The driver rubbed at his nettly chin With a huge, loose forefinger, crooked and black, And his wobbly, violet lips sucked in, And puffed out again and hung down slack: One fang shone through his lop-sided smile, In his little pouched eye flickered years of guile. And the horse, poor beast, it was ribbed and forked, And its ears hung down, and its eyes were old, And its knees were knuckly, and as we talked It swung the stiff neck that could scarcely hold Its big, skinny head up--then I stepped in, And the driver climbed to his seat with a grin. God help the horse and the driver too, And the people and beasts who have never a friend, For the driver easily might have been you, And the horse be me by a different end. And nobody knows how their days will cease, And the poor, when they're old, have little of peace. _John Drinkwater_ Primarily a poetic dramatist, John Drinkwater, born in 1882, is best known as the author of _Abraham Lincoln--A Play_ (1919) founded on Lord Charnwood's masterly and analytical biography. He has published several volumes of poems, most of them meditative and elegiac in mood. The best of his verses have been collected in _Poems, 1908-19_, and the two here reprinted are used by permission, and by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. RECIPROCITY I do not think that skies and meadows are Moral, or that the fixture of a star Comes of a quiet spirit, or that trees Have wisdom in their windless silences. Yet these are things invested in my mood With constancy, and peace, and fortitude; That in my troubled season I can cry Upon the wide composure of the sky, And envy fields, and wish that I might be As little daunted as a star or tree. A TOWN WINDOW Beyond my window in the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As over Warwick woods are sweet. Under the grey drift of the town The crocus works among the mould As eagerly as those that crown The Warwick spring in flame and gold. And when the tramway down the hill Across the cobbles moans and rings, There is about my window-sill The tumult of a thousand wings. _James Joyce_ James Joyce was born at Dublin, February 2, 1882, and educated in Ireland. He is best known as a highly sensitive and strikingly original writer of prose, his most celebrated works being _Dubliners_ (1914) and the novel, _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ (1916). His one volume of verse, _Chamber Music_, was published in this country in 1918. I HEAR AN ARMY I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees: Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.