Like Amanda Hall, Josephine Daskam Bacon is both novelist and poet, but it is as a poet that Mrs. Bacon will arrest our attention for her Truth o’ Women, which has been described as a Spoon River Anthology for women. The book consists of a group of “Epitaphs for Women” in free verse; this one being characteristic:
I was sorry to leave you,
Because I knew you needed me.
But are there no women who are sorry to die
Because they need their husbands?
I wanted, dying, to be one of them!
Forty of these “Epitaphs” are followed by a series of dramatic monologues under the general title, “Truth o’ Women.” The monologues are spoken by the mother of Joan of Arc, Lincoln’s mother, Dante’s wife, Milton’s daughters, the wife of Judas, one of Bluebeard’s wives, the mother of Mary and Martha and the wives of Columbus, Sir Isaac Newton, Cadmus, Adam, Shakespeare, Socrates, Pilate and Julius Cæsar.
No, evidently realism in poetry is not through! Look, here is “an epic of insignificance” called The Life and Death of Mrs. Tidmuss, by Wilfrid Blair. Pursuing the Spoon River comparison for Mrs. Bacon’s book, one is on the verge of calling Blair’s work a Main Street of England in verse. In subject matter it is more like John Masefield’s Widow in the Bye Street, I should say. We start with Selina as the young daughter of a greengrocer, see her as a slow and bashful girl leading a drab existence and wooed finally by Tom Tidmuss, who is interested in poultry-raising. He is a printer by trade. They plan to marry and get a cottage. Then, for the first time, Selina lives:
She had a ring, and roses in her cheek.
A year’s wait reaps the reward of her wedding day.