Poetry: A Magazine of Verse: Vol. 4, No. 5, Aug., 1914 by Various and Harriet Monroe | Audio Book

Section 1 of Poetry, a magazine of verse. Volume 4, number 5, August 1914. Edited by Harriet Monroe. To Kalon by Ezra Pound. Read for LibriVox.org by Lubette in New York City, December 2025. To Kalon, even in my dreams you have denied yourself to me. You have sent me only your handmaids. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Study in Aesthetics by Ezra Pound Read for LibriVox.org by Lubet in New York City, December 2025 The Study in Aesthetics The Very Small Children in Patched Clothing Being smitten with an unusual wisdom, stopped in their play as she passed them and cried up from their cobbles, guarda, ay, guarda, que bella. But three years after this I heard the young Dante, whose last name I do not know, for there are in Sirmione twenty-eight young Dantes and thirty-four You are catalyzed. And there had been a great catch of sardines, and his elders were packing them in the great wooden boxes for the market in Brescia, and he leapt about, snatching at the bright fish and getting in both of their ways. And in vain they commanded him to sta fermo, and when they would not let him arrange the fish in the boxes, he stroked those which were already arranged, murmuring for his own satisfaction this identical phrase. And at this I was mildly abashed. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Belairs by Ezra Pound. Read for LibriVox.org by Lubette. Aus meinen großen Schmerzen mach ich die kleinen Lieder. The good Belairs do not understand the conduct of this world's affairs. in fact they understood them so badly that they have had to cross the channel nine lawyers four counsels five judges and three proctors of the king together with the respective wives husbands sisters and heterogeneous connections of the good Belairs met to discuss their affairs but the good Belairs have so little understood their affairs that now there is no one at all who can understand any affair of theirs Yet fourteen hunters still eat in the stables of the good squire Bel-Air, but these may not suffer a tainer, for they may not belong to the good squire Bel-Air, but to his wife. On the contrary, if they do not belong to his wife, he will plead a freedom from a tainer for twelve horses, and also for twelve boar-hounds from Charles IV, and a further freedom for the remainder of horses from Henry IV. but the judges being free of medieval scholarship will pay no attention to this and there will be only the more confusion where plevin estoppel espavin and what not nine lawyers four counsels etc met to discuss their affairs but the sole result was bills from lawyers to whom no one was indebted and even the lawyers were uncertain who was supposed to be indebted to them Wherefore the good squire Belair resides now at Agde and Beaucaire, to Carcassonne, Puy and Aix he fareth from day to day, or takes the sea air between Marseille and Béziers. And for all this I have considerable regret, for the good Belairs are very charming people. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Salvationists by Ezra Pound Read for LibriVox.org by Brian Gallegos Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection, and we shall get ourselves rather disliked. Ah, yes, my songs, let us resurrect the very excellent term rusticus. Let us apply it in all its opprobrium to those to whom it applies. And you may decline to make them immortal, for we shall consider them and their state in delicate, opulent silence. Come, my songs, let us take arms against this sea of stupidities, beginning with Mumpidorus, and against this sea of vulgarities, beginning with Nimim, and against this sea of imbeciles, all the Bolmenian literati. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Amitié by Ezra Pound. Read for LibriVox.org by Loubette. Amitié. Old friends the most. WBY. To one on returning certain years after. You wore the same quite correct clothing. You took no pleasure at all in my triumphs. You had the same old air of condescension mingled with a curious fear that I myself might have enjoyed them. Te voilà, mon bourrienne. You also shall be immortal. To. To another. And we say goodbye to you also. For you seem never to have discovered that your relationship is wholly parasitic. Yet, to our feasts, you bring neither wit, nor good spirits, nor the pleasing attitudes of discipleship. 3. But you, Bozami, we keep on. For to you we owe a real debt. In spite of your obvious flaws, you once discovered a moderate chophouse. 4. Ist ifuit, we incultus. Deo laus quod est sepultus. Vair mais habend eus vultum. Amen. Ego autem jovialis. Gaudebo contubernalis. Cum jocunda femina. