And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentleman, ladies,
These are my hands,
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
“A miracle!”
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.
And there is a charge, very large charge,
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Alphabetical List of Poets
Alcott, Louisa May
Allen, Elizabeth Akers
Bates, Katharine Lee
Beers, Ethel Lynn
Bleecker, Ann Eliza
Bogan, Louise
Bradstreet, Anne
Branch, Anna Hempstead
Bristol, Augusta Cooper
Brooks, Gwendolyn
Brooks, Maria Gowen
Cary, Alice
Cary, Phoebe
Cather, Willa
Channing-Stetson,
Grace Ellery
Child, Lydia Maria
Cooke, Rose Terry
Coolbrith, Ina Donna
Crosby, Fanny
Davidson, Lucretia
Dickinson, Emily
Dodge, Mary Mapes
Doolittle, Hilda
Dunbar-Nelson, Alice
Embury, Emma C.
Fuller, Margaret
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Grimké,
Charlotte L. Forten
Guiney, Louise Imogen
Hale, Sarah Josepha
Hall, Hazel
Harper, Frances E. W.
Hewitt, Mary E.
Howe, Julia Ward
Jackson, Helen Hunt
Jewett, Sarah Orne
Johnson, Georgia Douglas
Kinney,
Elizabeth Clementine
Larcom, Lucy
Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne
Lazarus, Emma
Lowell, Amy
Millay, Edna St. Vincent
Monroe, Harriet
&n
bsp; Moore, Marianne
Morton, Sarah Wentworth
Moulton, Louise Chandler
Oakes-Smith, Elizabeth
Osgood, Frances Sargent
Parker, Dorothy
Peabody, Josephine Preston
Perry, Nora
Piatt, Sarah Morgan
Plath, Sylvia
Reese, Lizette Woodworth
Rowson, Susanna Haswell
Sangster, Margaret E.
Sigourney, Lydia Huntley
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Taggard, Genevieve
Teasdale, Sara
Thaxter, Celia
Thomas, Edith M.
Thorpe, Rose Hartwick
Townsend, Mary Ashley
Trask, Kate Nichols
Warren, Mercy Otis
Wharton, Edith
Wheatley, Phillis
Whitman, Sarah Helen
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
Willard, Emma Hart
Woolson,
Constance Fenimore
Wylie, Elinor
Alphabetical List of Titles and First Lines
Titles are given, in italics, only when distinct from the first lines.
A bird came down the walk
A bit of color against the blue
A black cat among roses
Above them spread a stranger sky
Across the narrow beach we flit
Advice Gratis to Certain Women
African Chief, The
After the fierce midsummer all ablaze
A gentle maiden, whose large loving eyes
Ah! little flower, upspringing, azure-eyed
Ah! woman still
Aidenn
All Greece hates
All I could see from where I stood
“All quiet along the Potomac,” they say
All things within this fading world hath end
Almost afraid they led her in
Along Ancona’s hills the shimmering heat
A mariner sat on the shrouds one night
Amber husk
America
America, Commerce, and Freedom
America the Beautiful
A narrow fellow in the grass
And, lo! leading a blessed host comes one
And this was once the realm of Nature, where
A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep
Answer, The
Any Woman to a Soldier
Appraisal
As by the instrument she took her place
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met
As the wind at play with a spark
A tall tree talking with the wind
At a Symphony
At the dead of night by the side of the Sea
At westward window of a palace gray
Author to Her Book, The
A vestal priestess, proudly pure
Avoid the reeking herd
A wounded deer leaps highest
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight
Barter
Battle Hymn of the Republic
Beauty
Because I could not stop for Death
Beds of Fleur-de-lys, The
Before the Birth of One of Her Children
Behold, I send thee to the heights of song
Bell of the Wreck, The
Bend low, O dusky Night
Bluebeard’s Closet
Bright, glowing Sappho! child of love and song!
Burial of Schlesinger, The
By the time you swear you’re his
Caged Bird, A
Come, my Susan, quit your chamber
Common Inference, A
Conservative, A
Creed
Crime of the Ages, The
Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night
Daddy
Dancing Girl, A
Day, in melting purple dying
Dead Child, The
Delilah
Democracy
Double Standard, A
Do you blame me that I loved him?
Dream, A
Drowned Mariner, The
Eagle and the Mole, The
Echoes
Ellen Learning to Walk
Emerson
England’s sun was slowly setting o’er the hill-tops far away
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare
Evening Prospect, An
Farewell, A
Far up the lonely mountain-side
Fasten the chamber!
Few, in the days of early youth
First Fig
First of that train which cursed the wave
Flaxman
For Eager Lovers
For, lo! the living God doth bare his arm
1492
Friendship After Love
From a bright hearth-stone of our land
Fruitionless
Garden by Moonlight, The
Georgia Volunteer, A
Gifts
Giving Back the Flower
God’s World
Good-by: nay, do not grieve that it is over
Grandma told me all about it
Grandmither, think not I forget, when I come back to town
Grieve Not, Ladies
Hail, happy saint! on thine immortal throne
Hail, happy shades! though clad with heavy snows
Harold the Valiant
Heard you that shriek? It rose
Heart of a Woman, The
Heat
Heaven is mirrored, Love, deep in thine eyes
He fumbles at your spirit
Helen
Helen Hunt Jackson
Her Horoscope
He who plants a tree
He woos me with those honeyed words
High at the window in her cage
High-lying, sea-blown stretches of green turf
Hope is the thing with feathers
How blest a life a sailor leads
How long it seems since that mild April night
How say that by law we may torture and chase
Hymn to the Evening, An
I am weary of the working
I, being born a woman and distressed
I believe if I should die
I do not own an inch of land
I felt a funeral in my brain
If ever two were one, then surely we
If I can stop one heart from breaking
If thy sad heart, pining for human love
If to repeat thy name when none may hear me
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees
I had forgotten the gesture of branches
I had no thought of violets of late
I have done it again
I have had enough
I heard a fly buzz when I died
I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses
I hoped that he would love me
I know a story, fairer, dimmer, sadder
I know it must be winter (though I sleep)
I’ll not believe the dullard dark
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over
I love my life, but not too well
I mid the hills was born
Imitation of Sappho
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I never saw a moor
In every line a supple beauty
Indian Names
Indian’s Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers, The
Individuality
Instruction
Instrumental Music
In tangled wreaths, in clustered gleaming stars
In the earnest path of duty
In the midnight of darkness and terror
Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body
Into the golden vessel of great song
I Shall Not Care
I Sit and Sew
I sit and sew—a useless task it seems
I stood and watched the still, mysterious Night
It lies around us like a cloud
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle
It sings to me in sunshine
I understand what you were running for
I walk down the garden paths
Jessie Mitchell’s Mother
Kiss, The
Lady Lazarus
Last Giustiniani, The
Late-born and woman-souled I dare not hope
Laugh, and the world laughs with you
Learning to Read
Let deep dejection hide her pallid face
Let No Charitable Hope
Letter, The
Let us walk in the white snow
Life
Life has loveliness to sell
Life, like a marble block, is given to all
Likeness, A
Lincoln
Lines
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Look, The
Louisa May Alcott
Love-Knot, The
Love Song
Love Unexpressed
Love Unsought
Medusa
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
Minuet, The
Morning-Glory, The
Mother Who Died Too, The
My Babes in the Wood
My beautiful trembler! how wildly she shrinks!
My candle burns at both ends
My hands that guide a needle
My heart has grown rich with the passing of years
My Last Dance
My life closed twice before its close
My Lighthouses
My mother’s hands are cool and fair
Nearer Home
Great Poems by American Women Page 22
