Newspaper History

Tag: Edwin Markham

  • 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 Testing

    From the Omaha Daily Bee, April 30, 1914. By Edwin Markham.

    When in the dim beginning of the years
    God mixed in man the rapture and the tears
    And scattered through his brain the starry stuff,
    He said, “Behold! Yet this is not enough,
    For I must test his spirit to make sure
    That he can dare the vision and endure.

    “I will withdraw my face,
    Veil me in shadow for a certain space
    And leave behind only a broken clue,
    A crevice where the glory glimmers through.
    Some whisper from the sky,
    Some footprint in the road to track me by.

    “I will leave man to make the fateful guess,
    Will leave him torn between the no and yes,
    Leave him unresting till he rests in Me,
    Drawn upward by the choice that makes him free—
    Leave him in tragic loneliness to choose,
    With all in life to win or all to lose.”

  • The Stone Rejected

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, November 7, 1913. By Edwin Markham.

    For years it had been trampled in the street
    Of Florence by the drift of heedless feet—
    The stone that Buonarroti made confess
    That shape you know, that marble loveliness.

    You mind the tale—how he was passing by
    When the rude marble caught his Jovian eye,
    That stone men had dishonored and had thrust
    Out to the insult of the wayside dust.
    He stooped to lift it from its mean estate,
    And bore it on his shoulder to the gate,
    Where all day long a hundred hammers rang;
    And soon his chisels round the marble sang,
    Till suddenly the hidden angel shone
    That had been waiting, prisoned in the stone.

    Thus came the cherub, with the laughing face
    That long has lighted up an altar place.