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Giant Hours With Poet Preachers

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"Where I drank deep the bliss of being young,
The strife and sweet potential flux of things
I sought Youth's dream of happiness among!"

Poems by Alan Seeger.


THE SONG OF BEAUTY

And closely akin to Youth always is Beauty. Beauty and Youth walk arm
in arm everywhere, and one may even go so far as to say anywhere. Youth
cares not where he goes as long as Beauty walks beside him. He will
walk to the ends of the earth. Indeed, he prefers the long way home.
Anybody who has known both Youth and Beauty knows this, and it need not
be argued about much, thank God. And so it is most natural to find this
young poet singing the lyric of Beauty even as he sings the lyric of
Youth. How understandingly he addresses Beauty, and how reverently in
"An Ode to Natural Beauty"!

"Spirit of Beauty, whose sweet impulses,
Flung like the rose of dawn across the sea,
Alone can flush the exalted consciousness
With shafts of sensible divinity,
Light of the World, essential loveliness."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

Then, talking about the "Wanderer" as though that character were some
far off person no kin to the poet (a way that poets have to hide the
pulsing of their own hearts), Seeger writes of Beauty. But we who know
him cannot be made to think that this "Wanderer" is a fellow we do not
know; "nor Launcelot, nor another." It is he, the poet of whom we
write. It bears his imprint. It bears his trade mark. It is stamped
"with the image of the king." He cannot hide from us in this:

"His heart the love of Beauty held as hides
One gem most pure a casket of pure gold.
It was too rich a lesser thing to hold;
It was not large enough for aught besides."

Poems by Alan Seeger.


THE SONG OF FAME

Fame always lures Youth. Perhaps later experience proves that it is
indeed a hollow thing, hardly worth striving for. But to Youth there is
no goal that calls more insistently than Fame. Youth and Beauty and
Fame--how closely akin they are! If Beauty and Fame keep him company,
Youth is next the stars with delight. And so it is natural that this
young poet shall sing the song of Fame with exuberant enthusiasm. He
says in "The Need to Love":

"And I have followed Fame with less devotion,
And kept no real ambition but to see
Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean
My dream of palpable divinity."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And while we are listening to the music of these human stars, the music
of the celestial spheres set down in human words, let us catch again
the poetic echo of that third line and let it linger long as we listen,
"Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean," and

"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled,
Till 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,"

that, as Edwin Markham sings, this echo is the echo of the eternal
poetic music.

With these wondrous lines he answers the question which he himself asks
in "Fragments," "What is Success?"

"Out of the endless ore
Of deep desire to coin the utmost gold
Of passionate memory: to have lived so well
That the fifth moon, when it swims up once more
Through orchard boughs where mating orioles build
And apple trees unfold,
Find not of that dear need that all things tell
The heart unburdened nor the arms unfilled."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

Joy comes next in our treatment of the outstanding singings of this
singing poet, and he himself has given us the connecting link in the
following lines:

"He has drained as well
Joy's perfumed bowl and cried as I have cried:
Be Fame their mistress whom Love passes by."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And thus smoothly we pass from Fame to Joy and hear him sing of this
fourth high peak of Youth.


THE SONG OF JOY

Whatever he did, whatever he sang, whatever he lived, this man swept
all things else aside and plunged in over head. He loved to swim and he
loved to dive. Perhaps into his living and his writing he carried this
athletic joy also, and as he lived he lived to the full. It seems so as
one reads in "I Loved" these impassioned lines:

"From a boy
I gloated on existence. Earth to me
Seemed all sufficient and my sojourn there
One trembling opportunity for joy."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And then one pauses to weep awhile, and the lines grow dim as he reads
them again to know that this man, who so loved to live, who gloated on
existence, who saw life as a trembling opportunity for Joy, must leave
it so soon. And yet he left it nobly. Again in "An Ode to Antares" he
sings of Joy:

"What clamor importuning from every booth!
At Earth's great market where Joy is trafficked in
Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!"

Poems by Alan Seeger.

