Great Poems by American Women
Page 10
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
“A wounded deer leaps highest”
A wounded deer leaps highest,
I’ve heard the hunter tell;
‘Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.
The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs:
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!
Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it cautious arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt” exclaim!
“Hope is the thing with feathers”
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
“There’s a certain slant of light”
There’s a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.
Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.
None may teach it anything,
’T is the seal, despair,—
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.
When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes ’t is like the distance
On the look of death.
“I felt a funeral in my brain”
I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.
And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.
And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll
As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.
“I’m nobody! Who are you?”
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
“He fumbles at your spirit”
He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,
Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow
Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.
“A bird came down the walk”
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,—
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home
Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless, as they swim.
“This is my letter to the world”
This is my letter to the world,
That never wrote to me,—
The simple news that Nature told,
With tender majesty.
Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see;
For love of her, sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me!
“I heard a fly buzz when I died”
I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.
The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.
I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,—and then
There interposed a fly,
With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.
“Because I could not stop for Death”
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then ’t is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.
“If I can stop one heart from breaking”
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
“A narrow fellow in the grass”
A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.
The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.
He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,
Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,—
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.
Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;
But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.
“I neve
r saw a moor”
I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.
“There is no frigate like a book”
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
“My life closed twice before its close”
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
NORA PERRY (1831—1896)
Nora Perry, born in Dudley, Massachusetts, and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, had her first short story published in Harper’s Magazine when she was eighteen. She worked as a Boston correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the Providence Journal. One of her best known poems, “The Love-Knot,” originally published in the National Era, is included here. Perry wrote poetry, novels, and stories for girls, including After the Ball, and Other Poems (1875), Her Lover’s Friend, and Other Poems (1880), For a Woman, a novel (1885), and Hope Benham, a Story for Girls (1894).
The Love-Knot
Tying her bonnet under her chin,
She tied her raven ringlets in;
But not alone in the silken snare
Did she catch her lovely floating hair,
For, tying her bonnet under her chin,
She tied a young man’s heart within.
They were strolling together up the hill,
Where the wind comes blowing merry and chill;
And it blew the curls, a frolicsome race,
All over the happy peach-colored face,
Till, scolding and laughing, she tied them in,
Under her beautiful dimpled chin.
And it blew a color, bright as the bloom
Of the pinkest fuchsia’s tossing plume,
All over the cheeks of the prettiest girl
That ever imprisoned a romping curl,
Or, tying her bonnet under her chin,
Tied a young man’s heart within.
Steeper and steeper grew the hill;
Madder, merrier, chillier still
The western wind blew down, and played
The wildest tricks with the little maid,
As, tying her bonnet under her chin,
She tied a young man’s heart within.
O western wind, do you think it was fair
To play such tricks with her floating hair!
To gladly, gleefully do your best
To blow her against the young man’s breast,
Where he as gladly folded her in,
And kissed her mouth and her dimpled chin?
Ah! Ellery Vane, you little thought,
An hour ago, when you besought
This country lass to walk with you,
After the sun had dried the dew,
What perilous danger you’d be in,
As she tied her bonnet under her chin!
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1832—1888)
Born in Cermantown, Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was educated by her father, Bronson Alcott. She began to write for publication at the age of sixteen. Her first book, Flower Fables, was published when she was twenty-two. Her poems and short stories were often printed in the Atlantic Monthly. Much of Alcott’s work was autobiographical; her job as a volunteer nurse in the Union Hospital during the Civil War resulted in Hospital Sketches (1863). Alcott’s fame is centered on her novel Little Women (1868), which tells of her own family life. The book became tremendously popular, and started a series of sequels, among them Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Alcott supported both women’s suffrage and the temperance movement.
Thoreau’s Flute
We, sighing, said, “Our Pan is dead;
His pipe hangs mute beside the river;
Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
But Music’s airy voice is fled.
Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
The bluebird chants a requiem;
The willow-blossom waits for him;—
The Genius of the wood is lost.”
Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
“For such as he there is no death;
His life the eternal life commands;
Above man’s aims his nature rose:
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent,
And turned to poetry Life’s prose.
“Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
To him grew human or divine,—
Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
Such homage Nature ne’er forgets,
And yearly on the coverlid
’Neath which her darling lieth hid
Will write his name in violets.
“To him no vain regrets belong,
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
O lonely friend! he still will be
A potent presence, though unseen,—
Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
Seek not for him,—he is with thee.”
MARY ASHLEY TOWNSEND (1832—1901)
Using the pseudonym “Xariffa,” Mary Ashley Townsend contributed a series of essays entitled “Quillotypes” to the New Orleans Delta. She also published articles in the Crescent under the name “Mary Ashley” and sent in letters about her trip to Mexico. Her first book was a novel, and was followed by Xariffa’s Poems (1870). The Captain’s Story (1874), a dramatic verse about a white man who discovers his mother was biracial, was highly praised by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Down the Bayou and Other Poems (1881) contained “Creed,” her most well-known poem at the time. Married with three daughters, Townsend was chosen to write for the New Orleans Cotton Exposition, and was the first American woman to be a member of the Liceo Hidalgo, a literary club in Mexico.
Creed
I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids when I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And, from its exile in the isles of death,
Life would come gladly back along my veins.
I believe if I were dead,
And you upon my lifeless heart should tread,
Not knowing what the poor clod chanced to be,
It would find sudden pulse beneath the touch
Of him it ever loved in life so much,
And throb again, warm, tender, true to thee.
I believe if on my grave,
Hidden in woody deeps or by the wave,
Your eyes should drop some warm tears of regret,
From every salty seed of your dear grief,
Some fair, sweet blossom would leap into leaf,
To prove death could not make my love forget.
I believe if I should fade
Into those mystic realms where light is made,
And you should long once more my face to see,
I would come forth upon the hills of night
And gather stars, like fagots, till thy sight,
Led by their beacon blaze, fell full on me!
I believe my faith in thee,
Strong as my life, so nobly plac
ed to be,
I would as soon expect to see the sun
Fall like a dead king from his height sublime,
His glory stricken from the throne of time,
As thee unworth the worship thou hast won.
I believe who hath not loved
Hath half the sweetness of his life unproved;
Like one who, with the grape within his grasp,
Drops it with all its crimson juice unpressed,
And all its luscious sweetness left unguessed,
Out from his careless and unheeding clasp.
I believe love, pure and true,
Is to the soul a sweet, immortal dew,
That gems life’s petals in its hours of dusk;
The waiting angels see and recognize
The rich crown jewel, Love, of Paradise,
When life falls from us like a withered husk.