like

"loveliness/' or pretty phrases like "reck not a whit," or sounded

archly appealing; but all that has been pretty well jettisoned

here, and one result is that his political verse is now stronger

both as art and as persuasion.

Defeat

On a train in Texas German prisoners eat

With white American soldiers, seat by seat.

While black American soldiers sit apart.

The white men eating meat, the black men heart.

Now, with that other war a century done.

Not the live North but the dead South has won.
Not yet a riven nation comes awake.

Whom are we fighting this time, for God's sake?

Mark well the token of the separate seat.

It is again ourselves whom we defeat.

Bynner's politics, the early ideological basis of which we

have seen, were always both serious and engagees. Long before

literary America became monolithically left-wing, he was an

organizer or active figure in social causes. A photograph of

May 6, 1911, shows him and John Dewey leading the men's

contingent of a parade for women's suffrage down Fifth Ave¬

nue; and he was always an advocate of Indians and blacks. It is

good to see a poem of political indignation, like the one above.

 Critical Introduction * cx ix

which does not subvert itself by being high-flown or sancti¬

monious. The poem begins with the planking down of un¬

deniable and intolerable facts, line by line, and it comes back,

at the end, to a contemplation of "the separate seat" and its
meaning: the general impression is of an evidential poem which

says, "Look at that, and that, and that. What do you think?"
Now, the poem does in fact tell us what to think, but for two
reasons no flushed, hectoring poet's face interposes itself be¬
tween us and the data. For one thing, the oppositions of German

and American, prisoners and soldiers, white and black, with

and apart, live and dead, North and South—all of which have a

compelling rhetorical effect—are initially a part of the objective

situation, and seem no more thrust upon us than the rocking of

the train would be, had the poet mentioned it. For another thing,

the bitter joke of line 4, and the ensuing recollection of the Civil

War, seem the obligatory responses of anyone able to witness

and remember; and when the poem threatens to sound "poetic,"

in line 7, Bynner end-stops the line in the middle of a couplet

and follows with a colloquial outburst which might be any

decent person's. Partisan political poetry usually fails, even

when we sympathize with its position, either because it distorts

and excludes facts or because, in the presence of some urgent

human situation, it asks us to admire an emotional and artistic

performance. Bynner's "Defeat" makes neither mistake.

I think of many other poems in Take Away the Darkness

which deserve more comment than I can give. There is, for in¬

stance, "More Lovely than Antiquity," which builds up to one

of those bizarre and yet apposite figures which Spectra had

emboldened Bynner to attempt from time to time. And there

is the four-line poem "Answer":

 c x x • Critical Introduction

Cease from the asking, you receive the answer.

God is not God, life life nor wonder wonder

Save as a man himself becomes the dancer

Across all variations of the thunder.

Here Bynner appears to recover from the pains of uncertain

identity expressed in Eden Tree, and to accept his restless di¬

versity as a good thing, reaffirming to some extent what he had

said in a prose "credo" written during his twenties. "Are we
not many people inside ourselves? Do we not begin, compact of
many ancestors? Do we not add still other lives from lovers,

friends, and books? . . . Experimenting, suffering, learning

with God in His growth toward that perfection which is in His

blood and ours, a man becomes mankind and mankind God." If

there is a notable difference between the old poet's "Answer"
and the young man's "credo," it may lie in this poem's stress,

not upon the loving incorporation of others, but on the full ex¬
pression of the poet's many selves. Given the assumption that

mankind is becoming God, and that there is nothing more divine

than human self-realization, Bynner could not have found a

better metaphor than the one we are offered here: man, in this
poem (as also in the poem "Clouds"), usurps the thunder and

lightning which were attributes of the old father-gods and turns

them into a varied music and dance which express his versatile
nature. The first line of the poem is reminiscent of "Find me,

and turn thy back on heaven"—the paradox which concludes

Emerson's "Brahma." It also reminds me of Yeats's statement

that we can embody the truth but cannot know it; and I daresay
that something akin to that is meant.

From his previous volumes Bynner selected Book of Lyrics

(1955), adding to the pick of his shorter poems a handful of

 Critical Introduction • cxxi

new efforts; and then, at the age of seventy-nine, he surprised

his readers with New Poems 1960, a batch of 131 strange little
poems which, so he declared, had come to him, during a brief
period, fully verbalized in sleep. Given the poet's reputation as
a hoaxer, such a claim was bound to meet with skepticism, and
Bynner himself said that the New Poems were in some sense a
harking back to Spectra. In what sense might that be true? The
poems do not seem directed against any school of poetry then
in need of debunking. They are not all of the same character,
and some, like this one, are in a dreamy way quite clear and
quite beautiful:

Barnacles on underposts of the piers

Are shown under green sashes
Which let elements do the dancing
Round its fixed limbs

A better ballet
Than any active limbs could do
Even in a forest
Green with slow scarves

Another sort of poem altogether is this subtle epigram:

Kindness can go too high

Even in heaven

A hawk carrying a fish

For instance

And giving it air

 c x xii • Critical Introduction

Those two poems are imaginatively limber, but there is no ele¬

ment of travesty or crypto-badness in them, and so I think we

must hunt elsewhere for the link between New Poems and

Spectra. Perhaps these lines from a Spectric poem, "Opus 111,

will indicate an answer:

After the end

Comes always the beginning . . .
And when you begin to understand this
I shall have done with meaning it.

That sort of thing and The Beloved Stranger's impatience with

rationality ("How long must the wind go round in a mill / And

the meaning be drawn?") strike me as pointing toward what are

the most frequent features of New Poems: non sequiturs, ab¬

surdities, logical contradictions, the "Zen" explosion of con¬

cepts. The following may be a poem which (like several in the

book) makes entire sense, though in a crazy way:

Coming down the stairs

She paused midway

And turned

And assembled the railing

Which thereupon went upstairs
Leaving her slowly alone

That is, those lines may tell of a woman who is descending to

join her company below, feels ill or shaken, turns, and follows

the banister upstairs toward her room. Or they may mean

nothing of the kind. In any event, the descriptive method makes

the poem quite at home in a book full of such outright anomalies

 Critical Introduction * c x x i i i

as backward-flying birds, uncast shadows, and promenading

oysters.

Are we to believe Bynner's story that these witty and eco¬

nomical poems coalesced in his brain during the hypnopompic
state, and were simply copied out upon his waking? Douglas
Day, writing in Shenandoah for Winter 1961, points out that

the book is replete with an imagery of ocean and of sanctuary

which belongs to subconscious experience, and puts also in

evidence the fact that Bynner had long been attracted to the

spare, direct, and concrete poetic method of China. It seems just

possible to Day that Bynner had absorbed Chinese standards and

practice so deeply that "his dream-visions [could] come neatly

packaged out of his subconscious as shih poems of the Tang

Dynasty." Despite the fact that one or two poems are reminis¬
cent of prior and conscious work, and despite the verbal and
logical cleverness of some of the pieces, I too think that a
possibility.

"Versatility and the willingness to try new forms," says

Day elsewhere in his article, "have always been Bynner's great¬

est fortes." Paul Horgan likewise speaks of Bynner's "various¬

ness" as a man, and lauds his ability to accompany "each kind

of response to life with a form appropriate to it." It is certainly

true that Bynner was always more venturesome and flexible

than his customary assignment to the ranks of "conservative

moderns" would suggest: he wrote odes, verse portraits, plays,

nonsense jingles, canticles, shih octaves, hoax poems, propa¬

ganda pieces, visions, confessions, dream compositions, and

much else. Such variety of genre and technique was good in

itself; if a man is many-sided, it is well for all his sides to be

articulate. But Bynner was not, in fact, at his best in every vein,

and I find him most unusual not for his Protean quality but
 c x x i v * Critical Introduction

for the extent to which he invested his own poetry with Chinese

qualities, succeeding so well in his most durable work that, as

Day puts it, "he hardly seems to belong to any tradition that

can be called American."

There are poems in Grenstone—"Driftwood," for example

—which show a predisposition toward the aesthetic which com¬

mences to operate in The Beloved Stranger, fully informs the
Chapala poems of Indian Earth, and governs much of Bynner's

superior writing thereafter. To show how conscious of all this

Bynner was, let me quote him once more, this time from a

letter to his friend Ficke:

I know that there is in the finest poetry of Asia a beauty

far surpassing the poetry of Europe . . . but, try though

I may, I apparently cannot put into English words the

thing I feel—the thing that is unmistakably to be found

in the work of the greater Chinese poets. English and

American poetry seem to me child's-play compared with

the severe beauty of the Chinese—the abstention from

superfluous comment, the hard selectiveness—and, mind

you, all this done in perfectly colloquial language, which

somehow achieves the beauty of frozen jade. How can we
put that into the soft English tongue? It seems impossible.

The background of that, to be sure, is Bynner's struggle with

the translations soon to appear as The lade Mountain, but it is

quite obvious what ameliorative characteristics the poet would

like to inject, both by his translations and by his own original

work, into "English and American poetry."

One aspect of Chinese art not stressed in the letter above

 Critical Introduction • c x x v

is mentioned in this slight and very "Chinese" poem from

Indian Earth:

A pepper-tree hangs and swings and hides the lake.

And I hear the edging waves and the laughter of children.

How can there be no sudden poems in my heart.

Under the pepper-tree by my cool southern window?

We sat here together yesterday, writing poems.

You were in the yellow chair, I in the green chair.

And today I can think of nothing to say but this:

When I look up, the yellow chair is empty.

There is, of course, a "sudden poem" in the poet's heart, and

we have just read it: the poet has set down in plain and pre¬

sumably swift words the scene, the circumstances, and his state

of feeling. Though based upon long discipline and rule, the kind
of poem Bynner here emulates is suddenly, spontaneously exe¬
cuted so as to be the precise product of its moment.

Bynner was not invariably spontaneous: there is a labored

jocularity, sometimes, in the texture of his Guest Book sonnets,

and he occasionally reworked or pared down old material: for

instance, a twenty-seven-line poem called "Seas and Leaves,"
included in Grenstone Poems, reappears thirty-eight years later,

in Book of Lyrics, as an eight-line poem called "The Vessel."

But it was essential to his mature theory of poetry, and usual in

his practice, that any line of verse should be or seem "a

moment's thought." Most serious poets whom I have known

would react with incredulity to the notion of sitting about with

other people, in green or yellow chairs, and "writing poems."

Yet I accept the poem just quoted as fact, and I have read of
 c x x v i • Critical Introduction

Bynner's composing, in the midst of a roomful of guests at Santa

Fe, verses which were later quite justifiably sent to the printer.

As regards compositional "suddenness/' he appears to have

meant it.
Those who remember Bynner's work, whether favorably

or not, always observe that he wrote too much. Indeed he did,

and I am sure that one reason for the waning of his reputation
was that, in his later years, he permitted so many dashed-off

lines to be used as magazine filler. Having said that, I hasten to

add that he was writing, much of the time, according to an

aesthetic standard not shared with other poets of his caliber, or

with the majority of his readers. He was, therefore, in his isola¬

tion, an uncertain judge of his own work, and was often mis¬
read. Selden Rodman, reviewing Book of Lyrics in The New
York Times, praised among other qualities its "plainness of

statement." Another reviewer, however, was disappointed pre¬

cisely by that plainness: "It is rather surprising," he wrote, "that

at the end of his life, a man so genuinely interested in poetry

should not have developed a more individual style." And still

another reviewer, writing in the U.5. Quarterly Book Review,

granted the Lyrics their good points but asserted that "they

make no great attempt toward the modification of a tradition,

which is so often the mark of the great craftsmanship that is

also great poetry."

It is not my purpose to prove that Bynner is thrice-great,

but I will so far contradict that third reviewer as to say that

much of Bynner's poetry is innovative; unfortunately, it did not

innovate in an expected manner, and indeed its distinctiveness

could readily be misconstrued as a deficiency. Housman con¬

gratulated Bynner on the "high level of purity and simplicity"

maintained in The fade Mountain, but added, "Of Chinese

 Critical Introduction * c x x v i i

poems I generally feel that, while they are free from the usual

vices of western poetry, they have not enough positive virtue/7

The densities, dimensions, and heightenings which Housman

felt the want of in Chinese poetry would also seem lacking, to

many Western readers, in those poems of Bynner's which some¬

how follow the Chinese model. I confess that I have had to

adapt my taste considerably, in making this selection, so as to

discern which poems are deceptively simple, which are beauti¬
fully simple, and which are too damned simple.

I said above that Bynner ‘ did not innovate in an expected

manner.7 Let me explain. Critics generally reserve the word

experimental for those who continue the work of other poets

deemed experimental: thus a poet of our present moment who

studiously omits the vowels from the word 77said,77 or imitates

the techniques of Williams or Neruda, will be considered ex¬

perimental. Rather than challenge that established usage, I

shall say that Bynner turns out to have been, in the high mo¬

ments of his varied career, an original poet. Hildegarde Flanner

wrote in 1940: "While not an adherent to an experimental

group, Mr. Bynner has advanced lyrical writing in our century

through the ingenious use of traditional form. No one else has,

either with satiric or serious purpose, better achieved the con¬
trasting effects of the intense and the casual, the passionate and

the nonchalant . . /' In such work, she said, Bynner possesses

what "can only be referred to as psychological velocity, a way

of getting with speed and smoothness from one point to the

next." One might add that Bynner did things both fine and

new in forms which were not traditional, or not traditional with

us. Because one does not want to see any original talent lost in

the small type of explanatory footnotes, it is good to see that

The Penguin Companion to American Literature (1971) includes

 c xxv Hi ’ Critical Introduction

a substantial entry by Malcolm Bradbury, who observes in

Bynner's work "the clarity and economy of the Chinese influ¬

ence" and concludes by saying: "He is a poet of real interest and

considerable endurance, altering with half a century of poetic

modes and fashions, yet retaining a distinctive voice." I hope

that the reader of this book will agree.

 from

AN ODE
TO HARVARD
AND OTHER
POEMS

[ 1 9 0 7 ]
The New Life

Perhaps they laughed at Dante in his youth,

Told him that truth

Had unappealably been said

In the great masterpieces of the dead:—

Perhaps he listened and but bowed his head
In acquiescent honour, while his heart

Held natal tidings,—that a new life is the part

Of every man that's born,

A new life never lived before.

