Delphi Complete Works of Thorne Smith (Illustrated), page 319
Wee, small and pink,
Dancing a merry swift retreat?
I would love to think
Of the Old Things playing among the leaves
And the solitude.
Were they the sounds of fairy feet?
Oh, it must be so!
The breathless scamper so soft and fleet,
And the heel and toe
Racing among the old brown leaves
In the fresh green wood.
THIS PLACE
Here I kissed her, here we fought.
Here we parted, here made up.
Here we ate the things we brought,
Drinking from the selfsame cup.
Here she made a wreath for me
Trimmed with fern and roses red.
Here I carved upon the tree,
Here I chased and here she fled.
Here we lay upon the grass,
Here we planned the unborn years,
Here we saw the summer pass,
Here I laughed away her tears.
Here she blossomed, here she grew,
Here she withered, here she died.
Here a world was rent in two,
Here I cursed my God and cried.
Here she lies beneath the mold,
Here at last in lonesome state.
Weary of the world and old
Here I think of her and wait.
THE LITTLE SHOP THAT WAS
For Claire
How cheery was the little shop and what a snug retreat
And what a pleasant thing it was to ponder there and search
Among the friendly rows of books, while, just across the street,
One saw the sparrows bathing in the fountain of the church.
The little shop has gone away, and so I go no more
To dip and delve and lose myself in tales of yesterday,
But sometimes, when I’m passing by, I falter at the door
To think of it as once it was and watch the fountain play.
I knew the niche for every book and took a certain pride
In joining in the heated search when one had been misplaced.
Suspiciously we groped about and eagerly we vied
Until at length the missing one triumphantly was traced.
Neil Lyons, Jacks, Hillaire Belloc — I knew them every one —
Hugh Clifford, Hudson, Beresford, Wells, Walpole, G. B. S.
And Kenneth Graham’s “Golden Age” and G. K. Chesterton
And, lower down, the Russian row — a sweetly morbid mess.
The poets shared the other side, among them Frost and Yeats,
John Masefield, Housman, Oppenheim — then many shelves of plays.
And here I’ve fled and locked myself behind these friendly gates
And in the old gloom of the shop explored enchanted ways.
There was a little cubby-hole, secreted in the rear
That breathed a proper mystery of life behind the scenes
And often of a winter’s night would we foregather here
Unravelling rare philosophies and figuring ways and means.
In silence lay the outer shop — extinguished were the lights,
Occasionally the wandering wind sniffed at the door and whined.
How mellow was the little place on those mid-winter nights
When all the world went rumbling by and left us far behind.
The little shop has gone away and so I go no more;
Deserted are the dusty shelves; the walls are stark and bare,
But sometimes, when I’m passing by, I falter at the door
And picture it as once it was, when all the books were there.
THE OLD BOOK-WORM
God gave his arm a natural crook
To snuggle and contain a book.
His eyes a little dim, yet quick,
A battered hat, a pipe, a stick,
I’ve often watched him hurry home,
His shoulders, hunched above some tome,
To leave the warring world behind
Within the pages of his find.
He loved to read his books in bed
And there one day they found him dead.
A jolly way for him to go.
I’m sure he must have wished it so;
His soul cut loose and winging free
Across some fine romantic sea
To friends and scenes he loved and knew.
For one, I hope his dreams came true.
And yet our street is not the same —
I think perhaps that he’s to blame.
AUTUMN IN THE SUBWAY
I watched her eyes, for they were fixed afar
Where sky and crag and flaring sunset meet,
And there before me in the fetid car
A river glided and the woods smelled sweet
And wind swam in the trees. The night came on
And through the singing dusk I saw her face
In Autumn foliage framed. Then she was gone
And there came one with dark eyes to her place.
Her heavy perfume drifting up to me
Swept out the night wind through the sobbing trees,
A shadow crossed the woods and stealthily,
There came the swift caress of silken knees.
Then beauty died, I sought another strap
And thought of one with red leaves in her lap.
TO A TRUE PROPHET
Men make a mockery, Martin, of your name,
And why is that and why are many things?
You fanned the flame and others stole the flame
And when you learned to fly they took your wings.
From out our midst the prophets, priests and kings
Have gone away; remains with us the shame,
In spite of which to you some credit clings,
Because of which men hold you much to blame.
