May that banner stand from shore to shore,
Never to those high meanings lost,
Never with alien standards crossed,
But always valiant and pure and true,
Our starry flag: red, white, and blue.
CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON (1840—1894)
Constance Fenimore Woolson, a great-niece of author James Fenimore Cooper, was born in New Hampshire. Woolson’s family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, after her three sisters died of scarlet fever. After her father’s death in 1869, Woolson traveled with her mother to the South while contributing sketches to magazines. Her first book, The Old Stone House (1872), was published under the pseudonym “Anne March.” Woolson’s stories began to reflect her travels, and in 1879 she settled in Europe. Her novels were originally published serially in Harper’s before appearing in book form as Anne (1882) and For the Major (1883). Woolson also published short story collections, verse, and travel sketches. Suffering from depression, she died in 1894 after falling from a window in her Venice apartment.
Love Unexpressed
The sweetest notes among the human heart-strings
Are dull with rust;
The sweetest chords, adjusted by the angels,
Are clogged with dust;
We pipe and pipe again our dreary music
Upon the self-same strains,
While sounds of crime, and fear, and desolation,
Come back in sad refrains.
On through the world we go, an army marching
With listening ears,
Each longing, sighing, for the heavenly music
He never hears;
Each longing, sighing, for a word of comfort,
A word of tender praise,
A word of love, to cheer the endless journey
Of earth’s hard, busy days.
They love us, and we know it; this suffices
For reason’s share.
Why should they pause to give that love expression
With gentle care?
Why should they pause? But still our hearts are aching
With all the gnawing pain
Of hungry love that longs to hear the music,
And longs and longs in vain.
We love them, and they know it; if we falter,
With fingers numb,
Among the unused strings of love’s expression,
The notes are dumb.
We shrink within ourselves in voiceless sorrow,
Leaving the words unsaid,
And, side by side with those we love the dearest,
In silence on we tread.
Thus on we tread, and thus each heart in silence
Its fate fulfils,
Waiting and hoping for the heavenly music
Beyond the distant hills.
The only difference of the love in heaven
From love on earth below
Is: Here we love and know not how to tell it,
And there we all shall know.
Yellow Jessamine
In tangled wreaths, in clustered gleaming stars,
In floating, curling sprays,
The golden flower comes shining through the woods
These February days;
Forth go all hearts, all hands, from out the town,
To bring her gayly in,
This wild, sweet Princess of far Florida—
The yellow jessamine.
The live-oaks smile to see her lovely face
Peep from the thickets; shy,
She hides behind the leaves her golden buds
Till, bolder grown, on high
She curls a tendril, throws a spray, then flings
Herself aloft in glee,
And, bursting into thousand blossoms swings
In wreaths from tree to tree.
The dwarf-palmetto on his knees adores
This Princess of the air;
The lone pine-barren broods afar and sighs,
“Ah! come, lest I despair;”
The myrtle-thickets and ill-tempered thorns
Quiver and thrill within,
As through their leaves they feel the dainty touch
Of yellow jessamine.
The garden-roses wonder as they see
The wreaths of golden bloom,
Brought in from the far woods with eager haste
To deck the poorest room,
The rich man’s house, alike; the loaded hands
Give sprays to all they meet,
Till, gay with flowers, the people come and go,
And all the air is sweet.
The Southern land, well weary of its green
Which may not fall nor fade,
Bestirs itself to greet the lovely flower
With leaves of fresher shade;
The pine has tassels, and the orange-trees
Their fragrant work begin:
The spring has come—has come to Florida,
With yellow jessamine.
INA DONNA COOLBRITH (1841—1928)
The daughter of Mormon parents, Ina Donna Coolbrith was born in Illinois and grew up in California. Coolbrith taught school for a time and then began to publish her writing in local newspapers. She was quite popular locally, and Bret Harte gave her an editing job in 1868 at the Overland Monthly. Coolbrith’s poems began to appear nationally, in such magazines as Harper’s, Scribner’s, and Putnam’s, and a book of her poems, A Perfect Day, was published in 1881. Coolbrith worked as a librarian at the Oakland Public Library for over twenty years. Fire destroyed her home and most of her writings in April 1906. In 1915, she summoned a World Congress of Authors and, in the same year, she was named poet laureate of California.
