Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Jessie B. Rittenhouse, ed. (1869–1948). The Little Book of Modern Verse. 1917.

John G. Neihardt

The Poet’s Town

’MID glad green miles of tillage

And fields where cattle graze,

A prosy little village,

You drowse away the days.

And yet—a wakeful glory

Clings round you as you doze;

One living lyric story

Makes music of your prose.

Here once, returning never,

The feet of song have trod;

And flashed—Oh, once forever!—

The singing Flame of God.

These were his fields Elysian:

With mystic eyes he saw

The sowers planting vision,

The reapers gleaning awe.

Serfs to a sordid duty,

He saw them with his heart,

Priests of the Ultimate Beauty,

Feeding the flame of art.

The weird, untempled Makers

Pulsed in the things he saw;

The wheat through its virile acres

Billowed the Song of Law.

The epic roll of the furrow

Flung from the writing plow,

The dactyl phrase of the green-rowed maize

Measured the music of Now.

Sipper of ancient flagons,

Often the lonesome boy

Saw in the farmers’ wagons

The chariots hurled at Troy.

Trundling in dust and thunder

They rumbled up and down,

Laden with princely plunder,

Loot of the tragic Town.

And once when the rich man’s daughter

Smiled on the boy at play,

Sword-storms, giddy with slaughter,

Swept back the ancient day!

War steeds shrieked in the quiet,

Far and hoarse were the cries;

And Oh, through the din and the riot,

The music of Helen’s eyes!

Stabbed with the olden Sorrow,

He slunk away from the play,

For the Past and the vast To-morrow

Were wedded in his To-day.

Rich with the dreamer’s pillage,

An idle and worthless lad,

Least in a prosy village,

And prince in Allahabad;

Lover of golden apples,

Munching a daily crust;

Haunter of dream-built chapels,

Worshipping in the dust;

Dull to the worldly duty,

Less to the town he grew,

And more to the God of Beauty

Than even the grocer knew!

Corn for the buyers, and cattle—

But what could the dreamer sell?

Echoes of cloudy battle?

Music from heaven and hell?

Spices and bales of plunder

Argosied over the sea?

Tapestry woven of wonder,

And myrrh from Araby?

None of your dream-stuffs, Fellow,

Looter of Samarcand!

Gold is heavy and yellow,

And value is weighed in the hand!

And yet, when the years had humbled

The Kings in the Realm of the Boy,

Song-built bastions crumbled,

Ash-heaps smothering Troy;

Thirsting for shattered flagons,

Quaffing a brackish cup,

With all of his chariots, wagons—

He never could quite grow up.

The debt to the ogre, To-morrow,

He never could comprehend:

Why should the borrowers borrow?

Why should the lenders lend?

Never an oak tree borrowed,

But took for its needs—and gave.

Never an oak tree sorrowed;

Debt was the mark of the slave.

Grass in the priceless weather

Sucked from the paps of the Earth,

And the hills that were lean it fleshed with green—

Oh, what is a lesson worth?

But still did the buyers barter

And the sellers squint at the scales;

And price was the stake of the martyr,

And cost was the lock of the jails.

Windflowers herald the Maytide,

Rendering worth for worth;

Ragweeds gladden the wayside,

Biting the dugs of the Earth;

Violets, scattering glories,

Feed from the dewy gem:

But dreamers are fed by the living and dead—

And what is the gift from them?

Never a stalk of the Summer

Dreams of its mission and doom:

Only to hasten the Comer—

Martyrdom unto the Bloom.

Ever the Mighty Chooser

Plucks when the fruit is ripe,

Scorning the mass and letting it pass,

Keen for the cryptic type.

Greece in her growing season

Troubled the lands and seas,

Plotted and fought and suffered and wrought—

Building a Sophocles!

Only a faultless temple

Stands for the vassal’s groan;

The harlot’s strife and the faith of the wife

Blend in a graven stone.

Ne’er do the stern gods cherish

The hope of the million lives;

Always the Fact shall perish

And only the Truth survives.

Gardens of roses wither,

Shaping the perfect rose:

And the poet’s song shall live for the long,

Dumb, aching years of prose.

King of a Realm of Magic,

He was the fool of the town,

Hiding the ache of the tragic

Under the grin of the clown.

Worn with the vain endeavor

To fit in the sordid plan;

Doomed to be poet forever,

He longed to be only a man;

To be freed from the god’s enthralling,

Back with the reeds of the stream;

Deaf to the Vision calling,

And dead to the lash of the Dream.

But still did the Mighty Makers

Stir in the common sod;

The corn through its awful acres

Trembled and thrilled with God!

More than a man was the sower,

Lured by a man’s desire,

For a triune Bride walked close at his side—

Dew and Dust and Fire!

More than a man was the plowman,

Shouting his gee and haw;

For a something dim kept pace with him,

And ever the poet saw;

Till the winds of the cosmic struggle

Made of his flesh a flute,

To echo the tune of a whirlwind rune

Unto the million mute.

Son of the Mother of mothers,

The womb and the tomb of Life,

With Fire and Air for brothers

And a clinging Dream for a wife;

Ever the soul of the dreamer

Strove with its mortal mesh,

And the lean flame grew till it fretted through

The last thin links of flesh.

Oh, rending the veil asunder,

He fled to mingle again

With the dred Orestean thunder,

The Lear of the driven rain!

Once in a cycle the comet

Doubles its lonesome track.

Enriched with the tears of a thousand years,

Æschylus wanders back.

Ever inweaving, returning,

The near grows out of the far;

And Homer shall sing once more in a swing

Of the austere Polar Star.

Then what of the lonesome dreamer

With the lean blue flame in his breast?

And who was your clown for a day, O Town,

The strange, unbidden guest?

’Mid glad green miles of tillage

And fields where cattle graze;

A prosy little village,

You drowse away the days.

And yet—a wakeful glory

Clings round you as you doze;

One living, lyric story

Makes music of your prose!