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Ladies by Ezra Pound. Read for LibriVox.org by Gerilyn Jansko. Agathas. Four and forty lovers had Agathas in the old days, all of whom she refused. And now she turns to me seeking love, and her hair also is turning. Young lady, I have fed your lar with poppies. I have adored you for three full years, and now you grumble because your dress does not fit and because I happen to say so. Lesbia Iulia. Memnon, Memnon, that lady who used to walk about amongst us with such gracious uncertainty, is now wedded to a British householder. Lugete Veneres, lugete, cupidinesque, passing, flawless as Aphrodite, thoroughly beautiful, brainless, the faint odor of your patchouli, faint, almost, as the lines of cruelty about your chin assails me and concerns me almost as little. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Seeing Eye by Ezra Pound. Read for LibriVox.org by Seamus Gibney. The Seeing Eye. The small dogs look at the big dogs. They observe unwieldy dimensions and curious imperfections of odor. Here is a formal male group. The young men look upon their seniors. They consider the elderly mind and observe its inexplicable correlations. Said Sin Sue. It is only in small dogs and the young that we find minute observation. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Abu Salamah, A Song of Empire by Ezra Pound Read for LibriVox.org by Gerilyn Yantko Being the sort of poem I would write if King George V should have me chained to the fountain before Buckingham Palace and should give me all the food and women I wanted, To my brother in chains, Bonga Bonga. Great is King George V, for he has chained me to this fountain. He feeds me with beef bones and wine. Great is King George V. His palace is white like marble. His palace has 98 windows. His palace is like a cube cut in thirds. It is he who has Slain the dragon and released the maiden, Andromeda. Great is King George V, for his army is legion. His army is a thousand and forty-eight soldiers, with red cloths about their buttocks, and they have red faces like bricks. Great is the King of England, and greatly to be feared, for he has chained me to this fountain. He provides me with women and drinks. Great is King George V, and very resplendent is this fountain. It is adorned with young gods riding upon dolphins. And its waters are white like silk. Great and lofty is this fountain. And seated upon it is the late Queen Victoria, the mother of the great king in a hoop skirt, like a woman heavy with child. Oh, may the king live forever. Oh, may the king live for a thousand years. For the young prince is foolish and headstrong. He plagues me with gibes and sticks. And when he comes into power, he will undoubtedly chain someone else to this fountain. And my glory will be at an end. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Coal Picker by Amy Lowell Read for LibriVox.org by Larry Wilson He perches in the slime, in a bed daubed with iridescent dirt. the oil upon the puddles dries to colors like a peacock's eyes and half-submerged tomato cans shine scaly as leviathans oozingly crawling through the mud the ground is here and there bestudged with lumps of only part-burned coal his duty is to glean the whole to pick them from the filth each one To hoard them for the hidden sun, which glows within each fiery core, and waits to be made free once more. Their sharp and glistening edges cut his stiffened fingers. Through the smut gleam red the wounds which will not shut. Wet through the shivering, he kneels and digs the slippery coals. Like eels, they slide about. His force all spent, he counts his small accomplishment. A half a dozen clinker coals which still have fire in their souls, fire, and in his thought there burns the topaz fire of votive urns. He sees it fling from hill to hill, and still consumed is burning still, higher and higher leaps the flame, the smoke in ever-shifting frame. He sees a Spanish castle old, with silver steps and paths of gold. From myrtle bowers comes the flash of fountains, and the emerald flash of parrots in the orange trees, whose blossoms pasture hummingbees. He knows he feeds the urns whose smoke bears visions, that his master's stroke is out of dirt and misery, to light the fire of poesy. He sees the glory, yet he knows that others cannot see his shows. To them his smoke is sightless, black. His votive vessel's but a pack of old discarded shards. His fire a peddler's. Still, to him, the pyre is incensed, an enduring gall. He sighs and grubs another coal. