a door opens by itself woman.) they so to speak were in Love once? now her mouth opens too far and: she attacks her Lobster without feet mingle under the mercy. (exit the hors d'oeuvres) SINCE FEELING IS FIRST since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you; wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate than wisdom lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry -the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids' flutter which says we are for each other: then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life's not a paragraph And death i think is no parenthesis SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose or if your wish be to close me, i and nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals (i do not know what it is about you that closes H. H. Phelps Putnam PHELPS PUTNAM was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1894. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale College, worked in an Arizona copper mine, in Washington as a government historian, in the importing business in New York, and as an editorial assistant in Boston. In 1923, he spent the year in Provence. Returning to America, he endeavored to make a serious profession out of what was a serious avocation; his first book, Trinc, appeared in 1927. Trinc is sharply divided by its two sections. The first ("Green Wine") is straightforward and lyrical, a set of frankly youthful reactions. The second half ("Brandy") is built about an impressionistic structure in which myth and modernity combine. The symbols used by Phelps are archaic, but the expression is distinctly of the moment. If, as Allen Tate wrote, "his attitude springs, in part, from the current romanticism of the 'hard-boiled,' the main feature of which is the worship of the crude, the barbaric, the 'un-intellectual,'" his Bill Williams, Hasbrouck, Jack Chance are figures in a new cosmogony. These heroes, presenting a latter-day scorn of the intelligence, are usually drunk (Trinc, according to Panurge, being “a Panomphean Word, signifying Drink") and always rugged; nevertheless their disintegrated sensitivities move in an undoubted atmosphere of poetry. "Ballad of a Strange Thing" is such a poem. Translating Daphne from Thessaly to the township of Pollard Mill and Apollo into a bawdy harvester, Putnam accomplishes something more than surprise. In what is one of the most interesting of contemporary ballads, he makes an old myth immediate and gives backwoods America a nimbus of antique legend. The Five Seasons (1933) is a. philosophical-narrative poem in which the central figure struggles to find a basis for action. It is a not wholly successful but extremely interesting study of cross-purposes. BALLAD OF A STRANGE THING1 Into the township Pollard Mill His name was Chance, Jack Chance, he said, Loafing along those roads which still, And that his family was dead. He was a lucid fool, his eyes Were cool and he beyond surprise. It is interesting to compare this treatment of a myth with Elizabeth Madox Roberts' use of a similar theme in "Orpheus," page 322. Though dying in the grass, report Their wings were tinged with gold; his breath Blew and the birds dipped and rose As if they surely lived, which were Autumn came bringing free Brought Jack, when I was sitting there To sweating teams, loading the sheaves Out of cool spoken words, or we Slowly the warm grapes, the rusty The long ridgepoles, the day grew late At night we made a fire to mark Other countrymen would come, Which we had borne carefully Then Jack would sing his bawdy songs: To timelessness, The Bastard King, She died with her boots on, as they tell, There went by then, in such a way, Of autumn, and the township slept. It was at noon, the hour of sleep And so I slept, above the bank Under an oak, the least of two But a sound crept through my nerves And I woke and I could hear Feet running fast and close, Then stop; and heard a noise like sobs And peering saw that a breathless girl And then a man came following, And when he stood beside her said, And then she turned at bay; she was A young ascetic fury she Was something almost strange to me 'Yes-and have waited even too long, I have seen the rabbits follow you O ladies, you should see him now, She ceased, and we all three were still And I kept hidden watching them, He did not knock her when he spoke, Listen, I keep no list of names Dislike the names and odors and ways Of their domestic wills; and I But there you are—and sometimes love He raised his quiet hand to touch enevieve taggard was born November 28, 1894, on an apple farm at Waitsburg, G Washington. At the age of two she was taken by her parents to Hawaii, where she remained, with one brief interval, for the next eighteen years. She attended the University of California, edited the college literary magazine, and graduated in 1919. Two years later, in New York, with a group of other poets, she helped found The Measure, that journal of poetry which was particularly hospitable to the modern lyric. She taught at Bennington College, in Vermont, beginning in 1931 and, beginning in 1935, at Sarah Lawrence College. |