Grace Hazard Conkling

Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done much to create an alert interest in poetry.

Mrs. Conkling’s Afternoons of April (1915) and Wilderness Songs (1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the poems are by no means monotonous. A 208fragrant whimsicality, a childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).

THE WHOLE DUTY OF BERKSHIRE BROOKS

To build the trout a crystal stair;

To comb the hillside’s thick green hair;

To water jewel-weed and rushes;

To teach first notes to baby thrushes;

To flavor raspberry and apple

And make a whirling pool to dapple

With scattered gold of late October;

To urge wise laughter on the sober

And lend a dream to those who laugh;

To chant the beetle’s epitaph;

To mirror the blue dragonfly,

Frail air-plane of a slender sky;

Over the stones to lull and leap

Herding the bubbles like white sheep;

The claims of worry to deny,

And whisper sorrow into sleep!

FROST ON A WINDOW

This forest looks the way

Nightingales sound.

Tall larches lilt and sway

Above the glittering ground:

The wild white cherry spray

Scatters radiance round.

209The chuckle of the nightingale

Is like this elfin wood.

Even as his gleaming trills assail

The spirit’s solitude,

These leaves of light, these branches frail

Are music’s very mood.

The song of these fantastic trees,

The plumes of frost they wear,

Are for the poet’s whim who sees

Through a deceptive air,

And has an ear for melodies

When never a sound is there.