Nava Atlas's Blog, page 42

Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

The extraordinary Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561 – 1621), was an almost exact contemporary of Shakespeare and has been one of the candidates in various conspiracy theories for the actual author of Shakespeare’s works, in particular his sonnets.

Even though this is nonsense, Mary Sidney, sister of the more famous Philip, was arguably Shakespeare’s – and almost everyone else’s – equal as a poet.

This introduction to Mary Sidney’s life and work is excerpted from Killing the Angel: Early Transgressive British Woman Writers by Francis Booth ©2021, reprinted by permission.

Background

In her time, Mary was probably known more as a host and patron to other writers than as a writer herself. Mary had grown up attached to the court of Elizabeth I where her mother Lady Mary Dudley – the sister of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s most favored courtier and perhaps the Queen’s lover – was a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber.

In these surroundings Mary received a liberal education, including scripture, the classics, rhetoric, French, Italian, and Latin, in which she was fluent, and possibly some Greek and Hebrew. Mary was also proficient at the ‘female’ accomplishments of singing and playing the lute as well as needlework, so much so that so that her name was used in endorsing needlework patterns and for books of music.

In 1577, Mary married Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, a family friend and wealthy landowner; among his properties were Wilton House near Salisbury, and Baynard’s Castle in London, where the couple entertained Queen Elizabeth to dinner. Henry died in 1601, leaving Mary less well-off than she had expected, and with the provision in his will that she should not remarry.

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The Psalms of David

Her largest work is her complete translation of the Psalms of David, a form known as a psalter. She and her brother worked on the translations together at first but he died in battle overseas in 1586 when they had only reached Psalm 43 of 150; she finished them by herself, also going back and revising all the earlier ones, so that the whole work may be considered to be hers.

Mary was at the time overshadowed by her famous brother Philip Sidney, who was a courtier, a warrior and considered then to be the ideal gentleman. He was indeed a major literary figure: his sonnet cycle Astrophel and Stella rivals Shakespeare’s sonnets and his critical work The Defence of Poesie introduced the ideas of continental theorists to England.

But The Sidney Psalter, largely the work of Mary, and certainly all overseen by her, is a masterclass of poetic styles and techniques: every conceivable poetic form and structure is included and all brilliantly executed; it is a great tour de force of poetry, one of the greatest extended works of verse of its own age, and indeed of any age.

When the volume of Psalms was published, Mary assumed authorship in her own name, Mary Sidney Herbert, but dedicated it to ‘the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney.’ It was highly appreciated at the time; John Donne was a fan and wrote a congratulatory poem.

So though some have, some may some Psalms translate,
We thy Sydnean Psalms shall celebrate …

The Psalms as a collection are known in the Church of England as the Book of Common Prayer, and regular churchgoers will be quite shocked by the Sidney translations of them. In their normal Church of England version, the Psalms as used in church services are almost unchanged since Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translations, which were largely preserved in the King James Bible of 1611. The Sidney versions are not translations so much as poetic reimaginings. The well-known Psalm 110, Dixit Dominus is a good example: the version known to Church of England attendees ever since services were conducted in English goes:

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.
The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.
The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of his wrath.
He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.
He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift up the head.

And here is Mary Sidney’s radically different version:

Thus to my lord, the Lord did say:
      Take up thy seat at my right hand,
      Till all thy foes that proudly stand,
I prostrate at thy footstool lay.
      From me thy staff of might
           Sent out of Sion goes:
     As victor then prevail in fight,
           And rule repining foes.

But as for them that willing yield,
      In solemn robes they glad shall go:
      Attending thee when thou shalt show
Triumphantly thy troops in field:
      In field as thickly set
      With warlike youthful train
As pearlèd plain with drops is wet,
      Of sweet Aurora’s rain.

The Lord did swear, and never he
      What once he swear will disavow:
       As was Melchisedech so thou,
An everlasting priest shalt be.
      At hand still ready priest
            To guard thee from annoy,
      Shall sit the Lord that loves thee best,
            And kings in wrath destroy.

Thy Realm shall many Realm contain:
      Thy slaughtered foes thick heaped lie:
      With crushed head even he shall die,
Who head of many Realm doth reign.
      If passing on these ways
      Thou taste of troubled streams:
      Shall that eclipse thy shining rays?
      Nay light thy glories beams.

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Killing the Angel on Amazon US*
Killing the Angel on Amazon UK*
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Praise from fellow poets

Despite living her earlier life in her brother’s shadow, Mary was recognized quite early on as an extraordinary talent and respected by her contemporaries both male and female; in addition to the recognition given to the publication of the Psalms, Mary was the only woman included in John Bodenham’s poetry collection Belvidere, 1600. Æmalia Lanyer’s encomium, from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, was dedicated to her:

This nymph, quoth he, great Pembroke hight by name,
Sister to valiant Sidney, whose clear light Gives light
to all that tread true paths of Fame,
Who in the globe of heaven doth shine so bright

For to this Lady now I will repair,
Presenting her the fruits of idle hours;
Though many Books she writes that are more rare,
Yet there is honey in the meanest flowers …

Mary was also praised at great length by John Davies in the dedication to The Muses Sacrifice, 1612.

PEMBROKE, (a Paragon of Princely PARTS,
and, of that Part that most commends the Muse,
Great Mistress of her Greatness, and the ARTS,)
Phoebus and Fate makes great, and glorious!
A Work of Art and Grace (from Head and Heart
that makes a Work of Wonder) thou hast done;
Where Art, seems Nature; Nature, seemeth Art;
and, Grace, in both, makes all out-shine the Sun.

Davies understands that even so prominent, so talented a woman as Mary Sidney cannot seek public fame, as male writers can.

And didst thou thirst for Fame. (as all Men do)
thou would’st, by all means, let it come to light;
But though thou cloud it, as doth Envy too,
yet through both Clouds it shines, it is so bright!

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You may also enjoy:
5 Early English Women Writers to Discover
Elizabeth Cary, Early English Poet, Dramatist, and Scholar
The Matchless Orinda: Katherine Philips
The Scandalous, Sexually Explicit Writings of Aphra Behn
Olympe de Gouges: An Introduction
Susanna Centlivre, English Poet and Playwright
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A prominent translator as well

Mary Sidney was not just a poet but a translator; her translation from the French of The Tragedy of Antony, Done into English by the Countess of Pembroke, 1592 revived the use of soliloquy from classical works and is a source of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, 1607. Mary also translated Petrarch’s Triumph of Death and is the probable author of the long poem The Doleful Lay of Clorinda, 1595, a lament for her dead brother.

Woods, hills and rivers, now are desolate,
Sith he is gone the which them all did grace:
And all the fields do wail their widow state,
Sith death their fairest flower did late deface.
      The fairest flower in field that ever grew,
      Was Astrophel: that was, we all may rue.

What cruel hand of cursed foe unknown,
Hath cropped the stalk which bore so faire a flower?
Untimely cropped, before it well were grown,
And clean defaced in untimely hour.
      Great loss to all that ever him did see,
      Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me.

 

 Mary Sidney’s legacy as patroness and poet

Under Mary’s vigorously transgressive stewardship, Wilton House became a literary salon for writers known as the Wilton Circle, which included Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson. John Aubrey said that ‘Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingenious persons. She was the greatest patroness of wit and learning of any lady in her time.’

Other poets agreed: Samuel Daniel said of his poetry that he had received ‘the first notion for the formal ordering of those compositions at Wilton, which I must ever acknowledge to have been my best School,’ andThomas Churchyard said that ‘she sets to school, our Poets everywhere.’ At Wilton house, after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Mary hosted the new King James I and Queen Anne; it is probable that Shakespeare’s As You Like It was first performed for a royal audience there.

Writers vied for her approval and patronage; she probably received more dedications at the front of published books than any non-royal woman, including from Thomas Nashe, Abraham Fraunce, who incorporated her name into the titles of several works that he presented to her, includingThe Countesse of Pembrokes Emmanuel (1591) and the three parts ofThe Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch (1591–2) and Nicholas Breton’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Love and‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion.

On her death in 1621, Mary Sidney was given a large funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral – possibly the only female writer ever to have been so honored – and her body was taken by torchlight to be buried at Salisbury Cathedral next to her husband. Her epitaph is probably by Ben Jonson:

Underneath this marble hearse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.
Death! ere thou hast slain another
Wise and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

More about Mary Sidney Poetry Foundation Tudor of the Month: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke Tudor Times: Lady Mary Sidney

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Allison MacKenzie: Coming of Age in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

This look at the coming of age of Allison MacKenzie, one of the central characters of Peyton Place, the controversial 1956 novel by Grace Metalious, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.

Peyton Place is set in a small New England town where everyone knows everyone’s business. The inhabitants of Peyton Place seemed to have a lot more sex than other novels of the mid-fifties – more than the censors and many critics were prepared to put up with: the novel was banned in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1957 and in Rhode Island in 1959.

But the censors were far too late. Peyton Place was already a bestseller by September 1956, and would remain so well into 1957. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first month, compared to the average first novel which sold 3,000 copies, if lucky, in its lifetime. Peyton Place eventually sold over 12 million copies but even then is most widely remembered for its film and TV adaptations.

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Learn more about Grace Metalious
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A page-to-screen success

Grace Metalious (1924-1964), born Marie Grace DeRepentigny, was born into poverty in New England. She married George Metalious and, unlike most other successful female authors who kept their names, published under her husband’s.

Despite their poverty, George attended university and became principal of a school while Grace continued to write, something she had done since she was a student, and in which George encouraged her. George later said that the novel’s eponymous town and its name were “a composite of all small towns where ugliness rears its head, and where the people try to hide all the skeletons in their closets.”

Grace was thirty when she finished the manuscript; she found a literary agent but had trouble finding a publisher because of the amount of sex it contained. Reviews in serious newspapers condemned the book but that did not stop people buying it. Much later Metalious said, “If I’m a lousy writer, then an awful lot of people have lousy taste.”

She was right. Less than a month after the novel was published, producer and screenwriter Jerry Wald paid her $250,000 for the film rights. He also paid her as a story consultant though she was not in the end responsible for any of the screenplay and in fact she hated Hollywood, hated the way her novel was sanitized and was appalled by the suggestion that Pat Boone – who wrote a bland advice column for teenagers in Ladies Home Journal – be cast in a leading role.

Still, the $400,000 she made from the film was probably some consolation. The film came out in 1957, featuring nineteen-year-old newcomer Diane Varsi who was far too beautiful and mature for the role but was nominated for an Academy Award anyway.

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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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Allison Mackenzie & Selena Cross

The TV series of Peyton Place began in 1964, running for five seasons until 1969. Like the film, it was a very toned down version of the novel, starring , age nineteen when the series began, as twelve-year-old Allison Mackenzie. Unlike Varsi and Farrow, Allison is plain, chubby, and  has very few friends.

Allison hadn’t one friend in the entire school, except for Selena Cross. They made a peculiar pair, those two, Selena with her dark, gypsyish beauty, her thirteen-year-old eyes as old as time, and Allison Mackenzie, still plump with residual babyhood, her eyes wide open, guileless and questioning, above that painfully sensitive mouth.

Selena is indeed entirely different from Allison: in many female coming-of-age novels the blameless, bookish, shy, unattractive central character has a foil who is pretty, popular and outgoing, and very often with looser morals. In this case the contrast is extreme. Selena is by no means a virgin, though we only find out later how and to whom she loses her virginity.

There is also a huge social difference between the two girls: Allison’s mother Constance is discreet and aloof and runs a high-class dress shop – “the women of the town bought almost exclusively from her” – while Selena lives in a rundown shack with her hopeless mother and vile, violent, drunken and lecherous stepfather who rapes her and takes her virginity.

In the original manuscript, he was her birth father; the one change that Metalious agreed with her publisher before publication was that he should become her stepfather – it hardly lessens the shock when the rape happens.

