SNOW

The moon, like a round device
On a shadowy shield of war,
Hangs white in a heaven of ice
With a solitary star.

The wind has sunk to a sigh,

And the waters are stern with frost;

And gray, in the eastern sky,
The last snow-cloud is lost.

White fields, that are winter-starved,
Black woods, that are winter-fraught,
Cold, harsh as a face death-carved,
With the iron of some black thought.

THE MAN HUNT1

The woods stretch wild to the mountain side,
And the brush is deep where a man may hide.

They have brought the bloodhounds up again
To the roadside rock where they found the slain.

They have brought the bloodhounds up, and they
Have taken the trail to the mountain way.

1 Taken by permission from The Vale of Tempe by Madison Cawein. Copyright, 1905, by E. P. Dutton and Co., New York.

Three times they circled the trail and crossed,
And thrice they found it and thrice they lost.

Now straight through the pines and the underbrush They follow the scent through the forest's hush.

And their deep-mouthed bay is a pulse of fear In the heart of the wood that the man must hear.

The man who crouches among the trees
From the stern-faced men that follow these.

A huddle of rocks that the ooze has mossed-
And the trail of the hunted again is lost.

An upturned pebble; a bit of ground
A heel has trampled-the trail is found.

And the woods re-echo the bloodhounds' bay
As again they take to the mountain way.

A rock; a ribbon of road; a ledge,

With a pine-tree clutching its crumbling edge.

A pine, that the lightning long since clave,
Whose huge roots hollow a ragged cave.

A shout; a curse; and a face aghast,
And the human quarry is laired at last.

The human quarry, with clay-clogged hair
And eyes of terror, who waits them there;

That glares and crouches and rising then
Hurls clods and curses at dogs and men.

Until the blow of a gun-butt lays
Him stunned and bleeding upon his face.

A rope, a prayer, and an oak-tree near.
And a score of hands to swing him clear.

A grim black thing for the setting sun
And the moon and the stars to look upon.

PENURY

Above his misered embers, gnarled and gray,
With toil-twitched limbs he bends; around his hut,
Want, like a hobbling hag, goes night and day,
Scolding at windows and at doors tight-shut.

DESERTED

The old house leans upon a tree

Like some old man upon a staff:
The night wind in its ancient porch
Sounds like a hollow laugh.

Be

The heaven is wrapped in flying clouds.
As grandeur cloaks itself in gray:
The starlight flitting in and out,
Glints like a lanthorn ray.

The dark is full of whispers.

Now

A fox-hound howls: and through the night,
Like some old ghost from out its grave,
The moon comes misty white.

Bert Leston Taylor

Bert Leston Taylor was born at Goshen, Massachusetts, November 13, 1866, and educated at the College of the City of New York. He had been engaged in journalism since 1895, conducting his column "A Line o' Type or Two" in the Chicago Daily News. He was the author of two novels as well as A Line-o'-Verse or Two (1911) and Motley Measures (1913); a pair of delightful light verse collections. Taylor died of pneumonia March 19, 1921.

CANOPUS

When quacks with pills political would dope us,
When politics absorbs the livelong day,

I like to think about that star Canopus,
So far, so far away.

Greatest of visioned suns, they say who list 'em;
To weigh it, science almost must despair.

Its shell would hold our whole dinged solar system,
Nor even know 'twas there.

When temporary chairmen utter speeches,

And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns,
My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches
To where Canopus swims.

When men are calling names and making faces,
And all the world's ajangle and ajar,
I meditate on interstellar spaces

And smoke a mild seegar.

For after one has had about a week of
The argument of friends as well as foes,
A star that has no parallax to speak of

Conduces to repose.

William Vaughn Moody

William Vaughn Moody was born at Spencer, Indiana, July 1, 1869, and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he spent the remaining eighteen years of his life in travel and intensive study-he taught, for eight years, at the University of Chicago-his death coming at the very height of his creative power.

The Masque of Judgment, his first work, was published in 1900. A richer and more representative collection appeared the year following; in Poems (1901) Moody effected that mingling of challenging lyricism and spiritual philosophy which becomes more and more insistent. (See Preface.) Throughout his career, and particularly in such lines as the hotly expostulating "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines" and the majestic, uncompleted "The Death of Eve," Moody successfully achieves the rare union of poet and preacher. "Gloucester Moors" is an outcry against the few exploiting the many; "The Quarry" and "An Ode in Time of Hesitation" are passionate with prophecy. His last, extended works have an epic quality which,