Tree you are,

Moss you are,

You are violets with wind above them.

A child-so high-you are;

And all this is folly to the world.

No, no!

A VIRGINAL

Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;

Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of aether;
As with sweet leaves; as with a subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness

To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her

No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:

As white their bark, so white this lady's hours.

BALLAD FOR GLOOM

For God, our God is a gallant foe

That playeth behind the veil.

I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,

I have loved my God as a maid to man-
But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;

To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus' pale.

I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man

Shall win at the turn of the game.

I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:

Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose

Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind

the veil.

When God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple

mail.

Δωρια

Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not

As transient things are—

gaiety of flowers.

Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs

And of gray waters.

Let the gods speak softly of us

In days hereafter,

the shadowy flowers of Orcus

Remember thee.

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Louis Untermeyer

Louis Untermeyer was born October 1, 1885, in New York City, where he has lived, except for brief sojourns in Maine and New Jersey, ever since. His education was sketchy; his continued failure to comprehend algebra and geometry kept him from entering college. His one ambition was to become a composer. At sixteen he appeared as a pianist in semiprofessional circles; at seventeen he entered his father's jewelry manufacturing establishment, of which he became designer and factory manager.

Untermeyer's first volume was The Younger Quire (1911), a twenty-four-page burlesque of an anthology (The Younger Choir). It was issued anonymously and only one hundred copies were printed. Later in the same year, he published a sequence of some seventy lyrics entitled First Love (1911) in which the influences of Heine, Henley and Housman were not only obvious but crippling. With the exception of about eight of these songs, the volume is devoid of character and, in spite of a certain technical facility, wholly undistinguished.

It was with Challenge (1914), now in its fourth edition, that the author first spoke in his own idiom. Although the ghost of Henley still haunts some of these pages, poems like Summons," "Landscapes" and "Caliban in the Coal Mines" show "a fresh and lyrical sympathy with the modern world. His vision" (thus the Boston Transcript) "is a social vision, his spirit a passionately energized command of the forces of justice."

.

Challenge was succeeded by These Times (1917), evidently an "interval" book which, lacking the concentration and unity of the better known collection, sought (not always successfully) for larger horizons. Certain poems (like "Swimmers," "The Laughers" and the colloquial sonnets) stand out, but as a whole it has neither the energy of his earlier nor the surety of his later work. The New Adam (1920) is a more satisfactory unit; here the varied passions are fused in a new heat.

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Besides this serious poetry, Untermeyer has published two volumes of critical parodies, and Other Poets" (1917) and Including Horace (1919)—paraphrases of the Latin bard as various classic and modern poets might have rendered him. He has also printed a strict metrical translation of three hundred and twenty-five Poems of Heinrich Heine (1917); a volume of prose criticism, The New Era in American Poetry (1919); and two text-books. He was one of the Associate Editors of The Seven Arts (1916-17) and has lectured at various universities in the Eastern States.

SUMMONS

The eager night and the impetuous winds,
The hints and whispers of a thousand lures,
And all the swift persuasion of the Spring,
Surged from the stars and stones, and swept me on
The smell of honeysuckles, keen and clear,
Startled and shook me, with the sudden thrill
Of some well-known but half-forgotten voice.
A slender stream became a naked sprite,
Flashed around curious bends, and winked at me
Beyond the turns, alert and mischievous.
A saffron moon, dangling among the trees,
Seemed like a toy balloon caught in the boughs,
Flung there in sport by some too-mirthful breeze
And as it hung there, vivid and unreal,

The whole world's lethargy was brushed away;
The night kept tugging at my torpid mood
And tore it into shreds. A warm air blew
My wintry slothfulness beyond the stars;
And over all indifference there streamed
A myriad urges in one rushing wave
Touched with the lavish miracles of earth,
I felt the brave persistence of the grass;
The far desire of rivulets; the keen,
Unconquerable fervor of the thrush;
The endless labors of the patient worm;
The lichen's strength; the prowess of the ant;
The constancy of flowers; the blind belief
Of ivy climbing slowly toward the sun,