Leslie Nelson Jennings
Leslie Nelson Jennings was born in 1891 at Ware, Massachusetts. When he was five years old, he moved to California, where he has lived ever since. For a short term, he worked on a newspaper but ill health forced him to discontinue this work and drove him to the hills.
Jennings’s work is still in a formative stage. His lyrics, while personal in theme, are full of the manner and music of several of his contemporaries. His sonnets, like those of David Morton, show Jennings at his best; they are quiet but never dull reflections of loveliness.
Frustrate 61
How futile are these scales in which we weigh
Pity and passion, and the spirit’s need!
Words—and the veins of desperate peoples bleed!
Words—and a lark, and hedges white with may!
O must this rapture and this grief remain
Uncaptured in our silences? And must
We stand like stones, less lyrical than dust
That flowers beneath the benison of rain?
And if I say, “I love you,” can you know,
Save by the urgent beating of my heart,
The flame that tears my baffled lips apart?
Poor symbols, cracked or broken long ago,
What witness can you bear that we have tried
To utter Beauty when our tongues were tied!