Kindly Age, Age who had not lost his love, always sings like that to
Youth; always tells Youth to live while he may, play while the
playworld is his. Every poet who has older grown, from Shakespeare to
Lowell, and yet retained his love, has told us this. We expect it of
older poets, but here a young poet sees it all clearly; that Youth must
buy Joy while his purse is full with Youth. And ye who rob Youth of
playtime, of Joy, ye capitalists, ye money makers and life destroyers,
listen to this dead poet who yet lives in these words. Fathers,
mothers, let childhood spend its all for Joy while the purse of Youth
is full. It will be empty after while and it shall never be filled
again with Youth. So says the Poet.


THE SONG OF LOVE

The discriminating reader of Seeger soon sees, however, that, while he
sings as needs he must, because of the springs that are within him
bubbling over, sings of Youth, and Beauty, and Fame, and Joy, yet he
knows that these are not all of life. He knows that there are higher
things than these. These higher things are Love, Death, God--what a
trilogy!

Love is all. He is sure of this. He is true to this. Romantic love he
knows--love of comrade, love of God. In this same "An Ode to Natural
Beauty" his final conclusion is that Love is best after all:

"On any venture set, but 'twas the first
For Beauty willed them, yea whatever be
The faults I wanted wings to rise above;
I am cheered yet to think how steadfastly
I have been loyal to the love of Love!"

Poems by Alan Seeger.

This is more than romantic love; it is the "love of Love."

And lest this be not strong enough, he sings in "The Need to Love" as
great a song as man ever heard on this great theme:

"The need to love that all the stars obey
Entered my heart and banished all beside.
Bare were the gardens where I used to stray;
Faded the flowers that one time satisfied."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

Then, not content, he sets up an altar of poetry and dedicates it to
Love and lights a fire of worship there, and leaves it not, nor night
nor day:

"All that's not love is the dearth of my days,
The leaves of the volume with rubric unwrit,
The temple in times without prayer, without praise,
The altar unset and the candle unlit."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

If Love be not queen to him, the palace is cold and barren; the "altar
unset and the candle unlit"


THE SONG OF DEATH

Like Brooke, a victim of the Hun, so Seeger, also a victim of the
barbarian, seemed to feel the constant presence of Death, an unseen
guest at the Feast of Youth and Joy and Fame and Love. Perhaps the war
made these two imaginative poets think of Death sooner than Youth
usually gives him heed. But most men will think of Death when they are
face to face with the shadow day and night as were these
soldier-crusading poets; when they see him stalking in every trench, in
every wood, on every hill and road, and in every field and village. But
how bravely he spoke of Death!--

"Learn to drive fear, then, from your heart.
If you must perish, know, O man,
'Tis an inevitable part
Of the predestined plan."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And again in this same poem, "Makatooh," he sings of Death:

"Guard that, not bowed nor blanched with fear
You enter, but serene, erect,
As you would wish most to appear
To those you most respect.

"So die, as though your funeral
Ushered you through the doors that led
Into a stately banquet hall
Where heroes banqueted;

"And it shall all depend therein
Whether you come as slave or lord,
If they acclaim you as their kin
Or spurn you from their board."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

What a challenge this is to all who must die in this war, to all lads
who are giving their lives heroically in God's great cause of liberty
in his world--this challenge to die so that you may be welcomed into
the fraternity of heroes!

Without doubt Seeger's best-known poem, and one which illustrates also
most strongly his attitude toward Death, is that poem entitled "I Have
a Rendezvous With Death," from which we quote:

"I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade;
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple blossoms fill the air--
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

* * * * *

"God knows, 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear,...
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town;
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous."

Poems by Alan Seeger.


THE SONG OF GOD

From the lighter thoughts of Youth, Joy, Fame, Beauty, through the
"long, long thoughts of Youth"; through Love and Death it is not a long
way to climb to God. We would not expect this young poet to be thinking
much in this direction, but he does just the same. I have even found
those who say that he was not a God-man, but these poems refute that
slander on a dead man and poet. I find him singing in "The Nympholept":

"I think it was the same: some piercing sense
Of Deity's pervasive immanence,
The life that visible Nature doth indwell
Grown great and near and all but palpable
He might not linger but with winged strides
Like one pursued, fled down the mountainsides."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

This reminds one instantly of the haunting Christ of Thompson's "The
Hound of Heaven." And again in the presence of War's death the poet
felt that other and greater presence without doubt, as these words
prove:

"When to the last assault our bugles blow:
Reckless of pain and peril we shall go,
Heads high and hearts aflame and bayonets bare,
And we shall brave eternity as though
Eyes looked on us in which we would see fair--
One waited in whose presence we would wear,
Even as a lover who would be well-seen,
Our manhood faultless and our honor clean."

