If I shall make no poems any more,
There will be rest, at least, so let it be,
Time to look up at golden stars and listen
To the long mellow thunder of the sea.
The year will turn for me, I shall delight in
All animals, and some of my own kind;
Sharing with no one but myself the frosty
And half ironic musings of my mind.
_Gladys Cromwell_
Gladys Cromwell was born November 28, 1885, in New York City. She
was educated in New York private schools and lived abroad a great
deal. “Her life,” writes Anne Dunn, “was little indented by outer
events, being wholly of the mind and spirit.” She was most at home
in the world within herself, sensitive and—to the final, tragic
degree—self-effacing.
In January, 1918, Gladys and Dorothea, her twin-sister, enrolled in
the Canteen Service of the Red Cross, sailed for France and were
stationed at Châlons. Both girls worked unremittingly for eight
months. It was only at the end of their desperate labors that they
gave way to hopelessness, believing their efforts futile and the
whole world desolate. Signs of a mental breakdown show in their
diaries as early as October. “After the armistice,” writes Anne Dunn
in her biographical note which serves as an appreciative epilogue to
Gladys Cromwell’s _Poems_, “they showed symptoms of nervous
prostration; but years of self-control and consideration for others
made them conceal the black horror in which they lived, the agony
through which they saw a world which, they felt, contained no refuge
for beauty or quiet thought. And when, on their way home, they
jumped from the deck of the _Lorraine_ it was in response to a
vision that promised them fulfilment and peace.” After their death,
which occurred January 19, 1919, the French Government awarded the
two sisters the Croix de Guerre.
_Gates of Utterance_ (1915) has something more than the usual
“promise.” But the best of Miss Cromwell’s work can be found in her
posthumously published _Poems_ (1919), which, in 1920, received the
yearly prize offered by the Poetry Society of America, dividing the
honor with Neihardt’s _The Song of Three Friends_. Her most
significant poems betray that attitude to life which was at the
heart of her tragedy—a preoccupation that was a mixture of
fascination and fear. Her lines, never mediocre, are introspective
and fraught with serious concern—the work of a frailer and unsmiling
Emily Dickinson. Several of the best of her delicate songs, like the
two lyrics quoted, tremble on the verge of greatness.