Letter to a Country Church

Dear Institution steepled on a hill. Part house and school, part music box and chorus, Part wedding cake, part white ship lying still At the dark piers of the pine grove-ringing for us Over the Sunday farms to come inside, We thank you for the gracious invitation. Will try to come. In the meantime, please abide, Hymning the hearts and legends of a nation.

Sing Rock of Ages as the legends fail. Keep Easters blossoming the ravaged wood. Preserve the white myths in the tangled trail That blinds in valleys where clear mountains stood O keep your belfry raftered in the sky To bless and bend us as we hurry by.

Marshall Schacht '27, author of the poem above, was recently declared the winner of the Twayne First Book Contest for 1949, sponsored by Twayne Publishers of New York City. John Ciardi, poetry editor for the firm, and F. O. Matthiessen, noted critic, voted the award to Mr. Schacht for his first volume of verse entitled Fingerboard.

The prize-winning volume, published in November, is a book of selected poems covering a period of over twenty years. Mr. Schacht s poems have appeared in Poetry and The New Yorker and also in a number of anthologies. A poem he wrote at the age of 18 appears in Louis Untermeyer's Yesterday andToday. He is also one of three American poets included in The Year's Poetry, a British anthology edited by Geoffrey Grigson in 194°! and his widely read Not to Forget Miss Dickinson is in Oscar Williams' recent collection, A LittleTreasury of Modern Poetry.

Mr. Schacht, a native New Englander, now teaches English at City College of New York.