"But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose

Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose."

It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady's bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

The rogue in scarlet and gray soon knew his mind
He wished to get his trophy and depart;

With gentle apology and touch refined

He pierced him and produced the Captain's heart.

God's mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

But God's deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
Who got the Captain finally on his back

And took the red red vitals of his heart

And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.

OLD MAN PONDERED

Three times he crossed our way where with me went
One who is fair and gentle, and it was strange,

But not once glancing did his vision range
Wayward on me, or my most innocent,

But strictly watched his own predicament.

How are old spirits so dead? His eye seemed true

As mine, he walked by it, it was as blue,

How came it monstered in its fixed intent?

But I will venture how. In his long years

Close-watched and dangerous, many a bright-barbed hate Burning had smote against the optic gate

To enter and destroy. But the quick gears

Blinked shut the aperture. Else those grim leers
Had won to the inner chamber where sat Hope
To spin and pray, and made her misanthrope,
And bled her courage with a thousand spears.

Thus hate and scorn. And he must guard as well
Against alluring love, whose mild engine
Was perilous too for the lone sitter-in,
So hard consented to her little cell;
The tenderest looks vainly upon him fell,
Of dearest company, lest one light arrow
Be sharpened with a most immortal sorrow.
So had he kept his mansion shut of hell.

Firm and upright he walked for one so old,
Thrice-pondered; and I dare not prophesy
What age must bring me; for I look round bold
And seek my enemies out; and leave untold
The sideway watery dog's-glances I

Send fawning on you, thinking you will not scold.

Under her father's vaunting oak

Who kept his peace in wind and sun, and glistened Stoical in the rain; to whom she listened

If he spoke.

And now the agitation of the rain.

Rasped his sere leaves, and he talked low and gentle, Reproaching the wan daughter by the lintel;

Ceasing, and beginning again.

Away went the messenger's bicycle,

His serpent's track went up the hill forever.
And all the time she stood there hot as fever
And cold as any icicle.

Conrad Aiken

ONRAD (POTTER) AIKEN was born at Savannah, Georgia, August 5, 1889. He at

Ctended Harvard, was chosen class poet during his senior year, received his A.B.

in 1912, traveled extensively for three years, and since then devoted all his time to literature, living at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts, until 1921. In that year he moved his family to England; a few years later he bought a house on the Sussex coast at Rye. After a brief return to America in 1928 Aiken alternated between England and Massachusetts, finally settling in the latter.

The outstanding feature of Aiken's work is its rapid adaptability and its slow growth. His first volume, Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse (1914), is the Keats tradition crossed, paraphrased, and vulgarized by Masefield. Turns and Movies (1916) is a complete change; Masefield is exchanged for Masters. But in the less conspicuous half of this book Aiken begins to speak with his true voice. Here he is the natural musician, playing with new rhythms, haunting cadences. The Jig of Forslin (1916) is an elaboration of his method. In this volume Aiken goes back to the narrative or rather, to a series of loosely connected stories-and, reënforced by studies in analytical psychology, explores "the process of vicarious wish fulfillment by which civilized man enriches his circumscribed life."

Nocturne of Remembered Spring (1917), The Charnel Rose (1918) and The House of Dust (1920) are packed with a tired but often beautiful music. Even though it is enlivened by injections of T. S. Eliot's conversational idiom, the effect is frequently misty and monotonous. Rain seems to fall persistently through these volumes; dust blows down the street; the shadows blur; everything dissolves in a wash of boredom and forgetfulness. Even the poignance seems on the point of falling asleep.

Often Aiken loses himself in this watery welter of language. In trying to create a closer liaison between poetry and music, he places so much importance on the rise and fall of syllables that his very excess of melody defeats his purpose. His verse, thus, gains greatly on the sensuous side, but loses, in its murmuring indefiniteness, that vitality of speech which is the very blood of poetry. It is a subaqueous music, strangely like the magic of Debussy.

