THE BLACK PANTHER

THE BLACK PANTHER
A BOOK OF POEMS

BY
JOHN HALL WHEELOCK

AUTHOR OF
“THE HUMAN FANTASY” “THE BELOVÈD ADVENTURE”
“LOVE AND LIBERATION” “DUST AND LIGHT,” ETC.

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1922

Copyright, 1922, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Printed in the United States of America

The author thanks the editors of the following, for kind permission to reprint here various poems first published in their pages: All’s Well, The American Magazine, The Art World, The Bellman, The Bookman, The Century Magazine, Contemporary Verse, The Dial, The Forum, The Freeman, Harper’s Monthly, The International, The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, The Lyric, McClure’s Magazine, The Outlook, Poetry, The Poetry Journal, The Poetry Review, Reedy’s Mirror, Scribner’s Magazine, The Smart Set, The Yale Review, Youth. Thanks are also due to Messrs. Harcourt, Brace and Company for permission to reprint “Sea-Horizons,” first published in the anthology, Enchanted Years.

CONTENTS

THE BLACK PANTHER

There is a panther caged within my breast;

But what his name, there is no breast shall know

Save mine, nor what it is that drives him so,

Backward and forward, in relentless quest—

That silent rage, baffled but unsuppressed,

The soft pad of those stealthy feet that go

Over my body’s prison to and fro,

Trying the walls forever without rest.

All day I feed him with my living heart;

But when the night puts forth her dreams and stars,

The inexorable Frenzy reawakes:

His wrath is hurled upon the trembling bars,

The eternal passion stretches me apart,

And I lie silent—but my body shakes.

I
DIM WISDOMS

NIGHT HAS ITS FEAR

Night has its fear:

As the slow dusk advances, and the day

Fades out in fire along the starry way,

The ancient doubt draws near.

Vague shapes of dread—

Soft owl, or moth, and timid, twittering things—

Move through the growing dark; on furtive wings

The bat flits overhead.

And in the house

The death-watch ticks, the dust of time is stirred

With timorous footfalls, in the night is heard

The gnawing of the mouse.

Through the old room

What phantoms throng, what shapes that to and fro

Tremble, and lips that laughed here long ago—

Gone back into the gloom!

A whip-poor-will

Bleakly across the baleful country cries

From a blurred mouth; and from the west replies

Echo—and all is still.

Now from her shell,

Her body’s prison, with the ancient doubt

And terror stricken, the scared soul looks out,

Asking if all be well.

Great kings have been,

Poets, and mighty prophets—shapes have cried

About the world, or moved in mournful pride;

And are no longer seen.

From many lands

Their plaint was lifted; from how many a shore

Sorrows have wailed, that are not any more!

They sleep with folded hands.

They have their day:

Their cry is loud about the earth, who come

To the one end; the singing lips grow dumb

Always in the one way.

Though they implore,

Brief is the plea, inflexible the fate!

Silence has the last word; and then—the great

Silence, forevermore.

Pondering these,

The fretful spirit in bewilderment

Quickens with a vague doubt, and, not content,

Broods—and is ill at ease.

Her being is

Throned on so frail a pulse; such fleeting breath

Bears up her dream across the gulf of death

And the obscure abyss.

Always she hears

The hurtling chariots of the hurrying blood,

Her shuttling breath that in the solitude

Weaves the one self she wears.

Now first the vast

Veil over heaven is rent, and bares the whole

Shining Reality; whereat the soul

Sickens, and is aghast!

Darkness reveals

The tragic truth; her will sinks hopeless wings

Before the inexorable Fact of things,

Humbling the dread she feels.

With the old Awes

Confronted and the flaming Mystery,

She may not speak; but pondering, suddenly

Grows silent, and withdraws.

She may not bear

That sight: the spangled heavens, from east to west,

Stretch out too wide the confines of the breast,

Straining in wonder there.

Upon what Brow

Of awful eminence—O thought that stuns!—

Is laid that chaplet of a million suns,

Upon what Forehead now?

Who was it wrought

This universal glory all around,

Of glittering worlds forever without bound?—

Great Poet, what a Thought!

It is a Word

Unutterable that is written there;

The spirit, gazing, is one voiceless prayer,

Careless if it be heard.

Her thoughts ascend,

Star beyond star, height beyond aching height

Upward, in adoration infinite,

Forever, without end.

So shall it be!

Till heaven yield her sceptre; till the throne

Of night be shaken, and the Face be known

Beyond eternity:

Till God divide

And rend asunder the embroidered hem

Of darkness; till the starry diadem

And crown be set aside!

THE SORROWFUL MASQUERADE

Even as to a music, stately and sad,

The young girl’s feet begin to move in a dance,

And curiously, for joy, shift and advance;

So to a mournful waltz, sombre and sweet,

All laughing things move with delighted feet—

So all things that draw light and laughing breath

Move to the mournful waltz of life and death:

Comedy is a girl dancing in time

To the tragic pipes, sorrowful and sublime;

And ever she laughs back, and as she skips

Mimics the mournful music with her lips;

Then, for sheer anger at her own pretense,

Sobs violently at her own vehemence;

And mocks her tears. But when the pipings sleep,

She needs must cover up her face and weep.

OCTOBER MOONLIGHT

Heaven is like an empty room to-night;

From rim to chilly rim

Wells the clear radiance of the cold moonlight,

And the earth-ways are dim.

