“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
Half-way up the stairs it stands,
And points and beckons with its hands
From its case of massive oak,
Like a monk, who, under his cloak,
Crosses himself, and sighs, alas!
With sorrowful voice to all who pass,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
By day its voice is low and light;
But in the silent dead of night,
Distinct as a passing footstep’s fall,
It echoes along the vacant hall,
Along the ceiling, along the floor,
And seems to say, at each chamber-door,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
Through days of sorrow and of mirth,
Through days of death and days of birth,
Through every swift vicissitude
Of changeful time, unchanged it has stood,
And as if, like God, it all things saw,
It calmly repeats those words of awe,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
In that mansion used to be
Free-hearted Hospitality;
His great fires up the chimney roared;
The stranger feasted at his board;
But, like the skeleton at the feast,
That warning timepiece never ceased,—
“Forever—never!
Never-forever!”
There groups of merry children played,
There youths and maidens dreaming strayed;
O precious hours! O golden prime,
And affluence of love and time!
Even as a miser counts his gold,
Those hours the ancient timepiece told,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
From that chamber, clothed in white,
The bride came forth on her wedding night;
There, in that silent room below,
The dead lay in his shroud of snow;
And in the hush that followed the prayer,
Was heard the old clock on the stair,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
All are scattered now and fled,
Some are married, some are dead;
And when I ask, with throbs of pain,
“Ah! when shall they all meet again?”
As in the days long since gone by,
The ancient timepiece makes reply,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
Never here, forever there,
Where all parting, pain, and care,
And death, and time shall disappear,—
Forever there, but never here!
The horologe of Eternity
Sayeth this incessantly,—
“Forever—never!
Never—forever!”
The Rainy Day
The day is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
The vine still clings to the mouldering wall,
But at every gust the dead leaves fall,
And the day is dark and dreary.
My life is cold, and dark, and dreary;
It rains, and the wind is never weary;
My thoughts still cling to the mouldering Past,
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast,
And the days are dark and dreary.
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
JOHN LUCKEY McCREERY
(1835–1906)
JOHN McCREERY was born in Sweden, New York, the son of a Methodist minister. His career in journalism took him to Delhi, Iowa, in 1857, where he bought a weekly newspaper that he edited until the end of the Civil War. After working for newspapers in Dubuque, he became a clerk with the Committee on Indian Affairs, Washington, D.C., where he later held other government jobs.
“There Is No Death,” in ten stanzas, first appeared, with McCreery’s byline, in Arthur’s Home journal 22 (July 1863): 41. Then a funny thing happened. A newspaper reprinted the poem, crediting it to one “E. Bulmer,” probably a fictitious name. Other editors assumed that “Bulmer” was a wrong spelling of “Bulwer,” which they took to be Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer, England’s poet who used the pen name Owen Meredith!
McCreery’s poem was soon reprinted everywhere—in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, hymnbooks and school readers—as the work of Meredith. Even Burton Stevenson, who devotes a chapter to all this in Famous Single Poems, credited the poem to Meredith in his earlier Home Book of Verse.
No other poem was more recited at funerals and burial sites than “There Is No Death.” Poor McCreery spent the rest of his life struggling vainly to prove the poem was indeed his. He included it as the first poem in Songs of Toil and Triumph (1883), where he revised it heavily, and expanded it to sixteen stanzas. Stevenson considers the revised version “vastly inferior” to the original, and finds little merit in any of the other poems in the book.
McCreery died in Duluth, Minnesota, after an appendicitis operation, and was buried in Glenwood Cemetery, in the nation’s capital. The first stanza of his once-admired poem is on his modest tombstone.
There Is No Death
There is no death! The stars go down
To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in heaven’s jeweled crown
They shine for evermore.
There is no death! The dust we tread
Shall change beneath the summer showers
To golden grain or mellow fruit
Or rainbow-tinted flowers.
The granite rocks disorganize
To feed the hungry moss they bear;
The forest leaves drink daily life
From out the viewless air.
There is no death! The leaves may fall,
The flowers may fade and pass away—
They only wait, through wintry hours,
The coming of the May.
There is no death! An angel form
Walks o’er the earth with silent tread;
He bears our best-loved things away,
And then we call them “dead.”
