The Blind Girl, by Nathalia Crane
Feb. 7th, 2007 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
browngirlSo, some time ago, I woke with two lines of poetry ringing through my head. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
redbird gave me the information I needed to find the book; I didn't find it in a (to be truthful, excessively) brief trip to the library, so I bought it.
I'm glad I did. The book is called Poetry of our Times and I have a great deal to say about it, from opening it and recognizing the font (long ago, when I was young, I fancied myself a poet in training, and read a great deal of it) to the intoxicating old-book scent of it, to the poets featured (Yeats and Frost and Millay and are names you might recognize; Piper and Wilson and Ledwidge are ones you might not) to the way people are discussed (poor Countee Cullen is there as the Token Black Guy; Nathalia Crane -- oh, I have to quote this. "Her chances of future fame should be considerably enhanced by the curious mixture of her blood; on one side the Pilgrim simplicity of John Alden, on the other the romantic turbulence of the Spanish Jews. Ad she is also related to that unappreciated master of American literature, Stephen Crane.") to the moment of history it inhabits (looking back at the Great World War, could they have even imagined the next one upcoming?).
Wow, that was a ludicrously long sentence.
Nathalia Crane herself was a child prodigy (so one reason I probably remembered this poem is that I likely identified with her, back in my days of potential), who was famously sassed by Edwin Markham who thought no "girl so immature could have written these poems". She grew up to become a professor, according to Wikipedia, and I'll have to look her up sometime. (That's another feature of this book: it's like watching Season 2 of Babylon 5 or reading The Fellowship of the Ring and knowing there's more to the story that viewers/readers at the time didn't have access to that I do.)
The Blind Girl, by Nathalia Crane
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
In the darkness who would answer, in the darkness who would care,
If the odor of the roses and the wing'ed things were there?
In the darkness who would cavil o'er the question of a line,
Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design?
Oh, night, thy soothing prophecies companion all our ways,
Until releasing hands let fall the catalogue of days.
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
In the darkness who would answer, in the darkness who would care,
If the odor of the roses and the wing'ed things were there?
redbird gave me the information I needed to find the book; I didn't find it in a (to be truthful, excessively) brief trip to the library, so I bought it. I'm glad I did. The book is called Poetry of our Times and I have a great deal to say about it, from opening it and recognizing the font (long ago, when I was young, I fancied myself a poet in training, and read a great deal of it) to the intoxicating old-book scent of it, to the poets featured (Yeats and Frost and Millay and are names you might recognize; Piper and Wilson and Ledwidge are ones you might not) to the way people are discussed (poor Countee Cullen is there as the Token Black Guy; Nathalia Crane -- oh, I have to quote this. "Her chances of future fame should be considerably enhanced by the curious mixture of her blood; on one side the Pilgrim simplicity of John Alden, on the other the romantic turbulence of the Spanish Jews. Ad she is also related to that unappreciated master of American literature, Stephen Crane.") to the moment of history it inhabits (looking back at the Great World War, could they have even imagined the next one upcoming?).
Wow, that was a ludicrously long sentence.
Nathalia Crane herself was a child prodigy (so one reason I probably remembered this poem is that I likely identified with her, back in my days of potential), who was famously sassed by Edwin Markham who thought no "girl so immature could have written these poems". She grew up to become a professor, according to Wikipedia, and I'll have to look her up sometime. (That's another feature of this book: it's like watching Season 2 of Babylon 5 or reading The Fellowship of the Ring and knowing there's more to the story that viewers/readers at the time didn't have access to that I do.)
The Blind Girl, by Nathalia Crane
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
In the darkness who would answer, in the darkness who would care,
If the odor of the roses and the wing'ed things were there?
In the darkness who would cavil o'er the question of a line,
Since the darkness holds all loveliness beyond the mere design?
Oh, night, thy soothing prophecies companion all our ways,
Until releasing hands let fall the catalogue of days.
In the darkness, who would answer for the color of a rose,
Or the vestments of the May moth and the pilgrimage it goes?
In the darkness who would answer, in the darkness who would care,
If the odor of the roses and the wing'ed things were there?
