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Giant Hours With Poet Preachers

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[Illustration: EDWIN MARKHAM ]


GIANT HOURS WITH POET PREACHERS

BY

WILLIAM L. STIDGER

Introduction by
Edwin Markham





To
WHITE-SOULED
EDWIN MARKHAM
DEMOCRACY'S VOICE, HUMANITY'S FRIEND
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK


CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION.

FOREWORD.


AMERICAN POETS:

I. EDWIN MARKHAM.

II. VACHEL LINDSAY.

III. JOAQUIN MILLER.

IV. ALAN SEEGER.


ENGLISH POETS

V. JOHN OXENHAM.

VI. ALFRED NOYES.

VII. JOHN MASEFIELD.

VIII. ROBERT SERVICE.

IX. RUPERT BROOKE.




LIST OF PORTRAITS:

EDWIN MARKHAM.

VACHEL LINDSAY.

JOAQUIN MILLER.

ALAN SEEGER.

JOHN OXENHAM.

ALFRED NOYES.

JOHN MASEFIELD.

ROBERT SERVICE.

RUPERT BROOKE.




INTRODUCTION


In writing to the readers of Mr. Stidger's book I feel as though I were
writing to old friends, friends who may have an interest in knowing
some of the thoughts that I hold regarding questions of the hour and
questions of the future.

The Christian as he looks out upon the battling and broken world sees
much to sadden his heart. Thinkers are everywhere asking, "Is
Christianity a failure?" I hasten to assure you that Christianity has
not failed, for Christianity has nowhere been tried yet, nowhere been
tried in a large social sense. Christianity has been tried by
individuals, and it has been found to be comforting and transforming.
But it has never been tried by any large group of people in any one
place--never by a whole city--never by a whole kingdom---never by a
whole people. It is for this trial that the watching angels are
waiting.

Our holy religion is not a saving power merely for individuals; it is
also a saving power for society in its industrial order. We have
applied it to the individual in the past, but we have never made any
wholehearted effort to make religion the working principle of society.
Religion is always cooperative and brotherly, but we have not yet made
any earnest effort to apply the cooperative and brotherly principle
to business. We have tried to persuade the individual to express the
ideals of the Sermon on the Mount, but we have made no earnest effort
to urge society to express the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount.

Therefore, while it is true that we have individual Christians--men and
women who make noble sacrifices in their effort to live the good
life--it is also true that we have no Christian society anywhere on
earth, no Christian civilization anywhere under the stars. Sometimes
a careless talker will refer to our social order as "a Christian
civilization." All such references, dear friends, disturb our hearts;
for they prove that the speaker has no conception of what a Christian
civilization would be, how noble and brotherly it would be. Five
minutes' reading of the Sermon on the Mount will convince any alert
mind that we are yet thousands of miles from a Christian civilization.
To speak of only one thing, it is certain that in a Christian
civilization these cruel riches we see standing side by side with these
cruel poverties could not exist; they would all crumble and vanish away
in the fire of the social passion of the Christ.

If we have not a Christian civilization, what have we? We have a
civilization that is half barbaric; we have a social order with a light
sprinkling of Christians in it. It is the hope of the future that this
body of earnest Christian men and women will awaken to the call of the
social Christ, awake determined to infuse his spirit into the
industrial order, and thus extend the power of the cross down into the
material ground of our existence. Men are not fully saved until tools
are saved, till industries are saved. They must all be lit with the
brother spirit of Christ the Artisan.

All of this transformation is implied in the Sermon on the Mount. For
that sermon may be taken to be the first draft of the constitution of
the new social order that the Christ has in his heart for men. It was
this new order that he had in mind when he uttered the great
invitation, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest." All the work-worn toilers of the world were to
find rest in the new brotherly order about to be established on the
earth. The Master has laid one great duty upon his followers--to
embrother men and to emparadise the world.

This is a great labor, for it demands that the spirit of the brother
Christ shall sing in all the wheels and sound in all the steps of our
industrial life. It means that the Golden Rule shall become the working
principle in our social order. This is the salvation that Christ came
to bring to the world; this is the glad tidings; this the good news to
men!

This is only a glimpse of the great social truth of the Lord that is
beginning to break like a new morning upon the world. And what I
have said in this letter I have tried a thousand times to say in my
poems that have gone out into the world. And this new note I catch in
the lines of the poets everywhere in modern poets, especially in the
poets discussed in the following pages.

