dent in Black Branches (1920), where much that is strained and artificial mingles with poetry that is not only spontaneous but searching. At his best, notably in the refreshing "Country Rhymes," Johns is a true and poignant singer.

THE INTERPRETER

In the very early morning when the light was low
She got all together and she went like snow,
Like snow in the springtime on a sunny hill,
And we were only frightened and can't think still.

We can't think quite that the katydids and frogs

And the little crying chickens and the little grunting hogs,
And the other living things that she spoke for to us
Have nothing more to tell her since it happened thus.

She never is around for anyone to touch,

But of ecstasy and longing she too knew much
And always when anyone has time to call his own,
She will come and be beside him as quiet as a stone.

ROBINSON JEFFERS

Robinson Jeffers' condensed autobiography runs as follows: "Born in Pittsburgh in 1887; my parents carried me about Europe a good deal; of the first visit I remember three things — a pocketful of snails loosed on the walls of a kindergarten in Zürich, paintings of Keats and Shelley hanging side by side somewhere in London, and Arthur's Seat, the hill about Edinburgh. When I was fifteen I was brought home. Next year my family moved to California and I graduated at eighteen from Occidental College, Los Angeles. After that, desultory years at the University of Southern California, University of Zürich, Medical School in Los Angeles, University of Washington, but with faint interest. I wasn't deeply interested in anything but poetry.

"I married Una Call Kuster in 1913. We were going to England in the autumn of 1914. But the August news turned us to this village of Carmel instead; and when the stagecoach topped the hill from

Monterey, and we looked down through pines and sea-fogs on Carmel Bay, it was evident that we had come without knowing it to our inevitable place."

Flagons and Apples (1912) was Jeffers' undistinguished first volume; it was followed by Californians (1916), a scarcely more distinctive book. In 1925 Tamar and Other Poems was brought out by a small printer and caused an overnight sensation. It was reprinted the following year, with the addition of new poems, as Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1926). This, it was evident at once, was masculine poetry, stark, even terrible in its intensities. Whatever defects this verse has and it must be confessed that Jeffers piles on his catastrophes with little humor and less restraint there is no denying its elemental power. He combines two almost contrary types of strength: the rude American and the stoic Greek. The best of his long poems read like fragments of Sophocles rewritten by Walt Whitman.

The Women of Sur Point (1927) shows again how easily Jeffers can swing the long line, how suddenly his phrases soar from the tawdry into the ecstatic, how boldly he can lift a language which, in the hands of most poets, would be nothing more than wild rhetoric. A monograph Robinson Jeffers: The Man and the Artist (1926) was completed by another poet, George Sterling, just before Sterling's death.

AGE IN PROSPECT

Praise youth's hot blood if you will, I think that happiness
Rather consists in having lived clear through

Youth and hot blood, on to the wintrier hemisphere
Where one has time to wait and remember.

Youth and hot blood are beautiful, so is peacefulness.
Youth had some islands in it but age is indeed
An island and a peak; age has infirmities,

Not few, but youth is all one fever.

And there is no possession more sure than memory's;

But if I reach that gray island, that peak,

My hope is still to possess with eyes the homeliness
Of ancient loves, ocean and mountains,

And meditate the sea-mouth of mortality

And the fountain six feet down with a quieter thirst
Than now I feel for old age; a creature progressively
Thirsty for life will be for death too.

COMPENSATION

Solitude that unmakes me one of men

In snowwhite hands brings singular recompense,
Evening me with kindlier natures when

On the needled pinewood the cold dews condense
About the hour of Rigel fallen from heaven
In wintertime, or when the long night tides
Sigh blindly from the sand dune backward driven,
Or when on stormwings of the northwind rides
The foamscud with the cormorants, or when passes
A horse or dog with brown affectionate eyes,
Or autumn frosts are pricked by earliest grasses,
Or whirring from her covert a quail flies.
Why, even in humanity beauty and good
Show, from the mountainside of solitude.

ROY HELTON

Roy Helton was born in Washington, D. C., in 1887. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908. He studied art - and found he was color-blind. He spent two years at inventions — and found he had no business sense. After a few more experiments he became a schoolmaster in West Philadelphia.

Helton's first volume, Youth's Pilgrimage (1915), is a strange, mystical affair, full of vague symbolism with a few purple patches. Outcasts in Beulah Land (1918) is entirely different in theme and treatment. This is a much starker verse; a poetry of city streets, direct and sharp. Since this volume Helton has become more intimately connected with primitive backgrounds, spending a great part of his time in the mountains of South Carolina and Kentucky.

OLD CHRISTMAS MORNING

(A Kentucky Mountain Ballad)

"Where you coming from, Lomey Carter, So airly over the snow?

And what's them pretties you got in your hand, And where you aiming to go?

"Step in, Honey: Old Christmas morning
I ain't got nothing much;

Maybe a bite of sweetness and corn bread,
A little ham meat and such.

"But come in, Honey! Sally Anne Barton's Hungering after your face.

Wait till I light my candle up:

Set down! There's your old place.

"Now where you been so airly this morning?' "Graveyard, Sally Anne.

Up by the trace in the salt lick meadows
Where Taulbe kilt man."

my

"Taulbe ain't to home this morning

I can't scratch up a light:

Dampness gets on the heads of the matches;
But I'll blow up the embers bright."

"Needn't trouble. I won't be stopping: Going a long ways still."

"You didn't see nothing, Lomey Carter,

Up on the graveyard hill? "

"

"What should I see there, Sally Anne Barton?”

66

"Well, sperits do walk last night."

There were an elder bush a-blooming

While the moon still give some light."

66

Yes, elder bushes, they bloom, Old Christmas,
And critters kneel down in their straw.

Anything else up in the graveyard?

66

66

66

I

One thing more I saw:

saw my man with his head all bleeding
Where Taulbe's shot went through."

What did he say? ""He stooped and kissed me."
"What did he say to you?

"Said, Lord Jesus forguv your Taulbe;

But he told me another word;

He said it soft when he stooped and kissed me.
That were the last I heard."

"Taulbe ain't to home this morning."

"I know that, Sally Anne,

For I kilt him, coming down through the meadow
Where Taulbe kilt my man.

"I met him upon the meadow trace
When the moon were fainting fast,
And I had my dead man's rifle gun
And kilt him as he come past."

"But I heard two shots."""Twas his was second:
He shot me 'fore he died:

You'll find us at daybreak, Sally Anne Barton:
I'm laying there dead at his side.”

ALAN SEEGER

Alan Seeger was born in New York, June 22, 1888. When he was still a baby, his parents moved to Staten Island, where he remained through boyhood. Later, there were several other migrations, including a sojourn in Mexico, where Seeger spent the most impressionable years of his youth. In 1906, he entered Harvard.

1914 came, and the European war had not entered its third week when, along with some forty of his fellow-countrymen, Seeger en