A Prayer in Spring

Robert Frost (1915)

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Robert Frost — even the sound of his name is folksy, rural: simple, New England, white
farmhouse, red barn, stone walls. And that’s our vision of him, thin white hair blowing at
JFK’s inauguration, reciting his poem “The Gift Outright.” (The weather was too blustery
and frigid for him to read “Dedication,” which he had written specifically for the event,
so he simply performed the only poem he had memorized. It was oddly fitting.) As usual,
there’s some truth in the myth — and a lot of back story that makes Frost much more
interesting — more poet, less icon Americana.

Did You Know?:

 Frost was actually born in San Francisco.

 He lived in California till he was 11 and then moved East — he grew up in cities
in Massachusetts.
 Far from a hardscrabble farming apprenticeship, Frost attended Dartmouth and
then Harvard. His grandfather bought him a farm when he was in his early 20s.
 When his attempt at chicken farming failed, he served a stint teaching at a private
school and then he and his family moved to England.
 It was while he was in Europe that he was discovered by the US expat and
Impresario of Modernism, Ezra Pound, who published him in Poetry.

Frost’s Early Years:

Robert Lee Frost was born March 26, 1874 in San Francisco to Isabelle Moodie and
William Prescott Frost, Jr. The Civil War had ended nine years previously, Walt Whitman
was 55. Frost had deep US roots: his father was a descendant of a Devonshire Frost who
sailed to New Hampshire in 1634. William Frost had been a teacher and then a journalist,
was known as a drinker, a gambler and a harsh disciplinarian. He also dabbled in politics,
for as long as his health allowed. He died of tuberculosis in 1885, when his son was 11.

Youth and College Years:

After the death of his father, Robert, his mother and sister moved from California to
eastern Massachusetts near his paternal grandparents. His mother joined the
Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but Frost left it as an adult. He grew up
as a city boy and attended Dartmouth College in 1892, for just less than a semester. He
went back home to teach and work at various jobs including factory work and newspaper
delivery.

First Publication and Marriage:

In 1894 Frost sold his first poem, “My Butterfly,” to The New York Independent for $15.
It begins: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he /
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead.” On the strength of this accomplishment, he
asked Elinor Miriam White, his high school co-valedictorian, to marry him: she refused.
She wanted to finish school before they married. Frost was sure that there was another
man and made an excusrsion to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. He came back later
that year and asked Elinor again; this time she accepted. They married in December 1895.

Farming, Expatriating:

The newlyweds taught school together until 1897, when Frost entered Harvard for two
years. He did well, but left school to return home when his wife was expecting a second
child. He never returned to college, never earned a degree. His grandfather bought a farm
for the family in Derry, New Hampshire (you can still visit this farm). Frost spent nine
years there, farming and writing — the poultry farming was not successful but the writing
drove him on, and back to teaching for a couple more years. In 1912, the Frost gave up
the farm, sailed to Glasgow, and later settled in Beaconsfield, outside London.

Success in England:

Frost’s efforts to establish himself in England were immediately successful. In 1913 he

published his first book, A Boy’s Will, followed a year later by North of Boston. It was in
England that he met such poets as Rupert Brooke, T.E. Hulme and Robert Graves, and
established his lifelong friendship with Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish
his work. Pound was the first American to write a (favorable) review of Frost’s work. In
England Frost also met Edward Thomas, a member of the group known as the Dymock
poets; it was walks with Thomas that led to Frost’s beloved but “tricky” poem, “The
Road Not Taken.”

The Most Celebrated Poet in North America:

Frost returned to the US in 1915, and by the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in
North America, winning four Pulitzer Prizes (still a record). He lived on a farm in
Franconia, New Hampshire, and from there carried on a long career writing, teaching and
lecturing. From 1916 to 1938, he taught at Amherst College, and from 1921 to 1963 he
spent his summers teaching at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury
College, which he helped found. Middlebury still owns and maintains his farm as a
National Historic site: it is now a museum and poetry conference center.

Last Words:

Upon his death in Boston on January 29, 1963, Robert Frost was buried in the Old
Bennington Cemetery, in Bennington, Vermont. He said, “I don’t go to church, but I look
in the window.” It does say something about one’s beliefs to be buried behind a church,
although the gravestone faces in the opposite direction. Frost was a man famous for
contradictions, known as a cranky and egocentric personality – he once lit a wastebasket
on fire on stage when the poet before him went on too long. His gravestone of Barre
granite with hand-carved laurel leaves is inscribed, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the
world.”

Frost in the Poetry Sphere:

Even though he was first discovered in England and extolled by the archmodernist Ezra
Pound, Robert Frost’s reputation as a poet has been that of the most conservative,
traditional, formal verse-maker. This may be changing: Paul Muldoon claims Frost as
“the greatest American poet of the 20th century,” and the New York Times has tried to
resuscitate him as a proto-experimentalist: “Frost on the Edge,” by David Orr, February
4, 2007 in the Sunday Book Review.
Spring Carol Robert Louis Stevenson (1918)
When loud by landside streamlets gush,
And clear in the greenwood quires the thrush,
With sun on the meadows
And songs in the shadows
Comes again to me
The gift of the tongues of the lea,
The gift of the tongues of meadows.

Straightway my olden heart returns

And dances with the dancing burns;
It sings with the sparrows;
To the rain and the (grimy) barrows
Sings my heart aloud—
To the silver-bellied cloud,
To the silver rainy arrows.

It bears the song of the skylark down,

And it hears the singing of the town;
And youth on the highways
And lovers in byways
Follows and sees:
And hearkens the song of the leas
And sings the songs of the highways.

So when the earth is alive with gods,

And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod,
And the grass sings in the meadows,
And the flowers smile in the shadows,
Sits my heart at ease,
Hearing the song of the leas,
Singing the songs of the meadows.

Robert Louis Stevenson Birth & Childhood:

Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His
parents were Thomas and Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson, and his nurse was Alison
"Cummy" Cunningham. "You can never be good," he observed at the age of four, "unless
you pray."

Stevenson was a sickly child, and suffered from tuberculosis from an early age. Of
course, those days in bed also gave him time to read and write...

Robert Louis Stevenson Education & Travels:

Robert Louis Stevenson began attending Edinburgh University. He started off by

studying engineering, and then he studied law. He passed the Scottish bar in 1875.

Stevenson traveled a great deal, ostensibly in an attempt to improve his health. Many of
his most memorable works are travel writings: "An Inland Voyage" (1878), "Travels with
a Donkey in the Cévennes" (1879), "The Silverado Squatters" (1880), and "In the South
Seas."

Robert Louis Stevenson Death:

Robert Louis Stevenson died on December 3, 1894, near Apia, in the Samoan Islands. He
was 44 at the time of his death from a brain hemorrhage. Forty chiefs carried him to his
burial site on the top of Mt. Vaea.

Robert Louis Stevenson Marriage:

Robert Louis Stevenson met Fanny Osbourne in September 1876. He was 25. She was a
36-year old American, who was married with children. By the next year, they were
romantically involved. And, "The Silverado Squatters" (1883) was Stevenson's account of
their honeymoon at a California silver mine. "As I look back," he wrote years later, "I
think my marriage was the best move I ever made in my life."

Robert Louis Stevenson Achievements:

Robert Louis Stevenson traveled around the world, writing about his adventures along the
way. He became famous for "Treasure Island" (1882). He also wrote: "Kidnapped:
(1886), "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886), "The Black Arrow"
(1888), "Master of Ballantrae" (1889), "The Wrong Box" (1889), and "Weir of
Hermiston" (1896), which was unfinished at his death.

Minor Miracle
by Marilyn Nelson
Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
"You fucking niggers!"
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.

"What did you say back there!" he shouted.

My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.

