Jesse James wore a red bandanner

That waved on the breeze like the Star Spangled Banner;

In seven states he cut up dadoes.

He's gone with the buffler an' the desperadoes.

Yes, Jesse James was a two-gun man

(Roll on, Missouri!)

The same as when this song began;
(From Kansas to Illinois!)

An' when you see a sunset bust into flames
(Lightnin' like the Missouri!)

Or a thunderstorm blaze-that's Jesse James!
(Hear that Missouri roll!)

ETERNAL MASCULINE

Neither will I put myself forward as others may do,
Neither, if you wish me to flatter, will I flatter you;
I will look at you grimly, and so you will know I am true.

Neither when all do agree and lout low and salute,
And you are beguiled by the tree and devout for the fruit,
Will I seem to be aught but the following eyes of a brute.

I will stand to one side and sip of my hellebore wine,
I will snarl and deride the antics and airs of the swine;
You will glance in your pride, but I will deny you a sign.

I will squint at the moon and be peaceful because I am dead,
I will whistle a tune and be glad of the harshness I said.
will come soon, when the stars are a mist overhead!

0

you

You will come, with eyes fierce; you will act a defiant surprise.

Quick lightings will pierce to our hearts from the pain in our eyes,
Standing strained and averse, with the trembling of love that defies.

And then I will know, by the heartbreaking turn of your head,
My madness brought low in a hell that is spared to the dead.
The upas will
will grow from the poisonous words that I said;

From under its shade out to where like a statue you stand,
Without wish to evade, I will reach, I will cry with my hand,

With my spirit dismayed, with my eyes and my mouth full of sand. . .

INSCRIPTION FOR A MIRROR IN

A DESERTED DWELLING

Set silver cone to tulip flame!
The mantel mirror floats with night
Reflecting still green watery light.
glimmer. If she came
Like silence through the shadowy wall
Where walls are wading in the moon

The sconces

The dark would tremble back to June.
So faintly now the moonbeams fall,
So soft this silence, that the verge
Of speech is reached. Remote and pale
As through some faint viridian veil
The lovely lineaments emerge,
The clearly amber eyes, the tint
Of pearl and faintest rose, the hair

To lacquered light, a silken snare
Of devious bronze, the tiny dint
With which her maker mocked the years
Beneath her lip imprinting praise.
Dim flower of desecrating days,
The old reflection, strange with tears,
Is gazing out upon the gloom,
Is widening eyes to find the light
In reminiscence, in the night
Of this foregone, forgotten room.

And you, the watcher, with your eyes
As wide as hers in dark distress,
Who never knew her loveliness

At least no gesturing figures pass;
Here is no tragic immanence
Of all the scenes of small events
That pantomimed before the glass.
No bliss, no passion, no despair,
No other actor lingers now;
The moonlight on a lifted brow
Is all, the eyes so wide aware
Of clouds that pass with stars, and suns,
Of mystery that pales the cheek,
Of all the heart could never speak,
Of joy and pain so vivid once,

That ceased with music and the lights,
Dimming to darkness and repose.
Lean then and kiss that ghostly rose

But guess through glass her shadowy guise, That was her face, this night of nights,—

For you around the glass I trace
This secret writing, that will burn

Like witch-fire should her shade return
To haunt you with that wistful face.

And know the vision fled indeed,
The mirror's surface smooth and cold,
The words unbreathed, the tale untold,
The past unpiteous to your need!

SAGACITY

We knew so much; when her beautiful eyes could lighten,
Her beautiful laughter follow our phrase;

Or the gaze go hard with pain, the lips tighten,

On the bitterer days.

Oh, ours was all knowing then, all generous displaying.

Such wisdom we had to show!

And now there is merely silence, silence, silence saying
All we did not know.

Hazel Hall

AZEL HALL was born February 7, 1886, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but as a small

H child was taken to Portland, Oregon, where she remained the rest of her life.

Either from the effects of scarlet fever or as the result of a fall, she was unable to walk after she was twelve years old. She never complained. As Ruth Hall, her sister, wrote in a letter to the editor, "The word 'invalid' was anathema in her ears. Although she was forced to spend her days in a wheel chair, she possessed a rare abundance of health, which enabled her to know life concretely, as a satisfaction for her senses, even though it might remain an abstract sorrow for her mind. She lived life thoroughly, admiring its complexities, with a fine relish for the irony which gave a bitter-sweet taste to the whole."

Curtains, her first volume, which appeared in 1921, is, in the main, a book of charming rather than arresting lyrics; it is evident from the poems that her needle

was not only a means of support but a refuge for the poet. The fact that she herself could never walk made her extraordinarily sensitive to the tramp or shuffle of feet; her mind seemed filled with the thought of men marching eternally about the earth. And so her second book, Walkers (1923), is filled with the wonder of mere pedestrian life, of a boy whacking a stick against a wall, of couples passing at dusk, of feet half-sinking in snow, of children's heels flashing in the sun.

Her third volume, Cry of Time (1929), upon which she was at work at the time of her death, contains her finest writing and the poems by which she probably will be remembered longest. These later poems have the appeal of the first two books with an emotional depth which the early volumes barely suggested.

