Edwin Markham
Charles Edwin Markham Anson (23 abril 1852 a 7 marzo 1940) fue un poeta estadounidense. De 1923 a 1931 fue poeta laureado de Oregon.
Edwin Markham nació en Oregon City, Oregon y fue el menor de 10 hijos, sus padres se divorciaron poco después de su nacimiento. A la edad de cuatro años, se mudó a Laguna Valley, un área al noreste de San Francisco, allí vivíó con su hermana y su madre. Trabajó en principio la granja familiar hasta los doce años. Aunque su madre se oponía a su deseo de cursar estudios superiores, estudió literatura en la Universidad de California en Vacaville, California, y recibió su certificado de maestro en 1870. En 1872 se graduó en San José Escuela Normal del Estado, y en 1873 terminó sus estudios de obras clásicas en la universidad cristiana de Santa Rosa. Se conoció por "Charles", hasta cerca de 1895, cuando tenía unos 43 años comenzó el uso de "Edwin".
En 1898, Markham se casó con su tercera esposa, Anna Catherine Murphy (1859-1938) y en 1899 su hijo Virgilio nació. Se mudaron a Río de Janeiro en 1900 para estudiar los nativos desde la ciudad de Nueva York donde vivían en Brooklyn y Staten Island. Edwin Markham, en el momento de su muerte, poseía una enorme biblioteca de más de 15 000 libros. Esta colección fue legada a la universidad de Wagner 's Library Horrmann, situado en Staten Island. Markham también legó sus documentos personales a la biblioteca.
OBRA:
POESÍA:
The Man With the Hoe and Other Poems – (1899)
Lincoln and Other Poems – (1901)
The Shoes of Happiness and Other Poems – (1913)
Gates of Paradise – (1920)
Eighty Poems at Eighty – (1932)
The Ballad of the Gallows Bird – (published 1960)
PROSA.
Children in Bondage – (1914)
California the Wonderful – (1914)
EL HOMBRE DE LA AZADA
(Ante el cuadro de Millet)
Doblado por el peso de los siglos,
apoyado en su azada mira al suelo,
en su faz el vacío de los tiempos
y la carga del mundo sobre el hombro.
¿Quién mató en él la rebeldía, el brío,
y lo dejó sin duelo ni esperanza,
torpe y vencido como el buey, su hermano?
¿Quién aflojó su quijada de bruto?
¿Cuál fue la mano que aplastó su frente?
¿Qué soplo le apagó la luz del alma?
¿Es esta la criatura que Dios hizo
para reinar sobre el mar y la tierra,
otear estrellas y rastrear los cielos,
para sentir la pasión de lo eterno?
¿Es este el sueño del que armó los astros
y les trazó su ruta en el vacío?
Del antro del Infierno a sus abismos
no se encuentra más trágica figura,
más reprochable a la codicia ciega,
más llena de presagios para el alma,
más tensa de peligros para el mundo.
¡Qué abismo lo separa de los ángeles!
Esclavo del trabajo, ¿qué le importan
Platón y la armonía de las Pléyades,
la larga fila de cimas del canto,
la luz del alba, el rubor de la rosa?
En él se mira el dolor de los siglos,
la tragedia del Tiempo está en su agobio;
la Humanidad, en su amarga figura,
robada, traicionada y desvalida,
protesta ante los Jueces de la Tierra,
y su protesta es también profecía.
¡Oh, señores y dueños de la tierra!
¿Esta es la obra que le dais a Dios,
esta cosa monstruosa de alma ahogada?
¿Cómo podréis erguir esta figura,
darle de nuevo la inmortalidad;
devolverle la luz de su mirada;
reconstruirla en la música y el sueño;
enderezar infamias milenarias,
pérfidos daños, incurables duelos?
¡Oh, señores y dueños de la tierra!
¿Qué cuenta le dará el futuro a este hombre?
¿Qué responder a su torva demanda
cuando la rebelión sacuda al orbe?
¿Qué será de los reinos y los reyes;
de todos los que así lo deformaron,
cuando este mudo miedo juzgue al mundo
tras del largo silencio de los siglos?
Círculo
Él dibujó un círculo que me excluía
(Hereje, insolente, pura rebeldía).
Mas supe ganar con el Amor de aliado:
Le hicimos un círculo y ¡quedó atrapado!
Traducción de Fernando G. Toledo
He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.
A Creed
There is a destiny that makes us brothers:
None goes his way alone:
All that we send into the lives of others
Comes back into our own.
I care not what his temples or his creeds,
One thing holds firm and fast
That into his fateful heap of days and deeds
The soul of man Is cast.
A Lyric Of The Dawn
Alone I list
In the leafy tryst;
Silent the woodlands in their starry sleep—
Silent the phantom wood in waters deep:
No footfall of a wind along the pass
Startles a harebell—stirs a blade of grass.
Yonder the wandering weeds,
Enchanted in the light,
Stand in the gusty hollows, still and white;
Yonder are plumy reeds,
Dusking the border of the clear lagoon;
Far off the silver clifts
Hang in ethereal light below the moon;
Far off the ocean lifts,
Tossing its billows in the misty beam,
And shore-lines whiten, silent as a dream:
I hark for the bird, and all the hushed hills harken:
This is the valley: here the branches darken
The silver-lighted stream.
Hark—
That rapture in the leafy dark!