"Well," said the white guy,

shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 26, 1946, to Melvin M. Nelson, a
U.S. serviceman in the Air Force, and Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, a teacher. Brought up
first on one military base and then another, Nelson started writing while still in
elementary school. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Davis, and
holds postgraduate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (M.A., 1970) and the
University of Minnesota (Ph.D., 1979). Her books include The Fields of Praise: New and
Selected Poems (1997), which was a finalist for the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize,
the 1997 National Book Award, and the PEN Winship Award; Magnificat (1994); The
Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the
1991 National Book Award; Mama's Promises (1985); and For the Body (1978); all
published by Louisiana State University Press. She has also published two collections of
verse for children: The Cat Walked through the Casserole and Other Poems for Children
(with Pamela Espeland, 1984) and Halfdan Rasmussen's Hundreds of Hens and Other
Poems for Children (1982), which she translated from Danish with Pamela Espeland. Her
honors include two Pushcart Prizes, two creative writing fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and the 1990 Connecticut Arts
Award. Since 1978 she has taught at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, where she is a
professor of English.

Wildflower
by Stanley Plumly
Some—the ones with fish names—grow so north
they last a month, six weeks at most.
Some others, named for the fields they look like,
last longer, smaller.

And these, in particular, whether trout or corn lily,

onion or bellwort, just cut
this morning and standing open in tapwater in the kitchen,
will close with the sun.

It is June, wildflowers on the table.

They are fresh an hour ago, like sliced lemons,
with the whole day ahead of them.
They could be common mayflower lilies of the valley,

day lilies, or the clustering Canada, large, gold,

long-stemmed as pasture roses, belled out over the vase--
or maybe Solomon's seal, the petals
ranged in small toy pairs

or starry, tipped at the head like weeds.

They could be anonymous as weeds.
They are, in fact, the several names of the same thing,
lilies of the field, butter-and-eggs,

toadflax almost, the way the whites and yellows juxtapose,

and have "the look of flowers that are looked at,"
rooted as they are in water, glass, and air.
I remember the summer I picked everything,

flower and wildflower, singled them out in jars

with a name attached. And when they had dried as stubborn
as paper I put them on pages and named them again.
They were all lilies, even the hyacinth,
even the great pale flower in the hand of the dead.
I picked it, kept it in the book for years
before I knew who she was,
her face lily-white, kissed and dry and cold.
Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly was born to Herman and Esther Plumly on May 23, 1939, in Barnesville,
Ohio. Following Stanley's birth, the family moved from farm work to carpentry jobs and
back to farm work in Virginia and Ohio. Plumly graduated from Wilmington College, a
small work-study school in Ohio, in 1962. While he was in college, his writing talents
were recognized and encouraged by the playwright-poet-teacher Joel Climenhaga.
Plumly received his M.A. from Ohio University in 1968 and did course work toward a
Ph.D. at the same school.

The writer's father, who died at the age of fifty-six of a heart attack brought on by his
chronic alcoholism, dominates the poet's work: "I can hardly think of a poem I've written
that at some point in its history did not implicate, or figure, my father" (Iowa Review, Fall
1973). His mother also figures prominently as the silent, helpless witness of her
husband's self-destruction.

Plumly's books of poetry include The Marriage in the Trees (Ecco Press, 1997); Boy on
the Step (1989); Summer Celestial (1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977), which won the
William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle
Award; Giraffe (1973); In the Outer Dark (1970), which won the Delmore Schwartz
Memorial Award. Most recently, he wrote the nonfiction book Argument & Song:
Sources & Silences in Poetry (Other Press, 2003).

He edited the Ohio Review from 1970 to 1975 and the Iowa Review from 1976 to 1978.
He has taught at numerous institutions including Louisiana State University, Ohio
University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Houston,
as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1978 and 1979.

His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (Plumly's father died while the poet was in
Europe on this grant in 1973), an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National
Endowment for the Arts grant. He is a professor of English at the University of Maryland,
College Park. Currently, he is Maryland's poet laureate.

HENRY HART

Bed of Nails

The one they call an imposter

Smudges bulls-eyes on his palms
With carpenters' chalk, lifts
A cross as big as an I-beam
To his shoulder. Stumbling
Down a bombed-out alley,
Adjusting barbed-wire on his brow,
He bends to catch a goat's
Saliva in a tin cup, sweat
Splashing from his eyes.