“Selena was beautiful while Allison believed herself an unattractive girl, plump in the wrong places, flat in the wrong spots, too long in the legs and too round in the face.” Selena, on the other hand, is “well-developed for her age, with the curves of hips and breasts already discernible under the too short and often threadbare clothes that she wore.” She has “long dark hair that curled of its own accord in a softly beautiful fashion. Her eyes, too, were dark and slightly slanted, and she had a naturally red, full lipped mouth over well shaped startlingly white teeth.”

Selena is nowhere near as well-read as Allison but she’s much wiser; “wiser with the wisdom learned of poverty and wretchedness. At thirteen, she saw hopelessness as an old enemy, as persistent and inevitable as death.” Selena cannot understand “what in the world ailed Allison that she could be unhappy in surroundings like these, with a wonderful blonde mother, and a pink and white bedroom of her own.”

Unlike Allison, Selena covets the dresses in Constance’s shop. Constance “could understand a girl looking that way at the sight of a beautiful dress. The only time that Allison ever wore this expression was when she was reading.”

When Constance asks Selena to work part-time in her shop, Selena thinks she is in heaven. Wearing one of the dresses, Constance thinks Selena has “the look of a beautifully sensual, expensively kept woman.” Selena adores Constance; she thinks: “Someday, I’ll get out, and when I do, I’ll always wear beautiful clothes and talk in a soft voice, just like Mrs. McKenzie.”

Allison may not be popular with the girls – or indeed the boys, not that she cares about boys – but her teacher Miss Thornton likes her. She has a mission: “If I can teach something to one child, if I can awaken in only one child a sense of beauty, joy in truth, and admission of ignorance and a thirst for knowledge then I am fulfilled. One child, thought Miss Thornton, adjusting her old brown felt, and her mind fastened with love on Allison Mackenzie.”

Allison knows about Miss Thornton’s feelings for her – an unusual example of a teacher having a crush on a girl – but she believes it is “only because Miss Thornton was so ugly and plain herself.”

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Peyton Place — two 1956 reviews
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An absent father

Allison’s mother has never told her the truth about her father, whom Allison believes to be dead, but who is in fact alive and well. Constance had an affair with him but they never married; he is a Scottish businessman and his name was also, confusingly, Allison. But he had a wife at the time of the affair and had no intention of marrying Constance, though he always provided for her and their daughter financially.

Constance left town, pregnant, before Allison’s birth and invented a fictitious, short lived marriage, coming back after Allison was born with a story that her imaginary husband was dead. To make the story work, she has had to subtract a year from Allison’s real age – Allison is a year older than she and everybody else believes.

Allison loves her absent father – or at least the false image she has built up of him – as well as her mother, though they have “little in common with each other; the mother was far too cold and practical a mind to understand the sensitive, dreaming child, and Allison too young and full of hopes and fancies to sympathize with her mother.”

 

Bookish Allison

Allison is bookish but does not get her love of reading from her mother: Constance “could not understand a twelve-year-old girl keeping her nose in a book. Other girls her age would have been continually in the shop, examining and exclaiming over the boxes of pretty dresses and underwear which arrived there almost daily.”

Unlike Selena, all Allison knows about life she has got from her reading. She has discovered a box of old books in the attic, and is fascinated by them; “she went from de Maupassant to James Hilton without a quiver. She read Goodbye, Mr Chips and wept in the darkness of her room for an hour while the last line of the story lingered in her mind. ‘I said goodbye to Chips the night before he died.’ Allison began to wonder about God and death.”

But what Allison loves most of all, better than books even, is being alone in the countryside just outside the town where she can “be free from the hatefulness that was school … For a little while she could find pleasure here and forget that her pleasures would be considered babyish and silly by older, more mature twelve-year-old girls.”

“Now that she was quiet and unafraid, she could pretend that she was a child again, and not a twelve-year-old who would be entering high school within less than another year, and who should be interested now in clothes and boys and pale rose lipstick… But away from this place she was awkward, loveless, pitifully aware that she lacked the attraction and poise which she believed that every other girl her age possessed …

There would not be many more days of contentment for Allison, for now she was twelve and soon would have to begin spending her life with people like the girls at school. She would be surrounded by them, and have to try hard to be one of them. She was sure that they would never accept her. They would laugh at her, ridicule her, and she would find herself living in a world where she was the only odd and different member of the population.”

 

Resisting the path to womanhood

Allison does not want to turn from a girl into a woman, does not want come of age, mentally or physically; the outward attributes of womanhood repel her. She hates the idea of “hair growing anywhere on her body. Selena already had hair under her arms which she shaved off once a month.” Selena tells Allison that she gets it all over with at once, “my period and my shave.”

Allison agrees this is a good idea but “as far as she was concerned, ‘periods’ were something that happened to other girls. She decided that she would never tolerate such things in herself.’ Allison sends off for a sex education book which she reads carefully to find out about periods; she clearly cannot contemplate asking her mother.

“Phooey, she thought disdainfully when she had finished studying the pamphlet. I’ll be the only woman in the whole world who won’t, and it’ll be written up in all the medical books.

She thought of ‘It’ as a large black bat, with wings outspread, and when she woke up on the morning of her thirteenth birthday to discover that ‘It’ was nothing of the kind, she was disappointed, disgusted and more than a little frightened.

But the reason she wept that she was not, after all, going to be as unique as she had wanted to be.”

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Peyton Place by Grace Metalious on Amazon*
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A book that’s better than its reputation

Despite its mauling by “serious” critics and its mangling by film and TV producers, the original novel’s reputation for lowbrow sleaze is completely unjustified: in its sensitive and perceptive treatment of both Allison and Selena it is as good a coming of age novel as many more vaunted classics.

It is certainly much better than Grace Metalious’s later novels, including its hastily written sequel, Return to Peyton Place, 1959, which follows Allison as she grows up to become a writer, writing scurrilous, thinly disguised portraits of the people in Peyton Place and, like her mother, has an affair with a married man. Success did not bring happiness to Metalious and she died of liver failure following years of heavy drinking at the age of thirty-nine in 1964.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Bookshop.org and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Allison MacKenzie: Coming of Age in Peyton Place by Grace Metalious appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Selections from Songs of the Elder Sisters (the Therīgāthā)

Songs of the Elder Sisters were composed during the Buddha’s lifetime, about 2,500 years ago. These women renounced home life and society, and joined the group of nuns founded by the Buddha. This selection of 14 poems from the Buddhist text known as the Therīgāthā were translated from Pāli by Francis Booth. See more of this translation of Songs of the Elder Sisters on Issuu.

These poignant songs are about loss of beauty, wealth and family, balanced by the greater gains of peace and wisdom through enlightenment in old age. All the songs are ascribed to particular women, whose names we know. They speak as individuals, not as wives, mothers and daughters.

Although Buddhist in intent, the songs are highly personal rather than pious and formal and are full of character and personality. They were passed down orally through chanting for 600 years before being written down and are among the earliest extant poems written by women. They also form the only canonical work in any religion written entirely by women.

Referring to a collection known as Verses of the Elder Nuns, the Therīgāthā, (Pāli: therī: elder in feminine form + gāthā: verses) consists of short poems dating from a three hundred year span beginning in the late 6th century BCE.

This collection of poems is believed to be the earliest text to record women’s spiritual journeys, and is the earliest known collection of women’s literature from India. What’s truly remarkable is that contrary to Virginia Woolf‘s famous (and often correct) claim that “anonymous was a woman,” the names of these ancient female poets are recorded.

This excellent analysis of the Therīgāthā from Zen Mountain Monastery gives a good historic background to this ancient text:

“… The adjective “first” and the Therīgāthā seem to go together. It is easy to see why. The Therīgāthā is an anthology of poems composed by some of the first Buddhists; while the poems of the Therīgāthā are clearly nowhere near as old as the poetry of the Rig Veda, for example, they are still some of the first poetry of India; the Therīgāthā ’s poems are some of the first poems by women in India; as a collection, the Therīgāthā is the first anthology of women’s literature in the world.” Read the rest in full here.

 

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Lost Beauty

Ambapali’s Song
Ah but when I was young I had beautiful hair
Glossy, curly and black like the colour of bees
Now my hair is like hemp or the bark of the trees
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my hair filled with flowers and perfumed with scent
Thick as trees in the forest adorned with gold pins
Now my hair smells like dog’s fur all matted and thin
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
I had eyebrows like crescents an artist would paint
And my eyes flashed like precious and radiant jewels
But the passing of time and the wrinkles were cruel
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my beautiful nose and my features refined
And my ear lobes so soft how my teeth brightly shined
Now all yellow and ruined by age and by time
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
Then my singing was sweet as the call of a bird
Like a cuckoo that warbles in the branches of trees
Now the music is broken and cracked with disease
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
With my neck like a conch shell and smooth rounded arms
On my delicate hands rings and bracelets of gold
Now all withered and dried like an onion turned old
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
In my young days my body was burnished and fine
And my breasts stood up proudly all shapely and round
Now my skin has turned baggy and sags to the ground
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
In my youth I had thighs like an elephant’s trunk
And my calves and my ankles and feet were adorned
But with age all my limbs are now knotted and worn
Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth
This magnificent body so beautiful then
Shows with time and with age how the truth is revealed
As a mansion looks fine ‘til the plaster has peeled

Ah, not false are the words of the teller of truth

 

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Anopama’s Song
The daughter of a house of wealth and fame
Well born in fortune and exalted name
A beauty celebrated through the land
A prize beyond a price to win my hand
Pursued and courted by the sons of kings
While merchant princes made rich offerings
A ruler promised treasuries of gold
And jewels equal to my weight eightfold
Gautama, worthy and enlightened one
In pity showed me life with passion gone
I shaved my head and left the world behind
Since seven nights all craving left my mind

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Vimala’s Song
Young and fine and drunk with beauty
Famous for my flawless face
Richly dressed and acting haughty
Putting others in their place

Painted and adorned with jewels
Standing at the brothel door
Like the hunter’s trap is cruel
Showing men delights in store
Teaching them my secret magic
Showing them my secret part
Now I see my life was tragic
Hating people in my heart
Now I live without possessions
Shaven headed, beg for alms
Now I conquered all obsession
Thoughts all gone now, cool and calm

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2 Grieving Mothers

Kisogotami’s Song
The noblest friends can even make
The wisdom of a fool increase
So cultivate the wisest ones
And see the tide of pain decrease
The driver of the chariot
Says women’s lives are full of grief
He drives and tames the hearts of men
Heals suffering and brings relief
To share a husband, bear a child
The pain of being second wives
Make some take poison, slit their throats
So suffering through many lives
I lost a husband and two sons
I laid them on the funeral pyre
My mother, father, brother too
Have burned to ashes in that fire
Through tears of a thousand lives
I reached the final state of peace
My dart cut out, my burden shed
From suffering at last released

 

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Vasitthi’s Song
Crazy with grief for the death of my son
Wandering far with my senses all gone
Naked and ragged and living in dirt
Three years I suffered with hunger and thirst
One day the Buddha was travelling near
Tamer of hearts and defeater of fear
Hearing the teacher’s true wisdom explained
Now I’ve cast out all the causes of pain

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3 A Woman Freed

Punna’s Song
Woman full is like the moon
Ripened on the fifteenth day
Full of wisdom, calm of mind
Darkness torn and thrown away

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Mutta’s Song
Woman freed is like the moon
Free from darkness and eclipse
Free in mind and free from debt
Free to live on alms and gifts

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Patacara’s Song
As men find wealth by planting crops
By ploughing fields and sowing seeds
By nourishing their wives and sons
They satisfy their earthly needs
So why could I, with virtuous mind
A woman pure in words and thoughts
Not find my peace and quench my thirst
By doing what the teacher taught?
Then one day as I bathed my feet
And watched the water run its course
I vowed to purify my mind
As men would train a noble horse
So in my cell I took the lamp
And from my bed I watched the flame
I grasped the wick and pulled it down
The light extinguished, peace remained

