[Mary Meriam]

A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918
by Natalie Clifford Barney

As I must mount to feed those doves of ours,
Perhaps you too will spend nocturnal hours
Upon your roof
So high aloof
That from its terraced bowers
We catch at clouds and draw a bath from showers.
Before the moon has made all pale the night,
Let's meet with flute and viol, and supper light:
A yew lamb, minted sauce, a raisined bun,
A melon riper than the melting sun—
A flask of Xeres, that we've scarce begun—
We'll try the « lunar waltz » while floats afar
Upon the liquid night—night's nenuphar.
Or else, with senses tuned alike perchance,
Reclining love will make the heavens dance;
And if the enemy from aerial cars
Drops death, we'll share it vibrant with the stars!

[Mary Meriam]

Winter: My Secret.
by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I;
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.

Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave the truth untested still.

Spring's an expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours.

Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.

____________________________________________

Since There Is No Escape
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Since there is no escape, since at the end
......My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
......This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
......Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
......And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
......In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead
......If there is any way to baffle death.

____________________________________________

A Farewell
Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

Remember me and smile, as smiling too,
........I have remembered things that went their way—
........The dolls with which I grew too wise to play—
Or over-wise—kissed, as children do,
And so dismissed them; yes, even as you
........Have done with this poor piece of painted clay—
........Not wantonly, but wisely, shall we say?
As one who, haply, tunes his heart anew.

Only I wish her eyes may not be blue,
........The eyes of a new angel. Ah! she may
Miss something that I found,—perhaps the clue
To those long silences of yours, which grew
........Into one word. And should she not be gay,
........Poor lady! Well, she too must have her day.

[Mary Meriam]

Frimaire
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

Dearest, we are like two flowers
Blooming last in a yellowing garden,
A purple aster flower and a red one
Standing alone in a withered desolation.

The garden plants are shattered and seeded,
One brittle leaf scrapes against another,
Fiddling echoes of a rush of petals.
Now only you and I nodding together.

Many were with us; they have all faded.
Only we are purple and crimson,
Only we in the dew-clear mornings,
Smarten into colour as the sun rises.

When I scarcely see you in the flat moonlight,
And later when my cold roots tighten,
I am anxious for morning,
I cannot rest in fear of what may happen.

You or I—and I am a coward.
Surely frost should take the crimson.
Purple is a finer color,
Very splendid in isolation.

So we nod above the broken
Stems of flowers almost rotted.
Many mornings there cannot be now
For us both. Ah, Dear, I love you!

____________________________________________


The Rainy Summer
Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
Height of a threatening noon.

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
And strains against the cloud.

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
Wild honey to cold cells.

[Steve Bucknell]

Looking in a 1913 Pocket Library book at an advert for other Pocket Library editions , familiar with most of the names mentioned there: Jeffries, Morris, Stevenson, Lang....just one woman on this list: Jean Ingelow.”Poems. Selected and arranged by Andrew Lang.” Not a name I'd heard; interesting to find out about her life and work. I like “The Divide” and this sonnet:

WISHING

WHEN I reflect how little I have done,
And add to that how little I have seen,
Then furthermore how little I have won
Of joy, or good, how little known, or been:
I long for other life more full, more keen,
And yearn to change with such as well have run—
Yet reason mocks me—nay, the soul, I weep,
Granted her choice would dare to change with none;
No,—not to feel, as Blondel when his lay
Pierced the strong tower, and Richard answered it—
No,—not to do, as Eustace on the day
He left fair Calais to her weeping fit—
No,—not to be Columbus, waked from sleep
When his new world rose from the charmèd deep.

Jean Ingelow 1820-97.

[Mary Meriam]

I like that one, Steve, thanks.

Here's a good quote from an essay by Annie Finch:

For centuries, the relationship of women poets with our poetic forebears has been fraught. Eager to be embraced by the powerful male poetry establishment, women have turned their backs on the women who came before them, disowning their female poetic ancestors as quaint or trivial. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out in their landmark 1985 essay “Forward into the Past,” the price of success as a woman poet for centuries was to disown one’s literary femininity.

[Janice D. Soderling]

From the collection: Women Poets From Antiquity To Now
Editors Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone

France. Anonymous Songs (12th-13th centuries) translated by Willis Barnstone

I am a young girl, gay,
graceful, not yet
in my fifteenth year.
My breasts have now begun to sway
and swell,
I should be set
for love and hear
its lovely bell.
But I am in an awful prison!
God curse the villain,
that wicked sinner who put me
in a nunnery.
I cannot stand religious life.
God, but I'm far too young!
In my belly I feel sweetly stung.
God curse the man who saddled me
as Jesus' wife.

[Janice D. Soderling]

From Jane Kenyon: Collected Poems

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless. So let evening come.

[Michael Juster]

As usual, I disagree with Annie Finch. I have been working on an essay on the history of female comic poets, and I think in that group there is actually quite an embrace of predecessors when they could find them; both Aphra Behn and Mary Wortley Montagu were respected models for many of their successors, and I see none of the alleged "disowning" in the group I have been studying.

It's just too easy to slap a little unacknowledged Harold Bloom onto the history of female poets and make grand pronouncements, in my opinion.

[Susan McLean]

Michael, I agree that women's reactions to previous women writers are more complex than simple acceptance or rejection. For many of them, just knowing that there had been previous women writers was enormously encouraging. I think that was Dickinson's reaction to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She didn't write like Browning, but she did admire her enormously. But it does vary from woman to woman. Imagine someone making a blanket statement about male writers.

Susan

[Michael Juster]

Yes, I agree. I have noted that Millay seems to be a particular inspiration for both this generation and the previous generation of women, particularly those with a formalist bent. Alicia Stallings, for instance, gets a unique, intense look on her face when she mentions Millay.

As Leonard's mother says on The Big Bang Theory, "Let's do the math!". Among women writing serious poetry today, what is the ratio of women routinely echoing Plath's "Ariel" as opposed to engaging in Finchian rejection of the best-selling female poet of the sixties & seventies (if not later...)? Adrienne Rich influences a smaller group, but I still see a huge number of women influenced by her work and no major female poet engaging in pseudo-Freudian rejection of her.

Aren't Gail White & Julie Kane grateful when the restless spirit of Dorothy Parker haunts their subconscious?

And what about perhaps the greatest female poet of the twentieth century, Anna Akhmatova, who risked her life supporting other poets, particularly other female poets? Is she anything but honored by major female poets of today? It strikes me as hideously culturally biased and ego-drenched to claim that only today's generation of female poets engage in mentoring of the next generation and receive respect for doing so.

In some sense, it is WAY too easy to pile on here, but that kind of vacuous statement by Finch is one of those drips of drivel that today's academics spout with sadly increasing regularity. What's worse is that their audiences are intimidated into nodding with somber agreement. Far worse...