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And with magnificent acknowledgment of the divine plan of it all, of
life and war and all, he sweeps that truly great poem, "The Hosts,"
to a swinging climax in its last tremendous stanza; which, fitting too,
shall be the closing lines of this chapter on our dead American,
martyred poet.

He first speaks of the marching columns of soldiers as "Big with the
beauty of cosmic things. Mark how their columns surge!"

"With bayonets bare and flags unfurled,
They scale the summits of the world--"

Poems by Alan Seeger.

And then:

"There was a stately drama writ
By the hand that peopled the earth and air
And set the stars in the infinite
And made night gorgeous and morning fair,
And all that had sense to reason knew
That bloody drama must be gone through."

Poems by Alan Seeger.





ENGLISH POETS


JOHN OXENHAM

ALFRED NOYES

JOHN MASEFIELD

ROBERT SERVICE

RUPERT BROOKE




[Illustration: JOHN OXENHAM.]

V

JOHN OXENHAM
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works The Vision
Splendid, All's Well, and The Fiery Cross Published by George H. Doran
Company, New York.]

WHO MAKES ARTICULATE THE VOICE OF WAR, PEACE, THE CROSS, THE CHRIST.


In the first volume of The Student in Arms, that widely read book of
the war, Donald Hankey has a chapter on "The Religion of the
Inarticulate," in which he shows that the "Tommy" who for so long has
been accused of having no religion, really has a very definite one. He
has a religion that embraces all the Christian virtues, such as love,
sacrifice, brotherhood, and comradeship, but he has never connected
these with either Christ or the church. His religion is the "Religion
of the Inarticulate." Hankey then shows that this war is articulating
religion as never before.

John Oxenham, Poet-Preacher, is giving articulation to the voice of
Christianity--a voice ringing out from over and above the thunder of
the guns, the blare, the flare, the outcry, the hurt, the pain and
anguish of the most awful war that earth has ever suffered. Some of us
have been thinking of this war in terms of Christian hope. We have
thought that we see in it a new Calvary out of which shall come a new
resurrection to the spiritual world. We have dreamed that men are being
redeemed through the sacrifice, through the spirit of service and
brotherhood thrust upon the world by war's supreme demands. We have
thought all of this, but we have not been able to make it articulate.
Now comes a poet to do it for us.

What magnificent hope sings out, even in the titles that Oxenham has
selected for his books in these days of darkness, anguish and
lostness. After his first book, Bees in Amber, comes that warm
handclasp of strength: that thrill of hope; that word of a watchman in
the night, like a sentinel crying through the very title of his second
book, "All's Well." Then came The Vision Splendid, and soon we are to
have The Fiery Cross. The publishers were kind enough to let me examine
this last book while it was still in the proof sheets. It is the one
great hope book of the war. Every mother and father who has a boy in
the war, every wife who has a husband, every child who has a father
will thrill with a new pride and a new dignity after reading The Fiery
Cross.


WAR AND ITS VOICE

No poet has voiced America's reasons for being in the war as has
Oxenham, and nowhere does he do it better than in "Where Are You
Going, Great-Heart?" the concluding stanza of which sums up compactly
America's high purposes:

"Where are you going, Great-Heart?
'To set all burdened peoples free;
To win for all God's liberty;
To 'stablish His sweet Sovereignty.'
God goeth with you, Great-Heart!"

The Vision Splendid.

To those who go to die in war the poet addresses himself in lines which
he titles "On Eagle Wings":

"Higher than most, to you is given
To live--or in His time, to die;
So, bear you as White Knights of Heaven--
The very flower of chivalry!
Take Him as Pilot by your side,
And 'All is well' whate'er betide."