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Bubbling Fountain by Helen Hoyt. Read for LibriVox.org by B-Sweat Scandal. This is a magic cup that needs no lifting up, and gushes the cool drink from an ever-flowing brink, from an ever-filling hollow. As you swallow, you can feel the water go against your lips with tumbling flow, and all its noise is here, as if you were a deer, or a wild goat, sucking the water into your throat, where a little brook goes by, under the trees and the summer sky. Oh, it is fun to drink this way. Like a pleasant game to play, not like drinking in other places, and it is fun to watch the faces that come and bend them at this urn, something you can learn of each person's secret mind, know which is selfish, which is kind, those who guard their dignity, and those whose curiosity is turning cold. Many of the young are old, and think. A drink is nothing but a drink. Water is water. Always the same. They could not turn it into a game. Girly with solemn mien. They lean, these incurious of heart, and hurrying depart. But the children know it is a gay rare thing to drink outdoors from a running spring and laugh and quaff as if their inquisitive zest would challenge to attest the bounty of the store which gives and still has more. They drink up all they can, wait and turn to drink again as I watch the reaching lips. It seems to be my mouth that sips. I stoop and rise with each one. But when they are done, And their faces touched with spray, they quickly wipe it away. And this, sometimes, I regret, because their lips look prettier, wet. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. A Dance Before the Arch by Alan Updegraff Read for LibriVox.org by Such6721 Windy April night mist swept the square. Lights among the leafage swayed and flashed. piquant bosky odors filled the air piquant as a maenad's flying hair late the dripping dogwood buds had lashed then three fared forth together a wise old teacher of men a poet who laughed with the weather and a silent knight of the pen they walked in the rain-witched park while the hours grew small and dark and their talk was light as a feather that bacchus blows at a mark all around the city sounds were whist all about where branches laughed and leapt glints of eyes looked out into the mist little golden dancing rainbow kissed little shapes and shadows flashed and crept then the sage oh wonderful weather strange eerie then he of the pen The pixies are out all together. Walpurgisnacht Bacchus. Amen. He waved his arms and inclined his face to the night. Joy-blind. Then the poet. Oh, pluck me a feather from the stretched grey wing of the wind. Over the asphalt polished by the rain. Out of mist swirls iris splotched with light. Loomed a sudden beauty. Marble, plain, arched and somber, fronting with disdain all the springtime turmoil of that night. Then the sage. The old arch, in this weather, needs garlands. Then he of the pen. The lost Roman thing. All together. Get branches. We're Romans again. So they took each boughs in their hands, obeying the ancient commands. When Laurel put forth a green feather, and Proserpine gathered her bands. They marched in a grave, wild measure. They waved their boughs. They were austere-faced for pleasure in the spring's house. The sharp wind gave them glee, the wind with a tang of the sea. They drank it deep, and at leisure, as a nobly offered rouse. There were faint lights under their feet, each light with a halo of pearl. There were lights in the night around, each blown mist-tressed like a girl, faster their feet beat. With a quick, glad sound. Io, Bacchus, honey sweet. Io, Proserpine, oh golden, oh divine. Loosed again from the ground, they lifted their arms. They danced with quick breath. Below, around, lights glanced as life from death. Io, Proserpine is dead, but the spring lives. Io, Bacchus, where's he fled? But the vine thrives. good hap to Aphrodite and her dove's red feet redder than new wine are the lips of my sweet Io spring young new fairer for the vast passionate old past Io Io spring i sing i sing i am drunk with wine with wine and the spring They danced. They swayed. The air sang under their boughs. They laughed. They played with the mist that stung their mid-carouse. Io, spring's blood's on my face and in my hair. Io, spring, magical maid. For me, for swear, the vine buds red, the willow gold, the lady birch is white and slim in the night. Oh, make my bed with white and gold and red, or ever the year grows old and cold. Ayo, ayo, and the tale of the frost is told. All around, the city sounds were whist, over asphalt polished by the rain, loomed the somber arch amid the mist. At its feet, some boughs the spring had kissed, whispered to the driving wind's refrain. Then, three fared forth together, a wise old teacher of men, a poet, who sang with the weather, and a silent night, of the pen. They went arm-linked from the park, that none be lost in the dark. And their hearts were light as a feather, that Bacchus blows, at a mark. