Adelaide Crapsey

These be Three silent things: The falling snow. . the hour Before the dawn. . the mouth of one Just dead.

Well and If day on day Follows, and weary year On year. . and ever days and years. . Well?

Written in A Moment of Exasperation How can you lie so still? All day I watch And never a blade of all the green sod moves To show where restlessly you toss and turn, And fling a desperate arm or draw up knees Stiffened and aching from their long disuse; I watch all night and not one ghost comes forth To take its freedom of the midnight hour. Oh, have you no rebellion in your bones? The very worms must scorn you where you lie, A pallid mouldering acquiescent folk, Meek habitants of unresented graves. Why are you there in your straight row on row Where I must ever see you from my bed That in your mere dumb presence iterate The text so weary in my ears: "Lie still And rest; be patient and lie still and rest." I'll not be patient! I will not lie still! There is a brown road runs between the pines, And further on the purple woodlands lie, And still beyond blue mountains lift and loom; And I would walk the road and I would be Deep in the wooded shade and I would reach The windy mountain tops that touch the clouds. My eyes may follow but my feet are held. Recumbent as you others must I too Submit? Be mimic of your movelessness With pillow and counterpane for stone and sod? And if the many sayings of the wise Teach of submission I will not submit But with a spirit all unreconciled Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars. Better it is to walk, to run, to dance, Better it is to laugh and leap and sing, To know the open skies of dawn and night, To move untrammeled down the flaming noon, And I will clamour it through weary days Keeping the edge of deprivation sharp, Nor with the pliant speaking on my lips Of resignation, sister to defeat. I'll not be patient. I will not lie still. And in ironic quietude who is The despot of our days and lord of dust Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop Grim casual comment on rebellion's end; "Yes, yes . . Wilful and petulant but now As dead and quiet as the others are." And this each body and ghost of you hath heard That in your graves do therefore lie so still.

With swift Great sweep of her Magnificent arm my pain Clanged back the doors that shut my soul From life.

The poet pursues his beautiful theme; The preacher his golden beatitude; And I run after a vanishing dream— The glittering, will-o’-the-wispish gleam Of the properly scholarly attitude— The highly desirable, the very advisable, The hardly acquirable, properly scholarly attitude. I envy the savage without any clothes, Who lives in a tropical latitude; It’s little of general culture he knows. But then he escapes the worrisome woes Of the properly scholarly attitude— The unceasingly sighed over, wept over, cried over, The futilely died over, properly scholarly attitude. I work and I work till I nearly am dead, And could say what the watchman said—that I could! But still, with a sigh and a shake of the head, “You don’t understand,” it is ruthlessly said, “The properly scholarly attitude— The aye to be sought for, wrought for and fought for, The ne’er to be caught for, properly scholarly attitude—” I really am sometimes tempted to say That it’s merely a glittering platitude; That people have just fallen into the way, When lacking a subject, to tell of the sway Of the properly scholarly attitude— The easily preachable, spread-eagle speechable, In practice unreachable, properly scholarly attitude.

Listen. . With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

Seen on a Night in November How frail Above the bulk Of crashing water hangs, Autumnal, evanescent, wan, The moon.

In the cold I will rise, I will bathe In waters of ice; myself Will shiver, and shrive myself, Alone in the dawn, and anoint Forehead and feet and hands; I will shutter the windows from light, I will place in their sockets the four Tall candles and set them a-flame In the grey of the dawn; and myself Will lay myself straight in my bed, And draw the sheet under my chin.

Scarlet the poppies Blue the corn-flowers, Golden the wheat. Gold for The Eternal: Blue of Our Lady: Red for the five Wounds of her Son.

I know Not these my hands And yet I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these.