Harriet Monroe, ed. (18601936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 191222. | | The Number | By Baker Brownell |
| From In Barracks THE SHEET of the morning Tribune bent | |
With thin crashing and clutters of sound. | |
Tight hands held it; its fabric | |
Rattled in fragile catastrophe. | |
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Sudden figures in the morning Tribune | 5 |
Three with sudden, significant being | |
Among slight marks by thousands | |
Strewing the pageraised themselves | |
In lustreless knobs, small, black, metallic, | |
Above the dim paper breadth. | 10 |
|
A man, Woodby, saw three numerals | |
That rose in dull, significant lumps | |
From the creaking page of the Tribune. | |
His own number! carved | |
Of hard, stupid material they seemed. | 15 |
|
Woodby, drafted man, left | |
His familiar papers, his thesis | |
On an unfinished and ancient past, | |
Forever, to learn the cold accuracy | |
Of near material, of steel, of half-ounce bullets. | 20 | | |
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