STEEPLE BUSH

by Robert Frost '96. HenryHolt and Cos., 1947- 62 pp. $2.50.

All those who love Robert Frost's poetry, whether through inherited background or acquired taste, will thankfully receive this latest volume of lyrics. There are forty-three of them, ranging from quiet meditation on the ways of inanimate nature to mocking derision of the ways of too animate man. The first lyric pictures a young birch,

"It was a thing of beauty and was sent To live its life out as an ornament;" the last presents a district schoolhouse which "wasn't keeping any more Unless for penitents who took their seat Upon its doorsteps as at mercy's feet To make up for a lack of meditation."

The reader who knows his Frost will have the feeling that here is nothing new, yet certainly nothing old. It is all authentically Frost, stamped with his inimitable individuality— therefore not new: it is, however, completely free from repetition of earlier work, therefore not old. The accuracy of observation, the integrity of insight, the sureness of phrase, the beauty of rhythm, the reality of thinking which we have come to expect always in his poems appear as unwaveringly here as in any of his earlier books. Yet it is fresh and up-to-date; it has at once the feel of the earth and the feel of the sky.

Frost mocks at all the pretenses of man—his false pride, false prophecies, false education; he laughs quietly at planners and theorists, scientific and non-scientific, and at nations, united and divided, and at bombs. But he is not cynical, for behind the laughter he reveals a respect for man himself, however small man's works before the infinite stretches of the universe. The universe, he reminds us, "may or may not be very immense." He counsels

"Patience and looking away ahead, And leaving some things to take their course."

His long look gives, if not security, at least a kind of peace of mind.