University of Virginia Library

A SLAYER OF POETS.

I hate new poets? Well, and if I do,
Leave me to hug my hate; it's mine not yours.
Once I adored the whole soft-hearted tribe,
And treasured many a stanza writ by them
That now to read stirs nausea. I have sat
Aloof in my small attic at eighteen,
And watched the stars push early silver out
Above the city roofs, and with my pipe
Blurring stark chairs and bedsteads till they looked
Ideal for symmetry, dreamed Orient dreams
That mocked to-morrow's breakfast as a myth,
And turned the uncouth brick stable opposite
Into a Moorish mosque. Bah! poetry!
I loved it once as bees love hollyhocks,
As humming-birds love honeysuckle; I've passed
Whole hours in yonder tramp-roamed park by night,
To note the summer fountain flowering there
Into mysterious petals of pale foam
Below the regnant moon. But work was work,
And mine dull drudgery with a pen of prose
That wrote those bald mechanic facts I scorned,
Yet dared not shrink from, since the task meant bread.
Then, later on, I married; scribes like me,
That scarce with decency can help one life,
Are sure to crave the helping of one more.
We clutch, we drowning men, at matrimony,
As though 'twere accident's fortuitous plank
The Islands of the Blest had drifted us.
Of course my bride was dowerless, and yet all
The diamonds of Brazil were not to me
Worth those two virgin amethysts, her sweet eyes!
I wrote more poetry in our honeymoon,
And afterward as well, when sturdier toil
Gave me a jealous interim. Then chanced
Her motherhood. That made me think of prose,
For prose was knit to thrift, while verse, forsooth,
Murmured “starvation” as I wrought its rhymes.
More children came, and with them more demand,
Exaction, charge, responsibility,
And cold insidious disillusionment,
Till one day, fingering at a sheaf of songs,
I said: “They are only such red sparks as fly
From the iron on the anvil ere 'tis bent
Into obedience—brilliant chaff at best,
Not the big metal forged by blows of art,
Beaten and crushed by burly power to shapes
Of beauty or majesty or delicacy.
“Why here's no poet at all,” I told myself,
“But only a fellow that has witched his brain
Into the fallacy of seeming one—
Just as if some stray shepherd of Greek times,
Wandering a hillside where the laurels clung,
Had suddenly seen, grouped on a low slant cloud,
The awful Nine, with fillets and white gowns,
And afterward gone dreamy and strange of mood,
Himself more witless than his nomad flock,
Spoiled for a shepherd, yet elected not
To destiny divine as Ganymede's!”
Well, brooding thus, I clenched a stoic's teeth
And flung those lyrics headlong in the fire.
They flamed from nothingness to nothingness,
Leaving my dead ambition in their dead
Ashes! And now you tell me I am called
The slayer of poets? Not a name inapt.
Granted I write invective merciless
On each new poet that dares lift his head;
The very vitriol that I choose for ink
Has heart's blood blended with its acrid flow,
For disappointment like to mine has bred
More critics like to me than ever yet
Genius made glorious bards of. Mark you that!