Although Hazel Hall was in sound health until a few weeks before her death, she seemed to have a premonition that the end was near before she became critically ill. She died May 11, 1924. The last two poems which she wrote were "Slow Death" and "Riddle," both of which appeared a fortnight after her death.

FLIGHT

A bird may curve across the sky-
A feather of dusk, a streak of song;
And save a space and a bird to fly
There may be nothing all day long.

Flying through a cloud-made place
A bird may tangle east and west,
Maddened with going, crushing space
With the arrow of its breast.

Though never wind nor motion bring
It back again from indefinite lands,
The thin blue shadow of its wing
May cross and cross above your hands.

ANY WOMAN

When there is nothing left but darkness
And the day is like a leaf
Fallen onto sodden grasses,
You have earned a subtle grief.

Never let them take it from you,
Never let them come and say:

Night is made of black gauze; moonlight
Blows the filmy dark away.

You have a right to know the thickness
Of the night upon your face,
To feel the inky blue of nothing
Drift like ashes out of space.

You have a right to lift your fingers
And stare in pity at your hands

That are the exquisite frail mirrors
Of all the mind misunderstands.

Your hand, potent in portrayal,
Falls of its own weight to rest
In a quiet curve of sorrow
On the beating of your breast.

HERE COMES THE THIEF

Here comes the thief
Men nickname Time,
Oh, hide you, leaf,
And hide you, rhyme.
Leaf, he would take you
And leave you rust.
Rhyme, he would flake you
With spotted dust.
Scurry to cover,
Delicate maid
And serious lover.
Girl, bind the braid
Of your burning hair;
He has an eye
For the lusciously fair
Who passes by.
O lover, hide--
Who comes to plunder
Has the crafty stride
Of unheard thunder.
Quick-lest he snatch,
In his grave need,
And sift and match,
Then sow like seed

Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and educated at the Put

Janam Seminary in the city of her birth. At sixteen she came to New York City,

pursuing special studies at Columbia. She married Louis Untermeyer in 1907, divorced in 1933.

Growing Pains (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, the result of eight years' slow and critical creation. This highly selective process did much to bring the volume up to an unusual level; a severity of standards maintains the poet on an austere plane. Perfection is a passion with her; the first poem in the book ("Clay Hills") declares it with almost intolerant definiteness.

Acutely self-analytical, there is a stern, uncompromising relentlessness toward her introspections; these poems are, as she explains in her title-poem

No songs for an idle lute,

No pretty tunes of coddled ills,

But the bare chart of my growing pains.

A sharp color sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of the ordinary in terms of the unexplored illumine such poems as "Sinfonia Domestica," "Clothes," and the much-quoted "Autumn," a celebration of domesticity which might be described as a housekeeper's paean. In the last named Mrs. Untermeyer has reproduced her early environment with bright pungency; "Verhaeren's Flemish genre pictures are no better," writes Amy Lowell. Several of her purely pictorial poems establish a swift kinship between the most romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny "Moonrise" is an example; so is "High Tide," that, in one extended metaphor, turns the mere fact of a physical law into an arresting fancy.

Dreams Out of Darkness (1921) is a ripening of this author's power with a richer musical undercurrent. An increase of melody is manifest on every page, possibly most striking in "Lake Song," which, beneath its symbolism, is one of the few notable unrhymed lyrics of the period. The form of this poetry is, as Joseph Free

man has written, "distinguished not only by the clear qualities of chiseled marble, not only by a music so melodious that some of her free verse pieces have to be read two or three times before their lack of rhyme becomes noticeable, but also by its intellectual fluidity." Amy Lowell, amplifying this theme, concludes, "After all, beautiful as Mrs. Untermeyer's forms often are, it is her thoughts that make the book. This is the very heart of a woman, naked and serious, beautiful and unashamed."

Her training as a musician (she made her début as a Liedersinger in Vienna and London in 1924) added to her equipment as translator of the "official" life of Franz Schubert by Oscar Bie in 1928. Steep Ascent (1927) marks a spiritual as well as poetic climax. The dominant note, as might have been foreseen, is ethical, but there is no reliance on mere religiosity. "What is most remarkable about Jean Starr Untermeyer," wrote Edmund Wilson, “is the peculiar shading and force of her style. I believe that hers is classically Hebraic. She has always seemed to me one of the few writers who have successfully preserved in a modern language something of the authentic austerity of Jewish literature."

The poems in Wingèd Child (1936)—two of which are reprinted in these pageshave a new serenity, even a sly humor; they do not proceed, as did many of the others, from struggle, but from assurance. The early vers libriste gives way to the later formalist, even the "dissonant" rhymes of "Dew on a Dusty Heart" being cast in a sonnet.

Love and Need (1940) assembles the four preceding volumes with the addition of about twenty new poems, among which are several of the author's best in craftsmanship and power of communication.

After the publication of her collected poems, Mrs. Untermeyer spent most of her time on a translation of Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, a work which combines the novel and lyric poetry, history, philosophy, and stream-of-consciousness. Stephan Zweig said that the book, beyond the life and death of a poet "reflects the problems of all ages."