Greatly shining,

WIND AND SILVER

The Autumn moon floats in the thin sky;

And the fish-ponds shake their backs and flash their dragon scales

As she passes over them.

1

A LADY1

You are beautiful and faded,
Like an old opera tune

Played upon a harpsichord;

Or like the sun-flooded silks

Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.

In your eyes

Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,

And the perfume of your soul

Is vague and suffusing

With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.

Your half-tones delight me,

And I grow mad with gazing

At your blent colors.

My vigor is a new-minted penny,

Which I cast at your feet.

Gather it up from the dust

That its sparkle may amuse you.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, the Macmillan Company, from Sword Blades and Poppy Seed by Amy Lowell.

When you came, you were like red wine and honey, And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness Now you are like morning bread,

Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all, for I know your savour;
But I am completely nourished.

Ridgely Torrence

(Frederic) Ridgely Torrence was born at Xenia, Ohio, November 27, 1875, and was educated at Miami and Princeton University. For several years he was librarian of the Astor Library in New York City (1897-1901) and has been on several editorial staffs since then.

His first volume, The House of a Hundred Lights (1900), bears the grave subtitle "A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai" and is a half-whimsical, half-searching mixture of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence.

Torrence's subsequent uncollected verses have a deeper force, a more concentrated fire. In "The Bird and the Tree" and "Eye-Witness," he has caught something more than the colors of certain localities-particularly of the dark race.

1

THE BIRD AND THE TREE

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There's something wrong tonight.
Far off the sheriff's footfall dies,
The minutes crawl like last year's flies
Between the bars, and like an age

The hours are long tonight.

Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell.

The sky is like a heavy lid

Out here beyond the door tonight.
What's that? A mutter down the street.
What's that? The sound of yells and feet.
For what you didn't do or did
You'll pay the score tonight.

No use to reek with reddened sweat,
No use to whimper and to sweat.

They've got the rope; they've got the guns,
They've got the courage and the guns;
An' that's the reason why tonight
No use to ask them any more.

They'll fire the answer through the door-
You're out to die tonight.

There where the lonely cross-road lies,
There is no place to make replies;
But silence, inch by inch, is there,
And the right limb for a lynch is there;
And a lean daw waits for both your eyes,
Blackbird.

Perhaps you'll meet again some place.
Look for the mask upon the face;
That's the way you'll know them there-
A white mask to hide the face.

And you can halt and show them there
The things that they are deaf to now,
And they can tell you what they meant-
To wash the blood with blood. But how
If you are innocent?

Blackbird singer, blackbird mute,

They choked the seed you might have found.

Out of a thorny field you go—

For you it may be better so—

And leave the sowers of the ground

To eat the harvest of the fruit,

Blackbird.

Robert Frost

Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England, Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26, 1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where, for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in The Independent. But the strange, soil-flavored quality which even then distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and for twenty years Frost continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the discouraging apathy.

After another unsuccessful attempt to achieve culture via college (Harvard 1897), Frost engaged in industry. For about three years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in 1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment and, after a few years' teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children, sailed for England in September, 1912.

A few months later, A Boy's Will (1913), his first collection,

was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of the few authentic voices of modern poetry. In the spring of the same year, North of Boston (1914), one of the most intensely American books ever printed, was published in England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of people." And it is more than that-it is a book of backgrounds as living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten wood-pile left

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow, smokeless burning of decay.

North of Boston, like its successor, contains much of the finest poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual values, every line moves with the double force of observation and implication. The poet's colors and characters are close to their soil; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a photographic realist. "There are," he once said, "two types of realist-the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I'm inclined to be the second kind. . . . To me, the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form."

Sounds, the delicate accents of speech, find their most sympathetic recorder here. Frost's lines disclose the subtle shades of emphasis and expression in words, in the rhythms and tones that call to life a whole scene by presenting only a significant detail. "If I must be classified as a poet," Frost once said, with the suspicion of a twinkle, "I might be called a Synecdochist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry-that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole."

In March, 1915, Frost came back to America-to a hill outside of Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. North of Boston had been published in the United States and its author, who had left the country an unknown writer, returned to find himself famous. Mountain Interval, containing some of Frost's most beautiful poems ("Birches," "An Old Man's Winter Night," “The Hill Wife”), appeared in 1916. The idiom is the same as in the earlier volumes, but the notes are more varied, the convictions are stronger. The essential things are unchanged. The first poem in Frost's first book sums it up: