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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Baker Brownell

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

En Masse

Baker Brownell

YOU too, America, have seen the hugeness of days

Break with unguessed being out of the sullen past;

To you the massive hour has called,

Halting you amid random progress,

Giving revelation, blasting, huge, of its being.

Ungainly grandeur rises from your soil,

Doom light stands above man’s dank shadow.

Above wrangle, above hypocrisy,

Light lifts its being, America,

Hugely above you.

……..

Terrible fluidities lurch through you, America.

Blind, slathering, fluent, the liquid of passion

Lifts you upon dark urgencies of being.

Tides move with terrible, unknowing will;

Grim tides come from the sea

Lifting all upon the breast of being, holding all

In the cruelty of oneness. The flood,

The flood of being, the surge

Of mobbed thought! The ebb, America,

The ebb again!

……..

The skin of time bursts with thick noises,

Formless, spilling in huge, helpless flux.

Gorged moments open with sodden split;

The clog and glut build shapeless things.

Time lolls in unexpected disgorgement—

Release, heavy war, loosed inhibitions; the sullen flux

Begins. All is overwhelming, limp, massive.

Where are the smooth Latin hours,

Neat with emptiness, indifferent optimism?

How has time debouched on unready men

These guttural, dizzy mists,

This massive slime of being?

……..

Fulness lies across these lives

In savage, self-created burden. Terrors

Raise themselves hugely from the soul

Like the massive water of breakers.

The inhuman, passionate quest rolls

Monstrously across placid lives, building

Immensity in staggered, foaming heaps.

Whence the blind utterness of these aggregations,

America? Who validates this load—

Congested, heaving experience, discreet things, poured

In immense preoccupation into the soul?

Whence the massive utterness of circumstance?

After Word

Where spaceless night rests upon the water

Can you find being:

There a star wounds the liquid darkness

With still, white stab;

A ripple lifts its soft load of light,

And returns to the fluid soul

Of the night water;

Light sinks pervasively into the textures of darkness,

Deep into the dusk of water;

The being of light sifts into all its spaces;

Light, ineffably its meaning

Fumes in fragrant faintness

Amid drenching visions.