The Long Road
By Matthew Foley

I see you there, standing by the crossroads,
studying the signs and reading the stars,
seeking the direction of a life that is yet to be…
wondering which way, O which way, should my feet point today?

Listen for a moment,
for these feet have felt the dirt of many a wrong path,
these boots have trod many a reckless misstep to be sure,
and those cracked and beaten roads ahead,
where all passion has gone out of the earth,
I too have wasted many a day walking those weary miles.

But for everyday I lived my passion, those days I do not regret.
Everyday I spoke boldly the truth of my soul,
that day I hold like a precious pearl in my memory.

On those days,
I lived like a wave, roaring with the rolling life of the sea,
begging no forgiveness for my right to breathe.

On those days,
I lived like a star, hiding not my fires in a universe gone dark,
for my soul was a candle that did not flicker or fade.

On those days,
I lived as a world, complete, and ushering all life into one,
as one as the different rivers of the world are but one rolling water,
as the separate nations of the earth are but one soil
sprouting but one family of life.

Take the long road, O wanderer, the long road of your passion.
Walk this one earth and breathe this one air,
and serve this one family of life with your fires of your passion.
Take the long, open road and walk it every day of your life.
Take the long road, O wanderer, the long road of your passion.

Matthew Foley is an English & Creative Writing teacher at the Charleston Charter School for Math & Science. When he’s not trying to make 7th graders fall in love with books & poetry, you can find Matt on Wednesdays hosting the Open Mic Poetry Night at The 827 art gallery in Avondale. Matt was also a recent feature poet at East Bay Meeting House’s Monday Night Poetry & Music series.  Find Matt on Facebook.

          If—

If you can keep your head when all about you
  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
  But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
  Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
  And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
  And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
  To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
  Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
  If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.

Rudyard Kipling may be best known for The Jungle Book, but I have always enjoyed his poetry. Kipling’s ‘If’ is a discourse on the virtues of model leadership and exemplary manhood. The poem celebrates stoicism, fortitude and righteousness as the hallmark of manliness. Through a series of paradoxes, Kipling tells his son how the middle path – a golden mean in everything will serve as the secret key to this world and everything in it.

The poem exhorts the reader to be patient, honest, and forthright, especially when faced with opposition and temptation to act in a less virtuous manner. He may have to face criticism, opposition, lies, and hatred. When others blame him, he must neither lose heart nor retaliate the same way. He must remain confident and believe in himself; yet he must do his best to see the grounds for others doubting him. In all things he must hold on to his strength of character, morals, and to his values, yet he must not look too good or wise.

Stoic detachment to success and failure alike is the keynote of the poem. An ideal man cannot be deceived into thinking either triumph or disaster final. Sometimes he may even have to risk the fruits of a lifetime’s toil, lose everything and start anew when nothing but sheer will power remains. Still he must hold on.

When it comes to people, he must be able to walk with kings and talk with crowds and not “lose the common touch” even when remaining noble of character. All men should be given their due; yet none too much. He should remain upright so that he won’t be swayed or hurt by friends or foes.

Praise of a strong work ethic is echoed throughout the poem, as is a warning against idleness. The poem also places higher value on the ability to act than on the ability to dream and philosophize.

Throughout the poem, Kipling illustrates ideal behaviour and virtue through the use of paradox: righteousness without smugness; detachment while practicing determination; and noble life blended with commonality. The employment of these contradictory extremes throughout the poem serves to illustrate a central theme of striving for an idealized “golden mean” in all facets of life.

Night Fell
By Florence Ripley Mastin

Night fell one year ago, like this.
He had been writing steadily.
Among these dusky walls of books,
How bright he looked, intense as flame!
Suddenly he paused,
The firelight in his hair,
And said, “The time has come to go.”
I took his hand;
We watched the logs burn out;
The apple boughs fingered the window;
Down the cool, spring night
A slim, white moon leaned to the hill.
To-night the trees are budded white,
And the same pale moon slips through the dusk.
O little buds, tap-tapping on the pane,
O white moon,
I wonder if he sleeps in woods
Where there are leaves?
Or if he lies in some black trench,
His hands, his kind hands, kindling flame that kills?
Or if, or if …
He is here now, to bid me last good-night?

When Florence Josephine Mastin was in her 20s and already a published poet, she decided to replace her girlish middle name with “Ripley.” “Ripley” sounds jaunty and masculine, and Mastin was proud of her Ripley ancestors, including George Ripley, a Transcendentalist who founded the utopian community of Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Mass. For the rest of her life, her friends called her Ripley. 

