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of a world she did not understand, work. Thank God, she's not the and could never enter.

Patricia Holling tossed the cigarette into the fire, with a quick motion. She caught up the unfinished manuscript, that new creative work of Ashcroft's, and glanced quickly through it again. A curious struggle was reflected in her piquant face; Marie-Louise watched in fascination. Then quickly Pat tore the precious thing, with the close distinctive writing of Lorry upon it, rending it viciously in two. She hesitated, glanced at the fire. MarieLouise stood stunned. She could not quite understand even when words began to spill fiercely from the lips of the girl by the fire: "His work! It's that. His work-not me, not me! I hate it. Oh, I hate it!"

She started to crumple the fragments, her gaze again upon the flames; that it was which touched the spring in Marie-Louise, enabling her to run forward with a cry of, "Oh, no! Oh, no! Stop!"

The torn pages cascaded to the floor. Pat turned and went swiftly from the room. Ashcroft, unseeing and unhearing in the hallway, felt her hand on his shoulder.

"I thought I heard the car, Lorry! Oh, there it is now! You've been a dear to me the flowers and everything!" She tapped his wrist; her laugh showed that she was still overwrought, he decided. "You mustn't do too much of that kind of thing, Lorry... the Latin mind might not understand such-comradeship!"

He was relieved at the word. There they were, on sensible terms again.

"Oh, Marie-Louise you mean," he said. "My dear Pat, she quite understands how vital you are to my

jealous kind!" He called after her: "You'll not fail me when I get the next part completed? Good! I'll phone you!"

He went, whistling now, to fetch his cigarettes from the living-room. He determined to work a while on his manuscript while the "feel" of it was upon him. After his manner, he thrust from him the idea that Marie-Louise had seen the incident of a few moments ago. Probably just his fancy.

He stopped short. A frightened little figure, white-faced, knelt by the hearth, her hands full of torn pieces of his manuscript. She caught them to her, staring up at him. He towered menacingly over her, shocked and stunned at the desecration.

Ashcroft

"You-little-beast!" is not certain if that is the word he used; he fears it is; he was too upset to notice or to guard his speech.

Marie-Louise looked up at him again, as if uncertain of her hearing. Then she stared at the pieces of torn paper in her hands, pieces she had been lovingly smoothing out, pieces she had been kissing because even his writing was dear, though alienation had come and she was no longer anything but a servant in his house. The pieces fluttered to the floor. She got up, and crept away from the awful look in his eyes. She must bear that; she must take the must reproach; for was not the other who has done this-how would one say it?"vital to him?"

22

Ashcroft sent for me in the morning. "She's going home," he told me, grayly, after he had given me the gist of the matter. "I don't know

that I should blame her so much. It'll be better for her to get away, for a while at least. She was cut up, of course, at our not getting to St. Lemaire for the month, and then-I can't be sure-but I fancy she saw us-that way!" He was enormously frank about it. "It's a ghastly mess, old man," he said. "I can't tell you how I felt, seeing her there, with the torn manuscript, you know. There's something-I can't just express it-some virtue gone from life. It's not a thing you can put your finger upon!" My mind snapped back to that afternoon at the art gallery, and Brynner's picture, and the elusive haunting thing I'd seen in his eyes that retreated from me as I reached for it. "I didn't see it before," he went on; "it was one of the things one accepted, like light and air. Once, old man, I was passing that vase there in the corner-the black one. She'd stuck those pussy-willows in it, and I thought, 'By Jove, that's Marie-Louise that's spring!' Another time it was that white hyacinth on the sill there. You won't understand, of course. I don't myself. But there it is. And there's that bit of a thing I wrote at St. Lemaire-I believe, subconsciously, I was writing of her. You remember it:

didn't-credit it-to Marie-Louisethat way!"

"It's not too late!" I said.

He shook his head.

"She's not Spring now," he said gravely. "She's Winter now. That's my doing. Spring beat itself to death against my window. I didn't understand-I didn't open in time!"