He leaves our hearts all desolate—
He plucks our fairest, sweetest flowers;
Transplanted into bliss, they now
Adorn immortal bowers.
The bird-like voice, whose joyous tones
Made glad this scene of sin and strife,
Sings now an everlasting song
Amid the tree of life.
Where’er He sees a smile too bright,
Or soul too pure for taint of vice,
He bears it to that world of light,
To dwell in Paradise.
Born unto that undying life,
They leave us but to come again;
With joy we welcome them—the same
Except in sin and pain.
And ever near us, though unseen,
The dear immortal spirits tread;
For all the boundless universe
Is Life—there are no dead!
There Is No Death [Revised version]
There is no death! The stars go down
To rise upon some other shore,
And bright in heaven’s jewelled crown
They shine forevermore.
There is no death! The forest leaves
Convert to life the viewless air;
The rocks disorganize to feed
The hungry moss they bear.
There is no death! The dust we tread
Shall change, beneath the summer showers
To golden grain, or mellowed fruit,
Or rainbow-tinted flowe
rs.
There is no death! The leaves may fall,
And flowers may fade and pass away—
They only wait, through wintry hours,
The warm, sweet breath of May.
There is no death! The choicest gifts
That heaven hath kindly lent to earth
Are ever first to seek again
The country of their birth.
And all things that for growth or joy
Are worthy of our love or care,
Whose loss has left us desolate,
Are safely garnered there.
Though life become a desert waste,
We know its fairest, sweetest flowers,
Transplanted into Paradise,
Adorn immortal bowers.
The voice of birdlike melody
That we have missed and mourned so long,
Now mingles with the angel choir
In everlasting song.
There is no death! Although we grieve
When beautiful, familiar forms
That we have learned to love are torn
From our embracing arms—
Although with bowed and breaking heart,
With sable garb and silent tread,
We bear their senseless dust to rest,
And say that they are “dead,”
They are not dead! They have but passed
Beyond the mists that blind us here
Into the new and larger life
Of that serener sphere.
They have but dropped their robe of clay
To put their shining raiment on;
They have not wandered far away—
They are not “lost” nor “gone.”
Though disenthralled and glorified
They still are here and love us yet;
The dear ones they have left behind
They never can forget.
And sometimes, when our hearts grow faint
Amid temptations fierce and deep,
Or when the wildly raging waves
Of grief or passion sweep,
We feel upon our fevered brow
Their gentle touch, their breath of balm;
Their arms enfold us, and our hearts
Grow comforted and calm.
And ever near us, though unseen,
The dear, immortal spirits tread—
For all the boundless universe
Is Life—there are no dead!
JOHN BOYLE O’REILLY
(1844–1890)
OF ALL THE poets mentioned in this book, O’Reilly had the most flamboyant and most tragic life. Irish-born, he became an ardent Fenian, a member of the secret organization dedicated to ending British rule in Ireland. He enlisted in the Tenth Hussars, a British cavalry regiment, for the purpose of winning the troops over to the Fenian cause. When his sedition was discovered, he was court-martialed and ordered shot. After this sentence was commuted to twenty years, he was “transported” to a penal colony in Bunbury, Australia.
Three years later O’Reilly escaped on an American whaling ship. As American Authors 1600–1900 puts it, “after hair-trigger escapes and breathless adventures” he finally reached Philadelphia. A devout Roman Catholic, he settled in Boston where he edited The Pilot, a Catholic newspaper, until he died at age 45 from a sleeping-pill overdose. In 1876 he had organized an expedition to Australia that rescued all the Irish political prisoners sent there from England.
O’Reilly’s novel Moondyne drew on his experiences as a convict in Australia. His books of verse include Songs from Southern Seas and Songs, Legends, and Ballads. Only “The Cry of the Dreamer” has survived.
It was in Boston that artists and writers first began to call themselves “bohemians.” O’Reilly’s “In Bohemia,” hailed as this subculture’s national anthem, was his most often recited poem. It begins and ends with “I’d rather live in Bohemia than in any other land.” A biography of the poet by J. J. Roche has an introduction by Cardinal James Cardinal Gibbons, and a monument to O’Reilly stands in Boston.
The Cry of the Dreamer
I am tired of planning and toiling
In the crowded hives of men,
Heart-weary of building and spoiling,
And spoiling and building again,
And I long for the dear old river,
Where I dreamed my youth away;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a toiler dies in a day.