Yours in the Fellowship of the great hopes,

[Signature: Edwin Markham]

West New Brighton, N. Y.




FOREWORD


Vachel Lindsay, one of the modern Christian poets, whose writings are
discussed in this book, has expressed the reason for the book itself in
these four lines:

"I wish that I had learned by heart
Some lyrics read that day;
I knew not 'twas a giant hour
That soon would pass away."

The author of this book makes no assumption that the "Giant Hours" are
in the setting he has given these literary gems, but in the "lyrics"
themselves.




AMERICAN POETS


EDWIN MARKHAM

VACHEL LINDSAY

JOAQUIN MILLER

ALAN SEEGER




EDWIN MARKHAM
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission of the publishers, Doubleday, Page & Co., and are taken
from the following works: The Shoes of Happiness and The Man with the
Hoe.]

A STUDY OF HAPPINESS IN POVERTY, IN SERVICE, IN LOWLINESS; AND A BIT OF
"SCRIPT" FOR THE JOURNEY OF LIFE


Edwin Markham is the David of modern poetry. He is biblical in the
simplicity of his style. He, like the poet of old, tended sheep on "The
Suisün Hills," and of it he speaks:

"Long, long ago I was a shepherd boy,
My young heart touched with wonder and wild joy."


THE SHOES OF HAPPINESS.

None less than William Dean Howells has said of him, "Excepting always
my dear Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Markham is the first of the Americans."
"The greatest poet of the century" is the estimate of Ella Wheeler
Wilcox; and Francis Grierson adds, "Edwin Markham is one of the
greatest poets of the age, and the greatest poet of democracy." Dr.
David G. Downey makes his estimate of the poet, in his book, Modern
Poets and Christian Teaching, a little broader and deeper in the two
phrases: "He is not more poet than prophet," and, "He is the poet of
humanity--of man in relations." And of them all I feel that the latter
estimate is best put, for Edwin Markham is more than "the poet of
democracy"; he is the poet of all humanity, down on the earth where
humanity lives. And that Dr. Downey was right in calling him "prophet"
one needs but to read some lines from "The Man with the Hoe" in the
light of the Russian revolution, and proof is made:

"O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quenched?
How will you ever straighten up this shape?

* * * * *

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
When those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries?"


THE MAN WITH THE HOE.

"How will it be with kingdoms and with kings?" the "Man with the Hoe"
is answering in Russia this star-lit night and sun-illumined day. Yes,
Markham is prophet as well as poet. And to this humble writer's way of
reading poetry there were never four lines for pure poetry more
beautifully writ, neither across the seas, nor here at home, neither
east nor west, than these four from "Virgilia":

"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled
And the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
And the springs of the seas run dust."
The Shoes of Happiness.

Prophetic? Yes! But ah, the music of it! Here rings and here sings
David the shepherd; the sweet lute, the harp, the wind in the trees,
the surge of the ocean-reef. It is music of a high and holy kind.

Which reminds me that I am to treat in this chapter on Markham only of
what he has written since 1906, the preceding period, best known
through his "Man with the Hoe," having been discussed by Dr. Downey in
the book heretofore mentioned. I have the joy-task in these brief lines
to bring to you Markham's "The Shoes of Happiness," which seems to me
the strongest book he has written, not forgetting, either, "The Hoe"
book, as he himself calls it.

If you have the privilege of personal friendship with this "Father
Poet," he will write for you somewhere, some time, some place, these
four favorite lines, with a twinkle in his eyes that is half boy and
half sage, but all love, which quatrain he calls "Outwitted":

"He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!"
The Shoes of Happiness.

And with these four lines he introduces the new book of poems, "The
Shoes of Happiness."


THE HAPPINESS OF POVERTY

One wonders where "The Shoes of Happiness" may be found, and the answer
is forthcoming in the first of "Six Stories," when he finds that the
Sultan Mahmoud is near unto death, and that there is just one thing
that will make him well, and that is that he may wear the shoes of a
perfectly happy man:

"For only by this can you break the ban:
You must wear the shoes of a happy man."
The Shoes of Happiness.

The Vizier was sent to find these shoes or lose his own head:

"Go forth, Vizier, when the dawn is red,
And bring me the shoes, or send instead,
By the hand of this trusted slave, your head!"
The Shoes of Happiness.

