We are the workers and makers. We are no longer dumb! Tremble, O Shirkers and Takers! Sweeping the earth—we come! Ranked in the world-wide dawn, Marching into the day! _The night is gone and the sword is drawn And the scabbard is thrown away!_ LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS[39] Let me live out my years in heat of blood! Let me die drunken with the dreamer’s wine! Let me not see this soul-house built of mud Go toppling to the dust—a vacant shrine. Let me go quickly, like a candle light Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow. Give me high noon—and let it then be night! Thus would I go. And grant that when I face the grisly Thing, My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps. Let me be as a tune-swept fiddlestring That feels the Master Melody—and snaps! _Witter Bynner_ Witter Bynner was born at Brooklyn, New York, August 10, 1881. He was graduated from Harvard in 1902 and has been assistant editor of various periodicals as well as adviser to publishers. Recently, he has spent much of his time lecturing on poetry and travelling in the Orient. _Young Harvard_ (1907), the first of Bynner’s volumes, was, as the name implies, a celebration of his _alma mater. The New World_ (1915) is a much riper and far more ambitious effort. In this extended poem, Bynner sought—almost too determinedly—to translate the ideals of democracy into verse. Neither of these volumes displays its author’s gifts at their best, for Bynner is, first of all, a lyric poet. _Grenstone Poems_ (1917) and _A Canticle of Pan_ (1920) reveal a more natural singing voice. Bynner harmonizes in many keys; transposing, modulating and shifting from one tonality to another. This very ease is his chief defect, for Bynner’s facility leads him not only to write too much but in too many different styles. Many of his poems seem like sounding-boards that echo the tones of every poet except the composer of them. Instead of a fusion of gifts we have, too often, a disintegration. When Bynner is least dexterous he is most ingratiating. When he does not try to sound the whole gamut of modern poetry from the lyrics of A. E. Housman to the attenuated epigrams of Ezra Pound, he can strike his own note with clarity and precision. Even in _The Beloved Stranger_ (1919), where the borrowed accents of his _alter ego_ are only too apparent, one is arrested by lines of musical charm and fluency.