Classic and Contemporary Poetry
THREE GREAT LADIES, by SARAH NORCLIFFE CLEGHORN Poet's Biography First Line: They seemed a sort of frame for the town's life Last Line: Of her familiar saint of self-control. Subject(s): Women | ||||||||
They seemed a sort of frame for the town's life, In their old houses, wide with porch and wing, Bowered with syringa, snowdrop, flowering currant, On a green street of elms and lawns and leisure, A quarter of a century ago; Three powerful New England Abbesses Dwelling secluded in their Priories. I THE VICTORIAN She drove behind an ambling chestnut horse In a high stilted buggy; at home she rolled Like a plump pea about the stately pod Of her centennial house. She lived at ease On the invested habits saved and stored For seventy years; and kept her bygone place As the Preceptor's wife she once had been, Up at the old Academy. Plump and smooth Were her jowls, like an infant's; and not more Tranquil an infant's breath in sleep, than heaved The small round of her bodice in the sermon. When she took lilies-of- the-valley down To lay them alongside the Latin stone Upon her scholar-husband's mossy grave She stooped with placid eyes, and turned away With placid eyes, contented with herself, (Or so, at any rate, I always judged) To think that she had not forgotten him. II THE AMAZON The ample body of this Amazon (Or if you like to call her an old Roman) Was like a porcelain stove, where late at night, Richly and gustily her spirit crackled. Her tongue was like a flag ripped with the wind. Her church was one exotic in New England; And by her countenance there must have been Latin or Oriental blood in her. Her ancestors were canny mountain lawyers, Judges, commissioners, and Congressmen, Who in their boyhood, ploughing out the rocks From their broad, beautiful and barren fields, Held open in the other hand their Blackstone. This their descendant jeered at sorrow and want, Dared her old age to come upon her, found Her loneliness a tonic. In the end, In her last illness, in her ninetieth year, She seemed, like a hawk, to fly into the face Of her own death, and beat it with fierce wings. III THE VESTAL Those thickly gathered, uniformly brown Skirts, and brown comb in sleekly parted hair, Still seem to me more nunlike than the veil; And she more delicately virginal Than the most soft young sylph; more innocent Her worn, enduring body of eighty years. Her pleasant patrimony all was spent In her fond brother's ventures; she began, In comfort-loving middle age, to save, Closely to save and turn; I will not say To scrimp, of what was so serenely done, With such a dedicated firmness. More, As years went by, her face, her house, her ways, Withdrew into their mould. Time made her face More and more gaunt, more rigorous and more sweet; Her house more mystic, stately and forlorn; It's pictures more symbolic and more strange, -- Pictures of heaven, and of pilgrimage. Through downward shutters scarcely did the sun Force in a lath of light to show their strangeness. Order and peace in her cold kitchen; order And peace in her faintly warmed sitting-room. Something about it made you fanciful; A person might imagine that he heard Beating of wings, hushed beating of the wings Of her familiar saint of self-control. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...ARISTOTLE TO PHYLLIS by JOHN HOLLANDER A WOMAN'S DELUSION by SUSAN HOWE JULIA TUTWILER STATE PRISON FOR WOMEN by ANDREW HUDGINS THE WOMEN ON CYTHAERON by ROBINSON JEFFERS TOMORROW by ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD LADIES FOR DINNER, SAIPAN by KENNETH KOCH GOODBYE TO TOLERANCE by DENISE LEVERTOV COMRADE JESUS by SARAH NORCLIFFE CLEGHORN |
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