Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Four Japanese Paintings

Arthur Davison Ficke

A PINE-BRANCH stretches out

Across the silence …

… Grey silence, untroubled

Until this living thing

Smote it into music….

The void is restless now.

Silence shall be no more.

Greyness shall be no more,

Nor any peace.

For a singing curve and color

Have entered the vast dwelling—

A life, singing

Of the suns and the snows.

Now the old gods tremble

In their timeless halls;

Now the far halls beyond Orion

Are shaken with music.

For this chord, living,

This soul that knows not peace—

This dream-dust—stretches out

Across the silence.

Red pine-trunks!

Immutable pines!

Pillars upright under the grey sky!

Pillars upright over the chasmed earth!—

Upon these snow-heights

Your downward sloping branches

Point toward the human world

Remote and troubled.

But here on the ultimate ramparts

Of the winter hills,

Your huge columns

Rise toward bleak heaven—

Like an indomitable procession

Of warriors, dark, green-crested,

To whom the snows

Are only wine and trumpets,

To whom the winds

Are only battle.

Around islands of jade and malachite

And lapis-lazuli and jasper,

Under golden clouds,

Struggle the grey-gold waves.

The waves are advancing,

Swirling, eddying; the pale waves

Are leaping into foam, and retreating—

And straining again until they seem not waves

But gigantic crawling hands.

The waves clutch at the clouds,

The near and golden clouds;

They rise in spires over the clouds,

And over the pine-branch set against the clouds.

And around the islands,

Jasper and jade,

Their rhythms circle and sweep and re-echo

With hollow and foam-crest,

Infinitely interlacing their orbits and cycles

That join and unravel, and battle and answer,

From tumult to tumult, from music to music,

Crest to trough, foam-height to hollow,

Peace drowning passion, and passion

Leaping from peace.

Two hills meet—

Two dark green hills.

About their shoulders

Silver mists cling.

Slowly the gigantic

Face of the Buddha

In massive presence

Looks over the hills.

Tranquil his brow, unsmiling his lips;

Filling the whole sky with his haloes of glory,

He broods in a dream of gold.

Measureless peace sleeps on his golden forehead;

Measureless compassion

Weighs on his eyes.

Yet as I look

It seems that his terrible hidden hands

Even now are stirring

To rend apart the hills—

To divide the corrupt and cloven earth

For the triumphal entry of his burning form.