I shall laugh with them! We shall pleasures! That my reward be greater, all laugh! Hohohohohoh!

Now is it the wind in arras murmuring?

What's chuckling, shuffling, whispering so?

The guards in the corridor gossip with the Queen's maids! And cuckoo singeth to goodman O!

For night was fallen, and the Queen was a-Maying,
And cuckold Arthur, in the King's double bed,

Was sprouting, perdy, the Queen's late planting,
Two little horns on the good King's head!

And sap springeth, and cuckoo singeth!

And a-Maying all night did the jolly Queen go! When sap springeth, in woman as greenwood, And cuckoo singeth to good man O!

By MARJORIE ALLEN SEIFFERT

It is a foolish thing you ask, I said,
This solemn ritual of earth with earth,
How shall it profit us, whose hearts are wed
In this clear ecstasy of delicate mirth.

This spirit wind by which our hearts are shaken
And merged like flame? How pagan is your pride
Crying: "Now let our bodies' pledge be taken!"
I said, You ask a foolish thing!....I lied.

For joy speeds lightly by, and we can keep
Only her finger prints that fade and are gone,
And there is nothing left for us to weep
Or curse, or bless, or break our hearts upon.

Only one seal, immutable and tragic,
Can mark us ineffaceably with dark magic.

A Sonnet for Kate Pennifether

By MARJORIE MEEKER

Her eyes are gray and hard as polished metal,
Set in a face precise and sad and small.
She has the whiteness of a Springtime petal;
Of flower-like attributes, this one is all.
She is not frail or strange; she is unbending
As a steel rod, and stoic as a stone
Before catastrophes that come unending,
And leave her drab and silent and alone.

Since she is neither pitiful nor wise,
(Trouble may blunt and make perception stale)
One finds it well to look away from eyes
That ask no questions, tell no wistful tale,

But gleam like steel-cold portals, locked and barred
Against all things, where all that come are hard.

Th

The Poetry of Dorothy Wordsworth

O what extent Wordsworth drew on his sister's journals for much of his most striking imagery is probably an insoluble question, and certainly an immaterial one. It is amusingly conceivable that Wordsworth and Coleridge, coming in from their walks around Grasmere, were accustomed to dive excitedly into Dorothy's diary, exclaiming, "Look here, there's a poem in that!" Or it may be that the similarity of concept and language between parts of Dorothy's journals and many of William's poems was due to their intimacy of life and thought and the habit of discussing together their common impressions before either attempted to record them.

Whatever may be the truth of these matters, Dorothy Wordsworth crowded her journals with beautiful and exact imagery, and her treatment, even of the same impression, is so different from that of her brother that her work deserves, as it has in the past received, independent recognition. Where he was too often guilty of "vague generalities -magnificent and sonorous," she never failed to compose in language that was "flat and final, like the showdown in poker." The biographical material of her journals is largely preserved in the various Lives of her brother. But since the journals themselves have, perhaps deservedly in the main, been relegated to the academic museum of books out of print, it seems that some attempt should

be made to preserve independently the flashes of great beauty that adorn the work, flashes that should live as unconscious contributions to modern imagist poetry, modern in the sense that the exact word is never sacrificed to metre or rhyme.

If Dorothy Wordsworth, in the copious images which she composed with unmistakable care and poetic feeling, intended merely to furnish her "beloved" with material for his more respected poems, her work fits admirably into a certain conservative definition of vers libre, namely, "notes for poetry". But her best passages, falling invariably into natural strophes, seem to comply with the sterner standards set up by the imagist manifesto itself. She uses the language of common speech and the exact word. She creates her own rhythms, writing, perhaps unconsciously, in natural cadences, the length or brevity of the swing usually adapted admirably to the particular image. Her subjects cover almost everything that touched her experience, though, like her brother, she achieves her greatest beauty in natural description. Her work is clearly imagistic rather than cosmic, the occasionnal generalities found in the diary being fortunately dissociated from any of the imagistic writing. The choice of hard and clear words and the concentration of atmosphere into a few phrases are her consummate achievements. Outside of the frequent monotony of her