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Mettika’s Song
Walking weak and weary now
Youthful step long gone
Leaning on my walking staff
Trudging slowly on
Climbing up the mountain peak
Robe cast to the ground
Overturn my begging bowl
Freedom all around

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4 The Temptations of Mara, the Evil One

Sela’s Song

Mara:
The solitary life brings no escape
Enjoy the world before it gets too late
Sela:
The pleasures of the body are like spears
And nothing you call joy do I hold dear
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

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Soma’s Song
Mara:
The wisdom of the sage is hard to gain
Beyond a woman’s nature to attain
Soma :
How can a woman’s nature interfere?
Our hearts are set, our way ahead is clear
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

 

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Khema’s Song
Mara:
As you are beautiful and I am young
Let us go in delight where songs are sung
Khema:
My body only fills me with disgust
Like swords and stakes to me are thoughts of lust
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

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Uppalavanna’s Song
Mara:
You stand under the blossoms in the wood
Exposed to evil men who mean no good
Uppalavanna:
A hundred thousand rascals could appear
I would not shake nor turn a hair in fear
Into your belly I could disappear
And in between your eyes could reappear
For I can rule the body with my thought
By following the way the Buddha taught
My love of earthly pleasure disappears
Go, tempter, you will gain no victory here

 

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Subha’s Song
Subha:
I was walking one day
In the beautiful woods
When a rascal appeared
Who was up to no good
So I said to him
Why do you stand in my way
Knowing purity’s rule
I have sworn to obey
For all passion has gone
From my unblemished mind
But the sensual pleasures
Have made your heart blind
The Man:
How can one as sweet as you
Give up life to be a nun
Dressing in the saffron robe
Come with me and have some fun
Trees exude the smell of spring
Forest beds are overgrown
Flowers bloom and pollen spreads
How can you go all alone?
Beasts of prey live in the woods
Elephants about to mate
Women unaccompanied
Risk a very frightening fate
You could be my golden doll
Wearing jewels, silk and pearls
In my palace in the wood
Waited on by serving girls
Garlanded and bathed in scent
On a bed of sandalwood
Like a lotus in the stream
Living long in maidenhood
Subha:
But what is it you see in this body of mine?
And what beauty appears in my face
When the cemetery calls and the body breaks down
Beauty vanishes without a trace
The Man:
Like a nymph inside the mountain
Spirit creature, my delight
Eyes like lotus blossoms blooming
Eyes that shine with radiant light
Like a spotless, golden vision
Long eyelashes, gentle gaze
Eyes that drive me wild with passion
Eyes to haunt me all my days
Subha:
Travel in the wrong direction
Try to leap the mountainside
Seek the moon to be your plaything
Try to trap the Buddha’s child
Purified myself of passion
Struck like sparks from blazing coal
Thrown down like a cup of poison
Truth has always been my goal
Just as puppets can dance
With their sticks and their strings
So my body is made
Of impermanent things
Like a beautiful painting
Seduces the mind
So illusions confused you
And rendered you blind
If you still want my body
To make me your prize
Then I’ll pluck out and give
To you one of my eyes
So your object of worship
You hold in your hand
And the true face of beauty
You now understand
The Man:
Try to hold a blazing fire
Try to grasp a poisonous snake
Lady, live without desire
Now I see my cruel mistake
Subha:
In the presence of the Buddha
There my sight will be regained
By the power of his merit
Passion conquered, peace attained

 

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More about the Elder Sisters and the Therīgāthā

Wikipedia The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns

More English Translations of the Therīgāthā

Therīgāthā translation  by Anagarika Mahendra Therīgāthā translation  by Bhikkhu Sujato Therīgāthā Verses of the Elder Nuns  Anthology of selected passages by Thanissaro Bhikkhu Psalms of the Early Buddhists: I. Psalms of the Sisters , London: Pali Text Society, 1909. Caroline A. F. Rhys Davids’ 1909 translation of the complete Therīgāthā

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

 

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Selections from Songs of the Elder Sisters (the Therīgāthā) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (full text)

Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1917) was the first published collection by this eminent American poet. The book’s title reflects Millay’s 1912 poem of the same name, published when she was just nineteen, and still considered one of her finest. Here you’ll find the full text of this work.

From Dover, a recent publisher of this work that’s now in the public domain:

The poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) have been long admired for the lyric beauty that is especially characteristic of her early works. “Renascence,” the first of her poems to bring her public acclaim, was written when she was nineteen. Now one of the best-known American poems, it is a fervent and moving account of spiritual rebirth.

In 1917, “Renascence” was incorporated into her first volume of poetry, which is reprinted here, complete and unabridged, from the original edition. The 23 works in this first volume are fired with the romantic and independent spirit of youth that Edna St. Vincent Millay came to personify.

From the introductory Note by Joslyn Pine from this edition:

At Vassar, College Millay enjoyed significant celebrity not only as a literary light, but also for her work in theatre where, it is generally believed, she began having intimate relationships with women. In addition to her acting and poetry, she gained an awareness of social issues like the suffragist movement and women’s rights …

In 1917, the year of her graduation from Vassar, she published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. She also moved to Greenwich Village in New York City where she dwelt in a 9-foot-wide attic, leading a rather bohemian and “poor but merry” life among fellow writers and intellectuals.

Here she devoted herself to writing poetry and prose pieces to bolster her perpetually scant finances, publishing the latter in various magazines under the pseudonym “Nancy Boyd” to keep her poetry pure from the taint of her “hack work,” as it was called by some.

More of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry on this site:

A Few Figs From Thistles (1921; full text) 10 Spring-Themed Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay 12 Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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More background on the title poem, “Renascence” (1912)

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 ContentsRenascenceInterimThe SuicideGod’s WorldAfternoon on a HillSorrowTavernAshes of LifeThe Little GhostKin to SorrowThree Songs of ShatteringThe ShroudThe DreamIndifferenceWitch-WifeBlightWhen the Year Grows OldSonnets

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Renascence

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.
So with my eyes I traced the line
Of the horizon, thin and fine,
Straight around till I was come
Back to where I’d started from;
And all I saw from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And—sure enough!—I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.
I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense
That, sick’ning, I would fain pluck thence
But could not,—nay! But needs must suck
At the great wound, and could not pluck
My lips away till I had drawn
All venom out.—Ah, fearful pawn!
For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all!
A man was starving in Capri;
He moved his eyes and looked at me;
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan,
And knew his hunger as my own.
I saw at sea a great fog bank
Between two ships that struck and sank;
A thousand screams the heavens smote;
And every scream tore through my throat.
No hurt I did not feel, no death
That was not mine; mine each last breath
That, crying, met an answering cry
From the compassion that was I.
All suffering mine, and mine its rod;
Mine, pity like the pity of God.
Ah, awful weight! Infinity
Pressed down upon the finite Me!
My anguished spirit, like a bird,
Beating against my lips I heard;
Yet lay the weight so close about
There was no room for it without.
And so beneath the weight lay I
And suffered death, but could not die.

Long had I lain thus, craving death,
When quietly the earth beneath
Gave way, and inch by inch, so great
At last had grown the crushing weight,
Into the earth I sank till I
Full six feet under ground did lie,
And sank no more,—there is no weight
Can follow here, however great.
From off my breast I felt it roll,
And as it went my tortured soul
Burst forth and fled in such a gust
That all about me swirled the dust.

Deep in the earth I rested now;
Cool is its hand upon the brow
And soft its breast beneath the head
Of one who is so gladly dead.
And all at once, and over all
The pitying rain began to fall;
I lay and heard each pattering hoof
Upon my lowly, thatched roof,
And seemed to love the sound far more
Than ever I had done before.
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.

The rain, I said, is kind to come
And speak to me in my new home.
I would I were alive again
To kiss the fingers of the rain,
To drink into my eyes the shine
Of every slanting silver line,
To catch the freshened, fragrant breeze
From drenched and dripping apple-trees.
For soon the shower will be done,
And then the broad face of the sun
Will laugh above the rain-soaked earth
Until the world with answering mirth
Shakes joyously, and each round drop
Rolls, twinkling, from its grass-blade top.
How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear
And blue again after the storm?
O, multi-colored, multiform,
Beloved beauty over me,
That I shall never, never see
Again! Spring-silver, autumn-gold,
That I shall never more behold!
Sleeping your myriad magics through,
Close-sepulchred away from you!
O God, I cried, give me new birth,
And put me back upon the earth!
Upset each cloud’s gigantic gourd
And let the heavy rain, down-poured
In one big torrent, set me free,
Washing my grave away from me!

I ceased; and through the breathless hush
That answered me, the far-off rush
Of herald wings came whispering
Like music down the vibrant string
Of my ascending prayer, and—crash!
Before the wild wind’s whistling lash
The startled storm-clouds reared on high
And plunged in terror down the sky,
And the big rain in one black wave
Fell from the sky and struck my grave.
I know not how such things can be;
I only know there came to me
A fragrance such as never clings
To aught save happy living things;
A sound as of some joyous elf
Singing sweet songs to please himself,
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.

 

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Interim

The room is full of you!—As I came in
And closed the door behind me, all at once
A something in the air, intangible,
Yet stiff with meaning, struck my senses sick!—

Sharp, unfamiliar odors have destroyed
Each other room’s dear personality.
The heavy scent of damp, funereal flowers,—
The very essence, hush-distilled, of Death—
Has strangled that habitual breath of home
Whose expiration leaves all houses dead;
And wheresoe’er I look is hideous change.
Save here. Here ’twas as if a weed-choked gate
Had opened at my touch, and I had stepped
Into some long-forgot, enchanted, strange,
Sweet garden of a thousand years ago
And suddenly thought, “I have been here before!”

You are not here. I know that you are gone,
And will not ever enter here again.
And yet it seems to me, if I should speak,
Your silent step must wake across the hall;
If I should turn my head, that your sweet eyes
Would kiss me from the door.—So short a time
To teach my life its transposition to
This difficult and unaccustomed key!—
The room is as you left it; your last touch—
A thoughtless pressure, knowing not itself
As saintly—hallows now each simple thing;
Hallows and glorifies, and glows between
The dust’s grey fingers like a shielded light.

There is your book, just as you laid it down,
Face to the table,—I cannot believe
That you are gone!—Just then it seemed to me
You must be here. I almost laughed to think
How like reality the dream had been;
Yet knew before I laughed, and so was still.
That book, outspread, just as you laid it down!
Perhaps you thought, “I wonder what comes next,
And whether this or this will be the end”;
So rose, and left it, thinking to return.

Perhaps that chair, when you arose and passed
Out of the room, rocked silently a while
Ere it again was still. When you were gone
Forever from the room, perhaps that chair,
Stirred by your movement, rocked a little while,
Silently, to and fro…

And here are the last words your fingers wrote,
Scrawled in broad characters across a page
In this brown book I gave you. Here your hand,
Guiding your rapid pen, moved up and down.
Here with a looping knot you crossed a “t”,
And here another like it, just beyond
These two eccentric “e’s”. You were so small,
And wrote so brave a hand!
How strange it seems
That of all words these are the words you chose!
And yet a simple choice; you did not know
You would not write again. If you had known—
But then, it does not matter,—and indeed
If you had known there was so little time
You would have dropped your pen and come to me
And this page would be empty, and some phrase
Other than this would hold my wonder now.
Yet, since you could not know, and it befell
That these are the last words your fingers wrote,
There is a dignity some might not see
In this, “I picked the first sweet-pea to-day.”
To-day! Was there an opening bud beside it
You left until to-morrow?—O my love,
The things that withered,—and you came not back!
That day you filled this circle of my arms
That now is empty. (O my empty life!)
That day—that day you picked the first sweet-pea,—
And brought it in to show me! I recall
With terrible distinctness how the smell
Of your cool gardens drifted in with you.
I know, you held it up for me to see
And flushed because I looked not at the flower,
But at your face; and when behind my look
You saw such unmistakable intent
You laughed and brushed your flower against my lips.
(You were the fairest thing God ever made,
I think.) And then your hands above my heart
Drew down its stem into a fastening,
And while your head was bent I kissed your hair.
I wonder if you knew. (Beloved hands!
Somehow I cannot seem to see them still.
Somehow I cannot seem to see the dust
In your bright hair.) What is the need of Heaven
When earth can be so sweet?—If only God
Had let us love,—and show the world the way!
Strange cancellings must ink th’ eternal books
When love-crossed-out will bring the answer right!
That first sweet-pea! I wonder where it is.
It seems to me I laid it down somewhere,
And yet,—I am not sure. I am not sure,
Even, if it was white or pink; for then
‘Twas much like any other flower to me,
Save that it was the first. I did not know,
Then, that it was the last. If I had known—
But then, it does not matter. Strange how few,
After all’s said and done, the things that are
Of moment.
Few indeed! When I can make
Of ten small words a rope to hang the world!
“I had you and I have you now no more.”
There, there it dangles,—where’s the little truth
That can for long keep footing under that
When its slack syllables tighten to a thought?
Here, let me write it down! I wish to see
Just how a thing like that will look on paper!