And a new expectant art.

It is the variations of the morn

That are forever, more and more.

The single dawning of the single truth.

So answers Dante to the heart of youth.

 4 ' Selected Poems

Mount Auburn Cemetery

There to the left was life, where the young men ply their graces.

Running, jumping, throwing hammers,—where the body is at

play

And its destiny is amorous and young

As the life-blood in their faces.

Across the river lie the resting-places

Of the dead;

And there, as though the night were their especial hour.

None others using it so well as they,

I heard the bell, that rings at dusk beside the balconied tower.
Send gently with its iron tongue
All those that wake away.

Across the river then I cried aloud

In a great wonderment.

As men have cried in anguish without cease,—

'O where are you today.

You vanished faces?'

And while the twilight wind's caprice

But echoed what I said.

But questioned from the future, asking me,—

More than before, the shroud that hung

From tree to tree

Half with an air of shelter and of peace.

Was infinitely still.

Yet I believe that heaven is on that hill;

 An Ode to Harvard and Other Poems ’ 5

That each who blindly loved the single soul

Shall thence illustriously love the whole;
And with the leaves that fall and fly

And with the river lifting by

Into the overwhelming sky.

That these are lifted, these who die.

To the remotest corners of their destiny,—

Infinitesimal in light to lie

Farthest and nearest in infinity;

That into breath of the mysterious will

The worlds are welding in that little hill,—

Where all shall be the mother and the son.

The daughter and the father and the one.

Night

Celia, when you bade me

Good-morning, I would wake

Quick again on your account.
Eager for your sake.

Yet at morning or at noon

In the clearest light.

Is there any voice as near

As your voice at night?

Or has anyone alive

Ever come and said

Anything as intimate
As you are saying, dead?
 1 0 ‘ Selected Poems

There Was a Poet Celia Loved

There was a poet Celia loved, who hearing, all around.

The multitudinous tread

Of common majesty,
Made of the gathering insurgent sound

Another continent of poetry.

His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.
. . . "And when he celebrates

These States,"
She said, "how can Americans worth their salt
But listen to the wavesong on their shores.
The waves and Walt,

And hear the windsong over rock and wood.

The winds and Walt,

And let the mansong enter at their gates

And know that it is good!"

Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness

Has let me guess

That into Celia, into me.

He and unnumbered dead have come

To be our intimates.

To make of us their home.

Commingling earth and heaven . . .

That by our true and mutual deeds

We shall at last be shriven

Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds

And petty separate fates—

 The New World * 1 1

That I in every man and he in me.

Together making God, are gradually creating whole

The single soul . . .

Somebody called Walt Whitman—

Dead!

He is alive instead.

Alive as I am. When I lift my head.

His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks.

My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks

Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand

grow old

And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth . . .

It is my joy to tell and to be told

That he, in all the world and me.

Cannot be dead.
That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth
Shall lift my head.
 1 2 * Selected Poems

Grieve Not for Beauty

Grieve not for the invisible, transported brow

On which like leaves the dark hair grew.

Nor for the lips of laughter that are now

Laughing inaudibly in sun and dew.

Nor for those limbs, that, fallen low

And seeming faint and slow.

Shall soon

Discover and renew

Their shape and hue—

Like birches varying white before the moon

Or a wild cherry-bough
In spring or the round sea—

And shall pursue

More ways of swiftness than the swallow dips

Among, and find more winds than ever blew

To haven the straining sails of unimpeded ships.

Opus 62

Three little creatures gloomed across the floor

And stood profound in front of me.

And one was Faith, and one was Hope,
And one was Charity.

Faith looked for what it could not find,

Hope looked for what was lost,

(Love looked and looked but Love was blind).

Charity's eyes were crossed.

Then with a leap a single shape.

With beauty on its chin.

Brandished a little screaming ape . . .

And each one, like a pin.

Fell to a pattern on the rug

As flat as they could be—

And died there comfortable and snug.

Faith, Hope and Charity.

That shape, it was my shining soul

Bludgeoning every sham . . .

O little ape, be glad that I

Can be the thing I am!

 1 6 • Selected Poems

Opus 14

Beside the brink of dream

I had put out my willow-roots and leaves
As by a stream
Too narrow for the invading greaves

Of Rome in her trireme . . .

Then you came—like a scream

Of beeves.
 Spectra • 1 7

Opus 101

He not only plays

One note

But holds another note

Away from it—

As a lover
Lifts

A waft of hair

From loved eyes.

The piano shivers.

When he touches it.

And the leg shines.

 1 8 ' Selected Poems

Opus 78

I am beset by liking so many people.

What can I do but hide my face away?—
Lest, looking up in love, I see no eyes or lids
In the gleaming whirl of clay.
Lest, reaching for the fingers of love,
I know not which are they.
Lest the dear-lipped multitude.
Kissing me, choke me dead!—

O green eyes in the breakers.

White heave unquieted,
What can I do but dive again, again—again—
To hide my head!
 Spectra * 1 9

Opus 79

Only the wise can see me in the mist.

For only lovers know that I am here . . .

After his piping, shall the organist
Be portly and appear?

Pew after pew.

Wave after wave . . .

Shall the digger dig and then undo

His own dear grave?

Hear me in the playing

Of a big brass band . . .

See me, straying

With children hand in hand . . .

Smell me, a dead fish . . .

Taste me, a rotten tree. . . .

Someday touch me, all you wish.

In the wide sea.

 from

GRENSTONE
POEMS

[19 17]
This Wave

Troughing at night.
Cresting at noon,
Down with the sun
And up with the moon,
Down with the moon
And up with the sun:
What was ended
Has begun.
 24 * Selected Poems

The Patient to the Doctors

Name me no name for my disease.

With uninforming breath;
I tell you I am none of these,
But homesick unto death—

Homesick for hills that I had known.

For brooks that I had crossed,
Before I met this flesh and bone
And followed and was lost . . .

Save that they broke my heart at last.

Name me no name of ills.
Say only, 'Here is where he passed.
Seeking again those hills/
 Grenstone Poems ' 2 5

The Fields

Though wisdom underfoot

Dies in the bloody fields.
Slowly the endless root
Gathers again and yields.

In fields where hate has hurled

Its force, where folly rots.
Wisdom shall be uncurled
Small as forget-me-nots.
 2 6 * Selected Poems

Poplars

Poplars against a mountain

Seem frequently to me
To be little-windowed cities
And sun-waves on the sea.

Perhaps dead men remember

Those beckonings of fire.
Waves that have often crumbled
And windows of desire . . .

Another year and some one.

Standing where I now stand.
Shall watch my tree rekindle.
From ancient sea and land—

The beckoning of an ocean.

The beckoning of a town.
Till the sun's behind the mountain
And the wind dies down.
 Grenstone Poems ' 2 7

A Thrush in the Moonlight

In came the moon and covered me with wonder.

Touched me and was near me and made me very still.
In came a rush of song, like rain after thunder.
Pouring importunate on my window-sill.

I lowered my head, I hid it, I would not see nor hear.

The birdsong had stricken me, had brought the moon too near.
But when I dared to lift my head, night began to fill
With singing in the darkness. And then the thrush grew still.
And the moon came in, and silence, on my window-sill.
 2 8 • Selected Poems

Grasses

He picked us clover-leaves and starry grass

And buttercups and chickweed. One by one.
Smiling he brought them. We can never pass

A roadside or a hill under the sun

Where his wee flowers will not return with him.

His little weeds and grasses, cups that brim

With sunbeams, leaves grown tender in the dew.

Come then, O come with us and each in turn.

Children and elders, let us thread a few

Of all the daisies; to enfold his urn

And fade beside this day through which he passes.

Bringing us clover-leaves and starry grasses.

 Grenstone Poems ’ 2 9

An Old Elegy for a Child

O earth, with flowers on his eyes

Be thou as sweet as he—

Be thou as light where now he lies

As he was light on thee.

 3 0 * Selected Poems

Rhythm

A nature that gives and never takes

Dreams a while before it wakes;

A nature that takes and never gives

Perishes before it lives.

Therefore let the dreamer rouse

And learn a lesson from the cows

That eat their fill the livelong day

The better to give their milk away.

And therefore let the corpse be quick—

It's rhythm, not arithmetic.

A poplar drops its treasure-trove

The sooner to become a grove.
 Grenstone Poems ‘ 3 1

Treasure

A ship came in, one colored day

Through rain and sun.

The rainbow waited in the bay—

The wealth was won.

Reaching at last the treasure-pot.

The golden hoard,

A ship came in . . . but there was not

A soul aboard.
 3 2 ' Selected Poems

Driftwood

Come, warm your hands

From the cold wind of time.

I have built here, under the moon,

A many-colored fire
With fragments of wood
That have been part of a tree

And part of a ship.

Were leaves more real.

Or driven nails.

Or fingers of builders.
Than these burning violets?
Come, warm your hands

From the cold wind of time.

There's a fire under the moon.
 Grenstone Poems ' 3 3

The Dead Loon

There is a dead loon in the camp tonight, killed by a clever fool.

And down the lake a live loon calling.

The wind comes stealing, tall, muscular and cool.

From his plunge where stars are falling—

The wind comes creeping, stalking.

On his night-hidden trail.

Up to the cabin where we sit playing cards and talking.

And only I, of them all, listen and grow pale.

He glues his face to the window, addressing only me.

Talks to me of death and bids me hark

To the hollow scream of a loon and bids me see

The face of a clever fool reflected in the dark.

That dead loon is farther on the way than we are.

It has no voice, where it hangs nailed to the gate.

But it is with me now and with the evening star.

Its voice is my voice and its fate my fate.

 3 4 ‘ Selected Poems

She Has a Thousand Presences

She has a thousand presences.

As surely seen and heard
As birds that hide behind a leaf
Or leaves that hide a bird.

Single your love, you lose your love.

You cloak her face with clay;
Now mine I never quite discern—
And never look away.
 Grenstone Poems ’ 3 5

Encounter

Yours is a presence lovelier than death.

Heavy with blossoms, poignant of the sea.
The dead are magical but O, your breath
Has given more than lordly death to me.
I am your lover and a cloud is my crest.
The headland is my chariot, my waves go four abreast.

Let me be fleet and sunlit in your sight

A little while, before I charge and drown . . .
Then, O my love, who have so lavished might
On me that I would strike mortality down.
When in the end I fall, trampled by the sea.
Slain by my horses, I shall know your blossoms blinding me.
 3 6 ' Selected Poems

Rose-Time

What though love require no test.

In this rose-time after rain

Let me touch your hand again!—

Since caressing reassures

Lovers that their love endures.

Now, whatever dark may come.

Now, before our mouths are dumb.

While away the twilight slips—

Celia, let me kiss your lips! . . .

Until dawn shall be as blue
As the little veins of you

At the temple and the breast.

 Grenstone Poems ’ 3 7

Shasta

The canyon is deep shade beneath

And the tall pines rise out of it.

In the sun beyond, brilliant as death.

Is a mountain big with buried breath—

Hark, I can hear the shout of it!

The engine, on the curve ahead.

Turns into sight and busily

Sends up a spurt out of a bed

Of coal that lay for centuries dead
But now recovers dizzily.

What shall I be, what shall I do

In what divine experiment,

When, ready to be used anew,

I snap my nursing-bonds in two

And fling away my cerement?

Shall my good hopes continue still

And, gathering infinity.

Inhabit many a human will?—

An Indian in me, toward that hill.
Conceives himself divinity.
 3 8 ' Selected Poems

A Spring Song in a Cafe

As gray, on the table, lay his hand

As the root of a tree in a barren land.

Or a rope that lowers the dead.

As gray as a gravestone was his head.

And as gray his beard as dusty grain;

But his eyes were as gray as the rain—

As gray as the rain that warms the snow.

The bridegroom who brings, to the grass below,
A breath of the wedding day.

O, his eyes were the gray of a rain in May

That shall quicken and mate a dead May-queen,

Shall waken and marry a queen of the May

When all the graves are green!
 Grenstone Poems ’ 3 9

The Highest Bidder

To the highest bidder.

Your birthplace, Walt Whitman,

Under the hammer . . .

The old farm on Paumanok, north of Huntington,

Its trees.
Its leaves of grass!
Voices bid and counterbid over those ninety acres . . .

And your own voice among them, like an element.

Roaring and outbidding.

 4 0 ‘ Selected Poems

Passing Near

I had not till to-day been sure.

But now I know:

Dead men and women come and go

Under the pure
Sequestering snow.

And under the autumnal fern

And carmine bush.

Under the shadow of a thrush.
They move and learn;
And in the rush

Of all the mountain-brooks that wake

With upward fling.

To brush and break the loosening cling

Of ice, they shake

The air with spring.

I had not till to-day been sure.

But now I know:

Dead youths and maidens come and go

Beneath the lure
And undertow

Of cities, under every street

Of empty stress.
 Grenstone Poems ’ 4 1

Or heart of an adulteress—
Each loud retreat

Of lovelessness.

