Books: POET’S POET

Hardly anyone except his fellow poets noted the fact or felt the loss when Ridgely Torrence died at 76 on Christmas Day, 1950. All the poems he ever published would fit in one small book. But he was admired as a poet, and loved as a friend, by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Padraic Colum, William Vaughn Moody. A tall, thin, diffident man with a gaunt face and staring eyes, Ridgely Torrence wrote his rare verse with passion and unceasing care; his poems, polished by humble sincerity as well as art, are understandable by common readers. An Ohio-born Greenwich Villager, Torrence loved life and reverenced it as deeply as many of his contemporaries seemed to fear or despise it. The best of his work is in Poems, published this week (Macmillan; $2). Samples:

ADAM’S DYING

He dreamed first Of what seem

The things worst In the dream:

The lost bower, The grave’s drouth,

The sword’s power, The worm’s mouth.

He dreamed last Of good things:

The pain past, The air’s wings.

The seed furled, The stirred dust,

Sight’s world,

The hand’s thrust.

Thought’s birth, The mind’s blade,

Work’s worth, The thing made.

The wind’s haste, The cloud’s dove,

The fruit’s taste, The heart’s love.

The sky’s dome, The sun’s west,

A man’s home, Eve’s breast.

The wave’s beach, The bird’s wood,

Dreams, each, But all good.

Life finds rest

Where life rose. Which was best?

The heart knows.

EVENSONG

Beauty calls and gives no warning.

Shadows rise and wander on the day.

In the twilight, in the quiet evening

We shall rise and smile and go away.

Over the flaming leaves

Freezes the sky.

It is the season grieves,

Not you, not I.

All our springtimes, all our summers,

We have kept the longing warm within.

Now we leave the after-comers

To attain the dream we did not win.

O we have wakened here and had our birth,

And that’s the end of earth;

And we have toiled and smiled and kept the light,

And that’s the end of night.

THE SON

I heard an old farmwife, Selling some barley,

Mingle her life with life And the name “Charley.”

Saying: “The crop’s all in, We’re about through now;

Long nights will soon begin, We’re just us two now.

“Twelve bushel at sixty cents, It’s all I carried—

He sickened making fence; He was to be married—

“It feels like frost was near—His hair was curly.

The spring was late that year, But the harvest early.”