Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Ship’s Prow

Andrea Hofer Proudfoot

STANDING out, as from the confusion

Of dark masses ebbing and flowing

In surging wastes on all sides,

I saw the signal figure of a man,

Standing as though

On the moving forepoint of a ship—

A sea-going dragon-like monster ship.

Always I saw this man figure:

The ship’s prow was always in the picture;

And the sea, blue and continent,

Swept its silhouette beyond and around him.

But I had my soul’s knapsack strapped on,

Ready for the brave climb

After the far-flung bloomy mass

That fringes every woman’s sky-line.

And so I passed by the ship’s prow

And its picture of power.

O wooing Wonder of Life,

You cast your spell upon me!

You swept over me with shivers of frightened delight,

And made every leaf and crevice

Turn into a fairy hiding-place and brownie fane;

You egged the trees to follow me,

And brought them to a standstill

When I turned and caught them;

You taught the bluffs and hills

To kneel and offer their breasts to me;

With spiring cyclones and flooding gullies

You whirled me out into the world-floods.

O wooing Wonder of Life!

Your spirit of adventure pushed me;

You rushed me with hot deeds

For humanity—that workshop where ever must

Young talent whittle itself into shape;

Where the only hindrance is the crawling hour of youth.

And oh, how I chafed like the steed of some boy Galahad,

Begging to be unleashed from the plow of Time.

But somehow I escaped you,

O wooing Wonder of Life,

For another wonder wooed me!

Always this massive figure of the man indeed,

Face outward toward the limitless,

Stood ready for the subduing leap into the blue,

Filling me with terror lest he take it.

One restless morning

Something made contact,

And the voiceless one broke into quiet words.

As though those words had called

To my heart’s Sesame,

A great wall lifted,

And I found myself behind it, shaking,

Like a lily that had nestled unwisely

A roistering bee. And then something was stolen,

Something that had swapped my honey for a bitter dew.

What had toppled?

What was broken?

What had been committed?—what wrong done

To the trust and charge that had been softly

Handed through the gate

When birth had kept its tryst with me?

There came a rust-gray swamp before me,

Where once the drowsy blueness of the day

Had lured me out into the shimmering mirage

That I had called my work.

Moonlights of promise and longing

Which had been opal before,

Turned to bronze-brown glare.

The warm rose of the cloud-edges

Of my daily doings shone off into a slimy silver void.

Haloes that had beckoned me to wear them

Fell into shivered icicles.

Roses I had reached for now were rags and sticks.

Songs that had called me to dizzy heights

Now tripped off in silly jingles.

Stories that had hungered me with plot-power died.

Garments that had helped me feel beauty and freedom

Fell as tatters, and I felt cold and naked….

For I saw my primal, self-swung orbit

Against the zenith of the myriad;

My solitary life against the solitary figure

On the ship’s prow,

With the whole sea to rest its shadow.

Then the shadow of the sea flooded from my eyes,

And, as though the whole of my future

Had gulped me in, I stood there, completed yet rebelling,

Lost in a boundless forest main.

For I realized his as a life that had the contour

Of the spreading prodigal English oak;

With a soul aspiring as the top-shoot

Of a Norwegian fir, tapping the sky for space;

With a fantasy complex as the cypresses of Lebanon;

With a power to structure itself,

Even as Lebanon’s blossomed into building

For a temple-ridden race, which bore David

In its lute-slumbering womb….

His ear and throat made the memory

Long for an hour to prowl

In the nightingale-haunted terraces

Of the Black Forest pines,

Where mix the scents of wine and resin.

And again like Lebanon’s planks

There was laid in him an everlasting sounding-board

Against which the mighty resonance

Of a choral heart might throw itself in song,

And sing as the Jehovah-mad Jew has sung to the ages—

A song which ever after mocked the little gods,

As his melody since has mocked my littleness….

His stern resolves were as the unfaltering spheres

That endless—forward, backward—thread their silver paths

Without a time-keeper or a score-line;

Since some paternal force, inhibiting,

Has seeded them with constancy.

A delirium of historic deeds ever battled

To break into the world through him;

Yet through the canyon of his fretless life

There threaded such a line of fine refreshment

That the merest weed and tiniest bird

Might lave itself—as I had learned to lave myself,

To lose my littleness.

And his untrammelled instinct

Swung him to the plumb of daily life.

Honor, sobriety and self-control

Were swallowed up in a rage of instinctive rightness

That held him ever at the ship’s prow,

Staying his acts as a relentless tide.

And the same tide caught me

And swayed my life,

And—fie for shame!—found me too small

Or else it might have made a poet of me.