For only by the stir we make

In passing near

Are we confused and cannot hear

The ways they take

Certain and clear.

Today I happened in a place

Where all around

Was silence; until, underground,

I heard a pace,
A happy sound—

And people there, whom I could see.

Tenderly smiled.
While under a wood of silent wild

Antiquity
Wandered a child.

Leading his mother by the hand.

Happy and slow.

Teaching his mother where to go

Under the snow . . .

Not even now I understand.

I only know.
 4 2 • Selected Poems

Breath

When so I lean my hand upon your shoulder.

When so I let my fingers fall forward

To the delicate arch of the breath,

To this most palpable cover and mold

Of the waves of life.

It is not you nor love I love—but life itself.

I look at you with a stranger, older intimacy,

I forget who you are whom I love.

With your temporal face,

I forget this or any of the generations

And its temporal face

And the lovely curious fallacy of choice . . .

Beyond the incomprehensible madness

Of the shoulder and the breast,

Above the tumult of obliteration,

I sow and reap upon the clouded tops of mountains

And am myself both sown and harvested.

And, from afar off, I behold, forget, achieve

You and myself and all things.

When so I let my hand fall forward

To the remote circumference of breath.
 Grenstone Poems ’ 4 3

At the Last

There is no denying
That it matters little.
When through a narrow door
We enter a room together.
Which goes after, which before.

Perhaps you are not dying:

Perhaps—there is no knowing—
I shall slip by and turn and laugh with you
Because it mattered so little.
The order of our going.
 44 * Selected Poems

Epitaph

She who could not bear dispute

Nor unquiet now is mute.

She who could leave unsaid

Perfect silence now is dead.
 Grenstone Poems ’ 4 5

During a Chorale by Cesar Franck

In an old chamber softly lit

We heard the Chorale played.

And where you sat, an exquisite

Image of life and lover of it.

Death sang a serenade.

I know now, Celia, what you heard

And why you turned and smiled.

It was the white wings of a bird

Offering flight, and you were stirred

Like an adventurous child.

Death sang, 'O lie upon your bier.

Uplift your countenance!'

Death bade me be your cavalier.

Called me to march and shed no tear

But sing to you and dance.

And when you followed, lured and led

By those mysterious wings,

And when I knew that you were dead,

I could not weep. I sang instead

As a true lover sings.

 4 6 • Selected Poems

A Prayer

I said a prayer to God

When I had need.

And I saw His great head nod.

Hearing me plead.

I thought He answered me,

I knelt and wept . . .
God did not even see.
He only slept.

But I no longer care

Whether He saw—

I have answered my own prayer

With God's own awe.

Finding that I may be

Mighty and nod

At my own destiny,

I sleep like God.

 from

THE
BELOVED
STRANGER

[19 19]
The Wave

You come with the light on your face

Of the turn of a river from trees to the open sun.

You are the wandering spirit of the most beloved place-

And yet you are a joy not there begun

Nor anywhere, but always about to be.

The invisible succeeding crest

That follows from the open sea

And shall be loveliest.

I have no language, hardly any word

To name you with, I have no flight of hands

To swim your surface closer than a bird:

For endless changing countermands

Your face and blinds me blacker than a crest of sun,

O joy not yet begun

But only about to be,

O sweet invisible unceasing wave

Following me, following me

Through the sea-like grave!

 5 0 • Selected Poems

Dream

I had returned from dreaming—

When there came the look of you

And I could not tell after that.

And the sound of you
And I could not tell.

And at last the touch of you

And I could tell then less than ever.

Though I silvered and fell

As at the very mountain-brim

Of dream.

For how could the motion of a shadow in a field

Be a person?

Or the flash of an oriole-wing

Be a smile?

Or the turn of a leaf on a stream

Be a hand?

Or a bright breath of sun

Be lips?

I can reach out and out—and nothing will be there . . .

None of these things are true.
All of them are dreams.

There are neither streams

Nor leaves nor orioles nor you.

 The Beloved Stranger • 5 1

The Wall

How is it.

That you, whom I can never know.

My beloved.

Are a wall between me and those I have known well—

So that my familiars vanish
Farther than the blue roofs of Nankow

And are lost among the desert hills?

 52 * Selected Poems

Lightning

There is a solitude in seeing you.

Followed by your presence when you are gone.

You are like heaven's veins of lightning.
I cannot see till afterward
How beautiful you are.

There is a blindness in seeing you.

Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.

 The Beloved Stranger • 5 3

Cherry-Blossoms

A child.

Looking at you, a cherry-bough.

And at me, a river.

Saw you and you, two cherry-boughs.

And laughed. . . .

For run as fast as ever I may.

My heart
Moves only with you.
Only with your blossoms.

Remembering them

Or awaiting them.

Moving when you move in the wind

And still when you are still.

 5 4 ’ Selected Poems

Horses

Words are hoops

Through which to leap upon meanings.

Which are horses' backs,

Bare, moving.
 The Beloved Stranger ’ 5 5

The Wind

How long must the wind go round in a mill

And the meaning be drawn?

How long before it shall climb a tree again

And shake down shivering silver?

 5 6 ' Selected Poems

Fear

This day has come.

Like an idiot, blank and dumb.
Over a lonely road
Under lonely skies.

And though at first I whistled and strode

Like a strong man showing no fear.
Yet I am afraid, afraid of this day.
You not being here.

And I look back and back at this uncouth day.

You not being here.

And my heart is in my mouth because of its eyes.

In which nothing is clear.
 The Beloved Stranger • 5 7

/I Sigh

Still must I tamely

Talk sense with these others?

How long

Before I shall be with you again,

Magnificently saying nothing!

 5 8 ' Selected Poems

The Boatmen

A nearing benison of boatmen singing . . .

Can they be bringing to me a new wonder?

They are waiting in the night, as for a passenger .

But who would embark now with no light at all?

The dark is shaking like a tambourine . . .

They are taking my old wonder.

 The Beloved Stranger ' 5 9

The Cataract

Over the edge of the days

My wonder has fallen

To be scattered and lost away,

Down from the temples of my love of you . . .

From the temples of blue jade

The downward flight of all the Chinese angels

Diving together.

With their white phoenixes attendant.

Plumes, arms, voices intertwirling.

All heaven falling.

Green with the touch of earth

Grievous with laughter.

Embracing, thrown apart.

And then, below.

Inwound for the upward flight again,

The crested flight.

To the temples of white jade . . .

To the changing temples of my love of you.

 6 0 • Selected Poems

Weariness

There is a dear weariness of love . . .

Hand relaxed in hand.

Shoulder at rest upon shoulder.

And to me that pool of weariness is more wonderful

Than crater, cataract.

Maelstrom, earthquake . . .

For it is a double pool

In which lie, silent.
The golden fishes of sleep.
 The Beloved Stranger • 6 1

Lament

There is a chill deeper than that of death.

In the return of the beloved and not of love.

And there is no warmth for it

But the warmth of a world which needs more than the sun.
Or the warmth of lament for beauty

Which is graven on many stones.

Someone was there . . .

I put out my hand in the dark

And felt

The long fingers of the wind.

And yet I would be with you a little while.

Dear ghost.
 6 2 • Selected Poems

The Moon

Red leaped
The moon.
From behind the black hill of night . .
And soon it was silver forever

And there was no change . . .

Until its time came . . .

And its setting was as white as a corpse

Among the flowers of dawn.

 The Beloved Stranger • 63

I Gamble

I threw the dice with Death,

I won.

Again I won.

Death only smiled . . .

But so did the deep-bosomed toad,

And the birch

Winked its pencilled eyes.

 6 4 • Selected Poems

1 Leer

If I might be tall negroes in procession.

Carrying each of them a rib of you.

And a cannibal-king bearing your collar-bones,

One in my right hand, one in my left.

And touching my forehead with them at slow intervals.

Might I not be too comforted
To weep?

If my love had only consumed you.

Not left you unconsumed.

Might not the moon have silvered me with content.

Oiled me like the long edges of palms?
 from

A CANTICLE
OF PAN

[ 1 9 2 0 ]
From Sea

Clear as a leaf of fern

Against a crystal sky.

Over the trailing stern

Hovers a butterfly.

Half-seen to southward sink

Sails that only now

Began, at the northern brink.

Half-seen to lift their bow.

Westward a fishing-fleet
Is anchored, dark of hull.

Eastward, in retreat.

Circles a single gull.

Not anywhere is land.

But under a soft sun

Peace is near at hand.

Simple and vast and one.
 6 8 ' Selected Poems

In Havana

I never saw your face.

But I saw you every night
Lean in the self-same place
Against the waning light.

There on your roof of the town

You would come out, like me.
To watch the sun go down
Beyond the sea.

And into my towered place

I would climb up, like you,
I never saw your face,
I never needed to.
 A Canticle of Pan • 6 9

Haskell

Here in Kansas is a school

Made of square stones and windows,
Where Indian boys are taught to use a tool,
A printing-press, a book.
And Indian girls
To read, to dress, to cook.
And as I watch today
The orderly industrious classes.
Only their color and silence and the way
The hair lies flat and black on their heads proclaims them Sioux,
Comanche, Choctaw, Cherokee,
Creek, Chippewa, Paiute—and the red and blue
Of the girls' long sweaters and the purple and yellow.
And the tawny slant of the machine-made shirts . . .

Noon—and out they come. And one tall fellow.

Breaking from the others with a glittering yell and crouching
slim.
Gives a leap like the leap of Mordkin,
And the sun carves under him
A canyon of glory . . .
And then it shadows, and he darts.
With head hung, to the dormitory.
 70 • Selected Poems

A Fortune-Teller

Turning the secrets from her pack of cards.

Warning of sickness, tracing out a theft.
Guarding from danger as an omen guards.
Her hand grew withered as it grew more deft . . .

Till in the stuffy parlor where she lies.

Now to these clients, neighbors, debtors, friends.
Truest is proven of her prophecies,
“l shall be dead before December ends."

That old man, facing us, who many years

Carried the marvellous message of her art.
Now hear him how he tells us with his tears
The simpler larger wisdom of her heart.

For she was quick to share the good that came.

So that young mothers turned at last and slept
And loafers gruffly reverenced her name—
Yet more than all she gave away she kept.

Kept red geraniums on her window-sill

And a gay garden in that narrow plot
Fenced-in behind her house. You'll find there still
Her hoe, her rake, her rusty watering-pot.
 A Canticle of Pan ■ 7 1

Bright, in the midst of all these dingy yards.

Her roses, hollyhocks and pansies grew;
As if some happy jester in the cards
Whispered the gayest secret that he knew.
 72 ’ Selected Poems

Meadow-Shoes

My shoe-soles, wet in the meadow.

Sang like the chirrup of birds—
But like birds of only a note or two.
Like persons of few words.

And, O my shoes, how hard it is

To tell the joy you touch!
I know, for I have tried to sing
The things I love too much.
 A Canticle of Pan ' 7 3

The Enchanted Toad

Three times you had neared—I unaware—

My body warm in the sand and bare.

Three times you had hopped your silent track

To the arch of shadow under my back.
And each time, when I felt you cool

And turned on you and, like a fool.

Prodded your exit from my place.
Sorrow deepened in your face.

You were loth to leave me, though I threw

Handfuls of sand to quicken you.

You would look as you went and blink your eyes

And puff your pale throat with surprise.

Three times you had tried, like someone daft . . .

O could it be that an evil craft

Had long bewitched, from the man you were,

Some old Chinese philosopher.

Had warted you dank and thwarted you dumb

And given you three times to come

Begging a friend to set you free?—

And did you spend them all on me?

 74 * Selected Poems

The Enchanted Swans

Out of a fairy-tale they flew above me.

Three white wild swans with silk among their wings—

And one might be a princess and might love me.

If I had not forgotten all such things.

They flew abreast and would not pause nor quicken.

One of them guarded by the other two,

And left me helpless here, alone and stricken.

Without the secret that I thought I knew.

 A Canticle of Pan ’ 7 5

The Swimmer

The reach of peace, the sky, the pines.

Leave me no more perplexed.
In which a memory divines

That bodies, buried, yet arise

Across the reach of all the skies,

Unburied and unvexed.

As arisen are the grass, the pines.

In upward-grown, delighted lines—

As a swimmer with one wave declines

And rises with the next.

 76 * Selected Poems

Through a Gateway in Japan

A torii stood, three miles above the bay,

A gate of sacred ground.

And when I wandered through a little way,

I paused and found

No temple-steps, no lanterns and no shrine.

Only divinity—
The solitary presence of a pine

Facing the sea.

 A Canticle of Pan • 7 7

In Kamakura

In Kamakura, near the great Diabutsu,

When I had sat a long time on the ground

And been gathered up, forgetful of my face and form.

Into the face and form of endless dream,

I found among the booths a little pendant Buddha

With the steel of a round mirror for His halo . . .

So that a brooding head still intervenes in bronze

Between my face and the image of my face,

And I cannot see myself and not see Him.

 78 • Selected Poems

Chinese Notes

IN MANCHURIA

In my heart flutter wings

Toward the little bright bough
On the brown hillside.

Toward the solitary tree, blossoming—

My heart flies there.

Leaving a shadow of azaleas.

IN PEKING

My eyes are blinded

By the flying dust of the dead.

And my heart smiles

At my own motions
In the wind.

THE MING TOMBS

Blown shadows, through the grass.

Not of the kings.

But of the builders and carriers . . .

It is the kings now who seem chained.

And the others free.

