Elinor Wylie: articulate and accessible

• October
• Beauty has a tarnished dress,
• And a patchwork cloak of cloth
• Dipped deep in mournfulness,
• Striped like a moth.

• Wet grass where it trails
• Dyes it green along the hem;
• She has seven silver veils
• With cracked bells on them.

• She is tired of all these —
• Grey gauze, translucent lawn;
• The broad cloak of Herakles.
• Is tangled flame and fawn.

• Water and light are wearing thin:
• She has drawn above her head
• The warm enormous lion skin
• Rough red and gold.

• Atavism
• I was always afraid of Somes’s Pond: 
• Not the little pond, by which the willow stands, 
• Where laughing boys catch alewives in their hands 
• In brown, bright shallows; but the one beyond. 
• There, where the frost makes all the birches burn 
• Yellow as cow-lilies, and the pale sky shines 
• Like a polished shell between black spruce and pines, 
• Some strange thing tracks us, turning where we turn.

• You’ll say I dreamed it, being the true daughter 
• Of those who in old times endured this dread. 
• Look! Where the lily-stems are showing red 
• A silent paddle moves below the water, 
• A sliding shape has stirred them like a breath; 
• Tall plumes surmount a painted mask of death

• Valentine
• Too high, too high to pluck
• My heart shall swing.
• A fruit no bee shall suck,
• No wasp shall sting.
• If on some night of cold
• It falls to ground
• In apple-leaves of gold
• I’ll wrap it round.
• And I shall seal it up
• With spice and salt,
• In a carven silver cup,
• In a deep vault.
• Before my eyes are blind
• And my lips mute,
• I must eat core and rind
• Of that same fruit.
• Before my heart is dust
• At the end of all,
• Eat it I must, I must
• Were it bitter gall.
• But I shall keep it sweet
• By some strange art;
• Wild honey I shall eat
• When I eat my heart.
• O honey cool and chaste
• As clover’s breath!
• Sweet Heaven I shall taste
• Before my death.

Elinor Wylie (1885–1928) was an American poet who wrote during the 1920s and 1930s. She was born into a politically active family – her grandfather was governor of Pennsylvania (Henry M. Hoyt), and her father, Henry M. Hoyt, Jr. was Solicitor General of the United States from 1903 to 1909. A regular member of Washington, D.C. high society, Wylie was probably as famous for her torrid love affairs as she was for her verse. She published eight books of poetry during her lifetime, all of which received high praise from critics and the general public alike. Always articulate and accessible, her work matured over time, increasing in polish and subtlety.