REFLECTION IN BLUE

Blue sea, blue sky, blue eggs:
O bird of yellow legs,
Which is the bluest blue
Of all you lead me to?

The sea is blue with sky
As iris is with eye;

The egg is blue with each,
Though far from either's reach.

Since Eve in Eden fell

The miracle of shell

Has been of sea and air
In all the blue that's there:

One shell has held the sea,
The life that's given me;
The sky's a shell as clear
As all you've nested here.

Stephen Vincent Benét

TEPHEN 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, and graduated 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 Kipling, was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In Benét's next volume, Young Adventure (1918), published before he was twenty, 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) charts 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.

For a while Stephen Benét was too prolific to be self-critical. He published several novels (the best of which are Jean Huguenot and Spanish Bayonet), collaborated on two plays which flickered a few nights in New York, and, unconsciously perhaps, began imitating his contemporaries. King David, published in book form a few months after it won The Nation's poetry prize for 1923, is less Benét than usual; it seems unjust that at least half the prize for this poem was not awarded to Vachel Lindsay. Tiger Joy (1925) betrays haste; the poet allows his rhymes to dictate and often to blur the course of his imagery. But though Tiger Joy is padded out with negligible verse, it contains "The Golden Corpse," a splendid octave of

sonnets, "The Mountain Whippoorwill" and "The Ballad of William Sycamore," two vigorous and thoroughly American ballads.

Stephen Benet's faculty for ballad-making stood him in good stead when he came to reconstruct the Civil War period in John Brown's Body (1928). With this work, the author, hitherto known only to a small circle, leaped into instant popularity. Within a few months, the book had reached more than one hundred thousand people, and Benét had proved that a long narrative poem if skillfully blended could hold attention as easily as a novel. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the year following its publication.

The weakness of John Brown's Body is in the treatment. Although his canvas is epical, the author sacrifices the unity of the epic by abruptly changing meters, by a cinematographic switching from one character to another, by interluding his narrative with lyrics, ballads, elegies, and even prose. Nor, in this intermingling, has he perfected a style of his own; the long cadences of Sandburg and the jingling beat of Lindsay occur throughout. It is, frankly, a work of assimilation rather than creation. Yet its virtues compensate for its defects. The historical events have been more powerfully projected by others, the battle-pictures are inferior to the fictional episodes the forgotten George Parsons Lathrop has done better in "Keenan's Charge" -but the composite is so new, the issues so impartially treated, that the struggle takes on a vitality barely suggested by orthodox histories. Benét's achievement of showing the war through its impact on a large number of dramatis personae-of jake Diefer, who sees the war in terms of his Pennsylvania farmland, of Spade, the runaway slave, of Breckenridge, the Tennessee mountaineer, of Connecticut-born Jack Ellyat-is no small triumph. If Benét sacrifices unity, he gains speed, sudden interest and the nervous contrasts which are continually stimulating. If no single passage contains that unanalyzable but unmistakable quality which permeates great poetry, the originality of the work, the vigor of its portraits, the interpolated lyrics, and the unflagging pace reveal an unusually rich talent.

With his wife Rosemary, Benét wrote A Book of Americans (1933), a set of fiftysix verses about famous pilgrims, pioneers, and presidents, obviously designed for uncritical young readers, although the slender “Nancy Hanks" has a charm which is not only captivating but memorable.

Burning City (1936) is a strangely mixed collection; hortatory prophecies, nimble whimsicalities, and impassioned lyrics reveal a candor and conviction, but little sense of integration. The long "Litany for Dictatorships" is the most dramatic of the larger poems; it rises above the indebtedness to MacLeish and that poet's suspended conjunctions and characteristically dangling participles. The best of Benét's verse, however, is neither forensic nor inflated; it is nimbly lyrical and dexterously macabre. The nightmares of metropolitan life in the machine age are most effective; they combine whimsical mischief and genuine horror.

Thirteen O'Clock (1937) is an assembly of Benét's best short stories. Among other fantasies, it contains "The Devil and Daniel Webster," which has become a classic in its own time, and which has been made into a play, an opera (with music by Douglas Moore), and a moving picture, the last having been retitled All That Money Can Buy. The vein of tall tales and pseudo-folklore was continued in Johnny Pye and the Fool-Killer (1938).