 A Canticle of Pan * 79

IN SHANTUNG

A burnished magpie
Strutting in the sun
Claiming a path among furrows of rice—

But in the distance

The quiet trot

Of a blue-coated horseman.
 8 0 * Selected Poems

Chinese Drawings

A FATHER

There is a fruit, my son.

Bitter to the taste at first
But afterward sweet . .
It is called advice.

A TEA-GIRL

When the fish-eyes of water

Bubble into crab-eyes—
Tea!

A WANDERER

Last night is a thousand years ago—

But tomorrow is a new mist.

A LOVER

The plums and cherries are blossoming.

My heart too is unsheathing from winter—

And it has all happened in one day.

 A Canticle of Pan • 8 1

A VENDOR OF ROSE-BUSHES

I am very poor.

Anyone who can buy from me

Ought to do it.

A PAINTER

I cannot paint

The growth of the spirit.

But I can paint an old man

Watching the smoke of incense

Join the sky.

A LADY

She does not see the tea her servant brings

Into the garden.

Her hands have fallen down from the instrument

She was playing.

But the strings can still answer

The cold fingers of autumn.

 82 • Selected Poems

A SCHOLAR

Having won his diploma.

He rides a horse of air

Through ten miles of the color

Of apricot-blossoms.

A PHILOSOPHER

What though they conquer us?

The tea has come.

In at most nine hundred years.

Someone will conquer them.

A HORSEMAN

Beyond him are many inlets curving among mountains

And on the way a temple,

And there is gold on the harness of his horse

Whose head and foot are uplifted together . . .

But the rider sits quiet now.

As he rides toward the shadow

Of the second willow.

 A Canticle of Pan ’ 8 3

The Chinese Horseman

There were flutes once merry with stops

And bottles round with wine.

Lips dewy as with attar-drops

And breasts of deep moon-shine—

There were thrushes in the market-rows.

Caught from the circling air,

And no bird sang so true as his.

And there were hills for prayer—

But over the bridge the rider goes.

The rider who was fond,

Leaving what was, crossing what is.

By the bridge that leads beyond—

Beyond the many songs he knew

And sang to lips he kissed.

Beyond the rounded green and blue.

Beyond the mist.

And the scholar who may question him

Will hear only the sound

Of wind-curled waves at the river-brim

And of willows trailing the ground.

And will see the quiet of five bays

Pointing like a hand

Toward the five valleys that divide

The long mountain-land

Beyond the white azalea ways.

 8 4 ' Selected Poems

Beyond the moonstone wave.

Where no one may be lost nor hide
Nor may be saved nor save.

But where the rider may forego.

And laugh no more nor moan.

And of all pulses never know

Which were his own.
 A Canticle of Pan ’ 8 5

Tiles

Chinese magicians had conjured their chance.

And they hunted, with their hooded birds of glee.

The heat that rises from the summer-grass

And shakes against the sea.

And when they had caught a wide expanse

In nets of careful wizardry.

They coloured it like molten glass

For roofs, imperially,

With blue from a cavern, green from a morass
And yellow from weeds in the heart of the sea.

And they laid long rows on the dwellings of romance

In perfect alchemy—
And before they ascended like a peal of brass.

They and their tiptoeing hawks of glee

Had topped all China with a roof that slants

And shakes against the sea.

 8 6 * Selected Poems

Saint-Gaudens

He called: and forth there came

Not wholly veiled.
Forth from the earth.

Silence made visible.

Touching no finite answer on that mouth.

Yet his fine fingers found reply
And from the light upon his soul

He drew the light of the unlighted tomb.

From man and woman both

The image of the unimagined face.

And left here in this Rock Creek burial-place

The arm of life.
The veil of time.

The uncorrupted presence of the dead.

 A Canticle of Pan ' 8 7

Foam

The ocean tosses patterns at my feet—

Large, irresistible, minute and lost.

A busy rabbit-headed grasshopper

Carves a green blade down to the yellow spine.

Over the mounded sand hot-foots an ant.

A ghostly spider pauses in the sun.

Across the sea those armies, that small chaos

Of rabbit-headed hot-foot ghostly men

Are ocean-patterns brought me by the surf.

Large, irresistible, minute and lost.

 8 8 ' Selected Poems

Sands

I lay on a dune and slept.

Sharp grasses by my head:

While armies far-off warred and wept,

I joined the earth instead . . .
Until I moved my hand
And was awake again

And shook myself out of the sand

To the cold wind of men.
 from

PINS FOR
WINGS
• 5*300? •

[ 1 9 2 0 ]
Conrad Aiken Harriet Monroe

phosphorescent the Mother Superior

plumbing considers lingerie

Richard Aldington Alfred Noyes

an Attic vase Robin Hood

full of tea singing
the Doxology

John Jay Chapman

Ezra Pound
Jove
in a pew a book-worm
in tights

T. 5. Eliot
Eizette Woodworth Reese
the wedding cake
of two tired cultures a singing hinge
of home

Thomas Hardy
James Stephens
a strong man
tripping meadows
on the shadow of a god amazed with men

John Masefield

fishing for the sunrise

he catches fish
O Hunted Huntress

O hunted Huntress, up the shore

Springs a white fawn for your dart.
And after you a night-black boar
Closes in upon your heart!
But keep your undeviating eyes
Upon that bright, escaping head—
Aim incessant where he flies.
Follow where those wild feet have fled.
Though you are mortally beset.
Toward the black boar never glance.
Be but swift and so forget
That a bow is no deliverance.
That barbs are slender and would bend
In so uncouth and thick a pelt—
That he would seize you and would rend
The very hand with which you dealt.
Look toward the fawn, the flashing white,
Hope not to flee but to pursue.
Before the onset of the night—
Before the fawn shall blacken too.
 9 6 - Selected Poems

Broken Circle

With rowlocks quieted, our unison

—Lately a burning image of the moon—
Is now a circle that the waves confound
And break and splinter from the perfect round.

A little wind shivers along the lake.

As though the shadow of a heart should break;
From far away, the wailing of a loon
Becomes another fragment of the moon.
 Caravan " 9 7

Wistaria

Clouds dream and disappear;

Waters dream in a rainbow and are gone;
Fire-dreams change with the sun
Or when a poppy closes;
But now is the time of year
For the dark earth, one by one.
To dream quieter dreams. And nothing she has ever done
Has given more ease
To her perplexities
Than the dreaming of dreams like these:
Not irises.
Not any spear
Of lilies nor cup of roses,
But these pale, purple images.
As if, from willows or from pepper-trees.
Shadows were glimmering on the Buddha's knees.
 9 8 ’ Selected Poems

The City

I'm a little of everything

And nothing much.
I've heard a tenor sing.
Read such and such.
Quoted what someone says.
Does or intends.
Greeted acquaintances,
Forgotten friends.
 Caravan ’ 9 9

Donald Evans

So I shall never hear from his own lips

That things had gone too ill with him awhile.
Nor ever see again, but in eclipse.
The brown precision of his smile.

It does not seem his way at all,

Shooting no firecrackers to a friend,
Making the usual interval
Unusual and finite and an end.

It is not hushed, like other deaths, nor grim.

Nor tragic nor heroic news.
But more as if we had not noticed him
Go by on lightly squeaking shoes

And down the coffins of the race

Tiptoe and stumble till he found his own,
Then clear his throat and decorate his face
With the consummate silence of a stone.
 10 0’ Selected Poems

A Winter Cat-Tail

Cat-tail standing in the ice.

Elderly New Englander
Standing mirrored in the ice.
Thin straight stalk and ruffled fur.
Do you wonder where the wind has blown
Dandelion and golden-rod?
Or are you happier alone
With the loneliness of God?
 Caravan ’10 1

D. H. Lawrence

Prowling in a corridor.
Coming upon a mirror.
You lay back your torn ear.
You arch your bony spine.
You spit at your own image.

And when the housekeeper strokes your torn ear.

And thinks benignly of the alley and the night and you.
You purr awhile in the very lap you loathe
And, twenty-one inches superior to that foul image.
You forget to move your claws
And slowly, luxuriously fall asleep.

11

Now and then your mute-footed familiar leaves you;

Your beard lies back again where it belongs.
Your blue eyes relax in their slits—
And then wilderness again,
A hollow glare in the eyeball!

Do you see that the moon is on its back for you?

And has turned up the white fur of its belly
And put out a silver-haired paw?
 10 2' Selected Poems

111

After wondering a long time, I know now

That you are no man at all.

The whiteness of your flanks and loins and belly and neck
Frightens you, affronts you,

A whiteness to be sloughed off, to be left behind you like ashes.

Forgotten by the new body, by the new mind.
By the new conforming surfaces.

Women have chosen you, in your white arms.

But what have you to do with women?

Only your seeming is theirs and the falsehood of your skin.

You would lengthen your finger-nails and your teeth
To mangle these women, these people;

You would drop them behind you with your cast-off skin;
You would wonder at the glaze of their eyes;

And your new pelt would contract and would tremble down
your spine

Before it settled into place;

And you would steal away, solitary.

To try in the wind the vibrancies of a new voice.

Only your reddish hair is you

And those narrowing eyes.

Eyes hostile to the flesh of people and to all their motions.

Eyes penetrating their thoughts to the old marrow of the beast.

 Caravan ’10 3

Eyes wanting a mate and the starlight,

A mate to be snarled at and covered
And stars to be known but not named.

Some day, if you are left alone

Beyond the roads, in a tough tangle of wilderness.
You will be held and torn and known to your own innermost
marrow.
Will be stripped of the skin that cumbers you.
Given over from the bondage of manhood,
And will be found at last.
With the blood of marriage in your teeth.

But if you are never left alone.

Are constrained in a country of houses.
You will always be smouldering against men;
And, after yielding slowly
The nine lives of a domestic cat.
You will be worshipped by the Egyptians.

iv
The world is full again of centaurs and sphynxes;
But it is the horse-head now and the lion-head
On the bodies of men who are tired of being men
And of women who are tired of being women.
It is these who turn with you and follow you
 1 0 4 * Selected Poems

To the hillsides that prick their flanks.

To the jungles that tear at their breasts;
It is these who forget with you
That the instep is not a galloping hoof.
That the finger-nail can not enter and climb the bark of a tree
Nor tear deep shreds
To be fed with.
And that the night can not last forever as a lordly dream
But must let in, finally, pointed barbs of light
To prick this hinge of the neck
Between what you are and what you would be.
Whether you are a man wishing to be an animal
Or an animal wishing to be a man.
 Caravan ’10 5

To a Young Inquirer

It is better sometimes that there be no fruit.

Only a mist of blossom blown away:
If never flower had ripened from the root
Long since, it would be Eden still, they say.

Yet if the tempering and seasoning

May come to you as they have come to me,
I wish for you the broken breath of spring
And the salt of wintry cypress by the sea.

Watch how a petal drifts upon your hand

And pales and withers. Watch another passing.
Light in the air. Watch how the waters stand
And fall along the shore, ebbing and massing.

Let only fools fathom the more or less

Of melancholy and of happiness.
 10 6 • Selected Poems

A Country Cottage

Than this there is no wiser funeral:

To choose a box with windows and with doors
Planted above the ground and to forestall
The peace of death, aware of it as yours.

You set your garden with calendulas;

Flesh of your flesh, they bear you to the sun.
And all the multitudinous life that was
Is quiet in this death you have begun.

It takes so little room to lie in peace.

So little motion to contain content,
There comes so little change with your decease.
So little difference to the firmament.
 Caravan '10 7

A Dance for Rain

You may never see rain, unless you see

A dance for rain at Cochiti,

Never hear thunder in the air

Unless you hear the thunder there.

Nor know the lightning in the sky

If there's no pole to know it by.

They dipped the pole just as I came.

And I can never be the same

Since those feathers gave my brow

The touch of wind that's on it now.

Bringing over the arid lands

Butterfly gestures from Hopi hands

And holding me, till earth shall fail.

As close to earth as a fox's tail.

I saw them, naked, dance in line

Before the candles of a leafy shrine:

Before a saint in a Christian dress

I saw them dance their holiness,

I saw them reminding him all day long

That death is weak and life is strong

And urging the fertile earth to yield

Seed from the loin and seed from the field.

A feather in the hair and a shell at the throat

Were lifting and falling with every note

Of the chorus-voices and the drum,

Calling for the rain to come.

 10 8’ Selected Poems

A fox on the back, and shaken on the thigh

Rain-cloth woven from the sky.

And under the knee a turtle-rattle

Clacking with the toes of sheep and cattle—

These were the men, their bodies painted

Earthen, with a white rain slanted;

These were the men, a windy line.

Their elbows green with a growth of pine.

And in among them, close and slow.

Women moved, the way things grow.

With a mesa-tablet on the head

And a little grassy creeping tread

And with sprays of pine moved back and forth.

While the dance of the men blew from the north.

Blew from the south and east and west

Over the field and over the breast.

And the heart was beating in the drum.

Beating for the rain to come.

Dead men out of earlier lives.

Leaving their graves, leaving their wives,

Were partly flesh and partly clay.

And their heads were corn that was dry and gray.

They were ghosts of men and once again

They were dancing like a ghost of rain;

For the spirits of men, the more they eat.

Have happier hands and lighter feet.