The telephone rang presently, as we sat there in silence. He roused himself to answer it. I heard his returning step at last. I saw by his eyes, his whole demeanor, that something was up.

a

"It was she!" he said, jerkily, after

moment. "Pat, I mean! To apologize! Overfatigued last night, didn't know what she was doing, what would I think of her-that kind of thing. I didn't understand at first!" He began pacing the floor, wringing one hand curiously with the other. Then his finger sprang at me, leading his words: "Why didn't Marie-Louise say? Why didn't she tell me?"

My intuition leaped to it.

"Perhaps she cared too much," I said, a little scorn creeping into my voice. "Perhaps she would not snap a link that was so-vital-to you!"

Ashcroft was shaking all over. He was utterly broken; and any anger I had for him, any scorn for his

"My window, growing weary of the blindness, died in that moment.

white

Of Winter's onslaughts, now rejoices in

The slow soft pulse of Spring that beats itself

Against the panes in cloudy tints of green.'

He went over and touched the white hyacinth with his lips.

"Marie-Louise!" I heard him say. "Marie-Louise!" And then, thickly: "Open that window, will you? I'm suffocating." I obeyed. He drew in great breaths. "By George," he said, "that's good!"

Old man, the pulse is gone. I never "It's Spring!" I told him. "It's felt a spring like that spring. I just Spring, old man!"

Y

EXPRESS YOURSELF

How to Teach Poets-with Examples

GENEVIEVE TAGGARD

OU CAN learn to write poetry as you would learn to build a bridge or drive a Ford car. Of course you are not likely to learn how to be a Great Poet, however much you learn. Are there many really Great Drivers of Trucks in the world? No, indeed, you must be born to that.

By being a poet at all I mean that you will be able after a time to get down on paper what is unique and peculiar to yourself. That is a distinct gain. And if what you get down on paper is of supreme importance in one way or another to a living and dying world, so much the better. Greatness is hard to guarantee, and will not be discussed in this article-except to start with the reflection that greatness, along with every other state of being, has had a period when it demanded that some one stand in the relation of teacher. In the past if the poet could manage it in the flesh, he preferred a tangible one, however often wrong and mundane. And when he could not lay hands on a mortal, he took, for a time, a dead man, or several-inscrutable and uncontemporary. Emily Dickinson wrote Colonel Higginson using the words "teacher" and "pupil," over a space of years; John Keats spent his evenings at Leigh Hunt's house. The

to

teachers were of course laughable in both cases; they knew nothing about the genius that was using them as a sounding-board. But they were much more than simply convenient; for a time they were as necessary as air.

Like Elizabeth's England, America is a nation of daily sonnet writers. They struggle alone or in tiny sentimental groups; it is hard going; and no one tells them why their lines are flat, or why one rhythm has more sinews than another. Expressing themselves, they call it; and that is the last thing they do, to be sure. Eddie Guest at one end, and your favorite at the extreme other, crack the professional whip across the land. Art-mad America can be said to have three main divisions: those who write poetry; those who practise on the saxophone; and those who plan to go into the movies. Of the three only the first class expects to lift itself over the fence by its own. boot-straps.

What a welter it makes!-ask any editor. "Do you value it?" ask him. "Has it anything to do with literature, or is it just sap in the spring tree-a Niagara of waste?"

Two or three times, in New York and in California, I have found myself taking the rôle of teacher and

playing out the rôle to discover what home dog-tired, but that poem was would come of it. still going in my head; and all day Sunday I worked.

23

This is a true story of a young man who is now one of the most promising younger poets.

"Third down. Three yards to

go, sang out his own voice, automatically, and down he put the ball, backed off, and blew his umpire's whistle.

It had been going so all afternoon; whistles, decisions, and the soft thudding sound of bumping bodies, booted leather and turf. It made a nice rhythm and a very unobtrusive accompaniment to something else.