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Song by Helen Dudley Read for LibriVox.org. A few more windy days must come and go their ways, and we will walk, my love and I, beneath the amber-dripping boughs. Then on the stars we'll tread, on purple stars and red, and wonder why the while we talk men sing so much of broken vows. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Intern by Maxwell Bodenheim. Read for LibriVox.org. By Lauren Beverly. Oh the agony of having too much power. In my passive palm are hundreds of lives. Strange alchemy. They drain my blood. My heart becomes iron. My brain copper. My eyes silver. My lips brass. Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from you. Strong wind or fluttering and broken. They are my children. I am their mother and father. I watch them live and die. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Old Jew by Maxwell Bodenheim. Read for LibriVox.org by Gerilyn Yantko. Not fond-tinged hospital pajamas could cheat him of his austerity, which tamed even the doctors with its pure fire. They examined him, made him bow to them. Massive altars were they, at whose swollen feet groveled a worshipper. Then they laughed, half in scorn of him, and there came a miracle. The little man was above them at a bound. His austerity, like an irresistible sledgehammer, drove them lower and lower. They dwindled while he soared. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Minor by Maxwell Bodenheimer read by Elizabeth Copnall Ventura California March 2025 those on top say they know you earth they are liars you are my father and the silence i work in is my mother only the son knows his father we are alike sweaty inarticulate of soul bending under thick knowledge I drink and shout with my brothers when above you. Like most children we soon forget the parents of our souls. But you avidly grip us again. We pay for the little noise of life we steal. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. To an Enemy by Maxwell Bodenheim. Read for LibriVox.org by Deborah. I despise my friends more than you. I would have known myself, but they stood before the mirrors and painted on them images of the virtues I craved. You came with the sharpest chisel, scraping away the false paint. Then I knew, and detested myself. But not you. For glimpses of you in the glasses you uncovered showed me the virtues whose images you destroyed. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. To a Discarded Steel Rail by Maxwell Bodenheim, read for LibriVox.org by Stacey M. Straight strength hitched into the surliness of the ditch. A soul you have. Strength has always delicate, secret reasons. Your soul is a dull question. I do not care for your strength, but for your stiff smile, at a time of smile, which men call rust. End of poem This recording is in the public domain. The Waste Places by James Stevens. Read for LibriVox.org by Sandra. As a naked man I go through the desert, sore afraid, holding up my head although I'm as frightened as a maid. The crouching lion there I saw, from barren rocks, lift up his eye. He parts the cactus with his paw and stares at me as I go by. He would follow on my trace if he knew I was afraid. If he knew my hardy face hides the terrors of a maid. In the night he rises and he stretches forth. He snuffs the air. He roars and leaps along the sand. He creeps and watches everywhere. His burning eyes, his eyes of bale. Through the darkness I can see. He lashes fiercely with his tail. He would love to spring at me. I am the lion in his lair. I am the fear that frightens me. I am the desert of despair and the nights of agony. Night or day, whate'er befall, I must walk that desert land until I can dare to call the lion out to lick my hand. 2. As a naked man I tread the gloomy forests, ring on ring, where the sun that's overhead cannot see what's happening. There I go, the deepest shade, the deepest silence pressing me, and my heart is more afraid than a maiden's heart would be. Every day I have to run underneath the demon tree, where the ancient wrong is done, while I shrink in agony. I saw the demon hold a maid in his arms, and she, daft, whimpered in fear, he bent and laid his lips on hers, and laughed. And she beckoned me to run, and she called for help to me, and the ancient wrong was done, which is done eternally. I am the maiden and the fear. I am the sunless shade, the strife. I am the demon lips, the sneer showing under every life. I must tread that gloomy way until I shall dare to run and bear the demon with his prey from the forest to the sun. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. By James Stephens. Read for LibriVox.org. By James Crook. And as we walked the grass was faintly stirred. We did not speak. There was no need to speak. Above our heads there flew a little bird, a silent one who feared that we might seek her hard-hid nest. Poor little frightened one, if we had found your nest that sunny day, we would have passed it by, we would have gone, and never looked or frightened you away. O little bird, there's many have a nest, a hard-found open place with many a foe, and hunger and despair and little rest, more to fear than you can know. Shield the nests, where'er they be, on the ground, guard the poor from treachery. This recording is in the public domain. The Liar by James Stevens. Read for LibriVox.org by Lindsay Miller. Did you think, old grizzly face, to frighten me? To frighten me who fronted you before times out of mind, when through that sudden door you took and bound and cast me to the sea, far from my kind, far from all friendly hands? Now I tremble no longer at your whisper, at your lie. I go with you, but only till the end of one small hour, and when the hour is done, I shall again arise, and leap, and run from the windswept icy caves, I shall ascend, I shall attain to the pearly sky, and the open door, and the infinite sun, and find again my comrades with me, every one. So, once more, here are my hands to wind your cords about, here are my feet to tie, straightly And here, on either eye, press your strong fingers until I am blind. Now, at the last, heave me upon your shoulder, whispering sly, as you so oft before have whispered your dark lie. A day dawns surely when you will not dare to come to me. Then you will hide away in your dark lands. Then you will pray, you will snarl and tremble when I see you there to bind your hands, to whisper truth where you have whispered lies. To press my mighty fingers down upon your eyes. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. Dark Wings by James Stevens. Read for LibriVox.org by Elizabeth Koppnall. Sing while you may, oh bird upon the tree. Although on high, wide-winged above the day. Chill evening broadens to immensity. Sing while you may. On thee, wide hovering too, intent to slay, the hawk's slant pinion buoys him terribly. Thus near the end is of thy happy lay, the day and thee and miserable me. Dark wings shall cover up and hide away, where no song stirs of bird or memory. Sing, while you may. End of poem. This recording is in the public domain. The Poet's Bread and Butter by Harriet Monroe From Poetry, a magazine of verse, volume 4, number 5, August 1914, edited by Harriet Monroe. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Paul Grantzio. It is instructive, in arts as in politics. To watch the workings of the public mind. I think it was John Quincy Adams who, nearly a century ago, considered proficiency in the arts unworthy of free and enlightened citizens. Probably the numerical majority of his race, on both sides of the ocean, are still of his opinion. But they no longer utter it with his confidence. Their security has been imperiled. not so much by the effrontery of artists in producing masterpieces as by the endless talk the noisy wigwagging of solemn tongues and pens which these masterpieces and their train of lesser works have excited to such a degree has the good citizen's contempt of art been shaken that he has begun to encourage certain of its manifestations The arts of painting, sculpture, music, and architecture are now heavily endowed in many of our cities. So many prizes, traveling scholarships, rich purchases, and other rewards now await the aspiring painter or sculptor that it is scarcely possible for him to maintain any longer that modesty of fortune and demeanor which once seemed necessary to his development. Indeed. The public seems at last quite willing to admit that starvation and other forms of avoidable suffering do not assist a man of genius to paint or carve. Not yet, however, does the public admit this of the poet. Large prizes and high prices may not injure the painter. Million-dollar orders may develop the architect. But any such substantial evidence of favor would undermine the precarious vitality of the poet. He is lucky if he gets a mere pittance from editors, insufficient to support him on bread and water in a hermit's cave. He competes for no scholarships and for no prizes but poetries. For him, no American academy at Rome opens its richly gilded doors. Though why a poet should not learn more in loafing around Rome than any other artist is a mystery deeper than Lord Dunsany's. The poet alone is continually reminded that lack of food and sympathy are good for him. Listen to the New York Nation's luminous exposition of the world's duty towards its poets. Quote, Even if he, the poet, ...shared