I can only give myself,
I have nothing left but this.
Naked I wait, naked I fall

Into Your Hands, Your Hands.

THE BIRTH OF LUCIFER

Helpless is God in struggling with that star
Which in derision makes His light less dim;
The evening bids the morning from afar
To rise and conquer Him;

After nine hours of night the sun, expiring,
Breaks the dark vessel that it fills; and then
Erect against the noon it stands, desiring

This transience, making us both Gods and men:

Life seeks again its dark and secret places,

Where under the sunset's leveled sword, it keeps Its rest until rekindled in new faces,

Old worlds awake from their too dreamless sleep.

A NEW HEAVEN

We have our hopes and fears that flout us,

We have our illusions, changeless through the years;

We have our dreams of rest after long struggle,

After our toil is finished, folded hands.

But for those who have fallen in battle,
What Heaven can there be?

Heaven is full of those who can remember

The ebbing-out of life that slowly lingered
At the dark doors of pain;

Heaven is full of those who dropped their burden
At last through weariness;

But these the War has taken

Remember naught but their own exultant youth
Filling their hearts with unaccomplished dreams:
The trumpet-call-then the swift searing darkness
Stilling the proud sad song.

How will these enter in

Our old dull Heaven?

Where we seek only to drowse at ease, unthinking,
Since we are safe at last.

Safe? For these souls who faced a thousand dangers,

And found sly Death that robbed them of their chance,
Ere it befell?

Safe-can a Heaven which is safe and painless,
Ever be Heaven to them?

Somewhere amid the clouds there is the home of thunder;
Thunder is naught to them,

It is a ball, a heavy plaything.

They may kick hither and thither with their feet.

Lightning is but a toy-the flaming stars

Are endless camp-fire lights;

And for the silence of eternity,

They too on out-post duty, often heard it speak.

We have the dreams of our fat lives that lead us

To waste our lives;

We have the false hope we are serving others

When it is but ourselves we serve;

Yet these who have never lived, and whose sole service

Was but to die too soon,

Perhaps somewhere are making a new Heaven

Filled with the divine despair and joy this dead earth never knew.

Looks over all;

Unless you wish to rouse

The dead. They will be ready when you call.
Thin hands will touch worn chair-backs and
sad eyes

Look on you long without the least surprise.
Go not into the lofty house, at Spring or Fall.
For ghosts are happiest left

About their own affairs;

Why should you trouble these, so long bereft
Of all but loss, with loss that is not theirs?
Go not into the house, I say;

Let the pale pillars still untroubled rear
Their light against the moons that shifting,
play

Against the pediment. Let windows
peer
Or remain blank, close-shuttered. Let the

mouse

Gnaw the old trunks in the dark attic stored.
For God's sake do not go into the house,
Unless you share a past still undeplored.

William Rose Benét

Liam rose benet was born at Fort Hamilton, New York Harbor, February 2,

W 1886. He was educated at Albany Academy and graduated from Yale in 1907.

After various experiences as freelance writer, publisher's reader, magazine editor, and second lieutenant in the U. S. Air Service, Benét became Associate Editor of the New York Post's Literary Review in 1920. He resigned in 1924 to become one of the founders and editors of The Saturday Review of Literature.

The outstanding feature of Benét's verse is its extraordinary versatility; an Oriental imagination runs through his pages. Like the title-poem of his first volume, Merchants from Cathay (1913), Benét's volumes vibrate with a vigorous music; they are full of the sonorous stuff that one rolls out crossing wintry fields or tramping a road alone. But Benét's charm is not confined to the lift and swing of rollicking choruses. The Falconer of God (1914), The Great White Wall (1916) and The Burglar of the Zodiac (1918) contain decorations bold as they are brilliant; they ring with a strange and spicy music evoked from seemingly casual words. His scope is wide, although he is most at home in fancies which glow with a half-lurid, halfhumorous reflection of the grotesque. There are times indeed when Benét seems to be forcing his ingenuity. The poet frequently lets his fantastic Pegasus run away with him, and what started out to be a gallop among the stars ends in a scraping of shins on the pavement. But he is saved by an acrobatic dexterity even when his energy betrays him. Perpetual Light (1919), a memorial to his first wife, is, naturally, a more subdued collection.

