Mrs. Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, one of Kentucky's most distinguished poets, was born near Lexington, Kentucky, August 11, 1836. Her grandfather was Morgan Bryan, brother-in-law of Daniel Boone, and one of the proprietors of Bryan's Station, near Lexington, famous in the old Indian wars. When only three years old she left Lexington to make her home near Versailles, Kentucky, where her beautiful mother died in 1844. After her mother's death she was sent to her aunt's home at New Castle, Kentucky. Miss Bryan was graduated from Henry Female College, New Castle; and on June 18, 1861, she was married to John James Piatt, the Ohio poet. George D. Prentice, of course, was the first to praise and print Mrs. Piatt's poems and start her upon a literary career. Her husband, too, has been her chief critic, and responsible for the publication of her work in book form. From the first Mrs. Piatt's poems have been deeply introspective, voicing the heart of a woman in every line. Her work has been cordially commended by Bayard Taylor, William Dean Howells, John Burroughs, Hamilton Wright Mabie, and many other well-known and capable critics in America and Europe. Several of Mrs. Piatt's poems were published in The Nests at Washington and Other Poems (Cincinnati, 1861), but her first independent volume, issued anonymously, was A Woman's Poems (Boston, 1871). This is her best known work, made famous by Bayard Taylor in his delightful little book, The Echo Club. This was followed by A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles and Other Poems (1874); That New World and Other Poems (1876); Poems in Company with Children (1877); Dramatic Persons and Moods (1880); The Children Out of Doors and Other Poems (with her husband, 1885); An Irish Garland (1885); Selected Poems (1885); In Primrose Time (1886); Child's-World Ballads (1887); The Witch in the Glass (1889); An Irish Wild-Flower (1891); An Enchanted Castle (1893); Complete Poems (1894, two vols.); Child's-World Ballads (1896, second series); and The Gift of Tears (Cincinnati, 1906). These volumes prove Mrs. Piatt to be one of the most prolific and finest female poets America has produced. English reviewers have often linked her name with Mrs. Browning's and Miss Rossetti's, and if she has not actually reached their rank, she has surely shown work worthy of a high place in the literature of her native country. Mrs. Piatt is at the present time residing at North Bend, Ohio, near Cincinnati.
Bibliography. The Echo Club, by Bayard Taylor (Boston, 1876); The Poets of Ohio, by Emerson Venable (Cincinnati, 1909).
IN CLONMEL PARISH CHURCHYARD
AT THE GRAVE OF CHARLES WOLFE
[From An Irish Garland (North Bend, Ohio, 1885)]
Where the graves were many, we looked for one.
Oh, the Irish rose was red,
And the dark stones saddened the setting sun
With the names of the early dead.
Then, a child who, somehow, had heard of him
In the land we love so well,
Kept lifting the grass till the dew was dim
In the churchyard of Clonmel.
But the sexton came. "Can you tell us where
Charles Wolfe is buried?" "I can—
See, that is his grave in the corner there.
(Ay, he was a clever man,
If God had spared him!) It's many that come
To be asking for him," said he.
But the boy kept whispering, "Not a drum
Was heard,"—in the dusk to me.
(Then the gray man tore a vine from the wall
Of the roofless church where he lay,
And the leaves that the withering year let fall
He swept, with the ivy away;
And, as we read on the rock the words
That, writ in the moss, we found,
Right over his bosom a shower of birds
In music fell to the ground).
... Young poet, I wonder did you care,
Did it move you in your rest
To hear that child in his golden hair,
From the mighty woods of the West,
Repeating your verse of his own sweet will,
To the sound of the twilight bell,
Years after your beating heart was still
In the churchyard of Clonmel?
A WORD WITH A SKYLARK (A CAPRICE OF HOMESICKNESS)[21]