Songs for a Little House | Page 6

and His pew,
My God of Unbent Knees!
THE NEW ALTMAN BUILDING
Madison Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street
(January, 1914)
Fled is the glamour, fled the royal dream,
Fled is the joy. They work
no more by night
Deep in that cave of dazzling amber light,
In
pools of darkness, under plumes of steam.
Gone are the laughing
drills that sting and hiss
Deep in the ribs of the metropolis.
Gone are the torches and the great red cranes
That swung their arms
with such resistless might;
Gone are the flags and drums of that great

fight,
No more they swink with rocks and autumn rains;
And only
girders, rising tier on tier,
Give hint of all the struggle that was here.
We too, mad zealots of the hardest craft,
Striving to build a
word-house fair and tall,
Have wept to see our dear erections fall;

Have wept--then flung away our tools, and laughed.
Fled is the dream,
but working year by year
We see our buildings rising, tier on tier.
THE MADONNA OF THE CURB
On the curb of a city pavement,
By the ash and garbage cans,
In the
stench and rolling thunder
Of motor trucks and vans,
There sits my
little lady,
With brave but troubled eyes,
And in her arms a baby

That cries and cries and cries.
She cannot be more than seven;
But years go fast in the slums,
And
hard on the pains of winter
The pitiless summer comes.
The wail of
sickly children
She knows; she understands
The pangs of puny
bodies,
The clutch of small hot hands.
In the deadly blaze of August,
That turns men faint and mad,
She
quiets the peevish urchins
By telling a dream she had--
A heaven
with marble counters,
And ice, and a singing fan;
And a God in
white, so friendly,
Just like the drug-store man.
Her ragged dress is dearer
Than the perfect robe of a queen!
Poor
little lass, who knows not
The blessing of being clean.
And when
you are giving millions
To Belgian, Pole and Serb,
Remember my
pitiful lady--
Madonna of the Curb!
MY PIPE
My pipe is old
And caked with soot;
My wife remarks:

"How can
you put
That horrid relic,
So unclean,
Inside your mouth?
The
nicotine
Is strong enough
To stupefy
A Swedish plumber."
I

reply:
"This is the kind
Of pipe I like:
I fill it full
Of Happy Strike,
Or
Barking Cat
Or Cabman's Puff,
Or Brooklyn Bridge
(That potent
stuff)
Or Chaste Embraces,
Knacker's Twist,
Old Honeycomb

Or Niggerfist.
I clamp my teeth
Upon its stem--
It is my bliss,
My diadem.

Whatever Fate
May do to me,
This is my favourite
B
B B.
For
this dear pipe
You feign to scorn
I smoked the night
The boy was
born."
TO A GRANDMOTHER
At six o'clock in the evening,
The time for lullabies,
My son lay on
my mother's lap
With sleepy, sleepy eyes!
(_O drowsy little manny
boy,
With sleepy, sleepy eyes!_)
I heard her sing, and rock him,
And the creak of the swaying chair,

And the old dear cadence of the words
Came softly down the stair.
And all the years had vanished,
All folly, greed, and stain--
The old,
old song, the creaking chair,
The dearest arms again!
(_O lucky
little manny boy,
To feel those arms again!_)
A HANDFUL OF SONNETS
I
I have no hope to make you live in rhyme
Or with your beauty to
enrich the years--
Enough for me this now, this present time;
The
greater claim for greater sonneteers.

But O how covetous I am of
NOW--
Dear human minutes, marred by human pains--
I want to
know your lips, your cheek, your brow,
And all the miracles your
heart contains.
I wish to study all your changing face,
Your eyes,
divinely hurt with tenderness;
I hope to win your dear unstinted grace


For these blunt rhymes and what they would express.
Then may
you say, when others better prove:--
"_Theirs for their style I'll read,
his for his love._"
II
When all my trivial rhymes are blotted out,
Vanished our days, so
precious and so few,
If some should wonder what we were about

And what the little happenings we knew:
I wish that they might know
how, night by night,
My pencil, heavy in the sleepy hours,
Sought
vainly for some gracious way to write
How much this love is ours,
and only ours.
How many evenings, as you drowsed to sleep,
I read
to you by tawny candle-glow,
And watched you down the valley dim
and deep
Where poppies and the April flowers grow.
Then knelt
beside your pillow with a prayer,
And loved the breath of pansies in
your hair.
PEDOMETER
My thoughts beat out in sonnets while I walk,
And every evening on
the homeward street
I find the rhythm of my marching feet
Throbs
into verses (though the rhyme may balk.)
I think the sonneteers were
walking men:
The form is dour and rigid, like a clamp,
But with the
swing of legs the tramp, tramp, tramp
Of syllables begins to thud, and
then--
Lo! while you seek a rhyme for _hook_ or _crook_
Vanished
your shabby coat, and you are kith
To all great
walk-and-singers--Meredith,
And Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats,
and Rupert Brooke!
Free verse is poor for walking, but a sonnet--
O
marvellous to stride and brood upon it!
ARS DURA
How many evenings, walking soberly
Along our street all dappled
with rich sun,
I please myself with words, and happily
Time rhymes
to footfalls, planning how they run;
And yet, when