Great Poems by American Women
Page 20
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light—
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit—
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
with a russet coat.
Or the melon—
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste—
it is better to taste of frost—
the exquisite frost—
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves—
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince—
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
Heat
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air-
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.
Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.
Helen
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON (1886—1966)
The first African-American woman poet to become famous since Frances E. W. Harper, Georgia Douglas Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and educated in public schools. Her emotional style is evident in her three books: The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), and An Autumn Love Cycle (1928).
The Heart of a Woman
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.
The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars,
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.
MARIANNE MOORE (1887—1972)
Characterized by a highly personal and unique style, Marianne Moore’s verse has earned a distinctive place in twentieth-century American poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore taught school after graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1909. She worked as an assistant librarian in the New York Public Library during 1921-25. Without her knowledge, Poems (1921) was published, edited by Hilda Doolittle and Winifred Ellerman. Moore’s verse also appeared in various magazines and periodicals, as well as in Selected Poems (1935), The Pangolin and Other Poems (1936), What Are Years (1941), and Collected Poems (1951), which won her a Pulitzer Prize plus two additional awards.
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they
are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same things may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—
nor is it valid
to discriminate against ‘business documents and
school-books’; all these phenomena are important. One must make a
distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is
not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
‘literalists of
the imagination’—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, shall we
have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
Sojourn in the Whale
Trying to open locked doors with a sword, threading
The points of needles, planting shade trees
Upside down; swallowed by the opaqueness of one whom the seas
Love better than they love you, Ireland—
You have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.
You have been compelled by hags to spin
Gold thread from straw and have heard men say: “There is a feminine
Temperament in direct contrast to
Ours which makes her do these things. Circumscribed by a
Heritage of blindness and native
Incompetence, she will become wise and will be forced to give
In. Compelled by experience, she
Will turn back; water seeks its own level”: and you
Have smiled. ”Water in motion is far
From level.” You have seen it when obstacles happened to bar
The path—rise automatically.
Roses Only
You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than
An asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form—we are jus-
tified in supposing
That you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and
sharp,
Conscious of surpassing—by dint of native superiority and liking for
everything
Self dependent—anything an
Ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided to attempt
through sheer
Reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation, is idle.
You cannot make us
Think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it
Is not because your petals are
the without-which-nothing of pre-
eminence. You would look—minus
Thorns—like a what-is-this, a mere
Peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew
But what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-
ordination? Guarding the
Infinitesmal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
The remark that is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too
violently,
Your thorns are the best part of you.
To a Steam Roller
The illustration
Is nothing to you without the application.
You lack half wit. You crush all the particles down
Into close conformity and then walk back and forth on them.
Sparkling chips of rock
Are crushed down to the level of the parent block.
Were not “impersonal judgment in aesthetic
Matters, a metaphysical impossibility,” you
Might fairly achieve
It. As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive
Of one’s attending upon you, but to question
The congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.
EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892—1950)
Famous for her lyrical and passionate sonnets, Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, and attended Vassar, graduating in 1917. At nineteen, Millay’s poem “Renascence” was published in The Lyric Year (1912). She lived in New York’s Greenwich Village, and was associated with the youthful, bohemian lifestyle prevalent there in the 1920s. Renascence and Other Poems (1917) was her first book of verse. In 1920, she published her second book of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles, and the following year, Second April appeared, along with two plays, Two Slatterns and a King and The Lamp and the Bell. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her book, Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. That same year, Millay married a Dutch businessman and moved to Austerlitz, New York, where she died in 1950.
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.
Renascence
All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.
Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.
Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line
,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!
I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,