The Project Gutenberg eBook ofOpen WaterThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Open WaterAuthor: Arthur StringerRelease date: October 12, 2011 [eBook #37557]Most recently updated: January 8, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPEN WATER ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Open WaterAuthor: Arthur StringerRelease date: October 12, 2011 [eBook #37557]Most recently updated: January 8, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Al Haines
Title: Open Water
Author: Arthur Stringer
Author: Arthur Stringer
Release date: October 12, 2011 [eBook #37557]Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OPEN WATER ***
OPEN WATER
BY
ARTHUR STRINGER
AUTHOR OF "THE WOMAN IN THE RAIN," "IRISH POEMS," ETC.
NEW YORK—JOHN LANE COMPANYLONDON—JOHN LANE—THE BODLEY HEADTORONTO—BELL & COCKBURNMCMXIV
Copyright, 1914, byJOHN LANE COMPANY
Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co.New York, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
A ForewordMilkweedHome ThoughtsLifeSome Day, Oh Seeker of DreamsBlack HoursBefore RenewalHill-Top HoursLetters from HomeChainsThe DrumsAnæsthesiaA Summer NightSappho's TombThe Wild Swans PassAt Notre DameThe PilotDoorsSpring FloodsThe Turn of the YearIf I Love YouWhat Shall I Care?Hunter and HuntedApple BlossomsThe House of LifeUltimataThe Life on the TableYou Bid Me to SleepThe Last of SummerAt Charing CrossPrescienceThe Steel WorkersThe ChildrenThe NocturneThe Wild GeeseThe DayThe RevoltAtavismMarch TwilightThe EchoAutumnFacesThere Is Strength in the SoilLife-DrunkMy Heart Stood EmptyOne Night in the NorthwestDreamersThe QuestionThe Gift of HateThe DreamOne Room in My HeartThe MeaningThe VeilThe Man of DreamsApril on the RialtoThe SurrenderThe PassingProtestationsI Sat in the Sunlight
To even the casual reader of poetry who may chance to turn to the following pages it will be evident that the lyrics contained therein have been written without what is commonly known as end-rhyme. It may also be claimed by this reader that the lyrics before him are without rhythm. As such, it may at first seem that they mark an effort in revolt against two of the primary assets of modern versification.
All art, of course, has its ancestry. While it is the duty of poetry both to remember and to honour its inherited grandeurs, the paradoxical fact remains that even this most convention-ridden medium of emotional expression is a sort of warfare between the embattled soul of the artist, seeking articulation, and the immuring traditions with which time and the prosodian have surrounded him.
In painting and in music, as in sculpture and the drama, there has been a movement of late to achieve what may be called formal emancipation, a struggle to break away from the restraints and the technical obligations imposed upon the worker by his artistic predecessors. In one case this movement may be called Futurism, and in another it may be termed Romanticism, but the tendency is the same. The spirit of man is seen in rebellion against a form that has become too intricate or too fixed to allow him freedom of utterance.
Poetry alone, during the last century, seems to have remained stable, in the matter of structure. Few new forms have been invented, and with one or two rare exceptions success has been achieved through ingeniously elaborating on an already established formula and through meticulously re-echoing what has already been said. This has resulted, on the one hand, in a technical dexterity which often enough resembles the strained postures of acrobatism, and, on the other, in that constantly reiterated complaint as to the hollowness and aloofness of modern poetry. Yet this poetry is remote and insincere, not because the modern spirit is incapable of feeling, but because what the singer of to-day has felt has not been directly and openly expressed. His apparel has remained mediæval. He must still don mail to face Mausers, and wear chain-armour against machine-guns. He must scout through the shadowy hinterlands of consciousness in attire that may be historic, yet at the same time is distressingly conspicuous. And when he begins his assault on those favouring moments or inspirational moods which lurk in the deeper valleys and by-ways of sensibility, he must begin it as a marked man, pathetically resplendent in that rigid steel which is an anachronism and no longer an armour.
Rhyme, from the first, has been imposed upon him. His only escape from rhyme has been the larger utterance of blank verse. Yet the iambic pentameter of his native tongue, perfected in the sweeping sonority of the later Shakespearean tragedies and left even more intimidatingly austere in the organ-like roll of Milton, has been found by the later singer to be ill-fitted for the utterance of those more intimate moods and those subjective experiences which may be described as characteristically modern. Verse, in the nature of things, has become less epic and racial, and more and more lyric and personal. The poet, consequently, has been forced back into the narrower domain so formally and so rigidly fenced in by rhyme. And before touching on the limitations resulting from this incarceration, it may be worth while to venture a brief glance back over the history of what Milton himself denominated as "the jingling sounds of like endings" and Goldsmith characterized as "a vile monotony" and even Howells has spoken of as "the artificial trammels of verse."
