excerpts from the First Harvest 1954
It seemed an utterly futile undertaking—to try to organize a poetry society in a day when guns were still echoing and poetry itself was filled with the clamor of cliques and coteries of poets and critics, each claiming to have found the one golden road to some poetic paradise ; but Mrs. Gordon Balwin—to whom this volume is inscribed—whose poems in respected publications had proved her right to issue the summons, lured her friends into a committee; and with this group, under her inspiration, guns or no guns, poetic apostles belaboring each other or not, the Poetry Society of Vermont came into being—in 1947.
“To the novice seeking guidance, to the lonely seeking kindred fellowship, to all of us striving forever to write even one poem that rises above mere verse, the Poetry Society of Vermont is a never-failing source of help and inspiration.”…”Although we contribute nothing, we have gained a knowledge and appreciation of poetry, both home-grown and foreign, and have become acquainted the problems of creating a poem.”
by Arthur Wallace Peach, First Harvest 1954.
How Still These Fields
by Mary Newton Baldwin, First Harvest 1954
How still these fields. How quiet they lie.
Beneath December’s snow. No stir at all,
Immobile as a hyphen between Fall
And Spring they lie in fixed tranquility.
Thus Winter links these seasons to each
In meaning that was never theirs alone;
And wintry fields give what they do not own
As hyphens add to what is not theirs to speech.
Or they are like the rest between two bars
Of music that allows the notes to come
Before to linger with a vibrant hum,
And makes the next cut sharp and clear the stars.
How still these fields—the quiet pause between
Fall’s last hushed note and Spring’s young shout
of green.