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It is a snowflake, which is like a star,
And melts upon the hand; it is a cobweb,
Shot with silver, that from the golden lip
Of April's dandelion hangs to the grass;
It is a raindrop,-of tremendous worth,-

Which slides the whole length of a lilac leaf. . .

This is not you? These symbols are not you?

Not snowflake, cobweb, raindrop? . . . Woman, woman, You are too literal, too strict with me.

What would you have? Some simple copper coin

I love you, you are lovely, I adore you?

Or (better still) dumb silence, and a look?

No, no, this will not do; I am not one
For whom these silences are sovereign;
The pauses in the music are not music,
Although they make the music what it is.
Therefore I thumb once more the god's thesaurus,
For phrase and praise, and find it all for you.

It is a star which might be thought a snowflake,
Lost in a twinkling; it is a dandelion

Shrouded with silver brightness; it is a leaf
Which lets the raindrop go, but keeps its light. . .
It is the purple veining in the white

That makes the pure throat of the iris pure.

Yet you

...

would have me say your hair is Helen's,— Your gait angelic; while I turn from these

To the vast pages of that manuscript

On which the stars are stars, the world a world;
And there I find you written down, between
Arcturus and a primrose and the sea.

CLOISTER

So, in the evening, to the simple cloister:
This place of boughs, where sounds of water, softly,
Lap on the stones. And this is what you are:
Here, in this dusty room, to which you climb
By four steep flights of stairs. The door is closed:
The furies of the city howl behind you:
The last bell plunges rock-like to the sea:
The horns of taxis wail in vain. You come
Once more, at evening, to this simple cloister;
Hushed by the quiet walls, you stand at peace.

What ferns of thought are these, the cool and green
Dripping with moisture, that festoon these walls?
What water-lights are these, whose pallid rings.
Dance with the leaves, or speckle the pale stones?

What spring is this, that bubbles the cold sand,
Urging the sluggish grains of white and gold?
Peace. The delicious silence throngs with ghosts
Of winged sound and shadow. These are you.

...

Now in the evening, in the simple cloister,
You stand and wait; you stand and listen, waiting
For winged sounds, and wingèd silences,
And long-remembered shadows. Here the rock
Lets down its vine of many-colored flowers:
Waiting for you, or waiting for the lizard
To move his lifted claw, or shift his eye
Quick as a jewel. Here the lizard waits
For the slow snake to slide among cold leaves.
And, on the bough that arches the deep pool,
Lapped in a sound of water, the brown thrush
Waits, too, and listens, till his silence makes
Silence as deep as song. And time becomes
A timeless crystal, an eternity,

In which the gone and coming are at peace.

What bird is this, whose silence fills the trees

With rich delight? What leaves and boughs are these, What lizard, and what snake? . . . The bird is gone: And while you wait, another comes and goes,Another and another; yet your eye,

Although it has not moved, can scarcely say

If birds have come and gone, so quick, so brief,—

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Or if the thrush who waits there is the same.
The snake and lizard change, yet are the same:
The flowers, many-colored, on the vine,
Open and close their multitude of stars,—

Yet are the same. . . . And all these things are you.

Thus, in the evening, in the simple cloister,
Eternity adds ring to ring, the darker
Beyond the brighter; and your silence fills
With such a world of worlds,-so still, so deep,-
As never voice could speak, whether it were
The ocean's or the bird's. The night comes on:
You wait and listen, in the darkened room,
To all these ghosts of change. And they are you.

.

James Whaler

AMES WHALER was born May 5, 1889, in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents came

J from Maryland and Pennsylvania with no city backgrounds anywhere until the

family reached Wilmington. Whaler attended the Wilmington Friends' School and graduated from Princeton University, from which he received a doctor's degree for a work on Miltonic simile. Paying hard for his education, he worked in many capacities until he became head of a Nature Study class at the Minnesota State Teachers' College and then Instructor of English at Goucher College, Baltimore. His first impulse to write poetry came when he found himself in the depths of the Maine woods in 1922, but Whaler was thirty-eight before his first book, Hale's Pond (1927), was published. The volume attracted little notice; beyond two or three perfunctory reviews, there was no critical consideration of the six long narratives comprising this strange work. But though few copies of the book were sold, rumors of its quality seemed to spread by grapevine telegraph; here a surprised critic and there an unprofessional enthusiast spoke up for the coiled vigor of "Runaway," "Jordan," "Monsieur Pipereau." This was New England with a difference. Purporting to be the poetry of the Maine woods, it was the very antithesis of the plein-air-afootthrough-the-great-outdoors sort of verse to which the Wanderlust school had accustomed us. Instead of pedestrian platitudes, here were ideas as novel as their idiom; instead of dilutions of sentiment, here were emotional and verbal richness.

