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 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 almost a passion with her; the first poem in the book declares:
I would rather work in stubborn rock
All the years of my life;
And make one strong thing
And set it in a high, clean place,
To recall the granite strength of my desire.
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 title-poem—
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 an almost 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 lines like:
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,” “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 a most arresting and noble fancy.
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 liquid unrhymed lyrics of the period.
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.
Sprang—but were drawn back slowly
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,
And how clean the picture comes
Of autumn days, brisk and busy;
Charged with keen sunshine.
And you, stirred with activity,
The spirit of those energetic days.
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.
And winter comforts coming in like a pageant.
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,
Exhaling the pungent dill;
And in the very centre of the yard,
You, tending the great catsup kettle of gleaming copper,
Where fat, red tomatoes bobbed up and down
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
Like slim, green fishes.
And there was fish itself,
Salted, silver herring from the city....
And you moved among these mysteries,
Absorbed and smiling and sure;
Stirring, tasting, measuring,
With the precision of a ritual.
I like to think of you in your years of power—
You, now so shaken and so powerless—
High priestess of your home.
Sinfonia Domestica
When the white wave of a glory that is hardly I
Breaks through my mind and washes it clean,
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
Not as a vision, but as something touched, yet grown
Radiant as the moonlight, circling my naked shoulder;
Wrapped in a dream of beauty, longed for, but never known.
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
With a frustration, inevitable and slow,
And bank my flame to a low hearth fire, believing
You’ll come for warmth and life to its tempered glow?
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
Is like the weeping of women,
The weeping of ancient women
Who grieved without rebellion.
The lake falls over the shore
Like tears on their curven bosoms.
Here is languid, luxurious wailing;
The wailing of kings’ daughters.
So do we ever cry,
A soft, unmutinous crying,
When we know ourselves each a princess
Locked fast within her tower.
The lapping of lake water
Is like the weeping of women,
The fertile tears of women
That water the dreams of men.