A general prods him with a baton

Up a hill shaped like a satellite dish.
Glaring into teleprompters,
He scoffs at the imposter's love
Of enemies, his parables of stones

And seeds. White-coated servants

Pour tea for journalists pecking laptops
And cell phones under a marquee,
For lieutenants tamping sand
Against the cross with gold shovels.

In a concrete apartment below,

A mother stops breastfeeding
Her son to listen to hammers
On bones, a Mercedes sputtering
Over gravel, flies thudding on walls.

She closes her son's eyelids

With her thumbs, sings a lullaby
About a gold moon soaring
From a bed of nails into a cave
Chiseled with the secrets of infinity.

Henry Hart lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he is a professor of English at

the College of William and Mary. In addition to two books of poetry, The Ghost Ship
(1990) and The Rooster Mask (1998), he has written critical works on such poets as
Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and Robert Lowell. He edited The James Dickey Reader
(1999); and his study of Dickey, James Dickey: The World as Lie (2000), was runner-up
in nonfiction for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. He has also recently completed
a novel, Changshin Mission, and a third book of poetry, Rural Apocalypse. His poetry has
appeared in numerous journals and in The Best American Poetry: 1996, and his essays
have appeared in Twentieth Century Literature, The Southern Review, New England
Review, and many other literary publications. Hart is also an editor of Verse, an
international poetry journal.
RON SMITH

Greece
Mountains, everywhere mountains,
young, soaring, jagged mountains,
where we are so
inconceivably old.

And sea, flashing sea

at every hairpin, glinting blue,
green, aquamarine
beyond the cliffs, lapping

the harbor, loses

its color at your feet, perfect
lens for the black anemone,
chloasma pebbles, quick, silver sardine.

And, oh, the goats! goats

in the road round the bend,
piss-luscious goats
that climb trees at our approach,

ashamed I come as a man,

not the Great God Pan,
and you, still-lovely you,
no nymph. Leathery goatherds

fixing us with that Orthodox stare,

rock ready in the hand behind
the back, goat pens, fieldstone sheds,
corrugated tin

rolling its distant thunder,

every gnarled olive shaking its basket
of cicadas, playing, playing
the hot, incessant, carnal wind.
RON SMITH

Greece
An Interview with Ron Smith

Ron Smith is Writer-in-Residence at St.

Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
He is the author of Running Again in
Hollywood Cemetery, judged "a close
second" for the National Poetry Series Open
Competition by Margaret Atwood. The
book's title poem was awarded Southern
Poetry Review's Guy Owen Award by judge
Linda Pastan, and the collection was
subsequently published by University
Presses of Florida. Smith's poems have also
won Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke
Prize, and in 2000 his poem "The Teachers
Pass the Popcorn" was nominated by The
Georgia Review for a Pushcart Prize. More
than a hundred of his poems have appeared
in periodicals, including The Nation, The
Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The
Virginia Quarterly Review, New England
Review, College English, and Kansas
Quarterly, and in anthologies published by
Wesleyan University Press, Time-Life
Books, The University of Georgia Press,
and University of Illinois Press. Most
recently, his eighteen-piece poetic sequence
"To Ithaca" appeared in the Summer 2002
issue of The Georgia Review.

CLARA SILVERSTEIN

Out to Buy Milk

I'm following this road,

my windshield spattered with salt,
snowbanks slumped at the edges,
a red stutter of stop signs.

What I'm carrying is useless,

Kleenex and a butterscotch drop
that escaped from cellophane,
change rattling by the gearshift.

Exhaustion trails me:

I'm staggering
under the weight of your smallness,
your serrated voice, your sticky

tracks up and down my arms,

your plastic animals, slimy
with drool, your hunger fishtailing
from blankets I lay gently on you.

My path is scraped clean

by plows, the distance like a picture
I once drew with too much white space,
the background filled with scribbles.

Clara Silverstein is currently a writer and editor at the Boston Herald. Her articles and
op-ed essays have also been published in the Boston Phoenix, Boston Parents' Paper,
Chicago Parent, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Her poems have appeared in
magazines including The Comstock Review, Sow's Ear, Sojourner, The Larcom Review,
and Peregrine. She has twice been a winner in the New England Writers annual Free
Verse Competition, with a 2002 selection by Yusef Komunyakaa. She is Program
Director of the Writers' Center at Chautauqua, a nine-week summer series of poetry and
prose workshops at the Chautauqua Institution. Currently, Silverstein is at work on poems
about the legacy of the Civil War.

WITH A WATER-LILY
by: Henrik Ibsen

EE, dear, what thy lover brings;

'Tis the flower with the white wings.
Buoyed upon the quiet stream
In the spring it lay adream.

Homelike to bestow this guest,

Lodge it, dear one, in thy breast;
There its leaves the secret keep
Of a wave both still and deep.

Child, beware the tarn-fed stream;

Danger, danger, there to dream!
 Though the sprite pretends to sleep,
And above the lilies peep.

Child, thy bosom is the stream;

Danger, danger, there to dream!
Though above the lilies peep,
And the sprite pretends to sleep

HENRIK IBSEN (1828-1906)

This often misunderstood Norwegian playwright once remarked, "With pleasure

I will torpedo the ark." As a young writer, he was discontent with everything.
He found himself unable to identify with any existing forms of drama, so Henrik
Ibsen set out to create his own.

Along the way, Ibsen experienced multiple shifts in dramatic form and
philosophy as he gradually came to terms with the intellectual, emotional, and
spiritual forces that were at war within his complex psyche. But throughout, his
plays are characterized by their rebellious spirit and their unforgiving scrutiny
of Ibsen's own faults and virtues.

Ibsen's early plays are wild and epic, utilizing an open form and concentrating
on mystical, romantic, poetic visions of the rebel figure in search of an
ultimate truth which is always just out of reach. In Brand, revolts against God,
howling at the heavens, like Prometheus, only to be punished with a huge
avalanche which buries him alive. In Peer Gynt, a young man rebels against
society by choosing to live a life of waste, only to find himself, ultimately,
living in a world of lost opportunities. Emperor and Galilean traces the life of
the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian, a disenchanted youth who seeks out
a variety of religious experiences in a search for beauty and truth, but
eventually, after failing to find contentment, devotes himself to overthrowing
the stage religion of Christianity.

With The League of Youth, Ibsen begins his "modern" phase--an eleven year
period during which he would consciously suppress his Romanticism along with
his poetry and mysticism and focus instead on the problems of modern society.
These plays are characterized by their "realism," a self-imposed discipline
which the playwright hoped would help audiences to more easily digest his
radical views. This period produced several masterpieces, including Ghosts and
Hedda Gabbler, but the aging playwright continued to suffer harsh attacks from
his critics.
 In his final period, Ibsen returned to the more mystical subjects of his youth,
tempered now by the Classical restraint of his middle period. Embittered by
the lack of public enthusiasm for some of his plays, the dramatist painted a
moving portrait in The Master Builder of an aging architect who, having given
up his dreams of building great monuments and churches with towers
reaching up to the heavens, instead devotes his life to building regular houses
for people to live in. When the architect finally realizes that society doesn't
even appreciate his sacrifice, he returns once again to the more mystical
structures of his youth. Although Henrik Ibsen was never fully appreciated
during his lifetime, he has since come to be recognized as one of the great
dramatists of all time and the "Father of Modern Drama."

THE PASSIONS
by: Maurice Maeterlinck

ARROW paths my passions tread:

Laughter rings there, sorrow cries;
Sick and sad, with half-shut eyes,
Thro' the leaves the woods have shed,

My sins like yellow mongrels slink;

Uncouth hyenas, my hates complain,
And on the pale and listless plain
Couching low, love's lion's blink.

Powerless, deep in a dream of peace,

Sunk in a languid spell they lie,
Under a colourless, desolate sky,
There they gaze and never cease,

Where like sheep temptations graze,

One by one departing slow:
In the moon's unchanging glow
My unchanging passions gaze.