This luxuriance, at first commendable, is Whaler's chief handicap, for it leads him to pile figure upon figure, pack word against word until his line becomes congested. So, too, his utterance, strained to its emotional capacity, tends to be pitched an octave too high. But Whaler might well be calling attention to a kind of Yankee we have forgotten. Understatement is characteristic of one type of New Englander; there is another and as genuine a type-who, when he speaks, speaks too loudly with the abrupt release of long suppressions. The very knots and congestions, as well as the intense key of Whaler's verse, result from an endeavor to express the person who, when he talks, cries out his thought and who, when a poet, is likely to forget restraint. Whaler's faults are the faults of excess, not those of insufficiency, and, though here and there he shows the danger of knowing the woods too well, his men and women come first. He can-and does-draw the fine line between the incidental and the inevitable.

In varying degrees, all the long poems exhibit this power to seize on the significant trivial, none better than "Monsieur Pipereau." In some ways this poem is the author's chief triumph, for here, without preamble or apology, Whaler calmly rewrites one of the world's most popular poems. "Monsieur Pipereau" is, plot for plot, detail for detail, Browning's "Pied Piper of Hamelin" translated to a lumber-camp in Maine. But instead of being overcome by the comparison, the reader forgets the American's audacity, even-after the first page or two-forgets the original.

Green River (1931) is a long poem centering about Constantine Rafinesque, the great botanist and nature-lover, who came to America when he was seventeen,

crossed the Alleghenies on foot, floated down the Ohio, and became a professor at Transylvania College, in Lexington, Kentucky. Green River is a headlong narrative distinguished by its strange evocativeness. It is the talk of a man who has been less persuaded than jarred into speech, jarred beyond the pattern of realism.

THE POND

(from "Runaway")

Shadowed in midnight green,

Wedging her belly down a wide ravine,
Pinned by birch-silver to a bed of umber,
Her splay-claws lax, vibrating with her slumber,

No moon to bathe her eyes

And wake her, warn her that a storm would rise,

Hale's Pond I felt before me in an hour

By thick black scents of fish and fern and flower.

I rested on the "Dock"

Two split logs slapping at a foundered rock

Where lichen-paint dripped into lily-wire;

Here often had I dived through June's wet fire,

Here often had I crawled a chill ooze-bed,

With frog-palms, trout-eyes, chest ribbed round with lead.

For Father, when he had a cider-bout,

And in the shame of it, would send me out

To weed-then dive instead, and shout and swim

Till sun-slope and the black cows' milking-hymn!
Was I not muskrat, water-snake, raccoon?
Was I not dragon-fly and diving loon?
Polliwog, dreaming under lily-pads?
Victor of song in frog-olympiads?
Crawfish investigating runes of stone?
Minnow of sucking glass and glassy bone?
I flamed a water-beetle's fat vermilion,
I joined the water-striders' cool cotillion;
I made my body calamus for thin

Silk fish to nibble at me, toe to chin;

And once, while I was floating like a mink,

Straight in my face a doe looked down to drink!
I saw my soul burn in her golden eyes,
Globed among ecstasies!

I caught her breath above a pickerel-bloom:
It was black plum and russet-mild mushroom.
But best of all, eyes fish-wide, six feet under,
Breasting the veil between two worlds asunder,
I measured the immeasurable caress,
The moving-calm, fin-naked gentleness
Of sunlight, and I heard an ocean boom
Afar, and my soul's treasure disentomb.

MONSIEUR PIPEREAU

The worst camp-life man ever lived? That season

Up near Seboomook. Couldn't been worse. The reason? RATS! Big enough rats to circumcise wildcats,

Sociable, devastating democrats,

Under the bunkhouse, up above the ceiling,
Under the cook-room, and forever squealing
Under the stables, through the manger-racks,
Round every bale of hay in herds and packs,
Under manure-piles, sawdust, shingles, sacks,
Kegs, harness, grease-pots, axle-trees, ropes, jacks,
Under our blankets, under our very backs,
Until that whole camp looked like maniacs!
For days big Simmons couldn't use his head:
Rats bit him in the neck one night in bed.
Nadeau got out his rosary and prayed
Currying his horses, he was so afraid;

And once I even saw him make his mare
Kneel down beside him in the straw for prayer.

Rogers, the foreman, had them send us traps

From Bangor: cages with invisible snaps

And flaps to hold a dozen, traps of steel

Whose center-plates would crash at a grasshopper's heel:
Flat-traps of maple, circle-traps of wire,

Traps built to serve mankind and to inspire,-
We had a hundred and seven traps all told;
And every brand of poison-mixture sold.
Ever study rats?—You'll take them by surprise
Once-no! not even once! No trap, how wise
Or simple, fools a rat in his right mind!

First day, caught ten-the deaf and dumb and blind;
And the first night six more-the sick and lean;
And next day none-making in all sixteen.

"Five cents per head!" Rogers announced that night.
Vainly imagining we could strike the light
Of inspiration, were there bounty to it,

Lord! we'd have paid him ten per head to do it!
One way was left: rifles with powder and lead:
Shooting them from the rafters overhead
By lantern-glow; but almost all objected—
Preferring rats to one shot misdirected;
And when a bullet killed a laying-fowl
Of Mrs. Grove's, our cook, we heard a howl
That went into the food she fed us. RATS!
As it grew cold they took to shoes and hats.
I woke one morning minus watch and vest:
Some rat's idea to improve his nest.

Now Rogers and his wife, and Mrs. Grove
Her sister, had a cabin-with its drove

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