It has been claimed that those early poets of Palestine who affected the custom of beginning a number of lines or stanzas with the same letter of the alphabet unconsciously prepared the way for that latter-day ornamental fringe known as end-rhyme. Others have claimed that this insistence of a consonance of terminals is a relique of the communal force of the chant, where the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet, or the twanging of bow-strings marked the period-ends of prehistoric recitative. The bow-string of course, later evolved into the musical instrument, and when poetry became a written as well as a spoken language the consonantal drone of rhyming end-words took the place of the discarded instrument which had served to mark a secondary and wider rhythm in the progress of impassioned recitative.
It must be admitted, however, even in the face of this ingenious pleading, that rhyme is a much more modern invention than it seems. That it is not rudimentary in the race is evidenced by the fact that many languages, such as the Celtic, the Teutonic, and the Scandinavian, are quite without it. The Greeks, even in their melic poetry, saw no need for it. The same may be said of the Romans, though with them it will occasionally be found that the semi-feet of the pentameter constitute what may be called accidental rhyme. Rhyming Latin verse, indeed, does not come into existence until the end of the fourth century, and it is not until the time of the Conquest that end-rhyme becomes in any way general in English song. Layman, in translating Wace'sLe Brut d'Angleterre, found the original work written in rhymed lines, and in following that early model produced what is probably the first rhymed poem written in England.
With the introduction of end-rhymes came the discovery that a decoration so formal could convert verse into something approaching the architectural. It gave design to the lyric. With this new definiteness of outline, of course, came a newer rigidity of medium. Form was acknowledged as the visible presentation of this particular art. Formal variations became a matter of studious attention. Efforts were made to leave language in itself instrumental, and in these efforts sound frequently comes perilously near triumphing over sense. The exotic formal growths of other languages were imported into England. No verbaltour de forceoftroubadourortrouvèreorjongleuror Ronsardist was too fantastic for imitation and adoption. The one-time primitive directness of English was overrun by such forms as the ballade, the chant royal, the rondel, the kyrielle, the rondeau and the rondeau redoublé, the virelai and the pantoum, the sestina, the villanelle, and last, yet by no means least, the sonnet. But through the immense tangle of our intricate lyric growths it can now be seen that mere mechanics do not always make poetry. While rhyme has, indeed, served its limited purposes, it must be remembered that the highest English verse has been written without rhyme. This verbal embroidery, while it presents to the workman in words a pleasingly decorative form, at the same time imposes on him both an adventitious restraint and an increased self-consciousness. The twentieth century poet, singing with his scrupulously polished vocalisation, usually finds himself content to re-echo what has been said before. He is unable to "travel light"; pioneering with so heavy a burden is out of the question. Rhyme and meter have compelled him to sacrifice content for form. It has left him incapable of what may be called abandonment. And the consciousness of his technical impedimenta has limited the roads along which he may adventure. His preoccupation with formal exactions has implanted in him an instinctive abhorrence for anything beyond the control of what he calls common-sense. Dominated by this emotional and intellectual timidity, he has attributed to end-rhyme and accentual rhythm the self-sufficiency of mystic rites, in the face of the fact that the fewer the obstacles between feeling and expression the richer the literary product must be, and forgetting, too, that poetry represents the extreme vanguard of consciousness both adventuring and pioneering along the path of future progress.
For the poet to turn his back on rhythm, as at times he has been able to do with rhyme, is an impossibility. For the rhythmising instinct is innate and persistent in man, standing for a law which permeates every manifestation of energy. The great heart of Nature itself beats with a regular systole and diastole. But, rhythmically, the modern versifier has been a Cubist without quite comprehending it. He has been viewing the world mathematically. He has been crowding his soul into a geometrically designed mould. He has bowed to a rule-of-thumb order of speech, arbitrarily imposed on him by an ancestry which wrung its ingenuous pleasure out of an ingenuous regularity of stress and accent. To succeed under that law he must practise an adroit form of self-deception, solemnly pretending to fit his lines to a mould which he actually over-runs and occasionally ignores. He has not been satisfied with the rhythm of Nature, whose heart-beats in their manifold expressions are omnipresent but never confined to any single sustained pulse or any one limited movement. It is not argued that he should ignore rhythm altogether. To do so, as has already been said, would be impossible, since life itself is sustained by the rise and fall of mortal breasts and the beat and throb of mortal hearts. Rhythm is in man's blood. The ear of the world instinctively searches for cadences. The poet's efforts towards symphonic phrasing have long since become habitual and imperative. But that he should confine himself to certain man-made laws of meter, that he should be shackled by the prosodian of the past, is quite another matter. His predecessors have fashioned many rhythms that are pretty, many accentual forms that are cunningly intricate, but at a time when his manner of singing has lost its vital swing it is well for man to forget these formal prettinesses and equally well to remember that poetry is not an intellectual exercise but the immortal soul of perplexed mortality seeking expression.
To abandon fixed rhythm, or meter, for the floating rhythm of the chant may not be an immediate solution of the problem. To follow the Psalms of David, for example, will not suddenly conjure a new school of verse into the world. But to return to the more open movement of the chant, which is man's natural and rudimentary form of song, may constitute a step towards freedom. The mere effort towards emancipation, in fact, is not without its value. It may serve to impress on certain minds the fact that poetry is capable of exhausting one particular form of expression, of incorporating and consuming one particular embodiment of perishable matter and passing on to its newer fields. Being a living organism, it uses up what lies before it, and to find new vigour must forever feed on new forms. Being the product of man's spirit, which is forever subject to change, verse must not be worshipped for what it has been, but for what it is capable of being. No necrophilic regard for its established conventions must blind the lover of beautiful verse to the fact that the primary function of poetry is both to intellectualize sensation and to elucidate emotional experience. If man must worship beauty only as he has known it in the past, man must be satisfied with worshipping that which has lived and now is dead.
A. S.
The blue, blue sea,And the drone of waves,And the wheeling swallows,And the sun on the opal sails,And the misty and salt-bleached headlands,And the milkweed thick at my feet,And the milkweed held in the hand of a childWho dreams on the misty cliff-edge,Watching the fading sailsAnd the noonday blueOf the lonely sea!
Was it all years ago,Or was it but yesterday?I only know that the scentOf the milkweed brings it back,Back with a strangle of tears:The child and the misty headlands,The drone of the dark blue sea,And the opal sailsIn the sun!
I am tired of the dustAnd the fever and noiseAnd the meaningless faces of men;And I want to go home!Oh, day after day I get thinking of homeWhere the black firs fringe the skyline,And the birds wheel down the silence,And the hemlocks whisper peace,And the hill-winds cool the blood,And the dusk is crowned with glory,And the lone horizon softens,And the world's at home with God!Oh, I want to go there!I want to go home!
A rind of light hangs lowOn the rim of the world;A sound of feet disturbsThe quiet of the cellWhere a rope and a beam looms highAt the end of the yard.
But in the duskOf that walled yard waits a woman;And as the thing from its cell,Still guarded and chained and bound,Crosses that little space,Silent, for ten brief steps,A woman hangs on his neck.
And that walk from a cell to a sleepIs known as Life,And those ten dark stepsOf tangled rapture and tearsMen still call Love.
Some day, O Seeker of Dreams, they will seek even us!Some day they will wake, Fellow Singer, and hunger and wantFor the Ways to the Lonelier Height!So let us, Shy Weaver of Beauty, take heart,For out of their dust they will call to us yet!Let us wait, and sing, and be wise,As the sea has waited and sung,As the hills through the night have been wise!For we are the Bringers of Light, and the Voices of Love,Aye, we are the Soothers of Pain, the Appeasers of Death,The Dusk and the Star and the Gleam and the Loneliest Peak!And when they have found and seen, and know not whither they trend,They will come to us, crying aloud like a child in the night;And when they have learned of our lips,Still back to our feet they will gropeFor that ultimate essence and core of all song,To usher them empty and naked, then, out to the unanswering stars,Where Silence and Dreaming and Music are one!
I have drunk deepOf the well of bitterness.Black hours have harried me,Blind fate has bludgeoned my bent head,And on my brow the iron crownOf sorrow has been crushed.And being mortal, I have cried aloudAt anguish ineluctable.But over each black hour has hungForlorn this star of knowledge:The path of pain too great to be enduredLeads always unto peace;And when the granite road of anguish mountsUp and still up to its one ultimateAnd dizzy height of torture,Softly it dips and meetsThe valley of endless rest!