 Caravan ’10 9

And the better they dance the better they know

How to make corn and children grow.
And so in Cochiti that day.
They slowly put the sun away
And they made a cloud and they made it break
And they made it rain for the children's sake.
And they never stopped the song or the drum
Pounding for the rain to come.
The rain made many suns to shine.
Golden bodies in a line
With leaping feather and swaying pine.
And the brighter the bodies, the brighter the rain
Where thunder heaped it on the plain.
Arroyos had been empty, dry.
But now were running with the sky;
And the dancers' feet were in a lake.
Dancing for the people's sake.
And the hands of a ghost became a cup
For scooping handfuls of water up;
And he poured it into a ghostly throat.
And he leaped and waved with every note
Of the dancers' feet and the songs of the drum
That had called the rain and made it come.
For this was not a god of wood,
This was a god whose touch was good.
You could lie down in him and roll
 110’ Selected Poems

And wet your body and wet your soul;

For this was not a god in a book.
This was a god whom you tasted and took
Into a cup that you made with your hands.

Into your children and into your lands—

This was a god that you could see.

Rain, rain, in Cochiti!

 Caravan ’ 111

Theology

One night I saw God:

The trunk of an elm,
Lighted from a window.

The next night I saw Satan:

An eaten leaf.
Lighted by the moon—
Yes, I saw Satan:
Tiny black eyes.
Smooth green coil.

And then I saw God:

Two golden wings.
With Satan between them.
 112’ Selected Poems

Loosen Your Marrow

That little tangled thing you call your brain.

Which has not lived before nor will again
In any such compartment of distress,
Is an abominable restlessness.

Loosen your marrow from corrupting thought

And be as inattentive as you ought
To all the little motions of the will
That feed upon the happiness they kill.

Open your being to the flows of air

That form its destiny from everywhere—
And let your mind become a native feather
And not a nest of worms, tangled together.
 Caravan ‘113

Epithalamium and Elegy

My single constancy is love of life:

Because we have entered no such formal pact

As dulls devotion between man and wife.

No bland acknowledgment, no binding fact,

No mingling of betrothal with divorce.

No dated bliss, no midnight certitude,

No sad necessity, no matter of course.

No pallid answer saying why we wooed;

Because she lets me love her as I can

Moment by moment, moments that always come

Beyond the calculation of a man

For joy or pain, for epithalamium

Or for elegy, and because, when I am spent.

Life shall have had her way, shall be content

Still to confer the sweet bewilderment

On someone else, shall loosen her lovely hair

To the wind, shall turn with bountiful intent

Toward anyone at all, and I not there.

Shall offer cool papayas, pale bamboo

And amorous guava to a later comer.

And none of her gifts, not even a drop of dew.

To me who had received them many a summer.

These are not harlotries but only joy,

These are the very tiptoes of delight.

This is the happiness she gives a boy

With nothing of wickedness, nothing of spite

 114' Selected Poems

In that immense, delicious, naked bed

Where anyone may lie, except the dead . . .
But I shall leave her. All that there is of rest
Shall be little enough, after so much of love.

Wherever I move, she is there. Her open breast

Offers the tenderness I am dying of.

Her arm along my body like a snake
Has softly wound me into rings of sleep

And, every time again, stings me awake

And drowns me in her rhythms deep and deep .
Can I be tragical, in having had

My love of life by life herself subdued?

Since I am satiate with joy, can I be sad
In leaving? All that there is of solitude
Shall be little enough, after this vast embrace.

Give her some younger lover in my place.

 from

INDIAN
EARTH

[ 1 9 2 9 ]
Harmonica

1
If there seem to be music in the Chapala night.

Make sure of it, although it be no more

Than a mouth-organ. Aware of it under the moon.

We went two ways that were wrong, and then the one that
was right

Between roofs that form a staircase up the hill.

And there, in the rocky shadow before the lane

Narrows among grass-houses, we found our man

Whitely unblanketed, breathing his tunes.

A fragment of darkness, moving into the moonlight

From a doorway, spoke and became a listener.

Slowly we knew that there were several others—

An aged woman and a water-boy.

Pedro had stopped, afraid that we were soldiers.

He had hidden his crescent knife under a stone;

But now he said, with a smile for all his comrades:

"The night is beautiful. I will play to the stars."

3
Are stars concerned with a song about a suitor

Who, wishing a mother to think that he can notice

The bars of a certain window and not be disturbed.

Nibbles a piece of bread whenever he passes?—

 118’ Selected Poems

Or a song about a husband recommending

That the mother of his wife be buried differently
From other people—by the favour of God,
Face down forever and her mouth at peace?

Do the stars prefer verses of swallow and dove?—

Or rapid dances played with such a swing
That when Pedro's brother, Pablo, came from bed
And danced over cobbles with his wakened feet,
Pedro himself put up his other hand
To drop his hat on the ground and danced around it
And sent a rhythm from his top to his toes
With doubly driven breath and forgot the stars?

After an interval, Jesus inquired,

"Are moneyed people, below us in the town.
As happy as we Indians on the hill?"
Rafael shrugged with his hands; but Pedro played
A final melody: he tipped his head
Back on his shoulders, even with the sky.
Held his harmonica cupped in his hand
And was lighted from brow to thumb, as mountains are.
 Indian Earth • 119

The Bats

1
In the June twilight, we looked without knowing why
At the peaked gable of a corner house;

And while we looked, a hundred bats flew out

From the patterned eaves over the beach and the lake;

And as soon as they had wavered high out of sight.

Came other hundreds at eight intervals:

Like black leaves dropping and gathered up again

In their own wind and blown to the setting sun.

2
After the firm birds of water and the bright birds of trees.
After the transparent golden air of day.

It is magical to see a host of shadows

Trembling upward over the mountain-top.

Or hovering past a balconied window at midnight

And flaking singly toward a mottled moon.

Even the bats are beautiful in Chapala

Where shadows leave the breast and fly away.

 12 0’ Selected Poems

Moonlight Rain

Once in Chapala there was a moon and music;

And before the clouds blew nearer to the moon.
Guitar and harp and violins and voices
Were singing on the beach before the rain
Under the moonlight, singing of a swallow.
And still were singing after the lake-rain fell.
Singing of a little deer that comes down from the mountain
Only to places that are very quiet.
 Indian Earth •121

Folk-Song

When a poor man takes but a drink or two,

“How drunk he is," says everyone.
But when a rich man takes too much.
Everyone cries, “How gay he is!"

Under a tree a peacock once

Would sleep and keep his feathers dry.

But the tree has withered and been cut down

And the peacock sleeps like the rest of us.

 12 2’ Selected Poems

Market-Day

1
On Saturdays they steer with the west wind

From the adobe houses of San Luis,

From Jocotepec, Tuzcueca, Tizapan,

Bringing broad-woven hats, leafy baskets of cheese.

Oranges, limes, zarapes and earthenware.

And often under their waxing waning sails.

To cheer Chapala, comes a bearded singer

As blind as Homer once, in other towns.

2
A sail crumples under the setting sun;
And barefoot fellows, leaning their weight on poles.

Walk half the way from lofty prow to stern

And hurry back again till, near the beach.

Wading the waves with copper thighs, dragging

The loosened rudder, they heave it up the sand

For double anchorage; then, on their shoulders.

They bring ashore their women and their wares.
 Indian Earth '12 3

A Countryman

Swinging a blanket over his left shoulder.

Wearing its bright-coloured heart upon his sleeve.

He takes up his bed and walks. It serves him well

For warmth at night on his mat, or in the evening

Against a wind that pours along the lake.

Even at noon it hangs from his neck to his ankle.

Unneeded in the sun except as a king

Always has need to be wearing majesty.

 12 4' Selected Poems

A Boatman

In a pool of shadow floating cool on the sand,

As if for a fish to lean in motionless.

The boatman lies asleep, hands under head.
Dreaming of death; and close to him as a weed

Is to a fish, his hat is sleeping too. . . .

How intimate he is with the good earth.

As if, long buried, he were still alive

Among the many other mounds of sand.
 Indian Earth ‘12 5

In Mescala

Above a floating edge of hyacinths,

Lantanas and zinnias interrupt the streets;

Weeds hung with blossom crowd to the roofless church

Where priests from Spain built better than their bones;

And in the tumbled plaza, two old sages
With Asian faces and with Indian hats

Play—on a drum and a morning-glory pipe—

A jolly requiem for the Spanish dead.
 12 6’ Selected Poems

Lovers

From somewhere over the houses, through the silence.

Through the late night, come windy ripples of music.

There's a lighted cigarette-end in the black street,

Moving beside the music he has brought her.

Behind a shuttered window, there's a girl

Smiling into her pillow. And now by her hand

There's a candle lighted and put out again.
And the shadow of a bird leaves its perch for a smaller twig.
 Indian Earth • 12 7

A Beautiful Mexican

There where she sips her wine, her copper brow

Is itself the sunset. Now she has lifted her eyes.

And they are evening stars. I have seen many

Mexican sunsets—but never before had I seen one

Come down from the mountain to be a beautiful woman.

To shadow a table with a dusk of light
From a bare arm and then, alas, to rise

And turn and go, leaving a sudden darkness.

 12 8' Selected Poems

Crow's Feet

If we are older then after the years, if our cronies look

For crow's feet at the corners of our eyes.

Shall we bend our temples toward the crooked shade

And be ashamed, or laugh untroubled and uplift

A brow for the bird of mirth to tread upon?
Hear how he caws through heaven, his black wings

And the hugging of his legs edged with azure.

If there were no ripeness here, would he alight?
 Indian Earth ‘12 9

A Foreigner

Chapala still remembers the foreigner

Who came with a pale red beard and pale blue eyes
And a pale white skin that covered a dark soul;

They remember the night when he thought he saw a hand

Reach through a broken window and fumble at a lock;

They remember a tree on the beach where he used to sit

And ask the burros questions about peace;

They remember him walking, walking away from something.

 13 0’ Selected Poems

The Web

I am caught in an iridescent spider-web.

One end of it attached to a pepper-tree

And the other to a weed on Tunapec.

Why should I break the pattern of the world?
Better to swing, so delicately caught.
Than to have my eyes put out in hollow flame.

I flutter my wings a while and then subside.

Till a shadow shall find me in the evening wind.
 Indian Earth ‘13 1

Tule

What is this reed that grows tall in the river-bed?

They make their plaited mats of it to lie on.

They gather it from the river-edge and make mats of it

And soften their earthen floors with it to lie on. . . .
Yesterday noon I saw the mat I needed.

Six feet of reeds torn loose from the river-bed,

A mat that I might peacefully have lain on.

Go blowing down the lake before the wind.
 13 2' Selected Poems

Water-Hyacinths

What is so permanent as a first love.

Except the impermanence of later loves?

. . . I sit in a rowboat, watching hyacinths

Float down the lake and thinking about people.
How they insinuate and change and vanish.

How everyone leaves everyone alone.

How even the look of a beloved child

Is lesser solace than a mountain-rim.

11

Have I a grievance then against my friends.

Against my lovers? Is love so unavailing.

That here in a rowboat I shrug my naked shoulder

And watch the hyacinths go down the lake?
Do words that were light as air on living lips

Last longer when they crumble underground?

And is the soul an insecurer thing.

Less intimate, than the connecting earth?
 Indian Earth ’13 3

Moving Leaves

How could I know the wisdom of a world

That blows its withered leaves down from the air

They gleamed in once and gathers their strength again upward

In the sap of earth, if I set my fervid heart

On a leaf unmoved by any wind of change.

If I wanted still that spring when first I loved?

No leaves that have ever fallen anywhere

Are anywhere but here, heaping the trees.
 13 4 • Selected Poems

Calendar

Why should I know or care what month it is?

An Aztec calendar was made long since.

What year was it? What century? What matter?

A piece of stone became symmetrical.

If I watch the time, some of my friends will die.
If I watch the time, I shall surely die myself.

Let me, then, gather all my friends about me

And carve an endless moment out of stone.
 Indian Earth ‘13 5

Idols

1
They must have buried him away from the lake
Lest he be discontented with his grave

And forsaking the image at his ear, rise up

And sail. No edge of water was visible

From where he had lain so many hundred years

That every bone was fibrous like old wood.

And his moony skull came crumbling in my hand

When I removed the god that whispered there.

2
Within that skull hate had once eaten, and love
Had spun its intricate iridescent web.

And then the worms and the wet earth had worn

Both love and hate down to the marrow-bone.

Fingers that mingle now with yellow roots

And indeterminably feed the world

May once have baked the fingers of this god

That, still intact, grope after human clay.

3
What surer god have I ever seen than this

Which I deliver from an earthen womb.

This idol made of clay, made of man.

This fantasy, this mute insensate whim

Enduring still beside its maker's dust?

 13 6’ Selected Poems

These are the open eyes, the lips that speak

Wonderful things, this is the living thought

That make the man alive and alive again.

4
Lie close to me, my poem, and comfort me.

Console me with substance lovelier than mine.

Breathe me alive a thousand years from now.
Whisper—beside that rim of an empty moon.

Under the earth, the moon I thought with once—

That once to have thought, once to have used the earth.

Is to have made a god more durable

Than flesh and bone. Lie close to me, my poem.
 Indian Earth ’13 7

Snake Dance
(Hotevilla)

We are clean for them now, as naked-clean as they are.

We go out for them now and we meet them with our hands.

Bullsnakes, rattlesnakes, whipsnakes, we compare

Our cleanness with their cleanness. The sun stands

Witness, the moon stands witness. The dawn joins

Their scales with our flesh, the evening quiets their rattles.

We can feel their tails soothing along our loins

Like the feathers on our fathers after battles.

For their fathers were our fathers. We are brothers

Born of the earth and brothers in the sun;

And our destiny is only one another's.

However apart the races we have run.

Out of the earth we came, the sons of kings;

For the daughters of serpent-kings had offered grace

To our fathers and had formed us under their wings

To be worthy of light at last, body and face.

