(Note: I was a bit tossed about whether to make this final submission a poem or another of her beautiful notes to Professor Locke. At length I decided upon this poem, Lady, Lady, for two reasons: one, because the draft included in the correspondence has a stanza that has been excluded from the anthologized version; and two, because the excluded stanza contains the referenced words, “air” and “shepherdess,” contained in the first handwritten note we discussed.)
Lady, Lady, I saw your face
Dark as night witholding a star. . .
The chisel fell, or it might have been
You had borne so long the yoke of men.
Lady, lady, I saw your hands,
Twisted, awry, like crimpled roots,
Bleached poor white in a sudsy tub,
Wrinkled and drawn from your ruba-dub.
(the excluded stanza)
Lady, lady, I saw your air:
Oh, delicate, distant shepherdess,
Pastoral fold and hours that run,
Held by clouds from the burning sun.
Lady, Lady, I saw your heart,
And altared there in its darksome place
Were the tongues of flame the ancients knew,
There the good God sits to spangle through!
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(And handwritten at the bottom of the page)
“Lady – Lady is in general the hub of our group. Specifically, she is my laundress.”
I’m happy you included this one Ray. It read to me as a direct modernist feminist approach – challenging rather than fitting into the romantic notions of form? The other – white masculine – poetic “portraits of a lady”? The “laundress” holds power in her “darksome Place”.
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