Great Poems by American Women
Page 17
Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,
Carves it apace in toys fantastical.
But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
Muses which god he shall immortalize
In the proud Parian’s perpetuity,
Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
That the night cometh wherein none shall see.
With the Tide1
Somewhere I read, in an old book whose name
Is gone from me, I read that when the days
Of a man are counted, and his business done,
There comes up the shore at evening, with the tide,
To the place where he sits, a boat—
And in the boat, from the place where he sits, he sees,
Dim in the dusk, dim and yet so familiar,
The faces of his friends long dead; and knows
They come for him, brought in upon the tide,
To take him where men go at set of day.
Then rising, with his hands in theirs, he goes
Between them his last steps, that are the first
Of the new life—and with the ebb they pass,
Their shaken sail grown small upon the moon.
Often I thought of this, and pictured me
How many a man who lives with throngs about him,
Yet straining through the twilight for that boat
Shall scarce make out one figure in the stern,
And that so faint its features shall perplex him
With doubtful memories—and his heart hang back.
But others, rising as they see the sail
Increase upon the sunset, hasten down,
Hands out and eyes elated; for they see
Head over head, crowding from bow to stern,
Repeopling their long loneliness with smiles,
The faces of their friends; and such go forth
Content upon the ebb tide, with safe hearts.
But never
To worker summoned when his day was done
Did mounting tide bring in such freight of friends
As stole to you up the white wintry shingle
That night while they that watched you thought you slept.
Softly they came, and beached the boat, and gathered
In the still cove under the icy stars,
Your last-born, and the dear loves of your heart,
And all men that have loved right more than ease,
And honor above honors; all who gave
Free-handed of their best for other men,
And thought their giving taking: they who knew
Man’s natural state is effort, up and up—
All these were there, so great a company
Perchance you marvelled, wondering what great ship
Had brought that throng unnumbered to the cove
Where the boys used to beach their light canoe
After old happy picnics—
But these, your friends and children, to whose hands
Committed, in the silent night you rose
And took your last faint steps—
These led you down, O great American,
Down to the Winter night and the white beach,
And there you saw that the huge hull that waited
Was not as are the boats of the other dead,
Frail craft for a brief passage; no, for this
Was first of a long line of towering transports,
Storm-worn and ocean-weary every one,
The ships you launched, the ships you manned, the ships
That now, returning from their sacred quest
With the thrice-sacred burden of their dead,
Lay waiting there to take you forth with them,
Out with the ebb tide, on some farther quest.
WILLA CATHER (1873-1947)
Known primarily for her fiction novels such as Alexander’s Bridge (1912), O Pioneers! (1913), and My Antonia (1918), Willa Cather was born in Virginia and moved to frontier Nebraska when she was a child. Cather managed and edited the Home Monthly magazine in 1896-97 and reviewed drama and music for the Pittsburgh Daily Leader. Cather became a schoolteacher in 1901 and published her poetry book, April Twilights, in 1903. Her 1905 collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, earned her the job of managing editor of McClure’s Magazine.
“Grandmither, think not I forget!”
Grandmither, think not I forget, when I come back to town,
An’ wander the old ways again an’ tread them up an’ down.
I never smell the clover bloom, nor see the swallows pass,
Without I mind how good ye were unto a little lass.
I never hear the winter rain a-pelting all night through,
Without I think and mind me of how cold it falls on you.
And if I come not often to your bed beneath the thyme,
Mayhap ’t is that I’d change wi’ ye, and gie my bed for thine,
Would like to sleep in thine.
I never hear the summer winds among the roses blow,
Without I wonder why it was ye loved the lassie so.
Ye gave me cakes and lollipops and pretty toys a score,—
I never thought I should come back and ask ye now for more.
Grandmither, gie me your still, white hands, that lie upon your breast,
For mine do beat the dark all night and never find me rest;
They grope among the shadows an’ they beat the cold black air,
They go seekin’ in the darkness, an’ they never find him there,
As They never find him there.
Grandmither, gie me your sightless eyes, that I may never see
His own a-burnin’ full o’ love that must not shine for me.
Grandmither, gie me your peaceful lips, white as the kirkyard snow,
For mine be red wi’ burnin’ thirst an’ he must never know.