Out of the earth we came, into this open

Largeness of light, into this world we see

Lifted and laid along, broken and slopen,

This world that heaves toward heaven eternally.

We have found them, we have brought them, and we know

them

As kin of us, because our fathers said:

As we have always shown them, you must show them

That kinship in the world is never dead.

 13 8’ Selected Poems

Come then, O bullsnake, wake from your slow search

Across the desert. Here are your very kin.

Dart not away from us, whipsnake, but perch

Your head among your people moulded in

A greater shape yet touching the earth like you.

Leave off your rattling, rattlesnake, leave off
Your coiling, your venom. There is only dew

Under the starlight. Let our people cough

In the blowing sand and hide their faces, oh still

Receive them, know them, live with them in peace.

They want no rocks from you, none of your hill.
Uncoil again, lie on our arms, and cease

From the wars our fathers ceased from, be again

Close to your cousins, listen to our song.

Dance with us, kinsfolk, be with us as men

Descended from common ancestors, belong

To none but those who join yourselves and us.

Oh listen to the feathers that can weave

Only enchantment and to the words we sing.

The feet we touch the earth with. Help us believe

That our ancestors are still remembering.

Go back to them with sacred meal, go back

Down through the earth, oh be our messengers!

Tell them with reverence, tell them our lack;

Tell them we have no roots, but a sap that stirs

 Indian Earth ’13 9

Forever unrooted upward to the sky.

But tell them also, tell them of our song

Downward from heaven, back where we belong.

Oh north, east, west and south, tell them we die!
 14 0' Selected Poems

Shalako
(Zuni)

Young men and wives, you are bold,—

Your little new hands have made little new houses of clay.

Newcomers, we are old

And we bless your boldness. In our far house this day

We have been told

Of your boldness; and we have arisen and come away

From the house the mountains have made us, where alone
With the mountains forever we abide in stone.

We have come down from the fastness of age, we have

come down

To bid you all, within your little town.

While time is yours to deal with, deal with it well.
Out of a marriage-bed

Rise ever the sublime

Dead,

Who shall dwell

Among the mountains and dispel

Mortality and time.

Lift up your beams, place them on walls of clay.

Make doors and enter them, make beds and lay

Your bodies down on them, make cradles, make

New beams and walls and doors and let them break

When break they must.

Beams, walls and doors and bodies, into dust.

Behold us maned with buffaloes' dead manes.

And beaked with beaks beyond man's memory

 Indian Earth '14 1

Of birds, and risen through endless suns and rains

To a great stature and final dignity.

Ahead of your boldness, we were bold.

We are the old

Who having time to deal with, dealt with it well

And are now to time and death inviolable.

Clothed in eternal buffaloes and birds.

We converse in mountain-peaks instead of words.

But we still have words for you. We bid you build

New houses that your ancestors have willed.

To hold new bodies adding to the dead.

These are our words. You have heard what we have said.
Chinese Procession

It is my own procession. Someone dead.

With the red insignia topping many a pole.
Comes through an arch in China,—charioted
By shuffling men, each with as much of soul
As haunted yesterday this body borne
Across the desert-mounds out of Peking.
My hired mourners, ragged and forlorn
But still alive, pass—in the wind of spring—
A fallen temple-yard behind whose gate
There sit the remnants of five broken gods.
Unroofed, untended now, grown desolate
And harsh with posturing mud and iron rods
And ends of straw. Are all gods as dead as they
Or shall new gods arise from this old clay?

11

And yet the dead are their own sanctuary,

And mine as well, from life and living men.
Doubtful of other gods, I bow the knee
Before the vaulted universe again.
To men forgotten, to a little tree
Whose leafage by the lake becomes a store
Of young and ardent anonymity
Where virtue is not virtue any more.
To the brook that by no toilful agony
 2 4 6* Selected Poems

Is risen round my feet but by a rain

High on the mountain, as unknown to me
As dead men having nothing to explain . . .
Yet had they never lived, would they be dead—
Or I have thought these things that I have said?
 Eden Tree '147

From Part XVIII

Please don't, she begged; but he was going on:

I have laboured in a garden; but your hands
Are sweeter substance than the flowered lands.
There is no creed
But you, no garden spot, no dew.
Before man was, you were.
No, no, she said.
Yes, you are the stir
Of young sap in the spring.
You are everything
That moves in the world, or lies still
Or expires in the moon, you are oblivion
Before it comes, you are the chill
Of death
Undone by breath.
You are lust.
You are mad, she said.
You are the beloved dust.
He persisted, poured upon my hair,
You are the only one
For whom I care.
You are all nations
In a grim embrace
Of martial ecstasies.
You are the single shout
At the base of philosophies.
 14 8’ Selected Poems

You are the axis of constellations.

The diameter of the moon, the end of space,—
You are the grace
Of babies reaching out
For their arms to be strong.
You are song.
You are my blood and bone.
You are the stone
That stands above my face.
I am praying, understand, I am praying
To the light in your face.
You are the end of my labour, of my thought, of my will.
Lie still.
Listen to what I am saying.
You are Lilith, to whom I belong.
Lie still
And listen to me
And do what I say.
This way
With your arms, with your coils on the trunk of the tree.
Lie still. . . .

Go to sleep, said she.

 Eden Tree • 2 4 9

Alone

Is it enough of life that this is all.

That epigrams consume the questioning mind,
Fusing eternal with ephemeral
In unraised letters for the fumbling blind?
Is it enough that nothing has been taught
Except by teachers who have taught and died?
Is it enough that everything is naught
When all the zeros have been multiplied?
Is it enough that boy and girl combine
To weave a lovely fabric of decay?
Is it enough that what is yours is mine
When the usurious worms have had their way?
Is there in waking nothing that can keep
A human mind contented out of sleep?
 15 0' Selected Poems

No Anodyne

Offer no anodyne
To dreamers who cannot dream alone to their uttermost end.
Befriend
No friend of chance but live unfriended, if ease must be the root
Of friendship. Account no sacrifice divine
But feel the nail
Stand friendly in your foot.
And know that little comes of love but this:
Gethsemane, the soldiers and the kiss
And the pale
Dawn, the perfect loneliness.
Benedick

His was a life of single blessedness.

Doubled upon occasion but not often,—
Because he still believed that toil can bless
While toils can only enervate and soften.
Therefore when twilight touched his studio
With loneliness, he would relieve his labour
By summoning his dog, and both would go
To while away a while upon a neighbour . .
What happened to this bachelor of parts
Not one of all his neighbours can explain.
Had he a heart, then, like most other hearts?
Had he found solitude only a vain
Evasion, that his name is also hers
And the hangings in his house are diapers?
 15 4 ' Selected Poems

Dust

Life is at ease now, so her heart asserts.

When things lie placed as she would have them lie;
And any minor disarrangement hurts
Almost as much as though a man should die.
She little dreams her husband, all the while.
Would rather she were dead and moths alive
Than have to see the neatness of her smile
Because a curtain or a rug survive.
If only she could care for something human
Instead of things upon her walls and floors!
No wonder that materials and woman
Have made him so material with whores!
But she is utterly secure from fluster.
Wiping his sins off with a feather-duster.
 Guest Book ’15 5

Greenwich Villager

The last cloud after sunset, touching through

Some shadowed room a vase of ivory.
Was life and everything that life could do.
Touching her cheek, her youth, her destiny.
Young as she was, she had the fateful air
Of age; her very laughter was the sound
Of a far-off bell of doom beyond despair.
And yet she had her living to impound
With sunset clouds; and well though she might want
To draw down loveliness with the point of a brush,
She somehow had to run a restaurant.
And tired after cooking, in the hush
Of her sad hope, she would begin to think
And take a drink and then another drink.
 15 6' Selected Poems

Hostess

Four winds there may be; but of all the four

None penetrates completely through the curtain

That's drawn nocturnally across her door

To make her status weather-proof and certain.
She holds her cards at bridge, a steady hand;

She keeps a servant often in the offing

To answer a conventional demand.

She has at times a proper touch of coughing.
Her forehead concentrates with troubled laughter

Over a quip that isn't quite au fait;

But if there's any criticism after
From prudish guests, it wasn't she but they

Who noticed, so she tells them on the path.

And then she memorizes in the bath.
 Guest Book ‘15 7

Oats

The silver spoon offended his young mouth.

The bit of sterling chafed him; and despite

Summers abroad and winters in the south.

Tutors and private schools, he chose to fight

His parents, thus forsaking several

Advantages convenient to a child

Born not of mud nor of a madrigal.

But tamely born and wishing to be wild.

After a wanton marriage, for a while

He liked the blonde affinity and fire;

But marriage is a road of many a mile

Beyond the little village of desire . . .

Now, as conventional as anyone.

He has a wild and marriageable son.

 15 8’ Selected Poems

Pettifogger

He had a birthright from New Hampshire hills,

Warmth from the sun and laughter from the belly;

Winters had borne him with the daffodils.

Summers had made of him crab-apple jelly.

Let me expatiate a bit on this:—

Some ancestor had blessed him at his birth;

But old New England being what it is.

He chucked his destiny and chose his dearth.
He knows the buttered side, he knows his mutton,

He's sewn his heart up on the windward end.

His belly knows exactly how to button.

He'll borrow just as little as he'll lend.

He has his laughter still, but laughter tells:

Out in the barn a shaft with rusty bells.

 Guest Book ’15 9

Sentimentalist

Picking a shell up, on a northern beach,

A slim girl heard it singing of the ocean

And knew innately, but with need of speech.

The shut-in thing she was with her commotion.

Knew that the shell was small but full of home.

Full of the breaking fathoms of her heart.
Full of the long on-reaching of the foam

And of imperial purple to impart.

Therefore she filled her shell with little tears

And poured them out again upon her hand

As though, by what one does not hear or hears

Or does not see or sees, to understand

Why maidens become older than they were

And why the ocean was reminding her.

The Sowers

Now horses' hooves are treading earth again

To start the wheat from darkness into day.
And along the heavy field go seven men

With hands on ploughs and eyes on furrowing clay.

Six of the men are old; but one, a boy,

Knows in his heart that more than fields are sown-—

For spring is ploughing heaven with rows of joy

In the voice of one high bird, singing alone.

 16 4’ Selected Poems

I Need No Sky

I need no sky nor stars

When once, beyond the bars

That fence a meadow in,
I have espied a place

Blowing with Queen Anne's lace

Where only stones had been.

New stars have come my way.

Encompassing by day

A constellation's rim;
And, if I dared before

To doubt, I doubt no more

But do believe in Him,

This Hermit who, unknown

To eye or ear, has sown
In a secretive hour.

This Stranger who can make

The whole of heaven wake

And wander in a flower.

 Against the Cold ’16 5

Moon Fragrance

When the moonlight brings to my bed a fragrance of cherry

blossoms.

Why do I dream of frost among their petals?

Why do I dream of winter covering with snow

Even their shadows on my window-sill?

 16 6’ Selected Poems

Echo

The heavens rode effulgent into hell:

Blue-armoured nothingness upon a horse

Of dappled chaos; and my heart

Astride its flesh and bone followed their course.

And all the debts that have been owed or paid

Were dusty shadow-trees that gave no shade.

But while I rode and bitterly would not weep,

I heard an echo of beloved tones

Saying beloved words, ashes of wonder.

And I was grateful for these rotting bones.
 Against the Cold ’167

Summer-Leaves

Friendship can turn as suddenly

As ever ripples on a sea

But likewise it can turn as slow

As noonday shadows on the snow

And be as fixed and firm in air

As summer-leaves are anywhere.

 16 8" Selected Poems

The Wind at the Candle

Age has its merriment as well as youth.

And both of them go flying
And either time, to tell the truth.
Is a likely time for dying.

Be your own ancestor when callow.

Be your own son when sere—
For wicks, when wind is at the tallow.
Bend and veer.
 Against the Cold ‘16 9

The Wintry Mind

Winter uncovers distances, I find;

And so the cold and so the wintry mind

Takes leaves away, till there is left behind

A wide cold world. And so the heart grows blind

To the earth's green motions lying warm below
Field upon field, field upon field, of snow.
 17 0’ Selected Poems

The Edge

Long, long before the eyelids harden

And an intake ends the breath,

A body's eyes and a body's burden

Feel the edge of death.

They do not move, they do not think.

They only sit and stare.
The eyes almost ceasing to blink

And the heart ceasing to care.

But it becomes a pleasant thing

To gaze upon the toes

So peacefully dismembering

Before the eyelids close.

Thus Buddha must have sat and known.

Midmost of earth and sea.

The dissolution of the bone

Into its rarity.
 Against the Cold ‘17 1

Midnight

What spirit is abroad that so bereaves

The night? No one has sung, nor guitar been played!

A hound under the house has whined and bayed,
And a bat is breathing at the window-eaves.
When I look out, the moon among the leaves
Of corn becomes a curve of steel. Afraid

Lest I may hear the stir of a grass-blade

Growing out of a body that still grieves,
I lock my door and cringe along the wall,
Snuffing my candle as I creep to bed;

And when I hear a fragment of wax fall

On the table-top I feel at the top of my head.

Tapping my memory, the bony ball

Of a finger that was once perfectly made.

 17 2' Selected Poems

At His Funeral

These busy motions have no life at all

Compared to motions death has now unmade;

No living person at his funeral,

Never a moving form of the parade

Affords the power of the silent face.

This gathered energy, ungathering.

Compared to which no passion, no embrace.

No parentage, no pain mean anything.
 Against the Cold ’17 3

Spring and a Mother Dead

I who should write her epitaph

Would err:

What could I say to anyone

But her?

