Newspaper History

Category: The Sun

  • The Seekers

    From The Sun, June 20, 1915. By Arthur Wallace Peace.

    On life’s high trails two pilgrims met,
    And east and west their ways were set.

    Said one: “I seek the towers tall
    That shelter Merlin’s mystic hall.

    “There shall I learn his secrets grave
    Until the earth shall be my slave.

    “I leave the valley’s peace to roam;
    I bid farewell to love and home.”

    Said one: “I from the heights come down
    To seek the valley kind and brown.

    “There shall I learn from seed and sod
    The quickest pathway unto God.

    “There shall I find my heart’s desire
    Beside a humble hearthside fire.”

    Then on they went with pitying thought,
    Each leaving what the other sought!

  • The Artist

    From The Sun, June 13, 1915.

    When nature with a mission grave
        Was by the Lord endowed
    She painted on the sea a wave
        And on the sky a cloud.
    And on the land she drew a hill
        And on the hill a tree,
    And in the vale she placed a rill
        That traveled to the sea.

    And then, progressing without doubt,
        She took a little brush
    And in the stream she placed a trout,
        And on the tree a thrush.
    And on the waves she painted foam
        And roses in the wild;
    And in the shelter of a home
        A woman and a child.

    And did all this perfection bring?
        Ah, no! Experience shows
    She caused the little thrush to sing,
        Gave perfume to the rose.
    And best of all, the artist wise,
        And in her happiest style,
    Put love into the woman’s eyes
        And made the baby smile!

  • The Fairy’s Invitation

    From The Sun, May 9, 1915. By Lillian MacDonald.

    Dear child, I’ve brought a toadstool,
        It’s a table for our feast,
    And a cowslip (such a bargain—
        Worth three daisies at the least!)

    With five small cups upon it,
        Full of sparkling, shining dew,
    And of violets for perfume
        We will scatter just a few.

    We’ve pollen in a rose leaf;
        Other dainties, more or less;
    For it takes such choice refreshments
        To make parties a success.

    Please come at half past midnight;
        I’ll send Glowworm to attend.
    Until supper time, believe me,
        Your devoted Fairy Friend.

  • The Non-Combatants

    From The Sun, May 2, 1915.

    Why should we mourn that shot and shell
        Are sweeping lives away
    When each man has his private hell
        And dies anew each day?

    Upon the bloody field where death
        His thundering summons calls,
    The men who face the cannon’s breath
        May win to glory’s halls.

    Mixed in that elemental strife
        Perhaps they may forget
    The heartaches that we bear through life,
        The sorrow, the regret.

    Sweeter by far the lot they choose
        Than ours who stay behind,
    Who find what we would gain we lose,
        Unbound what we would bind.

    We envy them the deaths they die,
        Our hearts must die each day,
    We greet with sad and hopeless eye
        Each morn’s returning ray.

    They fall, to live forever more
        In glory’s brightest page,
    We live in sorrow to deplore
        The bars around our cage.

    The gods on high, if gods there be
        To comfort or condemn,
    Shall, if they judge with equity,
        Lament for us, not them.

  • The Chant of the Vultures

    From The Sun, April 17, 1915. By Edwin Markham.

    We are circling, glad of the battle; we joy in the smell of the smoke.
    Fight on in the hell of the trenches; we publish your names with a croak!
    Ye will lie in dim heaps when the sunset blows cold on the reddening sand;
    Yet fight, for the dead will have wages: a death-clutch of dust in the hand.
    Ye have given us banquet, O kings, and still do we clamor for more;
    Vast, vast is our hunger, as vast as the sea-hunger gnawing the shore.

    O kings, ye have catered to vultures—have chosen to feed us, forsooth,
    The joy of the world and her glory, the hope of the world and her youth.
    O kings, ye are diligent lackeys; we laurel your names with our praise,
    For ye are the staff of our comfort, for ye are the strength of our days.
    Then spur on the host in the trenches to give up the sky at a stroke;
    We tell all the winds of their glory—we publish their fame with a croak!

  • The Flutes of April

    From The Sun, April 11, 1915. By Clinton Scollard.

    Don’t you hear the flutes of April calling clear and calling cool
    From the crests that front the morning, from the hidden valley pool,
    Runes of rapture half forgotten, tunes wherein old passions rule?

    Passions for the sweet earth beauty hidden long and hidden deep
    Underneath the seal of silence in the vasts of winter sleep,
    Now unleashed and now unloosened once again to pulse and leap!

    Don’t you hear the flutes of April, like the ancient pipes of Pan
    Summoning each slumbering kindred, summoning each drowsing clan,
    Sounding a far borne reveille to the laggard heart of man!