“*I had you and I have you now no more*.”

O little words, how can you run so straight
Across the page, beneath the weight you bear?
How can you fall apart, whom such a theme
Has bound together, and hereafter aid
In trivial expression, that have been
So hideously dignified?—Would God
That tearing you apart would tear the thread
I strung you on! Would God—O God, my mind
Stretches asunder on this merciless rack
Of imagery! O, let me sleep a while!
Would I could sleep, and wake to find me back
In that sweet summer afternoon with you.
Summer? ‘Tis summer still by the calendar!
How easily could God, if He so willed,
Set back the world a little turn or two!
Correct its griefs, and bring its joys again!

We were so wholly one I had not thought
That we could die apart. I had not thought
That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!
That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!
I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof
In some firm fabric, woven in and out;
Your golden filaments in fair design
Across my duller fibre. And to-day
The shining strip is rent; the exquisite
Fine pattern is destroyed; part of your heart
Aches in my breast; part of my heart lies chilled
In the damp earth with you. I have been torn
In two, and suffer for the rest of me.
What is my life to me? And what am I
To life,—a ship whose star has guttered out?
A Fear that in the deep night starts awake
Perpetually, to find its senses strained
Against the taut strings of the quivering air,
Awaiting the return of some dread chord?

Dark, Dark, is all I find for metaphor;
All else were contrast,—save that contrast’s wall
Is down, and all opposed things flow together
Into a vast monotony, where night
And day, and frost and thaw, and death and life,
Are synonyms. What now—what now to me
Are all the jabbering birds and foolish flowers
That clutter up the world? You were my song!
Now, let discord scream! You were my flower!
Now let the world grow weeds! For I shall not
Plant things above your grave—(the common balm
Of the conventional woe for its own wound!)
Amid sensations rendered negative
By your elimination stands to-day,
Certain, unmixed, the element of grief;
I sorrow; and I shall not mock my truth
With travesties of suffering, nor seek
To effigy its incorporeal bulk
In little wry-faced images of woe.

I cannot call you back; and I desire
No utterance of my immaterial voice.
I cannot even turn my face this way
Or that, and say, “My face is turned to you”;
I know not where you are, I do not know
If Heaven hold you or if earth transmute,
Body and soul, you into earth again;
But this I know:—not for one second’s space
Shall I insult my sight with visionings
Such as the credulous crowd so eager-eyed
Beholds, self-conjured, in the empty air.
Let the world wail! Let drip its easy tears!
My sorrow shall be dumb!

—What do I say?
God! God!—God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken,—that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing,—birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

O God, I see it now, and my sick brain
Staggers and swoons! How often over me
Flashes this breathlessness of sudden sight
In which I see the universe unrolled
Before me like a scroll and read thereon
Chaos and Doom, where helpless planets whirl
Dizzily round and round and round and round,
Like tops across a table, gathering speed
With every spin, to waver on the edge
One instant—looking over—and the next
To shudder and lurch forward out of sight—

. . . . . . .

Ah, I am worn out—I am wearied out—
It is too much—I am but flesh and blood,
And I must sleep. Though you were dead again,
I am but flesh and blood and I must sleep.

 

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The Suicide

“Curse thee, Life, I will live with thee no more!
Thou hast mocked me, starved me, beat my body sore!
And all for a pledge that was not pledged by me,
I have kissed thy crust and eaten sparingly
That I might eat again, and met thy sneers
With deprecations, and thy blows with tears,—
Aye, from thy glutted lash, glad, crawled away,
As if spent passion were a holiday!
And now I go. Nor threat, nor easy vow
Of tardy kindness can avail thee now
With me, whence fear and faith alike are flown;
Lonely I came, and I depart alone,
And know not where nor unto whom I go;
But that thou canst not follow me I know.”

Thus I to Life, and ceased; but through my brain
My thought ran still, until I spake again:

“Ah, but I go not as I came,—no trace
Is mine to bear away of that old grace
I brought! I have been heated in thy fires,
Bent by thy hands, fashioned to thy desires,
Thy mark is on me! I am not the same
Nor ever more shall be, as when I came.
Ashes am I of all that once I seemed.
In me all’s sunk that leapt, and all that dreamed
Is wakeful for alarm,—oh, shame to thee,
For the ill change that thou hast wrought in me,
Who laugh no more nor lift my throat to sing!
Ah, Life, I would have been a pleasant thing
To have about the house when I was grown
If thou hadst left my little joys alone!
I asked of thee no favor save this one:
That thou wouldst leave me playing in the sun!
And this thou didst deny, calling my name
Insistently, until I rose and came.
I saw the sun no more.—It were not well
So long on these unpleasant thoughts to dwell,
Need I arise to-morrow and renew
Again my hated tasks, but I am through
With all things save my thoughts and this one night,
So that in truth I seem already quite
Free and remote from thee,—I feel no haste
And no reluctance to depart; I taste
Merely, with thoughtful mien, an unknown draught,
That in a little while I shall have quaffed.”

Thus I to Life, and ceased, and slightly smiled,
Looking at nothing; and my thin dreams filed
Before me one by one till once again
I set new words unto an old refrain:

“Treasures thou hast that never have been mine!
Warm lights in many a secret chamber shine
Of thy gaunt house, and gusts of song have blown
Like blossoms out to me that sat alone!
And I have waited well for thee to show
If any share were mine,—and now I go!
Nothing I leave, and if I naught attain
I shall but come into mine own again!”
Thus I to Life, and ceased, and spake no more,
But turning, straightway, sought a certain door
In the rear wall. Heavy it was, and low
And dark,—a way by which none e’er would go
That other exit had, and never knock
Was heard thereat,—bearing a curious lock
Some chance had shown me fashioned faultily,
Whereof Life held content the useless key,
And great coarse hinges, thick and rough with rust,
Whose sudden voice across a silence must,
I knew, be harsh and horrible to hear,—
A strange door, ugly like a dwarf.—So near
I came I felt upon my feet the chill
Of acid wind creeping across the sill.
So stood longtime, till over me at last
Came weariness, and all things other passed
To make it room; the still night drifted deep
Like snow about me, and I longed for sleep.

But, suddenly, marking the morning hour,
Bayed the deep-throated bell within the tower!
Startled, I raised my head,—and with a shout
Laid hold upon the latch,—and was without.

 

. . . . . . .

Ah, long-forgotten, well-remembered road,
Leading me back unto my old abode,
My father’s house! There in the night I came,
And found them feasting, and all things the same
As they had been before. A splendour hung
Upon the walls, and such sweet songs were sung
As, echoing out of very long ago,
Had called me from the house of Life, I know.
So fair their raiment shone I looked in shame
On the unlovely garb in which I came;
Then straightway at my hesitancy mocked:
“It is my father’s house!” I said and knocked;
And the door opened. To the shining crowd
Tattered and dark I entered, like a cloud,
Seeing no face but his; to him I crept,
And “Father!” I cried, and clasped his knees, and wept.
Ah, days of joy that followed! All alone
I wandered through the house. My own, my own,
My own to touch, my own to taste and smell,
All I had lacked so long and loved so well!
None shook me out of sleep, nor hushed my song,
Nor called me in from the sunlight all day long.

I know not when the wonder came to me
Of what my father’s business might be,
And whither fared and on what errands bent
The tall and gracious messengers he sent.
Yet one day with no song from dawn till night
Wondering, I sat, and watched them out of sight.
And the next day I called; and on the third
Asked them if I might go,—but no one heard.
Then, sick with longing, I arose at last
And went unto my father,—in that vast
Chamber wherein he for so many years
Has sat, surrounded by his charts and spheres.
“Father,” I said, “Father, I cannot play
The harp that thou didst give me, and all day
I sit in idleness, while to and fro
About me thy serene, grave servants go;
And I am weary of my lonely ease.
Better a perilous journey overseas
Away from thee, than this, the life I lead,
To sit all day in the sunshine like a weed
That grows to naught,—I love thee more than they
Who serve thee most; yet serve thee in no way.
Father, I beg of thee a little task
To dignify my days,—’tis all I ask
Forever, but forever, this denied,
I perish.”
“Child,” my father’s voice replied,
“All things thy fancy hath desired of me
Thou hast received. I have prepared for thee
Within my house a spacious chamber, where
Are delicate things to handle and to wear,
And all these things are thine. Dost thou love song?
My minstrels shall attend thee all day long.
Or sigh for flowers? My fairest gardens stand
Open as fields to thee on every hand.
And all thy days this word shall hold the same:
No pleasure shalt thou lack that thou shalt name.
But as for tasks—” he smiled, and shook his head;
“Thou hadst thy task, and laidst it by”, he said.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

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.

. . . . . . . . . .

Afternoon on a Hill

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

. . . . . . . . . .

Sorrow

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain,—
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.

People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Tavern

I’ll keep a little tavern
Below the high hill’s crest,
Wherein all grey-eyed people
May set them down and rest.

There shall be plates a-plenty,
And mugs to melt the chill
Of all the grey-eyed people
Who happen up the hill.

There sound will sleep the traveller,
And dream his journey’s end,
But I will rouse at midnight
The falling fire to tend.

Aye, ’tis a curious fancy—
But all the good I know
Was taught me out of two grey eyes
A long time ago.

. . . . . . . . . .

Ashes of Life

Love has gone and left me and the days are all alike;
Eat I must, and sleep I will,—and would that night were here!
But ah!—to lie awake and hear the slow hours strike!
Would that it were day again!—with twilight near!

Love has gone and left me and I don’t know what to do;
This or that or what you will is all the same to me;
But all the things that I begin I leave before I’m through,—
There’s little use in anything as far as I can see.

Love has gone and left me,—and the neighbors knock and borrow,
And life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—
And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
There’s this little street and this little house.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Little Ghost

I knew her for a little ghost
That in my garden walked;
The wall is high—higher than most—
And the green gate was locked.

And yet I did not think of that
Till after she was gone—
I knew her by the broad white hat,
All ruffled, she had on.

By the dear ruffles round her feet,
By her small hands that hung
In their lace mitts, austere and sweet,
Her gown’s white folds among.

I watched to see if she would stay,
What she would do—and oh!
She looked as if she liked the way
I let my garden grow!

She bent above my favourite mint
With conscious garden grace,
She smiled and smiled—there was no hint
Of sadness in her face.

She held her gown on either side
To let her slippers show,
And up the walk she went with pride,
The way great ladies go.

And where the wall is built in new
And is of ivy bare
She paused—then opened and passed through
A gate that once was there.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

Kin to Sorrow

Am I kin to Sorrow,
That so oft
Falls the knocker of my door—
Neither loud nor soft,
But as long accustomed,
Under Sorrow’s hand?
Marigolds around the step
And rosemary stand,
And then comes Sorrow—
And what does Sorrow care
For the rosemary
Or the marigolds there?
Am I kin to Sorrow?
Are we kin?
That so oft upon my door—
*Oh, come in*!

