Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. NOTES AND QUESTIONS =Biography.= Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918) was born in New Brunswick, N. J. He was one of the first Americans to be deeply moved by Germany’s challenge to humanity. He gave up his journalistic career in New York, and enlisted seventeen days after the United States declared war. He was attached to the Intelligence Department of the army, one of his duties being to precede the troops before an attack and find out the positions of the enemy guns. He served during almost the whole of the battle of the Marne until August first, 1918, when he received a mortal wound. Kilmer was the first American man of letters to be killed in the war. At the time of his enlistment he was the editor of poetry for the _Literary Digest_. =Discussion.= 1. Do you agree with the poet’s conclusion given in the first stanza? 2. What is the most beautiful poem you have read? 3. What fact relating to the tree does the second couplet tell? The third couplet? The fourth? The fifth? 4. What does the last couplet tell you? =Phrases= hungry mouth, 68, 3 earth’s sweet flowing breast, 68, 4 looks at God all day, 68, 5 nest of robins in her hair, 68, 8 WINTER [Illustration] THE GREAT BLIZZARD HAMLIN GARLAND A blizzard on the prairie corresponds to a storm at sea; it never affects the traveler twice alike. Each norther seems to have a manner of attack all its own. One storm may be short, sharp, high-keyed, and malevolent, while another approaches slowly, relentlessly, wearing out the souls of its victims by its inexorable and long-continued cold and gloom. One threatens for hours before it comes, the other leaps like a tiger upon the defenseless settlement, catching the children unhoused, the men unprepared; of this character was the first blizzard Lincoln ever saw. The day was warm and sunny. The eaves dripped musically, and the icicles dropping from the roof fell occasionally with pleasant crash. The snow grew slushy, and the bells of wood teams jingled merrily all the forenoon, as the farmers drove to their timber-lands five or six miles away. The room was uncomfortably warm at times, and the master opened the outside door. It was the eighth day of January. One afternoon recess, as the boys were playing in their shirt-sleeves, Lincoln called Milton’s attention to a great cloud rising in the west and north. A vast, slaty-blue, seamless dome, silent, portentous, with edges of silvery frosty light. “It’s going to storm,” said Milton. “It always does when we have a south wind and a cloud like that in the west.”