Vine-leaves tap at the window, Dew-drops sing to the garden stones, The robin chirps in the chinaberry tree Repeating three clear tones.
Christopher (Darlington) Morley was born at Haverford, Pennsylvania, May 5, 1890. He graduated from Haverford College in 1910 and was Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, England, 1910-13.
Since 1914 he has been on the staff of various periodicals, coming to New York in 1920 to run his column (“The Bowling Green”) on the New York _Evening Post_.
Morley is the author of ten dissimilar volumes of essays, skits, gossip, travel-notes, light verse and serious poetry. _The Rocking Horse_ (1919) and _Hide and Seek_ (1920) sink too often in their own sentiment; their sweetness is frequently cloying, their charm a little too conscious. But Morley’s vigor energizes his lines and prevents his verses—especially those in the latter volume—from becoming tawdry with oversweetness.
Such little, puny things are words in rhyme: Poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs; You see them printed here, and mark their chime, And turn to your more durable affairs. Yet on such petty tools the poet dares To run his race with mortar, bricks and lime, And draws his frail stick to the point, and stares To aim his arrow at the heart of Time.
Intangible, yet pressing, hemming in, This measured emptiness engulfs us all, And yet he points his paper javelin And sees it eddy, waver, turn, and fall, And feels, between delight and trouble torn, The stirring of a sonnet still unborn.
Leslie Nelson Jennings was born in 1891 at Ware, Massachusetts. When he was five years old, he moved to California, where he has lived ever since. For a short term, he worked on a newspaper but ill health forced him to discontinue this work and drove him to the hills.
Jennings’s work is still in a formative stage. His lyrics, while personal in theme, are full of the manner and music of several of his contemporaries. His sonnets, like those of David Morton, show Jennings at his best; they are quiet but never dull reflections of loveliness.
How futile are these scales in which we weigh Pity and passion, and the spirit’s need! Words—and the veins of desperate peoples bleed! Words—and a lark, and hedges white with may! O must this rapture and this grief remain Uncaptured in our silences? And must We stand like stones, less lyrical than dust That flowers beneath the benison of rain?