Channel the congresses, nightly sessions,

Refractions of the thousand theaters, faces

Mysterious kitchens. . . You shall search them all.
Some day by heart you'll learn each famous sight
And watch the curtain lift in hell's despite;
You'll find the garden in the third act dead,
Finger your knees-and wish yourself in bed
With tabloid crime-sheets perched in easy sight.

Beyond extinction, surcease of the bone;
And repetition freezes-"What

what do you want? getting weak on the links?
fandaddle daddy don't ask for change Is THIS
FOURTEENTH? it's half-past six she said-if
you don't like my gate why did you
swing on it, why didja

swing on it anyhow-"

And somehow anyhow swing

The phonographs of hades in the brain
Are tunnels that re-wind themselves, and love
A burnt match skating in a urinal-
Somewhere above Fourteenth TAKE THE EXPRESS
To brush some new presentiment of pain—

"But I want service in this office SERVICE

I said-after

the show she cried a little afterwards but-”

Whose head is swinging from the swollen strap?
Whose body smokes along the bitten rails,
Bursts from a smoldering bundle far behind.
In back forks of the chasms of the brain-
Puffs from a riven stump far out behind
In interborough fissures of the mind . . . ?

And why do I often meet your visage here,
Your eyes like agate lanterns-on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
-And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft-gigantically down

Probing through you toward me, O Evermore!
And when they dragged your retching flesh,

Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore-
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,
Shaking-did you deny the ticket, Poe?

For Gravesend Manor change at Chambers Street. The platform hurries along to a dead stop.

The intent escalator lifts a serenade

Stilly

Of shoes, umbrellas, each eye attending its shoe, then
Bolting outright somewhere above where streets
Burst suddenly in rain . . . The gongs recur:
Elbows and levers, guard and hissing door.

Thunder is galvothermic here below . . . The car

Daemon, demurring and eventful yawn!
Whose hideous laughter is the bellows mirth
-Or the muffled slaughter of a day in birth—
O cruelly to inoculate the brinking dawn
With antennae toward worlds that spark and sink-
To spoon us out more liquid than the dim
Locution of the eldest star, and pack

The conscience naveled in the plunging wind,
Umbilical to call-and straightway die!

O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;

Condensed, thou takest all-shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.

And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking-lifting ground,
-A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some word that will not die!

A tugboat, wheezing wreaths of steam,
Lunged past, with one galvanic blare stove up the river.
I counted the echoes assembling, one after one,
Searching, thumbing the midnight on the piers.
Lights, coasting left the oily tympanum of waters;
The blackness somewhere gouged glass on a sky.

And this thy harbor, O my City, I have driven under,
Tossed from the coil of ticking towers. . . Tomorrow,
And to be . . . Here by the River that is East-
Here at the waters' edge the hands drop memory;
Shadowless in that abyss they unaccounting lie.
How far away the star has pooled the sea-
Or shall the hands be drawn away, to die?

Kiss of our agony Thou gatherest,

O Hand of Fire

gatherest

ROYAL PALM

Green rustlings, more-than-regal charities
Drift coolly from that tower of whispered light.
Amid the noontide's blazed asperities
I watched the sun's most gracious anchorite

Climb up as by communings, year on year
Uneaten of the earth or aught earth holds,
And the gray trunk, that's elephantine, rear
Its frondings sighing in aetherial folds.

Forever fruitless, and beyond that yield
Of sweat the jungle presses with hot love
And tendril till our deathward breath is sealed-
It grazes the horizons, launched above

Mortality-ascending emerald-bright,

A fountain at salute, a crown in view-
Unshackled, casual of its azured height,

As though it soared suchwise through heaven too.

THE AIR PLANT

(Grand Cayman, W. 1.)

This tuft that thrives on saline nothingness,

Inverted octopus with heavenward arms

Thrust parching from a palm-bole hard by the cove

A bird almost-of almost bird alarms,

Is pulmonary to the wind that jars

Its tentacles, horrific in their lurch.

The lizard's throat, held bloated for a fly,
Balloons but warily from this throbbing perch.

The needles and hacksaws of cactus bleed
A milk of earth when stricken off the stalk;
But this defenseless, thornless, sheds no blood,
Scarce shadow even-but the air's thin talk.

Angelic Dynamo! Ventriloquist of the Blue!
While beachward creeps the shark-swept Spanish Main.
By what conjunctions do the winds appoint
Its apotheosis, at last-the hurricane!

THE HURRICANE

Lo, Lord, Thou ridest!

Lord, Lord, Thy swifting heart

Naught stayeth, naught now bideth
But's smithereened apart!

Ay! Scripture flee'th stone!
Milk-bright, Thy chisel wind

Rescindeth flesh from bone
To quivering whittlings thinned-

Swept-whistling straw! Battered,
Lord, e'en boulders now out-leap

Rock sockets, levin-lathered!
Nor, Lord, may worm out-deep

Thy drum's gambade, its plunge abscond!
Lord God, while summits crashing

Whip sea-kelp screaming on blond
Sky-seethe, high heaven dashing-

Thou ridest to the door, Lord!
Thou bidest wall nor floor, Lord!

Allen Tate

LLEN TATE (whose full name, not often admitted, is John Orley Allen Tate) was

A born November 19, 1899, in Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky, and was

educated in public and private schools in Louisville, Nashville, and Washington, D. C., and after some tergiversation was graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1922. Immediately thereafter, he engaged in free-lance literary criticism for which he is as well known as for his poetry. He was one of the founders, in 1922, of The Fugitive, sharing that distinction with John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and a few others. An avowed believer in sectionalism, his critical acumen runs parallel to his predilections in Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928) and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929). Both biographies are skillfully constructed mosaics of fact and interpretation. His reviews and essays are among the most brilliant and provocative of his generation.

Mr. Pope and Other Poems (1928) reveals a mind that is critical and complex. His Ignis Fatuus, as acknowledged in Tate's Epilogue, has a “fierce latinity," and the adjective gives us an inkling of the paradox at the heart of his verse. Here Donne wrestles with Vergil; an essentially Gothic foundation shoots up into baroque efflores