E-text prepared by D. Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Barbara Tozier,
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
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The New World
BY WITTER BYNNER
-
AN ODE TO HARVARD
AND OTHER POEMS - TIGER
- THE LITTLE KING
- THE NEW WORLD
- IPHIGENIA IN TAURIS
The New World
by WITTER BYNNER
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
1918
COPYRIGHT 1915 BY
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
The greater part of this poem was delivered before the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in June, 1911; several passages from it have appeared in Poetry, and others in The Bellman, the Boston Evening Transcript and the American Magazine.
Printed in America
To
Celia
The New World
I
Celia was laughing. Hopefully I said:
“How shall this beauty that we share,
This love, remain aware
Beyond our happy breathing of the air?
How shall it be fulfilled and perfected?...
If you were dead,
How then should I be comforted?”
But Celia knew instead:
“He who finds beauty here, shall find it there.”
A halo gathered round her hair.
I looked and saw her wisdom bare
The living bosom of the countless dead.
... And there
I laid my head.
Again when Celia laughed, I doubted her and said:
“Life must be led
In many ways more difficult to see
Than this immediate way
For you and me.
We stand together on our lake’s edge, and the mystery
Of love has made us one, as day is made of night and night of day.
Aware of one identity
Within each other, we can say:
‘I shall be everything you are.’...
We are uplifted till we touch a star.
We know that overhead
Is nothing more austere, more starry, or more deep to understand
Than is our union, human hand in hand.
.... But over our lake come strangers—a crowded launch, a lonely sailing boy.
A mile away a train bends by. In every car
Strangers are travelling, each with particular
And unkind preference like ours, with privacy
Of understanding, with especial joy
Like ours. Celia, Celia, why should there be
Distrust between ourselves and them, disunity?
.... How careful we have been
To trim this little circle that we tread,
To strangers and forbid them!—Are they not as we,
Our very likeness and our nearest kin?
How can we shut them out and let stars in?”
She looked along the lake. And when I heard her speak,
The sun fell on the boy’s white sail and her white cheek.
“I touch them all through you,” she said. “I cannot know them now
Deeply and truly as my very own, except through you,
Except through one or two
Interpreters.
But not a moment stirs
Here between us, binding and interweaving us,
That does not bind these others to our care.”
The sunlight fell in glory on her hair....
And then said Celia, radiant, when I held her near:
“They who find beauty there, shall find it here.”
And on her brow,
When I heard Celia speak,
Cities were populous
With peace and oceans echoed glories in her ear
And from her risen thought
Her lips had brought,
As from some peak
Down through the clouds, a mountain-air
To guide the lonely and uplift the weak.
“Record it all,” she told me, “more than merely this,
More than the shine of sunset on our heads, more than a kiss,
More than our rapt agreement and delight
Watching the mountain mingle with the night....
Tell that the love of two incurs
The love of multitudes, makes way
And welcome for them, as a solitary star
Brings on the great array.
Go make a lovers’ calendar,”
She said, “for every day.”
And when the sun had put away
His dazzle, over the shadowy firs
The solitary star came out.... So on some night
To eyes of youth shall come my light
And hers.
II
“Where are you bound, O solemn voyager?”
She laughed one day and asked me in her mirth:
“Where are you from?
Why are you come?”
.... The questions beat like tapping of a drum;
And how could I be dumb,
I who have bugles in me? Fast
The answer blew to her,
For all my breath was worth....
“As a bird comes by grace of spring,
You are my journey and my wing—
And into your heart, O Celia,
My heart has flown, to sing
Solemn and long
A most undaunted song.”
This was the song that she herself had taught me how to sing:
.... As immigrants come toward America
On their continual ships out of the past,
So on my ship America have I, by birth,
Come forth at last
From all the bitter corners of the earth.
And I have ears to hear the westward wind blowing
And I have eyes to look beyond the scope Of sea
And I have hands to touch the hands
Of shipmates who are going
Wherever I go and the grace of knowing
That what for them is hope
Is hope for me.
I come from many times and many lands,
I look toward life and all that it shall hold,
Past bound and past divide.
And I shall be consoled
By a continent as wide
As the round invisible sky.
.... “The unseen shall become the seen....
O Celia, be my Spanish Queen!
The Genoan am I!”
And Celia cried:
“My jewels, they are yours,
Yours for the journey. Use them well.
Go find the new world, win the shores
Of which the old books tell!
.... Yet will they listen, poet? Will they sail with you?
Will they not call you dreamer of a dream?
Will they not laugh at you, because you seem
Concerned with words that people often say
And deeds they never do?”
The bright sails of my caravel shook seaward in reply:
“Though I be told
A thousand facts to hold
Me back, though the old boundary
Rise up like hatred in my way,
Though fellow-voyagers cry,
‘A lie!’—
Here as I come with heaven at my side
None of the weary words they say
Remain with me,
I am borne like a wave of the sea
Toward worlds to be....
