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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Jean Starr Untermeyer

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Clay Hills

Jean Starr Untermeyer

IT is easy to mould the yielding clay,

And many shapes grow into beauty

Under the facile hand.

But forms of clay are lightly broken;

They will lie shattered and forgotten in a dingy corner.

But underneath the slipping clay

Is rock….

I would rather work in stubborn rock

All the years of my life,

And make one strong thing;

And set it in a high, clean place

To recall the granite strength of my desire.