the limited assistance which endowments give to scientists and scholars, it would sap society's sense of duty towards the arts, and he may find various sweet uses in his adversity, a close acquaintance with life, a call to perseverance, and the protection of his art from the soiling hand of money-grubbing." The nation need not complain that society has not done its full duty by the poet. teaching him the sweet uses of adversity, not only by protecting him from the soiling hand of money-grubbing, but by turning upon him the deaf ear, and lifting against him the stone wall. Is there any third-rate painter in America or Europe who has never received $250 for a picture? Yet, when poetry offered this amount as a small prize to the most distinguished of living English poets, the world was agape with amazement that a poem could earn so much money. Mr. Sargent is no more famous as a painter than Mr. Yeats is as a poet. Yet, the labor of a week or two would be repaid, in the one case, by from five to ten thousand dollars, In the other, by little or nothing. But let us continue with the Illuminating Nation, quote, We are not, however, without consolation in watching the discomfort of men like Moody and Thompson, counterparts of many other poets. The necessities of occupation in an unkind environment seldom rob us of anything of the highest value. The commanding figure, under modern conditions that make a Chatterton's fate almost impossible, The beauty of this reasoning is beyond the reach of criticism. Put Shakespeare under the necessity of occupation in an unkind environment. In other words, set him pegging Elizabethan shoes for a living, Hamlet is never written, and the nation is not robbed of anything of the highest value, because even so, divinatory and editor cannot conceive of Hamlet's being possible until it has been written. In the same way he finds a Chatterton's fate impossible under modern conditions, alas, the modern Chatterton is not only possible but numerous. But when his genius is snuffed out by death, poverty, public apathy, or the compulsion to waste his time and brains earning a living, he is lucky if he gets a brief paragraph in a newspaper instead of immortal fame. How can the nation and its kind hear in their hearts the unsung songs? How can they tell what the world has lost by silencing its poets and crucifying its prophets? A masterpiece of art is not a miracle of individual genius, so much as the expression of a reciprocal relation between the artist and his public. He who must butt his head against a stone wall of apathy, ...cannot long get out of it his best work. Therefore, let the nation and its numerous rivals no longer be consoled by various flattering unctions as they watch the discomfort of poets, but be up and doing to diminish that discomfort. Quote, To have great poets, there must be great audiences too. End quote. H.M. End of The Poet's Bread and Butter by Harriet Monroe Carducci, a selection of his poems with verse translations, notes, and three introductory essays by G. L. Bickersteth, M. A. Longmans, Green, and Company. Acknowledge the greatest Italian poet of the second half of the 19th century, Carducci has received but scant recognition from England and America. This injustice Mr. Bickersteth has undertaken to correct by means of the present volume containing selections from the poet's work, verse translations of these selections, and a sheaf of essays. He has done his work exceptionally well. The essays build a broad and sympathetic avenue of approach to the Italian master, and the translations, though they will not be found and should not be expected, to render at all times the exact shade of the original show a skillful hand and a loving penetration into Carducci's world. To recommend a volume of Carducci's verse to American readers is to answer the question, what has the poet to say to the present generation? He was born in 1835 and lived through all those stirring years that transformed Italy into a modern nation. To achieve this end, splendid political victories had to be won. But, more important still and more fundamental, a moral change had to be wrought in the character of the whole Italian nation. Enslaved for centuries to foreign powers, the oppressed people had to be taught to walk erect and had to learn afresh the meaning of such sacred words as liberty and independence. And because Carducci, more successfully than any other, lit the altar fires in their hearts, they acclaimed him as their vate, their inspired seer. But while urging his countrymen to renew their own moral and spiritual beings as the best preparation for freedom and union, he did not fail to direct piercing shafts of hatred and contempt at every enemy of