BRIGHTON BEACH

This is the sea and I am but I,

Giving my body over to sky,

Running, an atom surcharged with delight,
Close to the atom I love. Let the night
Blot us to nothing, today we will run
Crazily into the camp of the sun!
We will emerge all dribbled with gold,
Knowing that we will never be old,
Never be haggard and never be two
Isn't the sea transcendantly blue?
This is the color archangels invent,
Blue for a madness, blue for content.
This is God's private and generous pool
Where he wades, naked, on nights that are cool.
This is the wind and the pigment of sky
Mixed and commanded never to dry,
Never to cease this throwing away -
Breaker and beach in primordial play.
Run with me, prodigal, over the sands
Into the sea, for an atom expands
Into the infinite, wind being right
And all of the breakers gathered to smite.
Now I believe in the purpose of fish
Swimming like us in the sea's blue dish,
Blood that is cold and tails that are free,
Under the same compulsion as we;
Polyps that never intend to be tame,
Seaweed too busy to get it a name,
Coral much pinker than well-polished bone
After a sinking, the green undertone
Of liberal waters that quicken their pace,
Stagger like giants, and fall on their face.
Even the gulls are a little more bold,
Drilling the sun for an ooze of gold,
Screaming for company there in the blue,
Jealous, perhaps, of my having you.

George Dillon was born November 12, 1906, in Jacksonville, Florida, and spent most of his childhood in Kentucky, his mother's region. He went to school in the Middle West and was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1927.

While still an undergraduate, his verses began to attract attention far beyond the borders of Illinois, and he was made president of the Poetry Club of his University and in 1925 was given the John Billings Fiske Prize as well as the Young Poet's Prize awarded by Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. In the same year he joined the Poetry staff as Associate Editor. His Boy in the Wind (1927) is distinguished by much more than precocity; always musical, there is a sharp-flavored tang which proceeds from an unusually keen intellect. With this first volume, Dillon proves himself one of America's undoubted lyricists.

IN TWO MONTHS NOW

In two months now or maybe one
The sun will be a different sun
And earth that stretches white as straw
With stony ice will crack and thaw
And run in whistling streams and curve
In still blue-shadowed pools. The nerve
Of each pink root will quiver bare
And orchards in the April air

Will show black branches breaking white.
Red roses in the green twilight
Will glimmer ghostly blue and swell
Upon their vines with such a smell
As only floats when the breeze is loud
At dusk from roses in a crowd.

I know that there will be these things
Remembering them from other springs.
All these and more shall soon be seen,
As beautiful as they have been;
But not so beautiful as they
Seem now to be, a month away.

Tom Prideaux was born May 9, 1908, in Hillsdale, Michigan, and came East as a child. The greater part of his education was undergone at The Lincoln School (New York City) where his contributions to the school magazine were widely reprinted. His work was the outstanding feature of Creative Youth (1925), a collection of unusual poems written by students of The Lincoln School. Prideaux entered Yale in 1926.

Hilda Conkling, gifted as an infant, was born at Catskill-onHudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 157), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there ever since.

Hilda began to write poems

or rather, to talk them at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision.

Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. She hears a chickadee talking

The way smooth bright pebbles
Drop into water.

The rooster's comb is "gay as a parade"; he has "pearl trinkets on his feet" and

The short feathers smooth along his back
Are the dark color of wet rocks,

Or the rippled green of ships

When I look at their sides through water.

Shoes of the Wind (1922) proves that her first volume was no mere wonder-child's freak. Here again her vision is precise even when her imagination is most playful. She watches pigeons with "feet the color of new June strawberries," she observes a pink peony standing in a tall glass as "Queen Elizabeth in a ruff," lilies-of-the-valley are "bell-shaped moments clustered, doves of time." This clarity of epithet makes Hilda kin to the Imagist; Amy Lowell might have described a flight of pigeons in just such words as Hilda's: "A cool curving and sliding down the light."

WATER

The world turns softly

Not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms
And the sky is held in the water.

What is water,

That pours silver,

And can hold the sky?

HAY-COCK

This is another kind of sweetness

Shaped like a bee-hive:

This is the hive the bees have left,

It is from this clover-heap

They took away the honey
For the other hive!

I KEEP WONDERING

I saw a mountain,

And he was like Wotan looking at himself in the water.

I saw a cockatoo,

And he was like sunset clouds.

Even leaves and little stones

Are different to my eyes sometimes.

I keep wondering through and through my heart
Where all the beautiful things in the world

Come from.

And while I wonder

They go on being beautiful.

NATHALIA CRANE

Nathalia Clara Ruth Crane, the most remarkable phenomenon since the days of Marjorie Fleming, was born in New York City, August 11, 1913. Through her father she is descended from John and Priscilla Alden, Stephen Crane being a not distant kinsman; on her mother's side she inherits the varied gifts of a famous family of Spanish Jews which counts among its members poets, musicians and ministers of state.

Nathalia began to write when she was little more than eight years old. At the age of nine she sent some of her verses to The New York Sun and they were accepted wholly on their merit by Edmund Leamy, the poetry editor, Leamy having no idea that the lines were written by a child.

Nathalia's first volume, The Janitor's Boy, appeared when its author was ten and a half, in 1924, becoming one of the most discussed publications of the year. Some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others scorned the chance that any child should have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones. Whatever the source may be, whether the inspiration derives from the unconscious or some inheritance, the poetry is a firm and definite accomplishment.

The verse itself is sharply divided into two kinds: the light and genuinely childish jingle the sort of thinking native to children but which most of them are unable to compress into rhyme — and the incredibly grave and cryptic poetry. Even in the first division