Anger, discontent and drooping hopes? Life is too strong for you- ANNE RUTLEDGE * 1 Out of me unworthy and unknown "With malice toward none, with charity for all." Shining with justice and truth. I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds, Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation. Bloom forever, O Republic, From the dust of my bosom! SILENCE 2 I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea, And the silence of a man and a maid, And the silence for which music alone finds the word, *See pages 51, 114, 232, 245, 252, 323. 1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. 2 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Songs and Satires by Edgar Lee Masters. And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin, And the silence of the sick When their eyes roam about the room. And I ask: For the depths Of what use is language? A beast of the field moans a few times When death takes its young. And we are voiceless in the presence of realities— We cannot speak. A curious boy asks an old soldier Sitting in front of the grocery store, How did you lose your leg?' And the old soldier is struck with silence, Or his mind flies away Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg. It comes back jocosely And he says, (6 A bear bit it off." And the boy wonders, while the old soldier Dumbly, feebly lives over The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon, The shrieks of the slain, And himself lying on the ground, And the hospital surgeons, the knives, And the long days in bed. But if he could describe it all He would be an artist. But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds Which he could not describe. There is the silence of a great hatred, And the silence of a deep peace of mind, Into a realm of higher life. And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech, There is the silence of defeat. There is the silence of those unjustly punished; Suddenly grips yours. There is the silence between father and son, Even though he be misunderstood for it. There is the silence that comes between husband and wife. There is the silence of those who have failed; And the vast silence that covers Broken nations and vanquished leaders. There is the silence of Lincoln, Thinking of the poverty of his youth. And the silence of Napoleon After Waterloo. And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc Saying amid the flames, "Blesséd Jesus "- And there is the silence of age, Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it In words intelligible to those who have not lived And there is the silence of the dead. If we who are in life cannot speak Of profound experiences, Why do you marvel that the dead Stephen Grane Stephen Crane, whose literary career was one of the most meteoric in American letters, was born at Newark, New Jersey, November 1, 1871. After taking a partial course at Lafayette College, he entered journalism at sixteen and, until the time of his death, was a reporter and writer of newspaper sketches. When he died, at the age of thirty, he had ten printed volumes standing to his credit, two more announced for publication, and two others which were appearing serially. Crane's most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), was written when he was twenty-two years old. What is even more astonishing is the fact that this detailed description of blood and battlefields was written by a civilian far from the scene of conflict. This novel (Crane's second) was an instantaneous and international success. The Atlantic Monthly pronounced it "great enough to set a new fashion in literature"; H. G. Wells, speaking of its influence in England, said Crane was "the first expression of the opening mind or a new period a record of an intensity beyond all precedent." Crane's other books, although less powerful than The Red Badge of Courage, are scarcely less vivid. The Open Boat (1898) and The Monster (1899) are full of an intuitive wisdom and a sensitivity that caused Wells to exclaim The man who can call these brilliant fragments' would reproach Rodin for not completing' his fragments." At various periods in Crane's brief career, he experimented in verse, seeking to find new effects in unrhymed lines, a new acuteness of vision. The results were embodied in two volumes of unusual poetry, The Black Riders (1895) and War Is Kind (1899), lines that strangely anticipated the Imagists and the epigrammatic free verse that followed fifteen years later. Besides his many novels, short stories and poems, Crane was writing, at the time of his death, descriptions of the world's great battles for Lippincott's Magazine; his droll Whilomville Stories for boys were appearing in Harper's Monthly and he was beginning a series of similar stories for girls. It is more than probable that this feverish energy of production aggravated the illness that caused Crane's death. He reached his refuge in the Black Forest only to die at the journey's end, June 5, 1900. I SAW A MAN I saw a man pursuing the horizon; I was disturbed at this; I accosted the man. "It is futile," I said, "You can never "You lie," he cried, And ran on. |