Moons of Grandeur (1920) represents an appreciable development of Benét's whimsical gift; a combination of Eastern phantasy and Western vigor. Even more arresting are those poems which appeared subsequent to this volume. A firmer line, a cooler condensation may be found in Man Possessed (1927), a selection of the best of the previous volumes with many new poems. "Whale" is a particularly brilliant example; "The Horse Thief" is one of the most fanciful and one of the most popular of American ballads; "Jesse James" rocks with high spirits and the true balladist's gusto; "Inscription for a Mirror in a Deserted Dwelling," written during the` life of his second wife, Elinor Wylie, reflects the poet who wrote it and the poet to whom it was written, while "Sagacity" is a tribute to her memory. Golden Fleece (1935) is a more critical selection of Benét's poems with the addition of several new verses, many of them in an unexpectedly light vein.

Besides his verse, the older Benét is the author of two novels and several tales for children, the editor (with Henry Seidel Canby and John Drinkwater) of Twentieth Century Poetry (1929), and Fifty Poets (1932), an "auto-anthology" in which fifty American poets chose their own best, or favorite, poems. The Dust Which Is God (1941) is a portrait in which the autobiographical element is lightly disguised.

How that
They came.

Of their
Beasts,

And their
Boast,

MERCHANTS FROM CATHAY

Their heels slapped their bumping mules; their fat chaps glowed.
Glory unto Mary, each seemed to wear a crown!

Like sunset their robes were on the wide, white road:

So we saw those mad merchants come dusting into town!

Two paunchy beasts they rode on and two they drove before.
May the Saints all help us, the tiger-stripes they had!
And the panniers upon them swelled full of stuffs and ore!
The square buzzed and jostled at a sight so mad.

They bawled in their beards, and their turbans they wried.
They stopped by the stalls with curvetting and clatter.
As bronze as the bracken their necks and faces dyed-

And a stave they sat singing, to tell us of the matter.

With its
Burthen

And

Chorus.

A first Stave Fearsome,

And a second Right hard To stomach

And a third,
Which is a
Laughable
Thing.

We gape to

Hear them end,

And are in
Terror,

And dread

it is Devil's Work!

"For your silks, to Sugarmago! For your dyes, to Isfahan!
Weird fruits from the Isle o' Lamaree.

But for magic merchandise,

For treasure-trove and spice,

Here's a catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan,
The King of all the Kings across the sea!

"Here's a catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan;
For we won through the deserts to his sunset barbican;
And the mountains of his palace no Titan's reach may span
Where he wields his seignorie!

"Red-as-blood skins of panthers, so bright against the sun
On the walls of the halls where his pillared state is set
They daze with a blaze no man may look upon.

And with conduits of beverage those floors run wet.

"His wives stiff with riches, they sit before him there.
Bird and beast at his feast make song and clapping cheer.
And jugglers and enchanters, all walking on the air,

Make fall eclipse and thunder—make moons and suns appear! "Once the Chan, by his enemies sore-prest, and sorely spent, Lay, so they say, in a thicket 'neath a tree

Where the howl of an owl vexed his foes from their intent:
Then that fowl for a holy bird of reverence made he!

"A catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan!
Pastmasters of disasters, our desert caravan
Won through all peril to his sunset barbican,
Where he wields his seignorie!

And crowns he gave us! We end where we began;
A catch and a carol to the great, grand Chan!
The King of all the Kings across the sea!”

Those mad, antic Merchants! . . . Their stripèd beasts did beat
The market-square suddenly with hooves of beaten gold!
The ground yawned gaping and flamed beneath our feet!
They plunged to Pits Abysmal with their wealth untold!

And some say the Chan himself in anger dealt the stroke-
For sharing of his secrets with silly, common folk:

But Holy, Blessed Mary, preserve us as you may

Lest once more those mad Merchants come chanting from Cathay!

NIGHT

Let the night keep
What the night takes,
Sighs buried deep,
Ancient heart-aches,
Groans of the lover,
Tears of the lost;

Let day discover not

All the night cost!

Let the night keep

Love's burning bliss,
Drowned in deep sleep
Whisper and kiss,