The shivering fawn
Paws at the snow.
South and dawn
Lie below;

Richness and mirth,
Dearth forgiven,
A happy earth,
A warm heaven.

The sleet streams,
The snow flies;

The fawn dreams

With wide brown eyes.

WHALE

Rain, with a silver flail;
Sun, with a golden ball;
Ocean, wherein the whale
Swims minnow-small;

I heard the whale rejoice
And cynic sharks attend;
He cried with a purple voice,
"The Lord is my Friend!"

"With flanged and battering tail, With huge and dark baleen, He said, 'Let there be Whale In the Cold and Green!'

"He gave me a water spout,
A side like a harbor wall;
The Lord from cloud looked out
And planned it all.

"With glittering crown atilt
He leaned on a glittering rail;
He said, 'Where Sky is spilt,
Let there be Whale.'

"Tier upon tier of wings

Blushed and blanched and bowed; Phalanxed fiery things

Cried in the cloud;

"Million-eyed was the mirk

At the plan not understood; But the Lord looked on his work And saw it was good.

"He gave me marvelous girth

For the curve of back and breast, And a tiny eye of mirth

To hide His jest.

"He made me a floating hill,

A plunging deep-sea mine. This was the Lord's will;

The Lord is Divine.

"I magnify his name

In earthquake and eclipse, In weltering molten flame And wrecks of ships,

"In waves that lick the moon;
I, the plough of the sea!

I am the Lord's boon;
The Lord made me!"

The sharks barked from beneath,

As the whale rollicked and roared,

"Yes, and our grinning teeth,

Was it not the Lord?"

Then question pattered like hail
From fishes large and small.
"The Lord is mighty," said Whale,
"The Lord made all!

"His is a mammoth jest

Life may never betray;

He has laid it up in His breast
Till Judgment Day;

"But high when combers foam
And tower their last of all,
My power shall haul you home
Through Heaven wall.

"A trumpet then in the gates,

To the ramps a thundering drum,
I shall lead you where He waits
For His Whale to come.

"Where His cloudy seat is placed
On high in an empty dome,
I shall trail the Ocean abased
In chains of foam,

"Unwieldy, squattering dread.
Where the blazing cohorts stand
At last I shall lift my head

As it feels His hand.

"Then wings with a million eyes Before mine eyes shall quail:

'Look you, all Paradise,

I was His Whale!' "

I heard the Whale rejoice,

As he splayed the waves to a fan; "And the Lord shall say with His Voice, 'Leviathan!'

"The Lord shall say with His Tongue,
'Now let all Heaven give hail
To my Jest when I was young,
To my very Whale.''

Then the Whale careered in the Sea,
He floundered with flailing tail;
Flourished and rollicked he,

"Aha! Mine Empery!

For the Lord said, 'Let Whale Be!'
And there Was Whale!"

John Hall Wheelock

John Hall Wheelock was born at Far Rockaway, Long Island, in 1886. He was graduated from Harvard, receiving his B.A. in 1908, and finished his studies at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin, 1908-10.

Wheelock's first book is, in many respects, his best. The Human Fantasy (1911) sings with the voice of youth-a youth which is vibrantly, even vociferously, in love with existence. Rhapsodic and obviously influenced by Whitman and Henley, these lines beat bravely; a singing buoyance arrests one upon opening the volume. A headlong ecstasy rises from pages whose refrain is "Splendid it is to live and glorious to die." The Beloved Adventure (1912) is less powerful, but scarcely less passionate. Lyric after lyric moves one by its athletic music and spiritual intensity.

Wheelock's subsequent volumes are less individualized. Love and Liberation (1913) and Dust and Light (1919) are long dilutions of the earlier strain. The music is still here, but most of the magic has gone. Wheelock has allowed himself to be exploited by his own fluency, and the result is mere lyrical monotony. Yet even vast stretches of two hundred and thirty unvaried love-songs cannot bury a dozen or more vivid poems which lie, half-concealed, in a waste of verbiage. "Earth," from the latter volume, reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay's ecstasy on the same theme, has its own accents of wonder and proves that Wheelock was no chance comet burnt up in his youthful fires.

The Black Panther (1922) furnishes additional proof that though Wheelock's star may have waned it did not die. In this volume the poet's gift has assumed a greater dignity; the flashing athleticism has matured into a steady fervor, the passionate exulting has grown into an exaltation of passion. Almost every poem, with the exception of a few innocuous songs, reveals a graver music than Wheelock has ever accomplished. The mystic rises above his own romantic rhetoric. In the longer poems he expresses the paradox of conflict and consent: the philosophy of the single Consciousness which reconciles terror and tenderness, murder and laughter, dawn and destruction-"Life, the dreadful, the magnificent."

SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON

Look-on the topmost branches of the world
The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick;
Over the huddled rows of stone and brick,
A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled
Like ghosts, languid and sick.

One breathless moment now the city's moaning
Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim;
There is no sound around the whole world's rim,
Save in the distance a small band is droning

Some desolate old hymn.

Van Wyck, how often have we been together
When this same moment made all mysteries clear;

-The infinite stars that brood above us here,
And the gray city in the soft June weather,
So tawdry and so dear!

TRIUMPH OF LOVE

I shake my hair in the wind of morning
For the joy within me that knows no bounds,
I echo backward the vibrant beauty

Wherewith heaven's hollow lute resounds.