Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind hath blown?
_Grace Hazard Conkling_
Grace Hazard Conkling was born in 1878 in New York City. After
graduating from Smith College in 1899, she studied music at the
University of Heidelberg (1902-3) and Paris (1903-4). Since 1914 she
has been a teacher of English at Smith College, where she has done
much to create an alert interest in poetry.
Mrs. Conkling’s _Afternoons of April_ (1915) and _Wilderness Songs_
(1920) are full of a graciousness that rarely grows cloying. Gentle
colors and a gentler sadness are here; soft music, the whisper of
flutes above a plaintive English horn, rises from her pages. But the
poems are by no means monotonous. A fragrant whimsicality, a
childlike freshness vivifies poems like “The Whole Duty of Berkshire
Brooks,” “Dilemma” and “Frost on a Window,” which reminds one of the
manner of her amazing daughter, Hilda, (see page 394).