SARAH M. B. PIATT
Reading edition
Mrs. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, one of Kentucky's most distinguished poets, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, August 11, 1836. Her grandfather was Morgan Bryan, brother-in-law of Daniel Boone, and one of the proprietors of Bryan's Station, near Lexington, famous in the old Indian wars. When only three years old she left Lexington to make her home near Versailles, Kentucky, where her beautiful mother died in 1844. After her mother's death she was sent to her aunt's home at New Castle, Kentucky. Miss Bryan was graduated from Henry Female College, New Castle; and on June 18, 1861, she was married to John James Piatt, the Ohio poet. George D. Prentice, of course, was the first to praise and print Mrs. Piatt's poems and start her upon a literary career. Her husband, too, has been her chief critic, and responsible for the publication of her work in book form. From the first Mrs. Piatt's poems have been deeply introspective, voicing the heart of a woman in every line. Her work has been cordially commended by Bayard Taylor, William Dean Howells, John Burroughs, Hamilton Wright Mabie, and many other well-known and capable critics in America and Europe. Several of Mrs. Piatt's poems were published in The Nests at Washington and Other Poems (Cincinnati, 1861), but her first independent volume, issued anonymously, was A Woman's Poems (Boston, 1871). This is her best known work, made famous by Bayard Taylor in his delightful little book, The Echo Club. This was followed by A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles and Other Poems (1874); That New World and Other Poems (1876); Poems in Company with Children (1877); Dramatic Persons and Moods (1880); The Children Out of Doors and Other Poems (with her husband, 1885); An Irish Garland (1885); Selected Poems (1885); In Primrose Time (1886); Child's-World Ballads (1887); The Witch in the Glass (1889); An Irish Wild-Flower (1891); An Enchanted Castle (1893); Complete Poems (1894, two vols.); Child's-World Ballads (1896, second series); and The Gift of Tears (Cincinnati, 1906). These volumes prove Mrs. Piatt to be one of the most prolific and finest female poets America has produced. English reviewers have often linked her name with Mrs. Browning's and Miss Rossetti's, and if she has not actually reached their rank, she has surely shown work worthy of a high place in the literature of her native country. Mrs. Piatt is at the present time residing at North Bend, Ohio, near Cincinnati.
Bibliography. The Echo Club, by Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1876); The Poets of Ohio, by Emerson Venable (Cincinnati, 1909).
IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD
AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE
[From An Irish Garland (North Bend, Ohio, 1885)]
Where the graves were many, we looked for one. Oh, the Irish rose was red, And the dark stones saddened the setting sun With the names of the early dead. Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him In the land we love so well, Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim In the churchyard of Clonmel. But the sexton came. "Can you tell us where Charles Wolfe is buried?" "I can— See, that is his grave in the corner there. (Ay, he was a clever man, If God had spared him!) It's many that come To be asking for him," said he. But the boy kept whispering, "Not a drum Was heard,"—in the dusk to me. (Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall Of the roofless church where he lay, And the leaves that the withering year let fall He swept, with the ivy away; And, as we read on the rock the words That, writ in the moss, we found, Right over his bosom a shower of birds In music fell to the ground). ... Young poet, I wonder did you care, Did it move you in your rest To hear that child in his golden hair, From the mighty woods of the West, Repeating your verse of his own sweet will, To the sound of the twilight bell, Years after your beating heart was still In the churchyard of Clonmel?
A WORD WITH A SKYLARK (A CAPRICE OF HOMESICKNESS)[21]
[From Songs of Nature, edited by John Burroughs (New York, 1901)]
If this be all, for which I've listened long, Oh, spirit of the dew! You did not sing to Shelley such a song As Shelley sung to you. Yet, with this ruined Old World for a nest, Worm-eaten through and through,— This waste of grave-dust stamped with crown and crest,— What better could you do? Ah me! but when the world and I were young, There was an apple-tree, There was a voice came in the dawn and sung The buds awake—ah me! Oh, Lark of Europe, downward fluttering near, Like some spent leaf at best, You'd never sing again if you could hear My Blue-Bird of the West!
THE GIFT OF TEARS[22]
[From The Gift of Tears (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1906)]
The legend says: In Paradise God gave the world to man. Ah me! The woman lifted up her eyes: "Woman, I have but tears for thee." But tears? And she began to shed, Thereat, the tears that comforted. (No other beautiful woman breathed, No rival among men had he, The seraph's sword of fire was sheathed, The golden fruit hung on the tree. Her lord was lord of all the earth, Wherein no child had wailed its birth), Tears to a bride? Yea, therefore tears. In Eden? Yea, and tears therefore. Ah, bride in Eden, there were fears In the first blush your young cheek wore, Lest that first kiss had been too sweet, Lest Eden withered from your feet! Mother of women! Did you see How brief your beauty, and how brief, Therefore, the love of it must be, In that first garden, that first grief? Did those first drops of sorrow fall To move God's pity for us all? Oh, sobbing mourner by the dead— One watcher at the grave grass-grown! Oh, sleepless for some darling head Cold-pillowed on the prison-stone, Or wet with drowning seas! He knew, Who gave the gift of tears to you!