PRELUDE

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o'clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps

The grimy scraps

Of withered leaves about his feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat

On broken blinds and chimney pots,
And at the corner of the street

A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

Conrad Aiken

Conrad (Potter) Aiken was born at Savannah, Georgia, August 5, 1889. He attended Harvard, receiving his A.B. in 1912, travelled extensively for three years, and since then, he has devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts.

The most outstanding feature of Aiken's creative work is its rapid adaptability and its slow growth. His first volume, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse (1914), is the Keats tradition crossed, paraphrased (and vulgarized) by Masefield. Turns and Movies (1916) is a complete change; Masefield is exchanged for Masters. But in the less conspicuous half of this book, Aiken begins to speak with his true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new rhythms, haunting cadences. The Jig of Forslin (1916) is an elaboration

of his method. In this volume, Aiken goes back to the narrative or rather, to a series of loosely connected stories-and, reinforced by studies in analytical psychology, explores "the process of vicarious wish fulfilment by which civilized man enriches his circumscribed life."

Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Charnel Rose (1918) and The House of Dust (1920) are packed with a tired but often beautiful music. Even though much of it is enlivened by injections of T. S. Eliot's conversational idiom, the effect is often moony and montonous. Rain seems to fall persistently through these volumes; dust blows down the street, the shadows blur; everything dissolves in a mist of boredom and forgetfulness. Even the poignance seems on the point of falling asleep. Often Aiken loses himself in this watery welter of language. In trying to create a closer liaison between poetry and music, he gives, too frequently, so much importance to the rise and fall of syllables that his very excess of music defeats his purpose. His verse, thus, gains greatly on the sensuous side but loses, in its cloying indefiniteness, that vitality and sharpness of speech which is the very blood of poetry.

This weakening overinsistence on sound does not prevent Aiken from attaining many exquisite effects. Primarily, a lyric poet, he frequently condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his best moments are these "lapses" into tune. The music of the Morning Song from Senlin " (in The Charnel Rose) is rich with subtleties of rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical movement. Beneath the flow and flexibility of these lines, there is a delightful whimsicality, an extraordinary summoning of the immensities that loom behind the casual moments of everyday. And in "The Fulfilled Dream," Aiken can divert the stream of the subconscious, whose vague outlines he reproduces so well, to show the dream in its vivid strength.

Besides his varied poetry, Aiken has written a quantity of criticism of contemporary poets, the best of his reviews having been published in Scepticisms (1919), a provocative and valuable series of studies.

CHANCE MEETINGS

In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive, The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves,

In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices, I suddenly face you,

Your dark eyes return for a space from her who is with

you,

They shine into mine with a sunlit desire,

They say an 'I love you, what star do you live on?' They smile and then darken,

And silent, I answer 'You too-I have known you,I love you!-'

And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight To divide us forever.

THE FULFILLED DREAM

More towers must yet be built-more towers destroyed— Great rocks hoisted in air;

And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes.
And so he did not mention his dream of falling
But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath.
Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by

And the small tree swell beneath him. . .
He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,-
And so went out. . For once, he forgot his pail.

Something had changed-but it was not the street-
The street was just the same-it was himself.
Puddles flashed in the sun. In the pawn-shop door
The same old black cat winked green amber eyes;
The butcher stood by his window tying his apron;
The same men walked beside him, smoking pipes,
Reading the morning paper.

He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly, As if he knew for certain he walked to death:

But with his usual pace,-deliberate, firm,

Looking about him calmly, watching the world,
Taking his ease.

Yet, when he thought again
Of the same dream, now dreamed three separate times,
Always the same, and heard that whistling wind,
And saw the windows flashing upward past him,—
He slowed his pace a little, and thought with horror
How monstrously that small tree thrust to meet him!
He slowed his pace a little and remembered his wife.

Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
Why should it be? He'd never been afraid-
His eye was sure, his hand was steady. .
But dreams had meanings.

He walked more slowly, and looked along the roofs,
All built by men, and saw the pale blue sky;

And suddenly he was dizzy with looking at it,
It seemed to whirl and swim,

It seemed the color of terror, of speed, of death.
He lowered his eyes to the stones, he walked more slowly;
His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;

He thought of the pail. . . Why, then, was it forgotten? Because he would not need it?

Then, just as he was grouping his thoughts again
About that drug-store corner, under an arc-lamp,
Where first he met the girl whom he would marry,-
That blue-eyed innocent girl, in a soft blouse,—
He waved his hand for signal, and up he went
In the dusty chute that hugged the wall;
Above the tree; from girdered floor to floor;

Above the flattening roofs, until the sea

Lay wide and waved before him. . . . And then he stepped

Giddily out, from that security,

To the red rib of iron against the sky,

And walked along it, feeling it sing and tremble;

And looking down one instant, saw the tree
Just as he dreamed it was; and looked away,
And up again, feeling his blood go wild.

-He gave the signal; the long girder swung
Closer upon him, dropped clanging into place,
Almost pushing him off. Pneumatic hammers
Began their madhouse clatter, the white-hot rivets.