Stephen Vincent Benét
Reading edition
Stephen Vincent Benét, the younger brother of William Rose Benét, was born at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in July, 1898. He was educated in various parts of the country, graduating from Yale in 1919.
At seventeen he published a small book containing six dramatic portraits, Five Men and Pompey (1915), a remarkable set of monologues which, in spite of distinct traces of Browning and Alfred Noyes, was little short of astounding, coming from a schoolboy. In Benét’s next volume, Young Adventure (1918), one hears something more than the speech of an infant prodigy; the precocious facility has developed into a keen and individual vigor.
Heavens and Earth (1920), the most representative collection, has a greater imaginative sweep. Like his brother, the younger Benét is at his best in the decoratively grotesque; his fancy exults in running the scales between the whimsically bizarre and the lightly diabolic.
PORTRAIT OF A BOY
After the whipping, he crawled into bed;
Accepting the harsh fact with no great weeping.
How funny uncle’s hat had looked striped red!
He chuckled silently. The moon came, sweeping
A black frayed rag of tattered cloud before
In scorning; very pure and pale she seemed,
Flooding his bed with radiance. On the floor
Fat motes danced. He sobbed; closed his eyes and dreamed.
Warm sand flowed round him. Blurts of crimson light
Splashed the white grains like blood. Past the cave’s mouth
Shone with a large fierce splendor, wildly bright,
The crooked constellations of the South;
394Here the Cross swung; and there, affronting Mars,
The Centaur stormed aside a froth of stars.
Within, great casks like wattled aldermen
Sighed of enormous feasts, and cloth of gold
Glowed on the walls like hot desire. Again,
Beside webbed purples from some galleon’s hold,
A black chest bore the skull and bones in white
Above a scrawled “Gunpowder!” By the flames,
Decked out in crimson, gemmed with syenite,
Hailing their fellows by outrageous names
The pirates sat and diced. Their eyes were moons.
“Doubloons!” they said. “The words crashed gold.
Doubloons!”