Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE SEVENTH VIAL, by WILLARD WATTLES


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE SEVENTH VIAL, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: These are the days when men draw pens for swords
Last Line: Tho this is war, there is another war!
Subject(s): Democracy; United States; War; America


These are the days when men draw pens for swords
Hurling hysteric bombs of epithets,
And girding on the glory of great words,
Storm the embarrassed parapets.
Words, words, -- "Democracy!" they cry,
Who pass their neighbors with averted eye.

America, my country, not with the lesser love
Do I, thy son and lover, set the flame
Cleansing thy shame,
But only that I know what love is molded of,
That here for us in these United States
Where still the dullard prates
Of the propitious fates,
Democracy as yet is but a name!

A name for demagogs to juggle facilely,
A tinsel ball to catch the crowd and mock it
While deft confederates with razor-edge set free
The staring burgher's plump distended pocket.
The trumpet blows to war and youth upstarts With shaken hearts,
Stirring to all old splendors of the past,
Knowing that we are heritors of glory
Whose names shall stand in story:
The die for us irrevocably is cast.

For youth has never shrunk to pay the price
Of the recurrent sacrifice.
It is youth's prerogative to do
What gray age tells them to,
With song upon our lips
Facing the last eclipse;
Death never waits to summon young men twice.

Youth is ready to lay down
Strength of foot and body brown,
Glow of eye and red of lip,
Supple knee and clinging hip,
Sting of health and gracious breath,
All to weave a crown for Death.
Youth is ready, stripped to run
That immortal Marathon.

And so the khaki clothes glad limbs once more,
The rifle's shouldered, and the quick-step starts,
The old flag billows, deep male cannons roar,
And honor draws our hearts.
To die for one's country, that is bliss --
But what of this:

Old men have a bitter tongue,
"So were we when we were young;
Now that we have wavering knees,
Blessing fall on subtleties!

"Youth would find a foe to fight
When his heels and heart are light;
Now that we have wavering knees,
Blessing fall on subtleties!"

Ah, old gray-beards, howdy-do,
Here's a subtlety for you:

Out of the crush of cities, maddening lights,
Exotic gardens of obscene delights,
The turmoil of the elevated overhead,
Faces that one passes set and dead,
Men's faces with slack creases at the lips,
And women mostly eyes and smell and hips;
There burns one vision of a summer night,
The night that England set her hand to war
Remembering her Waterloo and Trafalgar,
And men had gathered in the midnight glare
To watch the bill-boards posted at Times Square,
When I saw the German waiter who had lately brought my dinner
Stand beside me in the crowd with face grown sudden thinner,
And hand met hand but with a manlier grip
Than I suspected when he palmed my tip:
" You're going?" "Yes, the Vaterland.
She sails on Wednesday. And I'm glad to go."
"Auf Wiedersehn --"
He'll not come back, I know,
Yet I am glad I knew that different hand.

Just as the sense of all it meant struck home,
The broken bodies spumed with bloody foam,
The towzle-headed boys who scarcely knew
One of life's joys before death thrust them thru,
Staggering women learning how to plow
And children starving for milk of one lean cow,
There in the crowd upon the unshamed Square
I saw two men and a woman with red hair.
Her white arms gleaming, with dimples in the bends
Familiar with the shoulders of her friends;
Two men, one woman, but they scuffled there, --
Let Europe tumble, ten million young men die,
"Aw, quit your kidding, you're the lucky guy,
This is the life" -- it's midnight in Times Square!

Not in Manhattan only
But in lonely
Forgotten villages upon the plains
Men still are forging their invisible chains
Out of misplaced endeavor
That bind them to hoar Caucasus forever.

America is still the awkward boy,
Hobbledehoy,
Knowing no joy except in birds' nests or the mood's employ,
Stranger to heart-sweetening laughter,
Tooting horns and running after
Each his own peculiar grafter,
Reckless in all things, trying all by turns,
Here hits the saw-dust trail, there a Negro burns,
Mortgages his home to buy a motor-car
Still hitching wagons to a darkened star,
With something still of the strange whim of boys,
Thinking that man most great who makes the loudest noise.

And yet we need not be the thing we are.
There is a greater war,
The War at home!
And tho we go abroad
With the avenging rod
Calling ourselves from God,
Upholding now the desperate hands of France
In crater-scarred advance.
And tho to Mother England now we swarm
Under her wearying arm,
And tho to Russia we in faith extend
The warm hand of a friend,
Restore to Belgium all of what she lost
Haloed in holocaust,
And tho we win and break the brutal Hun --
Our task will not be done,
But just begun.

There is a War, a greater War, at home,
Not whistled by shrill fife,
But still a war to knife,
For more than life.

America has need, oh, pitiful, utmost need
Of the old breed here in our weakened seed
The spawn of mighty fathers, Jeffersons and Lincolns, Washingtons,
And shrewd-eyed "Richard" with his almanac.
We have lacked something, we oblivious sons,
Something we must win back.

A few there are by some direction sent
As if our fathers still were provident,
And gave us in this hour, a president.
Thank God, thank God for Wilson!
He has set
His hand against all bluster and it dies, --
The ancient verities are with us yet.

This is the hour I saw the angel stand
The seventh vial in his hand.

This is the Armageddon prophet-told
When seven hills give up the dead they hold.

When shines the angel in the bloody sun
And in the darkness Caesar is undone.

This is the day the flaming planet swings
Back to the sun from lonely wanderings.

And this the revelation shall not cease
Till ye have seen the perfect Prince of Peace.

So, oh, my country, follow, follow far;
Tho this is war, there is another War!





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