So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.

Yo

ou will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends."

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for quite a while.

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon
Would she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a "dying fall"
Now that we talk of dying-

And should I have the right to smile?

CONVERSATION GALANTE

I observe: "Our sentimental friend, the moon!

Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)

It may be Prester John's balloon

Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress."
She then: "How you digress!"

And I then: "Some one frames upon the keys That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain The night and moonshine; music which we seize To body forth our vacuity."

She then: "Does this refer to me?"
"Oh, no, it is I who am inane.

"You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,

Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your aid indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—"
And-"Are we then so serious?"

John Crowe Ransom

John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, April 30, 1888, of Scotch-Irish descent. Pulaski, so Ransom informs me, is otherwise distinguished as being the County Seat of Giles County, the birthplace of Sam Davis, the Confederate martyr, and of the Ku Klux Klan-Ransom's own great-uncle taking part in the foundation of the latter. Ransom, the son of a local minister, was educated in his own state and abroad: he received his B.A. at Vanderbilt University in 1909, his B.A. at Oxford in 1923. At the latter he was Rhodes Scholar from Tennessee, taking the "Greats" (classical) course. He has taught at Vanderbilt since 1914, except for two years during which he was with the A. E. F. He was the chief instigator and one of the founders of The Fugitive, that bravely experimental journal which did much to disprove Mencken's contention that the "solid South" was a vast "Sahara of the Beaux Arts."

Poems About God appeared in 1919, a raw first book with a tang of bitter humor. Here was no southern gentleman's proverbial courtliness, no unctuous and mincing gallantry; here was a bristling acerbity blurted through a strong if uncertain utterance. The lines range from the roughly powerful (reminding one of a coarser Robert Frost) to the surprisingly banal. During the five-year interval between Poems About God and his next volume Ransom's poetry underwent an almost complete change. Little of the crudeness and still less of the foreign influence remain in Chills and Fever, by all odds the most distinguished volume of poetry published in 1924. Ransom, it is evident, reacts from the callow simplicities and the tradition of Wonder in words of one

syllable; his verse is definitely for mature minds willing not only to allow a mature poet his mixed modes but willing to follow them. It is, at first glance, a curiously involved speech which Ransom uses to clothe his semi-whimsical, semi-ironic philosophy. But beneath his prim and almost too precise circumlocutions one is made aware of an extraordinarily sensitive, keenly musical lyricist. What adds zest to his verses is the mocking gravity of his speech —a gravity which is sometimes exaggerated to the verge of parody. Ransom strikes his note with a sureness that is almost defiant. He can spin fancies that are, at one time, whimsical and poignant; his account of a small boy's walk in deep woods ("First Travels of Max") is as fine a macabre piece as anything achieved by Amy Lowell. He can draw portraits of dream-lost mediocrities as sympathetically as Robinson ("Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" is a second cousin to "Miniver Cheevy" and "Bewick Finzer"). He can sound the stuffed brasses in "Captain Carpenter," the muted violins in "Here Lies a Lady" and the prophetic trumpets in "Spiel of the Three Mountebanks" with equal precision. Such music, half soothing, half stinging, is new in our poetry; the modulations are strange, the cadences charming in their slight irregularities. Ransom knows how to employ the unresolved suspension; he delights in pairing such fresh rhymes as "drunkard-conquered," "little-scuttle," "ready-study." But it is not merely the free use of dissonance and assonance which distinguish his poems; it is what he does with these properties. “Antique Harvesters" breathes the very quixotic spirit of the old South and the Southron's devotion to it.

And yet, for all of Ransom's variety, in spite of his ability to play equally well in the spangles of harlequin and the graver habit of Kapellmeister, this Southerner will never be a popular poet. His is too elegant a speech to meet with general favor; his vocabulary is meticulous to the point of being over-elaborate, his utterance is so precise as to seem pedantic. The fact that a great part of this particularity is not affectation, but a scholar's gentle mockery, will not save him from the disapproval or, worse, the neglect of the public which dreads polysyllabic poets.

Nevertheless, even in a facile, overproductive age, there can be no doubt that these crisp narratives and cerebral lyrics will, in spite of their allusive idiom, find their niche. And it will be neither a mean nor a long neglected one. Ransom has already received

recognition beyond the borders of patriotic poetry societies. In 1924 the Hogarth Press (London) published Grace After Meat, a curious mixture of ten poems from Poems About God and the same number from Chills and Fever. It was sponsored by T. S. Eliot and introduced by Robert Graves, who ended his foreword by saying, "Ransom is doing for his own state what Frost has done for New England, Vachel Lindsay for his Middle-West, Carl Sandburg for Chicago. Such poets are the forerunners of a national American school that will one day produce a synthesis of all regional contributions." One does not have to agree with the English writer's prophecy to accord Ransom his distinct and autochthonous place.

SPIEL OF THE THREE MOUNTEBANKS

THE SWARTHY ONE

Villagers who gather round,
This is Fides, my lean hound.
Bring your bristled village curs
To try his fang and tooth, sweet sirs:
He will rend them, he is savage,
Thinking nothing but to ravage,
Nor with cudgel, fire, rope,
May ye control my misanthrope;
He would tear the moon in the sky
And fly at Heaven, could he fly.
And for his ravening without cease
I have had of him no peace.
Only once I bared the knife
To quit my devil of his life,
But listen, how I heard him say,
"Think you I shall die to-day?
Since your mother cursed and died,
I am keeping at your side,
We are firmly knit together,
Two ends tugging at one tether,

And you shall see when I shall die
That you are mortal even as I."
Bring your stoutest-hearted curs
If ye would risk him, gentle sirs.
THE THICK ONE-

Countrymen, here's a noble frame,
Humphrey is my elephant's name.
When my father's back was bent
Under steep impediment,

Humphrey came to my possession,

With patient strength for all his passion.
Have ye a mountain to remove?
It is Humphrey's dearest love.
Pile his burden to the skies,
Loose a pestilence of flies,
Foot him in the quick morass
Where no laden beast can pass:
He will staunch his weariless back
And march unswerving on the track.
Have ye seen a back so wide,
Such impenetrable hide?

Nor think ye by this Humphrey hill
Prince Hamlet bare his fardels ill?
Myself I like it not for us

To wear beneath an incubus;
I take offence, but in no rage

May I dispose my heritage;

Though in good time the vast and tough

Shall sink and totter soon enough.

So pile your population up:

They are a drop in Humphrey's cup;

Add all your curses to his pack

To make one straw for Humphrey's back.

THE PALE ONE

If ye remark how poor I am,

Come, citizens, behold my lamb!