The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II

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The Dover Anthology of American Literature Volume II Page 62

by Bob Blaisdell


  SOURCE: Poetry (March 1914).

  Fog (1916)

  The fog comes

  on little cat feet.

  It sits looking

  over harbor and city

  on silent haunches

  and then moves on.

  SOURCE: Carl Sandburg. Chicago Poems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916.

  Window (1916)

  Night from a railroad car window

  Is a great, dark, soft thing

  Broken across with slashes of light.

  SOURCE: Carl Sandburg. Chicago Poems. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916.

  H.D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE)

  Under the pen-name H.D., Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote these Imagistic and classical Greek-inspired poems. Born in Pennsylvania, she spent most of her adult life in Europe.

  The Garden (1915)

  I.

  You are clear,

  O rose, cut in rock,

  hard as the descent of hail.

  I could scrape the colour

  from the petal,

  like spilt dye from a rock.

  If I could break you

  I could break a tree.

  If I could stir

  I could break a tree,

  I could break you.

  II.

  O wind,

  rend open the heat,

  cut apart the heat,

  rend it sideways.

  Fruit can not drop

  through this thick air:

  fruit can not fall into heat

  that presses up and blunts

  the points of pears

  and rounds the grapes.

  Cut the heat,

  plough through it,

  turning it on either side

  of your path.

  SOURCE: Poetry (March 1915).

  The Pool (1915)

  Are you alive?

  I touch you.

  You quiver like a sea-fish.

  I cover you with my net.

  What are you—banded one?

  SOURCE: Poetry (March 1915).

  Fragment XXXVI (1921)

  I know not what to do:

  My mind is divided.

  —Sappho

  I know not what to do—

  My mind is reft.

  Is song’s gift best?

  Is love’s gift loveliest?

  I know not what to do,

  Now sleep has pressed

  Weight on your eyelids.

  Shall I break your rest,

  Devouring, eager?

  Is love’s gift best?—

  Nay, song’s the loveliest.

  Yet, were you lost,

  What rapture could I take from song?—

  What song were left?

  I know not what to do:

  To turn and slake

  The rage that burns,

  With my breath burn

  And trouble your cool breath—

  So shall I turn and take

  Snow in my arms,

  (Is love’s gift best?)

  Yet flake on flake

  Of snow were comfortless,

  Did you lie wondering,

  Wakened yet unawake.

  Shall I turn and take

  Comfortless snow within my arms,

  Press lips to lips that answer not,

  Press lips to flesh

  That shudders not nor breaks?

  Is love’s gift best?—

  Shall I turn and slake

  All the wild longing?

  Oh, I am eager for you!

  As the Pleiads shake

  White light in whiter water,

  So shall I take you?

  My mind is quite divided;

  My mind hesitates,

  So perfect matched

  I know not what to do.

  Each strives with each:

  As two white wrestlers,

  Standing for a match,

  Ready to turn and clutch,

  Yet never shake

  Muscle or nerve or tendon;

  So my mind waits

  To grapple with my mind—

  Yet I am quiet,

  I would seem at rest.

  I know not what to do.

  Strain upon strain,

  Sound surging upon sound,

  Makes my brain blind;

  As a wave line may wait to fall,

  Yet waiting for its falling

  Still the wind may take,

  From off its crest,

  White flake on flake of foam,

  That rises

  Seeming to dart and pulse

  And rend the light,

  So my mind hesitates

  Above the passion

  Quivering yet to break,

  So my mind hesitates above my mind

  Listening to song’s delight.

  I know not what to do.

  Will the sound break,

  Rending the night

  With rift on rift of rose

  And scattered light?

  Will the sound break at last

  As the wave hesitant,

  Or will the whole night pass

  And I lie listening awake?

  SOURCE: Poetry (October 1921).

  Song (1921)

  You are as gold

  As the half-ripe grain

  That merges to gold again,

  As white as the white rain

  That beats through

  The half-opened flowers

  Of the great flower tufts

  Thick on the black limbs

  Of an Illyrian apple bough.

  Can honey distil such fragrance

  As your bright hair?—

  For your face is as fair as rain,

  Yet as rain that lies clear

  On white honey-comb

  Lends radiance to the white wax,

  So your hair on your brow

  Casts light for a shadow.

  SOURCE: Poetry (October 1921).

  At Baia (1921)

  I should have thought

  In a dream you would have brought

  Some lovely perilous thing:

  Orchids piled in a great sheath,

  As who would say, in a dream,

  “I send you this,

  Who left the blue veins

  Of your throat unkissed.”