. . . . . . . . . .

Three Songs of Shattering

I

The first rose on my rose-tree
Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
Nothing mattered.

Grief of grief has drained me clean;
Still it seems a pity
No one saw,—it must have been
Very pretty.

II

Let the little birds sing;
Let the little lambs play;
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring;—
But not in the old way!

I recall a place
Where a plum-tree grew;
There you lifted up your face,
And blossoms covered you.

If the little birds sing,
And the little lambs play,
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring—
But not in the old way!

III

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
Ere spring was going—ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me,—
Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.

All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,
Browned at the edges, turned in a day;
And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,
And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!

. . . . . . . . . .

The Shroud

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

(I, that would not wait to wear
My own bridal things,
In a dress dark as my hair
Made my answerings.

I, to-night, that till he came
Could not, could not wait,
In a gown as bright as flame
Held for them the gate.)

Death, I say, my heart is bowed
Unto thine,—O mother!
This red gown will make a shroud
Good as any other!

 

. . . . . . . . . .

The Dream

Love, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.

Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,—
White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose,—it screeched!

Swung in the wind,—and no wind blowing!—
I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort,—
And you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,

Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter,—
Ah, it is good to feel you there!

. . . . . . . . . .

Indifference

I said,—for Love was laggard, O, Love was slow to come,—
“I’ll hear his step and know his step when I am warm in bed;
But I’ll never leave my pillow, though there be some
As would let him in—and take him in with tears!” I said.
I lay,—for Love was laggard, O, he came not until dawn,—
I lay and listened for his step and could not get to sleep;
And he found me at my window with my big cloak on,
All sorry with the tears some folks might weep!

. . . . . . . . . .

Witch-Wife

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

. . . . . . . . . .

Blight

Hard seeds of hate I planted
That should by now be grown,—
Rough stalks, and from thick stamens
A poisonous pollen blown,
And odors rank, unbreathable,
From dark corollas thrown!

At dawn from my damp garden
I shook the chilly dew;
The thin boughs locked behind me
That sprang to let me through;
The blossoms slept,—I sought a place
Where nothing lovely grew.

And there, when day was breaking,
I knelt and looked around:
The light was near, the silence
Was palpitant with sound;
I drew my hate from out my breast
And thrust it in the ground.

Oh, ye so fiercely tended,
Ye little seeds of hate!
I bent above your growing
Early and noon and late,
Yet are ye drooped and pitiful,—
I cannot rear ye straight!

The sun seeks out my garden,
No nook is left in shade,
No mist nor mold nor mildew
Endures on any blade,
Sweet rain slants under every bough:
Ye falter, and ye fade.

 

. . . . . . . . . .

When the Year Grows Old

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old—
October—November—
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget—
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old—
October—November—
How she disliked the cold!

. . . . . . . . . .

Sonnets

I

Thou art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies,—I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.

Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.

II

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

III

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird’s wings too high in air to view,—
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair,—and the long year remembers you.

IV

Not in this chamber only at my birth—
When the long hours of that mysterious night
Were over, and the morning was in sight—
I cried, but in strange places, steppe and firth
I have not seen, through alien grief and mirth;
And never shall one room contain me quite
Who in so many rooms first saw the light,
Child of all mothers, native of the earth.

So is no warmth for me at any fire
To-day, when the world’s fire has burned so low;
I kneel, spending my breath in vain desire,
At that cold hearth which one time roared so strong,
And straighten back in weariness, and long
To gather up my little gods and go.

V

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again—
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man—who happened to be you—
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud—I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

VI       Bluebeard

This door you might not open, and you did;
So enter now, and see for what slight thing
You are betrayed…. Here is no treasure hid,
No cauldron, no clear crystal mirroring
The sought-for truth, no heads of women slain
For greed like yours, no writhings of distress,
But only what you see…. Look yet again—
An empty room, cobwebbed and comfortless.
Yet this alone out of my life I kept
Unto myself, lest any know me quite;
And you did so profane me when you crept
Unto the threshold of this room to-night
That I must never more behold your face.
This now is yours. I seek another place.

 

 

The post Renascence and Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (full text) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade (2020) sheds new light on fascinating female literary figures of twentieth century and their sojourns in the Bloomsbury district of London the interwar years. First, a brief description from the publisher:

“In the pivotal era between the two world wars, the lives of five remarkable women intertwined at this one address: modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf. In an era when women’s freedoms were fast expanding, they each sought a space where they could live, love, and—above all—work independently.

With sparkling insight and a novelistic style, Francesca Wade sheds new light on a group of artists and thinkers whose pioneering work would enrich the possibilities of women’s lives for generations to come.”

The following review was contributed by Lynne Weiss:

I visited London for the first time in the fall of 1991. Before my husband and I left, I read that the hotel we had booked in Bloomsbury was on the former site of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press.

Hoping the building would offer literary inspiration, I was disappointed by the bland budget hotel that was our home for our week-long visit. I didn’t spend a lot of time puzzling over the discrepancy between my expectations and the reality—there were plenty of things to do in London beyond inhaling any imagined remnants of Virginia Woolf’s genius that might have lingered in the air.

I recalled that drab hotel in the course of reading Francesca Wade’s excellent Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (Random House, 2020). I knew about the Blitz, but not the extent of its destruction. As Wade makes clear, the combination of bombs and the growth of educational institutions means that the Bloomsbury of today is architecturally very different from what it was between 1916 – 1940, the period covered in Wade’s book.

Does it matter? I consider this question for my own community (a city founded in 1630, old for an American city). Today it faces a severe housing shortage and thus an ongoing debate on how to provide housing while preserving history. I’m a sucker for wandering about in my hometown as well as elsewhere, reading historic plaques and trying to piece together the connections between the buildings and streets around me and the lives of those who came before.

London is a paradise for that kind of ambling. The city has more than 950 blue plaques marking the locations of people and events significant to the city’s history, as well as hundreds of other historical markers. 

“Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the City, and should still ask for more,” Virginia Woolf declared. Francesca Wade has set out to create one of those volumes, focusing on the women who lived in a particular square over the course of a couple of decades.

But why Bloomsbury, and why Mecklenburgh Square? Bloomsbury was a neighborhood for people “either going up or going down,” according to novelist Margery Allingham. For women longing for independence and freedom from social expectations, such as H.D (Hilda Doolittle), Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, and Virginia Woolf, it was a neighborhood of possibilities.

And yet, Mecklenburgh Square, the focus of Wade’s book, has only a single blue plaque marking the former residence of one of the five (H.D.) whose achievements and contributions Wade profiles in this enlightening book.

The five lived in Mecklenburgh Square at separate times, yet they shared a determination to realize their potential as writers and intellectuals. It was a time when the barriers to such achievement were just beginning to fall. Only in 1918 did property-owning women over the age of thirty win suffrage in Britain. (It was finally extended to all women over twenty-one in 1928). And in 1919, the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act allowed women to serve as lawyers and civil servants and to receive university degrees. 

But changes to laws do not ensure equality of opportunity. The 1919 law did not require that women in the civil service receive the same pay as men performing the same jobs, for example— and they did not.

Educational opportunities for women remained segregated and limited. And the women profiled in this book endured pain of a personal nature, made worse by the prevailing devaluing of women’s experiences—H.D. was reviled after suffering a still birth for taking a hospital bed that she was told should have gone to a soldier; Sayers spent her life hiding the existence of a son born to her out of wedlock; Harrison endured the humiliation of being rebuffed by a male colleague who regarded her as a mother; Power was embarrassed by unwanted marriage proposals.

. . . . . . . . . 

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
. . . . . . . . . 

H.D. 

Wade’s story of the square is bookended by wars, beginning in 1916, when Germany sent huge Zeppelin airships, like something out of science fiction, to drop incendiary bombs on London. In February of that year, H.D. (the pen name of poet Hilda Doolittle)., recently championed by her high school beau Ezra Pound for her Imagist poetry, and her husband, Richard Aldington, moved into a first floor flat at 44 Mecklenburgh Square.

H.D. threw herself into her writing to manage her pain over marital troubles, composing “Eurydice,” the groundbreaking poetic monologue that marked her transition from an impersonal Imagist aesthetic to explorations the inner lives of mythological heroines. She eventually removed herself to Cornwall, which she experienced as a “cold healing mist,” and where she met Bryher, the woman whose money and devotion finally allowed H.D. to find the affirmation and freedom she needed to realize her artistic calling.

. . . . . . . . . 

Dorothy Sayers
. . . . . . . . . 

Dorothy Sayers

Fewer than three years after H.D. left Mecklenburgh Square, Dorothy Sayers, who just a few months earlier had been part of the University of Oxford’s first group of women graduates, moved into H.D.’s former flat. Sayers, then twenty-seven, had completed her studies in modern languages five years earlier, but women were not awarded degrees until 1920.

Despite the hostile atmosphere (one don insisted that women sit behind him so he wouldn’t have to see them as he lectured), Sayers enjoyed her time at Oxford, where she was known for riding a motorbike and dressing in trousers.

In 1920, London’s streets were filled with injured, shell-shocked, and homeless veterans. Yet for young Sayers, it offered possibility. She dreamed of becoming a poet, but determined to support herself through her writing, and drawn to gruesome stories, she created the character of Lord Peter Wimsey, the fictional detective at the center of what would become her best-selling novels.

While living in Mecklenburgh Square, she spent her Saturdays in the nearby British Museum reading about sensational trials and wrote her first novel (Whose Body?), which introduced readers to Wimsey. 

. . . . . . . . . 

Hope Mirrlees and Jane Ellen Harrison
. . . . . . . . . 

Jane Harrison

Jane Harrison was seventy-five when she arrived at 11 Mecklenburgh Street. I knew little about Harrison, one of the first female academics in Britain, beyond her appearance in Woolf’s extended 1928 essay, A Room of One’s Own, as “a bent figure, formidable yet humble, with her great forehead and her shabby dress” and later in the essay as the author of books on Greek archaeology.

When Harrison moved to Mecklenburgh Street, she did so in the company of Hope Mirrlees, a much younger woman, whom Woolf described in her diaries as a “spoiled prodigy” but also as one who knew “Greek and Russian better than I do French.”

Harrison spent her last years on Mecklenburgh Street, dying there in April 1928, but they may have been her best years. There she was finally freed from the restrictions placed on her as a woman at Cambridge University, to live “alongside intellectuals and revolutionaries, still learning new languages and developing fresh ideas.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Eileen Power
. . . . . . . . . .

Eileen Power

The most surprising and delightful chapter of a book full of delightful surprises is Wade’s account of Eileen Power, someone who was completely unknown to me. Power moved into number 20 in January of 1922 and remained there through August 1940.

After receiving the “perfectly disgusting” news in 1920 that her alma mater, Cambridge, had decided not to grant women full membership in the university, Power accepted a post as a lecturer in economic history at the London School of Economics.

When she moved to Bloomsbury, she had recently returned from a year of traveling around the world as the recipient of a fellowship that allowed her to journey alone to Egypt, India, China, Japan, and North America—sometimes dressed as a man.

Her 1924 Medieval People was a surprise bestseller and pioneered portraying the lives of ordinary artisans, prioresses, and traders as contributors to history. Wade suggests that Woolf likely had Power’s work in mind when she called for “Anon” to be returned to her rightful place in history.

Throughout her life, Power was fascinated by China, which she had visited during her traveling fellowship and returned to in 1929. She became engaged to Reginald Johnston, former tutor to the 13-year-old Puyi, the last emperor of China. The marriage to Johnston never materialized, as Power’s professional commitments repeatedly took priority over domestic stability. She eventually married a much younger student.

. . . . . . . . . .

Virginia and Leonard Woolf
. . . . . . . . . .

