Ignoble themes! And yet -- those haggard faces!
Within that little shop. . . . Oh, here I say
One does not need to look in lofty places
For tragic themes, they're round us every day.

And so I saw their agony, their fighting,
Their eyes of fear, their heartbreak, their despair;
And there the little shop is, black and blighting,
And all the world goes by and does not care.
They say she sought her old employer's pity,
Content to take the pittance he would give.
The lame girl? yes, she's working in the city;
She coughs a lot -- she hasn't long to live.




Last night MacBean introduced me to Saxon Dane the Poet.
Truly, he is more like a blacksmith than a Bard -- a big bearded man
whose black eyes brood somberly or flash with sudden fire.
We talked of Walt Whitman, and then of others.

"The trouble with poetry," he said, "is that it is too exalted.
It has a phraseology of its own; it selects themes that are quite outside
of ordinary experience. As a medium of expression it fails to reach
the great mass of the people."

Then he added: "To hell with the great mass of the people!
What have they got to do with it? Write to please yourself,
as if not a single reader existed. The moment a man begins