He first found a crowd of idle rich going forth for a day's outing
among the fields and flowers, a "swarm of the folk of high degree," and
thought to find the shoes here, but, alas! he found that

"In each glad heart was a wistful cry;
Behind each joy was a secret sigh."
The Shoes of Happiness.

He turned from the rich and sought the homes of the poor, and the
Father in the home of the poor said unto him:

"Ah, Vizier,
I have seven sweet joys, but I have one fear:
The dread of to-morrow ever is here!"
The Shoes of Happiness.

A Poet was found weaving a song of happiness, and the Vizier thought
that surely here would he find the man with the "happy shoes," but the
Poet cried:

"No," sighed the poet; "you do me wrong,
For sorrow is ever the nest of song."
The Shoes of Happiness.

Everywhere that he wandered in search he found some touch of
unhappiness. He tried Youth and Age, but,

"The young were restless that youth should stay,
The old were sad that it went away."

The Shoes of Happiness.

He thought to find the shoes on the feet of the Lover, but heard the
Lover say:

"Yes, yes; but love is a tower of fears,
A joy half torment, a heaven half tears!"

The Shoes of Happiness.

He had heard of a wise old Sage, who had been to Mecca, and sought him
only to hear, "I am not glad; I am only wise." At last he heard of a
man from far Algiers. With hurried steps he sought in vain. At last one
day he found a man lying in a field:

"'Ho,' cried Halil, 'I am seeking one
Whose days are all in a brightness run.'--
'Then I am he, for I have no lands,
Nor have any gold to crook my hands.
Favor, nor fortune, nor fame have I,
And I only ask for a road and a sky--
These, and a pipe of the willow-tree
To whisper the music out of me.'

"Out into the field the vizier ran.
'Allah-il-Allah! but you are the man;
Your shoes then, quick, for the great sultan--
Quick, and all fortunes are yours to choose!'
'Yes, mighty Vizier,... but I have no shoes!'"

The Shoes of Happiness.


THE HAPPINESS OF LOWLINESS

And just as this opening poem teaches the happiness of poverty, so the
next, "The Juggler of Touraine," teaches the happiness of lowliness.

Poor Barnabas, just a common juggler, when winter came, because he had
been spending the summer amusing people, had no place to go, and a
sympathetic monk took him into the monastery to live. Barnabas was
happy for a time; but after a while, as he saw everybody else
worshiping the Beautiful Mother with lute and brush, viol, drum,
talent, and prayer, he began to feel that his talents were
worthless:

"But I, poor Barnabas, nothing can I,
But drone in the sun as a drowsy fly."

The Shoes of Happiness.

Then came a thought that leaped like flame over his being, and an hour
later the monks found him, kneeling in the sacred altar place. What he
was doing chagrined them. They were shocked just as many people of this
day, to see a man worshiping with a different bend of the knee than
that to which they had been accustomed. How prone we are to judge those
who do not worship just as we have worshiped! This seems such a common
human weakness that Alfred Noyes, with a touch of kindly indignation,
speaks a word in "The Forest of Wild Thyme" that may be interjected
just here in this study of Barnabas the juggler, whom the monks
indignantly found worshiping the Virgin by juggling his colored balls
in the air, and speaking thus as he juggled:

"'Lady,' he cried again, 'look, I entreat:
I worship with fingers, and body, and feet!"

"And they heard him cry at Our Lady's shrine:
'All that I am, Madame, all is thine!
Again I come with spangle and ball
To lay at your altar my little, my all!'"

The Shoes of Happiness.

But the poor old monks were indignant. They, and some others of more
modern days, had never caught the real gist of the "Judge not" of the
New Testament; nor had they read Noyes:

"How foolish, then, you will agree,
Are those who think that all must see
The world alike, or those who scorn
Another, who perchance, was born
Where--in a different dream from theirs--
What they called sins to him are prayers!
We cannot judge; we cannot know;
All things mingle, all things flow;
There's only one thing constant here--
Love--that untranscended sphere:
Love, that while all ages run
Holds the wheeling worlds in one;
Love, that, as your sages tell,
Soars to heaven and sinks to hell."

The Shoes of Happiness.

