Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, "That star went always wrong, and from the start I was dissatisfied.” He lifted up His hand I say He heaved a dreadful hand Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, "Stay, John Drinkwater Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of Abraham Lincoln-A Play (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative in mood. The best of his verses have been collected in Poems, 190819, and the two here reprinted are used by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. RECIPROCITY I do not think that skies and meadows are A TOWN WINDOW Beyond my window in the night Under the grey drift of the town The Warwick spring in flame and gold. And when the tramway down the hill The tumult of a thousand wings. J. C. Squire Jack Collings Squire was born April 2, 1883, at Plymouth, of Devonian ancestry. He was educated at Blundell's and Cambridge University, and became known first as a remarkably adroit parodist. His Imaginary Speeches (1912) and Tricks of the Trade (1917) are amusing parodies and, what is more, excellent criticism. He edited The New Statesman for a while and founded The London Mercury (a monthly of which he is editor) in November, 1919. Under the pseudonym "Solomon Eagle" he wrote a page of literary criticism every week for six years, many of these papers being collected in his volume, Books in General (1919). His original poetry is intellectual but simple, sometimes metaphysical and always interesting technically in its variable rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was published under the title, Poems: First Series. Another volume, Poems: Second Series appeared during Squire's visit to America in the fall of 1921. A HOUSE Now very quietly, and rather mournfully, And all the stubble-fields that were so warm to him And I, the traveller, break, still unsatisfied, From that faint exquisite celestial strand, And turn and see again the only dwelling-place In this wide wilderness of darkening land. The house, that house, O now what change has come to it. No hand has altered it, that parallelogram, So inharmonious, so ill-arranged; That hard blue roof in shape and colour's what it was; No, it is not that any line has changed. Only that loneliness is now accentuate And, as the dusk unveils the heaven's deep cave, This small world's feebleness fills me with awe again, And all men's energies seem very brave. And this mean edifice, which some dull architect Takes on the quality of that magnificent Darkness and stars will come, and long the night will be, Avoiding gallantly the stars' chill scrutiny, Ignoring secrets in the midnight's breast. Thunders may shudder it, and winds demoniac And all a universe of nameless messengers And stare and stare ahead and scarcely hear. From this great solitude of evening skies. So lone, so very small, with worlds and worlds around, Anna Wickham Anna Wickham was born in Wimbledon, Surrey, in 1883. She went to Australia at six, returned when she was twentyone, studied for Opera in Paris with De Reszke and suddenly, after a few years of marriage, became a poet. In a burst of creative energy she wrote nine hundred poems in four years. Her two first books were republished in America in one volume, The Contemplative Quarry (1921). The most casual reading of Anna Wickham's work reveals the strength of her candor. The poems could scarcely be put in the category "charming" verse; they are astringent and sometimes harsh; gnarled frequently by their own changes of mood. Her lines present the picture of woman struggling between dreams and domesticity; they are acutely sensitive, restless, analytical. The very tone of her poetry reflects the disturbed music and the nervous intensity of her age. of ENVOI God, thou great symmetry, Who put a biting lust in me That I have spent in shapeless ways, Give me one perfect thing. DOMESTIC ECONOMY I will have few cooking-pots, I will have four garments, My service shall be good, Though my diet be mean. Then I shall have excess to give to the poor, And right to counsel beggars at my door. THE SINGER If I had peace to sit and sing, But I am stung with goads and whips, Let it be something for my song, |