When the Grass Shall Cover Me
When the grass shall cover me,
Head to foot where I am lying;
When not any wind that blows,
Summer blooms nor winter snows,
Shall awake me to your sighing:
Close above me as you pass,
You will say, “How kind she was,”
You will say, “How true she was,”
When the grass grows over me.
When the grass shall cover me,
Holden close to earth’s warm bosom,—
While I laugh, or weep, or sing
Nevermore, for anything,
You will find in blade and blossom,
Sweet small voices, odorous,
Tender pleaders in my cause,
That shall speak me as I was—
When the grass grows over me.
When the grass shall cover me!
Ah, beloved, in my sorrow
Very patient, I can wait,
Knowing that, or soon or late,
There will dawn a clearer morrow:
When your heart will moan “Alas!
Now I know how true she was;
Now I know how dear she was”—
When the grass grows over me!
Helen Hunt Jackson
What songs found voice upon those lips,
What magic dwelt within the pen,
Whose music into silence slips,
Whose spell lives not again!
For her the clamorous to-day
The dreamful yesterday became;
The brands upon dead hearths that lay
Leaped into living flame.
Clear ring the silvery Mission bells
Their calls to vesper and to mass;
O’er vineyard slopes, through fruited dells,
The long processions pass;
The pale Franciscan lifts in air
The Cross above the kneeling throng;
Their simple world how sweet with prayer,
With chant and matin-song!
There, with her dimpled, lifted hands,
Parting the mustard’s golden plumes,
The dusky maid, Ramona, stands
Amid the sea of blooms.
And Alessandro, type of all
His broken tribe, for
evermore
An exile, hears the stranger call
Within his father’s door.
The visions vanish and are not,
Still are the sounds of peace and strife,—
Passed with the earnest heart and thought
Which lured them back to life.
O sunset land! O land of vine,
And rose, and bay! in silence here
Let fall one little leaf of thine,
With love, upon her bier.
Fruitionless
Ah! little flower, upspringing, azure-eyed,
The meadow-brook beside,
Dropping delicious balms
Into the tender palms
Of lover-winds, that woo with light caress,
In still contentedness,
Living and blooming thy brief summer-day:—
So, wiser far than I,
That only dream and sigh,
And, sighing, dream my listless life away.
Ah! sweetheart birds, a-building your wee house
In the broad-leaved boughs,
Pausing with merry trill
To praise each other’s skill,
And nod your pretty heads with pretty pride;
Serenely satisfied
To trill and twitter love’s sweet roundelay:—
So, happier than I,
That, lonely, dream and sigh,
And, sighing, dream my lonely life away.
Brown-bodied bees, that scent with nostrils fine
The odorous blossom-wine,
Sipping, with heads half thrust
Into the pollen dust
Of rose and hyacinth and daffodil,
To hive, in amber cell,
A honey feasting for the winter-day:—
So, better far than I,
Self-wrapt, that dream and sigh,
And, sighing, dream my useless life away.
EMMA LAZARUS (1849—1887)
Of Portuguese Jewish ancestry, Emma Lazarus was born in New York City to wealthy parents. She began writing poems as a teenager and her first book, Poems and Translations, was published in 1867. Influenced by the persecution of Russian Jews, Lazarus infused much of her writings with Jewish themes. Lazarus’s fame is immortalized by her timeless sonnet inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. “The New Colossus,” written in 1883, is a well-known and powerful statement of what it means to be an American. Other works by Lazarus include Admetus and Other Poems (1871), Songs of a Semite (1882), and a series of prose poems entitled By the Waters of Babylon (1887).
