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Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914)

[28] Cinquains (1911-1913)

NOVEMBER NIGHT

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

RELEASE

With swift
Great sweep of her
Magnificent arm my pain
Clanged back the doors that shut my soul
From life.

TRIAD

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow…the hour
Before the dawn…the mouth of one
Just dead.

SNOW

Look up…
From bleakening hills
Blows down the light, first breath
Of wintry wind…look up, and scent
The snow!

ANGUISH

Keep thou
Thy tearless watch
All night but when blue-dawn
Breathes on the silver moon, then weep!
Then weep!

TRAPPED

Well and
If day on day
Follows, and weary year
On year…and ever days and years…
Well?

MOON-SHADOWS

Still as
On windless nights
The moon-cast shadows are,
So still will be my heart when I
Am dead.

SUSANNA AND THE ELDERS

"Why do
You thus devise
Evil against her?" "For that
She is beautiful, delicate;
Therefore."

YOUTH

But me
They cannot touch,
Old Age and death…the strange
And ignominious end of old
Dead folk!

THE GUARDED WOUND

If it
Were lighter touch
Than petal of flower resting
On grass, oh still too heavy it were,
Too heavy!

WINTER

The cold
With steely clutch
Grips all the land…alack,
The little people in the hills
Will die!

NIGHT WINDS

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

ARBUTUS

Not Spring's
Thou art, but her's,
Most cool, most virginal,
Winter's, with thy faint breath, thy snows
Rose-tinged.

ROMA AETERNA

The sun
Is warm to-day,
O Romulus, and on
Thine olden Palatine the birds
Still sing.

"HE'S KILLED THE MAY…"

"He's killed the May and he's laid her by
To bear the red rose company."

Not thou,
White rose, but thy
Ensanguined sister is
The dear companion of my heart's
Shed blood.

AMAZE

I know
Not these my hands
And yet I think there was
A woman like me once had hands
Like these.

SHADOW

A-sway,
On red rose,
A golden butterfly…
And on my heart a butterfly
Night-wing'd.

MADNESS

Burdock,
Blue aconite,
And thistle and thorn…of these,
Singing, I wreathe my pretty wreath
O' death.

THE WARNING

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

SAYING OF IL HABOUL

Guardian of the Treasure of Solomon
And Keeper of the Prophet's Armour

My tent
A vapour that
The wind dispels and but
As dust before the wind am I
Myself.

FATE DEFIED

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

LAUREL IN THE BERKSHIRES

Sea-foam
And coral! Oh, I'll
Climb the great pasture rocks
And dream me mermaid in the sun's
Gold flood.

NIAGARA

Seen on a Night in November

How frail
Above the bulk
Of crashing water hangs,
Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
The moon.

THE GRAND CANYON

By Zeus!
Shout word of this
To the eldest dead! Titans,
Gods, Heroes, come who have once more
A home!

NOW BARABBAS WAS A ROBBER

No guile?
Nay, but so strangely
He moves among us…Not this
Man but Barabbas! Release to us
Barabbas!

FOR LUCAS CRANACH'S EVE

Oh me,
Was there a time
When Paradise knew Eve
In this sweet guise, so placid and
So young?

THE SOURCE

Thou hast
Drawn laughter from
A well of secret tears
And thence so elvish it rings,—mocking
And sweet:

BLUE HYACINTHS

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

Adelaide Crapsey. Cinquains. In Verse. [Rochester, N. Y]: Manas, 1915. pp. 30-58.

The first edition of Verse was published by the Manas Press in 1915. Alfred A. Knopf published a second edition in 1922 (reprinted in 1925 and 1929) and a third edition in 1934 (reprinted in 1938).
This [= 28 cinquains] is not a complete collection of Crapsey's cinquains. Additional cinquains were published in the third edition and still more were made available through The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (1977), the definitive source of Crapsey's work.
http://www.cinquain.org/cinquain.html

"Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) was not the first English-language poet to appropriate models from translation of the classical poetry of Japan, but for a time she was among the most famous for having done so. She wrote many of the poems that appeared in her only volume, Verse, in the last year of her life, and in the knowledge that she was dying of tuberculosis. Their publication in the year following her death was met with critical acclaim, particularly for the brevity, poise, and metrical sophistication of those she called Cinquains. As early as 1919 Louis Untermeyer had called attention to the debts of these to Japanese poetics, and the point has received considerable attention in subsequent scholarship."
David Ewick, note to Crapsey's 'Cinquains', Archive of Japan in English-Language Verse, http://themargins.net/anth/1910-1919/crapsey.html

"Before the combined efforts of women, centered around Amy Lowell, to bring haiku to North America, another woman, Adelaide Crapsey, was, through her independent study, already ahead of them.
In 1908, while in Europe with her father, she decided to return to Rome, where she had lived in 1904 - 1905, staying in Rome, London and Paris until 1911. While in London she studied English prosody at the British Museum in 1910. Perhaps as early as in 1909, the shy and sensitive Adelaide had read A Hundred Verses from Old Japan, William N. Porter's translation of the Hyakunin Isshu anthology and From the Eastern Sea by Yone Noguchis. In her notebooks she lists eleven tanka and eight haiku she had translated from Anthologie de la litt`erature japonaise des origines au XXe si`ecle from Marcel Revon. So influenced, Adelaide developed her own poetic system which she called cinquain.
These short, unrhymed poems consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2, in five lines were related to, but not copied from Japanese literary styles. Though she devised this form around 1909-1910, most of the 28 of which we have record that she accomplished were written between 1911 and 1914. An early death, on October 8, 1914, from tuberculosis prevented her from exploring the genre.
Published posthumously, in 1915, (by Claude Bragdon, Manas Press) with her other works as, Verse, cinquains came to be well-known only through the efforts of Carl Sandburg in his anthology, Cornhuskers, 1918, and Louis Utermeyer's Modern American Poetry, 1919. However, the interest in her poetry became so great that in 1922, Alfred A. Knopf published a second edition which was reprinted in 1926 and 1929 and a third edition was published in 1934 and reprinted in 1938.
Adelaide Crapsey is credited, not only with these first experiments with Japanese literature, but she is recognized as one of the earliest Imagists. Through the cinquain never became as popular as either tanka or haiku later became, it has outlived the Imagist Movement and continues to be used by tanka and haiku poets, notably Ruby Schackleford of Wilson, North Carolina."
http://www.ahapoetry.com/twchp2.htm