William L. Stidger

“ Nor shall one ever forget a month's communion with Fujiyama, that solitary, great and worshiped mountain of Japan; sacred as a shrine; beautiful with snow; graceful as a Japanese woman's curving cheek; bronzed by summer; belted with crimson clouds by sunset like a Japanese woman's Obie. It, too, presented its unforgettable Physical Flash-Lights.
The first glimpse was one of untold spun-gold glory. There it stood.
"There it is! There it is! Look!" a fellow traveler cried.
"There is what?" I called. We were on top of a great American College building in Tokyo.
"It's Fuji!" ”

“ The white and crimson roses of that little cottage in Brittany, the quiet and peace and promise and vision of a Jeanne d'Arc in the village of Domremy; the blooming of a billion red poppies in the fields of France; the blanketing of the earth with a covering of white snow sufficient to hide the ugliness of war, even for a day, all give promise of the God who, in the end, when he has given man every chance to redeem himself, and who, even amid cruel wars "still makes roses," will finally bring to pass "peace on earth; good-will to men." ”

“ Who has not seen factory windows in village, town, and city, and who has not known that "Factory windows are always broken"? How this smacks of pall, and smoke, and dirt, and grind, and hurt and little weak children, slaves of industry! Thank God, Vachel Lindsay, that the Christian Church has found an ally in you; and poet and preacher together—for they are both akin—pray God we may soon abolish forever child slavery. Yes, no wonder "Factory windows are always broken." The children break them because they hate a prison. ”

“ He leapt to his feet with a contemptuous look at his Japanese captors.
Then like flashing piston rods of steel his arms shot into the air above his head three times, shouting in their mute patriotism, "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!"
Nor are the women void of this determination for freedom. It beats in their brave hearts. It is a great flame in their souls as well as in the hearts of the children and men of the peninsula.
"The soul's armor is never set well to heart unless a woman's hand has braced it, and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails!" ”

“ War is grim. War is serious. War is full of hurt and hate and pain and heartache and loneliness and wounds, and mud and death and dearth; but the American soldier spends more time laughing than he does crying; more time singing than he does moaning; more time playing than he does moping; more times shouting than he does whimpering; more time hoping than he does despairing; and because of this effervescent spirit of sunshine and laughter his morale is the best morale that any army in the history of the world has ever shown. ”

“ And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger—a quartette of immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland, "faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough to save the world. ”

“ The beautiful kimonos of the Geisha girls of Japan; the crimson, gold, and rose glory of the Sing Song Girls of China; the flashing reds of the brown-skinned Spanish belles of the Philippines, as they glide, like wind-blown Bamboo trees through the streets; and the lurid, livid, robes which men and women alike wear in Borneo and Java. In fact all of the clothes of the Orient, are flame-clothes. There are no quiet colors woven into the gown of the Oriental. The Oriental does not know what soft browns are. Crimson is the favorite color for man or woman. ”

“ One never quite knows all that this verse means until he has been in France and has seen the suffering, the heartache, the loneliness, the mud, and dirt and hurt; the wounds and pain and death which are everywhere.
Then he turns from all the suffering to find a blood-red poppy blooming in the field behind him; or a million of them covering a green field like a great blanket. These poppies are exactly like our golden California poppies. Like them they grow in the fields and along the hedges; even covering the unsightly railroad-tracks, as if they would hide the ugly things of life. ”

“ Some of us have been thinking of this war in terms of Christian hope. We have thought that we see in it a new Calvary out of which shall come a new resurrection to the spiritual world. We have dreamed that men are being redeemed through the sacrifice, through the spirit of service and brotherhood thrust upon the world by war's supreme demands. We have thought all of this, but we have not been able to make it articulate. Now comes a poet to do it for us.
What magnificent hope sings out, even in the titles that Oxenham has selected for his books in these days of darkness, anguish and lostness. ”

“ And, after all, that is what America must learn to do, to get beyond, and to see beyond, the wounds, into the soul of the boy; to see beyond the blinded eyes, the scarred faces, the legless and armless lads, into the glory of their new-born souls, for no boy goes through the hell of fire and suffering and wounds that he does not come out new-born. ”

