Before the quiet church that smells of death They sit. And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath And reaches out and plucks them by the hand And calls them boldly, whispering to each In some strange speech They tremble to but cannot understand. It thrills and troubles them, as one by one, The days run off like water through a sieve; While, with a gaze as candid as the sun, Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive, They come and sit,— A part of life and yet apart from it. _Jean Starr Untermeyer_ Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and educated at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At sixteen, she came to New York City, pursuing special studies at Columbia. In 1907 she married Louis Untermeyer and, although she had written some prose previous to the poetic renascence, her first volume was published more than ten years later. _Growing Pains_ (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, the result of eight years slow and self-critical creation. This careful and highly selective process does much to bring the volume up to an unusually high level; a severity of taste and standards maintain the poet on the same austere plane. Perfection is almost a passion with her; the first poem in the book declares: I would rather work in stubborn rock All the years of my life; And make one strong thing And set it in a high, clean place, To recall the granite strength of my desire. Acutely self-analytical, there is a stern, uncompromising relentlessness toward her introspections that keeps them from being wistful or pathetic. These poems are, as she explains in her title-poem— No songs for an idle lute, No pretty tunes of coddled ills, But the bare chart of my growing pains. Intellect is always in the ascendency, even in the most ecstatic verses. In an almost religious poem, “A Man” (dedicated to her father), she pictures herself as a child, and expresses the whole psychology of our juvenile love of poor literature in lines like: A book held gaping on my knees, Watering a sterile romance with my thoughts.