I would experience new emotions,
Submit to strange enchantments,
Bend to influences

Bizarre, exotic,

Fresh with burgeoning.

I

WOU

Rocki

While

Curve

A hiss

I would climb a sacred mountain,

Struggle with other pilgrims up a steep path through

pine-trees,

Above to the smooth, treeless slopes,

And prostrate myself before a painted shrine,
Beating my hands upon the hot earth,

Bloom

Rocke

And

We w

And

Until And

Like

Quieting my eyes upon the distant sparkle
Of the faint spring sea.

In time to your singing;

Perhaps I would only watch the play of light

Upon the hilt of your two swords.

But

The

I would sit in a covered boat,

Rocking slowly to the narrow waves of a river,
While above us, an arc of moving lanterns,
Curved a bridge,

A hiss of gold

Blooming out of darkness,

Rockets exploded,

And died in a soft dripping of colored stars.
We would float between the high trestles,
And drift away from other boats,

Until the rockets flared soundless,

And their falling stars hung silent in the sky,
Like wistaria clusters above the ancient entrance of

a temple.

I would anything

Rather than this cold paper;

With outside, the quiet sun on the sides of burgeoning branches,

And inside, only my books.

MADONNA OF THE EVENING FLOWERS1

All day long I have been working,

Now I am tired.

I call: "Where are you?"

But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,

The sun shines in on your books,

1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers, The Macmillan Company, from Pictures of the Floating World by Amy Lowell,

Then I see you,

Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.

You are cool, like silver,

And you smile.

I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes,
You tell me that the peonies need spraying,

That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
rounded.

You tell me these things.

But I look at you, heart of silver,

White heart-flame of polished silver,

Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums
of the Canterbury bells.

WIND AND SILVER

Greatly shining,

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.

bears the Couple

hodge-po

dence.

is obviou the very

adroit ri

Torren

orce, a
and "E
colors of
are as el

Plays (1

gift as a

(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 hodge-podge of philosophy, love lyrics, artlessness and impudence. The influence of Omar Khayyám and Richard Hovey is obvious but not too dominant; Torrence saves himself on the very verge of sentimentality and rhetoric by a chuckle, an adroit right-about-face.

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 belt. They are as eloquent and moving as his Granny Maumee and Other Plays (1917), which owe their power not only to Torrence's gift as a poet but to his sympathy as a folk-lyrist.

THE BIRD AND THE TREE

Blackbird, blackbird in the cage,
There's something wrong to-night.

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 to-night.

The sky is like a heavy lid

Out here beyond the door to-night.

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 to-night.

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 to-night
No use to ask them any more.

They'll fire the answer through the door-
You're out to die to-night.

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 thereA 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 meantTo wash the blood with blood. But how If you are innocent?