UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

This remarkable poem appeared in the July issue of the POETRY REVIEW (published in London) and was adjudged the best of some two hundred poems submitted by writers from many countries. The contest was for the purpose of focusing the attention of the literary world on the memorial cottage for Poe at Fordham. The judges were Alfred Noyes and five leading editors. It afterward appeared in a tiny booklet in order that visitors at the Poe Cottage might have the opportunity of purchasing copies. The poem is of such importance that a wider presentation of it seems imperative.

In a letter to the editor, Mr. Markham says, "You are right in feeling that I have pressed all my energies into the work of this poem. It is indeed the burst of my whole mind, a mind which has been formed by fifty years of devotion to a study of the genius and fate of Edgar Allan Poe. I have read nearly everything that has been written about him; I have come more and more to feel the tragic misfortunes of his career and the sad injustice of many of the commentaries upon it. MY ISRAFEL gave me what I was looking for an opportunity to gratify the noble pleasure of praising."

I

The sad great gifts the austere Muses bring—
Breathing on poets the immortal breath-
Were laid on him that he might darkly sing
Of Beauty, Love and Death.

They laid upon him dreams of high romance,
A hunger for a loveliness more strange
Than earth can give in all her piteous chance,
In all her changeless change.

They sent him dreams of beauty's starrier birth,
Dreams of a beauty touched with tragic grief-
A wilder beauty than is known to earth,
Where beauty is so brief.

They laid upon him music's trembling charm,
The mystery of sound, of shaken air,

Whose touch can still the spirit or alarm—

Build rapture, build despair.

They struck him with imagination's rod,

The power that built these heavens that soar and seem

These heavens that are the daring of some God

Stirred by the lyric dream.

And then (for, oh, the Muses do not spare!)

They set for him one final gift apart:

They gave him sorrow as a pack to bear,

Sorrow to break the heart.

II

And so they called the poet into Time,

The saddest and the proudest of the race

That ever came this way with sound of rhyme,

Inquest of Beauty's face.

He knew life's immemorial grief-the cry

AM⠀of young Love with the ruined rainbow wings,

The pathos of the vanishing, the sigh

Out of all mortal things.

For he was son to Proserpine, and she
Drew his proud bark to many a secret shore
Of the dim continents whose names shall be
Night and the Nevermore.

Steering toward Shadow with melodious helm,
He touched with sombre prow the wharves of Dis,
Exploring all the hushed and hollow realm

This side the last abyss.

He knew, too, all the melancholy sounds
That beat about the pale Lethean piers;
And in his side he felt the secret wounds
Known to the lyric seers.

He mused among the gray sarcophagi,
While far upon the rim of ruin fled
A host of hooded forms that hurried by
With laughters to the dead.

He lookt on cities in their crumbling hours,
Where Death obscurely mumbles out his rune,
Hoary, remote, alone, where time-torn towers
Hang spectral in the moon.

III

He walked our streets as on a lonely strand:
His country was not here-it was afar.
Not here his home, not here his motherland,
But in some statelier star.

Life was his exile, Earth his alien shore,

And these were foreign faces that he passed;
For he had other language, other lore,

And he must home at last.

His country was not here, but in the isles

Of Aiden ringed around with lustrous seas,
Where golden galleys skim the silver miles
Or sleep upon the breeze.

And there were gardens where the waters sing
In valleys of a many-colored grass,

Where strange-eyed birds go by on rainbow wing,
And rose-pale maidens pass—