I have come from pride all the way up to humility This day-to-night. The hill was more terrible than ever before. This is the top; there is the tall, slim tree. It isn’t bent; it doesn’t lean; It is only looking back. At dawn, under that tree, still another me of mine was buried. Waiting for me to come again, humorously solicitous of what I bring next, it looks down. HER EYES Her eyes hold black whips— dart of a whip lashing, nay, flicking, nay, merely caressing the hide of a heart— and a broncho tears through canyons— walls reverberating, sluggish streams shaken to rapids and torrents storm destroying silence and solitude! Her eyes throw black lariats— one for his head, one for his heels— and the beast lies vanquished— walls still, streams still— except for a tarn, or is it a pool, or is it a whirlpool twitching with memory? IMPROVISATION Wind: Why do you play that long beautiful adagio, that archaic air, to-night Will it never end? Or is it the beginning, some prelude you seek? Is it a tale you strum? _Yesterday, yesterday_— Have you no more for us? Wind: Play on. There is nor hope nor mutiny in you. _Arthur Davison Ficke_ Arthur Davison Ficke was born at Davenport, Iowa, November 10, 1883. He received his A.B. at Harvard (1904), studied for the law and was admitted to the bar in 1908. In 1919, after two years’ service in France, he gave up his law practice and devoted himself to literature exclusively. Ficke is the author of ten volumes of verse, the most representative of which are _Sonnets of a Portrait Painter_ (1914), _The Man on the Hilltop_ (1915) and _An April Elegy_ (1917). In these, the author has distilled a warm spirituality, combining freshness of vision with an intensified seriousness.