But nothing Martin, now is quite the same
The fearless words which made men turn on you
Weak brothers shout, and swear that they are new;
Continues still the sickening search for fame.
And still we ply the practice of our trade
Of politics with vision stale and dead,
And sometimes, Martin, sometimes I’m afraid
When I recall how solemnly you said —
A party or a people lost to truth,
With courage gone to rot, bereft of dreams
Are dying things — for Martin so it seems.
We’ve done dishonor to our dreams of youth.
Men win the game who never play the game
While other men are prisoned in the dark,
And there is none to hear the things they claim
And there is none to bear to them the spark
Of hope as once you bore the spark to me
When mouths were unafraid and tongues were free.
Those hidden ones that turned on you the knife
Now hew the tree to which you gave your life.
And that’s about how things are with us here.
Old friend, our stately ship has drifted far
From off the course and there is much to fear.
You’re lucky, Martin, lying where you are.
TO A MODERN WOMAN
She lived in books and dreams, yet loved the earth.
She said a lot of silly things and died
And no one ever really knew her worth
And no one cared and no one ever tried.
She smoked her cigarettes with reckless pride
And talked artistically her Freudian gush.
Yet there were flowers underneath the slush
Still fragrant though perhaps a trifle dried.
One smiled at her, yet one could not deride.
The soul of her, one felt was much too brave
And large with love and, yet, no creature’s slave —
One felt this more, of course, when she had died.
She said a lot of things she did not know,
She knew a lot of things she did not say.
She said that this was thus and that was so
And said another thing another day.
As true as gold her heart and golden gay.
Her busy brain was very much alive
With dizzy thoughts, with which she loved to play,
Like bees abubble in a lofty hive.
Perhaps that’s why her thoughts could not survive,
Perhaps that’s why remained no lasting trace
Of all the things for which she used to strive
And yet, as we stood gazing on her face
With all its lovely animation dead
We all remembered something she had said
That we had used as ours. We turned away
And stealthy silence fell upon us all;
Before that frail accusing bit of clay
One felt quite furtive and a trifle small.
TO THE OTHER WOMAN
Across the great confusion of my mind
You came to me like Hebe through the night,
A pagan thing beyond all wrong or right,
Abundant in your love yet strangely kind;
Who called forgotten things long left behind,
A vagrant song, wild flowers, lost delight —
When was it now that beauty took its flight
And left a soul at war and unresigned?
Perhaps my lips were dumb, my eyes were blind,
Perhaps I killed the thing I sought to find.
The way is short to climb, but far to fall
And this might be the reason for it all.
Perhaps it’s wiser after all to ask
o questions here, nor further strive to task
A mind that plugged the saw with all its might —
Why curse-a bug because it bears a blight?
The facts are thus and other reasons pall.
We shake the hand, yet seldom hear the call.
So let it end.
Because your singing voice
A little while lulled shame within my soul
And made a jaded heart awhile rejoice
And see the glory of a vanished goal;
Because you snatched a thought beyond a dream
And made it live again before my eyes,
A song at dusk beneath fair -summer skies
That rendered mute awhile the frightened scream
Of my remorse, I show no great surprise,
Nor ask your name, nor weigh your moral worth,
Nor question what it was that brought rebirth
To things long dead, nor shall I strive to cloak
That when your song was hushed and daylight broke
Departed from my breast the wings of peace
Across the faint pink gables of the town
And with the dawn the darkness settled down
More fiercely for one fragrant night’s release.
It happened so and things are as they are,
And there is room for mockery and mirth.
We see the stars, yet cannot touch a star.
We tread the earth, yet cannot prove the earth,
And who can find the spot where beauty dwells?
And who can find the dwelling place of Good? —
In what distorted souls or looping hells,
Or say that this is false or that is true,
The clearest spring lies in the darkest wood,
And there is none to judge or pity you
Or me or any one, for no one knows
From what dark pit a breath of beauty blows,
What withered hands the stars of kindness strew,
Or in what cave a hidden blossom grows.
Within a word of yours, a fleeting thought
I caught, or so it seemed to me, I caught
A breath of love and pity more profound
Than all the words that echo and resound
Through windy domes where men to mortals preach
And stultify their souls through human speech.
It is not this. There is some other thing —
A crumpled bird that bears a broken wing
Perhaps has sweeter music in its breast
Than all the world and all the singing rest
Who fly unmaimed.