Summer is dead.And love is gone.And life is glad of this.For sad were both, with having given much;And bowed were both, with great desires fulfilled;And both were grown too sadly wiseEver to live again.Too aged with hours o'er-passionate,Too deeply sung by throatsThat took no thought of weariness,Moving too madly toward the crest of things,Giving too freely of the fountaining sap,Crowding too gladly into grass and leaves,Breathing too blindly into flower and song!Again the lyric hope may thrill the world,Again the sap may sweeten into leaves,Again will grey-eyed April comeWith all her choiring throats;But not to-day—For the course is run.And the cruse is full,And the loin ungirt,And the hour ordained!And now there is need of rest;And need of renewal there is;And need of silence,And need of sleep.Too clear the lightNow lies on hill and valley;And little is left to say,And nothing is left to give.Summer is dead;And love is gone!
I am through with regret.No more shall I kennel with pain.I have called to this whimpering soul,This soul that is sodden with tearsAnd sour with the reek of the years!And now we shall glory in light!Like a tatter of sail in the wind,Like a tangle of net on the sand,Like a hound stretched out in the heat,My soul shall lie in the sun,And be drowsy with peace,And not think of the past!
Letters from Home, you said.Unopened they lay on the shack-sillAs you stared with me at the prairieAnd the foothills bathed with light.Letters from Home, you whispered,And the homeland casements shoneThrough the homeland dusk again,And the sound of the birds came back,And the soft green sorrowing hills,And the sigh of remembered names,The wine of remembered youth,—Oh, these came back,Back with those idle wordsOf "Letters from Home"!
Over such desolate leagues,Over such sundering seas,Out of the lost dead years,After the days of waiting,After the ache had died,After the brine of failure,After the outland peaceOf the trail that never turns back,Now that the night-wind whispersHow Home shall never again be home,And now that the arms of the Far-awayHave drawn us close to its breast,Out of the dead that is proved not dead,To waken the sorrow that should have died,To tighten the throat that never shall sing,To sadden the trails that we still must ride,Too late they come to us here—Our Letters from Home!
I watched the men at work on the stubborn rock,But mostly the one man poised on a drillAbove the steam that hissed and billowed about himWhite in the frosty air,Where the lordly house would stand.
Majestic, muscular, high like a god,He stood,And controlled and stoppedAnd started his thundering drill,Offhand and careless and lordly as Thor,Begrimed and solemn and crowned with sweat,Where the great steel chains swung over the buckets of rock.
Then out of a nearby house came a youth,All gloved and encased in fur and touched with content,Thin-shouldered and frail and finished,Leading a house-dog out on a silver chain.He peered at the figure that fought with the drillAbove the billowing steam and tumult of sound,Peered up for a moment impassive,With almost pitying eyes,And then went pensively down the Avenue's calm,In the clear white light of the noonday sun,Not holding, but held by his silvery chain!
A village wrapped in slumber,Silent between the hills,Empty of moon-lit marketplace,Empty of moving life—Such is my quiet heart.Shadowy-walled it rests,Sleeping its heavy sleep;But sudden across the darkTingles a sound of drums!The drums, the drums, the distant drums,The throb of the drums strikes up,The beat of the drums awakes!Then loud through the little streets,And strange to the startled roofs,The drums, the drums approach and pound,And throb and clamour and thrill and pass,And between the echoing house-wallsAll swart and grim they go,The battalions of regret,After the drums, the valiant drumsThat die away in the night!
I caught the smell of etherFrom the glass-roofed roomWhere the hospital stood.Suddenly all about meI felt a mist of anguishAnd the old, old hour of dreadWhen Death had shambled by.
Yellow with time it is,This letter on which I look;But up from it comes a perfumeThat stabs me still to the heart;And suddenly, at the odour,Through a ghost-like mist I knowRapture and love and wild regretWhen Life, and You, went by.
Mournful the summer moonRose from the quiet sea.Golden and sad and full of regretAs though it would ask of earthWhere all her lovers had vanishedAnd whither had gone the rose-red lipsThat had sighed to her light of old.Then I caught a pulse of music,Brokenly, out at the pier-end,And I heard the voices of girlsGoing home in the dark,Laughing along the sea-wallOver a lover's word!
In an old and ashen island,Beside a city grey with death,They are seeking Sappho's tomb!
Beneath a vineyard ruinousAnd a broken-columned templeThey are delving where she sleeps!There between a lonely valleyFilled with noonday silencesAnd the headlands of soft violetWhere the sapphire seas still whisper,Whisper with her sigh;Through a country sad with wonderMen are seeking vanished Sappho,Men are searching for the tombOf muted Song!
They will find a Something there,In a cavern where no sound is,In a room of milky marbleWalled with black amphiboliteOver-scored with faded wordsAnd stained with time!