Grandmither, gie me your clay-stopped ears, that I may never hear
My lad a-singin’ in the night when I am sick wi’ fear;
A-singing when the moonlight over a’ the land is white—
Aw God! I’ll up an’ go to him a-singin’ in the night,
A-callin’ in the night.
Grandmither, gie me your clay-cold heart that has forgot to ache
For mine be fire within my breast and yet it cannot break.
It beats an’ throbs forever for the things that must not be,—
An’ can ye not let me creep in an’ rest awhile by ye?
A little lass afeard o’ dark slept by ye years agone—
Ah, she has found what night can hold ‘twixt sunset an’ the dawn!
So when I plant the rose an’ rue above your grave for ye,
Ye’ll know it’s under rue an’ rose that I would like to be,
That I would like to be.
A Likeness
Portrait Bust of an Unknown, Capitol, Rome
In every line a supple beauty—
The restless head a little bent—
Disgust of pleasure, scorn of duty,
The unseeing eyes of discontent.
I often come to sit beside him,
This youth who passed and left no trace
Of good or ill that did betide him,
Save the disdain upon his face.
The hope of all his House, the brother
Adored, the golden-hearted son,
Whom Fortune pampered like a mother;
And then—a shadow on the sun.
Whether he followed Cæsar’s trumpet,
Or chanced the riskier game at home
To find how favor played the strumpet
In fickle politics at Rome;
Whether he dr
eamed a dream in Asia
He never could forget by day,
Or gave his youth to some Aspasia,
Or gamed his heritage away;
Once lost, across the Empire’s border
This man would seek his peace in vain;
His look arraigns a social order
Somehow entrammelled with his pain.
“The dice of gods are always loaded”;
One gambler, arrogant as they,
Fierce, and by fierce injustice goaded,
Left both his hazard and the play.
Incapable of compromises,
Unable to forgive or spare,
The strange awarding of the prizes
He had no fortitude to bear.
Tricked by the forms of things material—
The solid-seeming arch and stone,
The noise of war, the pomp imperial,
The heights and depths about a throne—
He missed, among the shapes diurnal,
The old, deep-travelled road from pain,
The thoughts of men which are eternal,
In which, eternal, men remain.
Ritratto d’ignoto; defying
Things unsubstantial as a dream—
An Empire, long in ashes lying—
His face still set against the stream.
Yes, so he looked, that gifted brother
I loved, who passed and left no trace,
Not even—luckier than this other—
His sorrow in a marble face.
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY (1874-1922)
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Josephine Preston Peabody first published one of her poems in The Woman’s Journal when she was fourteen. She published poems in a few more magazines before the books, The Wayfarers (1898), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1900), and Marlowe (1901), a one-act play, appeared. Peabody was an English instructor at Wellesley College, and she married a Harvard engineering professor in 1906. The Piper (1909), a verse drama on the legend of the Pied Piper, won the Stratford Prize Competition and was performed at the Memorial Theatre in England. In addition to writing poetry for adults and children in the early twentieth century, Peabody also wrote dramas, including a play about Mary Wollstonecraft in 1922.
Prelude
Words, words,
Ye are like birds.
Would I might fold you,
In my hands hold you
Till ye were warm and your feathers a-flutter;
Till, in your throats,
Tremulous notes
Foretold the songs ye would utter.
Words, words,
Ye are all birds!
Would ye might linger
Here on my finger,
Till I kissed each, and then sent you a-winging
Wild, perfect flight,
Through morn to night,
Singing and singing and singing!
Rubric
I’ll not believe the dullard dark,
Nor all the winds that weep,
But I shall find the farthest dream
That kisses me, asleep.
The Nightingale Unheard
Yes, Nightingale, through all the summer-time
We followed on, from moon to golden moon;
From where Salerno day-dreams in the noon,
And the far rose of Pæstum once did climb.
All the white way beside the girdling blue,
Through sun-shrill vines and campanile chime,
We listened;—from the old year to the new.
Brown bird, and where were you?
You, that Ravello lured not, throned on high
And filled with singing out of sun-burned throats!
Nor yet Minore of the flame-sailed boats;
Nor yet—of all bird-song should glorify—
Assisi, Little Portion of the blest,
Assisi, in the bosom of the sky,
Where God’s own singer thatched his sunward nest.