MAURICE MAETERLINCK (1862-1949)

The following article was originally published in Modern Dramatists by Ashley Dukes. New York: Books For Libraries Press, Inc.,
1912. pp. 242-54.

The guileless have said that Maeterlinck belongs to no period. This is because
they have lost themselves so completely in his mystical forests that they can no
longer see the wood of modernity for the trees of illusion. To them his magic is
witchcraft. In seeking the source of the rainbow, they have found nothing but
mist. Nevertheless, the period claims him. The opportunity of realism comes
with the age of false romance. And, in the same sequence, there is a time for
magic. It is the hour when all the world is matter-of-fact.

The early eighteen-nineties saw the advanced theatre besieged by social

dramatists. They formed a European ring; Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy,
Hauptmann, Henri Becque and the authors of the comédie rosse. Their social
gospels varied, but they all practiced in common the outward technique of
realism, with its perfection of modern dialogue and setting. The subject
varied, too. Here it was the life of the bourgeoisie, there that of the peasantry
or the slums. Social politics were touched upon, as in The Weavers or An
Enemy of the People. An atmosphere of moral indignation pervaded the stage.
Society was "unmasked"; convention was exposed; new moralities were
preached. Each author, mounting the realistic steed, set off at a gallop in
pursuit of "Truth." And truth was the actual, the existing fact.

This was the destined hour of the magician, and Maeterlinck appeared. The
apparition was startling, and some critics, seeking a pompous imbecility to
cover their confusion, named him "the Belgian Shakespeare." In this fashion
Chekhov might be named "the Russian Ibsen," or Hugo von Hofmannsthal "the
Austrian Dante." Such is the disintigrating force of the new idea upon the mind
of the expert labeller.

The originality of the earlier Maeterlinck was marked in three respects; in

setting, subject and technique. I take them consecutively.

The setting was at first sight unfamiliar and (to the social politician)
reactionary. The peasant cottages and middle-class parlours of the realist
drama gave place to dim halls of feudal castles, gloomy medieval forests and
battlefields remote from space and time. The atmosphere was that of a dream-
world with the surface ethics of a barbaric age. So far, however, Maeterlinck
might be said only to have rediscovered the vessel of the old romance which
had lain unused so long.

The subject was more unfamiliar still. Dramatists of all ages had been
concerned to lay bare the motive of human action. Even the playwright-
manipulator of the market place, endeavoring to conceal the strings he pulled,
alleged a motive for his puppets; and the modern realists, challenging the
order of society, sought the true motive of actual men and women. George
Bernard Shaw, hurling the thunderbolts of his prefaces at an astonished Anglo-
Saxon world, denounced the attempt "to found our institutions upon the ideals
suggested to our imaginations by our half-satisfied passions, instead of upon
genuinely scientific natural history." Motive, then, was regarded as a fixed
scientific fact, accessible to investigation and exact analysis. It was a definitely
adjusted part of the human mechanism. Thus the logical evolutionist,
supported by nineteenth century thought. Maeterlinck modified this conception
without attempting a frontal assault upon it. He went deeper than the
logicians, and sought the source of all motive, the underlying self. Here he was
supported by modern psychology, which draws a distinction between the
conscious and the sub-conscious ego. He was concerned, however, not with a
new scientific form of drama to replace the old, but only with the expression
of a temperament. He dramatized the sub-conscious, the subterranean and
tremulous in man, called it forth and gave it life. It took the form of the child-
spirit, and its dominant trait was ever-present fear. It was awakened at night
after the sleep of centuries, and found the darkness peopled with the
unknown. Fate, a malignant horror with lean, clutching hands, hovered in the
gloom of the castle hall and crouched behind every tree in the forest,
purposing a rape of the soul. Even the blind were conscious of its presence.
The children fled before it, seeking to return to their sleep; but every way was
barred, and they beat their hands vainly upon heavy iron doors. Such children
as Pélléas and Mélisande, Aglavaine and Sélysette.

The technique was newest of all. The sub-conscious mood, hitherto expressed
only in music, found words. It became articulate through symbolic speech,
repetition, archaism and subtle delicacy of suggestion. Above all, through a
perfection of the artless.

