Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn,
Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue,
By the oath of work they swear: "I know you."

Hunted and hissed from the center

Deep down long ago when God made us over,
Deep down are the cinders we came from—
You and I and our heads of smoke.

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job
Cross on the sky and count our years
And sing in the secrets of our numbers;
Sing their dawns and sing their evenings,
Sing an old log-fire song:

You may put the damper up,

You may put the damper down,

The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Smoke of a city sunset skyline,

Smoke of a country dust horizon—

They cross on the sky and count our years.

A bar of steel-it is only

Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man. A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else, And left smoke and the blood of a man

And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,

Smoke and the blood of a man.

Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary-they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys
The smoke nights write their oaths:

Smoke into steel and blood into steel;

Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men.

Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

The birdmen drone

In the blue; it is steel

a motor sings and zooms.

Steel barb-wire around The Works.

Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.

Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.

The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their

automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel.

Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are

dumped:

Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.

Adelaide Crapsey

Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar

In 1905

College in 1897, graduating with the class of 1901. she went abroad, studying archæology in Rome. After her return she essayed to teach, but her failing health compelled her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.

In 1913, after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which, like some of Emily Dickinson's, are so precise and poignant. She was particularly happy in her "Cinquains," a form that she originated. These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables) doubtless owe something to the Japanese hokku, but Adelaide Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.

She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914. Her small volume Verse appeared in 1915, and a part of an unfinished Study in English Metrics was posthumously published in 1918.

THREE CINQUAINS

NOVEMBER NIGHT

Listen.

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . .

A white moth flew. Why am I grown

So cold?

ON SEEING WEATHER-BEATEN TREES

Is it as plainly in our living shown,

By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?

Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling's Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that seldom grows cloying. There is fragrant whimsicality, a child-like freshness in poems like "The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks," and "Frost on a Window," which remind one of the manner of her daughter, Hilda, (see page 213).

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way

Nightingales sound.

Tall larches lilt and sway
Above the glittering ground:
The wild white cherry spray
Scatters radiance round.

The chuckle of the nightingale
Is like this elfin wood.

Even as his gleaming trills assail
The spirit's solitude,

These leaves of light, these branches frail
Are music's very mood.

(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay was born in the house where he still lives in Springfield, Illinois, November 10, 1879. His home is next door to the Executive mansion of the State of Illinois; from the window where Lindsay does most of his writing, he saw many Governors come and go, including the martyred John P. Altgeld, whom he has celebrated in one of his finest poems. He graduated from the Springfield High School, attended Hiram College (1897-1900), studied at the Art Institute at Chicago (1900-3) and at the New York School of Art (1904). After two years of lecturing and settlement work, he took the first of his long tramps, walking through Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, preaching "the gospel of beauty," and formulating his unique plans for a communal art. (See Preface.) Like a true revivalist, he attempted to wake in the people he met a response to beauty; like Tommy Tucker, he sang, recited and chanted for his supper, distributing a little pamphlet entitled "Rhymes to be Traded for Bread." But the great audiences he was endeavoring to reach did not hear him, even though his collection General Booth Enters Into Heaven (1913) struck many a loud and racy note.

Lindsay broadened his effects, developed the chant and, the