Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, 1915, by JAMES OPPENHEIM


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

1915, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Hang the hills with black
Last Line: You, man, arise!
Subject(s): World War I; First World War


Hang the hills with black,
And blacken the early violets with the blood of the young:
What want we with a Spring of fragrant farmlands,
Gardens, smokes of the brush,
And healing rains?
Let the birds, the winds and the sea
Sing no more the loves of mating, and the marriage chants of Spring . . .
But mournfully pipe dirges of broad-cast tragic death.

What want we with the Spring?
We have cast in roaring foundries the dark-bored steel,
And like gods have snatched the chemical might of the Earth,
And devised a killing and a crime . . .

Out of the murder of our hearts, we have wrought great havoc . . .
Sinking of ships at sea, and the toppling of cities,
And the mowing of living hosts!
What want we with the Spring?
Patiently the millions wrought:
With sacrificial hands, and suffering vision,
Chaos became a city, a ship, a school . . .

Up was lifted the child, and the young mind scrutinized
That not a life might be lost . . .
How unfold these buds? how grow these possibilities?

Steadily the gates of pain were battered,
And the gates of darkness assailed,
And the waste of the spirit striven with.

And the young went forth crying: Spring! Spring!
Hope dawns! A glory!
We are shaping a marvel in the skies!
Man becomes god: this is the morning and the first day of Creation!

Spring?
The hosts contend together:
Cities are become dust-heaps:
The young god, the Creator,
Has turned fury and fiend, the Destroyer . . .

Strange sowing of seed goes on:
This is the year when we sow the Earth with the flesh of the young men . . .

Black! black! black!
We have blasted away in a day,
Our own children,
Our own creation . . .

We have gone mad, killing the young,
Slaying the hope of the world . . .
Now youth leaves his dream and his toil and his quickening love
To kill or to die . . .
O short-lived generation!
Debauch of blood!
Folly and sin!

No more of it!
Take away Spring, and give over the planet to a moon's death, a frozen death:

Our Earth deserves extinction,
With her rotten breed of men . . .

So I cried, and in rage and grief went forth through the city,
The New-World City of Peace . . .

I passed a prison . . .
Broken men decayed in the damp
I passed a mill . . .
Children and pale women peered wistfully from the windows . . .
I passed a hospital . . .
Human wreckage sunned there beside the morgue.
I walked through stinking slums . . .
Children nosed in the garbage.

Then I went to the home of a friend,
And found darkness . . .
Husband and wife were slowly slaying each other:
Slaying with love.

The woman whispered to me:
"God! Could I go to the war -- go to the war and be killed!"
Then I looked in my own breast,
And I said: What war is this I am bitter against?
Behold, the lyddite of my soul that destroys peace about me,
Behold, the bayonet of my hate, and the shrapnel of my bestiality:
The contending armies of lusts and shames and intrigues:
The sentries of dark sins: the spies of despisal . . .
In this little world of Self I saw the big:
In my own breast I found war and disaster and ship sinking,
The death of faith and of hope . . .
Behold, in myself I found Man:
Who since the beginning has been this advancing conflict . . .
Ever thus . . .

Then is it marvel no peace is on Earth?
Where is the Man of Peace?
Shall I be crushed then by the obvious horror of blood and carrion?
By wholesale carnage?

Dark in the world of darkness, I left the city:
And then I saw,
O ancient and new miracle . . .
Resistless, laughing at death, overruling decay,
Earth silently lifted life . . .
Impassive and calm lay the heaps of the hills,
And steadily rising,
Green pierced through, and the soil steamed, and the birds nested.
There was the farmer-boy plowing,
And there the young wife airing the house,
And close to the handled mud the absorbed faces of children . . .
Lo, thought I, Earth holds to her hope!

Then I greeted the hills . . .
O let them be mantled with green, I said,
And let beauty hang from the boughs . . .
Increase the laughter of children,
String the cities with color and glory,
Lift a music . . .
Once were the heavens a blackness,
Then blazed a sun forth . . .
In the Earth's blackness, O tragic struggler, roll forth your splendid sun
Fight darkness with light,
Destruction with creation.

Have cities toppled and ships been sunk?
Build! Build!
Is youth slain?
Beget new children of flesh and toil:
Beget a new self of splendor . . .
Have hopes died?
Kindle new ones . . .
Has man fallen?
You, man, arise!





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