This was the service of the earlier Maeterlinck; a notable discoverer.

Monna Vanna was the turning point. In setting, the transition was from the
mystical to the historical, from the dimly imagined to the known. The place,
Pisa; the period, the close of the fifteenth century. The roaming symbolist,
then, was tethered by his own choice; and, feeling the unfamiliar pull of the
imprisoning rope, at each browsing sweep he narrowed his range of liberty still
further, ending at last with many plaintive bleats in a tangle of impotence. But
of that later.

In subject there was a vaster change. The children had grown up. They were no
longer afraid of the dark. They passed from moods to problems, from the
midnight dream-world to the high noon of passion, from an atmosphere to a
morality. A dictated morality of unheroism, in accord with the "movements" of
the age; such a gospel as sparkled in lighter form through the pages of Arms
and the Man. Some of their former characteristics they retained--the half-
blindness of Marco, for example--but for the most part they were older and less
ingenuous. Yet in growing up they had grown no stronger. Their problems were
too great for them. Spoiled children from the first, they became querulous and
unmanageable. The reason for this is not far to seek. The perfect simplicity of
the earlier Maeterlinck portrayed each individual as a clearly defined,
homogeneous figure, troubled by fate, but yet limpid and serene within. The
child-spirit was a complete whole, the grown man a conflicting cosmos. Instinct
guided the poet in his native drama of the sub-conscious; it deserted him
almost wholly in the drama of action.

In technique too, there was a lapse. The artless gave place to the artificial,
and the old simplicity of speech and form to a covenant with the theatre. The
effective thrill of Vanna, naked beneath her cloak in the tent of Prinzivalle, her
great stage lie at the close, her all important "aside" ("Tais-toi . . . je te
délivrerai . . . . nous fuirons") at the critical moment, the explanatory speeches
of Marco as raisonneur;--these were all commonplaces of the theatrical
specialist, but they were foreign to Maeterlinck's genius. Moving in the depths
of the child-spirit he had been profound; returning to the surface of life he
was--superficial.

Let us look more closely at the figures of this drama. Pisa is beleaguered by the
Florentines and reduced to famine. Guido, husband of Monna Vanna, commands
the garrison. The old philosopher Marco, his father, returns from the besieging
camp with terms of peace. Marco has been the guest of the Florentine
mercenary, Prinzivalle, and has found him no barbarian, as was rumoured, but
a man of parts, wise, reasonable and humane. "But where," he asks, "is the
wise man without his madness, or the good man who has never harboured a
monstrous thought?" Prinzivalle's terms are that Vanna shall go to him at night,
naked beneath her cloak, and shall pass the night in his tent; earning thereby
the safe entry into Pisa of a convoy with provisions and the raising of the siege.
Marco urges his son to accept them: "Do what this madman asks, and the deed
which seems to you hideous will seem heroic to those who survive . . . . It is an
error to believe that the pinnacle of heroism is to be found only in death. The
most heroic act is the most painful, and death is often easier than life." Here is
the new morality of reason, linking Maeterlinck with the tendencies of a
period. Guido refuses; but Vanna consents, and goes to Prinzivalle.

Prinzivalle, unknown to Vanna, had loved her in his youth. He talks with her
now; they speak frankly as friends. She binds up his wounds, and treats him at
moments almost like a mother. The purpose of her coming is barely touched
upon. Her speech is half naïve, half yielding. Very simply she expresses her
astonishment at being able to speak with him at all, for "Je suis très
silencieuse." (What sinuous magic in this word!) Still Prinzivalle forbears to take
her; and their conversation is broken by an alarm in the camp. A new
detachment of the Florentines has arrived, and Prinzivalle is proclaimed a
traitor. Vanna implores him to return with her to Pisa, where he will be
received honourably as a guest. She kisses him upon the forehead, and he
carries her away in his arms.

