The very bats awaken That hang in clusters in Kentucky caves 175 To find her in the open where she smiles. So we are somehow sure, Stands by, alert for flight, to bear his lord 215 And know its longing as he knows his own. For all the bonds shall be broken and rent in sunder, 225 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 Assurance of her jubilant emprise, Or had its will among the fruits and vines Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. III 26 By justice for us, ere we lift the gage. 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. 96 80 Of sorrow or of blame Liftest the lyric leafage from her brow, And pointest a slow finger at her shame? And heart with crumbled heart climbs in the rose: The untaught hearts with the high heart that knew V 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, Out of the gladdening west is sinister If these things be indeed after these, Our fluent men of place and consequence 155 Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase, Or for the end-all of deep arguments One jot of their pure conquest put to hire, 210 The cup of trembling shall be drainèd quite, Eaten the sour bread of astonishment, 216 With ashes of the hearth shall be made white Our hair, and wailing shall be in the tent; |