To A Neo-Pagan

Your praise of Nero leaves me cold: Poems of porphyry and of gold, Palatial poems, chill my heart. I gaze--I wonder--I depart. Not to Byzantium would I roam In quest of beauty, nor Babylon; Nor do I seek Sahara's sun To blind me to the hills of home. Here am I native; here the skies Burn not, the sea I know is grey; Wanly the winter sunset dies. Wanly comes day. Yet on these hills and near this sea Beauty has lifted eyes to me, Unlustful eyes, clear eyes and kind; While a clear voice chanted-- _"They who find "Me not beside their doorsteps, know "Me never, know me never, though "Seeking, seeking me, high and low, "Forth on the far four winds they go!"

Therefore your basalt, jade, and gems, Your Saracenic silver, your Nilotic gods, your diadems To bind the brows of Queens, impure, Perfidious, passionate, perfumed--these Your petted, pagan stage-properties, Seem but as toys of trifling worth. For I have marked the naked earth Beside my doorstep yield to the print Of a long light foot, and flash with the glint Of crocus-gold-- Crocus-gold! Crocus-gold no mill may mint Save the Mill of God-- The Mill of God! The Mill of God with His angels in't!

Other Yale poets are W. B. Arvine, 1903, whose book _Hang Up Philosophy_ (1911), particularly excels in the interpretation of natural scenery; Frederick M. Clapp, 1901, whose volume _On the Overland_ (since republished in America) was in process of printing in Bruges in 1914, when the Germans entered the old town, and smashed among other things, the St. Catherine Press. Just fifteen copies of Mr. Clapp's book had been struck off, of which I own one; Donald Jacobus, 1908, whose _Poems_ (1914) are richly meditative; James H. Wallis, 1906, who has joined the ranks of poets with _The Testament of William Windune_ and _Other Poems_ (1917); Leonard Bacon, 1909, who modestly called his book, published in the year of his graduation, _The Scrannel Pipe_; Kenneth Band, 1914, who produced two volumes of original verse while an undergraduate; Archibald Mac Leish, 1915, whose _Tower of Ivory_, a collection of lyrics, appeared in 1917; Elliot Griffis, a student in the School of Music, who published in 1918 under an assumed name a volume called _Rain in May_; and I may close this roll-call by remarking that those who have seen his work have a staunch faith in the future of Stephen Vincent Benét. He is a younger brother of William, and is at present a Yale undergraduate. Mr. Benét was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-second of July, 1898. His home is at Augusta, Georgia. Before entering college, and when he was seventeen, he published his first volume of poems, _Five Men and Pompey_ (1915). This was followed in 1917 by another book, _The Drug Shop_. His best single production is the Cook prize poem, _The Hemp_.