Century Readings for a Course in American Literature

130

And forgets the lure of the butterflies. And west is east, if you follow the trail to the end;

And east is west, if you follow the trail to the end;

And the East and the West in the Spring of the World shall blend

As a man and a woman that plight
Their troth in the warm spring night. 135
And the spring for the East is the sap in the
heart of a tree:

And the spring for the West is the will in the wings of a bird;

But the spring for the East and the West alike shall be

An urge in their bones and an ache in their spirit, a word

That shall knit them in one for Time's foison, once they have heard.

And do I not hear

140

And life slips its tether

When the boys get together,

The very bats awaken

That hang in clusters in Kentucky caves 175
All winter, breathless, motionless, asleep,
And feel no alteration of the air,
For all year long those vasty caverns keep,
Winter and summer, even temperature;
And yet when April whistles on the hill, 180
Somehow, far in those subterranean naves,
They know, they hear her, they obey her will,
And wake and circle through the vaulted
aisles

To find her in the open where she smiles.

So we are somehow sure,

Stands by, alert for flight, to bear his lord 215
Into the strange heart of the alien world,
Till he shall live in it as in himself

And know its longing as he knows his own.
Behind a little, where the shadows fall,
Lingers Religion with deep-brooding eyes, 220
Serene, impenetrable, transpicuous
As the all-clear and all-mysterious sky,
Biding her time to fuse into one act
Those other twain, man's right hand and his
left.

For all the bonds shall be broken and rent in sunder, 225

By this dumb turmoil in the soul of man,
Of an impending something. When the

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY (1869-1910)

Another poet of unfulfilled promise, born in the West and educated in the East,- born in this case in Indiana and educated at Harvard was William Vaughn Moody who at the time of his death at forty-one (a life five years longer than Hovey's) was just coming unto a wide and deserved recognition as a poet and dramatist. Graduating in 1893, he was called two years later to the faculty of Chicago University, as professor of English literature, and remained there until his death. His Masque of Judgment, 1900, and his Poems, made him known to a judicious few, but after his The Great Divide, 1906, a prose drama in which the narrow ideals of the Puritan East are contrasted with the new spirit of the great West, he became widely popular. Another play. The Faith Healer, which followed in 1909, was not so successful. In all of his work despite certain classic influences discernible in his poetic trilogy The Fire Bringer, The Masque of Judgment, and the fragmentary The Death of Eve, there is an intense spirit of Americanism. His task as he conceived it was to interpret the old Puritanism of the New England beginnings, with its self-torturing ideals and its slavery to conscience, and contrast it with the new free conceptions of the great West. His Ode in Time of Hesitation is his strongest and most sustained poetic composition, the protest of the conservative and backward looking East against the rising tide of internationalism that seemed from the standpoint of the old Boston régime threatening to sweep over all known landmarks.

Through street and mall the tides of people go

1 Copyright by William Vaughn Moody.

Heedless; the trees upon the Common show
No hint of green; but to my listening heart 16
The still earth doth impart

Assurance of her jubilant emprise,
And it is clear to my long-searching eyes
That love at last has might upon the skies, 20
The ice is runneled on the little pond;
A telltale patter drips from off the trees;
The air is touched with southland spiceries,
As if but yesterday it tossed the frond
Of pendent mosses where the live-oaks grow
Beyond Virginia and the Carolines,

Or had its will among the fruits and vines
Of aromatic isles asleep beyond

Florida and the Gulf of Mexico.

III

By justice for us, ere we lift the gage.
We have not sold our loftiest heritage.
The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat.
And scramble in the market-place of war;
Her forehead weareth yet its solemn star. 90
Here is her witness: this, her perfect son,
This delicate and proud New England soul
Who leads despised men, with just-un-
shackled feet,

Up the large ways where death and glory meet,

To show all peoples that our shame is done, That once more we are clean and spiritwhole.

loomed

Huge on the mountain in the wet sea light, Whence now, and now, infernal flowerage

And heart with crumbled heart climbs in the rose:

This mountain fortress for no earthly hold Of temporal quarrel, but the bastion old 125 Of spiritual wrong,

Built by an unjust nation sheer and strong,

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