George O'Neil was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1898, and has lived there and in New York all of his life. He is one of the youngest editors of The Measure and his contributions to this and other magazines are rarely without a neat definiteness of touch. His book of first poems, The Cobbler in Willow Street, was published in 1919. Although the dominant note is one of tentative fantasy O'Neil communicates a distinctly personal feeling in many of the lines. His subsequent verse is somewhat sharper although by no means angular.

THE WHITE ROOSTER

Ah, God! To have a breast like that
To throw at day,

Thrust for the hands of dawn

To quiver and flare upon.

And a hook of gold to end you,

And a bloody flag sewn in your head,

And all yourself to arch,

And your soul a white cascade.

With yellow spirals,

Step, step, stalk,

And clutch reluctant loam,

Hard kernels and brown hens

In the brazen blue of noon.

Ah, God! Stab upward with your noise;

Tear at the sky.

With the day gone molten down his throat
And his spine a tilted flame,

What singer could not make one song
As fine as fire?

Léonie Adams was born in Brooklyn, New York, December 9, 1899. After a public school preparation she became a member of the class of 1922 at Barnard College, where she wrote her first published poems “in secret." While she was still an undergraduate, her remarkable "April Mortality" was printed in The New Republic, but, although this would have been sufficient stimulus for most young authors to rush into print, Miss Adams remained more reticent than ever and rarely submitted any of her verse for publication.

It was only through the persuasion of two or three of her friends that her volume, Those Not Elect (1925), was made ready for the press. The author's own evasion of "realism" is apparent in all of her poetry. The poems themselves are of two sorts: the younger and simpler verses, full of a shy ecstasy, and the later, more metaphysical expressions of a rare and not so easily communicable wonder. Without imitating the Elizabethans, Miss Adams has caught something of the quality of Webster, Donne and the earlier Skelton. But whatever her style, whether she is direct as in "April Mortality" or more difficult as in "Pity of the Heavens," her sensitivity makes even the most obscure passages a succession of splendid images. And there is no mistaking either her restraint or the beauty of her imaginative emotion. There is not a line in her work which is without suggestive distinction.

APRIL MORTALITY

Rebellion shook an ancient dust,

And bones bleached dry of rottenness
Said: Heart, be bitter still, nor trust

The earth, the sky, in their bright dress.

Heart, heart, dost thou not break to know
This anguish thou wilt bear alone?

We sang of it an age ago,

And traced it dimly upon stone.

With all the drifting race of men
Thou also art begot to mourn
That she is crucified again,

The lonely Beauty yet unborn.

And if thou dreamest to have won
Some touch of her in permanence,
'Tis the old cheating of the sun,
The intricate lovely play of sense.

Be bitter still, remember how

Four petals, when a little breath
Of wind made stir the pear-tree bough,
Blew delicately down to death.

HOME-COMING

When I stepped homeward to my hill
Dusk went before with quiet tread;
The bare laced branches of the trees
Were as a mist about its head.

Upon its leaf-brown breast, the rocks Like great gray sheep lay silent-wise; Between the birch trees' gleaming arms The faint stars trembled in the skies.

The white brook met me half-way up And laughed as one that knew me well, To whose more clear than crystal voice The frost had joined a crystal spell.

The skies lay like pale-watered deep.
Dusk ran before me to its strand
And cloudily leaned forth to touch

The moon's slow wonder with her hand.

THOUGHT'S END

I watched the hills drink the last color of light,
All shapes grow bright and wane on the pale air.
Till down the traitorous east there came the night,
And swept the circle of my seeing bare.
Its intimate beauty like a wanton's veil
Tore from the void as from an empty face.
I`felt at being's rim all being fail,

And my one body pitted against space.

O heart more frightened than a wild bird's wings,
Beating at green, now is no fiery mark
Left on the quiet nothingness of things.
Be self no more against the flooding dark:
There thousandwise sown in that cloudy blot
Stars that are worlds look out and see you not.

DEATH AND THE LADY

Their bargain told again

Death to the Lady said

While she to dancing-measures still

Would move, while beauties on her lay,

Simply as dews the buds do fill,

Death said: "Stay!

Tell me, Lady,

If in your breast the lively breath

May flicker for a little space,

What ransom will you give to death,
Lady?" he said.

"O not one joy, O not one grace,
And what is your will to my will?
I can outwit parched fancies still."
To Death said the Lady.

Death to that Lady said,

When blood went numb and wearily,

"In innocency dear breath you drew,

And marrow and bloom you rendered me,”
She said: "True."

"How now, Lady?"

"My heart sucked up its sweet at will,

Whose scent when substance' sweet is past,
Is lovely still, is lovely still,

Death," she said.

"For bones' reprieve the dreams go last:
Soon, soon your flowery show did part,
But preciously I cull the heart,"

Death said to the Lady.

Death to that Lady said:

"Is then not all our bargain done?
Or why do you beckon me so fast
To chaffer for a skeleton

Flesh must cast,

Ghostly Lady?"

"For, Death, that I would have you drain
From my dead heart the blood that stands
So chilly in the withered vein.

And, Death," she said,

"Give my due bones into your hands."
"Beauties I claim at morning-prime,
But the lack-lustre in good time."
Death said to the Lady.

PITY OF THE HEAVENS

Light all day from heaven was streaming,
But the last hour gathered earth with light,
Seeping the darkened air with a blue color.

And now the stars from the lofty brow of the night
Regard the earth, regard the withering land;