Anthology of Massachusetts Poets | Page 5

blue
billowy breast of hope,
Surging and sweeping,
laughing and leaping,

Tumbling its garments of foam upon the shore,
Rustling the sands
that know my step no more,
I should have found a valley, deep and
still,
To shelter me.
There flows the river, and it seems asleep
So far away,
Yet I
remember whip of wave and roar
Of wind that rose and smote against
the oar,
Smote and retreated,
Proud but defeated,
While I rejoiced
and rowed into the brine,
Drawing on wet and heavy -straining line

The great cod quivering from the deep
As counterplay.
What is the solace of these hills and vales
That rise and fall?
What
is there glorious in the greenwood glen,
Or twittering thrush or wing
of darting wren?
Give me the gusty,
Raucous and rusty
Call of the
sea gull in the echoing sky,
The wild shriek of the winds that cannot
die,
Give me the life that follows the bending sails,
Or none at all!
ERNEST BENSHIMOL
A BANQUET
ONE MEMORY FROM SOCRATES

AFTER the song the love, and after the love the play,
Flute girl and
pretty boy blowing
Bubbles of sparkling
Wine into darkling

Beards of a former austerity, stern even now, but
Fast growing

Foolish, with less of a stately
Reserve that held them sedately.
Oh
Zeus, what a sight! With the wine dripping off it,
The grin of an ass
on a bald-pated prophet.
After the feast the night, and after the night the day,
Fool and
philosopher stirring
With the day dawning,
Stretching and yawning,

While in each wine-throbbing, desolated brain is the
Wheeling and
whirring
Of thousands of bats, that the slaking
Of throats will not
hinder from aching,
No wine for the brow that is beating to bursting,

But water at morning is quench for the thirsting!
ERNEST BENSHIMOL
SONG
OUT of one heart the birds and I together,
Earth hushed in twilight,

Low through the live-oaks hung heavy with silver,
Gemmed with the
sky-light,
Under the great wet star
Shaking with light, we jar

Lute-voiced the silence with intervaled music.
While under the margined world the slow sun
lingers,
Flaming
earth's portal,
Over the lilac dusk spreads his great fingersEarth
is
immortal!
While the frail beauty dies.
Dream in the dreamer's eyes,

All the good gladness turns praise for the singers.
Hark, 'tis the breath of life! Hush! and I need it;
Northern, gigantic,-

Questing the silences, herding the sudden foam
Down the Atlantic;

Leaves from the autumn's store
Shrill at my desert door,
They
and I out of one heart that is grieving.
GEORGE CABOT LODGE

THE WORLDS
I SAW an idler on a summer day
Piping with Iris by a dancing brook;

And all his world was rife with Pleasures gay,
And languid Follies
smiled from every nook.
I saw an artist in a world of dreams,
His rainbow rising from his
radiant task,
To throw its magic prism beams
O'er Fancy's
changeful masque and countermasque.
I saw Toil--stooping underneath a world
Whereon his foster-brothers
lighter tread,
His skyward pinions ever closer furled
Before the
grim necessity of bread!
I saw a sinner working hard to be
Worthy his death-wage from the
mint of time;
I saw a sailor, unto whom the sea
Was hearth and
hope and love and weddingchime.
I saw a mother living in her child--
I saw a saint among his fellow
men--
Brave soldiery before my eyes defiled
And solemn-hearted
scholars--Sudden then
I cried: "The stars are no less neighborly
In their ethereal remoteness
swung,
Than these near human orbits wherein we
Live out our lives
and speak our chosen tongue!
"Love seek through all--less there be one
Least soul unlit within the
night--
And over all, the selfsame sun
Give each creation light!"
MARTHA GILBERT DICKINSON BIANCHI
THE RIOT
YOU may think my life is quiet.
I find it full of change,
An
ever-varied diet,
As piquant as 'tis strange.

Wild thoughts are always flying,
Like sparks across my brain,
Now
flashing out, now dying,
To kindle soon again.
Fine fancies set me thrilling,
And subtle monsters creep
Before my
sight unwilling:
They even haunt my sleep.
One broad, perpetual riot
Enfolds me night and day.
You think my
life is quiet?
You don't know what you say.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
HUNGER
I'VE been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a
saint,
Their bend of
weary knees and their contortions
long and faint,
And the endless
pricks of conscience, like a hundred
thousand pins,
A real perpetual
penance for imaginary sins.
I love to wander widely, but I understand a cell,
Where you tell and
tell your beads because you've
nothing else to tell,
Where the
crimson joy of flesh, with all its wild
fantastic tricks,
Is forgotten in
the blinding glory of the crucifix.
I cannot speak for others, but my inmost soul is
torn
With a battle
of desires making all my life forlorn.
There are moments when I
would untread the paths
that I have trod.
I'm a haunter of the devil,
but I hunger after God.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD
EXIT GOD
Of old our father's God was real,
Something they almost saw,

Which kept them to a stern ideal
And scourged them into awe.
They walked the narrow path of right
Most vigilantly well,
Because

they feared eternal night
And boiling depths of Hell.
Now Hell has wholly boiled away
And God become a shade.
There
is no place for him to stay
In all the world He made.
The followers of William James
Still let the