Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed. (1869–1948). The Little Book of Modern Verse. 1917.
John G. Neihardt
The Poets Town
And fields where cattle graze,
A prosy little village,
You drowse away the days.
Clings round you as you doze;
One living lyric story
Makes music of your prose.
The feet of song have trod;
And flashed—Oh, once forever!—
The singing Flame of God.
With mystic eyes he saw
The sowers planting vision,
The reapers gleaning awe.
He saw them with his heart,
Priests of the Ultimate Beauty,
Feeding the flame of art.
Pulsed in the things he saw;
The wheat through its virile acres
Billowed the Song of Law.
Flung from the writing plow,
The dactyl phrase of the green-rowed maize
Measured the music of Now.
Often the lonesome boy
Saw in the farmers’ wagons
The chariots hurled at Troy.
They rumbled up and down,
Laden with princely plunder,
Loot of the tragic Town.
Smiled on the boy at play,
Sword-storms, giddy with slaughter,
Swept back the ancient day!
Far and hoarse were the cries;
And Oh, through the din and the riot,
The music of Helen’s eyes!
He slunk away from the play,
For the Past and the vast To-morrow
Were wedded in his To-day.
An idle and worthless lad,
Least in a prosy village,
And prince in Allahabad;
Munching a daily crust;
Haunter of dream-built chapels,
Worshipping in the dust;
Less to the town he grew,
And more to the God of Beauty
Than even the grocer knew!
But what could the dreamer sell?
Echoes of cloudy battle?
Music from heaven and hell?
Argosied over the sea?
Tapestry woven of wonder,
And myrrh from Araby?
Looter of Samarcand!
Gold is heavy and yellow,
And value is weighed in the hand!
The Kings in the Realm of the Boy,
Song-built bastions crumbled,
Ash-heaps smothering Troy;
Quaffing a brackish cup,
With all of his chariots, wagons—
He never could quite grow up.
He never could comprehend:
Why should the borrowers borrow?
Why should the lenders lend?
But took for its needs—and gave.
Never an oak tree sorrowed;
Debt was the mark of the slave.
Sucked from the paps of the Earth,
And the hills that were lean it fleshed with green—
Oh, what is a lesson worth?
And the sellers squint at the scales;
And price was the stake of the martyr,
And cost was the lock of the jails.
Rendering worth for worth;
Ragweeds gladden the wayside,
Biting the dugs of the Earth;
Feed from the dewy gem:
But dreamers are fed by the living and dead—
And what is the gift from them?
Dreams of its mission and doom:
Only to hasten the Comer—
Martyrdom unto the Bloom.
Plucks when the fruit is ripe,
Scorning the mass and letting it pass,
Keen for the cryptic type.
Troubled the lands and seas,
Plotted and fought and suffered and wrought—
Building a Sophocles!
Stands for the vassal’s groan;
The harlot’s strife and the faith of the wife
Blend in a graven stone.
The hope of the million lives;
Always the Fact shall perish
And only the Truth survives.
Shaping the perfect rose:
And the poet’s song shall live for the long,
Dumb, aching years of prose.
He was the fool of the town,
Hiding the ache of the tragic
Under the grin of the clown.
To fit in the sordid plan;
Doomed to be poet forever,
He longed to be only a man;
Back with the reeds of the stream;
Deaf to the Vision calling,
And dead to the lash of the Dream.
Stir in the common sod;
The corn through its awful acres
Trembled and thrilled with God!
Lured by a man’s desire,
For a triune Bride walked close at his side—
Dew and Dust and Fire!
Shouting his gee and haw;
For a something dim kept pace with him,
And ever the poet saw;
Made of his flesh a flute,
To echo the tune of a whirlwind rune
Unto the million mute.
The womb and the tomb of Life,
With Fire and Air for brothers
And a clinging Dream for a wife;
Strove with its mortal mesh,
And the lean flame grew till it fretted through
The last thin links of flesh.
He fled to mingle again
With the dred Orestean thunder,
The Lear of the driven rain!
Doubles its lonesome track.
Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,
Æschylus wanders back.
The near grows out of the far;
And Homer shall sing once more in a swing
Of the austere Polar Star.
With the lean blue flame in his breast?
And who was your clown for a day, O Town,
The strange, unbidden guest?
And fields where cattle graze;
A prosy little village,
You drowse away the days.
Clings round you as you doze;
One living, lyric story
Makes music of your prose!