Who has departed from this perfect place!

What fiery one here set

His throne in splendor, whom, vanished now, the face

Of heaven remembers yet!

Emptiness—emptiness—the skies are bare,

And the stark earth no less

Grows vacant as a memory: everywhere

Sleeps the cold loveliness.

Old is the earth, too old; her voice is shrill

Against the end of things—

To the inevitable her bitter will

Grows humbler as she sings.

Now from my breast the very soul takes flight,

Leaving her chambers bare

Of all save lonely memory and moonlight—

And Song is silent there.

THE FLESH AND THE DREAM

The baffled dreamer, the defeated Christ

That for your love upon the cross-tree hung—

O take Him to your bosom, give Him rest

Close at the wanton wonder of your breast,

O carnal World, forever well and young!

VAUDEVILLE

When to a cheap and tawdry tune the orchestra cried out,

Frantic, in violent syncopation, and began

Your holy, adorable body in mournful grace to move about

Through the old, devious motions, the device of man—

How suddenly then, silent magnificence, you put to shame

The crowded and garish theatre, the strangled cries

Of flute and trumpet! O mortal body, bearer of our flame

Through the drear lands of death, flower of the eternities!

Revered, reviled, wept and adored, beseeched, cried out upon

By ravening lips of the ages—the sacred source of things,

That glimmered in Thrace, that shone in Rome, that swayed in Babylon,

Here moves to the vile throb of castanets and strings.

O through what generations have you lured, what secret ways,

Man’s fainting heart to be reborn! What splendors move

Deep in his breast when, dolorous, your reluctant beauty sways

In the old weary rhythms of eternal love!

1914

I lift my gaze beyond the night, and see,

Above the banners of Man’s hate unfurled,

The holy figure that on Calvary

Stretched arms out wide enough for all the world.

THE BELOVÈD

Life, Belovèd, I lay my heart against Your heart,

Long, long I peer into the dark pool of Your eyes;

Never will I forsake You, O adorable One!

I cannot comprehend You, but I love You.

In the shadow of Your locks I hide my eyes from the terrors;

But You are not greatly concerned—

Closer and closer I draw toward the dear Face.

See—I set my lips against Your lips,

But You do not answer:

Steadfast and grave beyond me Your eyes are burning,

As of one that dreams.

I am clinging here at Your heart!

I am singing my love of You for sheer joy!

Mother, what is it that trembles on Your lashes so soft—

And Your lips are salt as the taste of the sea?

Can it be for me Your eyes are brimming, Mother,

Even as they smile?

Can they be for me, these drops on Your lips so warm?

Dear One, do I understand at last!

O holy draught, wine of the world, bewildering and bitter-sweet!

Sacred tears, from the depths of what wild love welling!

Deeper and deeper let me drink and draw—

Nirvana, divine oblivion....

Bitter is the taste of Your lips, Belovèd!

* * * * *

Though I lie in the darkness, yet often do I remember You—and wonder—

And the touch of Your lips, how strange, and how sad.

PROUD DOOM

The crucifixion of Beauty on the cross

Of mortal destiny—the eternal law—

The thorny crown of death about her brows

Fills me with anger—then with sudden awe:

So dear, so lovely her adorable sorrow

Shows in the darkness, ’mid the tragic doom,

The very heart in me leaps up with laughter,

And hastens, proud and secret, toward the tomb.

THE SECRET ONE

Here, by this frame and network of the flesh

And wires of her control

Surrounded, central in her subtle mesh

And secret, sits the soul,

Urgent through all the body, while each part

Obeys, and all are one—

While in her dungeons labors the lone heart

To make her will be done.

She reins the forces in their wild career

That bear her, as they go,

Over the dark abyss; and knows how sheer

Reaches the gulf below.

How dubious her life and slenderly

Hangs, by a scarlet thread,

Between eternity and eternity—

She guesses, wise in dread;

And ever watchful, ever wary, set

In the centre all alone,

Feels ’round her cautiously if any threat

Be made against the throne.

Sometimes along her nerves the voice of pain

Bears tidings to her hate

And frantic wrath, that the old foe again

Is clamorous at the gate—

She rages up and down, and to and fro

In timid anger runs:

If the frontiers be menaced, it is known

All over, and at once.

She hears her breast of sorrows night and day

At labor; ’round her brood

The old oblivions, where she sits at bay;

She hears the battling blood.

Echoes assail her from far worlds that lie

Beyond the bourne of these—

Contact and color and the angry cry

Of the realities

Beat on the brain forever; the high dream,

By stratagem of speech,

Enters her portals, where she sits supreme

And silent, pondering each:

Weighing and challenging, for weal or woe,

All rumors, sending out

The emissaries of her will, that go

To the frontiers about.

But most she loves the hour that beauty brings,

Of rapture and release

From the crude hunger and the cry of things,

The hour of her peace—

When, by the inner light that floods her cell,

The spirit, even as here,

Travails, in secrecy and joy, to tell

Her passion and her fear.

Now to the listening soul in you who read

These lines, she tells it all—

How dear her day, how dark shall be, indeed,

The hour when night must fall.

THE UNDISSUADABLE AUSTERITY

Less than it is we would the Truth should seem:

Holy and marvellous the Actual is—

But stern her lips, and bitter is her kiss

Upon the brows of dream.

BLIND PLAYERS