Friday afternoon and evening, March 31st, at 2:30 and 7:30 p. m. A valuable collection of personal association books and first editions of English and American Authors belonging to the Estate of the late Edward Hornor Coates, formerly President of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. (No. 1296; Items 808.) Stan V. Henkels, 1304 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. [Auction Calendar]
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| Wikimedia Auguste Rodin's Le Penseur Musée Rodin, Paris, France |
RODIN'S it was—this vital thing, this Soul,"The 'Penseur'" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in The North American Review (March 1914) and Poems (1916) Volume I.
This striving force imprisoned in clay,
This monster Shape inert, held in control
By that it doth enshrine:
Rodin's it was; but, ah, to-day
It is the world's—and mine!
What mystery here is meant?
Is this Time's great event—
This creature earthward sent
With subtle might against himself to strive—
To struggle upward from the brutish thing
And, ruling the blood's rioting,
Keep the celestial spark in him alive?
What miracle is meant,
Suggested by this frame relaxed and bent?
What wonders to this Titan are revealed,
Sitting enisled and motionless as if
Lone on some cloud-invested Teneriffe?
Inward and inward still his vision sinks.
What does he here?—He thinks!
Thought is the travail that absorbs him thus;
Himself the workshop, most mysterious,
Wherein are wrought what human strengths there be.
Detached, aloof, with eyes that seem to stare
Beyond us and beyond apparent things,
He gazes far into futurity,
And doth with gods unbourned horizons share.
For thoughts, upborne on never-tiring wings,
Boldly adventure regions foul and fair:
To Hades sink, then rise to Heaven again,
Still finding everywhere
The mystic threads whereof are joy and pain
Shaped in the penetralia of the brain!
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| THE HÔTEL BIRON, PARIS. Formerly Convent of the Sacred Heart, "The Deserted Mansion," 1910. in Mother Mabel Digby (1914) |
THE lilacs blossom at the door,"Longing" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in Poet-lore (January 1898), Poems (1898) and Poems (1916) Volume II.
The early rose
Whispers a promise to her buds,
And they unclose.
There is a perfume everywhere,
A breath of song,
A sense of some divine return
For waiting long.
Who knows but some imprisoned joy
From bondage breaks,—
Some exiled and enchanted hope
From dreams awakes?
Who knows but you are coming back
To comfort me
For all the languor and the pain,
Persephone?
O come! For one brief spring return,
Love's tryst to keep;
Then let me share the Stygian fruit,
The wintry sleep!
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| Proserpina with Pomegranate (1882) by Dante Gabriel Rosetti |
"SOME things I never would forgive!""Unpardoned" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in Harper's Weekly (23 March 1912), The Unconquered Air (1912) and Poems (1916) Volume II.
So said you, dear, not knowing
That love is dead unless it live
All charity bestowing.
O you whose heart love so could brim
In cruel need, learn this of him
Whose all to you is owing:
The one wrong man can not forgive
Is the wrong of his own sowing!
“…anyone who went to college, as I did, around the 1920’s, lived through World War I and the Depression and all, must have registered a change in outlook. The big change for almost all of us was our reaction against Idealism and Romanticism, whether in art or in religion. With what we had gone through we were initiated into a new outlook and sensibility.
“…What does one make of the turn to abstraction in painting? Anyway, the human image became distorted in art. This was true also of poetry and the novel; they reflected the same influences that gave rise to cubism and surrealism. … it was a transition from an inadequate understanding of man, to a richer, more profound sense of the dynamics of human nature. You had to break up the old simplistic representational idealism, break that up, before you could grasp a deeper humanism…
“But … the new sense of reality that went with [the new movements in the arts], as always with movements and culture, soon could become a fashion and a fad and could become a stereotype. … So it seems to me that the critic or even the ordinary person interested in what is genuinely important often has difficulty in distinguishing between the authentic and the imitative or the spurious.”During WWI, Wilder volunteered in the Ambulance Field Service, and subsequently enlisted in the U.S. Field Artillery in 1917. He graduated from Yale University in 1920, and in 1923, published a volume of poetry entitled Battle-Retrospect (the work winning the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for that year). According to a letter from Florence Earle Coates to Wilder in January of 1924, Coates had received a copy of the book and was "charmed by new and eloquent lines," offering only the criticism and suggestion that he refrain from using "too many rare and aristocratic words." Wilder would become an ordained minister (1926), and subsequently Professor of Divinity at Harvard University in 1954.
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| Letters from Florence Earle Coates to Amos Niven Wilder courtesy of Wilder's son, Amos Tappan Wilder |
WHEN I hear men discoursing idle things,"Inviolable" by Florence Earle Coates. Published in The Athenaeum (21 March 1914) and Poems (1916) Volume I.
Who "beauty and corruption" would unite—
As who should say: "Now call we darkness bright!"
My wondering soul more passionately clings
To every image, every strain that sings
Of beauty—still, ah, still the world's delight!—
More valuing that bloom which knows not blight,
To which no touch of Time defacement brings.
From rocky Chios, from sweet Avon's side,
From Athens, Sicily—our earth to bless—
From each dear Land where Joy hath dwelt with Truth,
It comes adown Time's inexhausted tide
In myriad form, the ancient Loveliness,
Wearing its glory of immortal youth!
