There has been one bright afternoon, however--last Sat. when I went out to Brandywine valley (between here and Akron) and revisited Bill Sommer. The old baldpate was asleep on a sofa when I looked through the screen door and knocked. Arose a great bulk in white undershirt and loose white duck pants--the black eyes revolving in the pallid or rather, dusty-white miller face like a sardonic Pierrot’s. The few hours I was there were spent with him out in the old school-house studio, surrounded by a flower garden and filled with plentiful new wonders of line and color. I wish you could have seen several of the oil children’s portraits that he has been doing! And there is a line drawing of a head and hand that I am bringing back to New York that you will greatly care for. While we were both chewing, smoking and listening to the crickets I finally found out why Sommer has been so remiss about joining in with me in my several efforts to expose him to fame and “fortune.” He hates to let his pictures leave him. Against that impasse, I guess, nobody’s efforts will be of much avail. It’s just as well, of course, if he has triumphed over certain kinds of hope. I admit that I haven’t, at least not entirely. I still feel the need of some kind of audience. By the way--do you know if O’Neill is at present a resident anywhere on Nantucket? He has promised to write some kind of notice for my book, and I should like to get in touch with him. He wrote me from Bermuda, but where he has settled since returning from there I don’t yet know. If he has been near you I hope that you have got together. I am enclosing an improved version of “Passage,”--the poem I wrote in the country this summer. It should replace the version that is in the mss. you have. To me it is still the most interesting and conjectural thing I have written--being merely the latest, I suppose. I’m particularly anxious to know what you think of its form. On sending it to _The Dial_ I recently got this comment from Miss Moore: “We could not but be moved, as you must know, by the rich imagination and the sensibility in your poem, Passage. Its multiform content accounts I suppose, for what seems to us a lack of simplicity and cumulative force. We are sorry to return it.” It seems almost as though Miss Moore might be rather speaking of her own poems with such terms.... Allen Tate is writing a short essay (he intends a longer one later) on my work to appear along with four of the “Voyages” in the next copy of _The Guardian_. You will probably see it. It does hearten me somewhat that you and a few others have been so actively interested in what I’m trying to do. Certainly I have never done anything to personally deserve it, but I think my personal and economic embarrassments and frustrations have curtailed a good many of my intentions. --/--/ 214: TO CHARLOTTE AND RICHARD RYCHTARIK _New York_ _Sept. 15th, ’25_