Let you, my neighbor, and I,

Go through the silence of the tented evening corn.

Let us light a fire at the edge of the fields and the woodside, And let us stand round it watching the leap of the shadows, Saying over and over to ourselves,

"This is our mother, our sky mother autumn,

Who brings shadows and death all about us,
Who fills our hearts with the glory of dying

And soothes us with the promise of snow."

We thrust our hands into the memory of the night

And grasping the hands of our earth fathers, earth mothers, They who were loyal,

We stand till the last flare and flicker yields to the dark

ness,

And the darkness is peace.

Robert Nathan

Robert Nathan was born in New York City, January 2, 1894. He was educated at private schools there and in Switzerland, completing his studies at Harvard.

His first book, Peter Kindred (1919), was a mildly interesting novel which was succeeded by the far more original Autumn in 1921. Autumn established Nathan as one of the most individual of the younger writers. The delicately tinted prose as well as the interpolated rhymes revealed the fact that Nathan was a poet in disguise, and so it was no shock to his admirers when Youth Grows Old, a collection of verses, appeared within a few months after his successful prose. Although there is variety in these fifty pages, it is the mood of restrained poignance which Nathan best reproduces. But even the tenderest of his stanzas is saved from sentimentality by an ironically lifted eyebrow, a deprecating but resigned shrug. As a sequence, Youth Grows Old (1922) suffers from being pitched in too low a key; as individual songs, there is no denying the charm of at least a dozen of its lyrics, manifestly the work of one who is a composer as well as an author.

The Puppet Master (1923) and Jonah (1925) continue the strain

of fantastic irony. And if Nathan is, as some of his critics maintain, more a poet in his prose than in his rhymes, he is in both mediums a successful manipulator of the "dying fall" rendered in a not too cloying diminuendo.

AT THE SYMPHONY

(César Franck, D Minor)

The 'cellos, setting forth apart,
Grumbled and sang, and so the day
From the low beaches of my heart
Turned in tranquillity away.

And over weariness and doubt
Rose up the horns like bellied sails,
Like canvas of the soul flung out
To rising and orchestral gales;

When the Lord was born of Mary,

Rich men, wise and wary,

Living in that period,

Divided up the earth with God.

But God, who never slumbers,
Has a poor head for numbers.
So the rich as we progress
Get more and God less.

Soon the dairy companies,
In unusual liveries,

Will attempt to furnish sunny
Heaven all its milk and honey.

PROEM

Man grows up
In quietness,

As he grows older
He talks less.

When he is old

He sits among

Gray grandfathers
And holds his tongue.

I'd rather sit

By a wine-shelf

And tell people

About myself.

Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren was born at Hope, Illinois, June 13, 1894, and was educated at the University of Illinois and at Columbia. Besides teaching English at Columbia, he is literary editor of The Nation, for which weekly he has reviewed most of the current poetry since 1920. (His brother, Carl Van Doren, had been his predecessor as literary editor on the same weekly.)

Besides his verses, he has published two volumes of criticism: Henry David Thoreau, A Critical Study (1916) and The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), excellent analytical appraisals.

Spring Thunder and Other Poems appeared in 1924. A casual glance through its pages reveals the fact that Van Doren has been influenced by Robert Frost. But he is no mere imitator. He, too, writes of homely bucolic things: pastorals on water wheels which need mending, a mountain house in December, the coming of al

falfa, river snow, cows and dry meadows. His emotion, like Frost's, is restrained. But if neither his subjects nor his point of view are particularly individualized, his mellowness is his own, and the fine spirit which moves beneath the smooth contours of his verse personifies even the simplest of his quatrains.

FORMER BARN LOT

Once there was a fence here,
And the grass came and tried-
Leaning from the pasture-
To get inside.

But colt feet trampled it,
Turning it brown;

Until the farmer moved

And the fence fell down;

Then any bird saw,
Under the wire,
Grass nibbling inward
Like green fire.

IMMORTAL

The last thin acre of stalks that stood
Was never the end of the wheat.
Always something fled to the wood,
As if the field had feet.

In front of the sickle something rose-
Mouse, or weasel, or hare;

We struck and struck, but our worst blows
Dangled in the air.

Nothing could touch the little soul
Of the grain. It ran to cover,
And nobody knew in what warm hole
It slept till the winter was over,

And early seeds lay cold in the ground.
Then-but nobody saw-

It burrowed back with never a sound,
And awoke the thaw.

Raymond Holden

Raymond Holden was born in New York City in 1894 and educated at Princeton. He was, after several years of free-lancing, managing editor of Travel Magazine from 1923 to 1925.

His first volume, Granite and Alabaster (1922), is full of a packed intellectual strength; even the lyrics have philosophic undertones. But Holden's is no mere versified cerebration. His verse accomplishes that rare fusion of the object seen with the thing imagined. It is New England which Holden projects in this volume a world of questioning skies and ghostly retrospects, of brooding uncertainties and somber speculations. This "windwalled quietness," this freighting of lyrics with oblique philosophy, recalls the work of Robert Frost, to whom Holden is obviously indebted. There are moments when it is Frost's, rather than Holden's, voice which is heard in these poems. But, except for half a dozen pages, Holden maintains himself even when he is most under the spell of his teacher. His intonation often falters, but his intensity is his own.

The work which Holden has published subsequent to Granite and Alabaster is less reminiscent of Frost. The ideas as well as the technique are tighter and he has shaken himself free of idiomatic mimicry. One awaits his next book with unusual anticipation.