Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

November on the Lake Michigan Dunes

Howard Mumford Jones

THE DUNES are graves that shift and dance,

Showing a skeleton

When by the pushing wind’s advance

Their coffin is undone,

And in the ribbed and bitter sand

A murdered tree puts out

A white limb like a ghastly hand,

A dead trunk like a snout.

The dunes are ghosts that line the beach,

Hidden and veiled and wild,

Now holding silence, each with each,

Now lisping like a child.

And to their speech the waves reply,

The wind and the low waves,

Whispering and wildly wondering why

They talk of ghosts and graves.

They are as graves, they are as ghosts,

They are as sphinxes set

For umpires on these desolate coasts

With life and death at fret:

Life with her grass and juniper,

Death with his cloud of sand,

She strives with him and he with her

Between the lake and land.

The poplars and the pines are hers

His are the sands and wind;

Sometimes his desperate breathing blurs

The air till she grows blind.

She clutches up the dune to seek

Sometime his throat to kill;

And always the troubled waters speak,

Always the sea-gulls shrill.

The wind is fellow once with Death,

Storming against the land;

He howls across the hills, his breath

Burdened with snow and sand.

The wind is fellow once with Life,

Sweeping against the sea,

Sweeping across the waves in strife

With Death for enemy.

Yet life and death and land and lake—

To him what things are these?

Whether the sand-dunes shoreward shake,

Fleeing the broken seas,

Whether the water be as glass

Or wild beasts without chains,

They change and shift and scud and pass,

Only the wind remains!

Only the wind! The dead leaves flee,

Like smoke the blue lake fades,

The hills flow down into the sea,

And night and day like shades

About a carried lantern run,

Jigging alternately,

And star and moon and bolted sun

Slide crazily in the sky.

O God! The whole world, like the dunes,

Dances fantastic-wise

Down to what end, before what tunes,

Beneath what dancing skies!

And blown along like grains of sand

Ourselves must whirl and flee

Before a wind across the land

Into what open sea!