to-night Will it never end? Is it a tale you strum? Wind: Play on. There is nor hope nor mutiny in you. Arthur Davison Ficke Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years' service in France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to literature exclusively. Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative of which are Sonnets of a Portrait Painter (1914), The Man on the Hilltop (1915) and An April Elegy (1917). In these, the author has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision with an intensified seriousness. Having been an expert collector and student of Japanese prints, Ficke has written two books on this theme. His intellectual equipment is reinforced by a strong sense of satire. Writing under the pseudonym "Anne Knish," he was one of the co-authors (with Witter Bynner) of Spectra (1916), which, caricaturing some of the wilder outgrowths of the new poetry, was taken seriously by a majority of the critics and proved to be a brilliant hoax. PORTRAIT OF AN OLD WOMAN She limps with halting painful pace, Her cheeks hang gray in waxen folds Where was a breast, sunk bones she clasps; A ropy throat sends writhing gasps She stands, unhuman, bleak, aghast: An empty temple of the Lord From which the jocund Lord has passed. He has builded him another house, Whenceforth his flame, renewed and bright, THE THREE SISTERS Gone are the three, those sisters rare And one was mine. Ye mourners, weave for the sleeping hair For one was wise and one was fair, SONNET There are strange shadows fostered of the moon, When hills take on the noble lines of death, Badger Clark was born at Albia, Iowa, in 1883. He moved to Dakota Territory at the age of three months and now lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Clark is one of the few men who have lived to see their work become part of folk-lore; many of his songs having been adapted and paraphrased by the cowboys who have made them their own. A version of one of his poems ("The Glory Trail"), after wide circulation among the ranchers and cowpunchers, was printed as an example of anonymous folk-song in Poetry; A Magazine of Verse under the title "High-Chin Bob"-and credited to (6 Author Unknown." Sun and Saddle Leather (1915) and Grass-Grown Trails (1917) are the expression of a native singer; happy, spontaneous and seldom "literary." There is wind in these songs; the smell of camp-smoke and the colors of prairie sunsets rise from them. Free, for the most part, from affectations, Clark achieves an unusual ease in his use of the local vernacular. THE GLORY TRAIL1 'Way high up the Mogollons, But High-Chin Bob, with sinful pride 1 From Sun and Saddle Leather by Badger Clark. right, 1915. Richard G. Badger, Publisher. Copy "Oh, glory be to me," says he, That lion licked his paw so brown And dreamed soft dreams of veal- "Oh, glory be to me," laughs he. No human man as I have read Darst loop a ragin' lion's head, Nor ever hawse could drag one dead 'Way high up the Mogollons That top-hawse done his best, Through whippin' brush and rattlin' stones, From canyon-floor to crest. But ever when Bob turned and hoped A limp remains to find, A red-eyed lion, belly roped But healthy, loped behind. |