SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON

Look-on the topmost branches of the world
The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick;
Over the huddled rows of stone and brick,
A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled
Like ghosts, languid and sick.

One breathless moment now the city's moaning
Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim;
There is no sound around the whole world's rim,
Save in the distance a small band is droning

Some desolate old hymn.

Van Wyck, how often have we been together
When this same moment made all mysteries clear;
-The infinite stars that brood above us here,
And the gray city in the soft June weather,
So tawdry and so dear!

TRIUMPH OF LOVE

I shake my hair in the wind of morning

For the joy within me that knows no bounds,

I echo backward the vibrant beauty

Wherewith heaven's hollow lute resounds.

I shed my song on the feet of all men,
On the feet of all shed out like wine,
On the whole and the hurt I shed my bounty,
The beauty within me that is not mine.

Turn not away from my song, nor scorn me,
Who bear the secret that holds the sky
And the stars together, but know within me
There speaks another more wise than I.

Nor spurn me here from your heart, to hate me! Yet hate me here if you'will-not so

Myself you hate, but the Love within me

That loves you, whether you would or no.

Here love returns with love to the lover,
And beauty unto the heart thereof,
And hatred unto the heart of the hater,
Whether he would or no, with love!

Vision and hope of all the seers,

All prayer, all anguish, and all tears
Are but the dust that from her dream
Awakes, and knows herself supreme-
Are but earth, when she reveals
All that her secret heart conceals
Down in the dark and silent loam,
Which is ourselves, asleep, at home.
Yea, and this, my poem, too,
Is part of her as dust and dew,
Wherein herself she doth declare
Through my lips, and say her prayer.

THIS QUIET DUST

Here in my curving hands I cup
This quiet dust; I lift it up.

Here is the mother of all thought;
Of this the shining heavens are wrought
The laughing lips, the feet that rove,
The face, the body, that you love:
Mere dust, no more, yet nothing less,
And this has suffered consciousness,
Passion, and terror, this again
Shall suffer passion, death, and pain.

For, as all flesh must die, so all,
Now dust, shall live. 'Tis natural;
Yet hardly do I understand-
Here in the hollow of my hand
A bit of God Himself I keep,
Between two vigils fallen asleep.

Roy Helton

OY (ADDISON) HELTON was born at Washington, D. C., in 1886 and graduated

R from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908. He studied art-and found he

was color-blind. He spent two years at inventions-and found he had no business sense. After a few more experiments he became a schoolmaster in West Philadelphia and at the Penn Charter School in Germantown.

Helton's first volume, Youth's Pilgrimage (1915), is a strange, mystical affair, full of vague symbolism and purple patches. Outcasts in Beulah Land (1918) is entirely different in theme and treatment. This is a much starker verse, direct and sharp in its effect. Helton became intimately connected with primitive backgrounds, spending a great part of his time in the mountains of South Carolina and Kentucky. His later verse in Lonesome Water (1930) shows the influence of this intimacy. Its spirit creeps into his fanciful prose, The Early Adventures of Peacham Grew (1925), a story which unites quaintness and tragedy in a delicate chronicle of boyhood. Strangeness of another sort fills Nitchie Tilley (1934), a later novel.

"Old Christmas Morning" is a Kentucky Mountain dialogue in which Helton has introduced an element rare in modern verse. Told with the directness of an old ballad, this drama of the night twelve days after the universally celebrated Christmas unfolds a ghost story in which the surprise is heightened by the skillful suspensions. "Lonesome Water" is a direct communication in the vernacular. Asked to furnish a glossary, Helton wrote: "I have tried to use only the common and most general mountain words, despising that preciosity of folk-talk dug out and patched together which is now a fashion. . . . Sang: a universal Southernmountain word for Gin Seng wherever the weed is grown or picked. Trace: a trail or footpath. Pretties: any sort of toy or decoration. Uses: lives."

OLD CHRISTMAS MORNING

(A Kentucky Mountain Ballad)

"Where are you coming from, Lomey Carter, So airly over the snow?

And what's them pretties you got in your hand, And where you aiming to go?

"Step in, Honey: Old Christmas morning
I ain't got nothing much;

Maybe a bite of sweetness and corn bread,
A little ham meat and such.

"But come in, Honey! Sally Anne Barton's Hungering after your face.

Wait till I light my candle up:

Set down! There's your old place.

"Now where you been so airly this morning?"

"Graveyard, Sally Anne.

Up by the trace in the salt lick meadows
Where Taulbe kilt my man."

"Taulbe ain't to home this morning.
I can't scratch up a light:

Dampness gets on the heads of the matches;
But I'll blow up the embers bright."

"Needn't trouble. I won't be stopping:
Going a long ways still."

"You didn't see nothing, Lomey Carter,
Up on the graveyard hill?”

"What should I see there, Sally Anne Barton?”
"Well, sperits do walk last night."
"There were an elder bush a-blooming
While the moon still give some light."

"Yes, elder bushes, they bloom, Old Christmas,
And critters kneel down in their straw.
Anything else up in the graveyard?"

"One thing more I saw:

I saw my man with his head all bleeding
Where Taulbe's shot went through."

"What did he say?"

"He stooped and kissed me."

"What did he say to you?"

"Said, Lord Jesus forguv your Taulbe;

But he told me another word;

He said it soft when he stooped and kissed me.
That were the last I heard."

"Taulbe ain't to home this morning."

"I know that, Sally Anne,

For I kilt him, coming down through the meadow
Where Taulbe kilt my man.

"I met him upon the meadow trace
When the moon were fainting fast,
And I had my dead man's rifle gun
And kilt him as he come past."

"But I heard two shots."

"'Twas his was second:

He shot me 'fore he died:

You'll find us at daybreak, Sally Anne Barton:
I'm laying there dead at his side."

LONESOME WATER

Drank lonesome water:
Warn't but a tad then
Up in a laurel thick
Digging for sang;
Came on a place where
The stones were hollow,
Something below them
Tinkled and rang.

Dug whar I heard it
Drippling below me:
Should a knowed better,
Should a been wise;
Leant down and drank it,
Clutching and gripping
The over hung cliv

With the ferns in my eyes.

Tasted of heart leaf

And that smells the sweetest,
Pawpaw and spice bush
And wild brier rose;
Must a been counting

The heels of the spruce pines,
And neighboring round.
Whar angelica grows.

I'd drunk lonesome water,
I knowed in a minute:
Never larnt nothing
From then till today:
Nothing worth larning
Nothing worth knowing,
I'm bound to the hills
And I can't get away.

Mean sort of dried up old
Ground-hoggy fellow,
Laying out cold here
Watching the sky;
Pore as a hipporwill,
Bent like a grass blade;
Counting up stars

Till they count too high.

I know whar the gray foxes
Uses up yander:

Know what will cure you
Of tisic and chills,

But I never been way from here,
Never got going;

I've drunk lonesome water.
I'm bound to the hills.