These will remain, these will go searching Your veins for life when the flame of life smoulders: The night that you two saw the mountains marching Up against dawn with the stars on their shoulders The jetting poplars' arrested fountains As you drew her under them, easing her painThe notes, not the words, of a half-finished sentenceThe music, the silence. These will remain. 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 of 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 always a passion with her; the first poem in the book ("Clay Hills") declares it with an almost intolerant definiteness. 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 titlepoem 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 a curiously 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 such a phrase as: 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," and the much quoted "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 an arresting and noble fancy. Just as "Autumn" is a celebration of domesticity, an almost holy pæan of housekeeping, so most of this poet's work embodies an essentially feminine, or, one might better say, womanly attitude to life. 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 famous unrhymed lyrics of the period. The form of this poetry is, as Joseph Freeman has written, "distinguished not only by the clear qualities of chiseled marble, not only by a music so melodious that some of her free verse pieces have to be read two or three times before their lack of rhyme becomes noticeable, but also by its intellectual fluidity. She has mastered her emotions without deadening them." And Amy Lowell, amplifying this theme, concludes, “After all, beautiful as Mrs. Untermeyer's forms often are, it is her thoughts that make the book. This is the very heart of a woman, naked and serious, beautiful and unashamed." It is a curious fact that whereas Growing Pains is almost entirely in free verse, most of Dreams Out of Darkness is in regular formal patterns. Since the publication of the second volume, Mrs. Untermeyer's verse has employed rhyme with even greater frequency, "Rescue" being a particularly effective example of the double music of end- and interior-rhyming. HIGH TIDE I edged back against the night. The sea growled assault on the wave-bitten shore. And the breakers, Like young and impatient hounds, Sprang with rough joy on the shrinking sand. With a long, relentless pull, Whimpering, into the dark. Then I saw who held them captive; And I saw how they were bound With a broad and quivering leash of light, Held by the moon, As, calm and unsmiling, She walked the deep fields of the sky. AUTUMN (To My Mother) How memory cuts away the years, There was our back-yard, So plain and stripped of green, With even the weeds carefully pulled away From the crooked red bricks that made the walk, And the earth on either side so black. Autumn and dead leaves burning in the sharp air. I shall not forget them: Great jars laden with the raw green of pickles, Standing in a solemn row across the back of the porch, And in the very center of the yard, You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper, Like jolly monks in a drunken dance. And there were bland banks of cabbages that came by the wagon-load, Soon to be cut into delicate ribbons Only to be crushed by the heavy, wooden stompers. Such feathery whiteness-to come to kraut! And after, there were grapes that hid their brightness under a grey dust, Then gushed thrilling, purple blood over the fire; And enamelled crab-apples that tricked with their fragrance But were bitter to taste. And there were spicy plums and ill-shaped quinces, And long string beans floating in pans of clear water And there was fish itself, Salted, silver herring from the city. And you moved among these mysteries, Stirring, tasting, measuring, With the precision of a ritual. I like to think of you in your years of power- SINFONIA DOMESTICA When the white wave of a glory that is hardly I I know at last the meaning of my ecstasy, And know at last my wish and what it can mean. To have sped out of life that night-to have vanished For how with our daily converse, even the sweet sharing Of thoughts, of food, of home, of common life, How shall I be that glory, that last desire For which men struggle? Is Romance in a wife? Must I bend a heart that is bowed to breaking And bank my flame to a low hearth fire, believing Shall I mould my hope anew, to one of service, And tell my uneasy soul, "Behold, this is good"? And meet you (if we do meet), even at Heaven's threshold, With ewer and basin, with clothing and with food? LAKE SONG The lapping of lake water |