Hervey Allen

“ Leading the swinging boat's crew to the beach;
And all the world slides up—
And then the stars slide down—
As ocean breathes; while evening falls,
And destiny is being rowed ashore.
The twilight-muffled bells of town, the bark of dogs,
The distant shouts, and smell of burning wood,
Fall graciously upon their sea-tired sense.
Wide-trousered, barefoot sailors carry them to land,
Tho' snake-voiced waves flaunt frothing up the beach ”

“ But still he hears the bell,
A frozen sound clear as a cold, deep well.
The king is melancholy mad, I guess.
At nights
The tower windows flash with lights
And many an artisan
Comes after midnight with the garden's plan
Of walls and towers
And terraces and flowers,
And spreads them wondering upon the floor;
The queen comes seldom now and least
Of all the priest;
There is no priest alive
That can the king's soul shrive;
The dead hermit from his cell
Has lured him close to heaven with his bell,
A strange, a mad, a melancholy spell. ”

“ Underneath this motley canopy of gray and blue, lush with the early tenderness of leaves, the pink [90] azaleas open light-shy eyes like pupils of albinos, sloughing off delicate pods that smoulder, when the wind blows, live coals among the gray of furnace ashes. Here are magenta carpets fit for leprechauns, when crescent moons glimmer upon the ocher ponds, and the slow fireflies light their phantom lanterns, weaving to and fro about the ivory-orange marble of the tomb.
Each April day brings opalescent waves of birds that dart like living brands about the aisles to light the flower lamps ”

“ The fear of life came on him as he lay;
"Outside the world is garish," thought the king,
And then—and then he heard the lone bell ring
And saw the peace and green light of a wood;
It was a very vision of escape,
A high-walled garden on the crescent cape,
Fair as an evil thing but good.
The cape is luniform
Whereon the hermit's form
Lies bony white and still
Beside the chapel on the hill;
The long grass waves as if he breathes
At every breeze that weaves ”

“ The tides flow in long, gray, weed-streaked lines;
[68] The salt water, like the planet's lifeblood, goes
As if the earth were breathing with long-taken breaths
And we were very near her heart.
No wonder that these faces show a tired dismay,
Looking on burning suns, and scarcely blithe in May;
Spring's coming is too fierce with life;
And summer is too long;
The stunted pine trees struggle with the sand
Till the eyes sicken with their dwarfing strife. ”

“ It is no exaggeration to say, and not a derogation for the purpose of argument to admit, that in the final analysis most of those who have essayed the task of depicting provincial conditions in the South, involving the essentially differing peculiarities of minor Southern localities where the plantation, industrialism, the negro, and the Mountain White are all factors—it is we repeat, no derogation to say that for the most part those who have attempted to handle these themes in a major literary way have fallen short of the mark. ”

“ Where marriage torches flare,
And warriors drain the pulque to the bride?"
Then with a voice grown weak with many tears,
She spoke, as in a dream, and said,
"Yours was the hand that slew him on the stone—
You know that he is dead."
The far feasters shouted and he heard her moan. ”

“ That flashed and smiled beneath a bonnet shade;
Life with the lure of all its swift disguise.
Then from the soaring lyric of the spire,
Like the composite voice of all the town,
The bells burst swiftly into singing fire
That wrapped the building, and which showered down
Bright cadences to flash along the ways
Loud with the splendid gladness of the days.
War took the city, and the laughter died
From lips that pain had kissed. One after one
[22] All lovely things went down the sanguine tide,
While death made moaning answer to the gun. ”

“ Rang the lone hermit's bell,
"Alone-lin-lang-alone,"
Clear as a wounded angel's voice,
Soft as a death spell that old women croon—
The harbor gulf lay placid,
And in the west there hung a half a moon.
Through all his life the bell never ceases to lure him. Weak from wounds, he sees a vision of the peace of death in life in the hermit's garden on the cape. ”

“ Porgy, indeed is the first American novel about the American negro which depicts him faithfully, as he exists in a particular place, and yet presents him as a purely artistic but faithfully realistic study of a phase of human life. Mr. Heyward and his first novel were thus a nice example of a particular environment producing an artist peculiarly capable of exploiting the intriguing differences of his province in universal terms. ”

“ Here ends the second scroll with the sign of
a skull set with turquoise stones,
which is the symbol of
Coatlicue, the Goddess
of Death.
III Here begins the third scroll with the sign of a man in a black canoe, which is the symbol of a soul crossing the Lake of Death.
And no one dared awake the king—
He slept—to him it seemed
White vapor covered everything,
And through its rifts there gleamed
A figure striding through the mist;
Dimly he saw the head,
The white skull set with turquoise stones,
The goddess of the dead. ”

