Edith Sitwell: supporter of poets Dylan Thomas and Wilfred Owen

Portrait of a Barmaid

Metallic waves of people jar 

Through crackling green toward the bar

Where on the tables chattering-white

The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.

Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles,

Shroud wooden faces in their wiles —

Sometimes they splash like water (you

Yourself reflected in their hue).

The conversation loud and bright

Seems spinal bars of shunting light

In firework-spurting greenery.

O complicate machinery

For building Babel, iron crane

Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane

In noise and murder like the sea

Without its mutability!

Outside the bar where jangling heat

Seems out of tune and off the beat —

A concertina’s glycerine 

Exudes, and mirrors in the green 

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints 

Of tentative and half-soiled tints.

The Lady with the Sewing-Machine

Across the fields as green as spinach, 

Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich, 

Stands a high house; if at all,

Spring comes like a Paisley shawl —

Patternings meticulous

And youthfully ridiculous.

In each room the yellow sun

Shakes like a canary, run

On run, roulade, and watery trill —

Yellow, meaningless, and shrill.

Face as white as any clock’s,

Cased in parsley-dark curled locks —

All day long you sit and sew,

Stitch life down for fear it grow,

Stitch life down for fear we guess

At the hidden ugliness.

Dusty voice that throbs with heat,

Hoping with your steel-thin beat

To put stitches in my mind,

Make it tidy, make it kind,

You shall not: I’ll keep it free

Though you turn earth, sky and sea

To a patchwork quilt to keep

Your mind snug and warm in sleep!

Edith Sitwell

Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) was an English poet and writer, and the most prominent of the three Sitwell siblings, all of whom made important contributions to the British literary scene of the early 20th century. Although a poet with a reputation in her own right, Sitwell is equally well-known for her generosity toward aspiring poets, welcoming promising talent to her residence, one of the premiere literary salons in England at the time. Dylan Thomas was among those who benefited from her generosity. She also helped secure a place in the literary canon for the World War I poet Wilfred Owen by supporting efforts to publish his poems after his untimely death during the war. Sitwell would greet visitors in exotic costumes and with a dramatic flair—yet her poetry was as substantive in both craft and technique as her style was flamboyant. Her birthday is September 7.