Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A WOMAN OF SIXTY, by CALE YOUNG RICE


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A WOMAN OF SIXTY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The shock came when I went up to her coffin
Last Line: That might have been immortal given place.
Subject(s): Beauty; Death; Faces; Funerals; Life; Women; Dead, The; Burials


The shock came when I went up to her coffin
And looked upon her satin-pillowed face.
I had known her long,
But of soul had never seen in her a trace.
Her life had been a bitterness and a malice,
A venom against all visions of the spirit,
Beauty, I knew, had never touched her mind,
And nothing akin to beauty had come near it.
A cackling laugh that said all swans were geese,
A bigot sneer that slandered every fineness,
A jealousy that jaundiced her -- because
Her being was ever devoid of all divineness.
Loving none but the offspring of her body,
And wanting to suckle them beyond due time,
The bliss of her infatuate motherhood
Seemed hardly more than sentimental slime.
Obsessed with a desire for domination,
That shaped her mouth to fish-like egotism,
Her tongue clacked with inanities that rent
Faith in her virtues with distaste and schism.
All this and more I had seen. But now strange death
That takes the soul, had done a stranger thing;
It had given a soul to her -- endowed her brow
And lips and lids beyond imagining.
For calmness sat where bitterness had been,
And silence where coarse cackling laughter carked.
And where the snarling sneer had nostriled her
Eternity -- and majesty -- were marked.
And jealousy no longer jaundiced her;
For who is jealous of the Infinite?
Sublimity enswathed her like a dream;
On her divinity was deeply writ.
And now her motherhood was only Nature's,
Within whose womb she soon again would lie.
Her self was selfless -- and its littleness
Was great with all the peace of those who die.
Therefore my shock, as leaning over the coffin
I looked upon her satin-pillowed face.
All that had been unlovely had to all
That might have been immortal given place.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net