Apricot-blossoms open
Like a bell:

But this time there is nobody

To tell.
 17 4’ Selected Poems

One's Own Requiem

Oh, now for fewer roofs upon this house.

Only one roof and that a lasting one,

And so for quietude after carouse

And for indifferent feeling of the sun!

Darken me wholly with no lights to close.

Put me to bed beyond a need of sleep.

Let knowledge be the depth a dead man knows

And faith become an easy thing to keep.
 Against the Cold • 2 75

Episode of Decay

Being very religious, she devoted most of her time to fear.

Under her calm visage, terror held her,

Terror of water, of air, of earth, of thought.

Terror lest she be disturbed in her routine of eating her

husband.

She fattened on his decay, but she would let him decay
without pain.

And still she would ask, as she consumed him particle by

particle.

Do you wish me to take it, dear? Will it make you happier?

And down the plump throat he went day after day in tid-bits;
And he mistook the drain for happiness.

Could hardly live without the deadly nibbling. . . .

She had eaten away the core of him under the shell.
Eaten his heart and drunk away his breath;
Till on Saturday, the seventeenth of April,

She made her breakfast on an edge of his mind.

He was very quiet that day, without knowing why.

A last valiant cell of his mind may have been insisting

that the fault was not hers but his;

But soon he resumed a numbness of content:

The little cell may have been thinking that one dies sooner
or later

And that one's death may as well be useful. . . .

 17 6' Selected Poems

For supper, he offered her tea and cake from behind his

left ear;
And after supper they took together the walk they always

took together after supper.

 Against the Cold • 17 7

Moles

Little silvery threads wander under

These roots of earth, they are burrows of the moles that

gnaw asunder

Unborn blossoms and pull, declined

Into earth, new stalks that would have stood

Stalwart and straight and good

But for the penetration of the blind.

To give the unseeing a small taste of sky.

So must the upright die

And spend fair blossoms, desolate beneath

Invulnerable teeth.
 17 8' Selected Poems

Bell-wethers

Even popes and lamas wear

Terror beneath a breast-bone bare,

Bell-wethering the flocks they lead

With a nostalgia for stampede.
 Against the Cold '17 9

After a Rain at Mokanshan

While green bamboos come near again.

That a moment since were blown grey with rain.

And mountain-peaks once more exist
And the river renews its silver vein,
I close my eyes and see but you
After a rain beside Si Wu,—

Your shyness drifting like a mist

From the leaves of a bamboo.

 18 0’ Selected Poems

Sonnets from "Against the Cold"

11
Establish me in nether caverns, seize
These frightened remnants for great shadows' food.

Fill me with air from subterranean trees.

Let nothing more of the vague mind intrude

Upon the depths of darkness and the wide

Lone instancy of everlastingness.

So let me be the husband and the bride

Bound sound together, distant from distress.

Shed of these bright disasters which I live

Among, still dazzled. And so penetrate

Me with essential suns that they shall give

Warmth to my vitals, making early late.

Late early; the while I, untimed, unheard.

Time and attend the unalterable word.

XVI

Summer, O Summer, fill thy shadowy trees

With a reprieve of cooling sacrament

Before we die among the mysteries;

Loosen our wreaths and let us be content

To bow our heads before thy flower-bells

Beneath whose mould we too shall soon be spent,—

Lovers desiring this and little else:

Thy laurel now, not ours, thy firmament

 Against the Cold '18 1

Of blue in which to dedicate our blood

To earth, our vernal meaning now but meant.

Like the least meaning of thy smallest bud.

To go the way the earlier seasons went.

Breath is our fee and dividend and cost:
So let us grant the forfeit and be lost!

X X

Autumn is only winter in disguise,

A mummer skeleton in scarlet cover.

Now is no spring nor summer in the skies.

But autumn comes and is a mortal mover.

Bones are the fingers now that touch the grass

And turn the edge of timothy and clover;
Bones are the feet that on the highway pass

And tread the weeds down and the gravel over.

So of adversity make stronger walls

Than stone or wood or clay or winds that hover

Along the meadowlands and waterfalls.

Be an amazed but undiscouraged lover

And build of better stuff than spring—the old

Unceasing fortitude against the cold.
 from

TAKE
AWAY THE
DARKNESS

[ 1 9 4 7 ]
Defeat

On a train in Texas German prisoners eat

With white American soldiers, seat by seat,

While black American soldiers sit apart.

The white men eating meat, the black men heart.

Now, witir that other war a century done.

Not the live North but the dead South has won.
Not yet a riven nation comes awake.

Whom are we fighting this time, for God's sake?

Mark well the token of the separate seat.
It is again ourselves whom we defeat.
 18 6’ Selected Poems

Dead in the Philippines

Dead in the Philippines are they . . .

These boys who, born in Santa Fe,
Spoke Spanish here, spoke Spanish there.

Have now no language anywhere—

Save as the dead speak after death.

With an acute mysterious breath
At sudden times of night and day.

Some of the things they used to say.

 Take Away the Darkness '18 7

Prayer

Let us not look upon

Their like again.

This generation

Of bewildered men—

With earth-roads, sea-roads.

Sky-roads too, that show
All ways to enter

And no way to go.

 18 8’ Selected Poems

To a Light-Hearted Friend

You are of air, my boy.

No earth connects with you.
No arrow yet has pierced your joy

For pain to enter through.

And lightly I commend

Your free and easy wing.
Also its element, my friend.
Earth is a heavy thing.
 Take Away the Darkness ’18 9

Masthead

A night on the cabin roof, in a room

Reaching to Zanzibar,

With shipmates two, a shrouded boom

And a masthead fumbling from star to star.

Is a night on the roof of a little world

Which unrecorded tides have driven,—

Where the dead are comfortably furled
And the living catch at heaven.
 2 9 0• Selected Poems

Chart

Upon the ancient bark. Astronomy,

We serve as crew, accredited to find
Port for the long disturbance of the mind;
And to follow minutes moving through the hours.

We have no other choosing but to be

Aware of distant lights, firmer than flowers.
 Take Away the Darkness '19 1

Snow

Though he searched the south, the east, the west.

The north too, for a warming breast.
Now in the depth of night he goes
Naked among farthest snows.

For snow, touching the flesh, can warm

As well as fire and do less harm.
 19 2’ Selected Poems

Young Men Should Know

Young men should know enough never to laugh

Except when laughter is amazed or mean:

Young men should wince at any biograph

Admitting an emotion to the scene.

Should twist the living subject's neck apart

And prove that in no throat is any heart.

To old men objects only should be dear.

Trinkets in space perhaps, or in the mind
Philosophies, religions to revere.

Or the unimportances of humankind;

But old men cannot always live by rote:
Sometimes they put the heart back in the throat.
 Take Away the Darkness ‘19 3

Friendship

Staidness, a quality
I do not mean of morals
But a staying through frivolity.
Through casualness and quarrels,
A staying through the ticking clock
That lasts so long a while.
An ear-quick answer to the knock.
And quiet in the smile.
 19 4’ Selected Poems

Else Were No Ease

Forgiveness before apology is best.

Else were no ease of heart within the breast.
And understanding deeper is than words

As heaven is than all its nearing birds.

 Take Away the Darkness • 2 95

Answer

Cease from the asking, you receive the answer.

God is not God, life life nor wonder wonder

Save as a man himself becomes the dancer

Across all variations of the thunder.
 19 6' Selected Poems

To Li Po

Mingle the oceans into cups of wine

And lift all seven to your heart's content.

Your ancient impulses becoming mine—

I know, with cups, the fullness that you meant.

You meant, pausing as I do for a dram.

That the Emperor might call and we not come.

You were as independent as I am

Of purple canopies and bell and drum . . .
You tottered to the summons, you were carried
Drunk and half-blinded in the servants' arms.
You moved your brush, the court was haunted, harried

With premonitions and with high alarms

Because a tidal wave of tipsy speech

Had made all China but a crumbling beach.
 Take Away the Darkness ’19 7

The Two Windows

Out of my western window.

The purple clouds are dying
Edged with fire;

And out of my eastern window.

The full round moon is rising

Formed of ice.

So beautiful.

Although the day go by

And the night come on forever.

Is this momentary world.
 19 8’ Selected Poems

Testament

Crumble me with fire into the desert sand.

I have seen dead cattle, and I understand

Slow crumbling well enough to wish my hand

No broken shape when it has been unmanned.

Therefore release me, make me, when I die,

A part of wideness under widening sky.

 Take Away the Darkness ‘19 9

Archer

Master, with dart invisible.

Parallel to the dart we see.

How can you pull the fateful string

Of double archery?

How can you pierce an eagle on the wing.

So that the bird will drop and die

And yet its double be transfixed

Forever in the sky?
 2 0 0’ Selected Poems

Rose

The earth has gathered years and gathered roses

While you, my rose, remain

The breath of every petal that uncloses

To summer rain:
A single flash where dusty brambles thicken

Wild in the spring;

Or all the endless gardens that can quicken

To imagining,
Roses that have never been acquainted

With roses in bowls.

Those old, imperishable roses painted
On silk and paper scrolls:

You are as well the pollen and the attar,—

The mingled death and birth

Of petals that collect, unfold, and scatter

Blood of earth.
 Take Away the Darkness * 2 0 1

A Letter

When I walked home forgotten.

When I walked home in grief,
I found a letter under my door.
It was an autumn leaf.
 2 0 2' Selected Poems

More Lovely than Antiquity

There comes a moment in her veins

Not of the earth, not of the rains.

Something not of stalks and stems

But of dim crowns and diadems.

Something commanding her to be

More ancient than antiquity

And to soothe her head on a pike above
The vacant circumstance of love.
 Take Away the Darkness • 2 0 3

Duet

Let women sing, in little curls

Of happy voice, that they are girls.

While boys come by and sing again.

In breaking voice, that they are men.
 2 0 4 ’ Selected Poems

Burros

Upon my heart a sorrow lies

Like that within a burro's eyes.

But burros bear their burdens well
Of hemlock or of asphodel.

Most of the time they bear it well;

But I envy them the heaving yell
With which in the deep of night or day

They suddenly give themselves away.

 Take Away the Darkness '205

Solitude

No cave may be so deep

As the one that a hermit chooses to enter.

Not even sleep;

But if it has cracks in it from the very center,

Down he may go and close his eyes to tears

As Buddha sat.

But water drips in about his ears

And the dark stirs with a bat.
 2 0 6' Selected Poems

Snake

These are the moments of drouth when offshed skins

Of serpents strive again to enfold the flesh.

Feeling that there are no virtues or dried sins

Which they would not like once again to enmesh

And to lead over sly rocks, around brittle thistles.

Across lean sand, through crevices and up trees.

And the small mouth of the snake hisses and whistles
Toward the moon, because of memories like these.
For the earth is sweet, sweet to the belly's fold.

Scale upon scale with earth between the scales

Each rinsing away its momentary hold

While the moon grows ruddy and the moon pales.

And the long lithe line makes its imprint and the eye
Sits hard and silent, centering the sky.
 Take Away the Darkness "20 7

Impartial Be

As to the moment of your going, sir

You have no gauge:

Youth is as often executioner

As age.

Impartial therefore be to old and young

And neither favor.

Not knowing when their hearts or yours be wrung

Forever.
 2 0 5* Selected Poems

Circe

What though your face, that stole my sense of good

And led me captive through bewildered days.
Has now no potency of flesh and blood.

No changes in those thousand conquering ways.

Still, while your wanton will is quiet grown.

Your beauty captures whom it still disdains;

And in your heart of dust, that then was stone,

I stumble blindly with unbroken chains.
 Take Away the Darkness '20 9

Clouds

Bright-veined as lightning she was.

One touch of her would cleave the sky.

Anything that heaven does

Could happen when she came by.

She was buried winters ago:

1 he summer sky is heaped as if with snow.

 210' Selected Poems

A. E. Housman
(April 30, 1936)

Let now the willow weep no more

That wept within his mind.

But bear the long leaves that it bore.

Left for a while behind,

While he lies easy in a place
Where beds need little change.
And where the bedfellow to face

Shall not be lost nor strange.

Even to persons born as he,

Knowing too much to know.
Except that there is Spring to see

And blossoms hung like snow;

And not so very much to say.

Save in the saying well;

There comes an uneventful day

With nothing left to tell.

 Take Away the Darkness * 2 11

The Mantle

He looked at me from another life—

He was already dead;
He saw his children and his wife.
And this is what he said:

Against the darkness love is good.

Love clearing through a cloud;
And then he made, as a man should,
A mantle of his shroud.
 212 * Selected Poems

Autumn Tree

There's April in the Autumn,

December in the May;

There are many Springs forgotten.

More that stay.

Much has bereaved me

And still bereaves.
But I feel like an autumn tree
Taking back its leaves.
 from

BOOK OF
LYRICS
• ■

[ 1 9 5 5 ]
A Stream

Cool, moving, fruitful and alive I go.

In my small run reflecting all the sky.

I see through trees, I see through melting snow,

I see through riffles which the wind and I

Have made, and through the shadow of a man.

Nor know where I arrive, where I began.

 216’ Selected Poems

Prodigal Son

What was given

Me by birth

Was not heaven.

It was earth.

Though some other

House be fine.
Strange old father.

This is mine.
 Book of Lyrics ‘217

Squanderings

Be aware

That goods are brittle.

That those who have little often break that little

While those who have much take care.

Love is not a wealth to scatter.

To forsake.

Loneliness is hard to break.

Squanderings matter.
 2 18' Selected Poems

Out of the Sea

With your sun-white hair and your smile

And your body as white as a white sea-bird,
I took you and held you and watched you awhile
And never a word.

