Edward Davis - 3 Short Poems (1917)

Forgotten Poems #68: Blank Verse

     
              —: Anniversary :—

       If years are but the rhythm of the world,
       This day shall be the marking of the stress;
       And just as poets joy in some delightful beat,
       We, too, shall find in each recurrent year,
       A cadence freshening to our souls.
     

     
              —: Good Old Earth :—

       Good old earth, I pity thee, when as a mass of fire
       Thou wert hurled and whirled through cooling space,
       And in the spasm of the bleak centuries crusted to the core.
       For in these dark moments of mine,
       When Destiny holds me in its school,
       And flogs me to a better sight of things,
       I seem to feel the groaning of the earth
       When it was school'd to mountains and to trees.
     

     
              —: Alone :—

       A stranger to the turmoil and the noise,
       And moving like a specter ship alone,
       I feel myself apart and long for kin.
       If this be parcel of my feeling here,
       What will it be if I ascend that hill!
       An ocean full of loneliness would fill my soul
       Akin to what one feels when melancholy music silently
       Dismembers soul from brain and makes it
       Wander through the void.
     

Edward Davis (born c. 1890s?) only published six poems that I know of, in the student anthology The Rhymers: A Book of Pennsylvania Verse (1917), edited by Albert Edmund Trombly. Unlike the majority of the poets in Trombly’s anthology, Davis’ work is written in unrhymed ‘blank verse’, interspersed with playful moments of cadenced rhythm and self-reflixivity (as in the final line of ‘Anniversary’, meta-poetically shifting the beat).

“What young poets need, it seems to me, is what might be called an intellectual Mæcenas: a teacher more interested in the pupils than in the teacher; one whose gifts and experience make possible their discovering and fostering of ability; one ready to tolerate the vagaries of young artists, their ignorance of and disregard for the tool of the art, their sentimentality, their effusiveness, and their optimistic belief that whatever they have done is worthy of attention.” (Trombly, 1917)

      
              For Edward Davis
                 by Dick Whyte

                     I.

                              Listen!

       Flowing water:

                              Babbling brooks,
                              Rushing rivers,
                              Welling waves,

                  Teach me to
                  listen.


                     II.

       The beating wings of birds
       fast flying by
       Hammer flat the words
       before they cry;

       "Do you hear the wind
        singing in the trees?"

       Fragments of feathers wrapped
       in rhythms old,
       Fixed by the wax of bees
       & forged in gold;

       Before poetry,          silence.
     

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