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Who drank nothing But hatred of men from love's abundance? Once despised, now a despiscr, He kills his own life, The precious secret. The self-seeker finds nothing. Oh Father of Love, If your psaltery holds one tone That his ear still might echo, Then quicken his heart! Open his eyes, shut off by clouds From the thousand fountains So near him, dying of thirst In his own desert. (NOTE: These three stanzas are from Goethe's poem "Harzreise im Winter." They are the stanzas which Brahms detached from the poem and employed as the text for his "Alto Rhapsody" of 1869.) AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes. All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home. Their women cluck like starved pullets, Dying for love. Therefore, Their sons grow suicidally beautiful At the beginning of October, And gallop terribly against each other's bodies. THE BRANCH WILL NOT BREAK 113 ...

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