Nothing to say, to explain

Or to answer, nothing to hear or be heard.
Only to kiss you again and again
With never a word.

Even lately I cannot be sure.

It seems in my sleep that we neither have stirred.
So silent you vanished, so sweet you endure.
And never a word.
Descending Landscape

Snow on the mountain-top,

Blossoms on the lilac-tree,
A white skull on a man.

He has been mountainous.

He has been blossoming.

And shows it if he can.

 2 2 0’ Selected Poems

The Vessel

There lives no beauty, I believed when young.

But at the vessel's prow.

Only the foam is beautiful
Which flies before the voyage and is gone.

There lives no wisdom, I believed when old.

But in the ship's wake

Where the waves

Cover their noise again with the great sea.
 Book of Lyrics ’221

Island

There is an island where a man alone.

Alive beyond the selfishness of living.

Knows the whole world around him as his own

Without resenting and without forgiving.
 2 22' Selected Poems

Gothic

He came home at dusk and at night lay down

beside his wife, not telling her

About a fold in a dress which was not hers,

after all. It was a quieter

Fold than any she wore and it had been his handiwork

And he would cut another fold tomorrow,

alone on his high perch.

He kept feeling that the night made him shirk
Because of darkness and of his staying away from the church

And from his chisel and its cutting and its firm touch
On her robe in that small hidden shadowy place high up

Where people could not see how much

He loved his Virgin. . . . But tomorrow

was the Seventh Day and Her Son's cup

To think of instead, and no forming

Of the robe, no holy tryst to keep

With Her, no secret fold to shape on Her.

He sighed and felt his wife's breast warming

His mortal heart. And slowly, while he went to sleep,

He dreamed of a garden

In which he was warden.

And of far corners in it where he alone knew

What he had planted and what had faded and what grew.
 Book of Lyrics ’223

Winter Morning

The hills for miles are stricken into one.

Whiter and simpler than oblivion.

Alive with sudden snow, with sudden sun.

 2 2 4' Selected Poems

Grasses

Grant me to grasses, fashion me no grief.

Be glad awhile as I was glad before.

For you as well there shall arrive a leaf
Forever swinging better than a door.
All tempest

Has

Like a navel

A hole in its middle

Through which a gull may fly

In silence
 2 2 8’ Selected Poems

Any other time would have done

But not now

Because now there is no time

And when there is no time

It only stands still on its own center

Waiting to be wound

Once upon a time somebody will unwind it

And then what a time

In no time at all
 New Poems ‘229

Barnacles on underposts of the piers

Are shown under green sashes

Which let elements do the dancing

Round its fixed limbs

A better ballet

Than any active limbs could do

Even in a forest

Green with slow scarves

 2 3 0' Selected Poems

Coming down the stairs

She paused midway

And turned
And assembled the railing
Which thereupon went upstairs

Leaving her slowly alone

 New Poems • 23 1

Even my friend

Who at school read the entire encyclopedia

From beginning to end

Found that its covers bound him

And would never open or shut

So that his has become a black yielding

With the metal eyes of a field-mouse

Bright

Between talons
 2 3 2’ Selected Poems

He never knew what was the matter with him

Until one night

He chopped up his bed for firewood

It was comfortable that way

And then another night a year later

It came roaring up the street at him

As a sunset
 New Poems ’233

He noticed from the dark shore

That it was his own house being carried awkward on the

flood

He could see by the unlit lights in the living-room

That it was filled with total strangers
Dancing

And that the flooring of a flood

Is at an angle
 2 3 4’ Selected Poems

Kindness can go too high

Even in heaven

A hawk carrying a fish

For instance

And giving it air

 New Poems ’235

What is this death

It is not when the far clay-bank turns white

Nor when bright leaves darken in the veins

It is when the mind is too tired to take care of the heart

And the heart takes pity
 2 3 6’ Selected Poems

You fish for people

and not even their names

Come up for you

But the sun is still there

Aged fisherman
And you sit in it

fishing for people

And hooking the sun
UNCOLLECTED
POEMS
Santa Fe

Among the automobiles and in a region

Now Democratic, now Republican,

With a department-store, a branch of the Legion,

A Chamber of Commerce and a moving-van.
In spite of cities crowding on the Trail,

Here is a mountain-town that prays and dances

With something left, though much besides may fail.

Of the ancient faith and wisdom of St. Francis.

His annual feast has come. His image moves

Along these streets of people. And the trees

And kneeling women, just as they did before.

Welcome and worship him because he proves

That natural sinners put him at his ease.

And so he enters the cathedral-door.

 2 4 0’ Selected Poems

El Musico

Looking beyond us always.

He played the harp

And sang the song with it
A little sharp

Or took from one of the others

A violin
And sang the song with it

A little thin.

Or else he stroked the sand

Where he sat
And sang the song with it
A little flat;

But whatever song he sang.

He seemed to know
Exactly in his voice

How the winds blow.

And how the waves come up

Chapala shore.

And how the birds sing a little

And then more,

And why the birds are careless

Of a church-bell.
Others sang better than he.

But none so well.

 Uncollected Poems • 2 4 1

A Mexican Vase

Into what clay those fingertips were pressed

Magnanimous of energy and earth.

Making of clay the roundness of the breast

And pointing it with cleavages of birth.

The warrior's headdress seen along the edge

And drops of rain and sunrays incident

To dawn emerging on a mountain ledge!
This is the way the Indian mothers went.

Who dipped their fingers in the blood of fire.

Who held up hearts where pyramids held altars:

This was the absolution of desire

Which, though desiring, never faints nor falters

But brings oblivion alive today.

Shedding dark blood in images of clay.

 2 4 2’ Selected Poems

These Hours

I have twenty-four new porcelain jars each day

And in each of them is a jewelled tree

With sixty coral branches whereon the jade,

Carnelian, quartz, chalcedony.

Agate, amethyst and crystal blossoms,

Tipping each twig and needful of no dew

From heaven nor even
Of love from any heart, are you.

You are no person like other persons

Born of an earthly love, you are no

Woman susceptible to breath.
Nor blown like softly fallen snow.

You are harder than the stone of death.

You are a permanency of mist:

Carnelian, quartz, chalcedony.

Jade, agate, crystal, amethyst.
 Uncollected Poems • 2 4 3

Poplar at Dawn

Tremble again for me

And a friend of mine who is gone.
You silver poplar tree
Containing the blue dawn:
Lift your few years and live
Through the days that deck a tree;
Then be as fugitive
From worldliness as we.
 244 • Selected Poems

Lakes

Lifting its mountains full of leaves

Whose round is never done.

How smooth the great horizon heaves

Its inches one by one!

Sometime toward the sun or moon.

Sometime away it rolls
And still holds water upside-down
In its unspilling bowls.
 Uncollected Poems ‘245

The Titanic

A time comes when a majority of those you remember

Are not among the living but among the dead.

Some of them went down long ago on the Titanic.

Justus Miles Forman, for instance.

Who now besides me remembers him.

That tall suave presence with slim waist and pomaded words.
That dark edge of a jungle in exact clothes.

And Charles Frohman, that dumpling of finance with a heart

nonetheless.

And who else vanished suddenly on the Titanic?

But was it the Titanic after all?

And is it not always as sudden?

Is it not a shadow springing at you round a corner of the street.

The immense imminence of nothing on something?

There is no answer save the vibrations of a voice which

happens to be living

And might just as well happen to be dead.

 2 4 6’ Selected Poems

Bartender at Banff

I remember the days when I was a lad in Ireland

And the things I heard said in the Irish language

That ye can't tell in English without losing the heart and the
wit o' them.

I bear well in mind a woman named Annie

Who'd gone to thirty-five without marryin'

And so she says with a smile to a half-witted boy there,

"Denny," says she, "make a man for me."

And Denny says, "Annie, you're askin' too late.

I'm afraid that you didn't be watchin' the time."

And one o' the other girls with no money at all and as poor as
ye find 'em.

She says to her sister in the presence of a stranger.

When a rich farmer's cows come down the road,

"Where's the rist of our cows?" says she.

"There's only twelve o' them," says she.
And it's the true thing, for I heard her.

She come to America along with the rist of us.

The girls started out with us, walkin' forty miles to

Londonderry,

With their bundles on their backs and their dresses rolled up

over their bare legs.

An' we was all laughin' an' singin' light-hearted.

For we didn't know yet what the world was.
An' I ain't never seen her again.
 Uncollected Poems • 2 4 7

But I seen a girl like her in an eatin'-house where I ate in

Cheyenne

While I was workin' at a saloon called The Bucket o' Blood.

That was a great girl too.

She was strict with herself all right but with no one else.

She'd say to a grouchy-lookin' stranger at breakfast,

"If the head-waiter wasn't watchin' I'd hold your hand this
mornin'

Because you look cold," she'd say.

An' the devil himself would ha' smiled with her.

She'd have twenty-two fellows goin' at the same time.

She'd have father an' son goin' at the same time.

She'd tell me about all her lovers an' then she'd say,
"But I'm waitin' for you, Hughie,"

And, begorra, she'd make me believe it.

Be the look of her eyes she was honest as St. Peter.

She gave one o' them once a bottle of holy water

An' he went to Philadelphia an' fell an' broke his leg.

"Keep it by you," she wrote to him.

"If you hadn't had it, you'd have broken your neck."
She was a good girl.

Straight as a string.

An' the farthest she'd go was when she'd be thinkin' she'd

marry one o' them

But soon she'd be changin' her mind and her man.

There was another girl that summer, Delia.

 2 4 8’ Selected Poems

Cripes an' I don't dare tell you the language she'd use.

She got drinkin' and goin' with the men an' was a bad one all

through.

But there was the Irish in her and you couldn't help likin' her.

She took sick there that summer.

She gave me her picture just before she went to the hospital

an' I got it yet.

Well, there was a woman guest named Cox in the hotel.

An elderly woman, the cheap kind that washes their stockin's

in the bath-tub.

Delia couldn t bear the woman an' she got thinkin' about her

in her delirium

An' she died cursin' the name o' Cox.

God, it's the Irish girls is the great girls.

An' they hold their good looks after bearin' a dozen children,
God bless 'em.

I had a fine-lookin' woman in Belfast say to me on me last trip,

"I knocked down two Orangewomen with me own fist," says

she.

An' I believed her. Me own mother could ha' done it.

She's livin' yet, glory be to God.

I've been to the old country five times.

The last trip cost me eleven hundred dollars.

If it wasn t for the confessional the Catholic Church might as

well be upside-down.
 Uncollected Poems • 24 9

I'd have stolen money at the bar many a time but for the priest
tellin' me once,

“Put it back. You'd better have no money at all than that kind/'
And I couldn't go back to him with it still on me.

But well I remember the first time I walked in on me mother

washin' a couple o' dishes at the dresser

An' me brother, a grown man, whom I'd left as a babe on the

floor.

Was now drinkin' his dish o' tea be the fire.

An' he says to me, “Sit down."

An' me mother says, “An' have ye thravelled far?"

“All the way from America," says I.

An' she knows somethin' in me voice

An' shrieks an' topples over in a dead faint and lies sick for
ten days.

An' then they come in be the scores an' the hundreds to be

lookin' at me.

Cousins and kin I'd never known of and the children of old

friends that I'd never heard was married.

And I grew older and older there

And I felt the minutes come on me like years.

It saddens me to go back there.

I'd rather go back to Honolula,

The place that takes fifteen years off the age of you, maybe

more.

It's hot in Honolula, yes it's hot there.

 2 5 0' Selected Poems

But it's not warm.

There's somethin' about it, I don't know what.

You feel seventeen an' the rist o' your life is gone entirely.
All that's wrong in your system goes out be the pores, all
that's good in the world comes in.
I want to go back to die in Honolula, for I want to die young.

They can say that a rolling stone gathers no moss but I've
gathered some where I want it

And I think no more of a thousand miles than a bird of a tree.

An' me brother now has lived in Chicago twenty-three years

And except for me sendin' him post-cards
The moss has grown over his eyes.
He gets dark

An' the closer you come to him the farther away he is.
 Uncollected Poems ’251

The Stone

Sorrow stands tall and firm.

Naked, alive, unsad.

The everlasting germ

Of waking girl and lad.

Let the great blind bell toll

Its seal upon the morrow.

Today will still unroll

Sadness away from sorrow

As angels rolled a stone

And the unburied man

Who had been left alone

Awoke, arose, began.

 2 5 2’ Selected Poems

Sculpture on a Beach

Supine she lies with form complete

Of sand rounded from head to feet

And with a crevice seen by the crowd
Some in secret, some out loud.

And supine he, beside his mate.

Is moulded as no celibate.

Fellows nod and nudge and neigh

At what a wave shall wash away.

But no high tide will countermand

These images of constant sand:
Day after day a busy brood

Of sculptors moulds a multitude.

 Uncollected Poems * 2 5 3

The Web

What a pother of words we weave around

The simple need of being.
The simple ear for hearing sound.

The simple eye for seeing.

The ready mouth for tasting food.
The ready arm for love.

Which are almost all the bad or good

We need make mention of.

Except the trespass of the skies

Upon these lesser things

When we have need of more than eyes

Or of imaginings.

And that is when God takes his stand

Close upon reason's ebb

And makes with unimagined hand

A devastating web.
 2 5 4’ Selected Poems

Robert Frost
(1874-1963)

They would have stayed there for farewell

Until the train pulled out

But he waved them away and they could tell

He knew what he was about.

The train held only strangers, yes.

But he was a stranger too—

When you say goodbye to friends who bless

They leave you only you.

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