Ellis Park

Helen Hoyt

Helen Hoyt (Mrs. W. W. Lyman) was born at Norwalk, Conn., and educated at Barnard College, where she was graduated in 1909. She taught for a while in the Middle West, later joining the staff of Poetry and becoming Associate Editor. She now resides at St. Helena, Calif.

Let the tone of this poem be that of affection,-almost childish tenderness.

LITTLE park that I pass through,

I carry off a piece of you
Every morning hurrying down
To my work-day in the town;
Carry you for country there

To make the city ways more fair.
I take your trees,

And your breeze,

Your greenness,

Your cleanness,

Some of your shade, some of your sky,

Some of your calm as I go by;

Your flowers to trim

The pavements grim;

Your space for room in the jostled street,
And grass for carpet to my feet.

Your fountains take, and sweet bird calls,
To sing me from my office walls;
All that I can see

I carry off with me.

But you never miss my theft,
So much treasure you have left.
As I find you, fresh at morning,
So I find you, home returning-

Nothing lacking from your grace.
All your riches wait in place

For me to borrow

On the morrow.

Do you hear this praise of you, Little park that I pass through? Reprinted by permission of the author.

In Lady Street

John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater, the author of the famous play Abraham Lincoln, was born in 1882. He has published essays, poems, and plays, and has been general manager of the Birmingham (England) Repertory Theatre. Most of his poems are meditative in mood.

In reading this poem be sure to reveal the ugliness of the scene in the opening lines, and then transform that ugliness into beauty worthy of admiration. Low tones will mark the opening of the poem with traces of the guttural quality. Later the tone is higher and brighter, and abounds in waves of wonder and beauty.

ALL day long the traffic goes

In Lady Street by dingy rows

Of sloven houses, tattered shops

Fried fish, old clothes and fortune-tellers

Tall trams on silver-shining rails,

With grinding wheels and swaying tops,
And lorries with their corded bales,

And screeching cars. "Buy, buy!" the sellers
Of rags and bones and sickening meat

Cry all day long in Lady Street.

And when the sunshine has its way

In Lady Street, then all the gray

Dull desolation grows in state
More dull and gray and desolate,
And the sun is a shamefast thing,
A lord not comely-housed, a god
Seeing what gods must blush to see,
A song where it is ill to sing,
And each gold ray despiteously
Lies like a gold ironic rod.

Yet one gray man in Lady Street
Looks for the sun. He never bent
Life to his will, his traveling feet
Have scaled no cloudy continent,

Nor has the sickle-hand been strong.
He lies in Lady Street; a bed,

Four cobwebbed walls. But all day long
A tune is singing in his head

Of youth in Gloucester lanes. He hears
The wind among the barley-blades,
The tapping of the woodpeckers
On the smooth beeches, thistle-spades
Slicing the sinewy roots; he sees
The hooded filberts in the copse
Beyond the loaded orchard trees,
The netted avenues of hops;
He smells the honeysuckle thrown
Along the hedge. He lives alone,
Alone-yet not alone, for sweet
Are Gloucester lanes in Lady Street.

Ay, Gloucester lanes. For down below The cobwebbed room this gray man plies

A trade, a colored trade. A show
Of many-colored merchandise

Is in his shop. Brown filberts there
And apples red with Gloucester air,
And cauliflowers he keeps, and round
Smooth marrows grown on Gloucester ground,
Fat cabbages and yellow plums,
And gaudy brave chrysanthemums.
And times a glossy pheasant lies
Among his store, not Tyrian dyes
More rich than are the neck-feathers;
And times a prize of violets,

Or dewy mushrooms satin-skinned,

And times an unfamiliar wind

Robbed of its woodland favor stirs

Gay daffodils this gray man sets
Among his treasure.

All day long

In Lady Street the traffic goes
By dingy houses, desolate rows

Of shops that stare like hopeless eyes.
Day long the sellers cry their cries,
The fortune-tellers tell no wrong
Of lives that know not any right,
And drift, that has not even the will
To drift, toils through the day until
The wage of sleep is won at night.
But this gray man heeds not all
The hell of Lady Street. His stall
Of many-colored merchandise
Makes a shining paradise,

As all day long chrysanthemums
He sells, and red and yellow plums
And cauliflowers. In that one spot
Of Lady Street the sun is not
Ashamed to shine, and send a rare
Shower of color through the air,

The gray man says.

Reprinted by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin Company.

The Steam Shovel

Eunice Tietjens

Eunice Tietjens was born in Chicago in 1884. Her maiden name was Eunice Hammond, but she married Paul Tietjens, the composer, in 1904. She has been an associate editor of Poetry, and during the war was correspondent to the Chicago Daily News. In 1920 she married Cloyd Head, the writer.

Read this poem with great restrained force. Use low pitch and a certain plunging utterance that takes its form from the action of the steam shovel or the earlier monster. Note the change in

mood, however, toward the end.

BENEATH my window in a city street

A monster lairs, a creature huge and grim
And only half believed: the strength of him-
Steel-strung and fit to meet

The strength of earth

Is mighty as men's dreams that conquer force.
Steam belches from him. He is the new birth
Of old Behemoth, late-sprung from the source
Whence Grendel sprang, and all the monster clan
Dead for an age, now born again of man.