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A TREE WITH A BIRD IN IT

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A TREE WITH A
BIRD IN IT:

A SYMPOSIUM OF CONTEMPORARY
AMERICAN POETS ON BEING
SHOWN A PEAR-TREE ON
WHICH SAT A GRACKLE

BY
MARGARET WIDDEMER

AUTHOR OF "FACTORIES," "THE OLD ROAD TO PARADISE," "CROSS CURRENTS," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WILLIAM SAPHIER

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NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QUINN & BODEN COMPANY
RAHWAY, N. J.

THIS IS DEDICATED
WITH MY FORGIVENESS IN ADVANCE
TO THE POETS PARODIED IN THIS BOOK
AND THE POETS NOT PARODIED IN THIS BOOK

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FOREWORD

By the Collator

A little while since, I had the fortune to live in a house, outside of whose windows there grew a pear-tree. On the branches of this tree lived a green bird of indeterminate nature. I do not know what his real name was, but the name, to quote our great exemplar Lewis Carroll, by which his name was called was the Grackle. He seemed perfectly willing to be addressed thus, and accordingly was.

Aside from watching the Pear-Tree and the Grackle, my other principal occupation that winter was watching the Poetry Society of America now and then at its monthly meetings. It occurred to me finally to invite such members of it as cared to come, following many good examples, to an outdoor symposium under the tree. The result follows.

Margaret Widdemer.

P.S.—The tree died.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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A TREE WITH A BIRD IN IT

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Jessie B. Rittenhouse

(She steps brightly forward with an air of soprano introduction.)

RESIGNATION

I look from out my window,

Beloved, and I see

A bird upon a pear bough,

But what is that to me?

Because the thought comes icy;

That bird you never knew—

It's not your bird or pear tree,

And what is it to you?

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Edwin Markham

(who, though he had to lay a cornerstone, unveil a bust of somebody, give two lectures and write encouraging introductions to the works of five young poets before catching the three-ten for Staten Island, offered his reaction in a benevolent and unhurried manner.)

THE BIRD WITH THE WOE

Poets to men a curious sight afford;

Still they will sing, though all around are bored;

But this wise grackle does a kinder thing;

Silent he's bored, while all around him sing!

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Witter Bynner

(Prefaced by a short baritone talk on Chinese architecture.)

THE UNITY OF ONENESS

Celia, have you been to China?

There upon a mystic tree

Sits a bird who murmurs Chinese

Of the Me in Thee.

'Neath that tree of willow-pattern

Twice seven thousand scornful go

Paraphrasers and translators

Of the long-deceased Li-Po:

Chinese feelings swift discerning

Without all this time and fuss

Let us eat that bird, thus learning

Of the Him in Us!

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Amy Lowell

(Fixing her glasses firmly on the rest of the Poetry Society in a way which makes them with difficulty refrain from writhing.)

OISEAURIE

Glunk!

I toss my heels up to my head ...

That was a bird I heard say glunk

As I walked statelily through my extensive, expensive English country estate

In a pink brocade with silver buttons, a purple passementerie cut with panniers, a train, and faced with watered silk:

But it

Is dead now!

(The bird)

Probably putrescent

And green....

I scrabble my toes ...

Glunk!

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Edgar Lee Masters

(Making a statement which you may take or leave, but convincing you entirely.)

IMRI SWAZEY

I was a shock-headed boy bringing in the laundry;

Why did I try for that damn bird, anyway?

I suppose I had been in the habit of aiming for the pears.

But I chucked a stone, anyhow,

And it ricocheted and hit my head,

And as it hadn't any brains inside the stone busted it

And there I was, dead.

And dead with me were all the improper things

I'd got out of the servants about their employers

Bringing in the laundry;

But the grackle sings on.

Sing forever, O grackle!

I died, knowing lots of things you don't know!

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Edwin Arlington Robinson

(He mutters wearily in an undertone.)

RAMBUNCTO

Well, they're quite dead, Rambuncto; thoroughly dead.

It was a natural thing enough; my eyes

Stared baffled down the forest-aisles, brown and green,

Not learning what the marks were. Still, who learns?

Not I, who stooped and picked the things that day,

Scarlet and gold and smooth, friend ... smooth enough!

And she's in a vault now, old Jane Fotheringham,

My mother-in-law; and my wife's seven aunts,

And that cursed bird that used to sit and croak

Upon their pear-tree—they threw scraps to him—

My wife, too. Lord, that was a curious thing!

Because—"I don't like mushrooms much," I said,

And they ate all I picked. And then they died.

But ... Well, who knows it isn't better that way?

It's quieter, at least.... Rambuncto—friend—

Why, you're not going?... Well—it's a stupid year,

And the world's very useless.... Sorry.... Still

The dusk intransience that I much prefer

Leaves place for little hope and less regret.

I don't suppose he'd care, to stay to dine

Under the circumstances.... What's life for?

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Robert Frost

(Rather nervously, retreating with haste in the wake of Mr. Robinson as soon as he had finished.)

THE BIRD MISUNDERSTOOD

There was a grackle sat on our old pear tree—

Don't ask me why—I never did really know;

But he made my wife and me feel, for really the very first time

We were out in the actual country, hindering things to grow;

It gave us rather a queer feeling to hear the grackle grackle,

But when it got to be winter time he got up and went thence

And now we shall never know, though we watch the tree till April,

Whether his curious crying ever made song or sense.

