“Help me endure the Pit, until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me,”
never challenges her God with mad interrogation. It is not His justice she assails; she but beseeches the quickening of His will to save. There is an immeasurable distance between entire overthrow and the sanity of the creature who, though sorely wounded, has lost no jot of faith in divine medicaments. Her plea is only that she may share the wholesome life of His birds and trees.
“As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap!”
The poem may have been written in the period she calls “my calendar of imprisonments,” perhaps in the two years given over to “nerves.” This includes the eight years from 1894, when she entered the Auburndale post-office, through 1902. They were weighted with the routine work she desperately essayed at post-office and library. The summer of 1895, given to a walking trip in England, she illuminates by a rapt “annus beatus,” and two years were eaten into by the illness and death of the aunt she dearly loved, “the only being,” she writes, “who was all mine from my birth.” It was a cruelly large gulp for the dragon of time to make at the precious substance of her later youth. There was some fugitive versifying, but little of the steady routine of pen and book to make her life as she loved it. Some of her most significant verse did come in here, bright splashes of sunset red on the flat marsh lands of her way. Especially in the annus beatus there was exquisite writing and some immediately after in that surge of remembered passion risen over and over again in those who love England and have said good-bye to her, only to return in homesick thought. Of this period Arboricide stands alone and stately, like the tree of her lament.
“A word of grief to me erewhile:
We have cut the oak down, in our isle.
“And I said: ‘Ye have bereaven