The Winter Scene

Bliss Carman

Bliss Carman was born at Fredericton, New Brunswick, April 15, 1861. He was educated at the University of New Brunswick, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard. He studied law and was engaged in editorial work, but since 1894 has devoted himself entirely to literary pursuits. He is the author of many volumes of prose and verse.

The following blank-verse description of a northern winter runs true to form, having a more expansive background than the more localized and specific descriptions found in Whittier's "Snow Bound." If the reader keenly visualizes the scenes described, the vocal rendition will offer no special difficulty.

I

THE rutted roads are all like iron; the skies
Are keen and brilliant; only the oak-leaves cling
In the bare woods, or hardy bitter-sweet;
Drivers have put their sheepskin jackets on;
And all the ponds are sealed with sheeted ice
That rings with stroke of skate and hockey-stick,
Or in the twilight cracks with running whoop.
Bring in the logs of oak and hickory,
And make an ample blaze on the wide hearth.
Now is the time, with winter o'er the world,
For books and friends and yellow candle-light,
And timeless lingering by the settling fire,
While all the shuddering stars are keen and cold.

2

Out of the silent portal of the hours,

When frosts are come and all the hosts put on
Their burnished gear to march across the night
And o'er a darkened earth in splendor whine,

Slowly above the world Orion wheels

His glittering square, while on the shadowy hill
And throbbing like a sea-light through the dusk,
Great Sirius rises in his flashing blue.

Lord of the winter night, august and pure,
Returning year on year untouched by time,
To kindle faith with thy immortal fire,
There are no hurts that beauty cannot ease,
No ills that love cannot at last repair,
In the courageous progress of the soul.

3

Russet and white and gray is the oak wood
In the great snow. Still from the North it comes,
Whispering, settling, sifting through the trees,
O'erloading branch and twig. The road is lost.
Clearing and meadow, stream and ice-bound pond
Are made once more a trackless wilderness
In the white hush where not a creature stirs ;
And the pale sun is blotted from the sky.
In that strange twilight the lone traveller halts
To listen while the stealthy snowflakes fall.
And then far off toward the Stamford shore,
Where through the storm the coastwise liners go,
Faint and recurrent on the muddled air,

A foghorn booming through the smother,-hark!

4

When the day changed and the mad wind died

down,

The powdery drifts that all day long had blown Across the meadows and the open fields,

Or whirled like diamond dust in the bright sun,
Settled to rest, and for a tranquil hour

The lengthening bluish shadows on the snow
Stole down the orchard slope, and a rose light
Flooded the earth with glory and with peace,
Then in the west behind the cedars black
The sinking sun made red the winter dusk
With sudden flare along the snowy ridge,-

Like a rare masterpiece by Hokusai,

Where on a background gray, with flaming breath
The crimson dragon dies in dusky gold.
Reprinted by permission of the author.

Deserted

Madison Cawein

Madison Cawein was born at Louisville, Kentucky in 1865, and died in 1915. He began writing at twenty-two years of age and continued until his death. He was preeminently a poet of Nature.

Picture yourself abroad on such a night as the poet here describes. See the old, deserted house. Strive to reproduce in yourself the emotions you would feel when contemplating it. The pitch is low, the movement slow.

THE old house leans upon a tree

Like some old man upon a staff;
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:

The starlight, fluttering in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers. Now

A fox-hound howls: and through the night, Like some old ghost from out its grave,

The moon comes misty white.

Reprinted by permission of, and special arrangement with, E. P. Dutton and Company.

Down the Mississippi

John Gould Fletcher

John Gould Fletcher was born at Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1886. He was educated at Harvard, but soon after went to England, where he has since spent most of his time. His early works were highly fanciful, but "Lincoln" and his later works are strong and moving. His works include "Goblins and Pagodas," published by Houghton Mifflin and Co., "The Tree of Life," published by Chatto and Windus, London, and "Breakers and Granite," published by The Macmillan Company, New York.

This composition might well be styled a "poem of pictures and moods." The moods are the result of the pictures. Let the reader see the different scenes vividly and let them work their magic upon his "bodily texture." Notice a certain unity, too, through the entire poem. Do not neglect the sublimity of the last lines.

Embarkation

DULL masses of dense green,

The forests range their sombre platforms.

Between them silently, like a spirit,

The river finds its own mysterious path.

Loosely the river sways out, backward, forward, Always fretting the outer side;

Shunning the invisible focus of each crescent, Seeking to spread into shining loops over fields:

Like an enormous serpent, dilating, uncoiling, Displaying a broad scaly back of earth-smeared gold;

Swaying out sinuously between the dull motionless forests,

As molten metal might glide down the lip of a vase of dark bronze.

Heat

As if the sun had trodden down the sky,

Until no more it holds air for us, but only humid vapor,

The heat, pressing upon earth with irresistible languor,

Turns all the solid forest into half-liquid smudge.

The heavy clouds, like cargo-boats, strain slowly up 'gainst its current;

And the flickering of the heat haze is like the churning of ten thousand paddles

Against the heavy horizon, pale blue and utterly windless,

Whereon the sun hangs motionless, a brassy disk of flame.

Full Moon

Flinging its arc of silver bubbles, quickly shifts the

moon