“ In the spring when the first midges dance and warm days lure the last-year's butterfly, the scarlet of the cardinals begins to flicker through the ivory smoke of the mosses. Then the alligator leaves his winter ooze, and the widening "O" of the ripple which his gar-like nose makes, travels slowly across the sullen ponds, where the pendant gonfalons of the mosses kiss their imaginary duplicates, hanging head downward in the red water.
When the first frog honks with the bull-voiced trumpet of resurgent spring, the jasmine rings its little hawk-bells, golden harp notes through the forest ”

“ The wind comes fooling like an ape
And the strange boy-breasted sea things mourn.
The rock pools seep and creep,
Laugh like a mad child in a moonstruck sleep,
And then flow onward like an easy dream,
Talking among the rocks,
Into one valley stream,
That ticks and drips and strikes like distant clocks
Till with a snaky motion
It curves three times
And glides into the ocean.
Marry! The king now is a lover! ”

“ Then the American writers and critics at large, especially since the World War, may be said to have suddenly realized, indeed to have discovered, two startling but paradoxical facts, i.e., that at last there was a typical and very standard American type, but that he or she was not altogether a desirable person, and secondly and by contrast, that the country was not just one level, usual United States, but in reality a union of many different localities with varying backgrounds, traditions, and philosophies. ”

“ Some say she weeps,
But who can tell?
Why should the queen weep when she hears a bell?
The queen, desiring the love of her lord above all things, calls him from his garden, but is mocked by the voice of the solitude. ”

“ Gray beach, gray twilight, and gray sea—
How strange the scrub palmettoes down the coast!
No purple-castled heights, like dear Auvergne,
Against the background of the Puy de Dome,
But land as level as the sea, a sandy road
That twists through myrtle thickets
Where the black boys lead. ”

“ Perhaps the most significant thing about the book and its author was the fact that, for the first time, certainly in this generation, a novel had been written about the character of an American negro which was at once true to life and a work of art. Mr. Heyward did not regard his material from any standpoint except that of the literary artist. He did not pity, patronize, suggest, assume the white man's burden, or try to add to or lighten that of the colored man. ”

“ All day the mists take shape
And the high hawks slant drifting down the cape—
By night the heavenly hunter leads his hounds,
Wandering the zodiacal bounds,
And all the white stars march,
Flaming in the unalterable arch,
While the wind swings the listless bell
That rings the hermit's knell—
Sleep well, sleep well!
III.
By his art the king casts four new bells that blend in perfect harmony with the hermit's. ”

“ The white man hears, but cannot feel.
But it is always Sunday on sea-islands.
Plantation bells, calling the pickers from the fields,
Are like old temple gongs;
And the wind tells monodies among the pines,
Playing upon their strings the ocean's songs;
The ducks fly in long, trailing lines;
Skeows squonk and marsh-hens quank
Among the tidal flats and rushes rank on rank;
On island tufts the heron feeds its viscid young ”

“ Then Meeting Street first knew St. Michael's steeple,
When redcoats marched with royal drums a-banging,
Or merchants stopped gowned tutors to inquire
Why school let out to see a pirate hanging;
And gentlemen took supper in the street,
When candle-shine from tables guled the dark,
While others passing by would be discreet
And take the farther side without remark,
Pausing perhaps to snuff the balmy savor
Of turtle-soup mulled with the bay-leaves' flavor:
These walls beheld them, and these lingering trees
That still preempt the middle of the gutter ”

“ Peculiarly tempting, to those artists who have desired to present the more extreme provincial types of character, has been the wide field of the South, "Uncle Sam's Other Country", where the feudal tradition of the plantation, the isolated Mountain Whites, or the realm of the negro have successively, but not always successfully, engaged various pens. ”

“ Each sleeps and knows not that she is so near,
Or at the most sinks deeper in his dream,
And life, and all blithe things they once held dear,
Are far and faint like voices of a stream.
Hands off our dead! For all they did forbear
To drag them from their graves to point some speech;
Less sickening was the gas reek over there,
Less deadly was the shrapnel's whirring screech;
You cannot guess the uttermost they gave;
Those martyrs did not die for chattering daws
To loot false inspiration from the grave
When mouthing fools turn ghouls to gain applause. ”

“ Who hate solitude,
And march with drums—
Beat—beat—beat,
Down every ancient street,
The young giants! Minded like boys:
Action for action's sake they love
And noise for noise."
Voice of a Poet
"The fire of the sunset
Is remembered at midnight,
But forgotten at dawn.
While the old stars set,
Let us speak of their glory
Before they are gone."
H.A.
[20]
SILENCES [1]
You who have known my city for a day
And heard the music of her steepled bells,
Then laughed, and passed along your vagrant way,
Carrying only what the city tells
To those who listen solely with their ears ”