    Bidding every seed to quicken, bidding every root to climb,
    Thrilling every thew and fibre as with some ecstatic rhyme,
    Setting floods of sap to dancing upward in triumphant time!

    Don’t you hear the flutes of April blowing under sun and star
    Virginal as is the dawning, tender as dim twilights are,
    With the vital breath of being prisoned in each rhythmic bar?

    With their lyric divination, prescience of all things fair,
    With their magic transmutation, guerdon for each soul to share,
    Don’t you hear the flutes of April wafted down the April air?

  • The Cursing of Pertab Singh

    From The Sun, March 28, 1915. By F. W. Poole.

    The ryot crouched in his hut and moaned with his face to the plastered wall.
    He rent his rage and tore his hair and wept for his ruler’s fall.
    The children hushed their simple songs and whimpered and wailed with dread.
    Sir Pertab Singh, their prince, their king, had dared to touch the dead.

    The white sahibs had warned him though the slain was of their kin.
    They knew the awful laws of caste—to touch the dead is sin.
    “’Tis the son of a friend and comrade. His father is not here.”
    Sir Pertab gently bore the corpse and laid it on the bier.

    Five hundred priests of Brahma’s shrine awaited at the morn
    To make an ancient honored name a byword and a scorn.
    Calmly cool, Sir Pertab heard his fate all men might know—
    To be with outcast sweepers as the lowest of the low.

    “What care I for your paltry ban?” and as they paused he smiled.
    “If naught can soil me save your clan, then I am undefiled.
    Mine is a higher, nobler caste, of which you do not know,
    A caste as great as thine is mean—as high as thine is low.

    “A caste that was old and honored ere your upstart creed began—
    The caste of a loyal soldier. The creed of an honest man
    Who serves men less with a weakling word, and more with a well wrought deed—
    Who lives for the good of his kin and kind, and dies for his country’s need.

    “The caste of a man—his word a law which he obeys the first—
    Of one who well to serve the best will ever dare the worst—
    Who stands unawed by a host in arms, nor quails at a parting breath—
    Walks straight and true with a friend unto—and beyond—the gates of death.”

    The high priests gasped in wonderment, the vast throng gazed in awe
    That the will of a man was strong to stand in the face of an iron law.
    The pillars of caste that a realm had reared to shadow a man and king
    Wavered and crumbled and disappeared—and left Sir Pertab Singh.

  • Sweet Timothy; or Saved by the Secretary

    From The Sun, March 23, 1915. By Arthur Guiterman.

    A BALLAD OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY

    If I were a young middy in love with a girl, I would marry her if it broke up the whole navy. I would let nothing like that stand between me and the girl I loved.
    —Secretary Josephus Daniels

    It was just eight bells or about half past,
        And our tea was in the process of solution,
    When they piped all hands to the maintopmast
        For to solemnize a naval execution.

    An’ we heard the horns of the Horse Marines
        An’ their boots drumming hollow on the planking
    As they marched up a youth in his early teens
        With manacles an’ fetter locks a-clanking.

    Oh, they dragged him up, and I felt real bad
        When I saw ’twas little Timothy the ensign,
    An’ I knew that they meant for to hang the lad,
        A proceeding what there wasn’t any sense in.

    And our captain stern to the prisoner said,
        “You will shortly be suspended from a gibbet,
    For you’ve gone an’ went and a gal you’ve wed,
        Which the articles especially prohibit!”

    Oh, his gal runs up, so pale an’ sweet
        (And she was a ravin’, tearin’ beauty!)
    An’ she swooned for grief at the captain’s feet,
        But he only muttered, “Seamen, do your duty!”

    Oh, I wept big tears till my blouse was soaked,
        For they tied a halter round the middy’s wishbone,
    An’ the poor boy gulped, an’ the poor boy choked
        As he might have been a-swallerin’ a fishbone.

    Now we heard a shout an’ a whistle toot,
        And orders come to anchor an’ to reef us;
    An’ a man come aboard in a broadcloth suit
        Which I seen was the eminent Josephus.

    Oh, he stepped right up to the boy (poor chap!)
        And sez he, “You’re a credit to the nation!
    An’ you shan’t be hanged by no gold lace cap
        For the breakin’ of a stupid regulation!

    “For if I loved a gal an’ the gal loved me
        I’d marry her in Afriky or Siam
    If it wrecked every ship in the hull navee—
        For that’s the sort of prairie chicken I am!

    “An’ you shall cruise with your bride, you shall
        Afar on the ocean wavy,
    For I’ll make you a Lord High Admiral
        If there’s any such position in the navy!”

  • In Partibus

    From The Sun, March 21, 1915. By Rudyard Kipling.