No, we have no right to judge one another. The monks condemned poor
Barnabas because he was not worshiping as they had always worshiped.
They too forgot the real spirit of worship as they condemned him:

"'Nothing like this do the rules provide!
This is scandal, this is a shame,
This madcap prank in Our Lady's name.
Out of the doors with him; back to the street:
He has no place at Our Lady's feet!'"

The Shoes of Happiness.

However, then, as now, men are not the final judges:

"But why do the elders suddenly quake,
Their eyes a-stare and their knees a-shake?
Down from the rafters arching high,
Her blowing mantle blue with the sky--
Lightly down from the dark descends
The Lady of Beauty and lightly bends
Over Barnabas stretched in the altar place,
And wipes the dew from his shining face;
Then touching his hair with a look of light,
Passes again from the mortal sight.
An odor of lilies hallows the air,
And sounds as of harpings are everywhere.

"'Ah,' cry the elders, beating the breast,
'So the lowly deed is the lofty test!
And whatever is done from the heart to Him
Is done from the height of the Seraphim!'"

The Shoes of Happiness.


"HOW THE GREAT GUEST CAME"

A STUDY OF COMPLETE HAPPINESS IN SERVICE

I have never found a poem which more truly pictures the Christ and how
he comes to human beings than this one of Markham's. Conrad the cobbler
had a dream, when he had grown old, that the Master would come "His
guest to be." He arose at dawn on that day of great expectations,
decorated his simple shop with boughs of green and waited:

"His friends went home; and his face grew still
As he watched for the shadow across the sill;
He lived all the moments o'er and o'er,
When the Lord should enter the lowly door--
The knock, the call, the latch pulled up,
The lighted face, the offered cup.
He would wash the feet where the spikes had been;
He would kiss the hands where the nails went in;
And then at last he would sit with him
And break the bread as the day grew dim."

The Shoes of Happiness.

But the Master did not come. Instead came a beggar and the cobbler gave
him shoes; instead came an old crone with a heavy load of faggots. He
gave her a lift with her load and some of the food that he had prepared
for the Christ when he should come. Finally a little child came, crying
along the streets, lost. He pitied the child and left his shop to take
it to its mother; such was his great heart of love. He hurried back
that he might not miss the Great Guest when he came. But the Great
Guest did not come. As the evening came and the shadows were falling
through the window of his shop, more and more the truth, with all
its weight of sadness, bore in upon him, that the dream was not to come
true; that he had made a mistake; that Christ was not to come to his
humble shop. His heart was broken and he cried out in his
disappointment:

"Why is it, Lord, that your feet delay?
Did you forget that this was the day?"

The Shoes of Happiness.

Then what sweeter scene in all the lines of the poetry of the world
than this that follows? Where is Christ more wonderfully and simply
summed up; his spirit of love, and care?

"Then soft in the silence a voice he heard:
'Lift up your heart, for I kept my word.
Three times I came to your friendly door;
Three times my shadow was on your floor.
I was the beggar with bruised feet;
I was the woman you gave to eat;
I was the child on the homeless street!'"

The Shoes of Happiness.

One is reminded here of Masefield's "The Everlasting Mercy," wherein he
speaks as Markham speaks about the child:

"And he who gives a child a treat
Makes joy-bells ring in Heaven's street;
And he who gives a child a home
Builds palaces in Kingdom Come;
And she who gives a baby birth
Brings Saviour Christ again to earth."

The Shoes of Happiness.

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of one of these my
brethren, ye have done it unto me," another great-hearted Poet once
said; and these words Markham, in "How the Great Guest Came," has made
real.


"SCRIPT FOR THE JOURNEY"

"Script for the Journey" is all that it claims to be. Markham is not
doing what Lindsay did. Lindsay started out on a long journey with only
his poems for money. He meant to make his way buying his food with a
verse. And he did that very thing. But Markham had a different idea, an
idea that all of us need script for that larger journey, script that is
not money and script that does not buy mere material food, but food for
the soul. He means it to be script that will help us along the hard
way. And he who has this script is rich indeed, in his inner life.


"THE PLACE OF PEACE"

One would pay much for peace at any time, but especially when one on
the journey of life is wearied unto death with sin, and bickering,
and trouble and hurt and pain. Life holds so much heartache and
heartbreak. Markham has herein the answer:

"At the heart of the cyclone tearing the sky,
And flinging the clouds and the towers by,
Is a place of central calm;
So here in the roar of mortal things,
I have a place where my spirit sings,
In the hollow of God's palm."

