Frantically

Groping among the stars-stubbing themselves against the bloated clouds

Tapping desperately for a sure foothold

In the fluctuating mists.

Calm-eyed and inaccessible.

The stars peer through the blue fissures of the sky,
Unperturbed among the panic of scurrying beams;
Twinkling with a cold, acrid merriment.

GHETTO TWILIGHT

An infinite weariness comes into the faces of the old

tenements,

As they stand massed together on the block,

Tall and thoughtfully silent,

In the enveloping twilight.

Pensively,

They eye each other across the street,

Through their dim windows

With a sad recognizing stare;

Watching the red glow fading in the distance,

At the end of the street,

Behind the black church spires;

Watching the vague sky lowering overhead,

Purple with clouds of colored smoke;

From the extinguished sunset;

Watching the tired faces coming home from work

Like dry-breasted hags

Welcoming their children to their withered arms.

Stephen Vincent Benét, the younger brother of William Rose Benét, was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in July, 1898. He was educated in various parts of the country, graduating from Yale in 1919.

At seventeen he published a small book containing six dramatic portraits, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a remarkable set of monologues which, in spite of distinct traces of Browning and Alfred Noyes, was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In Benét's next volume, Young Adventure (1918), one hears something more than the speech of an infant prodigy; the precocious facility has developed into a keen and individual vigor.

Heavens and Earth (1920), the most representative collection, has a greater imaginative sweep. Like his brother, the younger Benét is at his best in the decoratively grotesque; his fancy exults in running the scales between the whimsically bizarre and the lightly diabolic.

PORTRAIT OF A BOY

After the whipping, he crawled into bed;
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle's hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping
A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed,
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor

Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and dreamed.

Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave's

mouth

Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright,
The crooked constellations of the South;

Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars,
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars.
Within, great casks like wattled aldermen
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again,
Beside webbed purples from some galleon's hold,
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white
Above a scrawled "Gunpowder!" By the flames,
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite,
Hailing their fellows by outrageous names
The pirates sat and diced.

"Doubloons!" they said.

Doubloons!"

Their eyes were moons.

The words crashed gold.

Hilda Conkling

Hilda Conkling, most gifted of recent infant prodigies, was born at Catskill-on-Hudson, New York, October 8, 1910. The daughter of Grace Hazard Conkling (see page 207), she came to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her mother when she was three years old and has lived there since, a normal out-ofdoors little girl.

Hilda began to write poems-or rather, to talk them—at the age of four. Since that time, she has created one hundred and fifty little verses, many of them astonishing in exactness of phrase and beauty of vision. Hilda "tells" her poem and her mother copies it down, arranges the line-divisions and reads it to the child for correction. Conceding a possible halfconscious shaping by Mrs. Conkling, the quality which shines behind all of Hilda's little facets of loveliness is a straightforward ingenuousness, a child-like but sweeping fantasy.

Poems by a Little Girl (1920), published when Hilda was a little more than nine years old, is a detailed proof of this

delightful quality. Every poem bears its own stamp of unaffected originality; "Water," "Hay-Cock," and a dozen others are startling in their precision and a power of painting the familiar in unsuspected colors. This child not only sees, feels and hears with the concentration of a child-artist, she communicates the results of her perceptions with the sensitivity of a master-craftsman. She hears a chickadee talking

The way smooth bright pebbles

Drop into water.

Everything is extraordinarily vivid and fanciful to her keen The rooster's comb is " gay as a parade;" he has

senses.

'pearl trinkets on his feet" and

The short feathers smooth along his back
Are the dark color of wet rocks,

Or the rippled green of ships

When I look at their sides through water.

She observes:

The water came in with a wavy look
Like a spider's web.

It is too early for judgments-even for a prophecy. It is impossible to guess how much Hilda's vision will be distorted by knowledge and the traditions that will accompany her growth. One can only hold one's breath and hope for the preservation of so remarkable a talent.

WATER

The world turns softly

Not to spill its lakes and rivers.
The water is held in its arms

And the sky is held in the water.
What is water,

That pours silver,

And can hold the sky?

HAY-COCK

This is another kind of sweetness
Shaped like a bee-hive:

This is the hive the bees have left,

It is from this clover-heap

They took away the honey

For the other hive!

THE OLD BRIDGE

The old bridge has a wrinkled face.

He bends his back

For us to go over.
He moans and weeps

But we do not hear.

Sorrow stands in his face

For the heavy weight and worry

Of people passing.

The trees drop their leaves into the water;

The sky nods to him.

The leaves float down like small ships

On the blue surface

Which is the sky.

He is not always sad:

He smiles to see the ships go down

And the little children

Playing on the river banks.