Within the flaming West
I saw a thing that called aloud to me,
And that one thing my eyes shall ever see,
And that one thing my ears shall ever hear.
I shall not give it name, nor name the year,
Nor try to analyze how much it meant.
Since then in devious ways my feet have trod
Across the world through leagues of discontent,
So, after all, perhaps that thing was God.
THE LISTENER
I told him my ambition was to write
And thereupon produced and read some stuff.
With sympathetic patience all that night
He listened; but my verse was not enough.
I thought that he should hear at least my play.
And so he did. “It’s very good,” he said.
Then rising, for the night was growing gray —
“It must be nice to write. Well, I’m for bed.”
Alone, I rummaged through his stuffy files
Of legal papers couched in jargon terse,
And strangely there among those dusty piles
I chanced upon a wistful bit of verse
Of honest poetry worthy of the name
And, as I read, my eyes grew bright with shame.
THE UNEDIFYING FIVE
The five of us frequented many bars,
And often spent entire evenings so,
Consuming cigarettes and black cigars
And other things, the while a steady flow
Of argument accompanied each drink,
So fiercely that a stander-by would think
We hated one another, which was true
Quite frequently, but most the time we quaffed
Our heady beverages the evening through,
And spent our hard-earned pay and cursed and laughed
And talked philosophy and dizzy schemes
Of how to make the world a better place,
Or how to renovate the human race,
And as we talked our rosy-tinted dreams
Became quite real to us, and time and space
Fell from our shoulders like a heavy cloak,
As we sat drinking in a haze of smoke;
Our god-like souls released on soaring wings
And though I fear we looked quite dissolute,
We felt that we were poets, priests and kings,
As Bacchus played upon his liquid flute,
Or syphon bottle, which is much the same
In these drab days, in fact, a substitute
For his once mellow reed. At five we came
Hot-footed from our offices and burst
Upon the scene to satisfy a thirst
Made keen by an uninteresting day,
Through which we toiled rebelliously to earn
Our beggarly but sadly needed pay
In order that the candle light might burn
At either end. Good God, the time we spent!
The rum we drank! The speeches wildly spoken!
The dissertation and the argument,
When future rows were brewed and dates were broken
And we resorted to the public booth
And phoned wild words, but never phoned the truth,
Which was unnecessary, for the friend,
Or wife or sweetheart at the other end,
Could gather by a strangely honeyed tone
The blackness of the lies so glibly told,
But yet we did not fear the telephone —
The distance somehow made us all feel bold.
A wretched lot were we if all were known —
“Good evening, Steve, has Chick or Bud been in?”
And Steve would set the Scotch or rye or gin,
And every man would grasp and pour his own.
A wretched lot, in truth, but not the worst.
Desk-ridden fags who toiled and dissipated,
Like other youths whom destiny had cursed
With both imagination and a thirst
That city life had hardly satiated.
When I recall those whiskey-drinking nights,
Those unregenerate, futile, drifting days,
The laughter and the arguments and fights,
The streets and taxicabs and gilded ways,
I see across an alcoholic haze
Familiar once, but long since vanished faces
Encountered here and there in sundry places,
In restaurants and lobbies and cafés —
The faces of young men who, like ourselves,
Paid tribute to the white-clad Irish elves
Who passed the bottles neatly o’er the board,
And gave us checks that we could ill afford
To settle for; young men around the town,
Wild, wayward youths, unedifying fives,
The spendthrift, tippler, sensualist and clown,
Who drank with us in those unsavory dives,
And turned each night into a sordid day.
We knew them all and liked them in a way.
Unedifying fives, where are they now,
Those roisterers that brawled around the bars,
Who loved to sing and dance and drink and row
And flash from pub to pub in creening cars?
Though thirsty still, they are no longer here.
And nothing now is as it was before;
The bars have lost their warmth, the cup its cheer
The fives have broken, some to meet no more,
And older men now toast their absent sons,
And strive to laugh and crack half-hearted puns
And keep a cheerful eye. It’s not the same.
There is no zest, the bars seem very tame.
The wicked ones have gone, those wretched boys,
Who raised such howling hell and made such noise,
Have gone, all gone. Their once familiar haunts
Resound no more with their unseemly taunts,
And business is a little more than slack,
Yet many more than bar-keeps wish them back.
Where are they now, those youthful rakes and gay,
Those wild, marauding, unregenerate fives,
Who took their final drinks and strolled away,
