Great Poems by American Women
Page 21
And, through and over everything,
A sense of glad awakening.
The grass, a-tiptoe at my ear,
Whispering to me I could hear;
I felt the rain’s cool finger-tips
Brushed tenderly across my lips,
Laid gently on my sealed sight,
And all at once the heavy night
Fell from my eyes and I could see,—
A drenched and dripping apple-tree,
A last long line of silver rain,
A sky grown clear and blue again.
And as I looked a quickening gust
Of wind blew up to me and thrust
Into my face a miracle
Of orchard-breath, and with the smell,—
I know not how such things can be!—
I breathed my soul back into me.
Ah! Up then from the ground sprang I
And hailed the earth with such a cry
As is not heard save from a man
Who has been dead, and lives again.
About the trees my arms I wound;
Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;
I raised my quivering arms on high;
I laughed and laughed into the sky,
Till at my throat a strangling sob
Caught fiercely, and a great heart-throb
Sent instant tears into my eyes;
O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e’er hereafter hide from me
Thy radiant identity!
Thou canst not move across the grass
But my quick eyes will see Thee pass,
Nor speak, however silently,
But my hushed voice will answer Thee.
I know the path that tells Thy way
Through the cool eve of every day;
God, I can push the grass apart
And lay my finger on Thy heart!
The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
God’s World
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
Wild Swans
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!
Pity Me Not
Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.
This have I known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails;
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.
“Into the golden vessel of great song”
Into the golden vessel of great song
Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast
Let other lovers lie, in love and rest;
Not we,—articulate, so, but with the tongue
Of all the world: the churning blood, the long
Shuddering quiet, the desperate hot palms pressed
Sharply together upon the escaping guest,
The common soul, unguarded, and grown strong.
Longing alone is singer to the lute;
Let still on nettles in the open sigh
The minstrel, that in slumber is as mute
As any man, and love be far and high,
That else forsakes the topmost branch, a fruit
Found on the ground by every passer-by.
“I, being born a woman and distressed”
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
“Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
“What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why”
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts to-night, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
DOROTHY PARKER (1893—1967)
Born in West End, New Jersey, author Dorothy Parker joined the staff of Vogue in 1916 before working at Vanity Fair in 1917. Her first book of witty verse, Enough Rope, was published in 1926 and
became a best-seller. She worked as a book reviewer for The New Yorker in 1927 and continued writing for the magazine for the rest of her career. Parker, famous for her quips, was a talented conversationalist, and soon came to represent the liberated woman of the twenties. Her later poems were published in Sunset Gun (1928), Death and Taxes (1931), and Collected Poems: Not So Deep as a Well (1936). Parker was married twice, and collaborated on film scenarios and a play. She died in New York City on June 7, 1967.
One Perfect Rose
A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
One perfect rose.
I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.
Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.
Unfortunate Coincidence
By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
GENEVIEVE TAGGARD (1894—1948)
Born in Waitsburg, Washington, Genevieve Taggard was raised in Hawaii. Her first published poem appeared in the Oahuan, and she was editor of the magazine four years later. She moved to New York City in 1920 and edited The Measure, a monthly poetry magazine. She frequently contributed to such periodicals as the Freeman, the Masses, and the Liberator. For Eager Lovers (1922), her first volume of verse, was highly praised. It was followed by Hawaiian Hilltop (1923), May Days (1925), a poetry anthology, and Words for the Chisel (1926). Taggard also taught English at Mount Holyoke College in 1929—30, published a biography of Emily Dickinson, and wrote song lyrics for composers like Aaron Copland. She was married twice and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931.
For Eager Lovers
I understand what you were running for,
Slim naked boy, and why from far inland
You came between dark hills. I know the roar
The sea makes in some ears. I understand.
I understand why you were running now,
And how you heard the sea resound, and how
You leaped and left your valley for the long
Brown road. I understand the song
You chanted with your running, with your feet
Marking the measure of your high heart’s beat.
Now you are broken. Seeing your wide brow,
I see your dreams. I understand you now.
Since I have run like you, I understand
The throat’s long wish, the breath that comes so quick,
The heart’s light leap, the heels that drag so sick,
And warped heat wrinkles, lengthening the sand. . . .
Now you are broken. Seeing your wide brow
I see your dreams, understanding now
The cry, the certainty, wide arms—and then
The way rude ocean rises and descends. . . .
I saw you stretched and wounded where tide ends.
I do not want to walk that way again.
LOUISE BOGAN (1897—1970)
Louise Began, born in Livermore Falls, Maine, left Boston University after her marriage in 1916. Widowed with a young child four years later, Bogan first published her poems in The New Republic as well as in Poetry and the Atlantic Monthly. Her books include Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), Collected Poems (1954), and The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923—1968. Bogan also wrote two books of poetry criticism and was poetry critic for The New Yorker. She won many prizes, including two from Poetry magazine and a National Endowment for the Arts award in 1967. Bogan frequently lectured at various colleges and universities and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Medusa
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved,—a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.
Women
Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead,
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.
They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.
They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.
They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.
They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917—2000)
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many poems as a child in Chicago and published in American Childhood when she was thirteen. She won several poetry competitions during the next few years and her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, was praised by critics. Annie Allen (1949) earned Brooks the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, making her the first black to receive this honor in any category. Her other works include a novel, Maud Martha (1953), The Bean Eaters (1960), In the Mecca (1968), two autobiographies, and children’s books. In addition, several of her poems have been published in The Hyde Parker, a community newspaper in Chicago. Brooks taught poetry at local colleges in Chicago and, in 1968, was named poet laureate of Illinois, succeeding Carl Sandburg.
Jessie Mitchell’s Mother
Into her mother’s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.
“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:
Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.
Only a habit would cry if she should die.
A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron. . . .
Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?”
The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’s mother
Reviewed her. Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.
Comparisons shattered her heart, ate at her bulwarks:
The shabby and the bright: she, almost hating her daughter,
Crept into an old sly refuge: “Jessie’s black
And her way will be black, and jerkier even than mine.
Mine, in fact, because I was lovely, had flow
ers
Tucked in the jerks, flowers were here and there. . . .”
She revived for the moment settled and dried-up triumphs,
Forced perfume into old petals, pulled up the droop,
Refueled
Triumphant long-exhaled breaths.
Her exquisite yellow youth. . . .
SYLVIA PLATH (1932—1963)
Sylvia Plath sold her first poem to Seventeen magazine when she was still in high school in Massachusetts. She entered Smith College in 1951 and was co-winner of the Mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952. While in college, Plath suffered a deep depression and breakdown, and was hospitalized for a time. She married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and attended Newnham College, Cambridge, on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1960, her first poetry book, The Colossus, appeared. Under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas,” Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, in 1963. Her powerful poems were famous for their anxiety, hostility, and self-revelation. Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963, at the age of thirty-one. Her last poems were collected in Ariel (1965) and in several other editions in the 1970s.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal