A Fragment

Note[1]

There are more worlds yet, there are more worlds waiting.

For the way winds up to the eldest sun,

Where the white ones go to their mystic mating

And the Holy Will is done.

I shall find you there where our low lives heighten

And the door of the Wonder again unbars—

Where the old loves lure and the old fires whiten

In the stars behind the stars. [2]

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[1] This clipping has a partial date: Saturday, October 17^th. The only year with this day/date combination that would make sense in the timeline of Clare’s book would be 1925. So, Clare was 23 when she pasted in this poem.

[2] These are stanzas 11 and 12 of Edwin Markham’s "The Crowning Hour." Charles Edwin Anson Markham was in 1852 in Oregon City, Oregon, the youngest of six children. His parents were divorced shortly after his birth, and Charles, as he was known for many years, saw almost nothing of his father. In 1856, Charles moved with his mother and only sister to a ranch in Lagoon Valley, northeast of San Francisco. By the age of twelve, he was doing hard labor on the family farm.

Charles’s mother vehemently opposed his interest in literature, but he nonetheless attended a rudimentary “college” at Vacaville, California, and managed to earn enough through teaching to continue his studies at Christian College in Santa Rosa, California. He completed the classical course in 1873 and went on to teach in El Dorado County. Markham was elected county superintendent of schools in 1879 and received the principalship of the Tompkins Observation School in Oakland in 1890. His circle of friends in Oakland included Joaquin Miller (see footnote 91), Donna Coolbrith, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Edmund Clarence Stedman, among many others.

Markham dropped the name Charles in about 1895 and became Edwin. In 1898, after two failed marriages, he married Anna Catherine Murphy. That same year, Markham read “The Man with the Hoe,” inspired by Millet’s painting by that title, at a New Year’s Eve party; the poem, which protested the plight of the exploited laborer, was soon published and became an instant success. Markham and his wife moved to New York shortly after, settling first in Brooklyn and then in Staten Island in 1901. He began lecturing extensively, appearing at labor and radical gatherings as frequently as literary ones.

Markham published several collections of verse, among them The Shoes of Happiness (1915) in which the above excerpted poem appeared. He died in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York. Upon his death, he bequeathed his personal library of 15,000 volumes to the Horrmann Library, Wagner College, on Staten Island. He also gave to the college his personal papers, including many manuscript letters from well-known literary and political figures of the early twentieth century. Among his correspondents were Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell.  (Source: poets.org)