The Chinese Nightingale | Page 5

lovers' ardent faces?Bending to one another,?Speaking each his part.?They infinitely echo?In the red cave of my heart.?`Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.'?They said to one another.?They spoke, I think, of perils past.?They spoke, I think, of peace at last.?One thing I remember:?Spring came on forever,?Spring came on forever,"?Said the Chinese nightingale.
Second Section?America Watching the War, August, 1914, to April, 1917
Where Is the Real Non-resistant?
(Matthew 5:38-48)
Who can surrender to Christ, dividing his best with the stranger, Giving to each what he asks, braving the uttermost danger?All for the enemy, MAN? Who can surrender till death?His words and his works, his house and his lands,?His eyes and his heart and his breath?
Who can surrender to Christ? Many have yearned toward it daily. Yet they surrender to passion, wildly or grimly or gaily;?Yet they surrender to pride, counting her precious and queenly; Yet they surrender to knowledge, preening their feathers serenely.
Who can surrender to Christ? Where is the man so transcendent, So heated with love of his kind, so filled with the spirit resplendent That all of the hours of his day his song is thrilling and tender, And all of his thoughts to our white cause of peace
Surrender, surrender, surrender?
Here's to the Mice!
(Written with the hope that the socialists might yet?dethrone Kaiser and Czar.)
Here's to the mice that scare the lions,?Creeping into their cages.?Here's to the fairy mice that bite?The elephants fat and wise:?Hidden in the hay-pile while the elephant thunder rages.?Here's to the scurrying, timid mice?Through whom the proud cause dies.
Here's to the seeming accident?When all is planned and working,?All the flywheels turning,?Not a vassal shirking.?Here's to the hidden tunneling thing?That brings the mountain's groans.?Here's to the midnight scamps that gnaw,?Gnawing away the thrones.
When Bryan Speaks
When Bryan speaks, the town's a hive.?From miles around, the autos drive.?The sparrow chirps. The rooster crows.?The place is kicking and alive.
When Bryan speaks, the bunting glows.?The raw procession onward flows.?The small dogs bark. The children laugh?A wind of springtime fancy blows.
When Bryan speaks, the wigwam shakes.?The corporation magnate quakes.?The pre-convention plot is smashed.?The valiant pleb full-armed awakes.
When Bryan speaks, the sky is ours,?The wheat, the forests, and the flowers.?And who is here to say us nay??Fled are the ancient tyrant powers.
When Bryan speaks, then I rejoice.?His is the strange composite voice?Of many million singing souls?Who make world-brotherhood their choice.
Written in Washington, D.C.
February, 1915.
To Jane Addams at the Hague
Two Poems, written on the Sinking of the Lusitania.?Appearing in the Chicago `Herald', May 11, 1915.
I. Speak Now for Peace
Lady of Light, and our best woman, and queen,?Stand now for peace, (though anger breaks your heart),?Though naught but smoke and flame and drowning is seen.
Lady of Light, speak, though you speak alone,?Though your voice may seem as a dove's in this howling flood, It is heard to-night by every senate and throne.
Though the widening battle of millions and millions of men?Threatens to-night to sweep the whole of the earth,?Back of the smoke is the promise of kindness again.
II. Tolstoi Is Plowing Yet
Tolstoi is plowing yet. When the smoke-clouds break,?High in the sky shines a field as wide as the world.?There he toils for the Kingdom of Heaven's sake.
Ah, he is taller than clouds of the little earth.?Only the congress of planets is over him,?And the arching path where new sweet stars have birth.
Wearing his peasant dress, his head bent low,?Tolstoi, that angel of Peace, is plowing yet;?Forward, across the field, his horses go.
The Tale of the Tiger Tree
A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver Henderson, ten years old.
The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in all ages. It shows how the mammoth forces may be either friends or enemies of the struggle for peace. It shows how the dream of peace is unconquerable and eternal.
I
Peace-of-the-Heart, my own for long,?Whose shining hair the May-winds fan,?Making it tangled as they can,?A mystery still, star-shining yet,?Through ancient ages known to me?And now once more reborn with me: --
This is the tale of the Tiger Tree?A hundred times the height of a man,?Lord of the race since the world began.
This is my city Springfield,?My home on the breast of the plain.?The state house towers to heaven,?By an arsenal gray as the rain . . .?And suddenly all is mist,?And I walk in a world apart,?In the forest-age when I first knelt down?At your feet, O Peace-of-the-Heart.
This is the wonder of twilight:?Three times as high as the dome?Tiger-striped trees