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Carl Sandburg

(Striking from time to time a few notes on a mouth-organ, with a wonderful effect of human brotherhood which does not quite include the East.)

CHICAGO MEMORIES

Grackles, trees—

I been thinkin' 'bout 'em all: I been thinkin' they're all right:

Nothin' much—Gosh, nothin' much against God, even.

God made little apples, a hobo sang in Kankakee,

Shattered apples, I picked you up under a tree, red wormy apples, I ate you....

That lets God out.

There were three green birds on the tree, there were three wailing cats against a green dawn....

'Gene Field sang, "The world is full of a number of things,"

'Gene Field said, "When they caught me I was living in a tree...."

'Gene Field said everything in Chicago of the eighties.

Now he's dead, I say things, say 'em well, too....

'Gene Field ... back in the lost days, back in the eighties,

Singing, colyumning ... 'Gene Field ... forgotten ...

Back in Arkansaw there was a green bird, too,

I can remember how he sang, back in the lost days, back in the eighties.

Uncle Yon Swenson under the tree chewing slowly, slowly....

Memories, memories!

There are only trees now, no 'Gene, no eighties

Gray cats, I can feel your fur in my heart ...

Green grackle, I remember now,

Back in the lost days, back in the eighties

The cat ate you.

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Edith M. Thomas

(She tells a friend in confidence, after she is safely out of it all.)

FROST AND SANDBURG TONIGHT

Apple green bird on a wooden bough,

And the brazen sound of a long, loud row,

And "Child, take the train, but mind what you do—

Frost, tonight, and Sandburg too!"

Then I sally forth, half wild, half cowed,

Till I come to the surging, impervious crowd,

The wine-filled, the temperance, the sober, the pied,

The Poets that cover the countryside!

The Poets I never would meet till tonight!

A gleam of their eyes in the fading light,

And I took them all in—the enormous throng—

And with one great bound I bolted along.

If the garden had merely held birds and flowers!

But I hear a voice—they have talked for hours—

"Frost tonight—" if 'twere merely he!

Half wild, half cowed, I flee, I flee!

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Charles Hanson Towne

(Who rather begrudged the time he used up in going out to the suburbs.)

THE UNQUIET SINGER

He had been singing, but I had not heard his voice;

He had been bothering the rest with song;

But I, most comfortably far

Within the city's stimulating jar

Feeling for bus-conductors and for flats,

And shop-girls buying too expensive hats,

And silver-serviced dinners,

And various kinds of pleasant urban sinners,

And riding on the subway and the L,

Had much beside his song to hear and tell.

But one day (it was Spring, when poets ride

Afield to wild poetic festivals)

I, innocently making calls

Was snatched by a swift motor toward his tree

(Alas, but lady poets will do this to thee

If thou art decorative, witty or a Man)

And heard him sing, and on the grass did bide.

But my whole day was sadder for his words,

And I was thinner

Because, in spite of my most careful plan

I missed a very pleasant little dinner....

In short, unless well-cooked, I don't like Birds.

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Sara Teasdale

(Who got Miss Rittenhouse to read it for her.)

AT AUTUMN

I bend and watch the grackles billing,

And fight with tears as I float by;

O be a fowl for my heart's filling!

O be a bird, yet never fly!

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Ezra Pound

(Mailed disdainfully by him from anywhere but America, and read prayerfully by a committee from Chicago.)

RAINUV: A ROMANTIC BALLAD FROM THE EARLY BASQUE

... so then naturally

This Count Rainuv I speak of

(Certainly I did not expect you would ever have heard of him;

You are American poets, aren't you?

That's rather awful ... I am the only American poet

I could ever tolerate ... well, sniff and pass....)

Therefore ... well, I knew Rainuv.

(My P. G. course at Penn, you'll remember;

A little Anglo-Saxon and Basuto,

But Provencal, mostly. Most don't go in for that....

You haven't, of course ... What, no Provencal?

Well, of course, I know

Rather more than you do. That's my specialty.

But then—Omnis Gallia est divisa—but no matter.

Not fit, perhaps you'd say, that, to be quoted

Before ladies.... That's your rather amusing prudishness....)

Well, this Rainuv, then,

A person with a squint like a flash

Of square fishes ... being rather worse than most

Of the usual literati

Said, being carried off by desire of boasting

That he knew all the mid-Victorians

Et ab lor bos amics:

(He thought it was something to boast of.)

We'll say he said he smoked with Tennyson,

And—deeper pit—pax vobiscum—went to vespers

With Adelaide Anne Procter; helped Bob Browning elope

With Elizabeth and her lapdog (said it bit him)

Said he was the first man Blake told

All about the angels in a pear-tree at Peckham Rye

Blake drew them for him, he said; they were grackles, not angels—

(Blake's not a mid-Victorian, but you don't know better)

So ... we come, being slightly irritated, to facing him down.

"... And George Eliot?" we ask lightly.

"Roomed with him," nodded Rainuv confidently,

"At college!"... Ah, bos amic! bos amic!

Rainuv is a king to you....

Three centuries from now (you dead and messy) men whispering insolently

(Eeni meeni mini mo...) will boast that their great-grand-uncles

Were kicked by me in passing....

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Margaret Widdemer

(Clutching a non-existent portière with one hand.)

THE SIGHING TREE