Within the city Marco and Guido await them. Here the conventions of the
theatre gain the upper hand, and, to borrow a phrase of Prinzivalle, "ce dernier
acte est le seul qui ne prouve rien." Vanna declares that she is unharmed;
Guido refuses to believe her. Protestations and incredulity--these are familiar
scenes, but they are at least convincing. The unreal triumphs with the
recognition of Prinzivalle. Note the gradual lapse into the theatrical rut. Guido
believes at first that Vanna has brought him as a victim, to revenge her wrong.
She still protests: "He did not touch me," "Why not?" "Because he loves me."
Guido is tortured by ignorance, craves for certainty. At all costs he must know
the whole truth. Prinzivalle is seized and bound for torture. Vanna rushes into
the midst of the guards, crying, "No! I lied! He took me! He is mine!" (Aside to
Prinzivalle, "Be silent! I will free you! We will fly together!") Stage psychology
ready-made; a wild, clap-trap scene. For the sake of form Guido asks "Why is
he here? Why did you lie?" and for the sake of form she answers, "I lied to spare
you . . . . I brought him to revenge myself." The play sinks fast, but Vanna's
proof touches the depths. She approaches Prinzivalle and embraces him with a
show of hatred. "Thus and thus I kissed him! . . . He is mine! . . . I will have
him! . . . He is the trophy of this night of mine!" Prinzivalle is led away.
"Adieu . . . we shall meet again!" Then, taking the key of his prison, she goes
out alone to set him free. "Ce dernier acte . . . ne prouve rien."

And the ethics? (For Monna Vanna has been called an ethical drama.) Accept
for the sake of argument the wildly preposterous fact of Prinzivalle's demand.
Marco urges a morality of unheroism and sacrifice; but he claims in the same
breath that it is based upon the experience of age. He foreshadows a time
when sole possession will not be the highest aim of love; but his immediate
instance is the prostitution of the beloved to the caprice of a mercenary. Guido
commands the garrison; but he allows Vanna to go against his will. Having
allowed her to go, he stands upon his honour and refuses to forgive her.
Prinzivalle is a philosopher, but yet "a madman." He loves Vanna, but he does
not take her. As for Vanna herself, she remains a mystery. (Perhaps a mystery
even to her author.) She loves Guido and treats him almost with contempt;
loves Prinzivalle in an instant, and saves him in the next. The last impression of
her is the strongest; as the steam of the theatrical machinery in the final act.
The motive of an ethical drama of weaklings.

Let us be uncritical for a moment, even towards these spoiled children. It is ill
work to be forever breaking butterflies upon a wheel. And in this Monna Vanna
there is so much music of speech, so much brave show of colour, so much pure
joy of life. There are triumphant moments; as when Prinzivalle draws aside the
curtain of his tent, and the fiery towers of Pisa are seen against the sky. These
are in part a legacy of past achievement; in part the flame of a fate at its
zenith. Monna Vanna is a landmark, a monument to the parting of ways. With
the earlier dramas, it traces the history of Maeterlinck the poet. He had
himself emerged from the gloom of the forest for the first time; and if he
blinked overmuch in the glare of noon, and his mystical second sight deserted
him, that may have been little for him by comparison with the new sense of
life and passion. One should not darken the eyes of the poet, as finches are
blinded to make them sing more sweetly. He must choose his own surroundings.
Only, it is the song that matters to the world, not the singer; and there is one
of the riddles of art and life. After Monna Vanna, Maeterlinck was no longer a
discoverer. He became a purveyor of water after wine. But the wine must first
be tasted, before the water is thrown away.

STAGNANT HOURS
by: Maurice Maeterlinck

ERE are the old desires that pass,

The dreams of weary men, that die,
The dreams that faint and fail, alas!
And there the days of hope gone by!

Where to fly shall we find a place?

Never a star shines late or soon:
Weariness only with frozen face,
And sheets of blue in the icy moon.

Behold the fireless sick, and lo!

The sobbing victims of the snare!
Lambs whose pasture is only snow!
Pity them all, O Lord, my prayer!

For me, I wait the awakening call:

I pray that slumber leave me soon.
I wait until the sunlight fall
On hands yet frozen by the moon.