Sleeping in a low-roofed chamber,With her phials of perfume round her,In a terra-cotta coffinWith her image on the cover,Childish echo of her beautyEtched in black and gold barbaric—Lift it slowly, slowly, seekers,Or your search will end in dust!
With a tiny nude Astarte,Bright with gilt and gravely watchingOver grass-green malachite,Over rubies pale, and topaz,And the crumbled dust of pearls!
With her tarnished silver mirror,With her rings of beaten gold,With her robes of faded purple,And the stylus that so oftenTraced the azure on her eyelids,—Eyelids delicate and weary,Drooping, over-wise!And at her head will be a plectronMade of ivory, worn with time,And a flute and gilded lyreWill be found beside her feet,And two little yellow sandals,And crude serpents chased in silverOn her ankle rings—And a cloud of drifting dustAll her shining hair!
In that lost and lonely tombThey may find her;Find the arms that ached with rapture,Softly folded on a breastThat for evermore is silent;Find the eyes no longer wistful,Find the lips no longer singing,And the heart, so hot and waywardWhen that ashen land was young,Cold through all the mists of time,Cold beneath the Lesbian marbleIn the low-roofed roomThat drips with tears!
In the dead of the nightYou turned in your troubled sleepAs you heard the wild swans pass;And then you slept again.
You slept—While a new world swam beneathThat army of eager wings,While plainland and slough and lakeLay wide to those outstretched throats,While the far lone Lights alluredThat phalanx of passionate breasts.
And I who had loved you moreThan a homing bird loves flight,—I watched with an ache for freedom,I rose with a need for life,Knowing that love had passedInto its unknown North!
O odour of incense, pride of purple and gold,Burst of music and praise, and passion of flute and pipe!O voices of silver o'er-sweet, and soothing antiphonal chant!O Harmony, ancient, ecstatic, a-throb to the echoing roof,With tremulous roll of awakened reverberant tubes, and thunder of sound!And illusion of mystical song and outclangour of jubilant bell,And glimmer of gold and taper, and throbbing, insistent pipe—If song and emotion and music were all—Were it only all!
For see, dark heart of mine,How the singers have ceased and gone!See, how all of the music is lost and the lights are low,And how, as our idle arms, these twin ineloquent towersGrope up through the old inaccessible Night to His stars!How in vain we have stormed on the bastions of Silence with sound!How in vain with our music and song and emotion assailed the Unknown,How beat with the wings of our worship on Earth's imprisoning bars!For the pinions of Music have wearied, the proud loud tubes have tired,Yet still grim and taciturn stand His immutable stars,And, lost in the gloom, to His frontiers old I turnWhere glimmer those sentinel fires,Beyond which, Dark Heart, we twoSome night must steal us forth,Quite naked, and alone!
I lounge on the deck of the river-steamer,Homeward bound with its load,Churning from headland to headland,Through moonlight and silence and dusk.And the decks are alive with laughter and music and singing,And I see the forms of the sleepersAnd the shadowy lovers that lean so close to the rail,And the romping children behind,And the dancers amidships.But high above us there in the gloom,Where the merriment breaks like a wave at his feet,Unseen of lover and dancer and me,Is the Pilot, impassive and stern,With his grim eyes watching the course.
Listen!FootstepsAre they,That falter through the gloom,That echo through the lonely chambersOf our house of life?
Listen!Did a door close?Did a whisper waken?Did a ghostly somethingSigh across the dusk?
From the mournful silenceSomething, something went!Far down some shadowy passageFaintly closed a door—And O how empty liesOur house of life!
You stood aloneIn the dusky window,Watching the racing river.Touched with a vague unrest,And if tired of loving too muchMore troubled at heart to findThat the flame of love could witherAnd the wonder of love could pass,You kneeled at the window-ledgeAnd stared through the black-topped maplesWhere an April robin fluted,—Stared idly outAt the flood-time sweep of the river,Silver and paling goldIn the ghostly April twilight.
Shadowy there in the duskYou watched with shadowy eyesThe racing, sad, unreasoningHurrying torrent of silverSeeking its far-off sea.Faintly I heard you sigh,And faintly I heard the robin's flute,And faintly from rooms remoteCame a broken murmur of voices.And life, for a breath, stood bathedIn a wonder crowned with pain,And immortal the moment hung;And I know that the thought of youThere at the shadowy window,And the matted black of the maples,And the sunset call of a bird,And the sad wide reaches of silver,Will house in my haunted heartTill the end of Time!