Stephen Vincent Benet

David sang to his hook-nosed harp:"The Lord God is a jealous God
His violent vengeance is swift and sharp
And the Lord is King above all gods
"Blest be the Lord, through years untold,

For all those beaten, for the broken heads,
The fosterless, the simple, the oppressed,
The ghosts in the burning city of our time
For those taken in rapid cars to the house and

The last pose flickered, failed
The screen's dead white Glared in a sudden flooding of harsh light Stabbing the eyes; and as I stumbled out The curtain rose
A fat girl with a pout And legs like hams, began to sing "His Mother"<...

He lay within a warm, soft world Of motion
Colors bloomed and fled,
Maroon and turquoise, saffron, red,
Wave upon wave that broke and whirled To vanish in the grey-green gloom,

Well,
I was tired of life; the silly folk,
The tiresome noises, all the common things I loved once, crushed me with an iron yoke
I longed for the cool quiet and the dark,

The night had fallen on the narrow tent
--Deep night of Virginia summer when the
Are burning wax in the near, languid
And the soft flowers hardly close all

All night they marched, the infantrymen under pack,
But the hands gripping the rifles were naked
And the hollow pits of the eyes stared, vacant and black,
When the moonlight shone

And so, to you, who always were Perseus,
D'Artagnan,
Lancelot To me,
I give these weedy rhymes In memory of earlier times

My friend went to the piano; spun the stool A little higher; left his pipe to cool;
Picked up a fat green volume from the chest;
And propped it open
Whitely without rest,

(A Virginia Legend
) The Planting of the Hemp
Captain Hawk scourged clean the seas (Black is the gap below the plank) From the Great North Bank to the Caribbees (Down by the marsh the hemp grows rank)
His fear was on the seaport towns,

"The College will reopen Sept
—
" `Catalogue'
I was just aiming at the jagged hole Torn in the yellow sandbags of their trench,

The grey gulls drift across the bay Softly and still as flakes of snow Against the thinning fog
All day I sat and watched them come and go;
And now at last the sun was set,
Filling the waves with colored fire Till each seemed like a...