How light and laughing my mind is,

When all good folks have put out their bedroom candles, And the city is still.

MEETING-HOUSE HILL

I must be mad, or very tired,

When the curve of a blue bay beyond a railroad track Is shrill and sweet to me like the sudden springing of a tune,

And the sight of a white church above thin trees in a city square

Amazes my eyes as though it were the Parthenon.
Clear, reticent, superbly final,

With the pillars of its portico refined to a cautious elegance,

It dominates the weak trees,

And the shot of its spire

Is cool and candid,

Rising into an unresisting sky.

Strange meeting-house

Pausing a moment upon a squalid hill-top.

I watch the spire sweeping the sky,

I am dizzy with the movement of the sky;
I might be watching a mast

With its royals set full

Straining before a two-reef breeze.

I might be sighting a tea-clipper,

Tacking into the blue bay,

Just back from Canton

With her hold full of green and blue porcelain

And a Chinese coolie leaning over the rail

Gazing at the white spire

With dull, sea-spent eyes.

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.

A LADY'

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.

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

A DECADE1

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.

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.

1 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,