Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, ed. The Book of New York Verse. 1917.

New York Days

William Ellery Leonard

’TIS something for a poet’s lip—

Our memorable comradeship.

The Empire City of the isle

Threw down on us her awful smile.

“My fate be on you,” said the Voice;

“Aspire, and if you can, rejoice …”

We entered, through a portico,

By ample steps that flanged below,

A dome supreme and luminous,

But housing statues not for us;

And sullen made o’er marble tile

Dumb exit through the brazen stile:

The college of the liberal arts

Was not the college of our hearts—

We had some other ends to win …

We saw the iron ships come in

From Brooklyn Bridge, the civic towers

That loomed too large for earth of ours,

The pits between, the smoky pall,

The stony shadows vertical

Aslant up many a windowed wall …

I’ve read that in the Middle Age,

When Dante made his pilgrimage,

Each Tuscan baron, bound to feud,

Who housed in city walls imbued

With blood of Ghibelline and Guelf,

Built a high watch-tower for himself,

And travellers over Alps looked down

On many a grim imperial town

That rose in rugged silhouette

Of parapet by parapet

Without a spire, a tree, a home—

’Twas thus with Pisa, Florence, Rome.

But here it seemed some giant broods

Had raised the bulwarks of their feuds

And mastered Titan altitudes!

We watched on slopes of Morningside

Broad Hudson wrestling with the tide,

Or from the granite balustrades

The sunset o’er the Palisades,

Where glowed the Cosmos in the West,

Like lightning flashes made to rest

And lie an hour manifest …

We passed in moonlight down the malls

Beneath the dusky citadels;

We wound from curve to curve in cars

On lofty girders under stars;

We drank in music-halls, aflame

With lantern green and scarlet dame;

And held, where passion most was rife,

Our fevered talk of human life …

And through the snow, the wind, the gloom,

We journeyed to each other’s room,

In those lamp-lit aërial crypts,

Piled with our books and manuscripts—

So far above the flash and roar

We seemed encaved forevermore

Upon some cliff or mountain shore;

We read in bardic ecstasies

Catullus or Simonides,

Or chanted verses of our own

In slow sonorous monotone,

That sometimes clove so true and free,

To us ’twas immortality;

We shared the agony of tears

Pierced by the ignominious years,

And times there were when we were three,

But late it grows and where is he?

And I long since was inland driven

To climb the hills of God as given,

While you again are by those seas

With more of vision, power, peace.

We overcame. But ’twas the press

Of no ignoble restlessness—

Outside the law yet not outside,

By austere issues justified,

And justified, were all else vain,

By brotherhood of song and pain.