Banners (1919) is the title of her remarkable first book. The rich emotional content is matched by the poet's intellectual skill. Unusually sensitive, most of these lines strive for—and attaina high seriousness.

Are you at ease now,

Do you suck content

From death's dark nipple between your wan lips?

Now that the fever of the day is spent

And anguish slips

From the small limbs,

And they lie lapped in rest,

The young head pillowed soft upon that indurate breast. No, you are quiet,

And forever,

Tho for us the silence is so loud with tears,
Wherein we hear the dreadful-footed years
Echoing, but your quick laughter never,
Never your stumbling run, your sudden face
Thrust in bright scorn upon our solemn fears.
Now the dark mother holds you close. . . O, you

We loved so,

How you lie,

So strangely still, unmoved so utterly

Dear yet, but oh a little alien too.

1 From Banners by Babette Deutsch. George H. Doran Co., Publishers.

Copyright, 1919.

IN A MUSEUM

Here stillness sounds like echoes in a tomb.
The light falls cold upon these antique toys
Whereby men sought to turn the scales of doom:
Jade gods, a ritual of rigid boys.

Warm blood was spent for this unwindowed stone
Tinct with the painted pleasures of the dead;
For secrets of unwithering flesh and bone-
With these old Egypt's night was comforted.

We lean upon the glass, our curious eyes
Staring at death, three thousand years remote.
And vanity, the worm that never dies,
Feeds on your silver ring and Pharaoh's coat.
And are these heartbeats, then, less perilous?
Since death is close, and death is death for us.

Alter Brody

Alter Brody was born at Kartúshkiya-Beróza, Province of Grodno, Russia, November 1, 1895. He came to New York City at the age of eight and, after a cursory schooling, wrote translations for certain Jewish and American newspapers. His first poems appeared in The Seven Arts in 1916-17.

In A Family Album (1918) one sees the impress of a tense and original mind, of imagination that is fed by strengthening fact, of sight that is sharpened by insight. Many of Brody's lines are uncouth and awkward; what music he achieves is mostly fortuitous, the melody accidental. And yet his pages are filled with a picturesque honesty and uncompromising beauty. Much of this work is an interpretation of the moderr

world against a background of old dreams: young America seen through the eyes of old Russia. It is a romantic realism that uplifts such poems as "Kartúshkiya-Beróza" (a record of boyhood which is one of Brody's finest achievements though, unfortunately, too long to quote), "A Row of Poplars: Central Park," "Ghetto Twilight" and the poignant "Lamentations." It is, to be more accurate, a romanticism that springs from reality and, after a fantastic flight, settles back with a new vision.

Timidly

A CITY PARK

Against a background of brick tenements

Some trees spread their branches

Skyward.

They are thin and sapless,

They are bent and weary

Tamed with captivity;

And they huddle behind the fence
Swaying helplessly before the wind,
Forward and backward,

Like a group of panicky deer
Caught in a cage.

SEARCHLIGHTS

Tingling shafts of light,

Like gigantic staffs

Brandished by blind, invisible hands,

Cross and recross each other in the sky,

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;