The Shoes of Happiness.

And when we learn to put our business ventures there as Abbey has his
Sir Galahad do in the Vigil panel of "The Search for the Holy Grail,"
in Boston Library; and when we have learned to put our homes, and our
children, and our souls "In the hollow of God's palm," there will be
peace on the journey of life. Yes, that is good script.


"ANCHORED TO THE INFINITE"

What a lesson the poet brings us from the great swinging bridge at
Niagara, as he tells of the tiny thread that was flown from a kite
from shore to shore; and then a larger string, and then a heavy cord,
and then a rope, and finally the great cable, and the mighty bridge.
And this he applies to life!

"So we may send our little timid thought
Across the void out to God's reaching hands--Send
out our love and faith to thread the deep--
Thought after thought until the little cord
Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
And--we are anchored to the Infinite."

The Shoes of Happiness.

Who does not need to know how simple a thing will lead to infinite
anchorage? Who does not need to know that just the tiny threads of
love and faith will draw greater cords and greater, stronger ropes
until at last the chasm between man and God on the journey is bridged,
and we may be anchored to him forever. This indeed is good script for
the journey of life Godward.


"THERE IS NO TIME FOR HATE"

The world is full of hate these days. War-mad Germany produced "The
Hymn of Hate," the lowest song that ever was written in the history of
the world. It seems impossible that a censorship so strict could ever
let such a mass of mire out to the world. But when one reads this
Markham poem, he somehow feels that life is so big, and yet so brief,
that even in war we are all brother-men and, as the opening lines say,

"There is no time for hate, O wasteful friend:
Put hate away until the ages end.
Have you an ancient wound? Forget the wrong.
Out in my West, a forest loud with song
Towers high and green over a field of snow,
Over a glacier buried far below."

The Shoes of Happiness.

And if all the world would learn the meaning of this great phrase,
"There is no time for hate," the world would happier be. Good script
for the journey? The best there is, is to know "There is no time for
hate."




II

VACHEL LINDSAY, POET OF TOWN; AND CITY TOO
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Congo, and
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven, Published by the Macmillan
Company, New York.]

A STUDY OF CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES IN VILLAGE AND CITY; ON TEMPERANCE,
MISSIONS, AND RACES


Vachel Lindsay is not only a poet but he is also a preacher. I do not
know whether he is ordained or not, but in a leaflet that he recently
sent me, he says, "Mr. Lindsay offers the following sermons to be
preached on short notice and without a collection, in any chapel that
will open its doors as he passes by: 'The Gospel of the Hearth,' 'The
Gospel of Voluntary Poverty,' 'The Holiness of Beauty.'"

His truly great book, "The Congo," that poem which so sympathetically
catches the spirit of the uplift of the Negro race through
Christianity, that weird, musical, chanting, swinging, singing,
sweeping, weeping, rhythmic, flowing, swaying, clanging, banging,
leaping, laughing, groaning, moaning book of the elementals, was
inspired suddenly, one Sabbath evening, as the poet sat in church
listening to a returned missionary speaking on "The Congo." Nor a Poe
nor a Lanier ever wrote more weirdly or more musically.

[Illustration: VACHEL LINDSAY]

The poet himself, Christian to the bone, suggests that his poetry must
be chanted to get the full sweep and beauty. This I have done, alone
by my wood fire of a long California evening, and have found it
strangely, beautifully, wonderfully full of memories of church. I think
that it is the echo of old hymns that I catch in his poetry. Biblical
they are, in their simplicity, Christian until they drip with love.


CHRIST AND THE CITY SOUL

I think that no Christian poet has so caught the soul of the real city.
One phrase that links Christ with the city is the old-fashioned yet
ever thrilling phrase, "The Soul of the City Receives the Gift of the
Holy Spirit."

An electrical sign suggests prayer to him. It is a unique thought in "A
Rhyme About An Electrical Advertising Sign," the lines of which startle
one almost with their newness:

"Some day this old Broadway shall climb to the skies,
As a ribbon of cloud on a soul-wind shall rise.
And we shall be lifted rejoicing by night,
Till we join with the planets who choir their delight.
The signs in the street and the signs in the skies
Shall make a new Zodiac guiding the wise,
And Broadway make one, with that marvelous stair
That is climbed by the rainbow-clad spirits of prayer."

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