The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 26

What golden galleons sailed into the sunset Not to come home unto eternity: What souls went outward hopeful of returning, This time and tide might well call back across the sea.

Did we not dream so while old Wests were burning?

Could you forget such once-dear things--and me?

From the dimmed sky and long grey waste of waters, Lo, one lone sail on all the lonely sea A moment blooms to whiteness like a lily, As sudden fades, is gone, yet half-seems still to be; And you,--though that last time so strange and stilly,-- Though you are dead, will you not come to me?

Lee Wilson Dodd, at present in service in France, was graduated in 1899, and for some years was engaged in the practice of the law. This occupation he abandoned for literature in 1907. He is the author of several successful plays, and has published two volumes of verse, _The Modern Alchemist_ (1906) and _The Middle Miles_ (1915).

His growth in the intervening years will be apparent to any one who compares the two books; there is in his best work a combination of fancy and humour. He loves to write about New England gardens and discovers beauty by the very simple process of opening his eyes at home. The following poem is characteristically sincere:

TO A NEO-PAGAN

Your praise of Nero leaves me cold: Poems of porphyry and of gold, Palatial poems, chill my heart.

I gaze--I wonder--I depart.

Not to Byzantium would I roam In quest of beauty, nor Babylon; Nor do I seek Sahara's sun To blind me to the hills of home.

Here am I native; here the skies Burn not, the sea I know is grey; Wanly the winter sunset dies.

Wanly comes day.

Yet on these hills and near this sea Beauty has lifted eyes to me, Unl.u.s.tful eyes, clear eyes and kind; While a clear voice chanted-- _"They who find "Me not beside their doorsteps, know "Me never, know me never, though "Seeking, seeking me, high and low, "Forth on the far four winds they go!"

Therefore your basalt, jade, and gems, Your Saracenic silver, your Nilotic G.o.ds, your diadems To bind the brows of Queens, impure, Perfidious, pa.s.sionate, perfumed--these Your petted, pagan stage-properties, Seem but as toys of trifling worth.

For I have marked the naked earth Beside my doorstep yield to the print Of a long light foot, and flash with the glint Of crocus-gold-- Crocus-gold!

Crocus-gold no mill may mint Save the Mill of G.o.d-- The Mill of G.o.d!

The Mill of G.o.d with His angels in't!

Other Yale poets are W. B. Arvine, 1903, whose book _Hang Up Philosophy_ (1911), particularly excels in the interpretation of natural scenery; Frederick M. Clapp, 1901, whose volume _On the Overland_ (since republished in America) was in process of printing in Bruges in 1914, when the Germans entered the old town, and smashed among other things, the St. Catherine Press. Just fifteen copies of Mr. Clapp's book had been struck off, of which I own one; Donald Jacobus, 1908, whose _Poems_ (1914) are richly meditative; James H. Wallis, 1906, who has joined the ranks of poets with _The Testament of William Windune_ and _Other Poems_ (1917); Leonard Bacon, 1909, who modestly called his book, published in the year of his graduation, _The Scrannel Pipe_; Kenneth Band, 1914, who produced two volumes of original verse while an undergraduate; Archibald Mac Leish, 1915, whose _Tower of Ivory_, a collection of lyrics, appeared in 1917; Elliot Griffis, a student in the School of Music, who published in 1918 under an a.s.sumed name a volume called _Rain in May_; and I may close this roll-call by remarking that those who have seen his work have a staunch faith in the future of Stephen Vincent Benet. He is a younger brother of William, and is at present a Yale undergraduate. Mr. Benet was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-second of July, 1898. His home is at Augusta, Georgia. Before entering college, and when he was seventeen, he published his first volume of poems, _Five Men and Pompey_ (1915). This was followed in 1917 by another book, _The Drug Shop_. His best single production is the Cook prize poem, _The Hemp_.

APPENDIX

_I Have a Rendezvous with Death_

The remarkably impressive and beautiful poem by Alan Seeger which bears the above t.i.tle naturally attracted universal attention. I had supposed the idea originated with Stephen Crane, who, in his novel _The Red Badge of Courage_, Chapter IX, has the following paragraph:

At last they saw him stop and stand motionless. Hastening up, they perceived that his face wore an expression telling that he had at last found the place for which he had struggled. His spare figure was erect; his b.l.o.o.d.y hands were quietly at his side. He was waiting with patience for something that he had come to meet. He was at the rendezvous. They paused and stood, expectant.

But I am informed both by Professor F. N. Robinson of Harvard and by Mr. Norreys Jephson O'Conor that the probable source of the t.i.tle of the poem is Irish. Professor Robinson writes me, "The Irish poem that probably suggested to Seeger the t.i.tle of his _Rendezvous_ is the _Reicne Fothaid Canainne_ (Song of Fothad Canainne), published by Kuno Meyer in his _Fianaigecht_ (Dublin, 1910), pp. 1-21. Seeger read the piece at one of my Celtic Conferences, and was much impressed by it. He got from it only his t.i.tle and the fundamental figure of a _rendezvous_ with Death, the Irish poem being wholly different from his in general purport. Fothad Canainne makes a tryst with the wife of Ailill Flann, but is slain in battle by Ailill on the day before the night set for the meeting. Then the spirit of Fothad (or, according to one version, his severed head) sings the _reicne_ to the woman and declares (st. 3): 'It is blindness for one who makes a tryst to set aside the tryst with death.'"

Miss Amy Lowell, however, believes that Seeger got the idea from a French poet. Wherever he got it, I believe that he made it his own, for he used it supremely well, and it will always be a.s.sociated with him.

At Harvard, Alan Seeger took the small and special course in Irish, and showed enthusiasm for this branch of study. Wis.h.i.+ng to find out something about his undergraduate career, I wrote to a member of the Faculty, and received the following reply: "Many persons found him almost morbidly indifferent and unresponsive, and he seldom showed the full measure of his powers.... I grew to have a strong liking for him personally as well as a respect for his intellectual power. But I should never have expected him to show the robustness of either mind or body which we now know him to have possessed. He was frail and sickly in appearance, and seemed to have a temperament in keeping with his physique. It took a strong impulse to bring him out and disclose his real capacity."

There is no doubt that the war gave him this impulse, and that the poem _I Have a Rendezvous with Death_ must be cla.s.sed among the literature directly produced by the great struggle. After four years, I should put at the head of all the immense number of verses inspired by the war John Masefield's _August 1914_, Alan Seeger's _I Have a Rendezvous with Death_, and Rupert Brooke's _The Soldier_; and of all the poems written by men actually fighting, I should put Alan Seeger's first.

While reading these proofs, the news comes of the death of a promising young American poet, Joyce Kilmer, a sergeant in our army, who fell in France, August, 1918. He was born 6 December, 1866, was a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia, and had published a number of poems. His supreme sacrifice n.o.bly closed a life filled with beauty in word and deed.