“ MANHOOD AND ITS VIGOR Virility like unto steel is the very mark of Noyes. But as this study of Childhood has shown, it is a virility touched with tenderness. As Bayard Taylor sings:
"The bravest are the tenderest,
The loving are the daring!"
And this is Noyes. Noyes knew Manhood, he sang it, he challenged it too, he crowned it in "Drake"; he placed it a little lower than the gods. Hear this supreme word, enough to lift man to the skies:
"Where, what a dreamer yet, in spite of all,
Is man, that splendid visionary child
Who sent his fairy beacon through the dusk!" ”

“ We want America to know that our faith in the Independence of Korea has not died! The fire burns higher to-day than ever. The Japanese cruelties are worse! The need is greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our determination is deeper than ever before! I have come here this day, knowing that you are going back to America; I came to write these words in my own blood that you may know; and that America may know; that our faith is a flame [56] which burns out like the beacon lights on the Korean hills, never to die! ”

“ Men may sing as they are marching into training-camps; they may sing when they board the boats for France now; they may sing as they march into rest-billets, but they were not singing that day as they marched into the great battle-line of Europe.
I heard no laughter. I heard no loud talking, I heard no singing; I heard only the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet, and the crunching of the great motor-trucks, and the patter of horses as the officers galloped along their lines. That army of American men knew that the job on which they were entering was not child's play. ”

“ When one comes back from such a trip, having fortified himself with the reading of many books written about these far lands, in addition to his [xi] travel, one still has the profound conviction that, after all is said, done, and thought out, the only honest way to picture these vast stretches of land and humanity is to confess that all is in motion; like a great mass of bees in a hive, one on top of the other, busy at buzzing, buying, selling, living, dying, climbing, achieving; groping in the dark; moving upward by an unerring instinct toward the light. ”

“ Poems by Alan Seeger.
Kindly Age, Age who had not lost his love, always sings like that to Youth; always tells Youth to live while he may, play while the playworld is his. Every poet who has older grown, from Shakespeare to Lowell, and yet retained his love, has told us this. We expect it of older poets, but here a young poet sees it all clearly; that Youth must buy Joy while his purse is full with Youth. And ye who rob Youth of playtime, of Joy, ye capitalists, ye money makers and life destroyers, listen to this dead poet who yet lives in these words. ”

“ It is watching for Hun planes, and it plays all night long from north to south, from east to west, restlessly, eagerly, quickly, like a "hound of the heavens" guarding the earth. First it sweeps the horizon, and then it suddenly shoots straight up into the zenith like another sun, and it seems to flood the very skies. No German plane can cut through that path of light without being seen, and one night I had the rare privilege of seeing a plane caught by the search-light on its ever-vigilant patrol. ”

“ One night the sky was flame from sea to zenith across Manila Bay. It was like a great Flame of the Forest tree in full bloom. Against this sky of flaming sunset-clouds, hundreds of ships, anchored in the bay, lit their lesser crimson lights; while, now and then, a battleship which was signaling to another ship, flashed its message [21] of light against the fading glow of glory in the crimson sunset.
"It is light talking unto light; flash unto flash; crimson unto crimson!" ”

“ Poems by Alan Seeger.
And while we are listening to the music of these human stars, the music of the celestial spheres set down in human words, let us catch again the poetic echo of that third line and let it linger long as we listen, "Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean," and
"Forget it not till the crowns are crumbled,
Till the swords of the kings are rent with rust;
Forget it not till the hills lie humbled,
And the Springs of the seas run dust,"
that, as Edwin Markham sings, this echo is the echo of the eternal poetic music. ”

“ There is another Physical Flash-light that will never die.
Coming out of the Singapore Straits one evening at sunset, bound for the island of Borneo across the South China Sea, I was sitting on the upper deck of a small Dutch ship. The canvas flapped in the winds. A cool, tropical breeze fanned our faces. Back of us in our direct wake a splashing, tumbling, tumultuous tropical sunset flared across the sky. It was crimson glory. In the direct path of the crimson sun a lighthouse flashed its blinking eyes like a musical director with his baton beating time. ”

“ Even the great guns on the top of the hill looked like white fingers pointing toward Berlin. The roads and fields and hills of France had suddenly been transformed as by a magic wand into things beautiful and white.
War is black. War is muddy. War is bloody. War is gray. War is full of hate and hurt and wounds and blood and death and heartache and heartbreak and homesickness and loneliness. ”