The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
1492
Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”
Echoes
Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope,
The freshness of the elder lays, the might
Of manly, modern passion shall alight
Upon my Muse’s lips, nor may I cope
(Who veiled and screened by womanhood must grope)
With the world’s strong-armed warriors and recite
The dangers, wounds, and triumphs of the fight;
Twanging the full-stringed lyre through all its scope.
But if thou ever in some lake-floored cave
O’erbrowed by rocks, a wild voice wooed and heard,
Answering at once from heaven and earth and wave,
Lending elf-music to thy harshest word,
Misprize thou not these echoes that belong
To one in love with solitude and song.
The South
Night, and beneath star-blazoned summer skies
Behold the Spirit of the musky South,
A creole with still-burning, languid eyes,
Voluptuous limbs and incense-breathing mouth:
Swathed in spun gauze is she,
From fibres of her own anana tree.
Within these sumptuous woods she lies at ease,
By rich night-breezes, dewy cool, caressed:
’Twixt cypresses and slim palmetto trees,
Like to the golden oriole’s hanging nest,
Her airy hammock swings,
And through the dark her mocking-bird yet sings.
How beautiful she is! A tulip-wreath
Twines round her shadowy, free-floating hair:
Young, weary, passionate, and sad as death,
Dark visions haunt for her the vacant air,
While movelessly she lies
With lithe, lax, folded hands and heavy eyes.
Full well knows she how wide and fair extend
Her groves bright-flowered, her tangled everglades,
Majestic streams that indolently wend
Through lush savanna or dense forest shades,
Where the brown buzzard flies
To broad bayous ’neath hazy-golden skies.
Hers is the savage splendor of the swamp,
With pomp of scarlet and of purple bloom,
Where blow warm, furtive breezes faint and damp,
Strange insects whir, and stalking bitterns boom—
Where from stale waters dead
Oft looms the great-jawed alligator’s head.
Her wealth, her beauty, and the blight on these,—
Of all she is aware: luxuriant woods,
Fresh, living, sunlit, in her dream she sees;
And ever midst those verdant solitudes
The soldier’s wooden cross,
O’ergrown by creeping tendrils and rank moss.
Was hers a dream of empire? was it sin?
And is it well that all was borne in vain?
She knows no more than one who slow doth win,
After fierce fever, conscious life again,
Too tired, too weak, too sad,
By the new light to be or stirred or glad.
From rich sea-islands fringing her green shore,
From broad plantations where swart freemen bend
Bronzed backs in willing labor, from her store
Of golden fruit, from stream, from town, ascend
Life-currents of pure health:
Her aims shall be subserved with boundless wealth.
Yet now how listless and how still she lies,
Like some half-savage, dusky Italian queen,
Rocked in her hammock ’neath her native skies,
With the pathetic, passive, broken mien
Of one who, sorely proved,
Great-souled, hath suffered much and much hat
h loved!
But look! along the wide-branched, dewy glade
Glimmers the dawn: the light palmetto-trees
And cypresses reissue from the shade,
And she hath wakened. Through clear air she sees
The pledge, the brightening ray,
And leaps from dreams to hail the coming day.
Gifts
“O World-God, give me Wealth!” the Egyptian cried.
His prayer was granted. High as heaven, behold
Palace and Pyramid; the brimming tide
Of lavish Nile washed all his land with gold.
Armies of slaves toiled ant-wise at his feet,
World-circling traffic roared through mart and street,
His priests were gods, his spice-balmed kings enshrined,
Set death at naught in rock-ribbed charnels deep.
Seek Pharaoh’s race to-day and ye shall find
Rust and the moth, silence and dusty sleep.
“O World-God, give me Beauty!” cried the Greek.
His prayer was granted. All the earth became
Plastic and vocal to his sense; each peak,
Each grove, each stream, quick with Promethean flame,
Peopled the world with imaged grace and light.
The lyre was his, and his the breathing might
Of the immortal marble, his the play
Of diamond-pointed thought and golden tongue.
Go seek the sun-shine race, ye find to-day
A broken column and a lute unstrung.
“O World-God, give me Power!” the Roman cried.
Great Poems by American Women Page 13