I am sick of the showy seeming,
Of life that is half a lie;
Of the faces lined with scheming
In the throng that hurries by;
From the sleepless thought’s endeavor
I would go where the children play;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And a thinker dies in a day.
I can feel no pride, but pity,
For the burdens the rich endure;
There is nothing sweet in the city
But the patient lives of the poor.
Oh, the little hands too skillful,
And the child-mind choked with weeds!
The daughter’s heart grown willful
And the father’s heart that bleeds!
No! no! from the street’s rude bustle,
From trophies of mart and stage,
I would fly to the wood’s low rustle
And the meadows’ kindly page.
Let me dream as of old by the river,
And be loved for my dreams alway;
For a dreamer lives forever,
And the toiler dies in a day.
EDWARD E. (“TED”) PARAMORE, JR.
(1895–1956)
THIS WILL BE a long introduction, partly because Paramore is not covered in the usual references on American writers, and also because his life was as bizarre as Yukon Jake’s.
Born in Manchester, Massachusetts, he attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and later was voted the most brilliant and versatile man in Yale’s class of 1917. His first job was that of newspaper reporter covering the Russian Revolution in Petrograd. He is said to have guided a trainload of American refugees safely through Siberia. Later he became the old New York World’s drama critic. The New York Times obituary (May 2, 1956, page 31), my sole source for Paramore’s life, quoted a paragraph from what it said was a Times story about him in 1927. (I was unable to locate this in the Times 1927 yearbook index.) Here is the paragraph:
[Paramore] also has been a sailor before the mast. He was run out of town in Santa Ynez, because he dropped three flies in a baseball game; put in jail in Nicaragua during revolutionary troubles, from which place he escaped within two hours after his incarceration, and fired by Hal Roach for insubordination at Culver City, Calif.
Paramore contributed to several leading magazines during the twenties, and was on the masthead of Time’s first issue as a “weekly contributor.” Somehow he got to Hollywood to become one of its most successful screenwriters. During the thirties he produced scripts for many films, including The Thundering Herd, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Baby Take a Bow, The Farmer Takes a Wife and The Virginian.
Paramore collaborated with his old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald on the 1938 screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s popular novel Three Comrades. The film starred Margaret Sullavan. Sharp disagreements over the script are vividly detailed in Fitzgerald’s letter to “Ted” (October 24, 1937)—a letter included in The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1969), edited by Andrew Turnbull.
Paramore also wrote several plays. His three-act mystery melodrama Set a Thief ran on Broadway in 1926, and was published the following year by Samuel French. Ringside was on Broadway in 1928. Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker closed after a four-day run in 1946.
In 1956 Paramore and his wife were returning to their home in Santa Barbara, California, from a vacation in New York City. During a stopover at Shreveport, Louisiana, he fell in a parking garage, and failed to recover from a badly fractured skull. The Times obituary said he was “about 60,�
�� and called him “a poet, playwright, journalist and adventurer.” It seems likely he wrote other poems than his famous ballad about Jake, but if so, I have failed to locate any.
Paramore’s marvelous parody of Robert Service first appeared in Vanity Fair (August 1921) and was reprinted three times by the same magazine. A small book, The Ballad of Yukon Jake, illustrated by “Hogarth, Jr.” (pseudonym of a young Rockwell Kent), was published by Coward McCann in 1928. Paramore is said to have collected five thousand dollars from Mack Sennett for having borrowed from the ballad for his silent comedy Yukon Jake.
The reference to “Tecla pearl” in the ninth stanza had me puzzled until English professor William Harmon found “tecla” defined in The Oxford English Dictionary as a proprietary name, trademarked in 1908, for a variety of artificial pearl. Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930), Chapter 6, speaks of “heirlooms of priceless value. . . among Tecla pearls.”
The Ballad of Yukon Jake
Oh, the North Countree is a hard countree
That mothers a bloody brood;
And its icy arms hold hidden charms
For the greedy, the sinful and lewd.
And strong men rust, from the gold and the lust
That sears the Northland soul,
But the wickedest born, from the Pole to the Horn,
Is the Hermit of Shark Tooth Shoal.
Famous Poems from Bygone Days Page 14