Florence Ripley Mastin chose her own name, and she spent her entire life trying to hoist that name out into the world. Between roughly 1900 and 1967, the year before she died at age 81, she published probably hundreds of poems in newspapers and magazines, including more than 90 in the New York Times alone. She authored several books of poetry, and her work appeared approximately a dozen times in Poetry between 1918 and 1935. 

Mastin’s timing was lucky and unlucky. She was brash and butch and she loved women—one woman especially—but she died one year before the Stonewall riots. She was not a great poet, but she was lucky enough to be writing in a time where poetry was published in almost every daily newspaper, and commissioned for just about every public ceremony. Poetry, during her lifetime, was a viable, exciting, and culturally relevant pursuit; Mastin relished its sheen of elitism, but the truth is that she benefited from its mass appeal. She was able to publish prolifically as a high school teacher with modest talent and without many connections to the literary scene. 

Grace Beatrice MacColl, Mastin’s partner of some 50 years, was a fellow teacher at Erasmus Hall High School in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Mastin met MacColl, who was born in Vermont, when they were students at Barnard College. When they graduated, they both took the exam to become New York City high school teachers, and applied to teach at Erasmus “because of its illustrious past, its beautiful campus, and its famous staff of teachers,” Mastin later wrote. 

Mastin and MacColl’s partnership was as public as the era allowed: They presented themselves as “close friends and devoted companions,” to use a phrase from feminist historian Judith Schwarz. Family members and friends sent “love to Grace” in their letters, and the pair traveled together, marched in suffrage parades, and lived together. When an Erasmus student working on a profile of Mastin for the school newspaper wrote her a letter in 1961 mentioning her “devoted friendship” with MacColl, Mastin wrote back paragraphs on the “gifted beautiful girl” who “was a constant inspiration for my poetry: She had a keen, a brilliant mind, a broad understanding and a subtle and delightful wit. She was more of a realist than I, and was an excellent balance wheel for my romanticism. A more noble, true and devoted friend never lived.”

Mastin wrote on subjects from the suffrage movement to both world wars to Sputnik to Vietnam. Since the above poem was published in 1918, I tend to think that it is about a young man going to war.  If it was written early in 1918, it would have been roughly a year since men began being sent to war.  In the poem “At the Movies,” two stanzas on watching a newsreel of British soldiers, was anthologized in a 1919 Treasury of War Poetry and is one of her only works to be reproduced frequently online. 

Occasionally she was funny, even cruel. In one undated handwritten poem, she savaged “certain modern poets”:

The ebullitions of modern poets make me sick.
I am an ordinary person, thank God,
With an ordinary brain and ordinary emotions;
And I come in tired to a warm fire and a drink,
And I open this book of verse . . . . . . . .
I may as well be a surgeon hereafter
And open gall bladders and tracts of bile and
holes with pus in them.
Why should I continue to read your verse
Spread everywhere like damp fungus?
… Dirty highways caked with manure will be
clean to me after you.

As her confusion and anger at highbrow moderns suggests, Mastin was an old-fashioned lyric poet with little interest in being on the literary cutting edge. And though she was publishing constantly, there is no evidence that she was in regular conversation with serious poets of her day, even those she admired. For Robert Frost’s 75th birthday in 1949, Mastin published a poem about him in the New York Times, then printed the poem on a huge scroll and had her students at Erasmus sign it. When Frost gave a talk at the New School soon afterward, a delegation of three students presented him with the scroll. She was only a dozen years younger than Frost, but this is the work of a fan, not a peer. 

Grace MacColl died in 1960 and was buried in the Mastin family plot on a hilltop overlooking the Tappan Zee. Afterward, Mastin couldn’t maintain her home Four Gables on her own, and she moved into an apartment north of Piermont, where she had a porch, a garden, and a view of her beloved Hudson River. “I think I never shall feel old—and maybe it is because I have lived with poetry all my life—and poetry is timeless,” she wrote around that time. “It is built of music and dreams so it never grows old.” She died in 1968. 

Florence Ripley Mastin loved to see her name—the name she had chosen for herself—in print. She kept detailed records tracking which newspapers reprinted which poems and who nominated her for which awards. Today, a few boxes of those papers can be found in the archives of Syracuse University’s Bird Library: dispatches from a life in poetry when such a thing must have seemed like anyone’s for the taking.

It is possible today to see Mastin as an unlikable woman; an unrelenting self-promoter, she sent clippings and copies of her work to friends, acquaintances, and politicians, including President Eisenhower. She was forever bragging about her Mayflower ancestry and her distant familial connection to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But she was a confident striver, that great American archetype, and her identity as a poet gave shape and weight to an otherwise ordinary life. She called herself a poet, and then she made herself one. And her story illustrates an important but easily overlooked chapter in the story of poetry in the 20th century.