shelter me.

  There flows the river, and it seems asleep
  So far away,
  Yet I remember whip of wave and roar
  Of wind that rose and smote against the oar,
  Smote and retreated,
  Proud but defeated,
  While I rejoiced and rowed into the brine,
  Drawing on wet and heavy-straining line
  The great cod quivering from the deep
  As counterplay.

  What is the solace of these hills and vales
  That rise and fall?
  What is there glorious in the greenwood glen,
  Or twittering thrush or wing of darting wren?
  Give me the gusty,
  Raucous and rusty
  Call of the sea gull in the echoing sky,
  The wild shriek of the winds that cannot die,
  Give me the life that follows the bending sails,
  Or none at all!

ERNEST BENSHIMOL

A BANQUET ONE MEMORY FROM SOCRATES

  AFTER the song the love, and after the love the play,
  Flute girl and pretty boy blowing
  Bubbles of sparkling
  Wine into darkling
  Beards of a former austerity, stern even now, but
  Fast growing
  Foolish, with less of a stately
  Reserve that held them sedately.
  Oh Zeus, what a sight! With the wine dripping off it,
  The grin of an ass on a bald-pated prophet.

  After the feast the night, and after the night the day,
  Fool and philosopher stirring
  With the day dawning,
  Stretching and yawning,
  While in each wine-throbbing, desolated brain is the
  Wheeling and whirring
  Of thousands of bats, that the slaking
  Of throats will not hinder from aching,
  No wine for the brow that is beating to bursting,
  But water at morning is quench for the thirsting!

ERNEST BENSHIMOL

SONG

  OUT of one heart the birds and I together,
  Earth hushed in twilight,
  Low through the live-oaks hung heavy with silver,
  Gemmed with the sky-light,
  Under the great wet star
  Shaking with light, we jar
  Lute-voiced the silence with intervaled music.

  While under the margined world the slow sun lingers,
  Flaming earth's portal,
  Over the lilac dusk spreads his great fingers—
  Earth is immortal!
  While the frail beauty dies.
  Dream in the dreamer's eyes,
  All the good gladness turns praise for the singers.

  Hark, 'tis the breath of life! Hush! and I need it;
  Northern, gigantic,—
  Questing the silences, herding the sudden foam
  Down the Atlantic;
  Leaves from the autumn's store
  Shrill at my desert door,
  They and I out of one heart that is grieving.

GEORGE CABOT LODGE

THE WORLDS

  I SAW an idler on a summer day
  Piping with Iris by a dancing brook;
  And all his world was rife with Pleasures gay,
  And languid Follies smiled from every nook.

  I saw an artist in a world of dreams,
  His rainbow rising from his radiant task,
  To throw its magic prism beams
  O'er Fancy's changeful masque and counter-masque.

  I saw Toil—stooping underneath a world
  Whereon his foster-brothers lighter tread,
  His skyward pinions ever closer furled
  Before the grim necessity of bread!

  I saw a sinner working hard to be
  Worthy his death-wage from the mint of time;
  I saw a sailor, unto whom the sea
  Was hearth and hope and love and wedding-chime.

  I saw a mother living in her child—
  I saw a saint among his fellow men—
  Brave soldiery before my eyes defiled
  And solemn-hearted scholars—Sudden then

  I cried: "The stars are no less neighborly
  In their ethereal remoteness swung,
  Than these near human orbits wherein we
  Live out our lives and speak our chosen tongue!

  "Love seek through all—less there be one
  Least soul unlit within the night—
  And over all, the selfsame sun
  Give each creation light!"

MARTHA GILBERT DICKINSON BIANCHI

THE RIOT

  YOU may think my life is quiet.
  I find it full of change,
  An ever-varied diet,
  As piquant as 'tis strange.

  Wild thoughts are always flying,
  Like sparks across my brain,
  Now flashing out, now dying,
  To kindle soon again.

  Fine fancies set me thrilling,
  And subtle monsters creep
  Before my sight unwilling:
  They even haunt my sleep.

  One broad, perpetual riot
  Enfolds me night and day.
  You think my life is quiet?
  You don't know what you say.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

HUNGER

  I'VE been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a saint,
  Their bend of weary knees and their contortions long and faint,
  And the endless pricks of conscience, like a hundred thousand pins,
  A real perpetual penance for imaginary sins.

  I love to wander widely, but I understand a cell,
  Where you tell and tell your beads because you've nothing else to tell,
  Where the crimson joy of flesh, with all its wild fantastic tricks,
  Is forgotten in the blinding glory of the crucifix.

  I cannot speak for others, but my inmost soul is torn
  With a battle of desires making all my life forlorn.
  There are moments when I would untread the paths that I have trod.
  I'm a haunter of the devil, but I hunger after God.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

EXIT GOD

  Of old our father's God was real,
  Something they almost saw,
  Which kept them to a stern ideal
  And scourged them into awe.

  They walked the narrow path of right
  Most vigilantly well,
  Because they feared eternal night
  And boiling depths of Hell.

  Now Hell has wholly boiled away
  And God become a shade.
  There is no place for him to stay
  In all the world He made.

  The followers of William James
  Still let the Lord exist,
  And call Him by imposing names,
  A venerable list.
  But nerve and muscle only count,
  Gray matter of the brain,
  And an astonishing amount
  Of inconvenient pain.

  I sometimes wish that God were back
  In this dark world and wide;
  For though sonic virtues He might lack,
  He had his pleasant side.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD

ROUSSEAU

  THAT odd, fantastic ass, Rousseau,
  Declared himself unique.
  How men persist in doing so,
  Puzzles me more than Greek.

  The sins that tarnish whore and thief
  Beset me every day.
  My most ethereal belief
  Inhabits common clay.