Babette Deutsch
Babette Deutsch, one of the most promising of the younger poet-critics, was born September 22, 1895, in New York City. She received her B.A. at Barnard College in 1917, doing subsequent work at the new School for Social Research. Since 1916, a year before she took her degree, Miss Deutsch has been contributing poems and critical articles to The New Republic, The Dial, The Yale Review, etc.
Banners (1919) is the title of her remarkable first book. The rich emotional content is matched by the poet’s intellectual skill. Unusually sensitive, most of these lines strive for—and attain—a high seriousness.
The Death of a Child 64
Are you at ease now,
Do you suck content
From death’s dark nipple between your wan lips?
Now that the fever of the day is spent
And anguish slips
From the small limbs,
And they lie lapped in rest,
The young head pillowed soft upon that indurate breast.
No, you are quiet,
And forever,
Tho for us the silence is so loud with tears,
Wherein we hear the dreadful-footed years
Echoing, but your quick laughter never,
Never your stumbling run, your sudden face
Thrust in bright scorn upon our solemn fears.
Now the dark mother holds you close.... O, you
We loved so,
How you lie,
So strangely still, unmoved so utterly
Dear yet, but oh a little alien too.
In a Museum
Here stillness sounds like echoes in a tomb.
The light falls cold upon these antique toys
Whereby men sought to turn the scales of doom:
Jade gods, a ritual of rigid boys.
Warm blood was spent for this unwindowed stone
Tinct with the painted pleasures of the dead;
For secrets of unwithering flesh and bone—
With these old Egypt’s night was comforted.
We lean upon the glass, our curious eyes
Staring at death, three thousand years remote.
And vanity, the worm that never dies,
Feeds on your silver ring and Pharaoh’s coat.
And are these heartbeats, then, less perilous?
Since death is close, and death is death for us.