Ridgely Torrence
(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City (1897-1901) and has been on several editorial staffs since then.
His first volume, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), bears the grave subtitle “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai” and is a half-whimsical, half-searching hodge-podge of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is obvious but not too dominant; Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face.
Torrence’s subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper force, a more concentrated fire. In “The Bird and the Tree” and “Eye-Witness,” he has caught something more than the colors of certain localities—particularly of the dark belt. They are as eloquent and moving as his Granny Maumee and Other Plays (1917), which owe their power not only to Torrence’s gift as a poet but to his sympathy as a folk-lyrist.
The Bird and the Tree
Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There’s something wrong to-night.
Far off the sheriff’s footfall dies,
The minutes crawl like last year’s flies
Between the bars, and like an age
The hours are long to-night.
The sky is like a heavy lid
Out here beyond the door to-night.
What’s that? A mutter down the street.
What’s that? The sound of yells and feet
For what you didn’t do or did
You’ll pay the score to-night.
No use to reek with reddened sweat,
No use to whimper and to sweat.
They’ve got the rope; they’ve got the guns,
They’ve got the courage and the guns;
An’ that’s the reason why to-night
No use to ask them any more.
They’ll fire the answer through the door—
You’re out to die to-night.
There where the lonely cross-road lies,
There is no place to make replies;
But silence, inch by inch, is there,
And the right limb for a lynch is there;
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes,
Blackbird.
Perhaps you’ll meet again some place.
Look for the mask upon the face;
That’s the way you’ll know them there—
A white mask to hide the face.
And you can halt and show them there
The things that they are deaf to now,
And they can tell you what they meant—
To wash the blood with blood. But how
If you are innocent?
Blackbird singer, blackbird mute,
They choked the seed you might have found.
Out of a thorny field you go—
For you it may be better so—
And leave the sowers of the ground
To eat the harvest of the fruit,
Blackbird.
The Son
(Southern Ohio Market Town)
I heard an old farm-wife,
Selling some barley,
Mingle her life with life
And the name “Charley.”
Saying: “The crop’s all in,
We’re about through now;
Long nights will soon begin,
We’re just us two now.
“Twelve bushels at sixty cents,
It’s all I carried—
He sickened making fence;
He was to be married—
“It feels like frost was near—
His hair was curly.
The spring was late that year,
But the harvest early.”