    The buses run to Battersea,
        The buses run to Bow
    The buses run to Westbourne Grove
        And Notting Hill also;
    But I am sick of London town
        From Shepherd’s Bush to Bow.

    I see the smut upon my cuff
        And feel him on my nose;
    I cannot leave my window wide
        When gentle zephyr blows,
    Because he brings disgusting things
        And drops ’em on my clothes.

    The sky, a greasy soup-toureen,
        Shuts down atop my brow.
    Yes, I have sighed for London town
        And I have got it now:
    And half of it is fog and filth,
        And half is fog and row.

    And when I take my nightly prowl
        ’Tis passing good to meet
    The pious Briton lugging home
        His wife and daughter sweet,
    Through four packed miles of seething vice
        Thrust out upon the street.

    Earth holds no horror like to this
        In any land displayed,
    From Suez unto Sandy Hook,
        From Calais to Port Said;
    And ’twas to hide their heathendom
        The beastly fog was made.

    I cannot tell when dawn is near,
        Or when the day is done,
    Because I always see the gas
        And never see the sun,
    And now, methinks, I do not care
        A cuss for either one.

    But stay, there was an orange, or
        An aged egg its yolk;
    It might have been a Pears’ balloon
        Or Barnum’s latest joke;
    I took it for the sun and wept
        To watch it through the smoke.

    It’s oh to see the morn ablaze
        Above the mango-tope,
    When homeward through the dewy cane
        The little jackals lope,
    And half Bengal heaves into view,
        New washed—with sunlight soap.

    It’s oh for one deep whisky peg
        When Christmas winds are blowing,
    When all the men you ever knew,
        And all you’ve ceased from knowing,
    Are “entered for the Tournament,
        And everything that’s going.”

    But I consort with long-haired things
        In velvet collar-rolls,
    Who talk about the Aims of Art,
        And “theories” and “goals,”
    And moo and coo with women-folk
        About their blessed souls.

    But that they call “psychology”
        Is lack of liver pill,
    And all that blights their tender souls
        Is eating till they’re ill,
    And their chief way of winning goals
        Consists of sitting still.

    It’s oh to meet an Army man,
        Set up and trimmed and taut,
    Who does not spout hashed libraries
        Or think the next man’s thought,
    And walks as though he owned himself,
        And hogs his bristles short.

    Hear now, a voice across the seas
        To kin beyond my ken,
    If ye have ever filled an hour
        With stories from my pen,
    For pity’s sake send some one here
        To bring me news of men!

    The buses run to Islington,
        To Highgate and Soho,
    To Hammersmith and Kew therewith
        And Camberwell also,
    But I can only murmur “Bus!”
        From Shepherd’s Bush to Bow.

  • St. Patrick’s Day Without Shamrocks

    From The Sun, March 17, 1915.

    We sought them ‘neath the snowflakes
        And o’er all the frosty ground,
    But no leaflet like the shamrock
        On St. Patrick’s Day we found.
    And our hearts went back to Erin,
        To her dewy vales and hills,
    Where the shamrock twines and clusters
        O’er the fields and by the rills.

    Oh, no more, no more my country
        Shall thy loving daughter lay
    Her head upon thy bosom
        While she weeps her tears away;
    There the primrose and the daisy
        Bloom as in the days of old,
    And the violet comes in purple
        And the buttercup in gold.

    Kildare’s broad fields are fragrant
        With the shamrock’s breath today.
    Shamrocks bloom from Clare to Antrim,
        From Killarney to Lough Neagh;
    And they speak of Patrick’s preaching
        With a quiet, voiceless lore,
    And they breathe of faith and heaven
        All the trefoiled island o’er.

    Wandering listless by the Liffey,
        Stoop and pluck the shamrock green;
    What an emblem plain and simple
        Of the one true faith is seen;
    Of the Father and the Spirit
        Speaks the mystic triune leaf,
    Of the Son in anguish dying
        On the Cross in love and grief.

    Well humility may choose it
        For an emblem fair and meet,
    Close beside the poorest cabin
        It is pouring fragrance sweet.
    Modest is our darling shamrock,
        Useful, charitable, kind,
    Clothing mean, deserted places
        With its green leaves intertwined.

    Many a lesson thus it teaches,
        Many a wholesome thought recalls,
    Many a teardrop all unbidden
        To its cherished memory falls;
    Nor the green of Erin’s banner
        Still must stir the Irish heart,
    Which in Erin’s many sorrows
        Ever, ever must have part.

    Oh be true, be true to Erin,
        True to faith and true to God,
    To St. Patrick, His apostle,
        Who redeemed our native sod.
    Never more her mystic emblem
        In green Erin may you see,
    Let the faith it symbolizes
        Be the dearer unto thee.