Red roses seem within their marble blown,
A painted garden chiseled in the stone;

The rose and violet trickling through their veins,
Where they drop brilliant curtains to the plains-
A ramp of rock and granite, jeweled and brightening,
Like some great colored wall of lightning!

Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, possibly the most gifted of the younger lyricists, was born February 22, 1892, at Rockland, Maine. After a childhood spent almost entirely in New England, she attended Vassar College, from which she was graduated in 1917. Since that time she has lived in New York City. Besides her keenly individual lyrics, Miss Millay has written a quantity of short stories under various pseudonyms, has translated several songs, and has been connected with the Provincetown Players both as playwright and performer.

Although the bulk of her poetry is not large, the quality of it approaches and sometimes attains greatness. Her first long poem, Renascence," was the outstanding feature of The Lyric Year (1912), an anthology which revealed many new names. "Renascence " was written when Miss Millay was scarcely nineteen; it remains today one of the most remarkable poems of this generation. Beginning like a child's aimless verse it proceeds, with a calm lucidity, to an amazing climax. It is as if a child had, in the midst of its ingenuousness, uttered some terrific truth. The sheer cumulative power of this poem is curpassed only by its beauty.

Renascence, the name of Miss Millay's first volume, was published in 1917. It is full of the same passion as its title poem; here is a hunger for beauty so intense that no delight is great enough to give the soul peace. Such poems as God's World" and the unnamed sonnets vibrate with this rapture. Magic

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burns from the simplest of her lines. Figs from Thistles (1920) is a far more sophisticated booklet. Sharp and cynically brilliant, Miss Millay's craftsmanship no less than her intuition saves these poems from mere cleverness.

Second April (1921) is an intensification of her lyrical gift tinctured with an increasing sadness and disillusion. Her poignant poetic play, Aria da Capo, first performed by the Provincetown Players in New York, was published in The Monthly Chapbook (Harold Monro, England); the issue of July, 1920, being devoted to it.

GOD'S WORLD

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

Thy mists that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;

Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year.

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

RENASCENCE

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I'd started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And sure enough!-I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And, reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass

Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold

Immensity made manifold;

Whispered to me a word whose sound

Deafened the air for worlds around,

And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.

I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.

The universe, cleft to the core,

Lay open to my probing sense

That, sick'ning, I would fain pluck thence.
But could not,-nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn

All venom out.-Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll

In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mire, and mine the gall

Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief

With individual desire,

Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire

About a thousand people crawl;

Perished with each,-then mourned for all!

A man was starving in Capri;

He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog-bank

Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death

That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.

All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.