Roberto Nickson / Pexels

• Adventure
• Sun and wind and beat of sea, 
• Great lands stretching endlessly… 
• Where be bonds to bind the free? 
• All the world was made for me!

• Doom
• Peter stands by the gate, 
• And Michael by the throne. 
• “Peter, I would pass the gate 
• And come before the throne.” 
• “Whose spirit prayed never at the gate 
• In life nor at the throne, 
• In death he may not pass the gate 
• To come before the throne:” 
• Peter said from the gate; 
• Said Michael from the throne.

• The Lonely Death
• In the cold I will rise, I will bathe 
• In waters of ice; myself 
• Will shiver, and shrive myself, 
• Alone in the dawn, and anoint 
• Forehead and feet and hands; 
• I will shutter the windows from light, 
• I will place in their sockets the four 
• Tall candles and set them aflame 
• In the grey of the dawn; and myself 
• Will lay myself straight in my bed, 
• And draw the sheet under my chin.

• Fate Defied 
• As it 
• Were tissue of silver 
• I’ll wear, O fate, thy grey, 
• And go mistily radiant, clad 
• Like the moon.

• Night Winds 
• The old 
• Old winds that blew 
• When chaos was, what do 
• They tell the clattered trees that I 
• Should weep?

• The Warning 
• Just now, 
• Out of the strange 
• Still dusk . . . as strange, as still . . . 
• A white moth flew . . . Why am I grown 
• So cold?

• November Night
• Listen . . . 
• With faint dry sound, 
• Like steps of passing ghosts, 
• The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees 
• And fall.

• Blue Hyacinths
• In your 
• Curled petals what ghosts 
• Of blue headlands and seas, 
• What perfumed immortal breath sighing 
• Of Greece.

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1814) was an American poet best known as the inventor of the cinquain. Inspired by the Japanese forms, the haiku and the tanka, a cinquain is comprised of five lines with stresses for each line increasing by one beat for each line — 1, 2, 3, 4 — before returning to a single stress on the final line, as illustrated in the last five poems published above. The poem derives its effect from this pattern, which builds up the reader’s expectations in the first four lines only to be followed by a dramatic collapse in the abbreviated final line.