  Why was it that your hands,

  That never took mine—

  Your hands that I could see

  Drift over the orchid heads

  So carefully;

  Your hands, so fragile, sure to lift

  So gently, the fragile flower stuff—

  Ah, ah, how was it

  You never sent, in a dream,

  The very form, the very scent,

  Not heavy, not sensuous,

  But perilous—perilous!—

  Of orchids, piled in a great sheath,

  And folded underneath on a bright scroll,

  Some word:

  Flower sent to flower;

  For white hands the lesser white,

  Less lovely, of flower leaf.

  Or,

  Lover to lover—no kiss,

  No touch, but forever and ever this!

  SOURCE: Poetry (October 1921).

  T. S. ELIOT

  The poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis and graduated from Harvard. A dozen years after he began working in London, first as a bank clerk, then, more fittingly, as an editor, he became a British citizen. His friend and mentor (for a time), Ezra Pound, helped him edit and shape the most famous American poem of the twentieth century, “The Waste Land.”

  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

  S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse

  A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,

  Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.

  Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo

  Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,

  Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.1

  L
et us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table;

  Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

  The muttering retreats

  Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

  And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

  Streets that follow like a tedious argument

  Of insidious intent

  To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

  Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

  Let us go and make our visit.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

  The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

  Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

  Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

  Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

  Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

  And seeing that it was a soft October night,

  Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

  And indeed there will be time

  For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

  Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

  There will be time, there will be time

  To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

  There will be time to murder and create,

  And time for all the works and days of hands

  That lift and drop a question on your plate;

  Time for you and time for me,

  And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

  And for a hundred visions and revisions,

  Before the taking of a toast and tea.

  In the room the women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.

  And indeed there will be time

  To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

  Time to turn back and descend the stair,

  With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

  (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

  My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

  My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

  (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

  Do I dare

  Disturb the universe?

  In a minute there is time

  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

  For I have known them all already, known them all:

  Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

  I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

  I know the voices dying with a dying fall

  Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

  And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

  The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

  And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

  When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

  Then how should I begin

  To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

  And how should I presume?

  And I have known the arms already, known them all—

  Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

  (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

  Is it perfume from a dress

  That makes me so digress?

  Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

  And should I then presume?

  And how should I begin?

  * * * * *

  Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

  And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

  Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

  I should have been a pair of ragged claws

  Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

  * * * * *

  And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

  Smoothed by long fingers,

  Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,

  Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

  Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

  Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

  But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

  Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

  I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

  I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

  And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

  And in short, I was afraid.

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

  Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

  Would it have been worth while,

  To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

  To have squeezed the universe into a ball

  To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

  To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

  If one, settling a pillow by her head,

  Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

  That is not it, at all.”

  And would it have been worth it, after all,

  Would it have been worth while,

  After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

  After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—

  And this, and so much more?—

  It is impossible to say just what I mean!

  But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

  Would it have been worth while

  If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

  And turning toward the window, should say:

  “That is not it at all,

  That is not what I meant, at all.”

  * * * * *

  No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

  Am an attendant lord, one that will do

  To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

  Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

  Deferential, glad to be of use,

  Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

  Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

  At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

  Almost, at times, the Fool.

  I grow old . . . I grow old . . .

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

  I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

  I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

  I do not think that they will sing to me.

  I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

  Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

  When the wind blows the water white and black.

  We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

  By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

  Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

  SOURCE: T. S. Eliot. Prufrock and Other Observations. London: The Egoist Ltd., 1917. [First published: Poetry, June 1915.]

  The Waste Land (1922)

  “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: respondebat illa: .”

  For Ezra Pound

  il miglior fabbro

  I. The Burial of the Dead

  April is the cruellest month, breeding

  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

  Memory and desire, stirring

  Dull roots with spring rain.

  Winter kept us warm, covering

  Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

  A little life with dried tubers.

>   Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

  With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

  And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

  And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

  Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

  And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

  My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

  And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

  Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

  There is shadow under this red rock,

  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

  And I will show you something different from either

  Your shadow at morning striding behind you

  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  Frisch weht der Wind

  Der Heimat zu

  Mein Irisch Kind,

  Wo weilest du?

  “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

  “They called me the hyacinth girl.”

  —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

  Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

  Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

  Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

  Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

  Oed’ und leer das Meer.

  Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

  Had a bad cold, nevertheless

  Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

  With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

  Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

  (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

  Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

  The lady of situations.

  Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

  And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

  Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

  Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

  The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

  I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

  Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

 

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