Adelaide Crapsey
Reading edition
CINQUAINS
NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen.
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.
TRIAD
These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow ... the hour
61Before the dawn ... the mouth of one
Just dead.
SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS
“Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?” “For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore.”
THE GUARDED WOUND
If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!
THE WARNING
Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk ... as strange, as still ...
A white moth flew. Why am I grown
So cold?
FATE DEFIED
As it
Were tissue of silver
I’ll wear, O fate, thy grey,
And go mistily radiant, clad
Like the moon.
THE PLEDGE
White doves of Cytherea, by your quest
Across the blue Heaven’s bluest highest air,
And by your certain homing to Love’s breast,
Still to be true and ever true—I swear.
62
EXPENSES
Little my lacking fortunes show
For this to eat and that to wear;
Yet laughing, Soul, and gaily go!
An obol pays the Stygian fare.
ADVENTURE
Sun and wind and beat of sea,
Great lands stretching endlessly ...
Where be bonds to bind the free?
All the world was made for me!
DIRGE
Never the nightingale,
Oh, my dear,
Never again the lark
Thou wilt hear;
Though dusk and the morning still
Tap at thy window-sill,
Thou ever love call and call
Thou wilt not hear at all,
My dear, my dear.
SONG
I make my shroud, but no one knows—
So shimmering fine it is and fair,
With stitches set in even rows.
I make my shroud, but no one knows.
In door-way where the lilac blows,
Humming a little wandering air,
I make my shroud and no one knows,
So shimmering fine it is and fair.
63
THE LONELY DEATH
In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.