progress, and above all at the Roman Catholic Church. It is astonishing how large a part of his work is permeated with these patriotic themes. If we note, in addition, that he grew up at a time when the Romantic movement was at its palest and its sickliest, and that he shared the strong reaction against its tenets that set in shortly after the middle of the century, we have pretty much the compass of his work till the learned second period of his life. It is this learned second period which, according to the present reviewer at least, spells disaster. Not unnaturally, a man whose wholesome vigor and simple sense of the realities of life turned him in his youth against the current romantic flabbiness, felt his heart go out more and more strongly to the great and self-contained literature of Greece and Rome. But misfortune would have it that to earn a livelihood, the poet accepted a professorship at the University of Bologna, and in a few years, alas, the transformation had been wrought and his winged pegasus was hardly distinguishable from the average academic cart horse. Carducci took to imitating classical forms. He peopled his verse with a forgotten mythology, and although he was too great a man ever to become insincere, the stream of his inspiration grew too thin to sweep along the heavy litter of superimposed scholarship. There are many who, far from sharing this opinion, date the real Carducci from the Odi Barbare, but if fire and passion are the just prerogatives of verse, the reviewer submits that such early pieces as the Hymn to Satan, celebrating the triumph of reason over superstition, and Per Giuseppe Monte I gitano Tonetti, which blasts the Vatican into a nameless shame. are worth more than several volumes of nobly reserved, Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas. In any case, the patriotic verse of the youthful Carducci has the feel of molten metal. And when, in what we will call his professorial period, his poetry acquires a sudden glow, the occasion is usually supplied by a return to the old theme of freedom and Italy. Because the American reader is sure to feel himself nearer to the red-blooded young Carducci than to the high-minded, excessively Olympian old man, it is to be regretted that so many of the editor-translator's selections confess the classical spirit. But even here Carducci is far from negligible, being from first to last an oak-hearted son of the Italian Mother Earth, of whom it may be said, and of how many poets besides, that he never penned a line that did not express an absolute conviction. End of Carducci. A selection of his poems, with verse translations, notes, and three introductory essays by G. L. Bickersteth, M. A. Longman's Green and Company. Read by Geraldine Y. The Ride Home by Florence Wilkinson Evans From Poetry, a Magazine of Verse Volume 4, Number 5 August 1914 Edited by Harriet Monroe This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Read by Brian Gallegos Mrs. Evans is a painter-poet. For the best of her poems are pictures, and the best of her pictures are those in which the artist follows her fancy most freely. She paints in rainbow colors, like Childe Hassam, and, like him also, she catches the glamour, the aura, around the figure or landscape she is studying, expresses something of the whimsical, the magical, in whatever attracts her keen interpretive glance. For her gaze is not straightly serious, nor yet roundly humorous. When she is most herself, that is, but a bit sidelong, shrewd or tender, gay or pitying, according to the emotion of the moment, the book, with its nearly four hundred pages and a third as many titles, is far too long of course. Indeed, it is a flagrant case of excess, for less than half its bulk would give room enough for the poet, and would banish the moralist and the Tennysonian dramatist. Mrs. Evans' passionate pity for the oppressed becomes poetry in The Milliner's Apprentice, The Flower Factory, and that series of pictures from Poetry, Our Lady of Idleness. But it is mere preaching in Children of the Belated Lands, The Music Hall, Fifth Avenue, and others. Even without its failures and half-successes, the book has more variety of mood and subject than most of its contemporaries. I can be whatever I choose beneath the sun, a beast, or a mountain spring, or an arrogant emperor. Thus the poet sings in self, and though one may question her power wholly to escape her own personality and sex, yet she has a far-roaming fancy and a woman's intuition for feeling and character, lifting now and then into high motion, inheritors of an undreamed element, transfigured, glowing. Near together we went. Ourselves grown mystic and magnificent, Mrs. Evans is at her best in such self-studies