Virginia and Leonard Woolf

Power’s final year in the square is marked by the arrival of Virginia and Leonard Woolf at 37 Mecklenburgh Square on August 17, 1939. Soon after, Hitler invaded Poland and Britain declared war on Germany. The Woolfs, who had learned that they were on a list of people marked for capture by the Gestapo following Germany’s anticipated invasion of Britain, planned to commit suicide in the event of Britain’s defeat, an event that seemed quite likely.

Despite these anxieties, Woolf completed a great deal of work during her year in Mecklenburgh Square, including a novel, Between the Acts, and a biography of art critic Roger Fry. Her diary entries record a busy life of dinners, parties, writing commissions, and gardening. But on September 7, 1940, Germany began bombing London, and the Woolfs abandoned Mecklenburgh Square for their country house in Sussex. For the first time in her life, Virginia had no home in London.

London had been Woolf’s muse: “London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets… To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.”

Bombs drove the Woolfs to Sussex. The Blitz drove the London School of Economics temporarily out of London as well, and Power followed it to Cambridge. Most of Mecklenburgh Square was destroyed in the war, but the statue of the Woman of Samaria, the only statue in London depicting a woman at the time these women lived, still stands at the entrance of Mecklenburgh Square.

. . . . . . . .

Square Haunting on Bookshop.org*
Square Haunting on Amazon.com*
. . . . . . . .

Summing up

Francesca Wade has not only uncovered the history of women such as Harrison and Power, who had faded from memory, but adds dimension to figures such as H.D. and Sayers by informing readers of the complexities of their situations and the very real obstacles—personal and social—they overcame.

Square Haunting is a valiant, poignant, and highly readable effort to uncover that history and revive our memories of some of the notable women who worked to bring women’s creativity and thought to the forefront of history. Would that information have been more available to us if Mecklenburgh Square had not been bombed? Probably not. Bombs or no bombs, we need accounts such as Wade’s.

And yet those of us who wander the streets in search of literary or historical inspiration might better recognize it in the buildings where people actually lived and worked. As Lytton Strachey wrote upon Jane Harrison’s death: “What a wretched waste it seems that all that richness of experience and personality should be completely abolished! Why, one wonders, shouldn’t it have gone on and on?”

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, she has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.org. 

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Mina Loy and the “Crowd” — Modernists in 1920s Paris

Though not as well known today, Mina Loy was well entrenched in the modernist circles that included leading figures of arts and letters of the 1920s. This musing on Mina Loy and the “Crowd” is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

Mina Loy (1882 – 1966), who practiced both as a writer and visual artist, was a vital member of the group of creatives that launched the modernist movement. Born in Hampstead, London, she was a painter, poet, novelist, and playwright, and also achieved some renown as a lamp designer.

The core of the “Crowd” was the largely lesbian 1920s New York circle that included Margaret C. Anderson, Jane Heap, and Georgette Leblanc. Djuna Barnes was there too; she was a lesbian by that time but, like Georgette, she hadn’t always been. Barnes was a close friend of the very heterosexual English poet Mina Loy; Djuna told Mina, in the presence of Mina’s teenage daughter Joella, that she had had nineteen male lovers, most of them Americans, before she had given up on men and taken a female lover.

She took many others later, though not Mina, who was famously beautiful, however much she might have wanted to. Margaret Anderson said that the “Crowd” included three “raving beauties”: Mina and her two daughters, Joella and Fabienne.

 

Meeting William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was among the men attracted to Mina, though he seems never to have done anything about it – he may be the only person in this group who was faithful to a single life-partner, if not entirely voluntarily. In an interview in I Wanted to Write a Poem he said ‘I had a flirtation with Mina – fruitless.’ His wife, Flossie, who was present, said “I don’t think you had enough money for Mina.”

Wiliams had met Loy when she first came to New York in 1916; they had acted together in the Provincetown players, Williams playing Loy’s husband. He said that Mina was “a very English, very skittish, and evasive, long-limbed woman too smart to involve herself, after a first disastrous marriage, with any others – though she was friendly and had written some attractive verse.”

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Mina Loy (front row, center) and some of the “Crowd” in Paris, 1923
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Arthur Cravan

After the failure of her first marriage to artist Stephen Haweis, Loy lived with writer and boxer Arthur Cravan, who broke into Paris society by claiming to be Oscar Wilde‘s nephew. Loy took Williams to meet Cravan at a party in 1916, where Williams also first met Marcel Duchamp.

“I was a bit late and the small room was already crowded – by Frenchmen mostly. I remember of course, Marcel Duchamp. At the end of the room was a French girl, of say eighteen or less, attended by some older woman. She lay reclining upon a divan, her legs straight out before her, surrounded by young men who had each a portion of her body in his possession which he caressed attentively, apparently unconscious of any rival. Two or three addressed themselves to her shoulders on either side, to her elbows, her wrists, hands, to each finger perhaps, I cannot recall – the same for her legs. She was in a black lace gown fully at ease. It was something I had not seen before.”

When she first saw Arthur, Mina had “no premonition of the psychological infinity that he would later offer my indiscreet curiosity as to the mechanism of man,” he was merely “dull and square in merely respectable tweeds; not at all homosexual.”

The next time they saw him he was drunk; Duchamp and Francis Picabia had made sure that he would be in bad shape for a lecture he was giving on “The Independent Artists of France and America.” He swayed and shouted and banged the table, he was arrested and taken to jail; Duchamp said “what a wonderful lecture.”

The next day Mina was present at a costume ball where everyone was watching Arthur. He had come wearing a bedspread as a toga, which he took off before sitting down next to Mina and putting his arm round her. His “unspoken obscenities chilled my powdered skin.”

At the time Cravan was largely homeless and often slept on park benches. He asked if he could stay at her apartment and sleep on the table. Loy agreed, but he didn’t sleep on the table; they became lovers. She stayed with Cravan and went to Mexico with him, where they were married in Mexico City in 1918.

Soon afterward Cravan disappeared in Mexico, presumed drowned off the coast, one of two writers in this book to drown off the coast of Mexico. He was never found and the mystery has never been solved.

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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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Sylvia Beach and James Joyce

Sylvia Beach said that of the three beauties in the “Crowd” – Mina and her two daughters – Mina “would have been elected the most beautiful of the three” but that, despite his glaucoma, James Joyce, “who could see as well as anyone when he wanted to, observed that Joella was a beauty according to all the standards: her golden hair, her eyes, a complexion, her manners.”

So Joella had Joyce’s vote, although she was born in the same year as Joyce’s own daughter Lucia, who will appear in this story later on. Joella had Robert McAlmon’s vote too; he recalled some of the women in Paris at that time in Being Geniuses Together:

“Mary Reynolds, Mina Loy and her daughter Gioella [sic], Catherine Murphy, Djuna Barnes stand out in my memory as the more elegant, witty, beautiful of the girls or women about at the time.”

His description of Joella as a teenager is rather disturbing, given her age at the time, though not as disturbing as his reference to the ‘lovely twelve-year-old Fabie’ [Fabienne], Joella’s younger sister. (Fabienne was ‘done’ by Berenice Abbott, looking very fetching in a fashionable Louise Brooks bob.) McAlmon here sounds like Humbert Humbert (of Lolita) describing Dolores Haze:

“Gioella was then a bit gangly with adolescence, but very lovely, with sleepy blue eyes, long pale eyelashes, and slender, childish arms which made Mariette Mills [a sculptor who did the head of McAlmon] wish to sculpt her, and abstract painters talk of doing her portrait.

Gioella had a proper youthful scorn for me and used to ask when I was going to pull myself together and why I acted like a cynical old uncle to her. We took long walks in the wood; deer crossed our path from time to time, and Gioella lectured, and she didn’t think for a second that any of us were getting satisfaction out of being ‘intellectual.’ Only occasionally she would cease being patronising and confess wonder and confusion. Generally, however, she preferred scolding me mildly.”

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Encounters with Sinclair Lewis

McAlmon published (and misspelt the title of) Mina Loy’s poetry collection The Lost Lunar Baedecker. He was with her when he met Sinclair Lewis, first American winner, in 1930, of the Nobel Prize for literature; his novel Babbit, about middle-American boosterism, was published in 1922.

Lewis introduced his wife to Robert McAlmon. (husband of convenience of Annie Winifred Allerman, better known by her nom de plume, Bryher, and as the longtime lover of H.D., aka Hilda Doolittle). Over gin fizzes, she suddenly “fired three questions at me: if I thought Lewis the greatest American writer, a fine artist, America’s first. Her questions were too fast, and I said so, whereupon she flew out of the door, refusing to drink with me.”

That was their first proper meeting but McAlmon had nearly met Lewis earlier when he was with Djuna Barnes in a bar one night. He had “known Djuna slightly in New York, because Djuna was a very haughty lady, quick on the uptake, and with a wise-cracking tone that I was far too discreet to rival.”

But one night, when he was out with a male friend, after a few drinks “I finally asked her to dance with me, drink having freed me of the fear of rebuff. As we danced she said, ‘Bob McAlmon, why do you act so nice to me? You know you hate my guts’”. He denied it, she wasn’t convinced, but nevertheless, they became friends, if only in the literary sense. One night when he was out with her:

“Sinclair Lewis barged in, some three sheets in the wind. He had once written a story about hobohemia and evidently feared Djuna would believe he had used her as one of the characters in it. Or perhaps he merely had an admiring eye for Djuna or a respect for her undoubted talent, however uneven it may be. But Djuna was well up with drink too and was not going to get chummy. I recall that Lewis looked wistful and went away from the table, with Djuna not having introduced him.”

At the time McAlmon hadn’t read Lewis’s work; when he did he concluded that Lewis didn’t “know a bit more about Main Street, or Minneapolis, or Babbitts, than did I.”

 

Meeting Djuna Barnes

The only record of Barnes’ and Loy’s first meeting is the fictionalized version in McAlmon’s novella Post-Adolescence, a roman à clef in which they both appear, as does Marianne Moore, thinly disguised. In the novel, the fictional version of Barnes wants to meet Loy and gets McAlmon to introduce them, in a New York cafe on Sixth Avenue that sells bootleg whiskey.

Barnes tells McAlmon that “she doesn’t sound a hell of a lot different from the rest of us, except I suppose she’s more of a lady than I am.”

The two women become confidantes and the fictional Mina tells the fictional Djuna about her lost husband, a fictional version of Arthur Cravan. She tells her she wishes it had been her first husband who had disappeared. Barnes also talks about her disappointments with men. The Loy character says to her: “We’ll have to form a union of women to show the men up.” The Barnes character replies “and make ourselves exhibits A and B.”

 

Enter Peggy Guggenheim

Fabulously wealthy gallery owner and art patron Peggy Guggenheim was a patron of both Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes. Guggenheim supported Barnes, who lived in the same apartment block as Loy, with a monthly check.

Peggy took Djuna with her to England, where she had rented a large house in Devon; “the bedrooms were simple and adequate except for the beds which were as hard as army cots. One bedroom, however, was rather dressed up in rococo style and it looked so much like Djuna that we gave it to her. It was in this room, in bed, that she wrote most of Nightwood.”

“Mina Loy, who was not only a poetess and a painter, was always inventing something new by which she hoped to make a fortune. She had just created a new, or old, form of papier collé – flower cut-outs which she framed in beautiful old Louis Philippe frames she bought in the flea market. She asked me to take these to New York for her and sell them.”

Peggy did so, and had them exhibited on Madison Avenue, with great success. When she moved back to France and took a villa in a remote area in the south, “one of our first guests was Mina Loy, who came with her daughters, Joella and Faby. Mina painted a fresco in her bedroom. She conceived lobsters and mermaids with sunshades tied to their tails.” Later, back in Paris, Mina and Peggy went into business together: they opened a lampshade shop.