Who is it shouts upon the bough aswing,
Waking the upland and the valley under?
What carols, like the blazon of a king,
Fill all the dawn with wonder?
Oh, hush,
It is the thrush,
In the deep and woody glen!
Ah, thus the gladness of the gods was sung,
When the old Earth was young;
That rapture rang,
When the first morning on the mountains sprang:
And now he shouts, and the world is young again!
Carol, my king,
On your bough aswing!
Thou art not of these evil days—
Thou art a voice of the world’s lost youth:
Oh, tell me what is duty—what is truth—
How to find God upon these hungry ways;
Tell of the golden prime,
When bird and beast could make a man their friend ;
When men beheld swift deities descend,
Before the race was left alone with Time,
Homesick on Earth, and homeless to the end;
Before great Pan was dead,
Before the naiads fled;
When maidens white with dark eyes shy and bold,
With peals of laughter on the peaks of gold,
Startled the still dawn—
Shone in upon the mountains and were gone,
Their voices fading silverly in depths of forests old.
Sing of the wonders of their woodland ways,
Before the weird earth-hunger of these days,
When there was rippling mirth,
When justice was on Earth,
And light and grandeur of the Golden Age;
When never a heart was sad,
When all from king to herdsman had
A penny for a wage.
Ah, that old time has faded to a dream—
The moon’s fair face is broken in the stream;
Yet shout and carol on, O bird, and let
The exiled race not utterly forget;
Publish thy revelation on the lawns—
Sing ever in the dark ethereal dawns;
Sometime, in some sweet year,
These stormy souls, these men of Earth may hear.
But hark again,
From the secret glen,
That voice of rapture and ethereal youth
Now laden with despair.
Forbear, O bird, forbear:
Is life not terrible enough forsooth?
Cease, cease the mystic song—
No more, no more, the passion and the pain:
It wakes my life to fret against the chain;
It makes me think of all the agéd wrong—
Of joy and the end of joy and the end of all—
Of souls on Earth, and souls beyond recall.
Ah, ah, that voice again!
It makes me think of all these restless men
Called into time—their progress and their goal;
And now, oh now, it sends into my soul
Dreams of a love that might have been for me—
That might have been—and now can never be.
Tell me no more of these—
Tell me of trancéd trees;
(The ghosts, the memories, in pity spare)
Show me the leafy home of the wild bees;
Show me the snowy summits dim in air;
Tell me of things afar
In valleys silent under moon and star:
Dim hollows hushed with night,
The lofty cedars misty in the light,
Wild clusters of the vine,
Wild odors of the pine,
The eagle’s eyrie lifted to the moon—
High places where on quiet afternoon
A shadow swiftens by, a thrilling scream
Startles the cliff, and dies across the woodland to a dream.
Ha, now
He springs from the bough,
It flickers—he is lost!
Out of the copse he sprang;
This is the floating briar where he tossed:
The leaves are yet atremble where he sang
Here a long vista opens—look!
This is the way he took,
Through the pale poplars by the pond:
Hark! he is shouting in the field beyond.
Ho, there he goes
Through the alder close!
He leaves me here behind him in his flight,
And yet my heart goes with him out of sight!
What whispered spell
Of Faëry calls me on from dell to dell?
I hear the voice—it wanders in a dream—
Now in the grove, now on the hill, now on
the fading stream.
Lead on—you know the way
Lead on to Arcady,
O’er fields asleep; by river bank abrim;
Down leafy ways, dewy and cool and dim;
By dripping rocks, dark dwellings of the gnome,
Where hurrying waters dash their crests to foam.
I follow where you lead,
Down winding paths, across the flowery mead,
Down silent hollows where the woodbine blows,
Up water-courses scented by the rose.
I follow the wandering voice—
I follow, I rejoice,
I fade away into the Age of Gold—
We two together lost in forest old.-
0 ferny and thymy paths, 0 fields of Aidenn,
Canyons and cliffs by mortal feet untrod!
O souls that are weary and are heavy laden,
Here is the peace of God !
Lo! now the clamoring hours are on the way:
Faintly the pine tops redden in the ray;
From vale to vale fleet-footed rumors run,
With sudden apprehension of the sun;
A light wind stirs
The filmy tops of delicate dim firs,
And on the river border blows,
Breaking the shy bud softly to a rose.
Sing out, O throstle, sing:
I follow on, my king:
Lead me forever through the crimson dawn—
Till the world ends, lead me on!
Ho there! he shouts again—he sways—and now,
Upspringing from the bough,
Flashing a glint of dew upon the ground,
Without a sound
He drops into a valley and is gone!
Anchored To The Infinite
The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge,
Before he swung his cable, shore to shore,
Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite
Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands
To grasp upon the further cliff and draw
A greater cord, and then a greater yet;
Till at the last across the chasm swung
The cable then the mighty bridge in air!
So we may send our little timid thought
Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands—
Send out our love and faith to thread the deep—
Thought after thought until the little cord
Has greatened to a chain no chance can break,
And we are anchored to the Infinite!
Epigrams
Preparedness
For all your days prepare,
And meet them ever alike:
When you are the anvil, bear--
When you are the hammer, Strike.
Outwitted
He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
The Avengers
The laws are the secret avengers,
And they rule above all lands;
They come on wool-soft sandals,
But they strike with iron hands.
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