'And Does the Time Seem Long?'

“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.” 

Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered.  Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction:

 

“Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn  she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem:

 

“‘I dust my open book,

But there is no dust on the pages.’

 

“A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.”

 

Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years:  

 

“I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.”

 

Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes:

 

“I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then:

 

“The unpeopled conventional rose garden

 Is where I shall take my heart

 With this new pain.

 Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds

 Shall ease its hurt.

 When it has grown quiet,

 I shall mount the steps, slowly,

 And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn

 On that low gate-pillar,

 And leave them there, to sleep,

 Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.”

 

Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”:

 

“You, who were blind to beauty,

 Unheedful of song,

You have time now to remember

In your quiet under the ground;

And does the time seem long?

 

“Harken, in your silence;

All things grow.

Is not your heart importunate?

You, too, must long again

To feel the wind blow.”

 

As late as 1930, Winters hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.