That little, heavenliest!
And north and north, to where the hedge-rows are,
That beckon with white looks an endless way;
Where, through the fair wet silverness of May,
A lamb shines out as sudden as a star,
Among the cloudy sheep; and green, and pale,
The may-trees reach and glimmer, near or far,
And the red may-trees wear a shining veil.
And still, no nightingale!
The one vain longing,—through all journeyings,
The one: in every hushed and hearkening spot,—
All the soft-swarming dark where you were not,
Still longed for! Yes, for sake of dreams and wings,
And wonders, that your own must ever make
To bower you close, with all hearts’ treasurings;
And for that speech toward which all hearts do ache;—
Even for Music’s sake.
But most, his music whose beloved name
Forever writ in water of bright tears,
Wins to one grave-side even the Roman years,
That kindle there the hallowed April flame
Of comfort-breathing violets. By that shrine
Of Youth, Love, Death, forevermore the same,
Violets still!—When falls, to leave no sign,
The arch of Constantine.
Most for his sake we dreamed. Tho’ not as he,
From that lone spirit, brimmed with human woe
Your song once shook to surging overflow.
How was it, sovran dweller of the tree,
His cry, still throbbing in the flooded shell
Of silence with remembered melody,
Could draw from you no answer to the spell?
—O Voice, O Philomel?
Long time we wondered (and we knew not why):—
Nor dream, nor prayer, of wayside gladness born,
Nor vineyards waiting, nor reproachful thorn,
Nor yet the nested hill-towns set so high
All the white way beside the girdling blue,—
Nor olives, gray against a golden sky,
Could serve to wake that rapturous voice of you.
But the wise silence knew.
O Nightingale unheard!—Unheard alone,
Throughout that woven music of the days
From the faint sea-rim to the market-place,
And ring of hammers on cathedral stone!
So be it, better so: that there should fail
For sun-filled ones, one blessed thing unknown.
To them, be hid forever,—and all hail!
Sing never, Nightingale.
Sing, for the others! Sing; to some pale cheek
Against the window, like a starving flower.
Loose, with your singing, one poor pilgrim hour
Of journey, with some Heart’s Desire to seek.
Loose, with your singing, captives such as these
In misery and iron, hearts too meek,
For voyage—voyage over dreamful seas
To lost Hesperides.
Sing not for free-men. Ah, but sing for whom
The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade,
The windows take no heed of light nor shade,—
The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom.
Sing near! So in that golden overflowing
They may forget their wasted human bloom;
Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing,—
Reck not of life’s bright going!
Sing not for lovers, side by side that hark;
Nor unto parted lovers, save they be
Parted indeed by more than makes the Sea,
Where never hope shall meet—tike mounting lark—
Far Joy’s uprising; and no memories
Abide to star the music-haunted dark:
To them that sit in darkness, such as these,
Pour down, pour down heart’s-ease.
Not in Kings’ gardens. No; but where there haunt
T
he world’s forgotten, both of men and birds;
The alleys of no hope and of no words,
The hidings where men reap not, though they plant;
But toil and thirst—so dying and so born;—
And toil and thirst to gather to their want,
From the lean waste, beyond the daylight’s scorn,
—To gather grapes of thorn!
And for those two, your pilgrims without tears,
Who prayed largess where there was no dearth,
Forgive it to their human-happy ears:
Forgive it them, brown music of the Earth,
Unknowing,—though the wiser silence knew!
Forgive it to the music of the spheres
That while they walked together so, the Two
Together,—heard not you.
AMY LOWELL (1874—1925)
Experimenting with free verse and polyphonic prose, Amy Lowell was the foremost American poet in the Imagist movement. The Massachusetts-born Lowell was educated in private schools. It wasn’t until 1910 that she published her first poem in the Atlantic Monthly, and her first book, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, was published in 1912. In 1913, Lowell met Ezra Pound and the Imagists, and started trying out new forms of verse that veered away from traditional rhyming sequences. Some of her books of poetry are: Sword Blades and Poppy Seed (1914), Men, Women, and Ghosts (1916), and Pictures of the Floating World (1919). In addition to several more poetry books, Lowell also edited three Imagist anthologies. Of the sampling of poems that appear here, “Patterns” is her most famous.
The Letter
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor