Great Poems by American Women (19 page)

Say not of Beauty she is good,
Or aught but beautiful,
Or sleek to doves' wings of the wood
Her wild wings of a gull.

 

Call her not wicked; that word's touch
Consumes her like a curse;
But love her not too much, too much,
For that is even worse.

 

O, she is neither good nor bad,
But innocent and wild!
Enshrine her and she dies, who had
The hard heart of a child.

Avoid the reeking herd,
Shun the polluted flock,
Live like that stoic bird,
The eagle of the rock.

 

The huddled warmth of crowds
Begets and fosters hate;
He keeps, above the clouds,
His cliff inviolate.

 

When flocks are folded warm,
And herds to shelter run,
He sails above the storm,
He stares into the sun,

 

If in the eagle's track
Your sinews cannot leap,
Avoid the lathered pack,
Turn from the steaming sheep.

 

If you would keep your soul
From spotted sight or sound,
Live like the velvet mole;
Go burrow underground.

 

And there hold intercourse
With roots of trees and stones,
With rivers at their source,
And disembodied bones.

Let us walk in the white snow

In a soundless space;

With footsteps quiet and slow,

At a tranquil pace,

Under veils of white lace.

 

I shall go shod in silk,

And you in wool,

White as a white cow's milk,

More beautiful

Than the breast of a gull.

 

We shall walk through the still town

In a windless peace;

We shall step upon white down,

Upon silver fleece,

Upon softer than these.

 

We shall walk in velvet shoes:

Wherever we go

Silence will fall like dews

On white silence below.

We shall walk in the snow.

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.

 

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

 

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens, fed on cream and curds.

 

I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.

I had forgotten the gesture of branches
Suddenly white,
And I had forgotten the fragrance of blossoms
Filling a room at night.

 

In remembering the curve of branches
Who beckoned me in vain,
Remembering dark rooms of coolness
Where fragrance was like pain,
I have forgotten all else; there is nothing
That signifies—
There is only the brush of branch and white breath
Against my lips and eyes.

My hands that guide a needle

In their turn are led

Relentlessly and deftly,

As a needle leads a thread.

 

Other hands are teaching

My needle; when I sew

I feel the cool, thin fingers

Of hands I do not know.

 

They urge my needle onward,

They smooth my seams, until

The worry of my stitches

Smothers in their skill.

 

All the tired women,

Who sewed their lives away,

Speak in my deft fingers

As I sew today.

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

 

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

 

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

 

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.

 

Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest—
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.

 

I have had enough—
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.

 

O for some sharp swish of a branch—
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent—
only border on border of scented pinks.

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.