Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. (1878–1962). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1920.

The Civil Engineers

THEY stormed the forts of Nature,

And marched with blast and drill

On her bulwark cliffs and sapping swamps,—

Her strength against their skill.

Though her torrents twisted their bridges

Like the horns of a mountain ram

And burst like a hungry tiger

Through the buttressed walls of their dam;

They threw out new spans like spiders,

And copied the beaver’s art,

And broke the desert’s slumber

With bloom in its rainless heart.

They tunneled her snowy shoulders,

Or wriggled up like a snake,

And laced her with iron girders

Like a martyr lashed to a stake.

And clove her spine-like ridges

From isthmus shore to shore,

And plied their mighty dredges

As she let the landslides pour,

She was harsh as a fickle mistress,

And stern as an angered god,

Then soft as the lap of a mother,

As they conquered her great untrod.

From the circles around the Arctics

To Cancer and Capricorn,

From the yellow streams of China

To the base of the Matterhorn;

They have vanquished their untamed Mother;

Though she thunders volcanic guns,

They force her to do their bidding,

Like masterful rebel sons.

Contemporary Verse