'You There in Your Straight Row on Row'

On Sunday, a friend and I, after lunch at a favorite Mexican restaurant, visited Kaboom Books here in Houston. He left with a stack of books. I found one: Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades Press and Gulf Coast, 2018). I know her thanks only to Yvor Winters, who championed her work and rightly called her “a minor poet of great distinction.” Crapsey (1878-1914) reminds us that reputation is fleeting and uncertain. Only dedicated readers keep a writer alive. Without the occasional reader, Crapsey would be doubly dead. She devised a homegrown poetic form, the American cinquain, much influenced by traditional Japanese verse, and reminiscent of the work of her contemporaries, the early Imagists. 

The editors, Jenny Molberg and Christian Bancroft, bring together a selection of Crapsey’s poems, excerpts from her study of metrics, letters and five essays by academics. Most of her poems are graceful and brief, feather-like in their delicacy yet often concluding with a sort of stinger at the end. Take “Triad”:

 

“These be

Three silent things:

The falling snow . . . the hour

Before the dawn . . . the mouth of one

Just dead.”

 

For Crapsey, who was ill for much of her life and died from tuberculosis at age thirty-six, death is a recurrent theme, as in “The Lonely Death”:

 

“In the cold I will rise, I will bathe

In waters of ice; myself

Will shiver, and shrive myself,

Alone in the dawn, and anoint

Forehead and feet and hands;

I will shutter the windows from light,

I will place in their sockets the four

Tall candles and set them a-flame

In the grey of the dawn; and myself

Will lay myself straight in my bed,

And draw the sheet under my chin.”

 

During her lifetime, Crapsey edited only one volume of her work, Verse, published in 1915, shortly after her death. Her range of subjects is narrow – death, dying, illness -- and family difficulties limited her growth as a poet. Yvor Winters, who survived tuberculosis, as did his wife Janet Lewis, wrote of Crapsey: “[T]he only known cure, and this was known to only a few physicians, was absolute rest, often immobilized rest. The disease filled the body with a fatigue so heavy that it was an acute pain, pervasive and poisonous.” We see Crapsey’s resistance to “immobilized rest” in her poem “To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window”:

 

“Why are you there in your straight row on row

Where I must ever see you from my bed

That in your mere dumb presence iterate

The text so weary in my ears: ‘Lie still

And rest; be patient and lie still and rest.’

I’ll not be patient! I will not lie still!”

 

Effective antibiotic treatment of tuberculosis wouldn’t become available until the nineteen-forties. A reader resists it, but there’s a pervasive sadness about Crapsey’s work, coupled with courage. It’s similar, though at a different level of accomplishment, to what we experience when reading Keats and Chekhov -- the wonder of what might have been. Tuberculosis killed both, at ages twenty-five and forty-four, respectively. “To the Dead . . .” concludes:  

 

“And in ironic quietude who is

The despot of our days and lord of dust

Needs but, scarce heeding, wait to drop

Grim casual comment on rebellion's end;

‘Yes, yes . . . Wilful and petulant but now

As dead and quiet as the others are.’

And this each body and ghost of you hath heard

That in your graves do therefore lie so still.”