“I had set up in a shop on the Rue du Colisée, and she had a workshop next to Laurence’s studio on the Avenue du Maine where she employed a lot of girls. I ran the shop and she and Joella, her daughter, ran the workshop … We allowed my mother to invite her lingère to exhibit some underwear at the same time, as we then thought to make some money; this upset Mina so much that she refused to be present at the vernissage.”

Peggy eventually relented on the underwear and the shop became very successful, so much so that Mina had no time to write. So instead, she put the celestial imagery that had been in her poetry into the lampshades, designing illuminated globes that she called mappemondes [world maps] and globes célestes [celestial globes] advertised under the name l’Ombre féerique [fairy shadow]. Sadly, as the name suggests, they were very delicate and none are known to have survived.

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

 

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10 Spring-Themed Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay

This year, as spring approached I took on the perspective of Emily Dickinson and slowly, tentatively, began to believe that hope — “the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul” — is real and possible. The poet that I instinctively read, and read again, was Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) and her observations on the spring season.

This bouquet of spring poetry that I culled from Millay’s poems seem to have a common thread: Millay is annoyed at spring’s exuberant beauty coming yearly, and becomes indifferent and slightly angry since nature’s exuberant beauty arrives when her heart is under torment once more and is experienced as something of an intrusion upon her grieving.

And yet, Millay loves spring, and, in a slightly dramatic fashion in her poem Assault,  she becomes overwhelmed at the breaking of winter’s silence by the sound of the frogs; she is “waylaid by beauty,” and can scarce continue her walk amongst such natural delights.

Millay consistently used nature in her poetry to express her emotional renderings. Whether in free verse, the lyric rhyme, or in the very formal rules of the sonnet, Millay challenges herself and her readers to experience spring’s beauty as solely impermanent; therefore, beware of taking too much pleasure in its transitory pleasures.

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Learn more about Edna St. Vincent Millay
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You’ll find the following poems ahead:

SpringAssaultSonnet IIIThree Songs of ShatteringMariposaPortrait by a NeighborCity TreesSong of a Second AprilDaphneSonnet 

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Spring

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

(Originally published in Second April, 1921)

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Assault 

I
I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

II
I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

(Originally published in Second April, 1921)

 

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Sonnet III

Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
     And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
     And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
    And all the nests that the bared branches show,
    And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.

You go no more on your exultant feet
     Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
     Of a bird’s wings too high in the air to view, –
But you were something more than young and sweet
     And fair – and the long year remembers you.

(originally published in Renascence and Other Poems, 1917)

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Three Songs of Shattering

I
The first rose on my rose-tree
>    Budded, bloomed, and shattered,
During sad days when to me
     Nothing mattered.
Grief of grief has drained me clean;
    Still it seems a pity
No one saw,— it must have been
     Very pretty.

II
Let the little birds sing;
   Let the little lambs play;
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring; –
     But not in the old way!
I recall a place
     Where a plum-tree grew;
There you lifted up your face,
    And blossoms covered you.
If the little birds sing,
    And the little lambs play,
Spring is here; and so ’tis spring –
    But not in the old way!

III
All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree!
     Ere spring was going – ah, spring is gone!
And there comes no summer to the like of you and me, –
     Blossom time is early, but no fruit sets on.
All the dog-wood blossoms are underneath the tree,
   Browned at the edges, turned in a day;
And I would with all my heart they trimmed a mound for me,
    And weeds were tall on all the paths that led that way!

(originally published in Renascence and Other Poems, 1917)

 

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Mariposa

Butterflies are white and blue
In this field we wander through.
Suffer me to take your hand.
Death comes in a day or two.

All the things we ever knew
Will be ashes in that hour:
Mark the transient butterfly,
How he hangs upon the flower.

Suffer me to take your hand.
Suffer me to cherish you
Till the dawn is in the sky.
Whether I be false or true,
Death comes in a day or two.

(originally published in Second April, 1921)

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Portrait by a Neighbor

Before she has her floor swept
    Or her dishes done,
Any day you’ll find her
    A-sunning in the sun!

It’s long after midnight
    key’s in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
    Till past ten o’clock!

She digs in her garden
    With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
    By the light of the moon.

She walks up the walk
    Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
    And pays you back cream!

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
    And if she mows the place
She leaves the clover standing
    And the Queen Anne’s lace!

(originally published in A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922)

 

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City Trees

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come, 
I know what sound is there.

(originally published in Second April, 1921)

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Song of a Second April

April this year, not otherwise
    Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
    Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
    Hepaticas that pleased you so
And here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
    And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
    The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
    The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,
    Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
    Go up the hillside in the sun,
   Pensively, — only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

(originally published in Second April, 1921)

 

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Daphne

Why do you follow me? —
Any moment I can be
Nothing but a laurel-tree.

Any moment of the chase
I can leave you in my place
A pink bough for your embrace.

Yet over hill and hollow
Still it is your will to follow,
I am off; — to heel, Apollo!

(originally published in A Few Figs from Thistles, 1922)

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Sonnet xxvii

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dar.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Where I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

(originally published in The Harp Weaver, 1923)

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Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

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Wild Places Without a Man: H.D. and Bryher

Towards the end of World War I, the American expatriate writer and poet Hilda Doolittle, H.D. met Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher. H.D. and Breyher became lovers and would remain intimate for the rest of H.D.’s life, supporting and sustaining each other and sharing the responsibility of parenting H.D.’s daughter Perdita.

However, theirs was not an exclusive partnership. Both took other lovers, and in 1921 Bryher entered into a marriage of convenience with the American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon. This arrangement enabled Bryher to keep her traditional family at arm’s length, and allowed McAlmon to use her wealth to set up his own press.

This excerpt, detailing the complex relationships of a circle of modernist literary figures, is from Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth. Reprinted by permission.

 

A confluence of poets

Robert McAlmon was a penniless writer, publisher, and art-class nude model when the poet William Carlos Williams introduced him to his very wealthy future wife, the writer and editor who named herself Bryher, after one of the British Scilly Isles. Bryher was the lifelong, on and off partner of poet and novelist known as H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), whom Williams had met along with Ezra Pound when they were all in college.

Hilda had first met Ezra Pound even before college, in 1901, when she was fifteen and a schoolgirl in a Philadelphia suburb; they met at a Halloween party. Pound was already a student at the University of Pennsylvania, as was Williams. Pound was dressed as a Tunisian prince. They got to know each other better from 1905 when Hilda went to the women’s liberal arts college Bryn Mawr, where her friend, the poet Marianne Moore also went.

However, Williams didn’t meet Moore until around 1914. Williams said that in those college days Hilda was “a bizarre beauty.” He may have been in love with her himself, but she was attracted to Ezra and they became engaged.

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More about H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)
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“Ezra was the official lover, but Hilda was very coy and invited us both to come and see her. Ezra said to me, ‘are you trying to cut me out?’ I said, ‘no, I’m not thinking of any woman right now, but I like Hilda very much.’ Ezra Pound and I were not rivals, either for the girl or for the poetry. We were pals, both writing independently and respecting each other. I was impressed because he was studying literature and I wasn’t. I was learning from the page when I had a chance.”

Williams had met Pound even before he met H.D. . It was a very significant meeting for him; he was already starting to write poetry but intending to become a doctor. In a series of 1950s interviews with him, published as I Wanted to Write a Poem, he said: ‘Before meeting Ezra Pound is like B.C. and A.D.”

“I don’t recall my first meeting with him. Someone had told me there was a poet in the class. But I remember exactly how he looked. No beard, of course, then. He had a beautiful heavy head of blonde hair of which he was tremendously proud. Leonine. It was really very beautiful hair, wavy. And he had his head held high. I wasn’t impressed but I imagine the ladies were.”

H.D. wrote to Williams in 1905 that she was going to dedicate herself to “one who has been, beyond all others, torn and lonely – and ready to crucify himself yet more for the sake of helping all – I mean that I have promised to marry Ezra.” Williams got the consolation prize of being a best friend: “you are to me, Billy, nearer and dearer than many – than most.”

Hilda invited Ezra and his parents to Sunday lunch at her very conservative parents’ house. Her father was director of the Astronomical Observatory at the University and he didn’t approve of Ezra from the start, though Pound’s parents were socially acceptable – his father was assayer at the Philadelphia Mint – and they seemed to approve of Hilda.

Hilda’s cousin recalled Ezra’s first meeting with Hilda’s parents; he came with no hat over his wild mass of hair and was the first person her cousin had ever seen wearing tortoiseshell glasses. And “while ties were the absolute standard of dress for men, he wore none, but had his shirt open at the neck in true Byronic fashion … After the meal he read his poems to his adoring parents and Hilda, while the rest of us listened in confused wonderment.”

The engagement was soon over – Hilda wrote to Bill that Ezra had met someone else, but that she was “happy now as I was before – and I know that God is good.”

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Annie Winifred Ellerman, known as Bryher
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H.D. meets Bryher

Bryher’s own first meeting with H.D. , on July 17, 1918, was seismic for both of them. Bryher had read about H.D. in Amy Lowell’s books; she had become a great admirer and knew H.D.’s collection Sea Garden of 1916 by heart. Bryher sought out her idol.

When she found her, Bryher said that Hilda had “the sea in her eyes” when she opened the door of her Cornwall, England cottage and said ‘in a voice all wind and gull notes, I have been waiting for you.’ Hilda asked Bryher if she had seen the puffins in the Scilly Isles, which are off the coast of Cornwall; Bryher asked Hilda if she would go there with her.

Bryher had arrived at the right time: H.D. was poverty-stricken, abandoned by both her husband, Richard Aldington, and her female lover, Frances Gregg. And she was pregnant, possibly with D.H. Lawrence’s child.

Nobody knows if H.D. had a physical affair with D.H. Lawrence – they both burned all their letters to each other – but they were certainly close intellectually and geographically: Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived above her in London. We know they critiqued each other’s manuscripts and often had dinner together; all the rest is speculation.

 

Relationships turned into fiction

H.D. fictionalized her relationship with Aldington and D.H. and Frieda Lawrence in her novel Bid Me to Live but does not resolve the issue. When Hilda met Bryher, Aldington was not unhappy: they had an open relationship – the stillborn child she had with him had put her off sex, at least with men.

He wrote to her, “damn it, Dooley I believe in women having all the lovers they want if they’re in love with them.” She told him about her new female friend and admirer and on July 28, 1918 Richard wrote to his “wild Dryad”:

“Ah, my dear, how sweet and beautiful you are. Of course I will come to you after the war and we will be ‘wild & free,’ and happy ‘in the unploughed lands no foot oppresses, The lands that are free being free of man,’ I love you, best-beloved and dearest among all the daughters of the half-gods. . . You must tell me more about this new admirer of H.D. She must be very wise since she can love your poems so much. Has she a name or is she just some belle anonyme? Is she truly of the sacred race or merely one to whom it is given to recognise the gods yet not be of them?”

Bryher was certainly not among the gods as a writer, though McAlmon did publish her. Whether or not H.D. was a goddess of writing is another matter; Pound thought she was, but then she was helping him, along with Amy Lowell, in his promotion of Imagism in poetry.

T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, certainly didn’t think so. On November 17, 1921, he wrote to Aldington: ‘I did not conceal from you that I think you overrate H.D.’s poetry. I do find it fatiguingly monotonous and lacking in the element of surprise.”

 

About Winifred Ellerman, aka Bryher

Bryher’s real name was Winifred Ellerman, and she was the daughter of the secretive shipping tycoon John Ellerman, at that time probably the richest Englishman who had ever lived. He had a huge mansion in Central London near to Selfridges where Winifred grew up – she hated it and called it a “stuffy mansion.”

She told Hilda that if she did not come to the Scilly Isles and live with her she would commit suicide. Hilda agreed, and Bryher nursed her through the pregnancy, this time resulting on December 13, 1919, in a daughter, Perdita – the lost one – whom the two women brought up together.

Ezra Pound turned up at the hospital in London the day before Perdita was born, carrying an ebony stick with which he pounded the floor. He said he was very happy for her, though he told her that in her black lace cap she looked like old Mrs. Grumpy. His only problem, he said, was that the child wasn’t his.