"Here lies the most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she; I think she was the most beautiful lady

Ever was in the West Country.

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It wasn't quite right; but the words went on and on of themselves: "But beauty dies, beauty passes, However rare, rare it may be, And when I die, who will remember This lady of the West Country?" Saying it not two or three times, but all afternoon, past the last whistle, and the break-up of the game.

The next Tuesday he told me about it.

"You know that De La Mare poem you read me last time. Well, Saturday I had to referee, and it was the first time at a big game, and I was sort of nervous. And that poem kept going in my head. I went around pulling the kids back, and bossing the whole game, and I never made a slip. It was a big game, and lots of fight. I came

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I reached out and took the batch of new stuff.

"I've got one swell sonnet there, best thing I've done. Not at all like those others. Gee, it was funny to be hard-boiled all Saturday, and to think nobody knew anything about what I was saying to myself."

21

My tall football pupil vanished into the delights of pure lyrics, and I found myself going over my bookshelves a few days later, as you would ransack a first-aid kit, in a moment of emergency.

"No De La Mare this time," I thought as I climbed the stairs to the sunny studio.

My

In the outer room I waited, going from one canvas to another. pupil was a distinguished landscape painter; every time I came I saw how distinguished, and I trembled. Here was an angular talent perfectly expressed in pigment, woefully lost in words. The doctor had forbidden the physical labor of standing at an easel. Very slowly, very starkly, this woman was dying.

Before death came she felt something that demanded words.

At first, at the class, where all the others had felicity and knew their poets, and what wasn't fashionable, and what was, she had seemed too far from the trickery of words. Facing death her poems were awkward, abstract, and banal. The class found her lack of literary sense appalling. I should have valued this lack. But she seemed to me to be unable to think in a poet's medium. She knew this and was in despair.

"You have no music, no rhythm; you just state things; you need a lighter touch.”

We all said this; and she struggled for concluding sonnet lines together with the sometime football coach and the writer of verse for "Smart Set."

Then one day in the mail from her came an eight-line irregular fragment, sharp as flint, irregular as thought, with not one atom of substance more than the thing itself required. How slow I had been in finding her next of kin!

I mailed my three volumes of Emily Dickinson without a word. To-day I was bringing Adelaide Crapsey.

She lay back on the chaise longue as I came in, and her hands trembled. "I've been writing all night. See what I've done." It was itself-this work-no longer buried under the verbiage of vague memory.

"How did you like Emily?" I asked.

Another pupil performed the classic task of educating her own teacher, who believed theoretically that any object or feeling is material for poetry, but who could be discovered dogmatizing freely on the theory's numerous exceptions.

She was a mother with four children. There were maids to manage, and spinach lunches to order; a whole elaborate organization went round and round because she willed it. Her husband bought her books of poetry and told her to take time for it. But so swiftly, if one of the children got the measles, or a maid left, she let the book slip.

"And anyway, it's more fun to write it than read it. When I go out to the country place in the spring and see the beautiful skunk-cabbage I really want to write poetry. matter how much better other people write it, I want to, too. What if I am thirty, and the mother of four? "But where shall I start? The

No

“Oh, this one," she said, hurriedly modern poetry is so awful, and the finding it. editors print things I think are very ugly. And the critics praise the

"The soul selects her own society, moderns for writing flippantly about

Then shuts the door;

On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

"Unmoved she notes the chariot's pausing,

At her low gate;

Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling Upon her mat.

"I've known her from an ample nation

Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention

Like stone."

Not long after she died.

love; does that make a poet? Or they write Nocturnes in Blue and Silver, and the critics talk as if they were as good as Shelley. Who is Harriet Monroe, and is she really related to Amy Lowell? I wish I knew some one to talk to; or some one who wrote poetry that was beautiful, and not too inhuman. You can't write like Milton nowadays. It's silly to be so sonorous. And lots of the great poets in the collections are very dull. I only like the simplest things. I wish people would stop writing free verse."

When I came to the great dark

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