Month: February 2020

“Elan Vital” by Sherard Vines

Elan Vital

I lay in the tepid mud

Grey-drab, bubbling here and there with steam,

A cell

Rebellious, derisive of my creator's

Incoherent gropings.

I would be the sport no longer

Of his bovine essays in creation!

 

The other cells,

Ere they dissolved meekly back

Into inorganism

Tried, at my effrontery

To develop shocked hands

That they might hold them up protesting.

I laughed cells' laughter

And said; " I am life; see me live,"

I died laughing.

 

I was the creeping things

Slime-tracking the thundered on

Primaeval strata.

[ . . . ]

Sherard Vines' poem "Elan Vital" was published in the 1919 "cycle" of Wheels. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org

The Modernist Journals Project

Librivox audio recording hosted on Archive.org

“Synthesized Perfumes and Essences” by Marsden Hartley

Synthesized Perfumes and Essences

Morning comes with such rapidity, purple plum

hanging on sensuous boughs over my head,

sweeping my shoulders, grazing my cheek, that

I wonder one ever thinks of the going of even-

ing.

I never talk of evening save to say of, it, it is another

kind of light.

Dark holes called doorways are for me only as places

to go into where one watches the light of night

from them.

[ . . . ]

Marsden Hartley's poem "Synthesized Perfumes and Essences" was published in 1920 in the third Others anthology. To read this poem in full in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link(s) below:

Archive.org 

“The Villain” by William H. Davies

The Villain

While joy gave clouds the light of stars,

That beamed where'er they looked;

And calves and lambs had tottering knees,

Excited, while they sucked;

While every bird enjoyed his song,

Without one thought of harm or wrong—

I turned my head and saw the wind,

Not far from where I stood,

Dragging the corn by her golden hair

Into a dark and lonely wood.

 

William H. Davies' poem "The Villain" was published in Georgian Poetry 1921-1922. To read this poem in a digitized version of this publication, follow the link below:

Archive.org

“Argyria” by Richard Aldington