On the warm Sunday afternoons
And every evening in the Spring and Summer
When the night hurries the late home-comer
And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes
Float from the open windows and jar
Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;
When the city noises commingle and melt
With a restless something half-seen, half-felt—
I see them always there,
Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;
That row of little girls who sit and stare
Like sparrows on a granite perch.
They come in twittering couples or walk alone
To their gray bough of stone,
Sometimes by twos and threes, sometimes as many as five—
But always they sit there on the narrow coping
Bright-eyed and solemn, scarcely hoping
To see more than what is merely moving and alive....
They hear the couples pass; the lisp of happy feet
Increases and the night grows suddenly sweet....
Before the quiet church that smells of death
They sit.
And Life sweeps past them with a rushing breath
And reaches out and plucks them by the hand
And calls them boldly, whispering to each
In some strange speech
They tremble to but cannot understand.
It thrills and troubles them, as one by one,
The days run off like water through a sieve;
While, with a gaze as candid as the sun,
Poignant and puzzled and inquisitive,
They come and sit,—
A part of life and yet apart from it.
_Jean Starr Untermeyer_
Jean Starr was born at Zanesville, Ohio, May 13, 1886, and educated
at the Putnam Seminary in the city of her birth. At sixteen, she
came to New York City, pursuing special studies at Columbia. In 1907
she married Louis Untermeyer and, although she had written some
prose previous to the poetic renascence, her first volume was
published more than ten years later.
_Growing Pains_ (1918) is a thin book of thirty-four poems, the
result of eight years slow and self-critical creation. This careful
and highly selective process does much to bring the volume up to an
unusually high level; a severity of taste and standards maintain the
poet on the same austere plane. Perfection is almost a passion with
her; the first poem in the book declares:
I would rather work in stubborn rock
All the years of my life;
And make one strong thing
And set it in a high, clean place,
To recall the granite strength of my desire.
Acutely self-analytical, there is a stern, uncompromising
relentlessness toward her introspections that keeps them from being
wistful or pathetic. These poems are, as she explains in her
title-poem—
No songs for an idle lute,
No pretty tunes of coddled ills,
But the bare chart of my growing pains.
Intellect is always in the ascendency, even in the most ecstatic
verses. In an almost religious poem, “A Man” (dedicated to her
father), she pictures herself as a child, and expresses the whole
psychology of our juvenile love of poor literature in lines like:
A book held gaping on my knees,
Watering a sterile romance with my thoughts.
But it is not only her keen search for truth and an equally keen eye
for the exact word that make these poems distinctive. A sharp color
sense, a surprising whimsicality, a translation of the ordinary in
terms of the beautiful, illumine such poems as “Sinfonia Domestica,”
“Clothes,” “Autumn.” In the last named, with its brilliant
combination of painting and housewifery, Mrs. Untermeyer has
reproduced her early environment with a bright pungency;
“Verhaeren’s Flemish _genre_ pictures are no better,” writes Amy
Lowell. Several of her purely pictorial poems establish a swift
kinship between the most romantic and most prosaic objects. The tiny
“Moonrise” is an example; so is “High Tide,” that, in one extended
metaphor, turns the mere fact of a physical law into a most
arresting and noble fancy.
_Dreams Out of Darkness_ (1921) is a ripening of this author’s
powers with a richer musical undercurrent. This increase of melody
is manifest on every page, possibly most striking in “Lake Song,”
which, beneath its symbolism, is one of the most liquid unrhymed
lyrics of the period.