(I might make a little pun about the Mews!) But what is really more Remarkable, she wore A pair of pointed patent-leather shoes. You have heard the like of that: His time he used to pass Writing sonnets, on the grass (I might say something good on pen and sward!) While the cat sat near at hand, Trying hard to understand The poems he occasionally roared. He is sure to make a bee-line She was jarred and very sore When they showed her to the door. (I might hit off the door that was a jar!) And she told him that he'd gone a little far. She remarked. "I think the time has I could fill half the page up With descriptions of her rage (I might say that she went a bit too fur!) She answered with a wrathful kind of purr. But I feel my conscience bid The Moral of the plot (Though I say it, as should not!) Is: An editor is difficult to suit. Trumbull Stickney (Joseph) Trumbull Stickney was born June 20, 1874, at Geneva, Switzerland, of New England parents. In 1891 he entered Harvard and was graduated with high classical honors in 1895. Immediately thereafter, he went abroad, studying at the Sorbonne and Collège de France for seven years. The University of Paris gave him the Doctorat ès Lettres, never before conferred on an American, for two scholarly theses in 1903, the critic Masqueray pronouncing his "Les Sentences dans la Poesie Grecque" one of the best modern studies of Hellenic literature. A few months later he returned to America, where he became instructor of Greek at Harvard University. Here his work was suddenly interrupted by death, caused by a tumor on the brain, and he died at the age of thirty, October 11, 1904. One year after his death, his friends, George Cabot Lodge, John Ellerton Lodge and William Vaughn Moody, edited his posthumous Poems (1905), a small and wholly forgotten volume, Dramatic Verses, having appeared in 1902. Stickney seems to have found no wider circle of readers than his restricted intimate one. The collections of the period have no record of him; Stedman's voluminous anthology does not even mention his name. Yet there can be no question but that Stickney was a repre sentative poet of his generation, worthy to stand beside Moody, whose point of view as well as his rhetoric he shared. There is a note, however, in Stickney's poetry wholly unlike Moody's, a preoccupation with death that relates him-in spirit at least to the later Jeffers. He spoke of divinely learning to suffer loneliness; his, he wrote, were the “wise denials.” LIVE BLINDLY AND UPON THE HOUR Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord, IN THE PAST There lies a somnolent lake Where never the mornings break Mad flakes of color Iridescent and streaked with pallor; The rocks rise sheer and gray And the hours lag dead in the air To the heart of the lonely boatman there: I, in my lonely boat, A waif on the somnolent lake, Now I lean o'er the side And lazy shades in the water see, Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide And next I fix mine eyes, And now to the rocks I turn, To the rocks, around That lie like walls of a circling urn The waters that feel my powerless strength But the gleam still skims At times on the somnolent lake, And tho' dead be the hours in the air, The heart is alive of the boatman there: AGE IN YOUTH From far she's come, and very old, And very soiled with wandering. The dust of seasons she has brought Unbidden to this field of Spring. She's halted at the log-barred gate. The May-day waits, a tangled spill Of light that weaves and moves along The daisied margin of the hill, Where Nature bares her bridal heart, She's halted, propped her rigid arms, A very soilure of a dream But look! Along the molten sky The bars are, falling from the gate. The daisies shudder at her hem. In the rude math her torn shoe mows The Spring grows sour along her track; Turn acid. "Just beyond the ledge," And to the tremor of her croon, In vain the flower-lifting morn The weak Spring here shall pause awhile ALONE ON LYKAION Alone on Lykaion since man hath been Stand on the height two columns, where rest Two eagles hewn of gold sit looking East Anna Hempstead Branch NNA HEMPSTEAD BRANCH was born at New London, Connecticut. She was grad Auated from Smith College in 1897 and has devoted herself to literature and social service, mostly in New York. She died in her home September 8, 1937. Her two chief volumes, The Shoes That Danced (1905) and Rose of the Wind (1910), reveal the lyrist, but they show a singer who is less fanciful than philosophic. Often, indeed, Miss Branch weighs down her simple melodies with intellectuality; more often, she attains a high level of lyricism. Her lines are admirably condensed; rich in personal as well as poetic value, they maintain a high and austere level. A typical poem is "The Monk in the Kitchen," which, with its spiritual loveliness and verbal felicity, is a celebration of cleanness that gives order an almost mystical nobility and recalls George Herbert. Although nothing she has ever written has attained the popularity of her shorter works, "Nimrod" has an epic sweep, a large movement which, within the greater curve, contains moments of exalted imagery. The deeply religious feeling implicit governs the author as person no less than as poet, for Miss Branch had given a great part of her life to settlement work at Christadora House on New York's East Side. "To a Dog" is more direct than is Miss Branch's wont; "The Monk in the Kitchen" is no less straightforward, though its metaphysics make it seem less forthright. THE MONK IN THE KITCHEN I Order is a lovely thing; On disarray it lays its wing, Lo-I will have thee in this place! All things that shine through thee appear That with angelic charity |