And, young and bold,
I am happier than they—
The timid unbelievers who grow old!”
She interceded: “How impatient, how unkind
You are! What secret do you know
To keep you young?
Age comes with keen and accurate advance
Against youth’s lightly handled lance.
Age is an ancient despot that has wrung
All hearts.”... My answer was the song forever sung:
“This that I need to know I know—
Onpouring and perpetual immigrants,
We join a fellowship beyond America
Yet in America....
Beyond the touch of age, my Celia,
In you, in me, in everyone, we join God’s growing mind.
For in no separate place or time, or soul, we find
Our meaning. In one mingled soul reside
All times and places. On a tide
Of mist and azure air
We journey toward that soul, through circumstance,
Until at last we fully care and dare
To make within ourselves divinity.”
“And what of all the others,” Celia said,
“Who ventured brave as you? What of the dead?”
Again I saw the halo in her hair
And said: “The dead sail forward, hid behind
This wave that we ourselves must mount to find
The eternal way.
Adventurers of long ago
Seeking a richer gain than earthy gold,
They have left for us, half-told,
Their guesses of the port, more numerous and blind
Than their unnumbered and forgotten faces.
... And though today, as then,
Death is a wind blowing them forward out of sight and out of mind,
Yet in familiar and in unfamiliar places
Inquiring by what means I may
The destination of the wind
Of death, I have found signs and traces
Of the way they go
And with a quicker heart I have beheld again
In visions, from my ship at sea,
The great new world confronting me,
Today, tomorrow, dwell my countrymen.”
And then I looked away,
Over the pasture and the valley, to the New Hampshire town....
And my heart’s acclaim went down,
To Florida, Wisconsin, California,
And brought a good report to Celia:
“My ship America,
This whole wide-timbered land,
Well captained and well manned,
Ascends the sea
Of time, carrying me
And many passengers.
And every cabin stirs
With the pulsing of its engine over the sway of time,
Yes, every state and city, every village, every farm,
And every heart and everyone’s right arm.
... Celia, hold out your hand,
Or anyone in any field or street, hold out your hand—
And I can see it pulse the massive climb
And dip
Of this America,
My ship!”
“Why make your ship so small?
Can your America contain them all?”
How wisely I replied
In the province of my pride:
“But these are my own shipmates, these
Who share my ship America with me!
... On many seas
On other ships, even the ancient ships of Greece,
Have other immigrants set sail for peace.
But these are my own shipmates whom I see
At hand—these are my company.”
“What have you said,” she cried,
“Thinking you knew?
Whom have you called your shipmates? You were wrong!
Your ship is strong
With a more various crew
Than any one man’s country could provide,
To make it ride
So high and manifold and so complete.
Of life itself, the ship of ships.
There is no other ship among the stars than this.
The wind of death is a bright kiss
Upon the lips
Of every immigrant, as upon yours and mine—
Theirs is the stinging brine
And sun and open sea,
And theirs the arching sky, eternity.”
And Celia had my homage. I was wrong.
Immigrants all, one ship we ride,
Man and his bride
The journey through.
O let it be with a bridal-song!...
“My shipmates are as many as eternity is long:
The unborn and the living and the dead—
And, Celia, you!”
III
That midnight when the moon was tall
I walked alone by the white lake—yet with a vanished race
And with a race to come. To walk with dead men is to pray,
To walk with men unborn—to find the way.
I have seen many days. That night I watched them all.
I have seen many a sign and trace
Of beauty and of hope:
An elm at night; an arrowy waterfall;
The illimitable round unbroken scope
Of life; a friend’s unfrightened dying face.
Though I have heard the cry of fear in crowded loneliness of space,
Dead laughter from the lips of lust,
Anger from fools, falsehood from sycophants,
(My fear, my lips, my anger, my disgrace)
Though I have held a golden cup and tasted rust,
Seen cities rush to be defiled
By the bright-fevered and consuming sin
Of making only coin and lives to count it in,
Yet once I watched with Celia,
Watched on a ferry an Italian child,
One whom America
Had changed.
His cheek was hardy and his mouth was frail
For sweetness, and his eyes were opening wild
As with wonder at an unseen figure carrying a grail.
Perhaps he faced, as I did in his glance,
The spirit of the living dead who, having ranged
Through long reverses, forward without fail
Carry deliverance
From privilege and disinheritance,
Until their universal soul shall prove
The only answer to the ache of love.
“America was wistful in that child,”
Said Celia afterwards—and smiled
Because all three of us were immigrants,
Over the city-roofs, the sun awoke
Bright in the dew
Of a marvellous morning, while she spoke
Of the sun, the dew, the wonder, in a child: