The glory that the prairie angels sing At night when sons of Life and Love are born Born but to struggle, squalid and alone, Broken and wandering in their early years. When will they start our vulgar blood athrill We must have many Lincoln-hearted men- And they must do their work, and come and go In many of the Western states the transition from one stage of civilization to the next succeeding stage has been phenomenally rapid. Centuries have been compressed into decades, and decades into a day. The frontiersman-scout, hunter, miner, or cowboy-is speedily followed by the farmer, who fences in the open prairie, builds a home, and raises cotton or wheat. The farmer, in turn, is often driven further west by the city, with its shops, factories, and railways. In this last stage the West has become a second East. Although few Easterners have suspected it, Texas has almost wholly lost her cowboys and the picturesque life of the cattle ranch. Not only that, for after being for two or more decades a leading agricultural state, Texas has already entered the stage of industrial development. What not a few old-time Texans feel as they contrast the picturesque Texas which is gone with the hustling commercialistic Texas which is at hand, Texans have left to an Eastern poet, Amy Lowell, to tell. I went a-riding, a-riding, TEXAS And the plain went a-sliding, a-sliding Fields of cotton, and fields of wheat, And the long plain breeze, The prairie breeze, Blows across from swell to swell With a ginger smell. Just ahead, where the road curves round, A long-eared rabbit makes a bound Into a wheat-field, into a cotton-field, His track glitters after him and goes still again Over to the left of my bridle-rein. But over to the right is a glare-glare-glare Of sharp glass windows. A narrow square of brick jerks thickly up above the cotton plants, A raucous mercantile thing flaring the sun from thirty-six windows, Brazenly declaring itself to the lovely fields. Tram-cars run like worms about the feet of this thing, The coffins of cotton-bales feed it, The threshed wheat is its golden blood. But here it has no feet, It has only the steep ironic grin of its thirty-six windows, Only its basilisk eyes counting the fields, Doing sums of how many buildings to a city, all day and all night. Once they went a-riding, a-riding, Over the great long plain. Cowboys singing to their dogey steers, Cowboys perched on forty-dollar saddles, “Hold up, paint horse, herd the little dogies. Bones of dead steers, Bones of cowboys, Under the wheat, maybe. The sky-scraper sings another way, A tune of steel, of wheels, of gold. And the ginger breeze blows, blows all day And the Texas sky whirls down, whirls down, Taking long looks at the fussy town. An old sky and a long plain Beyond, beyond, my bridle-rein. Amy Lowell (1874-) In reality, something of the traditional hostility of the poets to the cities will continue while selfish men live in them and run them for their own selfish ends. The old attitude re-appears with a new emphasis in the following poem in prose by Lord Dunsany, who looks upon the great city as a violent distortion of the purpose of nature. THE PRAYER OF THE FLOWERS * It was the voice of the flowers on the West wind, the lovable, the old, the lazy West wind, blowing ceaselessly, blowing sleepily, going Greecewards. "The Woods have gone away, they have fallen and left us; men love us no longer, we are lonely by moonlight. Great engines rush over the beautiful fields, their ways lie hard and terrible up and down the land. "The cancrous cities spread over the grass, they clatter in their lairs continually, they glitter about us blemishing the night. "The Woods are gone, O Pan, the woods, the woods. And thou art far, O Pan, and far away." I was standing by night between two railway embankments on the edge of a Midland city. On one of them I saw the trains go by, once in every two minutes, and on the other, the trains went by twice in every five. Quite close were the glaring factories, and the sky above them wore the fearful look that it wears in dreams of fever. The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing city, and thence I heard them sending up their cry. And then I heard, beating musically up wind, the voice of Pan reproving them from Arcady-"Be patient a little, these things are not for long." * Lord Dunsany (1878-) Copyrighted by Little, Brown and Company. CHAPTER XII THE CONTEMPORARY POETS Lo, with the ancient Passion of song. Ever Love fans it, Ever Life feeds it; Time cannot age it, Death cannot slay. William Watson: "England my Mother" WE are living in a poetic age. It is a little difficult to grasp this fact until one recalls the status of poetry some twenty years ago. In 1900 the public read little beside fiction; the short story was in its heyday. A volume of verse was something to be printed at the author's expense and read only by the poet's friends. The few poems that were published were, in the main, thin and bookish reechoings of older poets. Poetry had nearly lost its contact with life. Only those writers who cultivated light verse and the French forms were making any real advance. In England twenty years ago there was no younger poet of first importance except Kipling. In America the older New England poets were all dead, and |