Such little, puny things are words in rhyme: Poor feeble loops and strokes as frail as hairs; You see them printed here, and mark their chime, And turn to your more durable affairs. Yet on such petty tools the poet dares To run his race with mortar, bricks and lime, And draws his frail stick to the point, and stares To aim his arrow at the heart of Time. Intangible, yet pressing, hemming in, This measured emptiness engulfs us all, And yet he points his paper javelin And sees it eddy, waver, turn, and fall, And feels, between delight and trouble torn, The stirring of a sonnet still unborn. _Leslie Nelson Jennings_ Leslie Nelson Jennings was born in 1891 at Ware, Massachusetts. When he was five years old, he moved to California, where he has lived ever since. For a short term, he worked on a newspaper but ill health forced him to discontinue this work and drove him to the hills. Jennings’s work is still in a formative stage. His lyrics, while personal in theme, are full of the manner and music of several of his contemporaries. His sonnets, like those of David Morton, show Jennings at his best; they are quiet but never dull reflections of loveliness. FRUSTRATE[61] How futile are these scales in which we weigh Pity and passion, and the spirit’s need! Words—and the veins of desperate peoples bleed! Words—and a lark, and hedges white with may! O must this rapture and this grief remain Uncaptured in our silences? And must We stand like stones, less lyrical than dust That flowers beneath the benison of rain? And if I say, “I love you,” can you know, Save by the urgent beating of my heart, The flame that tears my baffled lips apart? Poor symbols, cracked or broken long ago, What witness can you bear that we have tried To utter Beauty when our tongues were tied! _Maxwell Bodenheim_ Maxwell Bodenheim was born at Natchez, Mississippi, May 26, 1892. His education, with the exception of grammar school training, was achieved under the guidance of the U. S. Army, in which Bodenheim served a full enlistment of three years, beginning in 1910. For a while he studied law and art in Chicago, but his mind, fascinated by the new poetry, turned to literature. He wrote steadily for five years without having a single poem accepted. In 1918, his first volume appeared and even those who were puzzled or repelled by Bodenheim’s complex idiom were forced to recognize its intense individuality.