The Vision Splendid.

"If God be with you, who can be against you?" is the echo that we hear
going and coming behind these great Christian lines. Indeed, behind
every poem that Oxenham writes we can hear the echoes of some great
scriptural word of promise, or hope or faith or courage. The Christian,
as well as those who never saw the Bible or a church, will feel at home
with this poet anywhere. The advantage that the Christian will have in
reading him is that he will understand him better.

Turning to those who stay at home and have lost loved ones, with what
sympathy and deep, tender understanding does he write in "To You Who
Have Lost." You may almost see a great kindly father standing by your
side, his warm hand in yours as he sings:

"I know! I know!--
The ceaseless ache, the emptiness, the woe--
The pang of loss--
The strength that sinks beneath so sore a cross.
'Heedless and careless, still the world wags on,
And leaves me broken,... Oh, my son I my son!'"

"Yea--think of this!--
Yea, rather think on this!--
He died as few men get the chance to die--
Fighting to save a world's morality.
He died the noblest death a man may die,
Fighting for God, and Right, and Liberty--
And such a death is Immortality."

All's Well.

If those who have lost loved ones "Over There" cannot be buoyed by
that, I know not what will buoy them, what will comfort.

Oxenham too gives us a picture of a battlefield where birds sing and
roses bloom, just as do Service and several other poets who have been
in the midst of the conflict. We have become familiar with this
picture, but no writer yet has caught its full, eternal meaning and
pressed it down into three lines for the world as has this man; in
"Here, There, and Everywhere":

"Man proposes--God disposes;
Yet our hope in Him reposes
Who in war-time still makes roses."

The Fiery Cross.

But this poet in his interpretation of war does not forget peace; does
not forget that it is coming; does not forget that the world is hungry
for it; does not forget that it is the duty of the poets and the
thinking men and women of the world not only to get ready for it, but
to lead the way to it.


PEACE AND ITS VOICE

In a remarkable poem called "Watchman! What of the Night?" we see this
great heart standing sentinel on the walls of the world, watching the
midnight skies red with the blaze and glow of carnage:

"Watchman! What of the night?
No light we see;
Our souls are bruised and sickened with the sight
Of this foul crime against humanity.
The Ways are dark---
'I SEE THE MORNING LIGHT!'

* * * * *

"Beyond the war-clouds and the reddened ways,
I see the promise of the Coming Days!
I see His sun rise, new charged with grace,
Earth's tears to dry and all her woes efface!
Christ lives! Christ loves! Christ rules!
No more shall Might,
Though leagued with all the forces of the Night,
Ride over Right. No more shall Wrong
The world's gross agonies prolong.
Who waits His time shall surely see
The triumph of His Constancy;
When, without let, or bar, or stay,
The coming of His Perfect Day
Shall sweep the Powers of Night away;
And Faith replumed for nobler flight,
And Hope aglow with radiance bright,
And Love in loveliness bedight
SHALL GREET THE MORNING LIGHT."

All's Well.

Then, as is most fair and logical, the poet tells us how we are to
build again after peace comes. We must needs know that. The newspapers
are full of a certain popular move--and success to it--to rebuild the
destroyed cities of France and Belgium. But the rebuilding that the
poet speaks of in "The Winnowing" is a deeper thing. It is a spiritual
rebuilding without which there is no permanent peace in the world and
no permanent safety for the material world.

"How shall we start, Lord, to build life again,
Fairer and sweeter, and freed from its pain?
'Build ye in Me and your building shall be
Builded for Time and Eternity.'"

All's Well.

There is the answer to the world's cry in short, sharp, succinct lines;
compact as a biblical phrase; and as meaningful. Hearken it, ye world!
Only in Him can the new spiritual world be built for "Time and
Eternity." And only to those who so believe and hold shall the world
belong henceforth. At least so says our poet:

"To whom shall the world henceforth belong
And who shall go up and possess it?"

which question he himself answers in the same verse:

"To the Men of Good Fame
Who everything claim--
This world and the next--in their Master's great name--

"To these shall the world henceforth belong,
And they shall go up and possess it;
Overmuch, overlong, has the world suffered wrong,
We are here by God's help to redress it."

The Fiery Cross.

And finally in this fight for peace he does not forget prayer, and in
"The Prayer Immortal," which is introduced, as are so many of Oxenham's
poems, by a phrase from the Bible, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be
done," he admonishes those who seek peace:

"So--to your knees--And,
with your heart and soul, pray God
That wars may cease,
And earth, by His good will,
Through these rough ways, find peace!"

The Fiery Cross.


THE CROSS AND ITS VOICE

The voice of the cross of Calvary is being heard this day of war as it
has never been heard before. The world is resonant with its message.
Every soldier, every nation, every home, every mother and father and
child and wife who has suffered because of this war, shall henceforth
understand the Christ and his cross the better. All through this
writer's interpretations of the war we find the cross to the fore. To
him the cross symbolizes the war. This war is the cross in a deep and
abiding sense. In "Through the Valley" he says:

"And there of His radiant company,
Full many a one I see,
Who has won through the Valley of Shadows
To the larger liberty.
Even there in the grace of the heavenly place,
It is joy to meet mine own,
And to know that not one but has valiantly won,
By the way of the Cross, his crown."

The Vision Splendid.

Thank God for that hope! Thank God for that word!

In "The Ballad of Jim Baxter" this same thought is more vividly and
strongly set forth. It is the story of one type of German cruelty of
which we have heard in the war dispatches several times and that have
been confirmed on the spot; the story of the Germans nailing men to
crosses. Jim Baxter suffered this experience:

"When Jim came to, he found himself
Nailed to a cross of wood,
Just like the Christs you find out there
On every country road.

"He wondered dully if he'd died,
And so, become a Christ;
'Perhaps,' he thought, 'all men are Christs
When they are crucified.'"

The Vision Splendid.

And in this homely lad's homely way of putting his cruel experience who
knows but that there may be such truth as yet we cannot see in the dark
chaos of war?


THE CHRIST AND HIS VOICE

It isn't a far step from the cross to the Christ of the cross, and in
this man's poetry the two mingle and commingle so closely that one
overlaps the other. But always these two things stand out--the cross
and the Christ. And in the new volume, The Fiery Cross, one finds
many pages devoted to this great thought alone.

Of the tenderness of the Christ he speaks most sympathetically, having
in mind again the lads that war has taken. In "The Master's Garden"
hear him:

"And some, with wondrous tenderness,
To His lips He gently pressed,
And fervent blessings breathed on them,
And laid them in His breast."

The Vision Splendid.

And then of his sweetness, referring again to the "Jim Baxter," we have
a wonderful picture of the oft mentioned Comrade in White, who is so
real to the wounded soldiers:

"His face was wondrous pitiful,
But still more wondrous sweet;
And Jim saw holes just like his own
In His white hands and feet;
But His look it was that won Jim's heart,
It was so wondrous sweet.

"'Christ!'--said the dying man once more,
With accent reverent,
He had never said it so before,
But he knew now what Christ meant--"

The Vision Splendid.

Oxenham has great faith in humanity. From time to time we find him
expressing man's kinship with the stars and with God and Christ.
"Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels" this poet takes
seriously, thank God. This word from the Book means something to
him. And so it is in a poem called "In Every Man" we see him finding
Christ in every man:

"In every soul of all mankind
Somewhat of Christ I find,
Somewhat of Christ--and Thee;
For in each one there surely dwells
That something which most surely spells
Life's immortality.

* * * * *

"And so, for love of Christ--and Thee,
I will not cease to seek and find,
In all mankind,
That hope of immortality
Which dwells so sacramentally
In Christ--and Thee."

The Fiery Cross.

He feels Christ's eternity so much that he cries out for him
continually and will not be satisfied without him. He knows that he
must have the Christ if he wants to grow great enough to meet life's
demands. In a poem, "A Prayer for Enlargement," which I quote in full
because of its brevity, one feels this dependence:

"Shrive me of all my littleness and sin!
Open your great heart wide!
Open it wide and take me in,
For the sake of Christ who died!

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