This weakening overinsistence on sound does not prevent Aiken from attaining many exquisite effects. Primarily, a lyric poet, he condenses an emotion in a few lines; some of his best moments are these "lapses" into tune. The music of the "Morning Song from 'Senlin'" (in The Charnel Rose) is rich with subtleties of rhythm. But it is much more than a lyrical movement. Beneath the flow and flexibility of these lines there is a summoning of the immensities that loom behind the casual moments of everyday.

Punch: The Immortal Liar (1921) is an almost complete volte face. After it seemed established that Aiken's gift was limited to the twitching of overrefined nerves, to a too ready response to gloomy subconsciousness, the poet strikes out toward a naked directness. Brilliant though the first half of this work is, it is the second part which burns steadily. Here Punch, stripped of his mask of bragga

docio, is revealed as the solitary, frustrated dreamer; a pitiful puppet floundering in a net he cannot see; jerked and gesticulating without knowledge of the strings which direct him—a symbol, in short, of man as marionette. This second part of Punch contains not only Aiken's most delicate exposition of the inhibited soul, but some of the finest lyrics he has produced.

Priapus and the Pool (1922) is preponderantly lyrical, containing twenty-five songs, several of which are as skillful as those of any contemporary American singer. The succeeding volume, The Pilgrimage of Festus (1923), returns to the symphonic form; beneath its imaginative outlines it is an extended essay in epistemology. Festus is the lineal descendant of Aiken's own Senlin and a not distant relative of Ibsen's Peer Gynt. A revised and enlarged edition of Priapus and the Pool appeared in 1925.

Aiken, the keenest critic of his own poetry, has been quick to see its limitations as well as its potentialities. In a self-analysis in which he confessed that his verse has groped continually toward symphonic arrangement, Aiken wrote, “Here I give myself away as being in quest of a sort of absolute poetry, a poetry in which the intention is not so much to arouse an emotion, or to persuade of a reality, as to employ such emotion or sense of reality (tangentially struck) with the same cool detachment with which a composer employs notes or chords."

Here we are at the heart of the contradiction: the paradox that, though Aiken is undoubtedly one of the most musical of living poets, he is one of the least popular. An audience that prefers its emotion outright, that craves a palpable reality, resents (or, worse, ignores) the nuance "tangentially struck." The emphasis on overtone and implication creates, too often, an obscure pantomime; it is, as Aiken himself was quick to see, "a prestidigitation in which the juggler's bottles or balls are a little too apt, unfortunately, to be altogether invisible." What is even more obvious, an audience is quick to sense the performer's uncertainty. This—until the most recent work has been Aiken's undoing. He has fancied himself as a symphonist when he was, preeminently, a lyricist, albeit a lyricist neither pure nor simple. More than any contemporary, except T. S. Eliot, who seems to have learned several tricks in dissonance from Aiken, he has evolved a subtly subjective poetry which flows as smoothly, as surprisingly, as the stream of the subconscious. He has given formlessness a form, has brought tortured self-analysis to a pitch of pure poetry, and (whether in the suspensions of the famous "Morning Song from 'Senlin'" or the more certain modulations of "Tetélestai") he has registered an immediacy of anguish. Aiken's growth in tonal surety must be evident to all but the tone-deaf. "The Road" is more than a compelling dream picture; in it Aiken contradicts his own credo and participates in the struggle of humanity. "At a Concert of Music" and "Annihilation" bring the earlier modulations to a perfect cadence.

Aiken's musical advance is cumulatively established by the Selected Poems (1929), which won the Pulitzer Prize for that year, John Deth and Other Poems (1930), and Landscape West of Eden (1933). All these deal with sets of symbols and dream pictures in a limbo of fantasy. John Deth is one of the most curious poems Aiken has written, and the lyrics which follow it ("Annihilation," "The Quarrel," "At a Concert of Music," with others) are among his completely successful pieces, something which cannot be said for The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones (1931).