THIS WAKING HOUR
Hochstein, Irma
THIS WAKING HOUR By Irma Hochstein ON AN enchanted May Sunday in the spring of 1923, a young poet stood on a summit overlooking the city of Madison and Lake Mendota, reading his poems to a group...
...It was a wooded hilltop facing the east and south...
...It is the voice of the poet speaking for all of us...
...genius that has budded into the beauty of "This Waking Hour...
...College Hills, the university campus and Madison were spread out below, Lake Men-dota's blue to the left...
...Many who heard him read his poems in those days at Madison will welcome this little volume...
...The newly plowed fields were a soft tan...
...THIS WAKING HOUR By Irma Hochstein ON AN enchanted May Sunday in the spring of 1923, a young poet stood on a summit overlooking the city of Madison and Lake Mendota, reading his poems to a group of listeners...
...One is conscious both of wings and fire...
...Only a poet, who, during the first six months after his coming to America worked in the magnificent hell of a Detroit automobile factory, could have written his "Evolution...
...No spot better suited to his poems and the cadences of his voice could have been chosen...
...Your words . . . perhaps they fell on ears too clogged with ribald jest for hearing...
...Here students of the University Library School, come for a picnic at Kate Reely's cottage, listened to Leon Herald, reading his poems to them...
...To a tree first in bloom," "My Nephew Spring...
...He had chosen poems suited to the day...
...There is satire, for example, in his Songs of a College Town...
...Power to Awaken LIKE his voice, his poems have the power to awaken "to the accents of authentic beauty...
...Zona Gale has written an introduction as beautiful as is Joseph Conrad's introduction to Thomas Beer's "Life of Stephen Crane...
...To appreciate that, read "The Campus...
...She concludes, "A bird sings on the crater of a volcano...
...And minds long dulled, and hearts unstirred, Were wakened to the accents of authentic beauty His poems are collected now and published in a little volume, "This Waking Hour...
...To quote snatches of the poems is to do them injustice...
...But your voice, like music, Came drifting back to earth Caressingly...
...From the cottage, hidden in the woods, a rustic bridge across a ravine led to an arbor...
...I fear not the punishment of Great Zeus, Nor is there large enough a mountain to be tied to, And no vulture that shall approach me, But what use shall I make of it...
...There is understanding of a civilization that may destroy us...
...One wishes that this young Armenian poet will find a real homecoming here in America— a homecoming which will make possible a flowering fruition of the...
...One of his listeners said to him afterwards, "I should like to watch your Nephew Spring, 'Until my eyes grow blossom blind.' I have never seen enough blossoms at once to make me blossom blind...
...Here is poetry than enchants all one's senses...
...You need to have seen by native village," Leon Herald replied, and described the valley in which the Armenian village had been situated where he spent his boyhood and the blossom-covered hills stretching far beyond...
...Throughout his poems there is an eastern mysticism whose meaning sometimes eludes...
...One feels himself carried along with this lover of youth and beauty into the peaceful motion, "Peaceful motion all at once...
...There is gayety and joy in life in "The wind and I" and "Alley Breeze...
...When so many feet beat together Up and down the hills and halls...
...The oak woods were budding into a pink violet...
...Prometheus, Prometheus, What will I do with it...
...Thought Soared Upward OF A later occasion when he read his poems at a community social in a Dane county school, a fellow contributor to the evening's entertainment, Mary Katherine Reely, wrote: "To a poet who read his verses in a country school-room...
...Your voice was music...
...Many of his pictures and figures of speech are of the East, of the sheep, the stars, the hills...
...The volume fulfills the promise of its title: it gives its readers "a waking hour...
...Of the fire of Prometheus he says: "What will I do with this fire Before it consumes me...
...Your thoughts soared upward...
...The charm of his village he has immortalized in his poem, in unforgetable lines: "The fllowers of our orchard were of many kinds And their speech to us was as our speech is to God...
Vol. 18 • September 1926 • No. 9