as Self and Motherhood, the latter a really fresh treatment of a hackneyed subject. In emotional and descriptive poems like The Ride Home, A Roman Garden, The Stranger in the House, and the very beautiful Memorial Tablet. In character studies like The Outcast, Pedro at the Spring, The Baker's Boy, The Innocent. In such half-told tales as White Azenor, and in vivid little pictures like The Nightingale, Fireflies, Waterfalls, Ecstasies, any of these might be quoted as typical, but no one or two of them would be adequate. Here is one stanza from Motherhood. The shimmer of poplars by still streams of France, all rapture stored, in the blue shadow of adjacent banks, ruins of towers, an army's glittering rank. Pale effigies of lady and of lord, Cathedral dusks, All these shalt thou inherit, For these have I adored. And the music at Sanssouci Is a perfect bit of imagery. It streams from nowhere, Fills the air, Booms like the thunder of a sea, That washes up invisibly, Having no shore, As if the pillars and the gloom, The space is vast, The height, The strength, The jeweled bloom. Made themselves audible at last. End of The Ride Home by Florence Wilkinson Evans Challenge by Lewis Untermyer. Review by Harriet Monroe. From Poetry a Magazine of Verse, Volume 4, Number 5, August 1914. Edited by Harriet Monroe. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Challenge by Louis Untermyer, The Century Company. One need not object to a poet's philosophy if he can, quote, get it across. If, in other words, his expression of it is poetry. Mr. Untermyer feels, quote, a myriad urges in one rushing wave and calls us to arms in the following strenuous lines, quote, Who can be listless in these stirring hours, when with athletic courage we engage to storm with fierce abandon, sterner powers, and meet indifference with a joyful rage? But the more he sets his, quote, arrogant and stubborn will upon these labors of Mars, firing his impetuously, quote, arrogant spirit and, quote, braggart blood, to, quote, assail with raging mirth the scornful and untroubled skies, the cold complacency of Earth, the more eagerly do Apollo and the muses take to their heels, leaving their deserted votary to the conventional trappings and claptrap. Utterances of the God of War. Mr. Untermyer has been too devoted a student and critic of poetry to ask us to forgive such worn or tawdry phrases as those above quoted, or others like, quote, vigorous discontent, torpid eaves, visions girt with beauty, the deathless urge shall stir me Be always, go struggling upward, passionate and proud. Revealment, or details of these quatrains, make way for her, for the fervor of life, for the passions that stir, for the courage of strife, my eager faith would keep me set against despair and careless hate, knowing this smoke and sweat is forging something violent, and great. This sort of thing may be valor, but all the zeal of ten thousand reformers could not make it poetry. it would be negligible if it were not symptomatic of a red blood disease which impels certain of our poets to sing with the good right arm instead of the voice muscle is not magic and art may not be achieved by brawn alone but occasionally when Mr. Untermyer takes his mission more lightly or forgets it altogether his shy muse comes back and gives him a poem Only twice does she fall in with his civic ardor, once rather reluctantly in a voice from the sweatshops, and again more eagerly in the light irony of battle cries. The bitterness of irony is rather in conflict with a poet's militancy, usually defiant even of death itself, but it becomes more poetic. in the subway and how much of godhood Mr. Untermyer succeeds in suggesting phases of the prodigious poetry of modern science Fürzauber is a vivid picture also haunted except for the last stanza and in the streets and folk-song are tender and lyrical but the finest poem in the book is probably the shell to the pearl or rather the following first half thereof for the second half becomes almost melodrama grow not so fast glow not so warm thy hidden fires burn too wild too perfect is thy rounded form cling close my child Be yet my babe, rest quiet, when the great sea urges beat and call, too soon wilt thou be ripe for men, the world, and all, thy shining skin thy silken sheath, these will undo thee all too soon, and men will fight for thee beneath some paler moon. I, thou, my own, my undefiled, shalt make the lewd world dream and start, when they have seized and torn thee, child, out of my heart. End of Challenge by Louis Untermyer, review by Harriet Monroe, read by Loubette, in New York City, December 2025. End of Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 4, No. 5, August 1914, edited by Harriet Monroe.