RAIN AFTER A VAUDEVILLE SHOW

The last pose flickered, failed. The screen's dead white
Glared in a sudden flooding of harsh light
Stabbing the eyes; and as I stumbled out

The curtains rose. A fat girl with a pout

And legs like hams, began to sing "His Mother."
Gusts of bad air rose in a choking smother;

Smoke, the wet steam of clothes, the stench of plush,,
Powder, cheap perfume, mingled in a rush.

I stepped into the lobby-and stood still,
Struck dumb by sudden beauty, body and will.
Cleanness and rapture-excellence made plain-
The storming, thrashing arrows of the rain!
Pouring and dripping on the roofs and rods,
Smelling of woods and hills and fresh-turned sods,
Black on the sidewalks, gray in the far sky,
Crashing on thirsty panes, on gutters dry,
Hurrying the crowd to shelter, making fair
The streets, the houses, and the heat-soaked air,-
Merciful, holy, charging, sweeping, flashing,
It smote the soul with a most iron clashing!
Like dragons' eyes the street-lamps suddenly gleamed,
Yellow and round and dim-low globes of flame.
And, scarce-perceived, the clouds' tall banners streamed.
Out of the petty wars, the daily shame,

Beauty strove suddenly, and rose, and flowered. . . .
I gripped my coat and plunged where awnings lowered.
Made one with hissing blackness, caught, embraced,
By splendor and by striving and swift haste-
Spring coming in with thunderings and strife-
I stamped the ground in the strong joy of life!

WINGED MAN

The moon, a sweeping scimitar, dipped in the stormy straits,
The dawn, a crimson cataract, burst through the eastern gates,

The cliffs were robed in scarlet, the sands were cinnabar,

Where first two men spread wings for flight and dared the hawk afar.

There stands the cunning workman, the crafty, past all praise,
The man who chained the Minotaur, the man who built the Maze.
His young son is beside him and the boy's face is a light,
A light of dawn and wonder and of valor infinite.

Their great vans beat the cloven air, like eagles they mount up,
Motes in the wine of morning, specks in a crystal cup,
And lest his wings should melt apace old Daedalus flies low,
But Icarus beats up, beats up, he goes where lightnings go.

He cares no more for warnings, he rushes through the sky,
Braving the crags of ether, daring the gods on high,
Black 'gainst the crimson sunset, gold over cloudy snows,
With all Adventure in his heart the first winged man arose.

Dropping gold, dropping gold, where the mists of morning rolled,
On he kept his way undaunted, though his breaths were stabs of cold,
Through the mystery of dawning that no mortal may behold.

Now he shouts, now he sings in the rapture of his wings,
And his great heart burns intenser with the strength of his desire,
As he circles like a swallow, wheeling, flaming, gyre on gyre.

Gazing straight at the sun, half his pilgrimage is done,

And he staggers for a moment, hurries on, reels backward, swerves
In a rain of scattered feathers as he falls in broken curves.

Icarus, Icarus, though the end is piteous,

Yet forever, yea forever, we shall see thee rising thus,

See the first supernal glory, not the ruin hideous.

You were Man, you who ran farther than our eyes can scan,
Man absurd, gigantic, eager for impossible Romance,
Overthrowing all Hell's legions with one warped and broken lance.

On the highest steeps of Space he will have his dwelling-place
In those far, terrific regions where the cold comes down like Death
Gleams the red glint of his pinions, smokes the vapor of his breath.

Floating downward, very clear, still the echoes reach the ear
Of a little tune he whistles and a little song he sings,

Mounting, mounting still, triumphant, on his torn and broken wings!

THE BALLAD OF WILLIAM

SYCAMORE

(1790-1871)

My father, he was a mountaineer,
His fist was a knotty hammer;

He was quick on his feet as a running deer,
And he spoke with a Yankee stammer.

My mother, she was merry and brave,
And so she came to her labor,

With a tall green fir for her doctor grave
And a stream for her comforting neighbor.

And some are wrapped in the linen fine,
And some like a godling's scion;
But I was cradled on twigs of pine
In the skin of a mountain lion.

And some remember a white, starched lap
And a ewer with silver handles;
But I remember a coonskin cap
And the smell of bayberry candles.

The cabin logs, with the bark still rough,
And my mother who laughed at trifles,
And the tall, lank visitors, brown as snuff,
With their long, straight squirrel-rifles.

I can hear them dance, like a foggy song,
Through the deepest one of my slumbers,
The fiddle squeaking the boots along
And my father calling the numbers.

The quick feet shaking the puncheon-floor,
The fiddle squeaking and squealing,
Till the dried herbs rattled above the door
And the dust went up to the ceiling.