Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
_Adelaide Crapsey_
Adelaide Crapsey was born, September 9, 1878, at Rochester, New
York, where she spent her childhood. She entered Vassar College in
1897, graduating with the class of 1901. Two years after graduation
she began work as a teacher of History and Literature, in Kemper
Hall, Kenosha, Wisconsin, where she had attended preparatory school.
In 1905 she went abroad, studying archaeology in Rome. After her
return she essayed to teach again but her failing health compelled
her to discontinue and though she became instructor in Poetics at
Smith College in 1911, the burden was too great for her.
Prior to this time she had written little verse, her chief work
being an analysis of English metrics, an investigation (which she
never finished) of certain problems in verse structure. In 1913,
after her breakdown, she began to write those brief lines which,
like some of Emily Dickinson’s, are so precise and poignant. She was
particularly happy in her “Cinquains,” a form that she originated.
These five-line stanzas in the strictest possible structure (the
lines having, respectively, two, four, six, eight and two syllables)
doubtless owe something to the Japanese _hokku_, but Adelaide
Crapsey saturated them with her own fragile loveliness.
“Her death,” writes her friend, Claude Bragdon, “was tragic. Full of
the desire of life she was forced to go, leaving her work all
unfinished.” She died at Saranac Lake, New York, on October 8, 1914.
Her small volume _Verse_ appeared in 1915, and a part of the
unfinished _Study in English Metrics_ was posthumously published in
1918.