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Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.S.*
Everybody I Can Think of Ever on Amazon U.K*
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A marriage of convenience

Soon after Perdita was born, Bryher got married — to Robert McAlmon of all people. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely couple, but all was not what it seemed. They had first met when Hilda contacted her old college friend William Carlos Williams to say that she and a friend were coming to New York en route to Los Angeles, where they were thinking of setting up; would he like to drop round to their hotel for tea? Williams was working with McAlmon on Contact magazine at the time; he asked Bob if he would like to come along.

Bryher turned out to be a very good thing financially, not only for McAlmon, but for many of his friends. Sylvia Beach, the owner of the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, regularly exchanged letters with her and with H.D; she spoke to Hilda as to a friend, but when she wrote to Bryher she wrote in gratitude, as to a patron. There are several letters extant where Sylvia thanks Bryher for saving her from financial ruin. Many years later, on Bryher’s fiftieth birthday Beach wrote to her:

“It was in one of the earliest days of ‘Shakespeare and Company’ that you came into my bookshop and my life, dear Bryher, and that we became a Protectorate of yours. We might have had the words: ‘By Special Appointment to Bryher’ painted above the door.”

When he first met her, McAlmon didn’t know – or said he didn’t know – that Bryher’s family was fabulously wealthy; he seemed to be genuinely attracted to her physically. He knew she wasn’t just another poor poet, though:

“Her family name meant little to me. However, I knew she was connected with great wealth.” At least that was the story that McAlmon, Williams, and others told. Morley Callaghan, a friend and former reporter colleague of Ernest Hemingway believed it; or at least he didn’t believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth: after the divorce McAlmon was left quite wealthy and was known as McAlimony.

“It had been a very nice thing for him to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement, but I had always believed his story that he hadn’t been aware it was to be a marriage in name only; he had insisted he was willing to be interested in women. And with the money, what did he do? Spend it all on himself? No, he became a publisher, he spent the money on other people he believed in.”

But McAlmon wasn’t telling the truth, certainly not the whole truth. Kay Boyle, in her edited version of McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together, prints a letter that he sent to Williams at his home in Rutherford, New Jersey.

“Then you’d better know this, Bill. I didn’t tell you in New York because I thought it wasn’t mine to tell. But Bryher doesn’t mind … The marriage is legal only, unromantic, and strictly an agreement. Bryher could not travel, and be away from home, unmarried. It was difficult being in Greece and other wild places without a man. She thought I understood her mind, as I do somewhat and faced me with the proposition. Some other things I shan’t mention I knew without realising. Well, you see I took on the proposition.”

It was a good proposition, for both of them: McAlmon got access to lots of money and a trip to Europe where he could meet James Joyce; Bryher got both a publisher and a husband as a cloak for her relationship with H.D.

He was presumably not the kind of husband her parents would have wanted: a penniless writer taking his clothes off for a living, but he was probably preferable to a lesbian lover in the eyes of them and the public. This wasn’t cosmopolitan, liberated Paris, this was conservative London and New York.

They were married in New York on February 14, 1921, Valentine’s Day – Williams and his wife Flossie, Marianne Moore, and the painter Marsden Hartley were at the supper afterward. They set off for Europe immediately, sharing the bridal suite, for which Sir John Ellerman had paid. H.D went with them.

 

Perdita’s last word

It wasn’t entirely a happy family though: McAlmon was a serial womanizer and needed conquests; he once even tried to kiss Sylvia Beach’s formidable partner Adrienne Monnier and got his lip bitten for the effort. And though he didn’t so much mind Hilda he barely tolerated Perdita, whom he called “Hilda Doolittle’s infant. It had black hair and eyes, and utterly blithe disregard in disposition and at the time looked like a Japanese Empress in miniature.” Note his charming use of the word “it” rather than “her.”

In return, many years later, Perdita (Schaffner as she became) wrote about McAlmon in her afterword to a 1984 republication of Bid Me to Live:

“Bryher’s husband Robert McAlmon turned up from time to time. from Paris. He never stayed long. It was a marriage of convenience; no reason why it shouldn’t work as well as any other, but it didn’t. He and Bryher fought constantly. Realizing that something was awry, I never looked on him as a father, even though Bryher was my second mother.”

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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:

Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde;  Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.

Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and  Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.

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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

The post Wild Places Without a Man: H.D. and Bryher appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Brilliant Quotes by Susan Sontag

To contemplate a quote, or a line from one of Susan Sontag’s (1930 – 2004) many essays or novels, will invariably have the reader pause and read the line or paragraph again. Quotes by Susan Sontag have the capability to change the reader’s perception about how we view our lives — especially in regards to art and our own cultural limitations and vanities.

My own literary daydream has been to visit a bookstore, most likely The Strand on Broadway and 12th Street in New York City, and Sontag would be my guide as we strolled the aisles. Sontag’s commitment to literature and art has made an imprint on my life. In my daydream, Sontag would be the one doing all of the talking — I could only contribute my appreciation with a nodding of my head.

These twenty-one quotes by Sontag would be the vital information she would impart to me on our bookstore journey. These perceptive words of great wisdom strike a chord of familiarity with her millions of readers — and yet, Sontag’s quotes seem to be written especially for the one reader contemplating them. That’s a brilliant writer.

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“All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.”

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“If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other worlds, other territories.”

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“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”

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“Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminent of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.”

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“It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.”

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“In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the person who invents it.”

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“Wherever people feel safe — they will be indifferent.”

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“My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.”

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“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It is a creator of inwardness.”

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“It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

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“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor.  It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

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“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”

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“The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one; or both. Usually both.”

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“All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.”

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“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

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“One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.”

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“I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue.”

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Books by and about Susan Sontag on Bookshop.org*
Susan Sontag page on Amazon*
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“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

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“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

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“All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.”

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“Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.”

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Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.

More about Susan Sontag Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography Susan Sontag on Storytelling, etc. The Books of Susan Sontag, Ranked

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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen (October 24, 1939 – May 29, 2008) was an award-winning Indigenous American poet, novelist, activist, and professor.

She is widely considered a founding figure of contemporary indigenous literature, defining its canon and bringing it to the greater public eye at a time when many denied its existence. She is remembered for her engaging fictional work and groundbreaking critical essays.

Known as one of the key intellectual minds of indigenous literature and history, Paula bridged the literary gap between indigenous writing and feminism. In her lifetime, she published seventeen works, many are still frequently anthologized.

 Personal life and education

Born Paula Marie Francis, she was the daughter of a Lebanese-American father and a Laguna-Sioux-Scottish mother. She found herself identifying with her Laguna Pueblo roots.

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1939, she was raised in the small New Mexican grant village Cubero, which bordered the Laguna Pueblo reservation. Her father, E. Lee Francis owned a local store there. Later, he served as the lieutenant governor of New Mexico. Her brother, Lee Francis, was a Laguna Pueblo storyteller and teacher. Paula is also related to other prominent Laguna authors. Carol Lee Sanchez is her sister, and Leslie Marmon Silko is her cousin.

Paula Gunn Allen’s early education consisted of attending mission and boarding schools. She graduated from Sisters of Charity in 1957, a religious boarding school just outside of Albuquerque.

Paula left New Mexico for her early college career, receiving a BA in English in 1966 and an MFA in Creative Writing in 1968 at the University of Oregon. She returned to her home state and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies with a concentration in Native American Literature from the University of Mexico in 1976. In the course of her studies, a poetry professor pointed her to some poets who would become her literary inspirations, including Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and Denise Levertov.

She received an NEA Creative Writing fellowship in 1978, and a postdoctoral fellowship to study at UCLA two years later.

Paula married twice and had two children. At one point she identified as a lesbian, but later described herself as “a serial bisexual.” Paula’s experience with her sexuality also contributed to aspects of her works, both critical and fictional.

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Literary Life

Paula’s stories sourced many memories and experiences from her childhood, often drawing from Pueblo culture. She utilized oral storytelling within her works, discussing traditional tales such as Grandmother Spider or Corn Maiden. Paula was also influenced by the matriarchal elements of her upbringing, which contributed to the feminist elements in her stories and critical works.

Paula published six volumes of poetry: America the Beautiful (2010), Life Is a Fatal Disease: Selected Poems 1962-1995; Skins and Bones (1988); Wyrds (1987); Shadow Country (1982); A Cannon Between My Knees (1981); and Blind Lion (1974).

She also published a novel titled The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). It tells the survival story of an indigenous woman seeking her future while connecting to her past. The story utilizes traditional rituals and folklore throughout and discusses aspects of racism and sexism.

Wanting to shine a spotlight on other indigenous authors, Paula also helped to establish the indigenous literary canon by publishing several anthologies: Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales; Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989), Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900–1970 (1994), and Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974–1994 (1996).

Perhaps what Paula is best known for are her critical and anthropological works. Her anthology, Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983), is considered a foundational work for Indigenous Literature studies.

Also notable is her most recent publication Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004), which discusses the tale of Pocahontas from a realistic lens. It explores and dismantles the stereotypes that came with the popular Disney movie. It received a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

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Paula Gunn Allen page on Amazon*
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The Sacred Hoop

Paula’s widely anthologized 1986 book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, is arguably her most influential. It was intended to counter many indigenous stereotypes, particularly about gender roles. Paula stated that many indigenous tribes are “gynocentric” — with women and men being considered equals, and argued that western culture placed a patriarchal lens on indigenous cultures.

The Sacred Hoop attempts to destabilize the monolithic narrative of indigenous cultures that western culture often wrongly ascribes to it. Moreover, she disliked the idea that a society can either be matriarchal or patriarchal, the states that these binary options aren’t realistic when examining indigenous cultures.

Her work utilized folklore, ceremonies, and other indigenous literature to discuss such issues. She also believed that this literature is inherently feminist, because many such cultures aren’t patriarchal. To be an indigenous author in itself went against the grain.

 Paula Gunn Allen’s Legacy

In 1990, Paula was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She also received the Native American Literature Prize, The Susan Koppelman Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award for her edited short stories by Indigenous authors. She also won two Hubbell Medals.

Paula Gunn Allen is considered a foremother of Indigenous literature. Her passion for Indigenous visibility within a Eurocentric literary canon helped spark an entire range of novels by other Indigenous authors. The nourishment and inspiration she provided for these books, as well as her own, established a new form of Indigenous literature that put new perspectives into the world.

Paula’s exploration of sexuality and feminism helped reshape an inaccurate narrative of Indigenous culture. She placed herself as a liaison between Indigenous and white culture. This position helped her rekindle tales lost by colonization.

A theme in many of Paula’s works is the idea of survival; not of the individual, but of heritage. In many ways, Paula embodied this theme in her own life. She put preservation over everything else. Paula Gunn Allen died of lung cancer on May 29, 2008, survived by her two children.

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Contributed by Jess Mendes, a 2021 graduate of SUNY-New Paltz with a major in Digital Media Management, and a minor in Creative Writing.

More about Paula Gunn Allen

Major Works

Poetry

The Blind Lion (1974)Coyote’s Daylight Trip (1978)A Cannon Between My Knees (1981)Star Child: Poems (1981)Shadow Country (1982)Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987 (1988)Grandmother (1991)Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995 (1997)

Nonfiction

Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (1983)The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986)Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Women’s Sourcebook (1991)Woman work Bridges: Literature across Cultures McGraw–Hill (1994)As Long As the Rivers Flow: The Stories of Nine Native Americans (1996)Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Loose Canons (1998)Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (2004)

Anthologies and edited collections

Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing
by Native American Women (1989)Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1900-1970 (1994)Song of the Turtle: American Indian Literature, 1974-1994 (1996)Hozho: Walking in Beauty: Short Stories by American Indian Writers (2001)

More information

Official Website Wikipedia L.A. Times Legacy Project Chicago Out History Magazine 

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*This is an Amazon Affiliate link. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!

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