Some Adelaide Crapsey

Amaze



I know

Not these hands

And yet I think there was

A woman like me once had hands

Like these.







Languor After Pain



Pain ebbs,

And like cool balm,

An opiate weariness

Settles on eye-lids, on relaxed

Pale wrists.







Laurel in the Berkshires



Sea-foam

And coral! Oh, I'll

Climb the great pasture rocks

And dream me mermaid in the sun's

Gold flood.







Mad Song

Grey gaolers are my griefs

   That will not let me be free

The bitterness of tears

      Is warder unto me.



I may not leap or run;

   I may not laugh nor sing.

"Thy cell is small," they say,

   "Be still though captivated thing."



But in the dusk of the night,

   Too sudden-swift to see,

Closing and ivory gates

    Are refuge unto me.



My griefs, my tears must watch,

   And cold the watch they keep;

They whisper, whisper there--

   I hear them in my sleep.



They know that I must come,

   And patient watch they keep,

Whispering, shivering there,

   Till I come back from sleep.



But in the dark of a night,

   Too dark for them to see,

The refuge of black gates

   Will open unto me.



Whisper up there in the dark....

   Shiver by bleak winds stung....

My dead lips laugh to hear

   How long you wait...how long!



Grey gaolers are my griefs

   That will not let me free;

The bitterness of tears

   Is warder unto me.

The Warning



Just now,

Out of the strange

Still dusk...as strange, as still...

A white moth flew. Why am I grown

So cold?







These poems are from Verse (Knopf, 1938--a reissue of the posthumous 1915 edition from Manas Press). I found this copy in New Orleans at Kaboom Books last year? The year before? I used to write biographical sketches of authors for Gale Literary Databases/Contemporary Authors series of reference books. (I did hundreds of these on mostly minor figures.) When I was first assigned Crapsey, I was only minimally familiar with her cinquains as a form. She spent most of her energy working not on the cinquains and her poems, but on a book of poetics called Analysis of English Metrics. She never finished it, but the portion she completed was published in 1918 as A Study in English Metrics. Like Joan Murray, she's associated with Smith College, where she taught poetics until her failing health required her to give it up in 1913. Here's an entertaining, and antiquatedly beautiful passage from the 1915 introduction to Verse by Claude Bragdon:



"Although in Meredith's phrase 'a man and a woman both for brains,' she was an intensely feminine presence. Perfection was the passion of her life, and as one discerns it in her verse, one marked it also in her rainment. In the line 'And know my tear-drenched veil along the grass' I see again her drooping figure with some trail of gossamer bewitchment clinging about or drifting after her. Although her body spoke of a fastidious and sedulous care in keeping with her essentially aristocratic nature, she was merciless in the demands she made upon it, and this was the direct cause of the loss of her health. The keen and shining blade of her spirit too greatly scorned its scabbard the body, and for this she paid the uttermost penalty."



Yeah, she's a dark little romantic, drama queen.



You can get a new edition of The Complete Poems and Collected Letters here. And there's a biography too, though it's also out of print.



Until just this moment I would have sworn I once rode in a subway car with "Amaze," miraculously chosen for a Poetry in Motion poster. But I just checked. Never happened. Must have been a dream. Hmm.