Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.

Better the blue silence and the gray west,

The autumn mist on the river,

And not any hate and not any love,

And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:

Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,

And the new corn shoveled in bushels

And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,

Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.

Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.

-Carl Sandburg

GOD'S WORLD

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!

Thy mists that roll and rise!

Thy woods this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with color! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;

Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,-Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,-let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound.

Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

-Robert Frost ·

* Taken from Wraiths and Realities, by Cale Young Rice, by permis

sion of the publishers, The Century Co.

There in the dark,
When flake on flake
Of white snow bars

Him in with its spars.

I would go out

And learn these things
That I may know
What dream or desire
Troubles my brothers
In nest or hole.
For even as I

The owl and the mouse,

Or blinded mole

With unborn soul,

May have some goal.

-Cale Young Rice

BIRCHES

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—